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A 25-year-old content creator turned a layoff into an opportunity. Now an influencer on LinkedIn, she says the platform can be more profitable than TikTok

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  • Valerie Chapman, a 25-year-old LinkedIn content creator, says the platform can be just as lucrative as TikTok—though many still see it as just “a place to apply for a job.” Influencers can build a personal brand, create digital products, and establish brand partnership. 

Influencing is a crowded market, with millions of creators pushing products and collaborations across TikTok and Instagram. But they could be overlooking a platform that one influencer says is an untapped goldmine

“For me, LinkedIn has just as good, if not better, of an infrastructure for creators to make money than TikTok,” Valerie Chapman, 25, a self-employed content creator and creative agency co-founder, tells Fortune.

Chapman, who had previously worked in advertising and content creation, says her LinkedIn career is why she no longer holds a corporate job. Two layoffs inspired her to pivot. And luckily, she brought some experience with her to the platform, as a previous social media management employer had asked her to become a LinkedIn thought leader in order to bring in sales. After she was let go in October 2023, LinkedIn influencing became her new hustle. She now has over 16,000 followers on the platform, with posts that reel in thousands of likes.  

“We’re in the creator economy,” Chapman says, adding that people are using AI to help scale content to their individual communities. “None of that was on my radar until I got into the world of LinkedIn, and really started investigating how other solopreneurs were leveraging their personal brands and monetizing.”

While content creators can build their brand and following on any platform, Chapman says the professional social media platform is particularly rife with opportunity. Influencers who turn to it could score big bucks among a new niche audience—and more people are catching on, with LinkedIn even creating its own “Top Voices” category for the most influential creators on the platform. 

“I would actually say LinkedIn is the most powerful in terms of monetizing your personal brand. No one’s talking about it in that way,” she says. “I just think that right now, so many people see LinkedIn as [just]…a place to apply to a job.”

LinkedIn is being overlooked—but it can be highly lucrative

Unlike TikTok, LinkedIn doesn’t pay creators for how much engagement they get on their posts. But there are other ways to cash in on the platform, Chapman explains. 

“There’s no creator fund, but there’s other ways to monetize, like digital products, which I’m working on. Right now my primary income streams are brand partnerships, primarily with tech companies,” she says. “If you put on a sales hat, there’s tremendous amounts of opportunity on LinkedIn, especially because of the video feature that has just been incorporated in the last year or so.”

Chapman has developed a client roster by cold-calling brands to be incorporated into one of her LinkedIn videos—including her “Gen Z Woman in Business” series. She also says creators can build courses and other digital products—like business workshops or E-books on their area of expertise—that, once distributed, can bring in passive income.

And when clients do take interest, there’s an opportunity to set higher rates.

“You can actually charge more in brand partnerships on LinkedIn than other platforms, because your audience is a bunch of professionals—oftentimes CEOs and founders,” Chapman says. “So you can charge a premium for that kind of audience as well.”

After four months of hard work growing her presence online, LinkedIn noticed her, and invited to visit the company’s NYC office. She toured the office and had conversations with LinkedIn’s team on the future of work and digital influence. Receiving that recognition was a strong sign she should keep going.

Chapman says she’s since made significant headway as a creator who can now support herself, earning about $10,000 a month by dishing out advice and think pieces on personal brands and AI to her thousands of followers

“I will say it took about three or four months to really build an infrastructure where the deals were coming in. It wasn’t like, ‘You got money right away,’” she says. “Once you start emailing people and you have an audience, then you can get to closing a brand partnership fairly easily, if you really dedicate your time to it.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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Recession forecasts: odds are starting to look like a coin flip

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Education Department staff cuts could limit options for families of kids with disabilities

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For parents of kids with disabilities, advocating for their child can be complicated, time-consuming — and expensive.

Changes at the Education Department are likely to make the process even more difficult, advocates for kids with disabilities say.

When a parent believes their child is not receiving proper services or school accommodations for a disability, they can seek remedies from their district. They can file complaints with their state, arguing the child’s rights have been taken away without due process of law, or even pursue litigation in state or federal courts.

Those processes often involve multiple sessions with hearing officers who are not required to be experts in disability law. Legal fees can cost tens of thousands of dollars for a single case. Legal aid and other advocacy organizations that can provide free assistance often have more demand for their services than they can meet.

But filing a complaint with the Education Department has long been an option for families who can’t afford a lawyer. They begin by filling out the Office for Civil Rights’ online form, documenting the alleged instances of discrimination. From there, the agency’s staff is supposed to investigate the complaint, often interviewing school district employees and examining district policies for broader possible violations.

