When people ask me what I do on social media, the word “influencer" does not come out of my mouth. I like to say that I do “contract work on social media,” and I work with these brands that I'm already in love with.

I knew that most of my audience were moms around my age. I told myself, “I'm only going to share one post per day that has anything to do with Seint.” The rest were just things that I felt my audience were interested in and I was interested in - whether it was sharing about my favorite book, my favorite family recipe, or a sale that was going on at Target with kids clothes. 

I noticed it was those posts that were keeping people around and creating conversation. 

I just wanted to make a little bit of money.

Every brand is a little bit different. Target has a lower kickback than Nordstrom does, but some companies can go up to 17%, so it just depends. 

After doing that for months and months, you would finally get a brand to reach out to you and say, “We've noticed your sales are great. We have a new Spring line coming out in March. Would you be willing to work with us?”

When I first started this business, I wasn't getting any free samples. I wasn't working with any companies. I was just genuinely sharing the things that I loved and providing a link. If things go well, that's when companies will start to reach out.

I share Nordstrom quite a bit, whether I'm under contract with them or not. If you look at it from a per post perspective - for example, they paid me to post this Thursday - then I’m probably going to make more money on the Thursday contract than I will from the affiliate links. However, I'm probably also sharing them three or four other times during the month, not under contract. 

We know what sells, how much of it's going to sell, what price points, what people love, where they're shopping. So we have a lot of insight into how to build a line that's actually going to perform for Anna. 

There's so many different capabilities. We added Anna's products in there and there are little widgets that you can go and shop. You can add searchable keywords and specific codes, and viewers can easily copy it before they go shop the link. 

I just want Delta miles, so American Express all the way - Delta, Platinum, whatever. I spend a lot of money. It is expensive to do this. 

I was doing this out of my house for three years, and it got to the point where it was just too much…It was so overwhelming. So I am now in an apartment. I come here every single day.

When people comment on my posts, Manychat automatically DMs people to shop whatever was in the post that they commented on. Instagram obviously doesn't allow links in the caption or comments, and a lot of followers find it hard to go to your link in bio to find your outfit of the day. 

It’s so easy - at the bottom of my caption, you'll always see “Just comment below and I'll message you the links to shop this post.” So when they comment on a specific post, the links to that outfit automatically are sent to their DMs 

That's been a game changer for my account because before that… we had an assistant who would send them out individually and it took forever. Not only is it good for sales, but it's also good for engagement. Everybody, even if they don't plan on buying it, will still ask for a link just because they think they might want it later!

I used to use a ring light and it made everything honestly look kind of artificial and strange. I chose a corner office with all this lighting intentionally so that I can just have natural light. 

LTK had an application process. I knew that if I applied with LTK, then I could start generating my own links. They were a lot more stringent back then. The first two times [I applied], they turned me away because they wanted me to take higher quality photos, so I worked on that and I just submitted a couple of times until they approved me. 

Once you're approved through LTK, then you are able to generate a link that is specific to me for all of these brands that I was already talking about and sharing. When someone clicks it, even if they don't buy anything, you can still see that they clicked the link and went to the website and all of that.

I'm her manager and represent her in all of her efforts. [That includes] everything from affiliate efforts to brand partnerships to the content in between…we do all of her Pinterest posting and TikTok posting, reposting of her content, creating collages of her products, and just overall strategizing on how she approaches her content on a monthly basis.

I just have a very solid weekly schedule for the operations side when it comes to repurposing her content, making sure that certain content goes up every week…We cover her bestsellers. We're posting to Pinterest and YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook.

She's making sure that I meet all of the requirements for each brand deal. It's really overwhelming when you look at each brand deal individually. It could be seven stories, eight stories, two stories, no stories, like no video content, just a picture. So just making sure that I reach all of those requirements, that's been a game changer for me. There's so many little things that you can miss.