You’re an unpaid data entry intern for a faceless company and you won’t ever meet, see, or talk with your boss – although they may fire you (suspensions). Learn how to spend your free time earning money instead of wasting minutes…
The following post was inspired by this tweet:
If you tweet, text, post, create, or share, you are essentially working as an unpaid data entry clerk.
Yeah…
In your free time, you’re an unpaid intern.
Learn to leverage your data points instead of giving them away.
— Chase “CHIEF” Curtis (@realchasecurtis) November 20, 2019
Wait, What Do You Mean I Work In Data Entry?
“I’ve never worked in data entry in my life. I didn’t even go to school for it.”
Let’s briefly go over the job description of a data entry clerk: A member of staff “employed” to enter or update data into a computer system. Data is often entered into a computer from paper documents using a keyboard.
The key takeaway from the job description? A person who enters data into a computer using a keyboard.
This sounds strangely familiar to what you do in your free time, although you may not even realize it because you do it on a phone instead…
Now you need to ask yourself, how do social media platforms make most of their money?
The answer? Advertising to new and existing users.
How Do They Do It?
Big social companies have incentivized you (and 2,820,000,000 others) to input data all day long FOR FREE by offering you a piece of the pie (followers) and making you feel wanted/needed in a community (likes, retweets, shares, etc).
Meanwhile, a user on the other side of the world is looking for a specific answer (or entertainment) on Google and guess what appears!
Your tweets, your posts, your status updates.
Sure, you get a small boost of notoriety for providing the solution, but if you don’t have a plan in place to turn impressions into a payday, you’re an unpaid intern.
Why do you think Quora has a program to pay people to ask questions on their platform? Because they want answers? To help their community?
You’d surely like to think that but no – they don’t pay you for asking questions or receiving answers. They pay you after they’ve presented their ads (pennies for thousands of impressions I might add).
How else are they going to beat WikiHow, WikiAnswers, Yahoo! Answers, and other big players?
- If you think you’re not an intern but you text friends and family – you ARE an intern.
- If you think you’re not an intern but your location services are on – you ARE an intern.
- If you think you’re not an intern but your apps have access to your microphone – you ARE an intern.
All your data is being collected, learned from, and potentially sold to the highest bidder.
How To Request Your Digital Raise?
You won’t be emailing anybody and asking them to pay you because, well, no one will. There’s no place to request what you truly deserve.
Therefore, the only option left is to take matters into your own hands. It’s your responsibility to turn your internship into a paying career. Most people won’t ever take the steps to turn their accounts into something substantial but you can.
If you want to get paid for your efforts, it’s time you take a few extra steps…
Incentivize Strangers
You don’t really know who is seeing your posts as you’re growing, so you need to do your best to get to know them. Giveaway a freebie or design a digital download as a lead magnet to learn who may be interested in what you have to offer.
You can run polls all day long, but the people who will actually engage and respond are different from what the numbers may show (see Hillary v. Trump polls 2016).
Build A Community
A lead magnet isn’t the end of the road; it’s the start of it. Continue to build trust and engage with your followers like you would a family member on Facebook or a close friend on Instagram.
Use your expertise to guide them on their own personal journey. Try handhold as little as possible because if/when you do turn into something HUGE, you won’t be able to keep up with those who aren’t self-sufficient.
Establish An Offer
Believe it or not, you don’t need a degree or 20+ years at a corporate job to build an offer other people want. It could be something as simple as increasing your social engagements or as difficult as creating an engine from scratch.
There are people out there who will pay for your knowledge.
Create Your Platform
Living on a social media platform is totally fine as an engaged consumer. You won’t ever really see a ban or suspension come your way. However, as you grow your audience, haters will come from every corner of the Earth to send you back to the bottom.
It’s a fact: Losers hate to see winners win.
The longer you rely on one platform, the riskier the game gets. Remember, one “wrong” post can send everything you’ve ever created into purgatory. Start a blog, save your videos, download your data, and put your back-ups on a flash drive. You only have the power when you are the one that runs the show.
