Why Are Influencers Begging for Money Online?

[00:00:00]Okay, y'all want to know the real reason that I'm dropping the link on my 18th birthday?

[00:00:05]I'm broke as [ __ ] This is the same fit that This is the only fit. This is the only fit that I own. It's literally the same fit that I was wearing on Rakai stream. That was months ago. That's why I haven't been posting content. I'm literally [ __ ] rope. Just let a girl get her bag.

[00:00:22]>> I made six figures last year as a content creator and this year um it's been crickets. The reality of being a content creator with over 200,000 followers is I'm broke. I go viral literally every single week. Every week I got like over 8 million views this past month. I have like loyal fans, you know, but I'm just like, yo, I had $101 in my bank account yesterday.

[00:00:49]Last month, the creator fund paid me like $70 because I make a lot of short form videos that aren't over 1 minute long. And I'm going to keep saying this, like people are not paying black creators. I have [ __ ] verified companies and businesses commenting on my videos trying to be relatable and [ __ ] And it's just like you guys won't [ __ ] pay me. Like I'm getting it gets to a point. I'm getting like really frustrated because this has been my career for a while. Like I used to make a lot more money on social media and I feel like as my platform grows bigger and bigger people get this idea that like you must be doing very very well like even better than before. And I'm just like dude what? Anyway, if you want to literally send me money cuz I'm just like this is so dumb.

[00:01:38]>> That was a bit confusing. Okay. 200,000 followers and she got 8 million views a month and she also used to make good money but now is not making good money.

[00:01:53]Creating short forms under a minute and also now blaming the advertisers not to go with her because she's black. But yeah, today's episode we're going to talk about influencers going broke.

[00:02:06]Let's go see what other people have to say.

[00:02:08]Okay, so I don't know about y'all, but I've noticed that there's a huge influx of broke ass influencers on Tik Tok that are begging for money and some of them even being involved in scams. Yesterday, I saw this Tik Tocker who had almost a million subscribers or followers and she was involved in a GoFundMe scam and the GoFundMe got shut down. And it's just like the problem with so many of these Tik Tockers is that or or any influencer is that they're living above their mean.

[00:02:39]And something that my grandma taught me as a kid that I'll never forget is she said, "If you cannot buy something with cash in hand right now, then you cannot afford it." Or if the money isn't in your checking account right now, the full amount, you can't afford it. And it's like I've seen so many scandals over the years of influencers, you know, from YouTube or any, you know, community that have gone broke because they start to live above their means. And you should never live above your means in life if you don't want to set yourself up for failure. Like, you know, let's say an influencer makes $40,000 in, you know, their first big payout month, right? And it starts to become consistent. Okay, great. but then they decide they want to go uh rent or lease an LA mansion for $15,000 a month, right? And just because they were making $40,000 a month consistently for a while, it doesn't mean that money is going to stay because life works in eb and flows. Life works in patterns. It has ups and downs, ups and downs, and ups and downs. So, learn firsthand from these influencers. Um, definitely do not live above your means. Have a goal in life, a goal you want to meet of the life you want to live, and then take actionable and reasonable steps to get there. It's like I said with the house example, a lot of these influencers, right, the money comes in, but they're taking too large of a leap. Like my grandma said, if you cannot buy it in cash, in full, you cannot afford it.

[00:04:10]>> Wow. Every influencer probably needs to listen to this guy. This guy said it so well and I love what his grandma had to say. If you don't have the money in your checking account, you can't buy it. That is so brilliant because we want to try to avoid going into debt. Also, you know, if you're a content creator and you make $40,000 a month and believe it or not, there are content creators that do that. They make $40,000 a month and that is just ridiculous amount of money.

[00:04:38]But if you are making $40,000 a month, you should be taking a percentage of that and investing it for your future and you know kind of give yourself kind of a safety net for something that goes wrong. Also, as he's mentioning, eb and flows, right? You never know when that money is going to change in terms of how much it comes in or if it comes in. And so with that, you know, any content creator out there, if you are in a position where you are making money and making money beyond that of what you're living on normally, take the extra money and put it away for emergency fund and also for investments and prepare for your future because social media, as much as you want to do it for years and years and years, there is going to be a point in time that it may stop.

