This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Today's caller opens the door to a highly controversial topic. Are you ready for this? Welcome everybody. This is Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host.
Today we're gonna talk about mommy Instagrammers. All right, mommy Instagrammers, also known as mom Instagrammers, momster grammers, probably some other phrase I'm not wise to yet. They are the new mom bloggers, a self-identified group that inspires a lot of feelings from all sides. Now let's go back. First year of Side Hustle School, did a couple of episodes on some mom bloggers, got a lot of email from women who said, "Hey, I'm a blogger and I'm a mom, but I hate this term." Basically like, "I hate this term.
I am not a mom blogger. I am a mom, I am a blogger." But these two things don't necessarily have anything to do with each other, or at least they're not my entire identity, which is of course a very good point. The challenge is that this is a, as I said, a self-identified group. So not every mom who is a blogger is a mom blogger, same with Instagram. But there is this group for which these topics are closely intertwined, mostly what they post is pictures of their kids, and they talk about products for their home, products for their family, et cetera.
So we have essentially morphed from blogging to Instagramming being the primary platform, or at least one of the primary platforms or outlets for this kind of content marketing, basically, which ultimately is what it is. It's content marketing, it's brands hoping to get access to users, and they're like, "How can we do this?" Oh, there are these bloggers, there are these Instagrammers. If they write about our products or share photos of our products, then that will increase our sales, et cetera. Anyway, all that to say, mommy Instagrammers, they are a category of their own, and our caller wants to know how the most popular accounts get paid. Not only how do they get paid, but how much do they get paid?
So let's get into it. How much money do mom Instagrammers make? [Music]
Hey, Chris, this is Carol, and I just recently found your show from the Happier Podcast. I've been seeing lots of stories about mom Instagrammers. I guess they're the new mommy bloggers.
Anyway, it's a strange world, and I started going down the rabbit hole to follow some of them. I found a lot of people with tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of followers. Do they mostly get paid for hawking products, and how much do they get paid? I'm not sure I wanna do this myself, and the politics behind it seem even stranger than all the posts about home furnishings. I'm mostly curious if this is even a viable idea.
Looking forward to hearing from you. [Music]
All right, there's a lot we could say about this, so let me try to be on point here. First of all, thank you so much, Carol, for the question. So glad you found the show from Happier. I'm a big fan of the Happier Podcast with Gretchen Rubin.
Gretchen has been a friend and, in many ways, a mentor to me for many years. I have learned so much from her. I continue to admire all of her work. All right, let's talk about this interesting strange world here. I love how Carol phrases this.
Is it a viable idea? Well, the whole point of Side Hustle School in many ways is to show that there are a tremendous number of viable ideas that most people would never have considered, basically. We've looked at all sorts of random topics. So in that sense, it is viable in the sense that some people have been able to do quite well with it. I'll come to that more in a moment.
So a big part of me thinks, well, more power to you. If you're able to figure this out, then great, why not? But I also think, it's fair to say as well, it is clearly a bubble of some kind. The people who really wanna be successful here, they're gonna have to evolve across platforms and also evolve with the times. Most of the big name so-called mom bloggers just went away.
And the ones that are still active online are either doing something else entirely or they just don't reach as many people now. They don't have the influence that they did during what was, I guess, peak mom blog. So to these questions of how much they get paid these days for the Instagram model and for what, well, they usually do collaborations. It is essentially, to use Carol's phrase, hawking products. They are pay per post.
In other words, a brand is saying, like, we're gonna pay you so much for this post. It's often based, almost always based on the audience size. Most mom bloggers in the 10,000 to 50,000 follower range will earn a few hundred dollars for product posts. It can be a pretty big range. Like I was reading about someone who has several hundred thousand followers and she was saying, she's done deals for $450, she's done deals for $5,000.
Okay, so there is some real money at the high end at least. I just think also it is a cutthroat world in a lot of ways, very saturated momster grammar market. Many brands only offer free product instead of payment, which also is kind of like more power to them. Like a lot of people say, well, they shouldn't be doing that. Well, they can try, right?
Just like anybody can try to be a mom Instagrammer or any other kind of influencer. We've had a lot of stories in our archives of people who have offered free product to Instagrammers and that's helped them a lot. So ultimately, it's a free market you can choose. You know, affiliate commissions where you get a cut of the sales price, they can be really, really small. And there are also issues with tracking.
So you can spend a lot of your influence through time, pitching something and very few people swipe up or whatever they're supposed to do. And if they do, it's not always tracked to your account. Last but not least, certainly not least, you were always at the mercy of Instagram and Facebook of course, which owns Instagram and it's algorithm. So it's clearly not a sustainable business. On the other hand, you always need to evolve.
So if you originally wanted to be a mom blogger, it's hard to ignore Instagram. So I hope that gives some information at least to Carol and anybody else who was wondering how it works, the details of payment and such. And as I said, more power to you. There's all kinds of ways to make money and you can also do it your own way, right? You don't have to do it the same way that every other person does.
In fact, you might be more successful, you know, finding something a little bit different, some kind of different twists on the same types of photos and same types of stories that people tend to post in this space. Okay, let me know if you have a different opinion on that by the way, either Carol or listeners, I would love to hear from you. Always happy to feature contrarian views. Just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. We will continue to feature this ongoing interaction dialogue, et cetera, throughout the year, along with updates from listeners as they launch their projects.
I'm so excited for you this year. I hope you do something amazing and I would love to support you or at least cheer you on in some way. Thank you again for joining me. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Sidustleschool." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
