On Thursday nights, most working 27-year-olds find themselves bustling around the city, socializing over drinks or winding down at the end of a long, tiresome week.
Erin Graham however, sits at her desk working through the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and sometimes twelfth hour of her workday. While others look forward to a relaxing weekend, Graham checks her calendar and gets organized for her packed schedule in the coming days.
For her, there is nothing resembling a weekend in sight. For some, it is a hobby, for others a dream. For many, social media is nothing more than a time-sucking pit of the internet. For Graham, though, she said it is her life.
Graham earns her living through her online brand, Erin Elizabeth. She blogs and posts on Instagram almost every day and uploads YouTube videos twice a week. While she is grateful for her career, she notes that it is not as glamorous as it may seem.
According to a 2017 Orbit Media study, one in three bloggers work on evenings and weekends, and four out of five take their work home.
“People just see the pretty pictures and think I want my life to be like that, but they don’t see what goes on behind the scenes,” she said
Graham is part of a growing group of digital entrepreneurs who are paving their own professional paths and making a living publishing their own content online.
With a rapidly shrinking labour market, today’s youth are faced with little choice but to take matters into their own hands. The millennial generation is turning to digital platforms like blogs and YouTube to create jobs for themselves.
In January 2017, Statistics Canada reported rising unemployment rates for Ontarians between the ages of 15 to 24. From 14.2 per cent in 2014, youth in Ontario now face a 15.6 per cent unemployment rate compared to the 5.5 per cent met by their 25- to 54-year-old counterparts.
Given the increased youth unemployment rate and the approximately one in three Canadians aged 20 to 34 that are still living with their parents, these realities are becoming a call to action for this generation’s entrepreneurial spirit.
A new career path for millennials
Liam Young, a communications professor at Carleton University and author of List Cultures: Knowledge and Poetics from Mesopotamia to BuzzFeed, said he believes that curating an online persona is a necessity in the digital age.
“I think that economic conditions are a driving force of a lot of this cultural activity,” Young said. “Industries don’t seem to be creating landing spots for the number of graduates who are coming out, so people are kind of racing to create a new niche for themselves.”
He added that social media has become a zone where ambitious people can find a way into their chosen careers through the web.
Zack Budge, a third-year environmental science student at Carleton, is working to hone these skills. He said he wants to pursue Instagram as a full-time job in the future.
“It’s a changing market,” Budge said. “If I’m going to be making just enough to scrape by, maybe there’s another way to finance my life.”
Budge’s long-standing fascination with internet fame as a career started becoming a reality when he volunteered to run social media accounts for a school club. He has been able to grow the club’s supporters from 20 to 150 Instagram followers in the past year.
“It’s still not much,” Budge said. “But it’s a start.”
His experience has showed him the viabilities of creating digital content as a career and helped him to understand the popularity of its pursuit.
“It’s the new form of being a celebrity,” he said. “Everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame but if it can last for 15 years and make you $15 million, then why not?”
For Budge however, social media as a career means more than just celebrity status. He is hoping to exert social influence in order to educate the public about environmental issues.
“The outreach is the biggest part of it,” he said. “You need to find that balance between popular appeal and something that actually has substance, so you can build a following and spread awareness.”
While there is infinite opportunity to make a living from social media and the blogosphere, the hard work, long hours and patience involved is not for everyone.
“A lot of people give up really easily because they don’t understand that it is a lot of work and you have to wear like five hundred thousand hats,” Graham said. “There are days when I sit in my pyjamas all day and I work for 11 to 12 hours. Not glamorous whatsoever.”
Michelle Schroeder-Gardner is no stranger to that work ethic. She started her personal finance blog Making Sense of Cents, six years ago. Today, at age 28, she has enough money to retire.
“Most people quit their blog within the first six months of starting it because people don’t realize how much work goes into it,” she said. “It is definitely not a get-rich-quick-scheme. The failure rate is high.”
While it has taken years for her to get to where she is, Schroeder-Gardner said she earns over $100,000 a month, most recently earning approximately $150,000 in each of the past five months respectively.
Making Sense of Cents generates income from a variety of avenues.
Schroeder-Gardner said she makes money from online advertisements and sponsorship deals but the majority of her revenue comes from affiliate marketing. By referring other organizations’ products, Schroeder-Gardner earns commission. Her profit depends heavily on the company and their product.
Making an income from your blog
“Some payments are only a dollar a signup and then others might be $500 per signup,” she said. “It really just depends.”
Still, she encourages new bloggers to start slow and not quit their day job.
“If someone is starting a blog and they want to earn a full-time living from it, I always recommend that they do it on the side to begin,” she said. “There’s a lot that goes into blogging, and it is usually something that people don’t have a lot of experience in. I also recommend having an emergency fund, so that you’re not worrying about a bad income month when it comes to blogging.”
Many organizations are flocking to digital content creators, because it allows them to reach audiences on what seems like a personal level. Brittany Tilstra, a public relations manager and content strategist for HelloFresh, a meal delivery service, explained that it is comparable to word-of-mouth recommendations on a larger scale.
“Paid ads have a completely different feel [than sponsorships] and influencers are a great marketing tool because they are organic and social, but we can still track the results,” Tilstra said in an email.
For her and her organization, it is all about collaborating to create mutually beneficial partnerships. HelloFresh looks for quantitative metrics like followers, average likes and comments per post. These measurements indicate the scope of the audience, but HelloFresh also assesses the quality of the content to ensure a good match between creators and sponsors.
“We’re all about building relationships and ideally long term partnerships, so creativity and genuine love for the brand are very key,” Tilstra said. “We craft unique partnerships that work for [the influencer’s] audience.”
Social media and digital content serve as a professional platform in more ways than one.
Instagrammer Shelby Levine has leveraged her Ottawa Foodie brand to supplement her income while she completes her master’s degree.
She said she considers her brand an online portfolio.
“I think that the skills are very transferable,” she said. “It shows that you are an independent person that is capable of creating something that can build a following. It shows dedication, because it’s something I work consistently on, a little bit every day. It’s a really good way to get your foot in the door.”
Similarly, Graham said she originally started posting online as a way to set herself apart from her classmates.
“It’s funny that it started as a way to get another job and turned into a job itself,” she said.
She added that she thinks a lot of brands and people are starting to figure out how much opportunity there is in social media work, and that the most exciting part of the job is how fast everything changes.
“I heard a funny thing, that now when they ask kids what they want to be in school, they all say a blogger. It’s cool that this has become a career in the past five years,” she said.
Luckily for this new generation of aspiring bloggers, the industry is in an uphill trend.
Between 2016 and 2017, the percentage of bloggers who said their blog was delivering strong content marketing results increased by 20 per cent, according to Orbit Media.
“It is still really new and I think a lot of brands are figuring it out and people like me are still figuring it out. It’s always changing and it will continue to change and that’s a big part of what is so exciting about it,” Graham said.
As for Graham, she said the key to success for aspiring content creators is just to keep going and keep posting.
“You can’t just give up. You have to consistently post all the time. Even when you’re getting like 10 views,” she said. “Keep going because people aren’t going to come back unless there’s a library of stuff there that they can browse through and get to know you.”
She added that another key part of being successful is starting your career for the right reasons.
“I think you shouldn’t get into this wanting [celebrity status] as the outcome, because you’re going to quit real soon if that’s your mentality,” she said. “You should get into this because you actually like it and it’s something you’re passionate about and that’s the only way you’re going to continuously do this and stay consistent with your content.”
Graphic by Manoj Thayalan
