#270: Why We Retired from Influencing

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Emma: You're listening to the Beautiful Mess Podcast, your cozy comfort listen. This week we're sharing the story of how we became influencers and why we decided to retire from it over the past few years. There are so many pros and cons to this career path that we don't hear talked about often enough. In this episode, we'll share our experiences as well as any advice for anyone considering going into influencing.

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Elsie: I feel like this is gonna be a fun episode. I've been looking forward to this one for a while because whenever I spend time particularly on TikTok, I've noticed there's just so much, it feels like it's such a dream job for people. It's just a very, very popular career path now, and a lot of people seem to see it as. This like golden opportunity and kind of simplistic, like if you go viral, if you blow up, then you've made it and you will just be rich and have a secure career. And that is not exactly how we see it or what we believe in. So I think this will be, you know, just kind of an interesting episode to add some context for people who are considering it. I also think influencing makes an excellent side career. Yeah. If you are kind of on the fence with it, I don't think it has to be all or nothing. I think it makes a great add-on to something else. Then we're also gonna talk about the mental health aspects of that, which is huge and very important to talk about. We're gonna talk about some of our favorite memories and sort of like the highlights of our experiences and we have a unique experience because we did start pre-social media influencing. So we like did it whenever it was only blogs. So we have, I feel like we were there for like, maybe like one of the very first brand trips that ever happened, which is really funny. Maybe actually, maybe for real though.

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Emma: It makes us sound really old, but I'm like, yeah, actually I own that.

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Elsie: I own that as, I think I'm like on the very last year it was like one or two last years that you can even be a millennial. That's my age, so that's fine. And then we're gonna talk about the pros and cons and we are going to give advice for anyone who is trying to do it. Now, I feel like the reason why I didn't do this episode in the past is like, I felt like it leaned a little negative and I was like, I don't wanna make it seem like it's like because a lot of our, it's terrible or no one should do it.

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Emma: It’s like, well, no, we don't really feel that way.

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Elsie: We definitely don't feel that way. Many, many of our close friends are influencers. Professionally, I think it's a career like, so yeah, start off with this. Start off with my big caveat because you know we love a caveat. It's our passion. I think that influencing is a career that deserves a lot more respect. It's straight up sexism, like, like beginning, middle, end. It's sexist that people think that influencing is not, is either not a hard career or that it's some kind of a cop out career or that it's not a real career that people like make fun of each other when they're trying to get into it. Like it's just all so stupid. So we do defend the, I defend it as a, a real career. Yeah. And as something that can be life-changing and really positive for people.

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Emma: I mean, from my experience, the IRS definitely considers it as a real career. They're gonna tax you, so Yeah. It's a real job where you make money. Yep. So. Maybe it's obvious to all listeners. But like, how do you kind of define an influencer?

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Elsie: So I define an influencer as someone who earns money through sponsorships.

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Emma: Okay.

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Elsie: And I think that's kind of the simplest way. So maybe we should define it a little further.

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Emma: So you could be a blogger, YouTuber, Instagram, all combination TikTok podcast, a podcast caster, even podcast casting.

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Elsie: And technically yes. Like for, for that one person who's like, hey, technically yes. We still have sponsors on our podcast. Yeah. It's just like not a big part of our career anymore, so we're not counting it and that's all right.

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Emma: You can call it semi-retired if you prefer.

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Elsie: Anyway, I think that that's kind of the main way that you can earn money. You can also earn money directly through the platforms. Some of the platforms are better than others. They do these little sort of bonuses. Also, there is affiliate programs, affiliate money, and some people make all of their influencer money that way. So that is also a way to be an influencer, but it is a little more rare. I would say definitely the most common way to earn money as an influencer is through sponsorships. Okay, cool, cool, cool. So, okay, how we got started? I love telling the story because it's just funny. Add your memories. So when we started our blog, A Beautiful Mess in, I don't even know what year. I don't know it officially started, but I know it's like getting almost to 20 years old now at this point.

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Elsie: So when we started, we kind of immediately could see that there was traction there that we weren't able to get from our local economy. So we had like opened some stores to, or I had opened a store and then Emma joined me on the second one and we made it like this adorable vintage store. Like cute, so cute with a bakery. And we were definitely making like below the line of poverty, like just absolutely not a full-time income from that store. But we loved it. We wanted to do it, and so we started using our blog as a way to supplement our income, and that became like we noticed immediately, like this is an easier way to earn money than selling just to our local economy. So I think that's one of the beautiful things about influencing is that it doesn't matter where you live. You don't have to live in a big city. You know, you don't have to, like, you can live anywhere in the world and become an influencer. And also you can do it with any level of education. I did not graduate from college, and that hasn't been a hindrance at any point in my career, and that's. A part of it is that we took an unconventional path. So that's one of the things that's really cool about it. Anyway, how we got started, so after we, we've started out with selling these little ads in our sidebar. It was like a hundred dollars a month or something to have an ad. And then we started kind of like doing tiers and then we started getting invited to do campaigns. And when we started actually doing the, the designated post for sponsors and the campaigns, I think was when it started to turn more into like an income. Our very, very first campaign was for Levi's jeans. And I remember I went to San Francisco twice for that. I think you did.

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Emma: Yeah. I think at the beginning and kind of at the end or kind of in the middle.

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Elsie: Which is a lot. And it was like a small, small budget. Like it was something that we wouldn't have even done anything for at the end of our career.

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Emma: Yeah. I think it was 10,000 or 20,000, something like that.

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Elsie: I think it was 10.

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Emma: Yeah.

