Ever Wondered How Much An Influencer Can Make For A Single Instagram Post?

We pore over what they eat, what they wear, what they do and who they do it with, but what do influencers really do for a living… and how do they do it?

- Kit Chua

A whopping $4,000 for two Instagram updates and a blog post? Welcome to the business of being an influencer – where a little bit of personality, a dash of good taste and a lot of media-savvy can earn you big bucks and Insta-fame.

But if you think all you’d need to earn $4,000 per campaign is a DSLR camera and a personalised domain name, you’d be wrong. With those two things, you’re just a blogger, which puts you one step above any random netizen with a Tumblr account.

But… blogger, influencer, what’s the difference, right? While a lot of us use these two terms interchangeably, a blogger is someone who runs a blog – an online journal, basically. An influencer, as the name suggests, is a person with influence; someone who can affect the thoughts, opinions, tastes and buying habits of her audience. Usually, an influencer will maintain a blog as a way of connecting to her followers, but not all bloggers are necessarily influencers.

Perhaps the most important distinction between the two is this – “blogger” is a term that evolved out of the Internet, and is a convenient catchall phrase that describes a new wave of diarists who emerged as the World Wide Web gained mainstream popularity.

On the other hand, the term “influencer” has its genesis in the marketing industry.

The idea of influencer marketing actually pre-dates the Internet by several decades, but the advent of social media also heralded the rise of a new category of Insta-famous people – those who don’t fit the mould of traditional celebrities, but whose popularity on social media sites could easily be tapped into by brands whose target audiences align with that particular person’s following. And, ta-da, in a few short years, a rich new marketing vehicle arrived – the influencer.