Marketing

T​​he hottest new influencer isn't the gym bro or food guru. It’s the affiliate marketing mom of two working from her pool deck. If you’ve stumbled upon her Instagram, she’s most likely bragging about her two-hour workday and the new house she just bought with her six-figure income stream. And you know she's got a link in her bio directing you to the class she took to learn it all.   These new "entrepreneurs" are flooding social media. Some have just a dozen followers, others hundreds of thousands. But they are all part of a new scheme that promises to make you millions working from home as a freelance marketer. The catch — the course they're selling is how they're making their money; they're not actually using it to build a business. And their advice for you?

The first time I saw the Instagram feed of Georgie Fenn I thought she was a model stooge. Utterly gorgeous, Fenn regularly poses in carefully picked diaphanous clothing, ‘nipple poke’ a specialty. Paid brand collaborations offer excellent returns. Her artfully shot images tagged with maxims as trite as ‘It doesn’t matter what you’re drinking as long as you’re enjoying it’ are a marketeer’s wet dream. Miss Fenn is an up-and-coming ‘vinfluencer’ — that is, she uses her considerable social media presence (31k and rising @winingawaytheweekend) to sell wine.

For Hindus, cows are objects of veneration. Govinda, protector of cows, resides in Goloka and tends to a herd of creatures that bring nourishment and strength. Krishna lives here, and cows roam lush grasslands in peace.My head is swimming slowly, meditatively. Am I in Goloka? There are cows here: giant beasts with gentle eyes. But these are not grasslands. This is a gigantic, stinking barn, where cows are huddled up together in unbearable heat. In the distance there are moans. A calf is being dragged from its mother.