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Elsie: Yeah. And it was quite a few things. And to do like months of work traveling, two trips. And it was it, it was very experimental. Like I could tell they were learning and we were learning at the same time. Right there, it was very strange. Like there was this one moment when we were sitting in the lobby and it was like all the different people that they had selected and it was not, it was not influencers, the way you see them now. It was kind of just like really random, a really random assortment of people. Like I remember someone was a photographer. And they were trying to pick a very big variety. And it was all women, but it was just really random. And one of the people was like, kind of like, just like cutting the tension with a knife. And she was like, this is weird, isn't it? And everyone else was like. No. No, I don't think so. It's just totally normal. I'm like, you know, and like it was just but it was weird. And like I always regretted not being like, yeah, like that. Like it was weird. And then they made us do a media training and I remember like, I almost ran out of the room crying. It was like a very awkward media training, the worst I ever had.

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Emma: Well, that's mean to say, but to be fair, you're not good at doing media.

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Elsie: I'm really bad at doing media training and I was even worse then. Yeah. Way worse then.

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Emma: This was 20 years ago. So, yeah, I think that's what's kind of interesting about, so obviously nowadays, like influencers, there's all different kinds and I feel like a big part of the industry now is kind of like, I guess you would say be less celebrities. So like reality TV stars would be a great way to start an influencing career or piece of it or whatever. But like back in the day, and this is still true, a lot of times it was people more like me or Elsie where we're kind of introverts. And that's part of why working online works really well for us.Because we get to do it kind of like. On our own in a room and then we put it online.

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Emma: So usually we are like, not on a, you know, a set with a big crew of people and having to do our job in front of them. Like, that's not really something you ever had any experience with until you started doing that. So it's like all of a sudden you're thrust into this thing where you're like, oh, I'm not very good at this, but I'm getting paid to do it. Yeah. And they kind of want me to do the same thing that I do when I'm on my own, but like I'm used to doing it on my own and I'm not really used to doing it in front of all of your cameras.

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Elsie: Yeah, but at the end of our career, I did like a full commercial for Airbnb all by myself, and I didn't mess up. I was so proud of my, like, so it, it was like a great learning experience too. You know, over the 15 years, very challenging 15 years or so. Yeah, it stretched us. It challenged us.

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Emma: And I think it's another thing sometimes people listening who probably many of you who listen are like. Blog readers or you at least know we have a blog and you know, that's what we used to do, what we do now. So I think too, like it's interesting that at least for us in our influencer career, there are a lot of pieces of our job that our main audience, the Beautiful Mess audience would see because we would do a post for Canon, Levi, Adobe, Photoshop, whatever. But then there were lots of pieces of the campaigns that our audience would never see because we would go maybe speak at a conference or be in some kind of commercial that they may not ever see or whatever. And so there was like all this work that happened that like our audience didn't really even know we were doing.

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Elsie: Yeah. Let me describe some of that. Yeah because some of these are really funny. So we used to do a lot of SMTs, which is called like satellite media tour. And it's like, it's kind of what, like, you see like, the only time I've ever really seen it is like when actors are promoting a film. Where they, where they're sat in one room, in one chair. So basically we sat in a news room, like a studio with a set up. Like I think one time we did one for Starbucks. One time we did one and I'm not sure what else.

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Emma: There's a couple more I can't remember.

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Elsie: So basically we would sit there and be interviewed by, remotely, by his stations. You have an air station. Either you could see them on the screen or usually you could just hear them in your ear. And there was a coach sitting in front of us pointing at the KAA bottle rapidly being like, mention this because it's like what? We would do it, we were. We were supposed to be giving a natural piece of like content, some kind of demonstration. Usually like this is how you make this craft. But then we had to mention the product in the certain way and get these lines in and we didn't always get it. And it was very challenging. We were okay at it.

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Emma: We were doing our best.

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Elsie: So if you ever see people doing that just look the other way. It's a skill. It's a skill. Be proud of them.

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Emma: That was really hard. We also did a lot of hosting events, so we would like to be the host at a blogger conference and just like go out and be like welcome everyone or, you know, give a speech or whatever.

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Elsie: I liked that you'd meet people.

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Emma: It just felt more, you still kinda had a script and you needed to, you know doing what you were hired to do, but I always felt like a little more like this is more casual. Yeah. It's, you know, whatever. I feel like I'm not even good at having an earpiece in and like listening with, you know what I mean?

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Elsie: No, we're not Taylor Swift. This is such a skill we're not equipped for, there was often times when we had to do things outside of our comfort zone or outside of our skillset and we just freaking did it.

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Emma: Did our best.

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Elsie: The other thing we often did. It was hosting these like private events, so in New York they would often, this was kind of a, I would say more on the edge of pre-social media or like in the early Instagram days. They would have these events that were meant for magazine editors. And so you would like be in this room with all these products, with all these like snacks. A lot of times they were beautiful. Sometimes it was kind of a party, sometimes it was just kind of a thing where they would stop in and then basically we would just stand there all day and wait for people to come in and talk to us. And talk to them about the product. And then, you know, we've had some friends who were magazine editors, so we would like always see them. We'd see them every time. Yeah and really it was, it was a lot of stuff like that. And then also like going like, we worked for Cannon prop. For closer to 10 years, would you say? So usually every year we would go to their headquarters and we would pitch our year long partnership in person ourselves, with Emma's husband who was at the time. He did our sponsorships.

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Emma: Then Claire did it afterwards.

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Elsie: So we had our own, instead of having an agency, we did have our own person on our team that sold our ads the entire time. So it was kind of the same thing.

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Emma: We had an agent too, who we worked with.

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Elsie: That's true.

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Emma: And she would do a few things for us. And then we kind of had our own in-house. Yeah, we did both. Which we were allowed to do, I guess. Yeah. Because we started so long before they made rules about it. But anyway. But yeah, we loved working with Cannon. Nicest team. They had the nicest team. The Home Depot had a super sweet team. There are so many companies that like because you would just meet people who are like, this is my job, I work for this company and I do various, you know, things for them and they're just fun and nice and had families and it was really fun to meet people. I always loved that part of it because it was like, most of our job is bloggers and influencers is very alone, which I like because I like being alone. I like working alone. But it was fun to kind of meet people here and there very randomly and people from different areas because Cannon was in New York, so it was very like New York people. That was fun though. It's outside New York.

