Unspoken Truths About Being an Influencer
A love letter, a reality check, and a few things you won’t hear people talk about
It’s officially April, which in corporate legalese, means it’s Q2! Time to take inventory of what worked, what didn’t, and plan for a smoother, slightly less chaotic next three months.
I’m a professional influencer (as opposed to a hobbiest I guess). I’m grateful for the work opportunities that came my way in March after a couple of quiet months.
That volatility is actually what inspired this post and peeling back the curtain on what it looks when your *whole job* is being an influencer.
What we do at the end of each quarter:
📈 Content performance across platforms: What verticals, video lengths, and formats (talking to camera, voiceover, trending audio) performed the best? What held people’s attention longer than 3.2 seconds?
📲 What actually drove growth: Not just views, but what led to new followers or Substack subscribers. This is almost always different from the highest-performing posts—and always a little surprising.
🖊️ Which Substack posts resonated most: What got replies, comments, DMs, or even someone emailing me just to say “this made me cry” or “I sent this to my sister.” That’s the stuff that makes me feel like I’m doing what I’m meant to do.
❔ Weekly AMA trends: I comb through the questions I get every week on Instagram. What are people repeatedly asking about? That’s where the next quarter’s content usually starts.
This is just a glimpse of a very detailed data mining experience that I undertake every quarter.
I realize how glamorous people see this job and it’s shiny on purpose. You’re supposed to think it’s really easy and just posting pretty pictures.
But it’s also a job. And like all jobs, it has its perks and its pressure. It can be lonely. It can be inconsistent. And it can definitely mess with your head if you’re not careful. You have to be really good at boundaries — luckily, I am.
In this column you’ll find:
🌌 The effect of Venus retrograde
✍️ My first ever Substack collaboration
🏖️ Things in my cart for my upcoming beach trip
💻 Behind the scenes of being an influencer
🛑 How I set boundaries in my social media job
⬆️ This week’s highs:
March was a really great month for me. I started doing the process of auditing my months with my “Unstructured” column and it turned out to be pretty therapeutic. I look back at what I bought, what I used, what I finished, what media I’m consuming and so much more. I’m proud of myself for buying less things this month and staying focused on creating more and consuming less.
⬇️ This week’s lows:
Venus was in retrograde or something last week because I experienced every range of emotions. I felt like a one-woman show of “inside out.” There was joy, excitement, regret, sadness, fear, anxiety, and hope across all of the verticals of my life.
It felt like all of my friends were dealing with their own instability between their jobs, personal lives, or family issues. Here’s to hoping we’re moving forward this week.
Platonic Love was one of the first Substack I ever signed up for. I love reading Aja and Aliza’s things. They remind me of my best friend and me—one stepping into motherhood while the other is in a different stage of life. I was so grateful when they asked me to contribute. You can read their newsletter and my feature here.
Paid subscribers have the option to start Work Wife chat, but anyone can chime in. We had a reader ask about pink dresses for wedding and here's what we put together for her.
I saw these gold-plated earrings online and went down a rabbit hole trying to find them. I found a few on Amazon, but they looked cheap and weren’t the right size. These minis are perfect, so I ordered them for my trip. I wanted to give you a first look at something something I'm really excited about.
Speaking of beach trips, we're heading out for spring break next week. I'm mostly shopping my closet, but I did buy a one-piece from J.Crew—I loved the color. I also got the matching beach pants and a foldable hat since I hate when my hats get crushed while traveling. I never end up bringing them back, so I’m hoping this one lasts.
Can you do me a favor? If you like this, will you hit the heart ❤️ at the bottom of your email? I pinky promise it helps me and will only take you a second!
What it really takes to be an influencer
Before this was a job, it was a hobby. And before it was a hobby, it was a habit — writing blog posts late at night when I should’ve been resting, photos uploaded from my camera roll to WordPress, paired with 500-1,000 words about the outfit I bought from Forever 21 or the best white sneakers for walking around NYC.
Unlike a lot of influencers of the current age, I didn’t start this job because I thought it would lead to money (there wasn’t any). I did it because I’ve always been a “googler” and I wanted others to benefit from my research.
There were no brand deals. No #sponsored captions. Just curiosity. And the joy of connecting with women who wanted to talk about beauty, style, books, relationships, or whatever else I couldn’t get out of my head that week.
This job is famously fickle. The media landscape that we consume has shifted so much in the past decade, that naturally the way we create follows these trends (or the other way around — chicken or egg?)
I learned to write & find my voice on my Wordpress blog first, and then had to rediscover it again in images when Instagram launched (yes I've been doing this before Instagram started) and yet again when short form video took the top spot with Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts.
& Now I’m here, back to writing long-form and rediscovering why I started this in the first place and my love for writing.
