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My wife and I are considered local "influencers" in our city by virtue of a local lifestyle blog we run and our social media presence. We're part of a local blo
by freehunter 8y ago
My wife and I are considered local "influencers" in our city by virtue of a local lifestyle blog we run and our social media presence. We're part of a local bloggers group, we get invited to tons of exclusive social events, we attend branded events, brands reach out to us directly for help with marketing. People and companies we interact with tend to assume we're making great money doing this. Brands tell us the dollar value of the event they're inviting us to as a way of apologizing for not paying us for it, and our followers sometimes seem to expect we're owned by a major brand or at least under contract.
In reality, in the three years we've been doing this we've made a grand total of $38.50 in cash. Just like how people expect artists to work for "exposure", "influencers" (I really dislike the term, we're just local bloggers as a side project) are often expected to work for free or for perks. We've tried to collect cash for obvious advertisements we're asked to make, and nothing shuts a brand up faster than asking for payment. The reason for that, I'm speculating, is that when we ask to be paid, there are a dozen more "influencers" in the area willing to do it for a free sample of the product.
We've since pretty much determined that we're doing this for fun and for the local influence/access and perks we get, and not for cash. We started as a hobby without the intent to make money, so it's not like we're losing anything. As an added benefit to this approach, we can afford to be super picky and only advertise the brands we actually enjoy using and the places we actually enjoy visiting. If a place/brand we hate asks us to promote them, well... we take cash or card. And 99% of the time, that's the end of the conversation.
Too many people are willing to shill for free, which hurts anyone trying to do it for money.
- exelius 8y agoBuy a few thousand followers from a click farm and see if the responses start to change. That’s honestly the best way to establish yourself if you’re serious; everyone is defrauding everyone and nobody cares because they’re all getting rich.
- freehunter 8y agoI've thought about it. It's a risk/reward thing, though. I like doing this, and I'd hate to be exposed as a fraud because then my passion project comes crashing down and what do I have left? I guess that's the downside to trying to make money from a hobby. Either it stays a hobby that you don't make money from, or it becomes a second job and stops being a hobby.
- wolco 8y agoOr sell your own products or link to affilate products where you get a cut. Ignore the emails.
- programmarchy 8y agoAren't fake followers easy to uncover? Pretty sure there are analysis tools that look at follower engagement, growth patterns, etc. to determine legitimacy. You risk blowing your reputation as soon as anyone does a modicum of due diligence. Seems better to just grow organically.
- neves 8y agoIt is easy if you are a sophisticate internet user. All the other people will be impressed when you boast your amount of followers.
- tajen 8y agoSo it will be easy for journalists and naysayers. Pretty much the most powerful people against you...
- benatkin 8y agoIt's easy to deny. If it was a clear bad mark against an account to have fake followers, anyone could buy fake followers to discredit their competition.
- VectorLock 8y agoIt seems the trend is to dismiss these discoveries by saying it was somebody trying to push negative reputation on their brand or get back at them. How do you go about directly proving the individual bought clicks and not just inferring based on the patterns of their followers?
- collyw 8y agoI don't see the sort of people following influencers to be so savvy.
- brianwawok 8y agoThe people PAYING influences are. So I think the circle is you buy followers to look popular, and fake real people into following you. Then you delete the fake followers and then have real followers to sell.
- skinnymuch 8y agoWon’t this really hurt for anyone who looks beyond just follower count? The ratio of your followers with your engagement (likes, comments, shares) will be pretty bad. For those that look at that, they’ll be more turned off than a smaller following count but good engagement ratio.
- 794CD01 8y agoThankfully, you're not the first person to think of this, so there are also many ways to buy fake engagement.
- sgtmas2006 8y agoIt can, but you can also find some that sell the accounts themselves, allowing you to falsify a network. Think taking accounts and re-purposing them from being a modern, pop-culture following network to one that is tech-oriented, or more obscure. If you're planning on inserting yourself in this method, you really need to be in control of it all yourself. Follow the major people in your industry, with added randomness to remove following some, while adding randomness to extend the network further. Keeping the network healthy is one of the more interesting topics. Simulating a real network is the biggest thing. It's very easy to embed yourself, unless it is that closed of a network.
- ryantbrown 8y agoIt’s all about the engagement rate so buying followers doesn’t really help. Platforms will usually cutoff anyone with low engagement for their followers count.