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Elsie: Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Okay, so I think, let's talk about our favorite memories a little bit. I feel like a lot of my favorite memories from influencing were times that we traveled. Before I had kids, which was also before COVID because that kind of changed things. But before that, we traveled about once a month, so we like one weekend a month. So we traveled all the time together for the sponsors. We hardly ever were split up just so we were very, very, very often traveling. All over the world really. There was a few times when we got to go to other countries, which was very cool, but most of it was New York and sometimes LA and sometimes other random cities. Yeah, that was a big part of it. They kind of always wanted, like in the bigger campaigns, like some kind of commitment to travel Yeah. Was just always kind of a part of it. But we ended up having like all these happy memories doing it together and it was just like a, you know, I don't know, a very fun part of life. Like thinking of all the times we were like going to Shake Shack Yeah. And like, you know, just like all the cute little things that we got to do because of those trips.

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Emma: It was fun traveling and it did sometimes feel like made it hard to travel for fun because you're a little worn out from traveling for work. But I don't know, some people travel a lot more for work, so I don't know. I just wasn't used to it, I think until we did it.

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Elsie: Yeah. I was used to it at the time, but I wouldn't be able to do that much now.

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Emma: No. As a mom, yeah. I have a hard time leaving with my kids' ages now.

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Elsie: Yeah. And it would, it wouldn't be worth it to me anymore. But at the time it, it was like we didn't have kids. We both were kind of, you know, on the same page with it. And it was fun. Yeah, lots of happy memories. And then the other thing I think was, for me, a favorite memory was I think like working on my skills. So I did start off as like. If you've ever listened to our first podcast, you can also see how bad, like I'm just natural. There's so many things that I was naturally so bad at public speaking, horrible meeting people. Horrible, like podcasting when I used to just guest before we had our own podcast, horrible. And just all of those things and writing, writing, really horrible and all those things. I feel like, you know, our career pushed me further and further, you know, to, to at least like, embrace, you know, get past the part where you're like, I'm so bad. I am, I wanna just run outta the room crying and get to a point where you can just do it and be a professional. Like, I think that was like something exceptionally valuable that I'm glad I got that out of it. Especially public speaking, like that used to be my biggest fear and now I think I can kind of do it if I have to.

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Emma: I liked it a lot too in that way. Like I also really like, so I really like creativity with borders.

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Elsie: Yes.

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Emma: I just think it's fun. Like I still do that with my writing and like, it's just something I think our mom kind of taught us about growing up.So what I mean is like if I was going to make a painting instead of being like, I can make anything with all colors, I would say, oh, I'm going to paint, you know, a landscape. Or, oh, I'm only going to use warm tones or something, and that would be creativity with borders and working with sponsors was a lot of that because it was, you can kind of do whatever you want. But you need to use Philadelphia cream cheese and no cheesecake recipe. Like they usually would have like some little thing that they're like, we've already got a lot of that, so we want you to do, you know, something else. Yeah. Because I think a lot of times people thought, oh, when you do a sponsored thing, they really dictated to you and it's not your idea. And actually it really wasn't, in my experience, it really wasn't that way at all. They were very open to your ideas. They wanted you to pick an idea that was gonna be something that. Resonated with your audience. That was why they were hiring you. But you did have to work with their product. And sometimes there were a few things like, don't do this, or you know, whatever. Because usually it's because they had too much of it or they were doing a campaign with five people and they knew somebody else was already doing something similar or whatever. So I always liked trying to come up with something interesting. Something I was excited about with the parameters, because to me it was just creativity with borders. And I think that's fun because a lot of our blogging over the years was very like, anything we wanna write?

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Emma: Yes, we could write anything. And that's fun. That was super fun. But it was just kind of an interesting exercise for your creative muscle to have some kind of border that you had to do. And so I always enjoyed that part of it too.

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Elsie: Yeah. Let's say what some of our favorite, favorite like, sponsored stuff was to work on because I do think, yeah, like I knew my least favorites.

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Emma: I think I've forgotten all the ones that I didn't enjoy actually. I'm like, yeah, I don't even really, I'm like, I don't know. I'm sure there was some disaster somewhere, but can't even really remember because I'm just like that. I didn't like that moving on. Like that's what my brain does.

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Elsie: Well, I guess that's kind of in the pros and cons. Okay. We'll move on to pros then. Okay. Pros of influencing is a career, so one of the things that we loved most about it that I still kind of missed this day is working with favorite brands. Like, you know it, it's so fun. That part of it really is just as good as you think it could be. Not always. A lot of the time, like you, you know, you have these favorite brands that you admire, that you use, that you, you know, they're like, you save up for them. And then one day you get to work with them and they send you a whole, you know, box full of like all their makeup or all their. Paint swatches or, you know, whatever the thing is. And it's, it is very exciting and it does feel truly collaborative. And like Emma said, we almost always got to think of the ideas. There was very, very few, I would say the SMT is probably the hardest thing we ever did. As far as technical execution, where it was a little excruciating to, you know, when the coach lady, it was more sitting there pointing at me.

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Emma: I was actually okay at it.

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Elsie: Yeah. So anyway, I think that making sponsored content was usually really fun and a lot of the stuff that I got tasked with, I always did a lot of the cocktails and then I always did a lot of the decor and I loved that stuff. Like if they were like, decorate your table like fall, and I'm like, great. I love the work. I love the, you know, just, there's nothing bad about it. There's no downsides.

