With the feed being filled with influencers and Instagrammers rising in popularity and fame with each passing day and post, you might have wondered if life was easier on the other side of the field. Well, true! For, how many of us can actually claim to have a life that allows passion and work to walk hand in hand? Not denying the fact that it takes immense hard work to climb up in the visibility chart, especially when you are competing against billions. But if you have passion and patience for it, the day is not far when you can establish your influencer base!
Start by selecting your niche!
It is better to focus on one and slowly expand the forte rather than trying to be the master of all trades. Your influencer journey must start with you crossing off and finally deciding on the topic you truly want to take ahead with you. Deciding on a niche implies that you are already cutting out an audience that will and will not see your content.
But the shrinking of the target audience also means you are dwindling the numbers of the competitors you are directly competing with.
Hence, select an area of your strength that you can compete with others. Even in the topic you choose, find your haven where you are capable enough to guide and influence others.
Select the media you want to employ
With tons of media platforms vouching for your attention, selecting a media that can effectively communicate your idea is important. While selecting from the social networking giants like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter to people’s forums like Pinterest and LinkedIn, you must consider whether they tick a few requirements or not.
- Where does your target audience lie?
- Which allows you to put your best foot forward?
- Where can you engage with the members of your community?
- Which platform allows your growth?
The above should act as your indices while choosing the platform. Starting out, it is better to engage on one platform so as to avoid burning yourself out. Establishing is an intensive process. Once you have held your ground, you can slowly branch out to other media and unite them, focusing on your primary platform.
Prepare a layout of what people should expect
Prepare a strategy on how you are going to send across the influence. Each topic requires its own level of brainstorming to chart out a plan that will work best for it. For example, let us consider, you are a fashion influencer on Instagram. You can experiment with the overall theme of your feed whether you want to go with the subtle undertones or be bold with the colors. The post contents like photos and reels can be overlapped to create a uniform feed.
Thus deciding what you want to focus on and what the users can expect off you help you to decide a trajectory you want to go and defines the area you must explore.
Don’t deviate far from the topic at hand!
It is easier to start but continuing to hold the grasp is difficult. Often, it is easier to get deviated from the main purpose of the influencing, especially when the brand joins hands with the marketing.
Yes, influencing eventually should lead to sponsorships and paid promotions for your best interest, but that does not mean that your followers like to be constantly shoved into product placements. Stay relevant to the start and cater to the people who have supported you to grow on the platform.
Be consistent! But Never compromise the quality for quantity
Another mistake that people often make when starting is that they equate quantity and quality. Often, trying to be consistent, people try to put in contents that carry neither head nor tail.
Being consistent is often considered an important factor for growing your niche because the more often you are putting out content, the more you are creating visibility in their eyes. When you have to vie for the attention among millions dolling out similar content, what makes you stand out is your quality and frequency. You can also automate your post so that the software itself posts the content at the desired time.
Quality also means your ability to revive your niche constantly. Exploring the niche, creating a new outlook to the old, and refurbishing them is your liberty to keep the users hooked and waiting for your content.
Rope in media to promote the platform
Promotion is an integral part to expand your establishment. While your content itself acts as a self-promoting agent, with the help of your users, you must look into other media where you can spread the word about your community.
An easy alternative is social media platforms. Another way is by creating blogs or websites for the same. Participating in competitions and joining hands with the bigshots increase your channel’s growth and your experience.
Engage with the users
Your growth depends on the users. Hence, make sure you carry them forward as you chart your growth story. Engaging with the community is the one way to reciprocate your thankfulness to your followers. Be it via comments section replying to their compliment or answering their queries, engaging bears more fruit because they help you build a deeper bond with the ground reality.
Apart from the comments or messaging, a great way to engage the users is by holding giveaways or competitions. Active participation is guaranteed, yielding benefits to both parties.
Take the first step towards fellows!
The niche you have chosen may already have some stalwarts who have established themselves over the years. Reach out to them and try to engage with them.
Learn about how they discovered their style over the years and the steps they took that changed their success story. Learning (not copy-pasting) is one virtue that you must develop. In this way, you can avoid repeating the same mistakes done by them. Engaging with them helps you get to know about their audience range and know how to target the base audience.
Compete to better yourself
If you want to evolve, then you must compete with yourself. A constant struggle to raise the standards, to not be satisfied with the stagnant attitude, and a drive to raise the numbers will help you keep the spark alive.
It is never easy to make it big in an instant thanks to the competition. But if you won’t try to get out and try things, you will never make it big. All the success stories written in gold have their own period of perfecting in the furnace.
Grow by collaborating
Collaborations help you grow as a brand and expose yourself to a wider audience range who are due to the cumulative presence of the collaborators. Collaborations on topics pertaining to the common area of interest help you gather the audience that you want.
In other words, you are letting your audience explore the others and, in turn, get a chance for your brand to get explored by their audience.
Track and change
Track your growth from time to time to enlist what you have done and the room for improvement that is left. Social media strategy changes with time and the age group that you are targeting. Hence while trying out from multiple ways, a statistic showing the result that each means has brought in will help you stick to the ones that yield results and discard the ones that do not.
Since the success is not measured by any thumb rule, hence some might not work for while it may work for others.
Hence, you must be dynamic enough to correct and change our strategy as and when the time calls for it!
Know your limitation
Building a success story is hard and requires enough hard work and patience to make your way to the top slowly, be it any platform that you chose; with globalization, what you are competing against is millions who, just like you, are trying their luck.
With creativity and constant strive to recreate yourself, you’ll enter into a dormant state where there is no way forward. Realize that overnight success is not for everyone. This does not mean you should get disheartened. Success stories have witness efforts spanning months and even years to bloom into beautiful flowers today. Hence, if you keep working to achieve your goal, success will find you.
Conclusion
With the right amount of guidance and immense will, you can surely make it anywhere you want. But the question lies, how far are you willing to try? Knowing about the basics of how to go about and learning from those who have already achieved their goal is a great way to define your work progress. So if you want to be the next influencer on the block, why not start now?
