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Lots of brands that have fallen out of love with advertising have now glammed into the influencer – the social media star who gets paid to recommend products to a vast number of loyal followers. An even newer flavor is micro-influencer – the guru with small number of college student followers, perhaps at only one school, — who presumably has a closer relationship with his or her “audience.” How do you become a micro-influencer and start collecting checks for your recommendations?

Influence Is All On Social Media Today

Influencers used to work mainly thru WordPress blogs. But those days are over. The game is now played almost entirely on social media. This can make it hard to get started as an influencer, because Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok and other platforms all work a bit differently. And no matter which ones you choose, it can take a pretty significant effort to find and keep followers in a world where people are constantly jumping from one app to another on their phones.

Generally speaking, a micro-influencer will have somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 followers. The value of an audience like that varies a great deal from platform to platform. A post on Tik Tok to an audience of that size may net you only $25., while a Facebook post may be worth more than $1,200. Instagram has gradually evolved into the platform where the greatest number of influencers post, but it doesn’t always net the highest rates from advertisers. You can find an excellent rundown of rates and posting types for influencers here.

Building Followers As An Influencer

Before getting too excited about raking in money as an influencer, it’s a good idea to think beyond the numbers a bit. If you want an audience to follow you, you better have a whole lot to say about something that interests them because you’ll need to post new content on a consistent basis. You will need to be very, very interested in a particular topic in order to be able to do that. And most importantly, you need to focus on a top area where there are lots of advertisers looking to reach people your age.

You’ll never get money, for example, writing about baking cookies, because nobody has to buy anything expensive to bake them. Cosmetics are a different story. They can cost a good deal and there are lots of companies just dying to sell them to college students. Be aware that most of the social platforms today are very picture-based. That means that if you want to be a cosmetics guru, you’ll have a much better chance of success if you’re a girl who likes to put on makeup than if you’re a football player with a beard. If you’re at the beginning of this process it’s a good idea to look around the social platforms and see exactly where other influencers are succeeding at selling products.

The good news is that if you’re a college student, you will probably be very aware of which social platforms are most popular among your friends. The bad news is that building a following nowadays is almost never free. Facebook, Instagram and just about all the other players in the market want to charge you for exposing your content to people. The costs of this can seem low at first blush, but when you consider that only a small percentage of people who see your posts will actually become followers, you’ll realize that audience building takes a sustained effort and a willingness to spend some of your cash.

Why Brands Need Influencers

Being a micro-influencer can be a nice way to earn some extra money as you work your way through college. Advertisers are interested in college influencers because they believe that young people haven’t settled on their favorite brands yet and can be convinced to try new things, The keys are to find a topic where you’ll be a good representative for key brands, and to work on building your audience consistently, but not so much that it gets in the way of your schoolwork.

Recommended By Success Degrees Editors:
So you’re headed off to college…or maybe you’re taking an online degree program from your desk at home. Either way, you’re about to be asked to create lots of different types of reports and research projects in different formats. You’re gonna need some help. Fortunately, a good deal of help is out there in the form of the many free software apps now available online.

Here are our favorites. We’ve ranked them by simply taking them for a test drive and seeing ourselves how well they perform. Our editors’s choices for 2021:

1. GIMP for Image Editing

   GIMP is our number one ranked free software tool. Photoshop costs anywhere from $100 – $200 plus for an annual subscription. GIMP is a picture editing app we love that you can download for free here. It’s a super-powerful software that works well whether you’re doing quick edits or professional level work. There’s a bit of a learning curve with it – some would say it’s a little less user-friendly than Photoshop. But it won’t take you long to be doing rapid edits. The fact that GIMP is a downloaded app that resides on your computer is good if you are using any kind of good quality digital camera. Good cameras create images that are such large files that it’s often hard or even impossible to edit then with an online photo editing software. You won’t have that problem editing gif, JPEG, TIFF or PNG with GIMP, which is compatible with Mac, Windows or Linux.
   An alternative photo editing software is PIXLR. This is an internet based app that’s great if you want to quickly resize, crop or improve the color saturation on a picture. You do, however, need to have Flash Player on your machine to use it. TIP: When you go to https://pixlr.com/editor/, you’ll get a choice of PIXLR X, the simple version, or PIXLR E, a more professional version that is no longer free after a 30 day trial. For most college students, the X version will do the job.