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Emma: Yeah. Another pro was, I feel like a lot of these have like two sides to it, but I'll say the pro side for now was that a lot of the content we would do would be, you know, we did a lot of categories over the years. We did decor, home decor, fashion, also crafting and food. And I tend to be more in the crafting and food realm, especially food, which we don't have as many food sponsors, but when we did, I was like, yes, my wheelhouse. But anyway, a lot of the crafting hosting, that type of thing. Big piece of it would be Q4. So Q4 is the end of the year. A lot of people have a lot of their budget that they're looking to spend at that time. It also is shopping season because it's holiday season. You've got Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas here in the US all in Q4 and then kind of New Year's, but that's sort of like at the very, very end. So we love holidays. If you're a podcast listener, then you know, we go crazy for holidays. We love holidays. So it felt like there was a lot of work that you could do around that time. So a lot of your work ended up being kind of like holiday stuff, which was great because I like making a spooky haunted mansion and if someone's gonna pay me to do that, amazing. Like I love that. You know? So that was really fun is it felt like the budget and the timeline and shopping season really aligned with some of our favorite times of year. So it was like doing a lot of work at the time of year around stuff that we enjoyed.

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Elsie: I always really enjoyed the schedule. Like throughout the year we would have consistent sponsor posts, like especially like our year long people. And then in October, November and December, especially November and the beginning of December, it would be like a sponsored. Many of them every week. Like Yeah. Shopping to you, you're just constantly making them. And it's fun because there is an end to it and you kind of just cram and you know, like this is our part of the year where we kind of earn the most money. And then we're gonna have, and then you, and then you know that in January it's gonna be quiet again and you're gonna get to like post about decluttering or whatever you feel like, and you're not gonna have as many to do anymore. So yeah, I liked the schedule of it as well.

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Emma: Yeah. Yeah, it was a very sustainable career for many, many years for us financially. We also had a team we worked with and I think, you know, we got to pay people well and work well as a team. It was very enjoyable. So financially, obviously there were pros. It's probably obvious, but there you go.

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Elsie: Another huge pro of it is that it pairs really well with other careers, like with other jobs. So I feel like if you work at an agency or you work at an office job and they see you on Instagram doing a sponsored post every week. Like it could, they could, and sometimes do, call people in to HR and that's like a problem or whatever, like it, there are conflicts and stuff, but in our, you know, experience of being self-employed, we did these sponsorships the entire, almost 20 years that we did this job. But we also launched our podcast. We also launched seven apps. We also launched, wrote three books. Yeah, we wrote three books. We made several big product lines, beginning, middle, end in that time. So I feel like that was probably the thing I valued and loved most about it, is that it kind of gives you this freedom to explore other things while you have this steady thing that you also do. So I think that can go really well for people who already work, like in a creative career. Like if you're an artist or maybe you're a writer or maybe you're, I don't know, like maybe you have some kind of a small business and it's not yet at the point where it can create a full-time income. You could pair it with influencing and possibly get there sooner, you know? So I think that's nice.

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Emma: I agree.

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Elsie: Okay. Now we're gonna talk about cons. So there's so many, let's talk about the mental health stuff first.

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Emma: Okay. Well, so influencing careers require that you put content out regularly online. And as you can guess, people are kind of mean online. Sometimes. So, you know, there's this whole side of it where you have to kind of navigate. People's reaction to your work alongside a sponsor who is paid for you to do that work. And that's sort of, I think being online generally is kind of hard, but then that kind of adds a level of you have to be a professional when you're getting made fun of or something like that. And that's sort of like a awkward thing, but it just happens and you have to do it. I don't know.

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Elsie: It's very difficult. Like it's one thing to do your own, like say it's a recipe, do your own recipe, and. It gets a mean comment, but it's a different thing to do a recipe for a sponsor that you want to impress, and then it gets, you know, the same mean comment like it does, it feels a little worse because like the point of it is to try to create a good response for the sponsor, you know? But you can't always do that. And some of the time, in fact, there. Backlashes happen on sponsored post. And yeah, that can always be really difficult.

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Emma: Yeah. And usually they have someone on their team that's like monitoring that stuff.So you kind of know that you, you don't even really have to bring it up to them. Like it's probably already being noted somewhere in an email or in a meeting or like, you know, it's just, it's just, you know, part of it and it can feel very just embarrassing.

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Elsie: Yeah. But I do think that the people who are best suited to be professional influencers are people who are able to have a little bit of an on off switch where you don't have to care. If you have that inside of you, I'd actually have not always had that. I deeply cared through most of the entire time, and I only stopped caring in the last five years. So that is, that's tough if you're a person who deeply cares and kind of internalizes things because it's. It's not, it's too much. And a lot of it you can't really fix or solve. There's nothing to do about it except for just move on to the next day a lot of times. So I think there is a mental health toll to it. And also, like we've talked about in the previous episode about our breaks, like we were never, we never really had the option of being offline for the past almost 20 years of our life. We were on there every day, you know? Because we're responding to people we're. It's our responsibility.

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Emma: Yeah. And when you pitch ideas, you're trying to pitch things that are gonna be successful. So you need to know what's happening online. You need to know the landscape or what new trends are, or like, you know, what's working well in the algorithms once the algorithms kicked in. So if you don't know that, then you can't really do well. And so your content won't do well, and so a sponsor's not gonna hire you, you know?

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Elsie: So yeah, getting through really hard mental health times is really tough. And also like online bullying, like you will be bullied if you want to do influencing for a living. You'll be bullied kind of about anything about your appearance. Definitely anything that you put out there as So I, that's why I recommend. Only putting stuff out there that you're okay with getting feedback on. So I think like being careful about, like that's one of the reasons why I don't like talk too much about like my kids and my parenting anymore is because I don't want any feedback on it. And there's actually kind of a lot of things. That I don't share about anymore, but people don't seem to notice, which is nice. But yeah, like if you don't want to be criticized on it, then don't talk about it at all. And you know, for the things that you do put out there, understand that you will be criticized by some people and it's just like part of the process and it's not avoidable. It's not in, it's not your responsibility to try to fix or avoid other people's negative reactions. You kind of just have to, I think it's a Georgia O'Keefe quote that she said, like she puts her compliments and her other stuff all into the same place in the same trash can. And I think that's like actually a really good attitude to have about it.

