Why I Never Became an Instagram Influencer
I tried. But I never tried hard enough.
Reason #1 — I have a flat ass
That’s it. That’s the only thing that prevents people from becoming influencers and achieving great social media success.
And now on a bit more serious note…
I have always wanted to be famous.
I don’t know what is it about fame that intrigues me so much, but I have been putting myself out there on the internet ever since I can remember, though I never quite achieved the fame I have always dreamed of.
First, it was a fashion blog. Then a cosplay page. After that, a travel-themed Instagram account.
Now it’s writing about my life here on Medium.
All of my former outlets generated moderate success. I wasn’t famous. I wasn’t influential. But I was at least known in the community, I guess, and people were watching and listening to what I was putting out. And every single time, once I achieved something, I realized that what I was doing wasn’t really for me, I dipped and moved straight onto the next thing.
This instability and unwillingness to commit to a cause is the single greatest tragedy of my life.
To travel is to post about it
I travel quite a bit, so it only came naturally to me that I should start posting about it on Instagram, and even though I started creating travel content back in 2016, I didn’t fully commit to the “game” until much later.
My early pictures were taken with my crappy phone, edited in VSCO, and captioned with song lyrics — not exactly very different from what everyone else in this world is doing and not exactly the kind of stuff that makes one famous.
But eventually, as time went by, I got sucked into the vortex. Like many of us young people in today’s society, I started chasing external validation in the form of hearts and began to base my value on my number of followers.
My travels and my Instagram became one and the same.
I educated myself on how social media works and how to crack the formula. I watched videos, read articles, and attended webinars. I became the student of Instagram in the hopes of making it big on there one day.
And yet, that day never came. Instead, I woke up one day, deactivated my account for a month, and when I returned, my approach towards the app was largely different. It has stayed like that ever since.
I firmly believe that anyone can become an influencer
There are people uglier than me, less talented than me, lazier than me, and less traveled than me who had made it. The only components of success that matter in the end are:
- luck
- marketing strategy
Looks, originality, authenticity, talent — all of these can contribute, but ultimately, it all comes down to the aforementioned two. And those are the two things I never quite nailed down.
Thanks to having listened to hours of gurus talking about how to make it on social media, I am very much aware of where I went wrong. I tried. But I never tried hard enough and I never sold my soul for it.
Let’s have some fun and review some of my shortcomings, shall we?
I didn’t want “travel” to become my sole identity
I am not a “traveler” and I have always been vocal about rejecting the label. I don’t want to be defined by only one aspect of my life, I am more than a girl who travels, and I don’t subscribe to the opinion people want to hear — the one that travel will solve your problems, make you happy, and form you into a better person.
I don’t care about giving people travel tips either and when I see influencers do that, it makes me laugh. They don’t typically provide any information you can’t find on Google unless it is advice for other aspiring influencers. But when it comes to traveling? Nah, thank you.
I tend to forget that repackaged, easy to consume content that anyone can look up themselves is exactly what people want. Most people are too lazy to do research and will instead listen to what influencers tell them.
But that’s not the kind of “value” I wanted to bring to the table.
What to do instead: To achieve success on Instagram, you need to pick a niche and provide value in that niche to your followers first and foremost. If your domain is travel, you need to post about travel most of the time.
“Just be yourself and the attention will come” is BAD advice that does not work. People follow you because of what you can provide for them and nobody cares about who you are as a person until you are famous.
I couldn’t bring myself to cheat the game
Making it big on social media in the current day requires putting in tons of hard work and you have to be extremely lucky to get popular organically without it.
Everyone I know who has managed to gain a decent following wasn’t afraid to get their hands dirty. Playing the follow-unfollow game. Buying followers. Using bots for automated following, liking, and commenting. Once you make it, nobody will remember or care how you started.
But if you don’t ever make it, you have now compromised your integrity. People see what you’re doing, and they love to hate influencers, especially the failed ones.
