How do people earn money using Social Media:

Earning money here in the information age is a bit different than earning your living through the sweat of your brow during the industrial revolution.

There was a news story on Yahoo that originally appeared on Market Watch entitled, “This teenager was making $4000 a month reposting memes on Instagram until he got purged.”

According to the article, this 15 year old had multiple Instagram pages devoted to comedy, the largest one having 500,000 followers. He earned money when people offered to pay him for a “Shout out”.




People wanted access to his 500,000 followers who were interested in humor, to call attention to their own Instagram Pages, Facebook Pages, websites, or other social media creations. This targeted traffic is worth paying for if you want more followers and visitors to your pages. That is how he made money from it.

Instagram shut his pages down because allegedly he was sharing memes created by others without giving them credit for being the original creator. This action effectively eliminated his lucrative source of income.

There were many comments after this article written by people who obviously had no idea what they were talking about.

Here is my take on it all…

What is a meme?

For those of you who don’t know what a meme is let me give you an example.

Let’s assume you have a dog. Like all dogs, your dog loves having his belly rubbed. Before you start rubbing your dog’s belly, you throw a large comfortable looking pillow on the sofa, and invite the dog to lay on top of it.

You then rub your dog’s belly until he gets a big smile on his face. At the perfect moment you snap a picture of the dog on his back with his legs spread eagle, and a big smile.

Save the photo to your computer, and open it with something as simple as MS Paint. Shrink it down to a more manageable size, and crop it down to create the perfect image.

Now add in the text, “People say Mondays suck, but I think Mondays rule!” Throw your logo, or website name in as well if you wish.

Congratulations, you just made a meme.

Creating a meme is not like writing a book, or painting a picture. The purpose of creating a meme is for it to be shared. Most people who create memes want them to go viral, meaning they want it to be ubiquitously shared many times.

The copyright of any well created meme is contained within the meme itself. Some creators imbed their logo into their meme, while others, myself included add their website to the meme.

I like to create a rectangular meme like a playing card, or holding your cell phone straight up and down.

I have found that for informational type memes using a more colorful illustration for your image gets a lot more shares than using a photo that you have taken to create your meme.

There are exceptions to this of course. Sometimes the facial expressions and body language of the subject being photographed is so endearing that they go viral all on their own.

The different text being added to the photo by those who have an overabundance of creativity only add to the viral shares of the meme “template”.

When I create a meme my purpose for doing so is to drive traffic to my website. I usually start with an image then add attention getting text to it with totallosersguide.com below it hoping someone will see it, and then come visit my website.

Do you think I want people to share my meme??? You’re damn right I do!!!

The more people who share my meme, the more eyeballs that will see my website at the bottom of it, and the more potential traffic that will find their way to my website.

The problem is that someone could easily edit my meme by cropping out the bottom that contains my website name to make it look like they created it. This defeats the purpose of me creating it in the first place.

I believe that could have been the problem of the teen in the news story. The meme was edited by him, or someone else, and the creator did not receive proper credit for it.

Sadly many people today are glued to their cell phones. Even here in my new home Bangkok, people walk around with their noses to the screen of their phone nearly oblivious to what is going on around them.

People want to laugh, and view amusing things on their cell phone, or laptop when they are relaxing at home. This is why people seek to discover things online with amusing content to keep them entertained. Those who have an amazing sense of humor, or those who can keep people entertained with their creativity will have no problem attracting new followers to the social media content they have created.

Those content creators who have many followers can justifiably sell advertising space for more money than those who have only attracted a handful of followers. It is simple advertising.

The Superbowl will attract many more viewers than the local news. Therefore commercials during the Superbowl will cost much more than a commercial on the local news. Understand…???

Attractive people, and famous people will also attract a large cult like following. Add in a charismatic alpha personality, and one could easily influence their follower’s ideology, and buying habits.

This makes social media influencers valuable to companies who want them to share their products with their followers, and convince them to purchase them.

So there we have it. Making money with social media is as simple as attracting a large number of followers to your page.

If you have a large number of followers other people who have pages in your niche will be willing to pay you to share their content on your page so your viewers can discover them as well.

Your mighty tribe of followers will also be a valuable commodity to companies who believe that their advertising dollars would be well spent on you sharing their products with your followers, and letting them know where to purchase them.

Good luck on your journey to social media mastery, and please tell your friends about totallosersguide.com. Share our content on your Facebook page.

Come visit us on our Facebook Page… Loserisms.

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