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Emma: Yeah, I think too, like there's just, you know. Multiple buckets of what kind of feedback because if someone's like, I don't really like this post, I feel that. The content's not very good. It didn't entertain me or I didn't feel the recipe was good or I didn't feel the project was cute or whatever. That I feel like is really not a big deal. Like it's more just like feedback that could be useful, honestly.

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Elsie: Yeah. Sometimes the negative feedback is useful.

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Emma: The feedback that's like, you're ugly. I wish you didn't exist. I wish you weren't. You couldn't make money doing this.

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Elsie: I liked you better when you were poor, is a comment that we often get. And it's kind of hard to. Here. Well, what do you do with it? You know, there's nothing, so there's nothing good you can do with it.

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Emma: I liked you better before you are who you are today. I don't like you. Now it's like, oh, okay, well what do I do with that? So those are the ones that are more like hard to avoid, but anytime you put your work out into the world, you're gonna get stuff. Some of it's good, some of it's like good feedback. That's helpful. Some of it's just mean.

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Elsie: I actually, I'm really inspired by the Gen Zs that I feel like, and people who kind of started on TikTok who didn't start in blogging like us. I feel like they're more accepting that even if it's rage bait, you're still getting people to interact and that the interacting is the goal. Like having a post where no one is talking about anything is kind of, in some ways worse than having a post where a hundred people in a row say you're ugly, like, and. You know? Yeah. Pursuit of being an influencer. It's better to have that activity, even if people are being negative and sometimes they're going to be, so I wish that's something that I would've been able to accept earlier. If I could go back and give advice to my younger self. I think I would, one of the pieces of advice I would give is don't delete every negative comment. Just let them, let them sit there and grow. Who gives a shit? Like, that's fine. Yeah. I think that, you know, people are smart enough. To see those like unearned little jabs for what they are. And you know, people are able, like people, people aren't stupid and I think that it's okay to kind of let people just mouth off at you if that's what they need to do. So. I'll see if I can take that advice in the future. But I think that it is something that I'm seeing like the younger generation be a lot more, like, they kind of like put the rage bait out there on purpose and I don't think I would do that. But I also, I respect the hustle. I see what they're doing. I think they probably have a little bit less like sad, like moments crying alone than I probably had, so that's good.

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Emma: Okay, so what other cons of an influencing career?

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Elsie: Okay, so I think the biggest con is that it's a really tumultuous, risky career. It can all go away. It can all go away, and I think that that is. It's just very frustrating, so, okay. It's the type of career where you don't get paid until after the content is posting. There will be times when you spend. Two or three days creating this gorgeous video, this whole scene, you spent money on it. Like you got your nails done, you did everything, and they cancel you. And like there will be times that things like that happen and it's just unfair. So it's not like a normal job where you clock in and you get paid for your time. You do only get paid for the outcome. And sometimes, you know, the cancellations happen and they're really inconvenient. Especially when they're big, you know? Yeah. Because that's one of the things that I think draws people to influencing is that the campaigns can be, you know, 30,000, $50,000 like they can be. These big, huge sums of money. And when you have a lot riding on that, it's kind of scary.

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Emma: Yeah. And I think you can to some extent protect yourself and have contracts, and you should do those things. That'd be a whole different episode and stuff. So yeah. It's unpredictable in that. You could do a lot of work and it could be canceled. You also kind of need to think about it when you're first starting out too. Like, oh, if they're gonna pay me, let's save 5,000. How much time can I spend on this? How many props can I buy to be in the video or whatever it is. Like you, you know, you kind of have to think all that stuff through, because at the end of the day, that's all on you. Unless you've worked out some agreement with them that they're gonna pay for production cost or something. They usually don't, though. They usually don't. Yeah. Because what does that mean? Like I wouldn't agree to that. I'd be like, whatcha gonna spend on this? So yeah, I think you have to think about all that. You have to really put on your business hat for that stuff. But I would also say some of the cons for me was that it's kind of. Unpredictable money. So if you work for someone else and you get a paycheck, you have this paycheck every two weeks. It's the same and it happens until you get fired or you quit. Right? But when you work for yourself, whether you're influencing or something else, then it's more like you have money when you make money, you know? And you might have a lot of people who wanna work with you in December and then you have no one who works with you in January and hopefully you budgeted for that because it just is what it is. So there's that. I also would say like. In some ways an influencer career is very flexible, and then in other ways it's very inflexible. So, you know, in my current life right now, if one of my kids is sick, I might have less time to work. If I was working at a job, then I would call in sick or I would, you know, and there may be some consequences. You know, you may have to talk to your employer at some point if it's like an ongoing thing. But like in influencing, if there's a deadline, you kind of have to hit it or you kind of have to cancel.

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Emma: There’s a good chance that they might be running some kind of sale or some kind of activation period. If your content isn't done for that window, it's kind of useless to them. So if you get sick, if your kid's sick, if you're just not able to complete your work, you know, like there are many times I can think of where I was doing, you know, sponsored content and I had like a fairly high fever because it was due. It was due and I had to finish it. Yeah. And you know, that just is how it is. So, and sometimes, like by the time you're done talking with them, pitching the idea, working out the money, signing the contract. They're sending you the stuff, so they're sending you the product that they want featured. Now you have two days to turn it around because it's like you would've had two months, but you had to do all this discussion, which is important and kind of the way you protect yourself. And then all of a sudden it's kind of to the end of where they're gonna need the content. And you might kind of end up with. A lot of the time goes to this business side that no one ever sees, and then you have this really small window of time to work on your fun, creative work, which is like the thing you're doing, you know? So it's sort of funny in that way.