What to do instead: Ask yourself where your morals lie. Does the end justify the means? I don’t see using these artificial growth tactics as a necessarily bad thing, but they are not for me.
On the other hand, if you choose to play clean, be prepared to put in tons upon tons of time and work, and expect an uncertain result.
I refused to shill for products I didn’t care about
Because Instagram as a platform doesn’t pay you anything, influencers have to rely on brand deals if they want to be compensated for their work.
But unless your account gains 100k followers overnight, you will need to take the baby steps first. Accept crappy deals that “pay” in product to see how it goes and build up your credibility.
I got approached by a company when I only had 2.5k followers, so naturally, I was eager to take to what they had to offer. The deal was harmless — they would send me a bunch of stuff, I would create a story and a post about it, and then we would discuss possible further paid collaboration.
But when I received the product, having to actually promote it drove me crazy. I liked it enough for something I got for free, so I went ahead with the agreement, but I would not buy it with my own money and I couldn’t recommend anyone to purchase it with a clear conscience.
I saw all these other people on Instagram who were sent the exact same product doing the MOST for an unpaid collab, and it didn’t make me feel good about the whole thing. I realized that I probably wouldn’t be able to make money by recommending useless shit to people who trust me.
What to do instead: We tend to think that being an influencer means working with amazing brands and showing people what you love. But that life is reserved for the top of the top. If you’re starting from zero and are looking to make money, you will most likely have to start shilling for skinny tea, hair growth gummy bears, and Daniel Wellington watches.
The alternative is, of course, to do it just out of passion and not expect to make money off of it.
I got too sucked into it and had to take a step back
My peak Instagram time was around 2018 when I was really into it. I had a camera, I had an Adobe license, I was interacting with people on the platform, consuming tons of advice, and I was still traveling quite a bit and producing decent content from it.
But eventually, this hobby of mine started taking its toll. It started to affect the way I was living, traveling, and interacting with people, too. I was buying clothes based on how it would look in pictures. My friends started to get annoyed with me. Traveling started to be less fun because I became too stressed about getting the perfect photo.
And by mid-2019, I realized that I needed to take a step back and live in a more authentic, offline way. I re-evaluated my priorities and though I still hope that I will become famous one day, being an Instagram influencer is no longer on my to-do list.
The heydays of Instagram are long gone anyway, at least for people who are new in the game. The audiences started to wake up, see through the fakeness, and migrate to, currently more popular and authentic, TikTok.
All of my travels since then have been way more fun. I only take pictures when I feel like it, and I take them the way I like them, not the way social media audiences expect them to be. I don’t stress about numbers, and my account is no longer a wannabe travel guru one — it’s just my account and that’s all.
What to do instead: That depends entirely on you. It is important to realize that travel influencers don’t get to travel and make content — they travel to make content, and no matter what anyone might preach about authenticity, you will have to adopt that mindset if you want to succeed.
It’s not a dream, it’s just a job. And not everyone has what it takes to do that job and is willing to sacrifice their freedom for it.
Despite everything, wasn’t all that bad
Having Instagram as a hobby because yes, I viewed and treated it as such, didn’t luckily only leave me with regrets over wasted time and low self-esteem. Good things came out of it.
It forced me to learn multiple new skills, namely photography, photo editing, and marketing. Especially marketing is something I was clueless about before, but now I know the basics of it and how it works on social networks.
For example, I recently helped my mom set up an account for her small business, taught her the basics, and she’s now regularly getting sales through it.
It made me look at my surroundings differently. When I wasn’t able to travel that often, I would often go for walks in Prague with my friends and we would take pictures at different locations in the city. Not only is it a fun activity you can do for free, but it makes you appreciate your city 100 times more.
It allowed me to meet new people. I have met multiple people from the Czech Instagram travel community IRL and formed actual friendships with them. On top of that, I regularly talk to some people in DMs despite having never met them. This is where the “social” in “social media” comes in, and I have been able to benefit from it.