- CodeSheikh 8y agoDo this and risk getting buried deep in Instagram trending and popular accounts. A quick rule of thumb is say you have 1M users but you are only getting likes in few hundreds per post than that means you bought most of your users from a click farm. Marketers have evolved as well.
- jocro 8y agoBuying likes and comments instead of just followers is trivial stuff, and makes it far harder to distinguish bought fame from real fame[1] [1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/people-are-turning-their-accounts-into-bots-on-instagram?utm_term=.lbkAqvaeP#.iorLqVAxk https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/people-are-turning-t...
- erik_landerholm 8y agoWho’s getting rich? “they’re all getting rich,” huh?
- alaskamiller 8y agoIt's just Yelp Elite program run amok.
- ghostbrainalpha 8y agoDo you have Ad Sense installed on your blog? Seems like you should have made much more than that from your own views independent of what "Brands" are paying you. Or have you promoted any Amazon products with an affiliate link?
- freehunter 8y agoI guess I should have clarified, that $38 is how much brands have paid us directly. Advertising income is a separate line item, although Internet advertising pays just as well as you would expect it to. Most months we're lucky just to cover hosting and expenses. Another thing to consider is that sponsored/branded posts don't get as many clicks as you might think. Brands want social media presence and they want links to their site, not yours. Going through the funnel of "clicking from Facebook to my site, then clicking from my site to the brand's site" is the same funnel as any other web interaction. 10% CTR from Facebook, the same or less inside the article. And Instagram is worse, since there are no links allowed in an Insta post.
- anoncoward111 8y ago>Too many people are willing to shill for free, which hurts anyone trying to do it for money. Shilling for money is not much better... On my social profiles and chatrooms, I evaluate products solely for the pursuit of knowledge and truth, rather than for financial gain. The idea here is that we should all be receiving value because we are finding the best products for our needs, not because some company is paying us to shill.
- ksk 8y agoBut people don't need the "best product" whatever that means, to derive value.
- minhazm423 8y agoAny tips for how my girl and I can get started on that path? Basically like you and your wife, for the social rewards?
- freehunter 8y agoFirst step is to just start blogging/vlogging. Lots of people try to just do social media and personally I think it's harder that way. Do social media but link it all back to your blog/vlog. Make sure Google can find your content (which is hard when you're pure FB/Insta). Do that for a while. A few months at least, with a few dozen quality posts. Also look in your area for a local bloggers group. One blogger doesn't have a lot of power, but the groups tend to get a group invite to big social/branded events. You're probably not going to get anywhere unless you pay Facebook. $1/day is enough to get them to show your page to a wider audience. FB ads can work on Instagram too if you pick the right settings. What we do most of the time is go out to a local restaurant, somewhere we were planning on going anywhere, but write an article about it afterwards. Shop local stores, and write about them. Look for upcoming events and write about them. Share all your posts on social media. Tag businesses in them. This is all stuff we would be doing anyway, the only difference is when we get home we write about it on our blog. That makes it an easy habit to keep up. After a few months and a few dozen quality posts, start making sure people know who you are. If you want to talk to a business owner, email them directly, introduce yourself, see if you can get an interview. Now they know who you are. Keep doing that. Keep attending blogger events around you. Congratulations, you're now reaping the social status that you're looking for. This all works best if you have no significant competition. If there are other high profile blogs doing exactly what you're doing, you're going to need a niche. And just like in startups, don't be afraid to pivot or re-launch a few times. We're in the middle of a small pivot right now, we grew a big audience over the years and now we're going to try to flex some muscle to see if our audience can pitch in and help with community projects. Natural growth is slow. Keep plugging away, and keep paying Zuckerberg his pound of flesh, and you'll get there. But the day it stops being fun without any additional cash in your pocket, that's the day you might want to rethink it.
- minhazm423 8y ago
- vitaflo 8y ago> Too many people are willing to shill for free, which hurts anyone trying to do it for money. But you're still a shill either way. Maybe I'm just old but when I was growing up being a sellout was a pejorative. Now it's considered a virtue. I frankly don't get it.
- collyw 8y agoWell said. There was something I inherently disliked about the whole influencer idea. By labeling it a sellout I see exactly what it was. (Sellout actually implies they had something cool to begin with like a band, unlike influencers).
- ghaff 8y agoIf one substitutes "write about things that interest me" for "shill," I don't have any problem with it. But I read shill as if you give me stuff/pay me, I'll write nice things about them. Personally, I sometimes accept review copies of things/books/etc. But, if I don't like them, that's what I'll write.
