Welcome to the Listening Time podcast.
Hey everybody, this is Connor and you're listening to episode 175 of the Listening Time podcast.
I hope you're all doing great.
Thank you for listening.
In today's episode...
We're going to talk about the topic of influencers and specifically, I'll address the question am I an influencer?
I think this is a very interesting topic.
This is a question that I've asked myself multiple times and I've been called an influencer, I think indirectly, by different companies.
For example, like sometimes companies will reach out to me to try to start a partnership so I can promote their product or their service or whatever.
And I'm referred to kind of indirectly as an influencer in their emails.
So it's an interesting question.
And this is something that I think people who create content online like me.
It's a question that we face sometimes.
And I think it's an interesting topic to talk about.
So that's what this episode will be about.
I hope you enjoy it.
And I want to mention that if you're interested in practicing your pronunciation with me, if you don't feel confident with your pronunciation and you want to sound more like a native speaker, then I highly recommend that you join my membership and you become a Listening Time super member or family member or VIP.
And you'll get my pronunciation seminars.
You'll get a new one every month and these seminars really help you with the different sound patterns in English, the different elements that make the difference between a native speaker's pronunciation and a non-native speaker's pronunciation.
You can find the link to my membership down below.
And you can also sign up for my US Conversations podcast if you want to practice listening to my conversations with other native speakers.
It's a lot of fun.
You learn a lot about the US.
And of course, it's great practice for your listening.
The link to that is also down below.
And the transcript for this episode is down below as well.
All right, let's get started.
Are your ears ready?
You know what time it is.
It's listening time.
Okay, let's talk about influencers.
And let's talk about whether or not I'm an influencer.
I think the main problem with this question is that people have different definitions of influencers.
So your definition might not be the same as my definition.
And Because of that, some people might be considered influencers in some people's perspective, but that person might not be an influencer from another person's perspective.
So just kind of a general definition that I was able to come up with that I think is a valid definition is that an influencer is a person with a significant following who has influence over an audience, their audience, right.
So by that definition, I think that many people would be considered influencers, even if they themselves don't think that they're an influencer.
And it's interesting because when I came up with this definition, which seemed valid, I thought about it.
And according to this definition it kind of sounds like I am an influencer, but I definitely don't consider myself one.
I'll talk about that in just a bit.
But if I just go by this definition, it sounds like I am because I have a significant following.
A lot of people listen to this podcast and watch my youtube videos and, of course, i have some influence over you because a lot of you view me as someone who is genuine and i know what i'm talking about for the most part when it comes to language learning and english.
So i have some influence over my audience.
So I kind of fit this definition.
But I think that the biggest thing that is missing here, the biggest reason why I think that many people, including me, don't consider themselves influencers, even though they have a large following and they have influence over that audience is, I think our idea of influencers is uh like people who have this following and uh, I think, try to sell a lot of different products to them from different companies.
And, um, they are maybe promoting, uh, other people's products over their own, right?
Maybe some influencers don't even really have their own business, so to say, like their own product or service that they're selling.
And maybe they just sell other people's products, for example.
I think that that's maybe one reason why people don't consider themselves influencers because, even if they have influence over their audience, they don't necessarily use this influence to sell all of these different companies' products.
Maybe they just sell their own product or offer their own service, or maybe they don't sell anything.
So those people might not consider themselves influencers.
But if we use the really general, broad definition of an influencer that I gave, it sounds like many of us are influencers who wouldn't consider ourselves to be influencers.
So let me talk about why many people avoid calling themselves influencers.
Let me go into more detail here.
So I think the term that many people prefer to use, and I prefer this as well, is content creator.
So a lot of people like this term because...
This is what we do, right?
I create content and I'm not necessarily always trying to influence people, right?
Of course, I have my membership and my U.S.
Conversations podcast that I try to get people to sign up for if they're interested in it.
But that's not the primary goal of each episode of this podcast, of course.
