Shelbi Howell, a 32-year-old stay-at-home mom, lives in a small town outside of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. She is not, in any traditional sense, an influencer. Like millions of other women around the world, she posts her daily outfits to TikTok, where she has a frankly paltry 1,624 followers, and Instagram, where she has 1,251. Yet despite being in every sense an ordinary woman on the internet, Howell estimates that she has made more than $500 just from posting to social media.
She does this by posting a video of her outfit or her makeup and reminding viewers – many of whom are people she knows personally – that they can buy the same item via a link in her bio.
