What: Get paid to tout products you like on Instagram
Expected pay: $3 to $50 per post
Husl$core: $$$$
Commissions & fees: NA
Where: Nationwide
Requirements: Be a woman with a smart phone, an Instagram account (with at least a few hundred followers) and a PayPal account (to get paid).
Review: If you are someone who loves to take photographs of yourself, your food, your clothes and tell all of your avid followers about everything you like and hate, you’re going to love Heartbeat, a.k.a. Heartbeat for Ambassadors. This smart phone application allows you to get paid to tout products for major brands ranging from Netflix and Amazon to Goop and H&M clothing by, well, being yourself. The concept is that brands get a better bang for their buck when the people touting them are real people — not actors — and are legitimately enthused about telling their friends about their products. Thus, Heartbeat is going to try to match you with things you’ll like. If you have a lot of engaged followers, you might even get free products, in addition to being paid.
Technically, you don’t need a set number of followers to participate, but the fewer followers, the less likely you are to get chosen for a campaign. (This is, after all, advertising and advertising requires an audience.) However, co-founder Brian Freeman says people with few followers can get started with Heartbeat through contests on the platform, where the pay isn’t guaranteed but you could win cash or swag. Eventually, the platform may pay for Facebook posts, too. But right now, the opportunity is only available to those with active Instagram accounts.
Here’s how it works: You download the app to your phone and then sign up with your Instagram account. The app will then examine your profile, followers and “engagement” to determine which advertising campaigns you might qualify for and how much they would pay you. The more followers, generally, the better. But forget about buying followers. The app tests for authenticity and disqualifies you if your follower list isn’t legitimate. Assuming you get through that screening process, the app will present you with campaign opportunities, telling you what you’d need to do and the proper hashtags to use when referencing the product.
The pay isn’t much — usually $3 to $5 per campaign — but the work involves snapping and posting photos that you’d probably be taking anyway. If you happen to be in love with, say, H&M clothing, you might even get invited to a few VIP events and get some free stuff. If this is something you might find fun, there’s no harm in signing up. One caution, the app is new and may still have a few glitches, which is the only complaint we saw from users.
What their users say: (From the Google and Apple app stores)
I already was having issues with the mobile website and never see campaigns on my discovery page until after the deadline. Now with the app i cant even log in. I’ll tap the log in button and nothing happens. Please fix this.
I really enjoy the idea, but I have questions that I can’t seem to get answers to, and my campaigns haven’t updated at all. It’s the 17th, and a campaign expire on the 1st. I haven’t received any new campaigns, ad the ones I have now I can’t do.