I talk about different topics and this serves as listening practice for you.
So I'm really creating content.
I'm not necessarily just trying to influence people.
So I think many people feel the same, that they are a content creator.
And many influencers, who definitely are influencers.
They make most of their revenue selling products that they don't own.
There's nothing wrong with that, obviously, but that's kind of a different model.
They have many sponsorships and partnerships.
And of course, I have some of these as well, for sure.
I think many content creators who sell their own product or their own service, they also have partnerships, but that's not the main source of revenue that they have, right?
So i think when content creators sell their own product, their own service as their primary way of earning a living when you earn a living, this means that you earn the money that you need in order to live.
So when a content creator sells their own product or service and that is their main revenue, the main way that they earn a living they probably consider themselves more like entrepreneurs, because they're providing a product or a service to the market and they're doing the different things in order to market that product and to sell it and keep customers happy and provide a good service.
And maybe they hire employees to work for them.
I don't have employees, but other people do and if that's the case, these content creators are probably consider themselves entrepreneurs.
Or if they work by themselves, like me, I guess you could call me a solopreneur, right?
So it feels like a different model of business than selling other people's products, primarily right.
And many content creators who don't consider themselves influencers and consider themselves more like entrepreneurs.
They probably get a lot of offers from different companies to be partners and to sell that company's product.
And they have to turn them down or say no to a lot of companies, probably because That's not their model of business.
These content creators sell their own products more.
This is something that happens to me.
I get tons and tons of emails.
I get emails every week from companies that want to have a partnership and want me to promote their product either online on my YouTube channel, my Instagram, my podcast, whatever.
So I get this all the time.
And as you can probably guess, I don't accept these partnerships like 99% of the time.
So that being the case, it kind of feels like the model is different.
I'm more like a solopreneur or an entrepreneur, a content creator.
I'm not an influencer in that way, even if I do have some partnerships sometimes.
But I think an even bigger reason why people don't want to call themselves influencers is that there are some negative connotations of the term influencer.
A connotation is just like a meaning of something, a meaning that people infer or perceive from some word right.
So there are some negative connotations of the term influencer.
For example, people might view influencers as people that just sell products from anywhere.
Any company that will pay them the money to do so, even if the product is not very good or whatever.
Or some people might think influencers have bad influence over people, right?
This influence they have is not good, it's not positive, or they think of influencers as having this glamorous lifestyle and just like vlogging, video logging about their life, and they're like celebrities almost, and that kind of thing.
And obviously some of these things might be true sometimes, but it's definitely not the case for many, many influencers, right.
Hopefully the vast majority of influencers are aren't using their influence to do negative things or just sell any product from any company that'll pay them or whatever.
I don't think that most influencers should be seen as really negative for that reason.
I don't know, because I don't follow influencers really, but I would assume that most of them aren't necessarily negative in that way.
However, people have a negative idea about them, sometimes right, but again, that's definitely not the case for many influencers, and Influencers come in different sizes.
In case you didn't know this, there are subcategories of influencers.
There are nano influencers, micro influencers, mid-tier influencers, macro influencers and mega influencers.
I saw all of these terms online.
These describe influencers that have an audience of a certain number of people and, depending on the size of their audience, They're in one of these categories.
So you can imagine that a nano influencer or a micro influencer you know people that don't have many, many people following them.
These people probably aren't living this glamorous influencer life and using their influence to just sell any product from any company that's paying them.
No, these people are probably just passionate about a certain topic and they make content about this topic and they're trying to make a living, earn money, by making content about this topic and they might have some sponsorships or whatever.
But you can imagine that influencers of that size are not these big, glamorous celebrity influencers.
They don't have this life and this style of content and business that many people think of when they think of influencers.
And even bigger influencers, like by some metrics, I guess I would be considered a macro or a mega influencer, which I think is ridiculous because I don't even view myself as an influencer.
But for example, this podcast has a lot of followers.
The success of a podcast isn't really defined by followers.