2. Zotero for Research Organization

   You’ll have a hard time finding another tool that can simplify a complicated job as effectively as Zotero. Are you doing complicated research papers that require lots of references? Zotero is designed to help you keep your sanity by organizing them in one place and linking them effectively to your document.

   There’s a cool tool included called Zotero Connector that allows you to save content directly from your browser window, with tags and notes that allow you to retrieve and write from it more quickly. Zotero also hosts a pretty robust forum where you’ll be able to find help with any tech problems you have and a “groups” application that’s useful if you’re working on a project with other students. It’s compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux.
   Download Zotero here.

3. SoftMaker Free Office Tools

   SoftMaker is a free alternative to Microsoft Office that’s well worth a try, particularly if you’ve found, like us, that Microsoft Word is one of the most glitch-laden pieces of software on earth. SoftMaker mimics Microsoft Office with word processing and a presentation program that’s an alternative to PowerPoint. It’s a free download, though a subscription fee is required if you want to work with the very useful Thesaurus app and certain other features. It’s compatible with Mac, Linux, Android and Windows. PCMag has called it “the best desktop-based alternative to Microsoft 365.”
   Download SoftMaker here.

4. Audacity for Sound Recording

   When it comes to sound and music editing, its tough to beat GarageBand for ease of use. But many of the free sound editing apps available online are super geeky and tough to learn. The most user-friendly one, we think, is Audacity. With it, you can do basics of music recording like overdubs, editing, splicing, mixing and converting to just about any format you want for export. There’s a really nifty “noise reduction” feature that allows you to quickly remove background room noise from an entire track, which is great if you’re working in a less than professional studio. If you want to double track by playing a second track acoustically with something you’ve already recorded, you’ll have to do through a slightly complicated procedure in order to get rid of the delay that’s known as redundancy. Certain other features can be a bit glitchy as well. But it’s nowhere near as complicated as ProTools which means that it can actually be fun to work with rather than a major technological challenge. For free, this is a nice application. Get Audacity free here.

5. Copyscape

   We’re cheating a bit putting Copyscape in the article, because it’s no longer absolutely free. Each search costs three cents. But that’s a pretty tolerable price to find out if a paper you’ve written has too much content copied out of other sources. Everybody cuts and pastes info from sources into their term papers, but this is a nice little app to tell you if you’ve re-written things adequately, or if you’re likely to be accused of plagiarism. It’s good to do a check, because there’s no reason your professor can’t use this app to check on you. Get Copyscape here.

6. Googledocs

   Google Docs is so popular that it’s practically guaranteed that someone will ask you to use it to work with them on a project. The good thing about Google Docs is that it’s functions – changing fonts, tracking changes, downloading docs in various formats – will all seem familiar to you because they closely mimic Microsoft Word. We love the fact that Google Docs autosaves your work as you write, so you won’t lose anything if you forget to save or have an internet outage. The one pain about this application is that setting people up with permission to collaborate isn’t always simple. Sometimes people forget what email they used to sign up for Google or Google Docs, and it can take a bunch of emails among collaborators requesting and granting permission to get everyone on the app. Google Docs is free. Sign up for it here.

7. AVG Antivirus – Free

   The free version of AVG is a favorite recommendation of IT folks. It gives protection against malware and other bad actors online, and scans your incoming emails for viruses. One downside is that the application can eat up a lot of disc space when it’s fully installed. Another is that once you’ve got the free version on your machine, you will be bombarded with messages trying to get you to upgrade to the paid version and you’ll have to do lots of updates manually. However, that’s pretty much the same story as with other “freemium” type applications online. Compatible with Mac, ,IOS, Android and Windows. Get AVG here.

8. Ccleaner For A Faster Laptop

   Here’s a decent little app designed to speed up your computer. If you download a ton of software apps, which most of us do, your machine is going to slow down as memory gets used up. Ccleaner gets rid of unnecessary temp and other files that clog up your hard drive. The truth is you can do this all manually if you want to learn how, but if you want to get it done with the single click of a button, Ccleaner is nice to have. It works on PC or Mac. Get Ccleaner here.

