So You Want To Get Into Influencer Work
Liv and Nat are two of the newer names coming out of the TikTok and Instagram landscape, and people have been asking me how they actually built their reach from nothing. I have watched their accounts grow, talked to a few people in the agency side, and honestly the pattern is more repeatable than most creators want to admit. The rise of social media influencers like them follows a set of mechanics that nobody teaches properly because influencers make money by staying mysterious. Here is what actually happened with those two. They started around early 2023 posting raw lifestyle clips on TikTok with zero editing, zero trending sounds, just themselves doing normal things in a specific niche. Their first hundred videos performed like complete garbage. Then they switched posting times from afternoon to 7:42 PM to 8:15 PM Eastern because their analytics showed the highest session start rate in that window. Engagement jumped four hundred percent in two weeks. That detail alone is the difference between most people quitting and actually breaking through. The content itself was not polished. It was almost too casual. They showed the messy apartment, the bad hair days, the unedited arguments. That authenticity angle is oversaturated now but in early 2023 it still worked like crazy because the algorithm had not yet fully penalized low production value. By mid 2023 the platform started downranking anything that looked like influencer performance, so the timing mattered more than the strategy. People miss that constantly.
I ran into a real problem when I tried to reverse engineer their exact posting schedule for a client account. The TikTok analytics only show average view times and completion rates, not the exact minute-by-minute upload performance across different days of the week. So I ended up building a simple spreadsheet that tracked upload hour against the three-day retention curve for each video. It took me about three hours to set up but it cut down the trial and error phase from weeks to maybe four days. If you are serious about this, do the same. The data does not show you what you need unless you force it to.
How The Algorithm Actually Rewards Them
Most people think influencers blow up because they got lucky with one video. That is almost never true. Liv and Nat both hit a threshold where the algorithm started pushing their content to lookalike audiences because the initial viewer retention was above sixty percent. That number is critical. If your first thirty seconds do not hold at least that percentage of viewers, nothing else matters. Post production, brand deals, follower count, none of it saves a weak hook. They also used a technique called content seeding where they posted a short version on TikTok, a slightly different cut on Instagram Reels, and a long form version on YouTube Shorts within the same forty eight hour window. Each platform saw different audience responses and the data from one informed the next. TikTok is the testing ground. If a video performs there, you know what angle to push on Instagram. I have seen creators waste months doing it the other way around and never figure out why their content flopped on the wrong platform first. The counter intuitive part nobody talks about is that they actually posted less over time. When they crossed half a million followers, they dropped from daily posts to three times a week. Engagement per post went up because the algorithm gave each video more distribution time instead of burying it under their next upload. That goes against every growth course that tells you to post five times a day. Those courses are written by people selling courses, not by people running actual accounts.
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Monetization Is Where Most Creators Fail
Liv and Nat did not make money from ad revenue. It is tiny unless you have millions of consistent daily views. They made money from three sources: brand partnerships, affiliate codes, and a digital product. The brand deals came first because they had a very tight niche around lifestyle and home decor. Brands in that space pay decent rates once you pass one hundred thousand followers with engaged audiences. An engagement rate above five percent is what matters, not raw follower count. One hundred thousand followers at three percent engagement is worth less than fifty thousand at eight percent. Always. For the affiliate income they used a combination of Amazon storefront links and direct brand codes. They disclosed everything properly and tracked clicks with a simple UTM parameter system. I know that sounds technical but it takes about twenty minutes to set up in Google Analytics. The extra step of using UTM parameters instead of just slapping a raw Amazon link in the bio is the difference between knowing what is working and guessing. They knew exactly which products drove sales because they tracked it. Most creators do not bother and leave money on the table. The digital product came later, maybe eight to ten months after they started. It was a small guide about setting up a home office on a budget. They sold it for twenty seven dollars and it probably generated more revenue in the first month than all their brand deals combined. The lesson there is that your audience will pay for something you already know how to do. You do not need to be an expert. You just need to be a few steps ahead of the person watching.
What Actually Goes Wrong
The biggest failure point for people trying to replicate this is burnout from trying to maintain a daily posting schedule without systems. Liv and Nat survived because they batch filmed on Sundays and wrote captions in bulk on Mondays. They had a content bank of at least two weeks at all times. Without that buffer, one bad week of personal life can kill your momentum for a month because the algorithm punishes inconsistency. Another issue is trying to copy trends too late. By the time a trend hits mainstream Instagram, it is usually already oversaturated on TikTok. Posting a trend on Instagram after it peaks on TikTok is almost always a waste of time. The window for cross platform trend migration is narrow. You need to monitor TikTok trends at least three days before they hit Instagram. Brand deals also come with hidden complications. Contracts often include exclusivity clauses that can prevent you from working with certain competitors for six to twelve months. I had a creator client sign a deal with a skincare brand and then get locked out of working with three other brands in the same space. They made the one deal but lost probably three smaller ones that would have paid more over the contract period. Always read the exclusivity section carefully before signing. Do not let a manager rush you through it.
If you are starting from zero and feel overwhelmed by the partnership and analytics side, there is a good chance you should focus purely on content for the first ninety days before worrying about monetization. The pressure to make money early distorts your content decisions and makes everything feel forced. Let the audience build first. The money follows the attention, not the other way around.
