First of all, if you're a new influencer who's starting out, you should be doing this all the time. Just make a list of your 10 favorite products every month and do a post about them. Let's say you do 30 posts in a month. Do 10 that are really product focused and practice telling those stories. Think about what you love about it. I think Grace, one of the women that works here, she says that the first thing you tell someone about a product is generally the most interesting about it or the way that should lead with it.

When you're telling stories about products, think about that. What is the thing that you would tell your friend about it that would convince them to use it and go with that? I just did a post about this Headspace Sleepcast that I love. It was interesting. One, yes, I did try and build a post like a sponsored post. I sought out to try and convince people to try this thing. It was very explicit. I wasn't just being like, "I'm going to do a post here." I was like, "I'm going to try and craft a post that can convince some people to try this. I have been using it for weeks I really loved it. I've been talking about it organically.

I told a little story about the fact that I've been struggling to sleep. I talked about what specifically made Sleepcast so great and encouraged people to try it. Then over the next couple of days, I posted stories at night talking about the Sleepcast. I got dozens of messages about it. About people who downloaded the app because of that. About people who also loved it, people who had questions, people who used competing apps. I had five or six times as many saves as I usually do, which to me indicates that people are saving it because people want to go back and reference it at a later time.

To me, that was successful. One of my friends joked and was like, "You forgot hashtag ad." Yes, they are a client but, obviously, they're not paying me to talk about this. I wanted to try to do what you all do and try and craft a message that could try and convince someone to take some action. It's not necessarily easy but I do think it all has to come from a place of personal experience and a place of actually using the product and make a checklist, whatever it is. Come up with some system that helps you understand what it is about a product that makes it great because that's the thing you need to be able to distill and communicate to your audience if you're going to be a successful influencer.

Why is this thing great and why should you spend your money on it? Being able to answer that question is paramount to being successful as an influencer, from a brand partnership standpoint not necessarily from the ability to create engaging or beautiful content, but to turn that ability to create engaging and beautiful content into a sustainable business that can grow and can be something that you do for years and years to come. You have to be able to tell those brand stories in a way that is compelling and concise and clear. I think so simple and compelling that it removes barriers to entry for people to try something that they're just like, "You know what? That sounds great, I'm going to try that."

Again, harder for bigger purchases but like, I bought a $5,000, 20-year-old camera because of people on the internet. It worked. Now, they weren't trying to sell me that camera, they were just shooting with it but, I think I was using a sleeve cast for like two weeks before I posted about it, and I think that in your paid or organic brand partnerships, I think you should try and set a time and say to the brand, "I need at least a week to use this product before I post. If they send it to you on a Tuesday and they say, I need the post by Wednesday, I would push back and say, "You know what? For me to make this post to make sense, I really need to use the product for a while, and I need to live with it, and I need at least a week."

I think most brands unless they're under some insane deadline where like, something is launching and they need to get the post out, will really appreciate that because they just don't hear it much. I don't think influencers are taking their personal experience and putting it into the brand messaging really effectively. I think that as a whole, influencers are actually doing a terrible job at that. I think doing that and understanding how to communicate those things clearly can be a huge competitive advantage.