Podcasters pay a lot of attention to downloads.
And I think we don't really care that much about followers.
But still, if you take the number of followers that this podcast has, it has a lot.
So I guess by certain definitions, I'm this big influencer in one of the top categories, right?
But that sounds kind of ridiculous, probably even to you guys, right?
You're probably thinking, wow, Connor's not some mega influencer, right?
He's just this English teacher who makes this podcast and these YouTube videos.
So you can see how it's kind of funny.
It's not just a very clear definition when it comes to you know who's an influencer and who's a mega influencer, for example.
So these are all things to consider.
And these are all just things that I thought about when I was thinking about this question about...
The fact that I fit the bill.
When you fit the bill, it means that you fulfill the criteria of something.
I fit the bill in terms of this broad general definition of influencers, and yet I would never consider myself an influencer, right.
So what do I do?
If I'm not an influencer, what do I do?
Well, I could say I'm a podcaster, right?
This is what I do.
I have this podcast, so I'm a podcaster.
I guess you could say I'm a YouTuber as well, because I have a YouTube channel and I make YouTube videos.
And I have an Instagram as well, but I'm not active on it, at least currently.
I usually just post stories announcing like new episodes and things like that.
So I have these different things, but I'm not only a podcaster or only a YouTuber, or I'm definitely not an Instagrammer.
But all of these things are just content that I make.
So I guess I could say I'm a content creator, an English content creator.
Usually, when people ask me what I do for a living, what I usually say is I make content for English learners.
That's kind of my definition of my job, of what I do.
And I think what is a little bit different about my content versus, let's say, the content of an Instagrammer who is definitely an influencer and has that type of business?
My content itself is like a product, in the sense that my free content, this podcast that you're listening to, is English practice.
So this is what most of you are coming to consume, to train, to practice with.
I assume that all of you use this podcast and you use my YouTube videos as training for your English, specifically for your listening and your vocabulary.
And so this content itself is like a product in the sense that this is the training that you get.
You don't have to pay me to get training.
Of course, some of you are trained in my membership and listen to my US Conversations podcast.
Of course, but this free content is English practice, right.
This is content that is training just on its own, right?
So I think that that makes me think a little bit differently about my content.
I know that my content is is educational content, right?
It's not just for fun or whatever.
I hope you have fun with it, but really it's educational at its core.
When we say at its core, we're saying at its heart, in the center, right?
So that's another thing.
And then, Of course, I have paid content for higher level content like my advanced episodes and technical practice like my pronunciation seminars and things like that.
But really, what I do is I make content to help people learn English.
And when I think of it that way, doesn't really feel like I'm an influencer right, and that doesn't feel like it fits in the same specific definition of an influencer, even if, technically speaking, if you look at the big general definition of influencers, I fall under that category.
So, But I don't know.
I think it just feels better to think of myself as a person who is making content for English learners.
Right.
Even though that doesn't sound as glamorous as an influencer, let's say.
Those are some of my thoughts.
Maybe some of you disagree with me about this, but I guess, in summary, I definitely don't consider myself an influencer.
I would say I'm a content creator. but I definitely wouldn't say that I'm an influencer.
And I hope that you view me as someone who's providing good content for English learners.
That's what I hope.
Whether or not you consider me an influencer, I hope that you can at least view me as an educational content creator who's providing good practice for english learners right.
So i hope you enjoyed this topic and this episode and, of course, like i've mentioned throughout this episode, i have this membership that you can sign up for.
If you want technical practice with your pronunciation and your listening, or if you want to use my advanced episodes, You can sign up for that.
The link is down below.
And you can use my U.S.
Conversations podcast to help bring your English listening comprehension to the next level where you can understand two people talking at normal speed, having a conversation with each other.
That's not easy, but my U.S.
Conversations podcast will help you practice with that type of content to reach that level eventually.
So the link to sign up is also down below.
All right.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode and I'll talk to you on the next episode of listening time.
