Top 5 Influencer Tips to Grow your Community and Become a Genuine Brand

These 5 Influencer tips will not help you grow your community but build a build

I often receive questions on blogging and Instagram from my followers on @dreamin.loud. Recently one of my followers sent me these questions that I thought were very relevant to the current influencer world.

“Do you get requests from other bloggers to share or promote their page or promote their page in your stories? How do you actually feel about that and how do you respond to that?”

“Do you collaborate with other bloggers on sharing their posts and do it mutually, meaning sharing each other? For example- In short, I see this pattern in new bloggers where person A shares person B’s post, and in the next day or two-person B shares some post of person A. Is that new of collaborating?”

These questions inspired me to write this post. Instagram is oversaturated with Influencers, but there is an opportunity to grow and be successful with the right combination of strategy, effort, and luck.

What’s encouraging is that you don’t need hundreds of thousands of followers to succeed as an Instagram influencer in 2020 because brands are getting more and more attuned to the power of micro-influencers.

If you want to become a go-to influencer in your industry, here are a few things you can do to demonstrate value, not only to your followers but to potential brand partners

5 Influencer Tips to Grow your Community and Become a Genuine Brand

1. Other influencers are not your Target Audience

It’s hard to scroll the Instagram feed and not compare yourself to what you see. Someone is purchasing something that you can’t purchase, or making friendships you haven’t yet made, working with brands you haven’t already worked with!

I know it feels like an endless and inescapable rat-race!

But what I don’t want you to do is join the rat-race and piggyback on what everybody else is doing and trying. By focusing on what other’s influencers are doing, you are creating content for other Influencers and the audience who are not yours!

Similarly, getting hundreds of likes and comments from other influencers is not helping your account rather hurting your brand. Imagine a brand PR head scrolling through your posts, all they notice is a pool of comments from other influencers and people who don’t even follow you. Wouldn’t that put them off and gauge the value of your account negatively?

Your engagement should come from your ideal audience. If it’s not the case then it’s the time your re-visit your goal and strategy.

2. Identify your Niche and Find your Unique Voice

When people come to your page, they want to know what they can expect by following you and feel confident that they will consistently receive that type of content. Because of this, niching down is absolutely vital because it will help you grow your audience faster.
Ask yourself these questions-

1. What am I most passionate about?
2. What am I most knowledgeable about?
3. What could I happily create consistent content about for a year without making a dime?

Once you know your niche, focus on finding your unique voice, by defining your content categories. These categories are smaller, more specific topics that fall under your broader niche.

Ex- If your niche is Fashion and Beauty, then your content categories can be like corporate fashion, green beauty, budget style, and your unique voice is “helping savvy corporate women to dress for success without braking banks”

or if you’re passionate about multiple things and niche is Lifestyle, content categories can be like eccentric fashion, wine lover and travel and your unique voice can be “Wine enthusiast traveling the world in style”

[Related post: 6 Steps to Beat the Instagram Algorithm]

3. Focus on Building Trust, not Following

I have mentioned this in my live session on blogging and influencer tips as well. If you center your content based on transparency and authenticity. No matter what’s your audience size is, you will be Thriving. Brands will love to work with you because of the trust you built with your audience. Loyal followers= good conversion rate, engagement rate, and good audience quality. These are all the factors brands look for when partnering with influencers.

4. Share your Knowledge Generously

I believe this is one of the foundation pillars of my brand. This is a great way to improve your engagement and exposure.

Create content that is helpful to your audience. Be passionate about your niche, your brand, your offering. Be the subject matter expert and people will follow you and engage with your brand if you give them value upfront. Share it for free as you are building your personal brand. When the time is right, they will support you with their wallets.

5. Be a Good Community Member

Here is how you can be a good community member:

1. Support and share other influencers posts/profiles that you genuinely like and think your followers will benefit from it. Because if you keep pushing profiles and posts that are not relevant to your audience, they will stop trusting your suggestions.
2. Engage in other influencers posts without expecting reciprocation.
3. Follow accounts that you think will serve you even though they don’t follow you back.
4. Help other influencers by sharing your knowledge.. for free.
5. Recommend other influencers for projects you can’t work on.

[Related post: How to be a Productive blogger/influencer]

Shop my Look:

Target blazer (fits tts; wearing size 4; similar here and here) | Target trousers (fits tts; wearing size 4)| Tee (similar here and here) | Heels (under $50 here) | Earrings

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