What Is An Influencer?

An influencer is someone that has the power to influence the thoughts and opinions of a large audience. And using a personal brand as an influencer is the most popular, probably of the big advantages of using a personal brand as an influencer. This is typical for someone on Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok with a large, highly engaged following.

Creating a personal brand as an influencer is what most influencer do.  A personal brand is a brand that places you as the creator front and center. That’s why you should use a personal brand as an influencer. That means that you’ll be using your name on the website, on your social media profile, and on other marketing efforts.
Using your name as an influencer is one of the best decisions you can make from a business standpoint, as it will help to make you seem more like a ‘real person’ and far more accessible.

Lots of people want to become an influencer because they love the idea of being paid to make posts on their channels. The idea of getting paid thousands of dollars just to wear a pair of shoes is obviously appealing to a lot of people.

10 Tips For Creating Sharable Content

One of the best strategies has always been ‘link baiting’. Essentially this means writing an article or posting something on social media that is eye-catching and entertaining enough that people will want to share it. They want to share it on their own social media sites and forums. This is a strategy that was around before social media marketing existed in a big way and one that allowed for a piece of writing to go viral before the days of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

But, having a big network with a lot of followers on social media is not enough to ensure that your content will be spread. The strategy for many influencers is to simply develop a large number of ‘followers’ or ‘friends’ and then to just share everything they create and hope for the best.

The problem is that not everything is well suited to that kind of viral sharing, and like the link bait articles that SEO gurus use, a better strategy would be to devise articles from the outset that will be more likely to get shared.

Here are two tips on how to do that:

• Post With An Emotional Hook – The first thing you need to do if you hope for your posts to spread quickly is to give them some kind of emotional resonance. If someone reads your post and comes away thinking wow’ or even feels angry, then they will be more likely to share, comment, or interact with that content in some way.
• Write A Catchy Titel – For someone to share your post they first need to see it, and the only weapon you have at your disposal as far as that’s concerned is the strength of your title and your image. While you could write an entire post, the tenets you should follow are to make your title descriptive of your post so that people know what it’s going to be about, to make it engaging in some way, and to use hyperbole and eye-catching images.

If you want to become a YouTube influencer means that you have to create a lot of high-professional good-looking content that provides value. This can take a lot of time, and be difficult if you aren’t a natural presenter.

What makes life much easier is to create a permanent spot in your home for doing this – a spot that will always be ready for you to just step into and start filming. A spot that will look great on film and YouTube.

Let’s look at how to create a good spot:

• Choosing Your Spot – Firstly, you need to choose your spot. Ideally, this should be somewhere you can leave your camera permanently on its stand and where you can set up lightning around the area too. The hope is that you’ll then be able to start recording immediately without worrying about things getting in your way, or about having to clear the area first. Making content for YouTube takes time, so the more you can optimize the process, the more value and content you can put out. ***As such you’re likely to want to choose somewhere such as a porch, a basement, or a study where you don’t entertain guests or have to work often. At the same time though there are also some other important considerations for your filming area, which should also be:
  • Light and spacious
  • Not backing onto any window will create difficulties
  • Not prone to getting cluttered easily
  • Good in terms of acoustics
  • Be large enough to provide space for your videos – especially if you’re doing exercise instructions etc.
  • Able to look good on camera (kind of crucial!) – and suitable for your niche
• Dressing Up Your Spot – This last point is important. If you’re creating a YouTube channel that you hope will be able to promote your site and your business, then you need to make sure that it looks professional and that you are ‘selling the dream’. That means your home should look great, so make sure that you pick a room that makes you look like someone worth listening to/emulating.
  At the same time, you should also think about how the area matches the niche of your site. In other words, if your site is bout bodybuilding then a weights room or a kitchen will make more sense than a living room. Likewise, if you are vlogging about video games then you might want to do it in a man cave filled with games memorabilia.
  Here you’re basically trying to make your space into a backdrop that is fitting for your topic. That might require you to hang a poster, or it might mean installing LED lights. When creating this setup, spend a day shopping around for items that might help it to look better and you’ll find that your videos become much more popular.

Creating A Personal Brand As An Influencer

Often internet marketing involves creating a brand and then you are selling products through that brand. That brand will often be cold, detached, and alien to the users.

But have you considered that this brand does not have to be a bland corporate brand? It doesn’t need to be ‘faceless’.

You don’t need to have a fancy logo or have some meaningless and hip name. Another option is to make yourself the brand. This is what’s called personal branding and it’s a fantastic strategy for anyone that’s looking to promote a product online and that doesn’t mind putting themselves out there.

What is Personal Branding?

Personal branding means that you’re turning yourself into the figurehead of your business in a very public manner. This can mean either that you are the business and you trade under your own name or it could just mean that you’re featured front and center on your website and social media.

A good example of this would be the Smart Passive Income Blog where anyone who reads the blog regularly will recognize Pat Flynn. Likewise, you have the Four Hour Blog where Tim Ferris is front and center, These are examples of personal brands that have worked very well. Two other examples are Björn Borg and Salming.

Advantages

One advantage of a personal brand is that it can make you famous. Sure, some people will see this more as a disadvantage but if you’re the sort of person who likes the limelight it may well appeal.

Another advantage is that it lets people feel as though they know you and it gives your brand personality. This means that when you interact with someone on Twitter or Facebook, they’ll feel like they’re talking to an actual human being rather than just being the recipient of market speak. They thus become far more likely to buy from you in the future.

It’s definitely worth considering and if you’re interested, pay close attention to the web’s big names to see how they’re making it work for them!

If you create a personal brand people will be more likely to order your service or products because they’ll feel as though they know you and they’ll be able to get a response from you should anything goes wrong.

But this strategy is not for everyone.

When you create your social media account or blog using your own name as your branding, you might find that this makes you feel somewhat anxious. Many people are shy to put themselves out there, and might even worry about security and privacy issues.

This is something that you should aim to overcome. After all, if you are too shy for your friends to see your content and know it is yours, then there is a good chance that you need to rethink your strategy!

But there are genuine occasions where using your own name might not be ideal. In these circumstances you have a few options:

• Create a ‘screen name’. This can be an obvious username you might pick for YouTube or Instagram that is used in addition to your real name – you then make your real name harder to find.
• Use a pseudonym. There is no reason this can’t work – just make sure it is believable. Of course, things like Whols information might give you away though.
• Create a brand name but make yourself more prominent. A good example of this is Pat Flynn, who is the owner of Smart Passive Income. That website is a brand in itself, but Pat is also known to the users.
• Create a brand that is the Influencer. This is much harder to do but is achievable if you are smart and lucky.
• Team up! A great way to protect yourself is through strength in numbers. If you have friends with similar interests, then you can all create a website or social account together and this way give your audience multiple people to respond to. This can be a great strategy because it helps to start that sense of community early on.

All these tips and strategies work very well, but wherever possible, it is always better to use your own name if you want to become an influencer.

Wrapping Up

These were just a few tips for you who want to become a social media influencer and have some thoughts about the brand. If you should use your personal brand as an influencer or if you should take a fancy screen name.

Of course, there are advantages to using your own name and using a personal brand as an influencer, but there may still be times when you do want to use your own name. If you for some reason don’t want to use your personal brand as an influencer you have to think about what brand name, the screen name you should use. Being shy is no reason why you not should use your personal brand as an influencer.

Also, your photos and videos should be of high quality and professional looking, this provides a more professional outlook and people will be more willing to share and buy what you put out as an influencer.

But, not to forget are you. How you look, how you highlight yourself.

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