- pas 8y agoEventually the companies will ask those who reliably write positive things. And when you have nothing, but followers, and all you want is followers, you don't really want to say negative things anyway. So, it's a social game, of how to climb the ladder made of nothing, by latching on to those who are somehow higher up all the way up to the sky. This is the Kim Kardashian model.
- ghaff 8y agoFortunately, it's not how I make money and I don't really care if a company sends me stuff or pays my expenses to an event or not. And at least some companies, especially if they believe they have a genuinely good product, are willing to roll the dice with people who have a genuine following and are frequently critical but fair.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
- Jedd 8y agoThank you for the candid insights. It's a world unknown to me. > Just like how people expect artists to work for "exposure", "influencers" (I really dislike the term, we're just local bloggers as a side project) are often expected to work for free or for perks. Elsewhere you call your blog a passion project, but here you're calling it work -- which suggests your readers / influencees are the product, so to speak. I'm sure it's much more nuanced than this, especially as it's sounding like you're not in it primarily for the income -- could you dive into the motivation for starting, and maintaining, your lifestyle blog?
- freehunter 8y agoI'm calling it work there because brands/companies do approach me to advertise for them, and I would love to get paid for it. That is work in my opinion. The fact that I don't get paid for it puts it back to a hobby level, and the fact that I do it anyway (but only for brands/companies I really enjoy doing business with) puts it as a passion project. If I buy some really good cheddar from my local artisan cheese shop, I'm going to put it on my Instagram whether they pay me to do it or not, because it's really good cheese and people need to know about it. We originally started doing it because our city didn't have any good digital media outlets, so we knew there were all these cool events and local businesses all around us but no one was talking about them. So as long as we were already doing the research to figure out what was happening in our city, we figured we might as well share that. We started it with no intention on making money, the thought never crossed our minds until we started getting demands from companies to advertise for them. After that we started asking for payment from anyone who demanded we talk about them, but even though we rarely successfully get paid, we still talk about the events and businesses we want to talk about. We just ignore demands that don't come with perks, invites, discounts, or cash attached. I guess the motivation is kind of selfish. We live in a place that is commonly understood to be very old and conservative in demographic but we know there are a lot of cool younger people around too. We want to 1) show that our area is cool and we have young and cool people, and 2) attract more young and cool people to the area. It'd be nice to get paid, but there are these other benefits that keep us going too.
- Jedd 8y ago
- ChildOfChaos 8y agoTo be honest, it's hardly unexpected when both parties are just trying to use each other.
- orblivion 8y agoThat's actually somewhat heartening. If the majority of "influencers" (what a ridiculous word) are like you, doing it for fun and honest expression of opinion, it means we can trust popular opinions more.
- Atlantium 8y agoAnd your attitude makes it near impossible to get an honest review of something so I don't waste my time and money.
- iffe_closure 8y agoThere are influencers making 6+ figures. They are mostly Youtuber's, IG accounts with 500K to 1M+ subscribers. 1 million views can garner near ~$10,000 in ad revenue (depending on your partner level) and they also can monetize further with sponsorships/patreon pages. There is money but you have to build a very large audience on Twitter, IG or Youtube.
- ralphc 8y agoMy wife is a CPA, and now by reflex when I see a story like this I think of the tax consequences. Do you have to count products and event tickets as income and declare it?
- freehunter 8y agoYes, anything that's given as a promotional item is considered income, which is one reason branded events/swag often include the equivalent dollar value. There is a line you can draw though. If you're making deductions on travel expenses or cost of attending an event, you should probably declare any swag you get at that event as income. If you're not writing off the cost of the event, you probably don't need to worry about it unless you're also getting cash or something extraordinarily valuable. Same thing with anything you're given for free in exchange for writing a review of it. If a company sends you something and you write a review about it, regardless of if money changes hands, the value of that item is considered taxable income. But if it just shows up at your door unsolicited and you ignore it and the company never gets their review, then it's just an unsolicited gift. And you should probably send it back. We have a whole file cabinet drawer dedicated to keeping track of "free" stuff we get so we can declare it on our taxes.
- malchow 8y agoThis is why the commission model works better, see, e.g. https://medium.com/@sku_67047/how-kinja-earns-so-much-in-commission-revenue-af69d3e7a952 https://medium.com/@sku_67047/how-kinja-earns-so-much-in-com...