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Elsie: That's true. I remember so many times. In December when we would get these like kind of unhinged offers from companies that normally wouldn't reach out to us that we had never worked with before. And it would be, it was usually you could tell someone had canceled. Like some other influencer had backed out. They're trying to spend their year end budget and they will pay you a lot of money, but it's like, can I do this fantastical amount of work in 48 hours? Right. Like things like that. We kind of have always, until now, had to leave our December with a lot of working hours, like kind of, yeah. You know what I mean? And we worked most weekends.

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Emma: I do think we kind of built a reputation, like not to our blog readers or to our listeners, but internally among agencies and among, you know, people who do influencing type stuff. That we were people who we would turn in our stuff on time because there are a lot of, you know, influencers. I don't know if this is still true, but it certainly was as we were coming up, a lot of people are kind of flaky. It's a lot of artists, it's a lot of like, you know, kind of people are just doing their thing online. So a lot of people wouldn't hit deadlines and we were an outfit that we really would, so that we would get a lot of these last minute things because they would know if they say yes, they'll get it done.

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Elsie: Yeah. One time we got accidentally copied on this email where they were talking about how we were their backup plan, and that was fun. And we were like, what's the fee though? I don't care. True. We still did it. I don't care. We still did it. So during the, let's say post COVID years, like 20, 22, 3, 4. During that time, we experienced an extreme drop in sponsors, like more than a salary, like several people. Salary drop in, sponsors a huge drop. And a big part of it was I think our own. Fault or, or our own like doing is that we just, we didn't want to become solely video creators. It was like the turning point years when if you wanna be an influencer, you have to make a video every time. And we were still trying to hold on to like, we would get occasional blog sponsors and we would get occasional people who. Let us do photo content still, which has always been what we were most comfortable with and best at. And I don't think we're horrible at making videos, but it definitely was not our skill at that time.

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And it wasn't like we weren't taking the necessary steps to become experts at it, and we knew that. So in a way we knew that if we didn't like pivot hard to posting video every day, that we were not going to still be influencers in five to 10 years time. We were correct. Yeah. But the other thing that happened during those years, several of our employees quit, just naturally moved on to other jobs that were just an upgrade for them. And at the time when it first started happening, we didn't replace them and we didn't feel a need to replace them. And that was, I think when we started to really know like we are. More like internally, like emotionally in our personal life goals were leading us to. Wind down rather than to maintain. So I think that's also part of why we didn't push ourselves to become video experts and prove that we could like, because I actually, I actually think we could have done it. I think that, yeah, probably like maybe Emma, Emma's like a little more, like, she doesn't like video. I always kind of thought it was fun, but I don't know. It's like, it's not what I signed up to do.

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Emma: And I don't wanna do it. I don't enjoy editing video at all. I really don't. I'm just not good at it. I don't like it. I'm just more of a photographer. Yeah, for sure. So I also had a kid in 2021 and that changed my work life. A great deal.

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Elsie: Yeah.

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Emma: Which I always knew it would.

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Elsie: We kind of could see the crossroads coming and we were like, do we wanna do this? Because we had originally said like, we can be influencers still were 50. And I think we could have done that, but we kind of decided not to because it became, it was like this is a higher amount of creative effort. We're getting paid less because we lost so many sponsors. It was like, do you, do we wanna do more work for less money, basically? And we decided no, we didn't want to.

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Emma: Well, and so much of it was becoming social media only. Which for us, most of it was Instagram stuff. And we kind of saw ourselves as bloggers still and we liked that. And it's not that we didn't like working on Instagram, it was just. I don't know if you all remember, but social media got a little wild in 2020. Just, you know, speaking of mental health stuff, it got amplified everything that was bad about it before. It got worse by a lot.

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Elsie: We definitely had some difficult experiences and I think that the whole of the internet did during those years.

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Emma: So it just didn't feel fun to work there anymore. And it was kind of a secondary thing for us anyway. So it just at a certain point felt like we've gotta learn a new skill that's not really our wheelhouse and we're not sure we want it to be. This place is really mean and it's gotten meaner in order to, you know, stay in this place that's mean and do these skills that weren't our wheelhouse. We have to kind of neglect the stuff that we're good at and enjoy. And it just felt like, you know, eh, don't really wanna do this. Yeah. You know?

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Elsie: Yeah. So we did begin going towards a smaller team in those years, so we were like, we're going to. Kind of make our business more sustainable. So we kind of did like a sunset era and we also, during those years, invested a heavy amount of time in our blog. We stopped investing in social media and we started investing in our blog, and now that's the only paycheck we get every month, and I'm glad that we did that. In the podcast a little bit. Okay. So I kind of feel like that brings us to the part about giving tips and advice.

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Emma: Yeah. Elsie and I have always thought about business for a long, long time. This is advice we got from our friend Carter many, many years ago. Creative brats. So you should think of your business when you work for yourself, like a table. So you don't want your table to have one leg. Ideally, you want your table to have three or four legs. If your table can have eight legs, it's never gonna fall over. Like you get the analogy four, minimum, but four is sort of the minimum. Three is like. That table's gonna stand, but it's look for another lake, you know? Yes. So, that's how we were, and if you are wanting to be in an influencing career, or if you wanna do something else, I think this is a really good way to think about owning your own business, is thinking about how can I have multiple revenue streams? How can I have money coming in from different places? In part because if something dries up. Especially if it dries up overnight, quickly, probably through something you can't control. Probably something happening in the world or you had a supplier drop out, you know, who knows? Now you have these other table legs that you can keep you standing until you figure that out or until you build a new leg or whatever.

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Elsie: I know that it was around the time that we stopped doing our product lines, that we added the podcast. So yeah, always like adding something when something else has come to the end of its life, I think is like a really smart way to do business.

