Mr. Motor Oil is the Kind of Influencer Everyone Seeks

Picture this: I’m standing in an aisle of an auto shop (is that what they’re called?) staring at a row of motor oil. Synthetic. Conventional. Premium. Higher-mileage. What? All I want to do is avoid going to the oil change place near my house, where I’m almost always convinced by the very convincing techs slash sales folks that I need a new filter, transmission flush, and tire rotation. They get me. Every time.

So now I’m confused and frustrated trying to pick an oil, preferably under 30 bucks on sale, and then I can get out of here and perform an oil change, by myself. Which would honestly warrant a whole other article, but for now, let’s just talk about this experience.

If dogs can sniff out fear, apparently so can affable auto enthusiasts at your friendly neighborhood automotive retailer. An older gentleman, also evidently shopping, notices me standing there and offers his two cents.

“What car do you drive?” he asks, obviously amused at my bewilderment. “You got a lot of clicks on it?” After hearing my timid reply, he plucks a product from the shelf. “You want this one. It outperforms all the other high-mileage oils, protects all your engine parts, gives you more power than the stuff your dealer probably uses. You’ll never use another oil again.”

And he goes on. And on. And I sponge it all in gratefully. He talks about how he first discovered this oil when he bought a used 2004 and was so impressed that he could barely hear the engine running. He says the engine started right away, ran cool, consumed very little oil and never leaked.

The man is a walking advertiser for this oil, which I’ve been using (yes, by myself, with the help of YouTube tutorials) ever since.

“Sir,” I say to him on the way to the cashier, “if only this brand had you on their payroll.”

“You got that right,” he answers with a chuckle. “If I had a dime for every time I recommended this stuff…”

It occurs to me now that Mr. Motor Oil is the kind of influencer everyone seeks — an honest, authentic, excited user of a product who really just wants to share his love of it. I’m sure I wasn’t the first person he successfully sold this product to, and I’m sure I wasn’t the last. In this digital age, when we’re inundated with sponsored posts and paid editorial content designed to look like candid, sincere reviews, are these legit recommendations really that hard to come by? I think of how easily Mr. Motor Oil convinced and converted me, and how much I trusted his suggestion — and it’s because, like me, he’s just a shopper, someone who just really likes talking about this product he happens to really enjoy. Not only is that honesty refreshing, it’s trustworthy — because it’s real.

That’s why a site like Peopletail — an innovative and cutting-edge Canadian company designed to bring people and retail together — is such a breath of fresh air. We’ve all heard of affiliate programs — sites that allow you to sign up, review products, and get compensated for every time a consumer buys your recommended product using your link. But signing up for individual affiliate programs — especially with the big guns — has proven again and again to be difficult, time-consuming, confusing, and for the mere mortal who doesn’t have the title “Influencer” or “Content Marketer” on an uber-cool, modern-day resume, just not worth it.

Peopletail makes it possible to create shoppable recommendations to share with your network of friends, family and social media followers by creating a profile page and being provided a link that you can post everywhere on the web that you frequent, whether that’s Facebook, Instagram, or yeah, even a digital family newsletter. The cherry on top is that you can make money doing this — by building a reputation for your recommendations, you’ll earn rewards and gain a loyal following.

Like my new auto shop friend recommended his favourite motor oil to me, I’m recommending Peopletail — fervently! — to you. With a growing list of retailers like Well.ca (and more coming on board as we speak) and over 40,000 products so far to choose from, it’s an easy way to talk about what you love and make money in the process. So write about it. Take pictures. Post a video. You’re probably reviewing stuff you love every day anyway, whether it’s online or in passing to some girl you don’t know in some store. After all, like my new friend wondered: if you had a dime for every time you recommended something. Well, you can. Because now you’ve got Peopletail.