Dylan Vanas breaks down how creators actually make money: through platform ads, brand deals, and selling their own products. A 2020 study shows many creators earn substantial income. He also explains the follower tiers from micro-influencers to mega, and what separates real creators from fake ones.
Questions this video answers
Less than 10,000 followers.
Anyone over 1,000,000 followers.
Roughly 50,000 to 1,000,000 followers.
Roughly 10,000 to 50,000 followers (speaker notes this is easy to inflate).
Fake influencers — accounts with purchased or bot-inflated followers.
Chapters
We live in a world where everybody wants that winning lottery ticket of going viral or having a huge social media following. But do you really know what that means? Do you know the steps on how to get there? My name is Dylan Vanis, and I run an agency that works with influencers on this channel. I'm going to share the lessons I've learned working with both brands and creators so you can avoid common mistakes and grow your influence online. Let me show you how to do this. And when you do this properly, it affords you freedom. So let's break down the different types of influencers that there are, starting with micro influencers. So micro influencers are generally influencers with less than 10,000 followers on their platforms. Then there's influencers. Now, these are generally creators with roughly 10 to 50,000 followers. But it's pretty easy to inflate your numbers these days. So the threshold has increased. And usually people now consider regular influencers to be anyone with 50,000 to a million followers. Then we move into mega influencers, and that's anyone over 1 million followers. Now, there's a fourth category that people don't really talk about too often, which is fake influencers. It's become so easy to just get fake followers and inflate your following count that it's hard to know if someone's real or fake these days, especially at first impression when you take a look at it. So I can make a lot of videos about this topic, showing you how to inflate your own numbers and how influencers do that themselves. And I can show you exactly how to tell if someone else's numbers are inflated as well. So what is an influencer? Well, an influencer is anyone who has a large social media following and uses it to impact people. The influencer could be anything from motivational speakers to someone who makes entertaining vlog videos, someone who livestreams video games, or someone who just takes fitness pics and puts them online. There's different types of influencers and someone in nearly every single niche you can imagine, even the most obscure niches out there, like model trains, coin collections, and Pokemon. Now, the term influencer has developed a lot of stigma over the years because people imagine some hot chick with a big butt posting pics online. But in reality, the opposite is true. I prefer the term creator because it more accurately explains what these people do, which is create content. Modern creators make content that appeals to a certain type of audience. But the thing most people don't know about creators is they can actually make a lot of money. Nowadays you could ask someone what they do for work and they might say social media as a career. Imagine the look on our parents faces five or 10 years ago if someone said that. In 2020, a study came out that showed there were more than 2 million creators that made a six figure income from social media. Wow. In other words, it's a legitimate way of making money. Being an influencer isn't like this get rich quick scheme. I have friends of mine that spend years making content and they never get any traction. So yeah, it's cool to be able to impact people, have brands reach out to you and want to pay you for your stuff. Being an influencer is a lifestyle choice. It turns life into running a business. You don't just get to post pictures, being out with friends, or post pictures of your food. You have to think through every single little action you do and make sure it's in alignment with the brands that sponsor you and your vision for yourself. This isn't like a 9 to 5 job where you go in and clock out. You have to be thinking about everything in your life, how much content you have banked up, new content ideas for the future, making sure that, that you can actually go out and get brand deals to pay for those things and then making sure that it's created in a way that your audience wants to see. How do influencers make money? Well, there's three main ways. First off is through platforms, ad revenue. So TikTok has their creator fund, YouTube has their Google Ad revenue, and Instagram has their Instagram reels that they pay for. Second way influencers make money is through brand sponsorships and affiliate deals. Basically, brands will either pay you to do a promo or pay you a commission every time you send a buyer to their page. And then the third, the third way is by creating your own products. So imagine you have your own courses, your own merch, your own NFT projects. As an influencer, you can make money just by selling your own stuff. Creators have the ability to not only make money or impact people, but in some cases change the world. Think about if you're a finance channel, the ability to inspire someone and teach them how to manage their money. Or an adventure channel who helps someone get out of their comfort zone and do things they never thought they could have done before. Every different industry has its own ability to impact people. And so whatever that is for you, think about what you love doing and what changed your life and help bring that to your channel so you can also impact other people. All right everyone, thanks for watching. Go ahead and hit the like button and subscribe. Because in the next episode, I'm going to give you details on how you can make money as an influencer. See you then.
