Have you ever wondered how articles published by CopyBlogger team get reblogged, reposted and shared around the world close to 100,000 times or more for every post they published? Some people say Brian Clark has a black book for contact, having a huge fan base and some believe Brian is an influencer in the industry. Which do you think is true?
Glen Allsopp is another example. He is a great mastermind when it comes to SEO and at times, he shares his thoughts of what Google is doing wrong etc. So, what makes him such an important figure? Could it because of his wonderful creation of OptinSkin, his bold rambling on Google or simply, he is a great contributor to the SEO community?
In order to be an influencer, you need to reach out. Yes my friend … go out the door and say “hello” to your neighbour!
How to become an influencer? What is an influencer?
When I started this site, I was determined to turn myself into an influencer. Yes, while people are thinking of how to monetize their blogs, I was thinking on how to build a bigger audience and brand.
So, how do I make ‘Reginald Chan’ stand out from the rest?
Here are a few goals I had planned for myself:
- Perform soul searching and explore my talents
- Building a portfolio of myself
- Choose the right talents and develop them further
- Reaching out to others
- Learning from other influencers
As easy as those may sound, it could take a lot of time and highly depending on your techniques. It took me roughly 3 months to build a good reputation and standing out from the crowd.
1. The talent search process
Blogging is really a saturated industry with over 60 million blogs out there. If your main goal is to blog about general niches, you stand a high chance of failing. This is extremely true especially when you are starting a new blog.
Knowing what you are going to blog is extremely important.
Here’s another cold and hard fact – if you think that you want to start a blog to help others generally, you are creating the recipe for failure. You need to be specific … real specific when it comes to blogging.
As much as it may sound crazy but that’s true. Here’s an example:
Derek Halpern from Social Triggers. He blogs about marketing strategy and this is one very challenging industry. So, what was the trick for him to be at the top of the pile? Adding psychology into his marketing strategies. This means that instead of being an influencer of a very challenging industry, he basically ‘long tailed’ to a smaller but still popular niche.
If you want to reach out and become an influencer yourself, you need to know the facts. You need to know what you are really good at. In this world, I don’t believe you can be successful if you are a ‘Jack of all trades’.
2. Build a damn good portfolio
I am not talking about those random portfolios. I am talking about great ones.
Look at Neil Patel and how he boost about helping TechCrunch to increase their traffic by 30% in a short period of time.
Yes, that’s what I am talking about!
A good portfolio will convince others that you are an influencer and they should listen or trust your words. Now, I am not saying about deceiving others but you got to be honest with them. For example, you are probably good in marketing and you need to convince others why you are really good at it.
When you are building a portfolio, remember that you are your ‘face’ and stepping stone for your business.
A good portfolio is usually short and precise. Forget about providing 1,000 reasons why they need you. Instead, give them just one great reasons why they MUST use or follow you.
3. Developing your influence and going the beyond of influence marketing
For this part, it is all about learning and further increasing your influence market. Once you have located your hidden ‘talents’, you need to start reaching out to other influencers of the same niche.
When choosing a person to be your ‘mentor’ or a person who you can look up to, you need to avoid finding for the best. Instead, find for influencers who are more popular than you (obviously) and who are around mid-level. This means that they have yet to be the top 50 or 100 influencers in the world but yet, still play a very sufficient role in the influence market.
You need these ‘mid-level’ influencers as top influencers usually have the money and social strength to get things moving real fast … and something you probably wouldn’t have. A mid-level one would be a better bet for you in terms of time and money.
Get a list of 50 or maybe 100 of them and start contributing on their blogs (and read them of course). Do this for the next few months and they will slowly recognize you as one of their loyal readers.
Now, this is where you start to say “hello” and build a relationship from there. The most important thing is to learn from them. These are people with lots of experience and of course, their guidance are of great help to start ups like you.
Recommended read: How do you create, manage and measure influence marketing?
4. Getting out of your safe zone and reach out to your potential market
You might be thinking that with over 60 million blogs out there, everyone is a competitor which makes no sense on why you should reach out to them right?
This is where you are wrong! We can’t avoid competitions and that’s a fact. However, what we can control are creating more followers and building a bigger reach.
Influence market is all about the number of reach. The more reach you have, the more chance you are going to expand your ‘territory’.
Reaching out to others is always the easy part all thanks to number of social media platforms we have today. Here are some of the popular social platforms you can start with.
Through my experience, Facebook and Google+ are the fastest way to build influence and here are you can get it done correctly:
- Join communities or groups which are related to your expertise
- Contribute and help other members constantly (twice a day is more than enough)
- Share other members’ links on social media platform and tagging them
Do it for a month or so and you will see your influence level grow. You may increase or decrease the level of engagement according to your liking and the above are just my examples.
5. Reverse engineering your influencers
Your influencers made it to fame because of something they did and you got to learn ‘that’ from them.
So, how do you talk the talk, and walk the walk?
The concept here is easy; Understand what makes your influencers popular and how they reach out to others.
By now, you should have realized that there is probably no way you can recreate the same situation. However, it doesn’t mean that you can’t use the information for your own gain.
When it comes to influence marketing, it is all about sharing the right information … at the right time.
For example, you know that your influencer is attracting a lot of traffic due to the topic he or she is blogging. Draft down a list of keywords and niche to start with.
The next step will be writing article related to the keyword or niche you have selected. The trick here is to avoid using the same keywords as your influencer to avoid competitions and even if you are going to compete, chances are you will lose due to your lower credibility.
Related article: Using Google Keyword Planner to find long tail keywords.
The science behind becoming a successful influencer and reaching out to others
There are probably two very distinct ways to become an influencer in today’s market:
- Provide information or services no one else is doing
- Follow what successful influencers are doing and reverse engineer those steps
Both of these methods have their own risk factor which is failing. In the first method, there is a chance of failing because it depends on timing while the second method depends on your research strategy. Focusing on the wrong keyword or target market could easily be a downfall for you.
As easy as they might both sound, the chances of failing is very real. If you want to make it to the influencer’s world, you need to be hardworking and do your homework properly; this means finding the right long tail keywords and the proper target market.
And a simple video for a quick recap.
Did I miss out anything about being an influencer?
I hope you enjoyed this article as much as I do. When it comes to influence marketing, do you have any tips under your sleeves? I bet you do and let’s discuss it over. Tell me if you have any plans when it comes to building an influencer’s portfolio and how that works out for you using the comment form below.
