Paying Your Way To Success

A friend of mine and I were talking and thought about how easy it would be to 'artificially' become an influencer.

We're not talking about just making it look like you are popular but legitimately becoming an influencer with a real audience and accelerating this process by investing.

Essentially fake it until you make it. There were a few ideas we came up with that could help with this process but I wanted to know how the people of BHW would do this.

If you wanted to create an entire personal brand from scratch and turn someone into an influencer with a good amount of funding behind it, how would you do it?

I'd pay for vacations and expensive things rather than buying promotions.

However, I don't think faking as an influencer is a good business model long term wise:

• Faking it is not a good business model at all since you will have to continue to fake it for the rest of your influencer life.
• You don't make much money as an influencer. and faking it will mean you will never actually make a profit.

I dont think flexing is a good idea. BUT if you are really willing to produce good quality content then I am sure you will have what it takes to be an influencer. I have recently seen a great example. Recipe: Great content.

The problem is, the minute you purchase fake likes, followers, etc for "social proof" you kill your account. So, it's impossible to fake a following or engagements unless you literally fake everything 100%. Instead of actually going on vacations, you could just learn Photoshop and edit yourself into exotic location photos, or you could get a green screen and fake images using it (people have done this in YouTube videos).

Thanks for everyone's opinion. This is all just a though experiment exploring the idea. My logic was that you could spend large amounts of money on ads promoting yourself as an influencer until you actually become popular and then, eventually, everyone will forget that you used ads to get your success. By faking being an influencer, I guess I mean getting a kickstart.

Pretty sure there was a story on reddit (not sure whether people eventually decided it was real or not) in which someone claimed they were a multimillionaire app developer until eventually enough blogs and media sources started reporting it and he became a public speaker and everyone just accepted it was true as there was so much secondary evidence.

I pass because I don't want to get arrested for embezzlement, and end up on next season's American Greed. I'm too camera shy for that.

For sure you could pay for unlimited ads, purchase or rent exotic cars, exotic holidays and so on to catch people's attention.

But if you have money for all that, not so sure you'd really need to show it off on social platforms to make money.