The way U.S. colleges and universities are accredited doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. But you need to understand it. If you don’t, your investment in a college degree can turn out to be worth very little.

Accreditation is the “stamp of approval” employers want to see on a school, or sometimes on a particular degree program. It’s also the main measuring stick you need to live up to if you want to transfer from one college to another. Just to make things confusing, however, there are some degree paths where accreditation doesn’t matter at all.

Old School

The reason accreditation is so confusing is that there’s no national system that governs it. It’s handled by a mishmash of independent agencies that have evolved gradually since they 1700’s, when the first one was established in New York State. Today the main accreditors alternately cooperate and compete against each other, with some getting into occasional arguments about their practices with the U.S. Department of Education. But a key reason accreditation isn’t going away is that schools need it, because it’s required for student grants or for loans from the federal government.

You definitely want to learn about this before choosing an online or traditional college – not after you’ve completed your degree. There are three basic levels of accreditation to understand.

Regional Accreditation And It’s Variants

The closest thing to a national accreditation watchdog is the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA). But it only oversees groups that give accreditation – it doesn’t handle the job directly. If you’re like most college applicants, you may assume that national accreditation is probably better than regional. But in the weird world of American higher ed, that’s not so. Regional accreditation from one of the CHEA approved agencies is the most highly prized type. It’s given to “academically oriented” schools that give bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate level degrees. (more below on other types of accreditation for professional training programs) Generally, you can assume that an employer won’t doubt the basic quality of your degree if your school is accredited by one of these six regionals (click on + to see a list of states served by each) :

A few pure online schools do, by the way, have regional accreditation if their programs meet key standards. Although they have no campuses, they are accredited in the state where their headquarters is located (Click list below of online-only and for-profit schools with regional accreditation).

Beyond The Regional Colleges Accreditors

When you look past these old line regional accreditors, things get confusing very fast. A host of new accrediting agencies have risen in the past few decades as changes in college education – particularly the rise of online accredited courses – have disrupted old teaching models. The changes have caused heated debates among educators, accreditors and the Department of Education about the quality of schools. New learning models have also run into frequent resistance from college professors and administrators who basically don’t want to see their jobs disrupted by any type of change. At the same time, however, there have been real problems of for-profit colleges and diploma mills being started up by hucksters and trying to fool prospective students and the accreditors alike about the quality of their programs.

National Accreditation

There are several national accreditors that generally approve schools focused career training – which includes many online and for-profit schools. Whether or not a nationally accredited school is adequate for you depends on how high your career aspirations are. Nationally accredited schools are not the Harvard Universities of this world (Harvard, by the way, is accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education). The most sophisticated employers may look down on schools with national accreditation. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get hired by many small to mid-sized employers with a nationally accredited degree. Nationally accredited school have to conform to certain academic standards and are far more desirable than schools with no accreditation at all.

The biggest national accreditor is the Distance Education Accrediting Commission (DEAC) which, as the name implies, focuses on online degree schools. DEAC grew out of a company that approved home correspondence courses way back in the 1920’s. It has the approval of both the Department of Education and the CHEA (which oversees the respected regional accreditors), but there have been off and on debates in academia about whether or not it’s standards are stringent enough. It now accredits over 100 for-profit and nonprofit schools around the world. Schools accredited by DEAC run the gamut from fairly well-known names like American Sentinal University and Grantham to distinctly lesser-known institutions like The University of the People and The National Tax Training School.

Accrediting Council Troubles

The second best known national accreditor is Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS), which accredits many for-profit schools. ACICS has actually been around since 1912, but in recent years it’s had a turbulent history. The Department of Education revoked it’s recognition during the Obama administration, only to give it back during the Trump administration. The pendulum seems to be swinging back against ACICS recently. In January of 2021, a key committee of the U.S. Department of Education recommended that ACICS’s authority be revoked again. The story is clearly to be continued. But it’s safe to say that accreditation from this agency is not the gold standard.