[00:05:27]Your channel may stop. Whether it be, you know, you may lose your motivation and drive or you may lose popularity or you may lose the, you know, streams of marketing revenue. It's going to be a point in time it stops.

[00:05:41]>> How the hell do you go from making $350,000 a month as an influencer to now where you're on this app crying that you cannot afford your $25,000 a month mortgage? Like sell your house. That's the first thing most people are thinking when they hear that you're struggling to pay a $25,000 per month mortgage. And also, you're telling me while you were making $350,000 a month, you didn't think that it would have been a good idea to save any of your money. I have no ounce of sympathy for you whatsoever because again, there's no way you were making $350,000 and you didn't save nor did you invest any of that money for a rainy day. That was stupid. Being a full-time influencer is not a stable job. You can be the it person right now and six months from now no one cares about you or your content.

[00:06:36]350k a month and you're now broke. Yeah.

[00:06:40]Nah, that's on you. You stupid. You could have took two months salary and just bought a house cash and you would not be in that situation right now where you're worried about paying a mortgage for $25,000 a month because the money is drying up >> and he's giving it to you pretty much bluntly. No filter. He just kind of give it to you bluntly. So if you are someone that makes $350,000 a month and you're broke now, I seriously I don't know what to tell you. That's kind of messed up.

[00:07:10]But a lot of times a lot of the influencers or people on social media um are younger and they are growing up without maybe I guess guidance on managing their money and it's a lot of responsibility. I mean you're talking about like you know someone in their 20s or even their teens becoming all of a sudden rich seeing money they've never seen before in that quantity before. So imagine, I mean, there's people that are adults that win the lottery and they go broke because they don't know how to handle all that money. So, if you are one of those influencers that are making a lot of money per month like this, yeah, seek out some financial advice because you don't want to be in a position where like he's saying, you know, you make this much money and then next thing you know, six months later, all the money dries up and you have nothing. You have and then you go broke. Like he's saying, this person went broke and some people retire on this kind of money.

[00:08:20]>> Call me cheap, call me boring, call me whatever you want, but I live by one rule, which is just because you can afford something doesn't mean you should be buying it. And I think that's exactly why most influencers go broke after a few years because they're not intentional with their spending. And as someone who grew up with a family that struggled with money, moving constantly, having an attic parent, I experienced firsthand what it's like to go without.

[00:08:39]And I promised myself I would never let that be me or my future family. So, yes, even now with having over a million followers, I still buy drugstore makeup, still DIY my hair, my nails, my lashes, my tan, literally everything. I still wear fake ass jewelry from Amazon and buy dupes. And it's not because I can't afford these things now. I'm so grateful to be in the position where I do have money for them. But simply put, I don't want to spend my money on it when I can do it myself. And I'm not at all ashamed to admit these things because I choose very wisely what I do spend my money on, which is maxing out my retirement and investing accounts, being able to buy my family and my mom a home, being a bread winner, and just making sure that the people I love and care about are taken care of. And listen, I'm not saying I never spend my money and that I don't buy nice things because you will see me occasionally splurge and buy myself something nice. Like when I bought my dream car a year ago after hitting a huge personal goal of mine, I splurged and spoiled myself. It's what I personally like to call frugal. So, you can call me whatever you want, but I think that saving money, budgeting, and being intentional with what you choose to spend your money on is the most responsible, sexy thing that you could ever do.

[00:09:35]>> So, I hope that clears everything up for everyone pocket watching.

[00:09:39]>> Wow, that was a Porsche. She bought a Porsche. Oh my goodness. And for me, uh, as someone that's being frugal, um, I would probably never buy a Porsche. Even if I could afford it, I probably would never buy a Porsche. But hey, kudos to her because she has a financial, I guess, smarts about her in terms of how she's managing money. Also, she's also saving and investing, helping out her family. So, you know what? Can't really complain about what she's doing. And she's kind of also, I guess, the flip side of influencers going broke. She's not going broke. She's being sensible with her money so that she can not only pay for things that she wants now, but also prepare for herself for the future.

