We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Caroline Makepeace. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Caroline below.
Alright, Caroline thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with what makes profitability in your industry a challenge – what would you say is the biggest challenge?
One of the biggest challenges to profitability for influencers is that the majority of businesses see you as a free marketing channel.
We’re consistently asked to create content on our channels for free in exchange for a hosted meal … or even a beer or brewery.
This is going against one of the most important rules for win win relationships and negotiations – step inside the shoes of the person you’re negotiating with. What’s in it for them? why would they give their valuable time and resources to work with you for such an exchange?
Here’s the reality. Let’s take the situation of a hosted meal in a restaurant. Sure we love it and love to help local businesses but here is our reality if we exchanged
Time taken to enjoy the meal: 2 hours
Time taken to capture and create content: 2-3 hours
Costs: Fuel & tip money & cost of video editor
= Negative profitability
This doesn’t even take into our account our creativity and the influence we have spent years building.
It’s a LOSING game for us. All we get is extra calories I then have to work off in the gym, and my accountant upset with me because we’re sliding into the red.
The only time we do this if we can see another way, we can leverage this into other income. And we have built a diversified business to have lots of options. But it’s still not smart for us to spend our own money and time promoting someone else for free.
And alongside that you have many influencers – who are new or building their business – that don’t understand their worth and value and so will work for free or in exchange for low value products. So, it’s become. more and more “standard practice”.
I know many influencers with tens of thousands of followers who are barely making any money. because they’re working for free thinking it’s their only option and they haven’t considered how to do build a sustainable business.
Firstly, relying just on one social media platform is fraught with danger. You are at the mercy of algorithms which can change at any moment, and mostly your value is capped because it’s a lower barrier to entry and competition high.
Anyone can start an Instagram account and publish content that ends up looking the same as everyone else. Where does your unqiue, long-term value lie beyond this so you can charge for your worth?
Caroline, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Craig and I are travel bloggers, content creators, and entrepreneurs and the founders of two online brands: This is Raleigh, a platform for anyone looking to explore the best of Wake county, and YTravelBlog,com is one of the world’s most influential travel blogs.
We’re Australians and have lived in 5 countries and traveled to over 60 and started our travel blog in 2010 as a way to take control of our income and lifestyle and live wherever we wanted whenever we wanted. We also wanted to share the world and our travel tips with our global audience.
During the pandemic we started This is Raleigh as a way to give back to our community and share our passion and love for this city we call home.
We are a multi-media publishing platform that specializes in using our own personal brand and story to share expert tips, insights, and stories into destinations and experiences. We love to use our personal experiences to inspire others to see what is possible for themselves and then lay out an easy pathway to do it. Whether that is in an international destination or here in Raleigh, we have a well-trained eye for finding fun and unique experiences.
We create articles on This is Raleigh with suggestions on things to see and do in the city, itinerary guides, neighborhood guides, and insights on monthly and weekly events. Our podcast shares our personal stories and those of other business and thought leaders of the community via our interviews.
And on our social media, we showcase the Raleigh lifestyle via our vibrant photos and video (including drone footage) This helps our followers feel connected to it. If we can do it, they CAN TOO!
We also partner with brands and companies on specific marketing campaigns. We create content to share on our platforms that aligns with their messaging and offerings but maintains our personal perspective.
What sets us apart is our unique story, our ability to create content on multiple platforms in an authentic, relatable and personal way.
Our genuine passion and love we have for sharing Raleigh is evident and contagious. This is more than just a business to us.
We fought for 17 years to earn the right to live in this city when we could have lived anywhere, including across the road from the beach in Australia. People feel that from our content and so trust that we’re genuine. People also see us actually experiencing what we’re sharing so they know it’s not content created from behind a laptop.
Because we’ve had decades of global travel experience, people trust our opinion.
Do you have multiple revenue streams – if so, can you talk to us about those streams and how your developed them?
We started our travel blog in 2010 when it was very new. No one was really making money and we were constantly up against the old way of thinking that publishing can’t be “pay to play.” It involved years of us educating the industry and proving the worth of new media.
Because of this we had to get good at throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what stuck. This lead to us creating multiple streams of income – a strategy we still consistently follow.
We thought we were well protected having diverse streams of income in the travel industry, until the pandemic hit and all those streams collapsed. This taught us the value of having diversity across industries as well so we started This is Raleigh to create something outside of the travel industry – yet can still retain some elements of it.
Our income streams are mostly display advertising, affiliate income, and marketing campaigns with brands and tourism destinations.
We also started a new income stream with This is Raleigh as a referral real estate agent. WE have a team of qualified realtor we’re working with who we can refer new clients to. These are clients coming to us via our This is Raleigh website and social channels who need help with buying and selling. We save them time and stress by matching them with an agent suited to what they are looking for.
As our other income streams rely a lot on traffic, SEO rankings, and social media follower numbers, this is great to diversify an income stream that can be profitable if we lose traffic, rankings, and/ or followers.
Any fun sales or marketing stories?
I’d love to share the marketing campaign that really marked the turning point with our travel blog from moving into unpaid hobby into a business. It’s when we really broke through in an industry, as mentioned, didn’t want to pay bloggers.
When we started our travel blog, we wrote a list of brands we’d love to work with – those we “know, like, and trust.” At the top of that list was Qantas – Australia’s airline. Then in 2011, 10 days after the birth of our second child, they invited us to join the Rugby World Cup tour in New Zealand as the official Qantas correspondents.
It was unpaid, which was standard back then, but we knew this was an opportunity we couldn’t say no to. Despite having a newborn, we made the sacrifice and Craig went for two weeks on that tour. He used to a professional rugby league player so it was his ultimate dream job! All Craig had to do was explore New Zealand in a campervan caravan with other rugby union fans, attend the Australian games, and write blog posts about it. We didn’t even have Instagram back then, so he just posted on Facebook.
As a result of that trip, our credibility went up and we were noticed more as a professional influencers who create quality content to a loyal following. Other marketing campaigns soon followed with some of the biggest brands in the world: American Express, Canon, TripAdvisor, Nissan, and Ford. And the best thing is that most of these were paid! We’d finally cracked the code.
These brand collaborations also helped us immensely to get our green card where we had to prove we were at the top of our field! It’s a definite favorite story of ours.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://thisisraleigh.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/thisisraleigh
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/thisisraleighnc
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/makepeace/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/thisisraleighnc
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/thisisraleigh
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisisraleigh
Image Credits
Caroline and Craig Makepeace