What's It Like To Be An Influencer?
A look inside a job I didn't want to have
Blogging/influencing has been not at all what I expected. When I first started out writing and blogging in college, all that I wanted more than anything was to make a living from writing.
I didn’t like being in photos and I didn’t really like making videos. Moreover though, I wanted to travel and do fun things and I figured the best way to be a writer was just to start. Pretty early on I realized I could use Instagram to market my own writing.
What I didn’t realize is exactly what it means to be “seen” online and how it would feel for people you only ever knew in passing to have a strong opinion about you. I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t understand what it would feel like to be read and experience people who feel like they know you through what they’ve seen of you online.
People know your work and think they know you the person. They see an Instagram post or read a Substack and fill in an entire personality. And people often set out with the express purpose of proving their dislike of you is based on something other than they “don’t like influencers”.1
Read full Essay “Are Influencers People?” here.
Not that I’m complaining — don’t get me wrong it’s uncomfortable when I meet someone in the real world who has decided they don’t like me based on a photo and a few sentences. But my job is fun, and lately the people I’ve met on the women’s trips I’m running who have also found me through Instagram or Substack have been a really cool reminder that the internet is a tool.
Tools are not inherently good or bad; it’s about how you choose to use them.
VLOG: Inside working as a content creator/ influencer
In reality, I’ve sort of carved out the coolest job in the world for myself. I work part-time as a magazine editor (remote) and the rest of the time — which generally amounts to more than “part” — as a freelance content creator and outdoor guide. I’m pretty much always busy and often overwhelmed and everryyyyyy now and then I realize I’ve done a terrible job scheduling and everything falls on the same stretch of two weeks.
This is a look inside one of my crazy scheduling choices, and a little bit about what work actually looks like for me.
Quick note!! Right now YouTube is just a fun project for me to see if I like creating in this type of platform or not. I know that the video quality is kind of garbage, and I will perhaps test out some new formats (camera ideas ect) in the coming months (August primarily). This is my “the best way to get good at something is just to start” of 2025.
Creating online outdoor resources:
The part of my job that has gotten me the farthest is the time I’ve spent creating online resources for beginners in the outdoors. When I started using Instagram more, I started to get more and more questions about the outdoors — what’s the best tent, how do I find hiking near me, where can I find cheap gear, ect.
It was around this time that I started looking into the online outdoor resources that existed and realized that most of what is online exists primarily to sell ad space, not necessarily to provide good information, and that shows. I’m thinking of a blogger who writes in their Apostle Islands blog that it’s totally fine to bring an inflatable kayak (which is wildly dangerous in that area) and links her Amazon affiliate page. Or I’m thinking of packing lists that encourage you to spend hundreds of dollars on gear you don’t need for car camping, or outdoor content that is inaccurate or misleading simply because it’s written by a blogger, not an outdoor expert. To be clear — I think it’s totally okay to make mistakes. But I remember looking through what was already online and thinking wow, none of this is really useful and some of it is frankly misleading.
So I wrote down an outline of topics I thought I could help with: answers to common questions I got about kayaking, and camping, and adventuring around Lake Superior. Since then, a lot of those simple blog posts have been the launching point for work projects, and even though I now also have ads on my blog and use affiliate links (gotta pay for things somehow) I continue to write reader-first educational outdoors content.
Looking for a resource? Start here:
Which on many fronts I actually think is fair. By most base definition, influencer is often synonymous with rich hot girl hocking amazon products and pushing consumerism. However functionally, the job title has swelled to include any freelance or independent writer, photographer, digital marketer or artist who uses social media marketing effectively, AND of these creative fields effectively using the internet, the most likely demographic to be labeled an influencer instead of their job title is women. I often wonder if I were a man, and all of my content had a more masculine tinge to it, would people look hard enough to discover I’m actually more a writer than anything else? I don’t know. Either way, I find that the blanket “I hate influencers” statement often has a lot to do with not understanding how the field of freelance media has changed over the past five or so years. Because the “I hate influencers” crowd really actually hates the top 1% of influencers, rage baiting and selling crappy products at huge personal profit, not scrappy young writers and freelancers.
Very informative, thank you for doing this. I still love that picture of your frozen eye lashes every time you post it. Enjoy the rest of your week.