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.
Fun rule: if you're ever wondering why something odd or stupid is popular, it's probably kids.
My wife does the same in interior design.
There are lots of kids, true. But try looking at mommy-instagram and you'll see a whole other world.
But older people spend lots of money on non essential items.
Also have you seen how much time a stay at home Mom spends on social media? They'd give any teenager fair competition.
I am right here in Poland and I tell you, the things you show, and the things described in the article and in the first comment in this thread, they are all consumed en masse by young and mid-age adults (especially women). Lifestyle, sports, fashion, diet, craft, yoga, coaching, ikebana, it's all on Insta and Facebook and other platforms and when you see who's commenting, it's not JUST kids. And there's way more people 20+ than the kids. I never said kids do not have influence (sic) of that kind, they do. But when someone says "if you see something odd or stupid, it's the kids", it's just completely wrong. Kids have serious purchasing and decision making power now, but still it's just a fraction.
I'm not disputing the existence of such 20 - 40 y/o, just that their percentage of YT or IG usage is small compared to real kids.
My gut feeling is, the higher the number of followers, the higher the percentage of those followers are bots.
Perhaps guilt prevents many of the influencers from charging "full price"? I also presume any contracts with big brands - however difficult they might be to enforce - clauses that attempt to mitigate such fraud.
The internet...the news is fake...the people are fake...fake is the only thing that's real.
Personally, I sometimes accept review copies of things/books/etc. But, if I don't like them, that's what I'll write.
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.
But again, this could be why some many brands pay so little most of the time. They're just tossing shit at the wall, but in this case kinda hoping not too much actually sticks.
People know it, but that doesn't matter, what matters is that people like those who live the high-life. Crystal clear ocean lapping the painfully white sand beach, the sky so blue, even its reflection seems to burn out as it shimmers on the endless cerulean horizon, all there for those who "have it". And the next post is a seemingly boring street, just shops, and our hero, somewhere in Europe, and maybe a messy hair day photo thrown in, our hero rests, somewhere in a 5 star hotel, a scantly clad young female caught an impromptu point in time, yet somehow critically perfectly advantageous for her, all of it - of course - done effortlessly. The next post is just a boring "shopping" pic again. Maybe a bag, a shoe, a dress from Prada, Gucci, Dior, but the 1000-3000 USD ones, of course.
So little said, everything implied.
We even talk about the "net worth" of someone, like if their money what "what they're worth".
It was always thus.
To me, I am worth infinite money. But I accept that to others, I am hardly worth much of anything.
Eh. Everyone has a job, and everyone has an opinion. The difference between an honest "influencer" and you posting a comment here talking about a product/service you like is that the influencer is getting paid for their honest opinion while you're doing it for free. I don't see that as a bad thing personally.
As for dishonest influencers who shill for products they don't like... well, probably half the people on this forum work for an advertising company. It's literally the same thing. Me telling my Instagram followers to buy a product isn't any different from Google showing you an AdWords ad for the same thing.
Being a sellout is only a pejorative to hippies and artists. To anyone else, it's called having a job.
You're describing a reviewer, brainiac.
>you posting a comment here talking about a product/service you like
The only difference between unsolicited, antisocially consumerist behavior and what you do is that you're pay to play. Sure, this is factual.
>As for dishonest influencers who shill for products they don't like... well, probably half the people on this forum work for an advertising company.
Imagine the frailty of a life propped up by shit like transparent tu quoques and $38 in revenue plus like sephora samples and mushroom brand watches with busted dials. Imagine the intense shame and suicidal ideation over the worthlessness of such a life
>Me telling my Instagram followers to buy a product isn't any different from Google showing you an AdWords ad for the same thing.
Google's game is to be large enough that this process can almost be tolerable, while remaining bureaucratically impersonal yet targeted to the ad recipient's consumer profile. It's also eminently avoidable.
Your game is to get access to "exclusive social events" in Area City at the expense of anyone who might've followed you thinking you were an actual person, while failing to get compensated more meaningfully because you just ain't that pretty.
>Being a sellout is only a pejorative to hippies and artists. To anyone else, it's called having a job.
Sellouts are people without professional integrity. That's what the term means.
I'd only promote something I truly liked or "believed" in, and even then it's risky - the establishment, recipe or product can change on a dime, and then you're image and promotion is still tied to it.
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.
Ignore the emails.
For those that look at that, they’ll be more turned off than a smaller following count but good engagement ratio.
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.
[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/people-are-turning-t...
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
I would guess I'm mentally in the same place as you describe yourself in the first paragraph -- and reading other comments it sounds like many HNers would self-assess similarly.
It's that (probably startling) transition to 'until we started getting demands from companies to advertise for them' that most of us have never experienced, and I can see how that would massively skew the expectations on both sides, especially as popularity / traffic increases and demands get more frequent, emphatic, dubious, etc.
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.
Or have you promoted any Amazon products with an affiliate link?
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.
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.
Any tips on how to blog? Or be better at it?
I'm always doing things with my gf but never think to write about it, or think that id have some unique perspective or opinion to offer. How do I find my voice? How do I get better at writing? Before I even start? Meaning I know the common wisdom of just do it and you'll get better but I have this anxiety of even starting at all because of being seen as less than, or try-hard, or w/e. The idea of being watched as I perform scares me, the thought of failing publically. Maybe its a certain type of bravery that I lack? Idk
Any advice appreciated. In terms of getting better at writing, and handling the anxiety of critique and etc.
Thank you!
One thing you can do, open up Word and write there. Pictures and everything. Just practice, offline, where no one can see it. See if it sounds good. Write stuff you want to read, and read other blogs to see how they do it. As for the critique, unless they're correcting factual inaccuracies that you should fix, I just ignore it all. Haters gonna hate, and you should be glad someone's paying enough attention to you to have an opinion on your writing. More realistically, the people who don't like what you're doing will just not read your stuff. Negative criticism I've found to be pretty rare unless you're talking politics.
And if your target audience is under 40, you're in luck: their attention span is almost nonexistent. You can get away with a good picture and 200 words and that can be your entire article. You don't need to write SAT essays for every post because no one's gonna read all of that. Save your words for "evergreen" content where people will be reading it for months/years in the future.
Oh, and read blogs about blogging so you get to know and understand terms like SEO and evergreen and stuff. There's a whole culture behind crafting a post.
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.