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Emma: Yeah, I think so too. And then the other thing I would, a tip I would give, and this is kind of a tip for any small business owner. So influencing you get paid for your time basically. Not in a literal sense because you could spend 50 hours on one project and 10 hours on another and get paid very differently. So not in a literal sense, but all I really mean is. You have a campaign, maybe it's three Instagram videos. You do the videos, you get the money, that's it, done. You don't get any more money for those videos. You know, it's not a passive income. It's not something that keeps growing over time. It's, you get money for the work, the end. So because of that, it's similar in many ways to like working for someone else or getting a paycheck or whatever. So. You should invest your money in your own personal finance life. You should be thinking about investing your money so that it can grow outside of you. And maybe that means owning a house. Maybe that means. Getting a vanguard maybe that, you know, it could mean a number of different things and you should think of that your personal finance life, like a table with legs. Don't just do one thing, preferably do a few things that way. If, you know, if all your money's in the stock market and the stock market had some kind of crash or a really bad time, you have something else that you can kind of keep you afloat for a while. Things like that. So I would say that, and then, you know, to me that's one of the big cons of influencing is that it is kind of the money is contingent on you working.

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Elsie: Yeah.

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Emma: Whereas that's part of why we leaned into blogging is the money is contingent on kind of nothing. Like there's months, we've barely worked on our blog and it made the same amount of money as a month that we worked on it a ton. That's just, you know, a different thing. And if you want that, then. Influencing might not be the bag for you.

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Elsie: Yeah. No, everyone is different and I can't see inside of other people's careers and like we're sharing a lot of things. This episode you probably didn't even know that we did, or you know, like the inner workings of each business are completely different. But one of the things I always kind of worry about for our fellow influencer friends, I'm always like asking Emma, I'm like, should I email them? Should I tell them I'm worried that people spend all of their time and energy creating their social media. Which, you know, just getting it to grow and then, you know, building up those sponsor relationships takes years and it's an incredible thing to get to, you know, half a million, a million followers, whatever, and have these like social media accounts that are known for something. But at the end of, you know, the day, like you could have, you know, an injury or you could have, you know, some kind of disruption in your life that causes you not to be able to work or to need to take a season off or to need to take a year off or to, you know, something. Or in our case, you could decide that you want to move on to do other things. And at the end of that, like I can tell you how much money I make from my affiliates. Now it's seriously like $30 a month. And like it used to be like $10,000 a month. Like it, like when I was doing it actively, but now it's like 30 Do like you don't really make anything after you stop doing it with sponsors. Yeah, like 0, 0, 0. So I always just hope that. Everyone builds something on the side that is truly theirs. And that could be anything. You know, like we did have our apps for a long time and we exited away from that more recently. But now we have our blog still. And like I think that people don't under, like, people think that the blog is just sitting there not making any money. It's not incorrect. It still makes a good strong amount of money for us every single month. And now we work much less hours than we used to. So anyway, that is my biggest piece of advice is just to build something that you can keep later. Because if you want that transitional time or you need it, you'll have it.

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Emma: Yeah, and I'll say too, like I think this is a similar thing, goes along with it. If you're gonna have an influencing career on social media, if at all possible, have some kind of homepage or something, you know, website, that's newsletter. Yeah, you need a newsletter. And why? Well, anytime any social media site wants to, they could ban you or they can change their algorithm drastically and never show your content again. They make the rules, they own it. It's free. We're just using it. So you need a way to like stay in contact with your following people who like you, because if for some reason they can't find you on your platform anymore because of something like that, then now you have your newsletter where you can say, Hey, I'm now podcasting or hey, I have a book coming out or whatever it is that you're doing now, you know? Hopefully you're doing something and you're well, but like. You know, so a newsletter is really kind of the way to go with that. Yeah. There's lots of options of newsletters. We use Flow Desk, which I believe is free when you start.

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Elsie: It's really, really affordable.

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Emma: Yeah. It's really, really affordable. There's all sorts of ones though. Use whatever works for you and usually you need some kind of website it's attached to. That just means a domain and like a splash pitch. We're not saying you have to start a whole blog. I think you should, but I also think like if you don't have time for that, I get it. But just have a newsletter. That way you can stay in contact with people in the event that you were kicked off or the algorithm changes or the whole thing shuts down, or who knows.

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Elsie: Yeah. There's been people whose social media gets stolen or deleted and they never get it back. They get hacked. I think do plan for those things. And keep yourself safe first and foremost, because like that's, I think the hard thing about being an entrepreneur is you do have to look out for yourself and protect yourself. No one else will do that for you. But yeah, if you decide to do it, I hope that this was positive and not too negative, because I do think there's two sides to it.I do think that it's a great opportunity. I think that there's lots of ways you can earn money online, especially if you're just trying to like. Make a little bit of extra money. I think that's very realistic and I think it's a great goal to have and pursue. Yeah. Okay. I just wanna say about PR before we go. PR is not as good as you think it's gonna be. That's like all I have to say. Like for years and years. What do you mean by that? We got a lot of PR.

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Emma: So like exposure?

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Elsie: No PR packages in the mail.

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Emma: Oh, okay. Packages in the mail, PR.

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Elsie: So. I have just seen so many young people on TikTok, just like, they just really wanna get PR packages. And I get it. I do get it. If it's makeup, I do get it. If it's makeup, kind of, I kind of get it. If it's makeup, I kind of get that. But like there would be times in my life when I would get like the giant, giant tower of packages and most of the time. It was a burden of getting rid of all the boxes and knowing what to do with all the stuff can be so random, and I promise you that what people show on like social media is the very, very, very most interesting of the PR boxes. It's not what represents the majority of what it's like. The majority of what it's like is like, you're like, oh, I'm like, I'm sad. Like it's like it's cool that they sent me a Stanley Cup, but it's like in my least favorite color and it has my name monogrammed on it, so I can't even donate it. And it's just confusing, like what to do with it. And you just feel guilty, like so then you just use it forever. Yeah. You're like, wow. I just felt guilty every single time I opened one. I hated it. And I'm not saying that none of, I'm not saying there wasn't a cool one once in a while, like, and I do understand when it's like your favorite brand or whatever, but like I'm just telling you, PR is not a goal to strive for. It is just a lot of boxes of sometimes stuff you've never even heard of. You don't even know why you're getting it some of the time.

