Why Numbers Matter & How You Can Help

Some of the most asked questions I get about blogging is, "Do you get paid? How much do you get paid? How do you get paid?" Even though I am very transparent with this answer, there's a lot of numerical work that goes behind it that most people don't really understand, which is okay because for a long time I didn't understand it either. I would work on my blog as a hobby and in the past couple years it's turned into my own side hustle. Except, I'm still very, very small. I am a very small fish in a very large pond filled with other wonderful and more well-known creative fish.



If this blog ever turns into a full-time gig that would be amazing, but I'm not relying on this as a financial support anytime soon. I want to answer some of the most asked questions I get about blogging and also breakdown the numbers to help everyone understand why numbers are an important factor in this. I will also explain how the littlest things you do can help me grow my brand.

Money
Let's jump right into it and answer all of your questions.

Do I make money from my blog?
The short answer is yes. I don't make a lot or really even enough to give you finite numbers. Through a variety of different ways, I make anywhere between $50-$200 a month from my blog and socials.

How do you make money?
Most of my money comes from affiliate links and Instagram ads. Those are my two top ways of making money online. There are a few other ways that I earn money, it's just not as much.

Affiliate Links– Whenever you are reading a blog post of mine you may realize that I will link a product, whether it's a product I recommend or it's something I'm wearing, I will link it. When a person clicks on that link and purchases something I get a commission from it. Not a big commission, but a commission nonetheless. Even if you don't purchase the exact product I am recommending, if you simply stay on that page and buy other items I get a commission from that entire purchase. I use programs such as Shop Style Collective, Reward Style and Amazon Associates. Amazon is where I make my most money. It's just the most conveinent way for people to shop nowadays.

Instagram Ads– I work with a third party website called Heartbeat that connects my profile to hundreds of companies who want to partner. Some ads are for products only and others are paid. I have earned over $500 working with this company in the past couple years. Most of the time, the season makes this fluctuate. I notice I'll have a lot more campaigns in the fall-winter time and right at the beginning of summer usually. How this works (and I'm sure other campaign partners do as well) is they alert you that there is a campaign that you can apply for, I apply, get accepted and create the post. I will say, that though my friends joke with me, I will never post about something that is off brand. There are tons and tons of campaigns that get released, but if it doesn't work with my brand I'm not going to apply for them. Some examples of those are food products that have meat in them (I'm a vegetarian, hello) or items that contain CBD (not that I'm against it, but I've never used it so why would I suggest it to others?). It's very important to me that when I work with a company it's a product that I actually use.

Sponsored Blog Post– I'm putting this in here because it's on my goal list for 2020. I haven't ever had a paid blog post, but I have had a sponsored blog post. A sponsored post is when a company reaches out to me to offer me a free product in hopes that I'll like the product and share about it on my blog. I have had a handful of these and they have even resulted in a giveaway to share with my readers. Again, I have turned down some options because their products do not fit well with my brand.

Shop The Post– This one sort of works with affiliate links except it correlates to a specific post. You'll notice on my Instagram post that I'll add to the caption, "Shop This Post: http://liketk.it/2F9hc." If you copy & paste this link onto your web browser you will see my Instagram picture with any products that I have linked to that. Then from there it works the same way as affiliate links. If you like the shirt I'm wearing in a picture and you click on that shirt and purchase it (or purchase other things) then I earn a commission from that.

AdSense– Something I am still trying to get a hang of, but with Google I can place ads on my website. Even though people are so used to seeing those ads, if anyone clicks on the ad I get a commission from that.

Numbers
The general idea is that the more followers you have the more opportunities you have. That's true. There's no easy way around that, the more followers, clicks, likes, comments, etc that an influencer gets on their post translates to percentages of impressions that brands look at when deciding if they want to partner with you. So when people say that "numbers don't matter," they're lying. They do.
Side note, Instagram allows the swipe up feature for profiles who have 10K followers or more. It's hard to advertise products on your Instagram story without the swipe up feature, but Snapchat does allow it and it's a great way to cross promote.

Now to completely contradict myself, numbers aren't everything. If you have 1,000 followers and only 2 interact with you. Your percentage of impressions and reactions are really low. But if you have 100 followers and 60 of them interact with you, your percentage is much higher. People interaction is when brands look at too. You can have thousands of followers, but if you're not getting any interaction on your posts then you just have ghost followers.

Let's talk about ghost followers and bots. When I was first starting out I connected my Instagram account to an app that helped you "get followers." I didn't fully understand what that meant and I was still new and next thing you know my Instagram got flooded with bots. That's fake accounts liking and unliking, following and unfollowing your account to give the impersonations of followers. Bad move. I quickly unlinked my account from that app and never did that again. I still get spam accounts here and there and I try to clean those up to the best of my ability by reporting them as spam. If you're going to start a blog or influencer platform stay away from those apps and focus on the followers that interact with you authentically.

Another number that matters is the time. The time of day is not crucial, but it is important when curating a post. Having a set schedule (dates) and time of the day that you post will help you to have a consisting posting schedule that your followers can easily follow. Checking Instagram insights will also help to see when most of your followers are online at that time. If you notice that people are online more at Mondays at 2 p.m. then that should be your target to hit.

The next part of the number game is clicks. Clicks, clicks, clicks. If you have a YouTube channel or a blog or whatever it is, most of your statistics are coming from clicks. Whether it's clicking the link in your bio, clicking an ad, clicking a product recommendation...a lot of the numbers boil down to how many "clicks" you get.

How You Can Help
If you have a friend that has an influencer brand, whether it's YouTube or a blog, etc., there are a ton of easy ways that you can help them out and here's how:

Follow, Like & Comment
You should be following all of their accounts. Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Sign up for the newsletters... whatever it is. By being a subscriber or follower Then make sure to engage with their post. You're going to see their post when you go online anyways so take a second to like their post and leave a nice comment while you're at it. Even if it's an emoji or a quick comment, those comments and likes translate to numbers which help out more than you can possibly know. It takes two seconds to follow, like and comment. Comments on a blog post and YouTube videos are also very helpful, but take a little more effort.

Clicking the links or swiping up on something that they advertise. If you have a little more time to spare you should open up the link that they share with you. For my blog, I get statistics that show how many people click the link to my post and stay on the page for more than thirty seconds. All of this is tracked the moment that someone clicks a link.

Shop the post. This one is obvious, if you plan on making a purchase from a store, try to use your friends affiliate links first. I love when my friends and family tell me they did their holiday shopping using my Amazon link. It's extremely helpful and shows that they support me.

Share the post. Whether it's on Instagram, Facebook, or a retweet on Twitter. Sharing your friend's post helps to grow their followers. You may share an interesting post and then a follower of yours will like it and start to follow. It's a chain reaction and a sharing of a post can go along way.

All of these ways to help your friend grow their brand could lead to new brand opportunities, getting on PR lists, invitations to events or paid trips. There's really no limit when it comes to building an influencer brand. You already know the exciting opportunities that your favorite influencers receive and of course those would be great to one day be apart of, but it takes a lot of work to get there. No one received their popularity overnight. It takes a lot more work than people realize sometimes, which is why when people enter this industry with the wrong intentions and they tend to burn out very quickly. I love what I do and first and foremost this blog will always be a hobby, turning it into a business is just a happy bonus to it all.

You can take what you want from this and if you choose to keep supporting me (you simply clicking on this link is a way to show your support) I can't thank you enough. Even if you're not interested in blogging or how it works, at least you'll know as a family member, a friend or just a reader how you can continue to help me grow and create a lifestyle brand.

If you ever have any questions please feel free to reach out and ask!

xoxo, Michele

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