The idea of transforming a passion into a paying career has never been more attainable, but more competitive. Even though reports suggest there are well into the double digits of millions of influencers globally, the low barrier of entry, but hard work surrounding the road to success, creates a challenge.
Whether you are exceeding subscribers as a highly engaging micro-creator or are just starting as a mega-on-the-rise macro-creator. Nothing will shorten your career faster than not successfully defining your niche, engaging your audience, securing your personal safety, and running your business appropriately.
Even experts have claimed some businesses have $30 billion by the end of this year. These are the non-negotiable actions you must take before you hit “post” on your professional journey.
Thereby, this written guide will cover everything, so let’s learn them!
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- The first thing is to prioritise your niche.
- Engage your audience and protect your privacy.
- Finally, understand the business.
Before you start gathering likes and counting followers, you should first define your niche. There are three things to think about when making the plan:
Once you have a response to these three questions, you can start working on your strategy. The reason for this is that some niches need more content, while others don’t. Also, not all topics and types of content will act great on all social media platforms. This part of the process is theoretical planning.
Uploading content is half the story because there is something else you need to keep your audience interested in what you have to post. Engaging with your audience not only maintains them on board, but it can also help you grow further.
Reports indicate that engagement is essential, especially with the smaller influencers. Account owners who have fewer than 10 thousand followers often have engagement rates over 4%. On the flip hand, the larger ones are seeing numbers below the 2% mark.
The result of this is minimal content creators who can do a lot, as long as they build authentic relationships. Responding to comments, polls, or creating interactive content are just a few things you can do to keep your audience engaged.
As you grow as an influencer, you will be exposing yourself to attacks a lot more than before. Doxxing, jacking, or identity theft are the most common problems that influencers face, and the good news is that there are ways to protect yourself from them:
To put everything in perspective, as per a report from 2023, over 1 million people in the US were affected by identity theft. This is why password managers, VPNs, and data removal services can be powerful tools for any rising influencer.
In case you are looking for reputable providers to get these tools into your toolbelt, make sure to do your research well. For VPNs, never go with the free ones, as you pay them with your data. For pass managers, you might want one that offers end-to-end encryption and supports multi-factor authentication. Additionally, for the data removal services, you can go look for user sentiment on Reddit, like this one Incogni data removal review.
You’ll need to work on your reputation, and the first step is to look at what you have posted in the past. A misstep, like an old tweet or a poor sponsorship choice, can become a hurdle for future growth. There are three aspects that you might need to cover to make sure your reputation is spotless:
Building yourself as an influencer is not only about getting followers. What was once a hobby is now a business, so you may need to make sure you treat it accordingly. This also shows that you may need to make sure you understand the business side if you want to succeed in this.
Look at it this way. About a quarter of brands allocate over 40% of their marketing budget to work with influencers. There are a lot of opportunities, but you need to make sure you treat them professionally.
To get the most out of this to learn the ins and outs of contracts and make sure you are signing one that you know will be fair towards you. Then there’s also the tax side of things, so the need to track your income and expenses or hire someone to do it for you. Finally, once you start to thrive, you should consider setting up a business entity, or if you are not too keen on that, at least set up a separate account.
The most important step is Defining Your Niche. This involves expertise, target audience, and content type.
As you gain visibility, you become a larger target for cyber threats like doxxing, hacking, and identity theft. They may scrub your personal information from broker sites, directly reducing your risk of fraud or harassment.
Yes, data consistently shows that smaller accounts often have engagement rates over 4%.
The three crucial aspects are audit your posts, be cautious about collaborations and be professional about criticism.