[00:10:20]So, good for her. to remind you that most of your favorite influencers are broke, too. Remember that the statistic is 57% of folks in the US don't even have $1,000 in emergency funds. And this is also true for people who have a lot of money. You have a lot of money and you spend a lot of money and you still can be poor.

[00:10:42]This is why we are seeing so many people sell their souls to organizations or companies to get wristbands or whatever it is to get into these events because they don't have any money. They're probably spending all of their money. It is not normal to go to these events all the time. It's not normal to spend all this money all the time. You know what is normal? You know what is normal?

[00:11:06]sitting at home with coffee and enjoying your mortgage that you work hard and pay for. That's what's normal. Don't feel bad. These are the highlight reels of folks's lives. They're not the real behind the scenes.

[00:11:22]Yeah, he's right. I mean, there is people out there that um make a lot of money, but they spend a lot of money.

[00:11:30]So, they are not only broke, but in debt. And same for these influencers. If you have bad money habits before you become an influencer that and you know you become an influencer, it doesn't change. You still have bad money habits.

[00:11:44]So, um if you're going to try to become a social media influencer or go into social media and make money, I would recommend do you have your financial house in order before you do it? And if you don't, I would recommend take a look at your financial house first. Make sure that if you do come into a large sum of money or more money than you have now presently that you know how to manage that money before you get started into social media. That's a good way to look at it. I've worked really hard for the past 2 years to become an influencer.

[00:12:17]And now that I'm an influencer, I hate it because the whole time what I wanted to do was build a brand. Did build a brand through my content. Not the brand with the type of products I wanted to sell to people. What I realized is I started making content online to help other women. I wanted free clothes. I wanted free shoes. Whatever it was, I wanted to work with brands. Awesome. But what I realized when I was trying to become an influencer and not function like a brand, it was creating a scarcity mindset in my everyday life. I was at the will of other brands. I was at the will of other digital marketing companies, managers. I couldn't control my own product because my product was my videos. My brand was myself. But what I really want my product to be is a solution for the women I care about. And so two months ago, I made a really big transition in my content where I started focusing more on making money, building wealth, and showing other women how to do this. And in the past two months, I've been the happiest I've ever been. I made a budgeting template on Google Drive that is easy to manage your money, easy to look at, cute, you can change the colors, and I started investing time. I started learning skills on sales psychology, marketing, how to sell somebody a product, not just a product to make money, but a product that will genuinely help the people that I care about. Budgeting template isn't the end all be all. But when it came to my content journey and the way I grew up financially unstable, I realized that I was never going to build wealth in my own life until I started addressing my money issues. I thought that I just need to make a lot more money and then they would all go away. But the truth is when you start making more money, that doesn't come with a budgeting lesson. In fact, a lot of people are broke because of lifestyle creep. And lifestyle creep often happens because you are not you are avoiding your emotions around money and then using money to numb your emotions. I want my brand to be solely focused on helping women get out of these shitty financial situations that are keeping them tied to terrible partners, terrible people in their life, terrible environments. And I know an $8.99 budgeting template is not going to do that. But what that $8.99 does for me makes me an extra $600 to $1,000 a week to then come online and start talking about how you should leave that crappy man and fix your financial situation or help you realize you are never going to become successful or wealthy for your future family until you start addressing your emotions and coping skills around money.

[00:14:36]>> Wow, really smart. So, couple things to unpack from this. Um, one is the fact that she has created this template for budgeting to help people. At the same time, it also kind of frees her up so that she can also do more content to help women another way. So there you go.