Sure, you can throw a dart and hit 12 influencers — the job has no shortage of takers, but there are a lot of things people don’t see. So if you’ve ever looked at someone’s influencer life and thought “must be nice,” here are a few things I wish more people knew:
1. You don’t get paid for views on Instagram. And TikTok? Literal cents.
People are floored when I tell them this. One of my most viral TikToks, with 1.4 million views, earned me exactly $1.53. Not a typo. One dollar. Fifty-three cents. You read that right. I can’t even get a Chobani Flip for that.
Unless you’re part of a specific monetization program (which Instagram has largely phased out), views don’t pay. All those eyeballs are great for exposure… but exposure doesn’t pay my mortgage.
The real income comes from brand deals, long-term partnerships, affiliates (sometimes), or speaking to your audience directly (like here on Substack). But views alone? That’s just optics.
2. You have to be okay with uncertainty *really okay*
This job is wildly inconsistent. One month you land your dream campaign. The next, nothing but ghosted email threads and invoices “processing” for 90 days.
There’s no salary. No biweekly direct deposit. And definitely no PTO. You build your income month by month. Sometimes day by day. One month you can make five figures. The next month? Crickets. Influencing is the most “feast or famine” career I’ve ever known.
You learn to be a budgeter, a negotiator, and a backup-plan-haver or you burn out fast.
Speaking of burn out …
3. You work for yourself… which means you’re always working.
I love the flexibility of this job, but the truth is: the work never ends unless you end it. There are no protected nights or weekends unless you draw the line and enforce it.
There’s no coworker to pass the baton to. No manager to cover for you. No “OOO” email that actually keeps the work at bay.
Unless you intentionally build time off into your schedule, the work never really ends. Even when the phone is down, your brain’s still on. I can’t doomscroll you guys!
4. The lifecycle of an influencer isn’t as long as people think.
Most careers in this space don’t last more than 10–15 years. And that’s if burnout doesn’t get you first. It’s a creative job that demands constant reinvention — your content, your voice, your platforms, your aesthetic, your POV.
It’s a short game. It can be a great game— but it’s not usually forever. Audience tastes change. Algorithms shift. New platforms pop up. You can build something sustainable, yes… but only if you treat it like a business, not a sprint.
And many people burn out before they ever get the chance to evolve. Why? Because when your job is also your identity, it’s hard to turn off.
📰 In case you missed it…
5. Over time, your standards get higher… and your income might get lower.
At the beginning, you say yes to everything. You’re excited! You got a gifted toothbrush! It feels like your big break!
But over time, you realize that people are trusting you. With their money, their time, their attention. And it hits different, it’s sacred.
I’m incredibly particular about what I put my name on. My audience isn’t a follower count — it’s real women with real budgets and real jobs. I only want to recommend what I’d buy for my sister. I want my people to know that if I’m putting my stamp of approval on it, I recommend it with my chest.
Saying no is part of the job — even when it means saying no to a paycheck.
6. You become fiercely protective of your privacy
Well at least for me it is. People assume they know every detail of your life when you share online.
They only see what I choose to show — put it on a bumper sticker.
I share glimpses of my daughter (but never her face straight on), and while I know that she has a group of Instagram aunties who always cheer her on (and I love that) her safety, security, and right to a private life will always come first.
I don’t say that for applause. I say it because the line between public and private blurs quickly in this job — and you have to draw your boundaries before someone else does it for you.
7. You are allowed to take a break.
A lot of creators struggle with the burnout. But the truth is that a day off social media won’t kill your engagement. So is the pressure to constantly show up. But your audience follows you— not your content calendar. It’s okay to disappear for a bit. I love the saying “rest don’t quit”
8. You wear so many hats, one is usually always falling
When you’re not creating, you’re answering emails, negotiating, planning, analyzing, pitching, rescheduling, managing back-end systems. “Posting pretty pictures online” is about 10% of the job — at the max!
The rest is admin, strategy, and invisible work. Before I launched this newsletter, I did about 8 month of invisible work, or as my best friend likes to say, “shadow work”.
That’s why this move to Substack has felt like such a full-circle moment. Writing was how I started — before there were brand deals, before Instagram even existed. I wrote because I loved researching, learning, and sharing. And I still do.
Now, I get to write freely, longform, without worrying about algorithms or sponsorships. And if you’re one of the people supporting this work with a few dollars a month—thank you. Truly. You’re making it possible for me to return to the part of this job that brings me the most joy.
Here’s to Q2—whatever that looks like for you.
Thank you for being here,
Sabrina
PS — If you love these kinds of behind-the-scenes stories, consider supporting this Substack. For a few dollars a month, you help me write more posts like this — without needing brand sponsorships or viral hits to make it possible. (And I’ll never take that for granted.)
Thanks for keeping it real. Being an influencer is a job and a business.
Being an influencer is a hard job IMHO. Taking pretty pictures isn’t always easy. You make it look easy.