To be a successful influencer, you need to gain a loyal following that not only enjoys the content you produce but also eagerly waits for you to release new content.
They trust you to post about the latest trends in your particular niche.
Therefore, you want to be their go-to person on the subject.
Once you’ve gained trust, you can start leveraging your influence to continue growing your business, blog, or social media! But earning that faithful following requires some work on your end first.
When hoping to gain a following you’ll need to do these five things.
1. Know Your Target Audience
Your target audience is not only the people you’re creating content for, but it’s also where many potential followers will come from.
As a result, you should incorporate what you learn about your desired audience—likes, dislikes, interests, hobbies, and more—into every aspect of your blog, online business, and social media.
Understanding who your target audience is will also help you determine when, where, and how frequently to post content.
Determining when to post content also depends on the platform you plan to use, so make sure you are aware of the best times for each.
2. Create Quality Content
If you want to gain a following, then you have to produce content people want to follow.
Even if you publish a high quantity of posts, if they’re of poor quality you won’t attract many followers.
So what makes for quality content?
After reading a handful of posts about the topic, I’ve come across four traits typically found in high-quality content: currency, uniqueness, relatability, and accuracy.
Current
Make sure you’re staying on top of all of the latest trends within your niche.
Craft content around topics and events that are relevant to your audience at the moment.
This can be tricky since trends come and go rather quickly in certain niches like fashion.
However, following other influencers in your industry can help with this!
Also, to stay on top of what’s current, you can use online tools like BuzzSumo.
Unique
You want to provide your audience with fresh content!
Despite that, if you can’t think of completely original ideas, don’t worry. It’s extremely difficult considering how much stuff is out on the internet!
But you can try to come up with new, unique twists on existing ideas.
For example, if you run a food blog and you want to make your recipes stand out, relate them to your audience’s favorite TV show characters!
Relatable
As an influencer, you want your following to be able to relate to the content you produce or they won’t want to invest time in it.
Making relatable content means crafting tweets, blog posts, Instagram captions, and anything else that caters to your followers’ specific needs.
You might also want to consider using a similar writing style as your audience too!
Accurate
The last thing you want to do is publish untrue information. Not only does this make for low-quality content, but it also negatively impacts your credibility.
To gain a loyal following you have to demonstrate that you’re a trustworthy source of information, which means only posting accurate information.
Quality posts require a good amount of work to create, so make sure to give yourself enough time to deliver top-notch content!
3. Engage Your Audience
Another great way to gain a following is to engage with your audience.
This is extremely important because it demonstrates that you genuinely care about their needs and allows you to be more accessible.
Make sure to list all your social media accounts so your audience can connect with you on their favorite platform. They are likely to be more engaged if it’s one they enjoy.
When you interact with your audience by responding to comments, hosting giveaways, or filming live footage, you make yourself available to your audience.
Encourage your audience to thoughtfully engage with your content and then return the favor by taking the time to respond to them.
This is also the perfect way to get feedback and suggestions for future content!
As you develop a relationship with your following, they will be more inclined to continue interacting with your content.
It will also show potential followers that you’re an engaging influencer.
4. Network With Other Influencers
If you’re a new influencer, the best way to start networking is to follow 3-5 influencers from your niche who have around the same number of followers.
Choose influencers who have content you believe your own audience will appreciate. Then thoughtfully engage with those influencers’ posts.
As you like, comment, and share their posts, you invite them to do the same for you. If they reciprocate the interaction, you’ll be given access to their followers too!
What’s important to remember is to not overload your own feed with the content of other influencers.
On top of that, make sure to follow back influencers whose content you enjoy!
Always spread the love!
5. Be Consistent
Lastly, to gain a following and leverage your influence, you need to remain consistent in two areas: schedule and content.
Schedule
As an influencer, you need to consistently produce and publish content.
One of the easiest ways to do this is by having a schedule.
Whether you want to publish one blog post a week or one post a day, you need to develop a schedule and commit to it.
It’s much more beneficial to consistently publish posts over an extended period rather than produce a ton of content at once and then go radio silent.
Three online tools to help you with scheduling your content include SmarterQueue, Planoly, and Tailwind.
While SmarterQueue works with multiple platforms, Planoly focuses on Instagram and Tailwind centers primarily on Instagram and Pinterest.
Choose the tool that works best for your needs!
Content
On top of consistently scheduling posts, your content should remain consistent too.
However, this doesn’t mean posting the same things all the time!
Instead, you should make sure that everything you produce relates back to your niche and your mission.
If your influence is based in fashion and you aim to provide your audience with affordable ways to follow current fashion trends, then all of your content should be centered on that.
You can expand into different areas, but always try to find a way to relate it back to your main focus.
Remember to educate yourself on who your target audience is, create quality content, engage your audience, network with other influencers, and be consistent about when and what you post.
Gaining a following and learning to leverage your influence are two large tasks, but with some strategic, hard work you’ll be well on your way to climbing the influencer ranks!
Additional articles you might be interested in:
- 5 Things To Avoid Doing As An Influencer
- 12 Most Profitable Niches For Making Money Online
- 5 Ways To Build Trust Using Social Media
- How To Find Your Target Audience As An Influencer
- How To Discover And Engage Your Target Audience
- 5 Best Ways To Connect With Your Instagram Followers
- How To Choose The Right Social Media Platform For Your Business
- 5 Apps For Social Media Content Creation
- How To Engage Your Target Audience
- 10 Influencer Marketing Trends That Will Explode In 2020
- How To Increase Your Credibility
- How To Position Yourself As A Trustworthy Expert Online
- 5 Mistakes New Influencers Make On Instagram
- How To Find Your Niche In Blogging
- 5 Ways To Network As A Micro-Influencer
- How To Stay Relevant As An Influencer, Blogger, And Entrepreneur
- How To Schedule Your Content For The Next 12 Months
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