[00:14:55]You're using one to leverage another in terms of I guess what you want to do for your content creation. The second thing is talking about learning sales too. And you got to decide um when you're creating content, are you doing it for the purpose of just creating content or are you looking to make money? And if you're looking to make money, you got to also understand how are you going to make money off your content. Are you making it from, you know, people watching and then paying you AdSense through YouTube or are you looking at in terms of, you know, a sponsorship deals, ad deals. Um, you know, also you're looking at from maybe you're creating a course or she created a budget template that she sells. So, you got physical products or digital products you're selling. Um, also physical products too.

[00:15:40]We got Tik Tok um sales, Instagram sales, you're actually doing like a you know selling affiliate marketing sales.

[00:15:46]So, there's a lot of different ways that um people in social media and influencers can make money off of the platforms, but you got to decide also which way you're approaching um your social media platform to make money. And budgeting is so important, so crucial.

[00:16:03]And you'll hear me talk about budgeting all the time throughout a lot of my different episodes. But uh yeah, so you got to know that if you're going to create a social media business that you have to create a budget and manage the money that comes in. So it can also help you with the longevity of your business as well as to expand your business.

[00:16:24]Sometimes I feel like I'm never going to achieve my goal or my dream of becoming a full-time social media influencer or content creator because of my financial situation. And it gets really discouraging because it's almost as if you can't or you shouldn't work. So you can actually dedicate like a full 40hour work week to just pursuing content creation, creating content, posting it, all of that. And it's almost as if you have to like be married to somebody who is rich or you don't have to work in that relationship or you have parents that can provide for you. And it's really hard if you're providing for yourself. And like I just it just makes me sad because like it always feels so far away because all the expenses build up and I have to put content creation on the side to take care of business and it just makes me so sad.

[00:17:24]Okay, I don't mean to be laughing about the situation because of course she is sad and very passionate about becoming a content creator or influencer. But when she was talking about, you know, a spouse taking care of her or her parents taking care of her while she's wants to pursue her uh dream to become an influencer. That part kind of made me laugh. Um you know with social media not only do you want to understand the finances of um creating a social media platform also becoming an influencer but also you got to understand that you know it's a I don't want to say side hustle but um if you don't have the means to take the time to be full-time in it then you have to create it as a side hustle.

[00:18:14]It has to be your side hustle. That's just the way it is. And life is just the way life is, right? You have to have a job to survive, to pay your bills, to eat, to have shelter. So, it just kind of um cracks me up a little bit that um she hasn't grown up enough to understand that you have to make a living first and then if you want to uh become an influencer either you take some time and save and then that way you can commit yourself to becoming influencer full-time or you create a side hustle, do it on the side and hopefully that money that you make from becoming an influencer will go surpass your current job and then you can go full-time. time.

[00:18:55]I mean, that's best advice I can give to her.

[00:18:58]This is what I've been saying.

[00:19:01]1.6 million followers, half a billion views, and this girl announces that she's quitting social media because she makes no money and she can't afford her rent. Let this forever shatter the lie that you can just post with no strategy, and expect to live the glamorous life of an influencer. It doesn't work that way.

[00:19:17]This girl is broke because she has no product to sell. She has no engaged audience to sell it to and she has no idea how to sell it to them. Her content offers no value other than light entertainment and she offers no value and that is why she's now begging for a job. This is not a difficult game, but you have to treat it like a business.

[00:19:34]You don't want to be an influencer. You want to be a business owner that uses content to sell their product. If you can do that, you can make an obscene amount of money, which is, I assume, your goal. Make a product that solves a problem or copy someone else's product.

[00:19:49]figure out whose problem it solves, make content to attract that type of person, and then sell it to them.

[00:19:56]>> There you go. That's what I was saying earlier. You got to have a way of making money through social media, and that may be addressing the concerns or needs of those people that are following you. And I think a lot of people um that are in social media um that deal with makeup. I think a lot of the ladies um you know uh do like these makeup tutorials or stuff like that and show people how to use makeup and then they turn around and sell makeup or they you know are basically brand ambassadors for the makeup and sell um and get the commission off the sales. So, you know, there's one example of, you know, using social media to uh make an income.

