What it Really Means to Create Your Career Online

Photo Credit: Business Insider — Photo Credit: *Business Insider*

For many, a nine-to-five is far from ideal: putting in hours of unfulfilling work for a paycheck and doing the same mundane tasks each day. Today, in the age of self-promotion, however, social media has been a new avenue for the entrepreneurial-minded and those who chase celebrity. Whether it’s going viral on Tik Tok or Twitter, or creating craveable content for Instagram or Youtube, the dream is to live life… for a living.

Here’s how influencing works: once a user has built a solid following, brands may reach out to them and send either free products for influencers or pay them to post. This model applies to all social media apps but initially exploded on Instagram.

The average influencer can make anywhere between $30,000 to $100,000 (Vox, 2018) and can also receive paid-for trips and other “priceless” experiences. And that is just for a minor to mid-sized influencer, not even close to what some major influencers can rake in per year.

Many apps have built-in analytic software to alert the content creators of the best posting times and how to best reach their audiences, which makes the content creation scheduling a bit more of a breeze. A few years ago, influencers were mocked and not taken very seriously. Now, it is a full-time job for the rare few who are in the upper echelons of the social networking apps, and a sought after position for almost all social media users. Influencing has become such a full-time job, that daily posts require fresh content and thus, fresh outfits that have never been seen before by followers.

To show how much social media can change your life, take a look at travel and fashion blogger Lauren Bullen (@gypsea_lust). At 27 years old and on Instagram since the beginning, Bullen has 2.1 million followers and gets paid to travel, wear certain brands and eat at restaurants. She recently built a house in Bali, Indonesia on her Instagram earnings alone and also sells photo editing presets as an added bonus. In an interview for Forbes Magazine, Bullen says that she quit her job in 2016 after networking with photographers and landed her first press trip to Fiji. There she met her boyfriend Jack (@doyoutravel) with a whopping 3 million followers, and the rest is history (“How”, 2019).

Merchandise by influencers is another lucrative and rapidly growing avenue. Mainly a business model for those who have gone viral on Youtube, IG or TikTok, merch advertising a catchphrase, cool design or name of the famous content creator selling it can be a large part of their added business value. Fans wearing their merch not only pay the creator to buy it but are essentially free promotion. Logan Paul, a controversial social media star, has a net worth of about $12.5 million and earns about $3 million of that from his merchandise (Gupta, 2018). For YouTubers, personalized merchandise, aside from the monetization of videos, is the only real way to get paid aside from the occasional sponsor or two in which the Youtuber will simply say in their intro that it was sponsored.

Charli D’amelio, the sweetheart of video app Tik Tok has 60 million + followers (@charlidamelio). A junior in high school made famous for her impressive dancing videos, she has a net worth of $4 million she garnered in one year. She gets paid an estimated $25,000 per video posted (“How Much”, 2020), and that revenue comes from artists paying her to promote their song by creating a dance challenge to it, lip-syncing challenge or putting it as a soundtrack to a video montage of her friends. She also gets paid by brands to promote their goods and sell her merchandise. The accumulation of wealth from social media at such a young age sets D’amelio up nicely for the rest of her future, as she technically already has a career and has a substantial amount of earnings which gives her the freedom to choose her future as she grows up.

Fame brings interest, and through that, money from sponsorships. As society becomes less inclined to work at jobs that do not bring joy and struggle through paying for schooling, the old adage “do what you love and love what you do” has been the goal for many. The drive to fund your own future doing what you love and living life on your own terms is a major motivator in the quest to be a celebrity. The era of individualism is here, and the lucky few who are vaulted to fame truly have the world at their fingertips.