If you are looking for ideas how to make money from home by simply doing what you love doing, influencer marketing may be the answer. It has seen immense growth in the past several years and proves to be one of the most successful forms of modern marketing. Furthermore, influencer marketing is a digital marketing trend for 2019. Brands are quick to connect with influencers and offer them free gifts and/or monetary remuneration as statistics show incredibly high ROI (almost $7 return for every $1 investment!). Influencers on the other hand, can make a totally comfortable living by being themselves and doing life the way they like. Sounds appealing to you? Let's answer that boiling question - how to become an influencer and make money of it?
1. Choose Your Niche
Being niche-specific is rule number 1 to be successful as an influencer. Make sure you choose something you are truly passionate about and love. In the process of building your name and personal brand, you will have to show a lot of consistency and dedication, doing that particular thing every single day. If it's not something you really believe in and it doesn't lie deep in your heart, you will get tired and dump it. That's how your dream of becoming an influencer goes down the drain. Here are some examples of niches:
Home and Garden
DIY Crafts
DIY Home Decor
Fashion
Lifestyle
Beauty
Travel
Food
Tech
Fitness
Health
Family and Children
Arts
Music
Photography
and the list is practically endless...
2. Choose Your Platform
The three main types of influencers are Bloggers, Vloggers and Social Media Influencers. Very often each of these types seeks popularity on more than one platform. For example, many bloggers have great numbers of followers on Instagram, Twitter or Pinterest, yet their focus remains on the blog. They are usually most busy creating regular content for their blog, which they then repurpose for social media.
Vloggers are the type of influencers who choose videos as their main way of communicating with their fans and followers. They usually spend a lot of time growing and maintaining their YouTube channel. Quite often, they promote their videos on platforms like Instagram or Twitter too.
And there are those influencers who are mainly focused on entertaining their audience on a specific social media channel, quite often Instagram.
Choose a platform that you feel most comfortable with. Are you good at writing and telling stories with words? Start a blog and make sure you commit to creating frequent entertaining and valuable content.
If writing is not your thing, then maybe talking in front of the camera is. In that case, YouTube may be the best platform for your career as an influencer. Bear in mind that video content looks much easier to produce than a written piece, but that's not quite the case. There is a lot of preparation, equipment and editing behind every engaging and high quality video you watch on YouTube. If your quality is less than ideal, chances are you won't be getting many subscribers and if you don't have a high number of subscribers, then you can't really call yourself an influencer.
All those seem too hard or you don't have that sort of time to commit to writing or video making? Perhaps being active and useful on social media is the shoe that fits you. Travel influencers are particularly successful on Instagram, because it is a visual platform that works mainly with images. The more high quality imagery content you produce, the more your chances to gain a lot of followers increase.
Truth be told, best influencers in the world always use a mix of platforms, just to be able to reach a wider audience. But there is beauty in being centred in one niche or one platform. That way you may be bringing more value to the brands who want to work with you because you guarantee them highly targeted audience, which converts easier.
3. Become Proficient in Using Your Preferred Platform
Whether you choose to develop a blog, a YouTube channel or an Instagram account, you must learn everything about how your chosen platform works. This means a lot of research, a lot of professional courses on blogging, YouTube Marketing or any other social media that you want to use as your base. Perhaps, you need a mentor too. Trying to figure out everything on your own is gonna take you a lot more time than if you have someone experienced, who can just tell you what to do and how.
Remember, every platform has its peculiarities, rules and algorithms that you need to master if you want to stay on top.
4. Learn How to Repurpose Content
Go back a couple of lines to what I said about using a mixture of platforms. No doubt, most of the leading influencers use an array of platforms to share their content. The best example I could give you is Gary Vaynerchuk. He has a podcast, a YouTube channel, a blog and buzzing Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts. He is present on all of them all the time. How does he do it? He's surely not creating different content for every platform because that would mean he wouldn't be moving from his desk for 12 hours straight every day. How do I know... I've tried it and that's not the smart way to do business.
Gary is a master of repurposing content. He would write a blog post, then use its content to turn it into a long form video for YouTube. He would choose the highlights of that video and edit them into a 1-minute video, which will then go on Instagram. The blog post will be broken down to bits and pieces, which will become powerful tweets. Learning how to do this with all of your content will save you a lot of time and will help you be consistent, which is the next must-do if you want to be a successful influencer.
5. Be Consistent
Tenacity in any sort of business is everything! Those sugarcoated stories where people decided to start a business and bought a million-pound villa on a tropical island in the first year could be classified as fairytales. In reality, it simply doesn't happen like that. If you are going to succeed you need to be tenacious, no matter what life throws at you. And one of the pillars of tenacity is consistency. You can't be a leader if you only show up from time to time. When it comes to becoming an influencer you need to prove to your audience that they can rely on you for new valuable and engaging content at a specific time pattern. It could be daily, weekly, by-weekly or monthly. You choose your frequency, but if you say you going to publish a new blog post every Monday, then you must do it. Even if that means no sleeping on Sunday night.
With social media is even harder. You need to keep your followers engaged daily, sometimes hourly (as it may be the case of Instagram). Skipping a day of posting can cost you between 5 and 30 followers. Just like that.
6. Know, Follow and Engage with Your Competitors
Well, that's something you should do no matter what kind of business you are doing. Monitor your competitors' performance and behaviour not with the intention to copy them, but with the intention to build on what they are already offering or to understand how they grow their audience. It's the same audience you want for yourself!
7. Stay Relatable in the Eyes of Your Audience
The reason why people followed you most probably is because you inspired them. Apart from making sure you continue providing them with that inspirational and educational content, you want them to see you as someone who they can relate to at all times. That's the biggest difference between an influencer and a celebrity. A world known singer or a movie star can inspire millions, but when those millions comment under their picture on Instagram, the celebrity hardly ever replies. Therefore, they aren't really relatable. Your selling point is the fact that you are just an ordinary person like your followers, who they can get in touch with pretty easily. That's also an important selling point for brands when you pitch them your services, which brings us to...
8. Contact Brands and Introduce Yourself
Most people don't like it when they have to go and pitch their products or services because it takes rather strong selling skills. But the reality is, you will have to go through the stage where you approach a brand or a company instead of the other way round. Make sure you have a good number of followers, subscribers or high traffic and an established consistent path. Prepare a pitch that shows what are the benefits of working with you, how can you increase the brand's revenue and why you are the right fit for their campaign. When you gain enough experience and increase your numbers even more, you'll get to the point where brands contact you directly and make you an offer. This is when you know, you've made it as an influencer.
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