[00:20:38]>> An influencer with 1 million followers just announced that she cannot pay her rent. 1 million followers. I need you to let that sink in because this shatters everything that you thought that you know about social media and making money online. She's broke because she has no product to sell. She's broke because she has no offer. She's broke because she spent years building an audience and not once she asked herself, "Why am I building this audience? And what value am I bringing?" Her content just entertains people. It doesn't solve anything. It doesn't help anyone with anything. It just entertains people. It just exists. And content that just exists will make you famous, but it will never make you rich. And that's literally why she's not asking people to give her a job. And I promise you, this is not the hard game. You just need to understand one thing. You don't want to be an influencer. An influencer just creates content. A business owner creates content that makes her money.

[00:21:29]And the difference between these two is so small that it's actually embarrassing that we don't know it. An influencer creates content to get followers. A business owner creates content to target a specific person who have a specific problem to solve that specific problem that they have through their content.

[00:21:46]And that's it. That's the whole secret.

[00:21:48]That's the thing that everybody here is trying to over complicate. You find a problem that people have. You create something to solve it and you find out exactly who that specific person is and then you create content that will speak to that specific person every single day and then you sell them the thing that fixes the problem. That's it. Because views turns into trust. Trust turns into buyers and buyers turns into money so you can actually pay your rent. So stop creating content to be seen. Start creating content to be useful because useful content builds a business and a business pays you whether or not the algorithm likes you one day or not. And that's really how you make money on social media. It is that simple. So, make sure you go the right route so you don't end up like the girl with a million followers that cannot afford her rent.

[00:22:32]There you go. I tell you what, for any content creator that is looking to start or has a, you know, a business right now, listen to this lady. She said it so well. And like I mentioned earlier, either you're a entertainer or you're a business owner.

[00:22:51]You're there to entertain, gain followers, or you're there as a business owner and you're there to solve a problem for your customers. So that's, you know, you got to choose what you want to do for your channel or your your social media platform. And yeah, having a million followers, I mean, you have a million followers, you have a huge market to sell to. And unfortunately, with social media, it really is about sales. It's about you selling something to an audience that has gained trust in you that you know what, I'm going to sell you this information. I'm going to sell you this product and their million followers are trusting you enough to buy that product and that drives sales and that's how you make money. Now, give you one example. This is a great example that kind of really threw me for a loop.

[00:23:45]At the same time, when I watched that, I was like, "Oh, that makes sense." There is this YouTuber, and I won't say who it is because I can't remember that person's name, but anyways, she has a YouTube channel, and the YouTube channel that she has um highlights her creating a YouTube channel and how to build a YouTube channel to make money. And so um her channel not that big. I mean it was started out to be maybe a couple thousand subscribers.

[00:24:15]But when she got the couple thousand subscribers, she created then a work template or like a I guess tutorial or something to teach you as a person that's never done YouTube how to do YouTube to create a business. And the each tutorial packet, I think she's selling like for $3,000 for this course.

[00:24:40]And this course packet, I think what I think she got like five people signed up, right? That's 5,000. Five people times 3,000 $15,000 she made just like that, right?

[00:24:59]And with that, she's making more money off selling those tutorial courses than she is on YouTube because AdSense is not paying her anything. And it's not like she's getting, you know, millions of views on her videos. And it's not like she has millions of subscribers. She has a couple thousand subscribers, has, you know, maybe 10,000 views on her videos, but yet the courses being sold, and she's making a killing off those courses. And the courses then are teaching other people how to make videos and those courses. So, kind of recycling like you're investing $3,000 in her course to learn how she did the course to turn around and make $15,000.

[00:25:46]That's what I'm talking about. So, and uh yeah, that is and that was also I want to say side hustle, but I believe she is a like a mom and the husband's working. And so, she took on this job in YouTube while raising a child. And so, with that money, um she is using towards her family and towards their, you know, investments. She's not using it and buying some, you know, crazy stuff that I think some people would do in terms of getting all a sudden $15,000. you'd be like, "What would you do for $10,000 right now?" That kind of dropped in your lap. So, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode and yeah, we'll see you guys in the next one. Have a great day. Bye-bye.