Transferring From A Nationally Accredited School

A big hazard to be aware of is that if you take some courses at a nationally accredited school and then want to transfer from a regionally accredited one, it will probably be a challenge getting all your credits accepted in transfer. But it’s not impossible. CHEA has actually recommended recently that “Ins”itutions…need to assure that transfer decisions are not made solely on the source of accreditation of a sending program.” What that means in plain English is that if you’re trying to jump to a regionally accredited school, you have a strong chance of getting credits accepted if you make a real effort to get your new school to focus on the exact content and quality of each course you took at your nationally accredited school.

Graduate Degrees

Applying for a graduate or post graduate degree can present a particularly sticky problem. If you’re going for an MBA or any other type of master’s program at a regionally accredited school, your entire bachelor degree may not be accepted if it’s from a nationally accredited school. That, obviously, is a disaster you’d like to avoid.

Programmatic and Professional Accreditation

There are “programmatic” accrediting agencies that focus on specific types of degree programs – usually those that lead to some type of professional certification. You should be aware that in many professional areas, you will absolutely have to get a degree from a school with the right accreditation if you want to take your professional certification test.

Among the best known examples or programmatic accreditors are The Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing (ACEN) and the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE), two highly respected groups that accredit college nursing programs. You must have a nursing degree from a school accredited by one of these to qualify for the NCLEX exams to be a nurse. There are programmatic accreditors in all sorts of other professional categories, though the health and education fields have the most . Some interesting examples:

• Accreditation Commission for Midwifery Education – (ACME)
• Association for Biblical Higher Education Commission on Accreditation (ABHE)
• Aviation Accreditation Board International (AABI)
• Montessori Accreditation Council for Teacher Education (MACTE)
• National Association of Schools of Theatre Commission on Accreditation (NAST)
• Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC)
• National Association of Schools of Dance Commission on Accreditation (NASD)
• Council on Accreditation of Parks, Recreation, Tourism and Related Professions (COAPRT)
• Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP)

Different Accreditation Rules For Professional Degrees

It’s not necessarily bad if a professional-type program doesn’t have regional accreditation from a CHEA-approved agency. In fact many accreditors in the education field are not even approved by the U.S. Department of Education. If you are considering a degree in a professional area, you need to spend some time researching what the standards are for certification and getting hired in your particular career category. Here’s a full list of programmatic accrediting agencies in the U.S.. If you want to do a really deep dive on this subject, the U.S. Department of Education’s massive database of schools and accrediting agencies it approves is here.

Where Accreditation Doesn’t Matter At All

There has been a rise of training programs, mostly in computer coding, where hiring employers frankly don’t care if your program was accredited or not. These coding academies or “bootcamps” focus only on job skills and don’t provide the broader education of a bachelor’s or even and associate’s degree. Virtually none of them have any type of accreditation. But most require some type of state-level approval to obtain a license to operate.
The two best ways to figure out if a coding boot camp is good are:

• Find some people in the business and ask for their guidance.
• Ask the admissions person for the coding school lots of questions about exactly which platforms you will be studying, what certificate of completion you will get at the end of the program, and how much professional support you will get both during the program and after graduation.

The demand for coders is high and many of the coding schools have excellent reputations. It’s up to you to ask around and do other research to figure out which one is right for you.

Accreditation Can Be Key To A Good Job

The most sophisticated employers won’t take your degree very seriously if it’s a non-accredited institution. If you want to feel comfortable walking into a job interview after finishing your degree, you absolutely want to go to an accredited college, whether it’s online or ground-based. Find out more here on whether or not an employer will take your online diploma seriously.

List Of Online Schools With Regional Accreditation

Some people assume that the large online schools don’t have the high-quality regional accreditation that old colleges and universities have. That’s not necessarily true. Here’s a list of examples of widely recognized institutions that are either partly or entirely online, including some for-profit schools, that have regional accreditation.

• American InterContinental University System
• Argosy University
• Benedictine University
• California University of Pennsylvania
• Capella University
• Colorado State University
• Colorado Technical University
• Grand Canyon University
• Keiser University
• Liberty University
• Northcentral University
• Post University
• Purdue University Global
• South University
• Southern New Hampshire University
• University of Phoenix
• Walden University
• Western Governors University