PHILADELPHIA -- Janesha Moore wants you to know she wasn’t an overnight success. The Philadelphia fashion influencer created content for nine years before hitting it big in 2023, when her Instagram followers jumped from 30,000 to more than 170,000 in just a year.

During that time, she made over $110,000 from social media.

Her secret? Affiliate marketing, or when influencers receive a commission for directing followers to purchase products using, say, a specific Amazon link that will pay the creator driving traffic to the site. The practice — thought to have died alongside blogging — has been revived by influencers. Moore, who posts outfit ideas and style recommendations, includes a call-to-action with almost every video or photo: comment “NEED” and she’ll send links to everything in the post.

Now, Moore is teaching others that method through the Strategic Influencer Academy, a virtual community for BIPOC content creators looking to make a living without relying on advertising partnerships, a practice with a history of pay discrimination.

Enrollment begins at $997 and caps at 30 students who receive three to six months of personalized coaching from Moore, info sessions with popular e-commerce platform LTK, and a year’s access to an online library of 30-plus virtual lessons on how to create shoppable social media posts. The academy had a 5,200-person waitlist before its first cohort began in February, Moore said. All of her students are women of color.

“The biggest misconception new creators have is that brands will just come to you and want to work with you if you’re producing good content,” said Moore, 27, who is Black. “Brands don’t, and if they do, pay is a mixed bag.”

Most influencers don’t make money from posting, but the creator economy’s compensation issues get worse when you factor in race. White content creators stand to make 29% more than non-white ones for advertising on behalf of brands, giving influencer marketing a reputation for socioeconomic inequality.

The Strategic Influencer Academy’s logic, then, is that BIPOC influencers focus on what they can control — how they convert their followers’ trust into sales — instead what they can’t: How much value corporations place on their followers.

“I have to turn down so many brand deals because these companies keep lowballing me,” said Rasheena Liberté, 33, a Black fashion influencer enrolled in Moore’s academy. “I want to be in charge of my income, and right now I’m not.”Teaching influencers to influence

Below the part of the creator economy that sells you stuff is another one where influencers sell the concept of financial freedom — via dropshipping, flipping houses, or dozens of other self-employment trends.

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