The influencer marketing industry is enormous, with nearly every industry participating in one way or another. The key to being an influencer that brands flock to in order to create content together is building a follower base. There are plenty of influencers that got followers through inorganic means that offer no real ROI for a brand partnering with an influencer. The building of a reliable and valuable follower base is going to take a period of time, so it is important to keep grinding out quality content. The following are tactics ad tips for building a follower base that is extremely profitable.
Establish Your Niche
The niche that you pick depends on your expertise as well as interests. You are going to have to create as well as consume/research the type of content that builds a following. Luckily, there are plenty of tools that can help give data on what type of posts on a blog or social media converted with the most traffic. Content creation can be fun when you are passionate about what you are posting about. Becoming a thought leader in a niche can allow a person to do their influencer work full-time as it can be immensely profitable.
Create a Sense of Community
Creating a sense of community between followers of a social media account or blog is imperative. This will keep people coming back not only for the content but for the banter between comments. Barstool Sports did a great job of creating a community of Stoolies, which are their loyal readers as well as podcast listeners. Asking viewers and readers what type of content can make them feel more involved with an influencer which can be extremely valuable.
Do Not Plug Products That Are Subpar
The easiest way to lose the trust of followers immediately is to promote a product that is incredibly bad in terms of quality. If you are going to promote a product, make sure that you test out that product first. There are platforms that allow brands to partner with influencers that shows the ROI of each campaign for the influencer. Those that have created communities based on trust will have a far easier time finding opportunities to work with brands going forward.
Content Needs to Be High Quality
Content can come in many forms, whether it is written or video. SVG animation on a website can help set a site apart from others in the niche. Podcasts are great for those people that are an authority on a specific subject. Creating a podcast that many in a niche consider their favorite podcast can have lasting positive impacts on a person starting their influencer career. For a travel influencer, great photos on Instagram as well as going live on different social media platforms might be far more important than for a finance influencer that does a podcast as well as social media AMAs.
Do Not Post Constantly
Spamming the feeds of people on social media is one of the fastest ways to lose followers. People do not want to see a myriad of sponsored posts as this is not organic content. For this reason, you should also partner with brands that are aligned with what you post about so the content can be far more natural looking. Schedule posts out for the month then spend time daily on responding and replying to people on social media.
The world of social media influencers can be immensely fun, but it will take hard work. Continually grow your following in a natural way and your hard work will pay off.
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