Laid off twice, content creator turns into LinkedIn influencer, earns Rs 8.6 lakh a month

Valerie Chapman said her LinkedIn career is why she no longer holds a corporate job.

Valerie Chapman was laid off twice before she took up content creation seriously and now the 25-year-old earns about Rs 8.6 lakh a month creating content on LinkedIn. According to her, the platform can be lucrative for creators though many still see it as just “a place to apply for a job.”

“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, told Fortune.

Chapman previously worked in advertising and content creation before two layoffs made her pivot. In one of her previous jobs, she was asked by a social media management employer to become a LinkedIn thought leader to bring in sales. But after being laid off in October 2023, "influencing" people on LinkedIn became her new hustle. With over 16,000 followers on the platform, her videos and posts draw in thousands of likes. Chapman told Fortune that her LinkedIn career is why she no longer holds a corporate job.

“We’re in the creator economy,” she told the publication. “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 monetising.”

Elaborating more on how she utilises LinkedIn for her income, Chapman said, “There’s no creator fund, but there’s other ways to monetise, like digital products, which I’m working on. Right now my primary income streams are brand partnerships, primarily with tech companies. 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.”