“It’s known and has the weight of the federal government behind it,” said Dan Stewart, managing attorney for education and employment at the National Disability Rights Network. “The process, the complaint portal, as well as the processing manual are all in public, and it does not require or typically involve lawyers.”

That option seems increasingly out of reach, advocates say.

Under President Donald Trump, the Education Department’s staff has been cut approximately in half — including in the Office for Civil Rights, whose attorneys are charged with investigating complaints of discrimination against kids with disabilities. The staff has been directed to prioritize antisemitism cases. More than 20,000 pending cases — including those related to kids with disabilities, historically the largest share of the office’s work — largely sat idle for weeks after Trump took office. A freeze on processing the cases was lifted early this month, but advocates question whether the department can make progress on them with a smaller staff.

“The reduction in force is simply an evisceration of the Office for Civil Rights’ investigatory authority and responsibility,” Stewart said. “There’s no way that I can see that OCR can keep up with the backlog or with the incoming complaints.”

A federal lawsuit filed Friday challenges the layoffs at the Office for Civil Rights, saying they decimated the office’s ability to process and investigate complaints.

While the OCR process was not perfect, reducing the office’s investigative staff will only worsen the challenges families face when seeking support for their kids, said Nikki Carter, an advocate for kids with disabilities and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

“It makes them feel hopeless and helpless,” Carter said. “By reducing the number of employees to handle cases, by putting stipulations on certain cases, it only makes it feel intensified.”

Education Department officials insist the staff reductions will not affect civil rights investigations and the layoffs were “strategic decisions.”

In her state of Alabama, Carter said families face an uphill battle to finding legal representation.

“They don’t have the money for an attorney,” she said. “Or the representation they’re getting is not the representation they feel like will be best for their child.”

Even if families can afford the high costs, a limited number of attorneys have the expertise to take on disability discrimination cases. Programs that offer free representation often have limited capacity.

If the backlog of cases increases at the federal Office for Civil Rights, families may lose faith in how quickly the department will investigate their complaints, Stewart said. That may drive them to alternate pathways, such as filing state complaints.

But state and local agencies haven’t always had the capacity or understanding to handle education disability complaints, Stewart said, since those cases so often went to the U.S. Education Department.

“They might not have the infrastructure or the knowledge or the staffing to take on the influx of cases,” Stewart said.

In a separate federal lawsuit filed Thursday, Democratic attorneys general argued the staff reductions at the Education Department may embolden school districts to ignore complaints of discrimination or harassment.

“Students with current complaints will likely see no meaningful resolution, with cases backlogged due to the shortage of employees to resolve them,” the lawsuit said. “Students facing discrimination, sexual harassment or sexual assault will lose a critical avenue to report their case.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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China maps out plan to raise incomes and boost consumption

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China will take steps to revive consumption by boosting people’s incomes, the official Xinhua News Agency reported on Sunday, citing a statement from the State Council.

Other measures include stabilizing the stock and real estate markets, and offering incentives to raise the country’s birth rate, as the government tries to ease the deflationary pressures afflicting the economy.

Beijing will promote “reasonable growth” in wages and establish a sound mechanism for adjusting the minimum wage, Xinhua reported. It will also look at setting up a childcare subsidy system, as well as strengthening how investment can support consumption. 

Read More: Why China Is Struggling to Escape Cycle of Deflation: QuickTake

Invigorating consumption has been a challenge for the government since the end of the pandemic. Retail sales have been anemic while consumer prices fell into deflation in February for the first time in over a year.

At annual parliamentary meetings this month, the country’s leadership made boosting consumption their top priority for the first time since President Xi Jinping came to power over a decade ago.

Chinese stocks rallied the most in two months on Friday after the State Council, China’s cabinet, announced that officials from the finance ministry, the central bank and other government departments plan to hold a press conference Monday on measures to boost consumption.

Other highlights of the plan:

  • Enlarge variety of bond-related products suitable for individual investors
  • Adopt multiple measures to promote increase in farm incomes
  • Raise financial help for some students
  • Appropriately increase the basic pension for retirees
  • Ensure timely and full distribution of unemployment benefits
  • Support tourist attractions in expanding services and the reasonable extension of business hours
  • Support opening of duty-free shops in cities where conditions permit
  • Boost support for trade-in programs
  • Lower the interest rate on housing provident fund loans at an appropriate time
  • Scale back restrictions on consumption in an orderly manner
  • Accelerate the development of new technologies and products such as smart wearables and autonomous driving

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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