Little People, Big World alums Jeremy and Audrey Roloff have a different approach to being influencers than others in the field.
“I think it’s just interesting. One of the things that I was made, like, more aware of on this [brand] trip was just how segregated our worlds are with work,” Audrey, 33, said on the Thursday, April 17, episode of the couple’s “These Are The Days” podcast. “At this trip, all of these creators are on the brand partnership grind. That’s their main thing that they do, which is great.”
According to Audrey, other influencers are “successful” at their approach to content creation, which often doesn’t include selling “their own product” or running a local business. (Audrey and Jeremy, 34, own a brand called Beating 50 Percent and have also published several journals and self-help books about marriage.)
“Most of them have never done an MLM, or know anything about the MLM space,” Audrey said, referring to the business model of multi-level marketing. “Some of them do affiliates, but in a different way. … It’s just interesting because I feel like you and I have our hands dipped in all these different buckets, and we’re not really great at any of them.”
According to Audrey, she and Jeremy have also been involved with MLM programs like Young Living that they balanced with doing “the author thing” and selling books. (Audrey has not publicly shared when or why she left Young Living but hinted on Thursday that her reasoning was “multifaceted.”)
“It’s hard because we’ve tried to do them all — and it’s hard to do them all,” Audrey said. “I think we’re really good at diversifying, maybe in fear, partially. We’ve always been painfully aware that what we do could be gone in a heartbeat. We’ve always tried to diversify, even if it’s through, ‘Let’s buy an Airbnb that we’re going to make a rental property’ or ‘Let’s [buy] Bitcoin.’ … We’ve tried a little bit of a lot of things.”
Jeremy, meanwhile, stated that he and his wife — they wed in 2014 before welcoming four kids — wanted to “get out” of LPBW so badly and saw influencing as a “life raft.” (Jeremy and Audrey left his family’s TLC series in 2018 after 17 seasons to prioritize their home life.)
“We knew we had this mission, but, like, how do you monetize a mission or build a brand?” Jeremy recalled. “We just tried a bunch of things and then we know very well, like, ‘Oh, this blogging thing could be something but it could also disappear tomorrow, so let’s make sure we turn this thing we’ve been doing into a product.’”
Audrey also does a handful of brand partnerships.
“If you’re someone that’s monetizing the internet [or] even if you’re someone who’s not and you want to be in some way, it is the easiest way by far to do that,” she said. “You need to have a following, you have to build up this thing [and] you have to be super consistent with content. If you want to sell your own product, same thing, and then you’re having to invest your own capital or you’re having to buy inventory and manage all this stuff.”
For example, Aubrey has a deal with Thrive Market and said that she was only “paid a one-time flat fee.”
“That’s it,” she said. “It ends with that unless they want to renew another contract and continue.”