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Emma: Yeah. If you wanna know how much I dislike PR boxes, you should read my novel Handmade Murder.

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Elsie: She does. She did put a couple of gold nuggets in that novel. You did? I noticed it. I noticed.

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Emma: I don't actually hate them, hate them. We've gotten good stuff. You just also, you also get junk. It's like mail. It's like. Some of those good things.

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Elsie: It’s very confusing because, oh, there's weird stuff. It feels like someone made you something very personalized. Like a lot of times there's like cookies with your name on it or like things that people spent time and money on, you don't even know like who to say thank you to or, and you know that they're hoping for you to post it, but so are all the other people and a lot of it you just can't like, so I always found it to be very like emotionally unsettling

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Emma: It is kind of emotionally unsettling.

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Elsie: Yeah. Okay. We have a listener question. This is from our book club episode. Would you like to read that?

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Emma: Hi Emma and El. I really enjoyed the recent episode on starting your own book club. I'm curious about the logistics of your book club. Do you meet monthly or weekly? Do you read a whole book or a specific section for each meeting? Approximately how many people are in your book club and how many show up at any given meeting? I've been thinking about one, but haven't been sure about the sweet spot for size and meeting frequency. Thank you.

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Elsie: Yay. Okay. So our book club, we do a chapter each time and we meet once every two weeks. We meet every other Tuesday night. And I would say there's about 30 people in the group.

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Emma: I think there's less than that.

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Elsie: 20. 20 something.

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Emma: Yeah.

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Elsie: And about not even half of the people come every time, so there's usually like less than 10 people there. And a lot of people kind of, you go once a month or so. That's what I usually do. And this is a very loose book club. I think that if you wanna have the type of book club where it's very serious, I would probably do once a month, but it can get, the thing I like about ours is that there is this no pressure feeling like if you miss a meeting, you just come to the next one. And I feel like if we felt like we were missing something, that then we would feel bad or guilty and we don't have to feel that way, which is nice.

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Emma: Yeah, there's also kind of two parts to it. So the first part of the meeting is talking about the book. And then the second part is when we do what we call friendship updates. So in my current life right now with my kids' bedtime, I always miss the book discussion. And I'm even like doing the book that we're doing right now, The Artist's Way. But I haven't been to one discussion because if I make it to girls group, which is what we call it internally, then. I'm usually only there for the friendship updates or I'm there at the very tail end of the book discussion.

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Elsie: She comes so late.

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Emma: Yeah, I do because it's just like I get one of my kids down. The easier one, I won't tell you which. And then I get to leave.

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Elsie: Yeah.

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Emma: And by the time I get there, it's like half done. So anyway, I feel like that works for this group because it does kind of make it where you can still get something out of it, even if you have to show up late. But then also maybe you don't wanna do it that way. Maybe yours is gonna be more serious about the books. I dunno. Yeah. I also think having a designated person, we talked about this in the episode, our person, Jen, so we always meet at her house. She's also kind of like the admin of the group. So she'll put in our shared Slack, like what chapter we did and what chapters we're doing next. So if you did miss a group, you can see what we're doing next. And you won't, you aren't behind. Yeah. You know, you don't have to frantically text everyone and be like, I don't, you know, it's in the Slack..

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Elsie: I think that it's good to definitely give space where if people miss one, they don't feel bad. So like some kind of show notes, some kind of a shared. Either a group text or the slack is nice.

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Emma: We did the Slack because, so if you have, some people have iPhones, some people have Androids. I feel like they at least used to. Maybe it's better now, but it used to just not be great for group text to have both devices. I don't exactly know why. Maybe someone who's an iPhone or Android expert could tell me, but that's sort of why we made a Slack. I do think the Slack is better because you can also have different channels. So if we're planning a baby shower or something like that, then like that can go in a different channel. So it is kind of better than a group text in many ways. But if you use Slack for work, you might have like a, because Elsie and I were this way, we used to have Slack for work and like I was like Slack. Oh no because it made me think about all the, like every little ping is like someone needing something from you or wanting their attention or something.

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Elsie: This slack is pretty nice. It's pretty chill. So I like the twice a month. I will say that I think that's a good amount because you don't have to go to every single one, but you can. And then we also have a Christmas party and the Christmas party, everyone comes and I think that's really nice to do too. And it's like a little gift exchange, like a, I think like $10 or $20 or something like that kind of vibe, so. Love it.

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Emma: Do a little potluck. You know, it's fun. Okay. And now it's time for a joke or a fact, or a meditation with Nova.

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Elsie: Hey Nova, what do you have for us this week?

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Nova: I have a fact and it's pretty interesting.

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Elsie: Okay. I'm ready.

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Nova: Did you know a baby when even if they're in their mom's stomach, can still hear voices? Which is why when they're newborns they can recognize a voice and they will calm down usually, or stop crying. And I think that was really cool because I didn't know that. I thought they could only hear once they were born.

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Elsie: Yeah, that is interesting. Do you think your little cousins knew Aunt Emma’s voice before they were born?

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Nova: Probably it was her own mom's voice and I bet they heard it more than probably everyone else's voice.

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Elsie: Yeah, that's a good fact. Thank you so much.

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Nova: Happy Halloween.

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Elsie: Thank you so much for listening. We love hearing your episode request, so please send us episode request or questions at podcast@abeautifulmess.com.