Make Money With Influencer Marketing – Become A Social Media Influencer And Profit BIG — affiliatemarketingmc at YouTube.com
Today we’re talking about influencer marketing. This is something you see on the news. You hear everywhere about companies spending millions of dollars on influencer marketing. But what is influencer marketing?
Influencer Marketing
Quite simply, influencer marketing is a person with an audience, or a person with influence. Perhaps they have a YouTube channel, or an Instagram following. Maybe they’re on Twitter, or maybe they have a blog, or something like that. They have influence over a certain group of people.
For example, remember back in the days when we used to watch daytime television, and there was a lady on TV every day called Oprah Winfrey? She built a billion-dollar industry based on a billion-dollar business—or, I should say, based on influencer marketing. If you’ll recall, she had these shows every week, or every couple of weeks, where she would review a book, or talk to an author, or talk about a movie, or something similar.
People started to notice that when she said, “hey, this guy’s book is really good,” it shot to the bestseller list instantly. The reason that happened is because Oprah Winfrey has an audience that likes her stuff. They trust her and they follow her, AKA she has influence.
That’s the key. That’s the pinnacle of influencer marketing.
A lot of people tend to look at the people with the big numbers. Someone with 19 bazillion followers might make good money because of the fact that he has that many followers. But you can also make a lot with just a few followers, if you have more powerful influence.
Influencers, Companies, and the Gap
The first side of the coin is influencers that want to monetize their stuff, those that want to make money. They realize that people are checking out their stuff, people are liking it, reading books, buying things they tell them to buy.
The second side of the coin is companies that want to make money or sell products. These companies look at influencers and see how those influencers can move product. And those influencers can move product because people do what they say to do.
For example, let’s say we have an influencer who talks about tech stuff every day. He tells people, “Here’s the laptop you need to buy, here’s the memory you need to buy,” etc. And people love him. The look at his recommendations and they trust him. If someone’s in the market for a new computer, they go to that guy, and there it goes.
Then, you have these companies that sell computers, like Best Buy or Amazon. They’re willing to spend a lot of money to get a sponsored post, or a sponsored tweet, or something like that, based on that influencer’s traffic.
There is a gap here. Influencers don’t know their influence. They don’t understand their value. Right now, you can go on Instagram and buy influencer posts for like $20, for a guy with like 50,000 followers or subscribers. That’s really cheap. Same thing with YouTube—you can buy ads extremely cheap, because a lot of these influencers don’t realize their value.
But these companies do understand the influencers’ value. They understand that the influencers can move product, and they can do it in a really effective way. Understanding this gap is one of the biggest, hugest opportunities to make money in all of history, because it provides an opportunity for us to get involved in the gap.
Influencer Marketing and Affiliate Marketing
As affiliate marketers, we can combine these two things. A lot of influencers out there know they have 50,000 followers, but Best Buy and Amazon and other companies are not beating down the door to pay them. Affiliate marketing bypasses these companies.
You can go out and find influencers. You can make posts that show up for their traffic. You can even send people to your website and promote different affiliate programs to their markets.
For example, let’s say you are in the motivational market, and you have a website. You could find an influencer in this market and have sponsored ads on their channels, or affiliate offers for various motivational books, or you could advertise your own courses and programs on motivation. You could even be an affiliate for other programs, where people are coaching people success, and you could have that show up for your influencer’s following as well.
But you have to be careful with this. If an influencer starts posting a bunch of your ads for their audience, they might not want to keep paying attention.
If you really want to build relationships with influencers, you can always just become an influencer yourself.
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How to Become an Influencer
- Get an audience
Are there people on Instagram, or YouTube, or Twitter, or Facebook that are interested in a certain thing? Can you compile them? Can you get them in a group? Can you get them in a mailing list? Can you get them to be your followers?
Find an audience that’s interested in something, whether it’s people on Instagram looking for inspiration, or motivational quotes, or people looking for Bible verses, or people looking for the daily funny comics, or something like that. You want to find a group of people, that you know about, who are interested in something.
- Build content for your audience
Your goal is to provide value to that group. The value could be in the form of a daily quote, a daily cartoon, a daily picture, a daily video, or anything like that. That gets your following in the mood to check your stuff out. That is building influence.
A lot of people say they don’t want to be on camera. But you can actually influence people without even using your name. You could just be the guy on Instagram who does inspirational quotes, and all you do is post inspirational quotes. Maybe from time to time, you say, “Hey, go to my site, check this out, check that out.” If you’re in this market, make your audience feel like things are getting better by looking at your quotes. As you create content, you build rapport with people, and you start to bond with them.
- Post consistently
Get out there and start posting content consistently, and post content that they want to see. If you’re the tech guy, post tech stuff. Don’t post something about dogs. Keep everything about tech stuff. If you’re in the motivational market, keep things about motivation.
As time goes on, you have to main your influence, and your ability to influence. The name of the game is that you control the audience. You control their attention. This is the attention-based economy. If you get attention, you win.
Your Responsibility as an Influencer
If you’re going to be an influencer marketer, you need to realize your responsibility in the world. Your following anticipates your next move, and they will do something that you tell them to do. You have to understand what your market is into, what your market likes, and what they’re susceptible to. You don’t want to abuse the influence you have by telling your audience to do things that are not in their best interest, or things that are not going to work for them. You want to stay within ethical guidelines. You definitely don’t want your following to do things that are shady or weird, or things that could be harmful or dangerous.
You have a power. You have a responsibility. Realize that you can reach a lot of people.
That’s why I mostly only promote things that I myself that personally tried. I promote very few affiliate programs that are other peoples’ stuff—I usually only do my own because I know that’s what’s best for you.
Get Started as an Influencer
A lot of people think that the only person who has influence is the most popular person in the world, and that’s not necessarily true. You don’t need millions of followers. There are lots of people with smaller followings who are able to influence, and get people to buy things, or motivate people, or whatever it may be.
I just started on Instagram, and I don’t even know what I’m doing. I have around 600 followers, and I’ve already made a thousand dollars or more. How does that work?
It works because of the power of my influence. You have to create good influence—things that people want to do, that people want to watch. You want to give them a feeling.
I have a little sticker on my monitor, on my desk, and it says: “From this office, you can reach the world.” From where you sit, right now, you can reach the world, and you can reach them in a really cool way. If you have a message to share, you can share it. If you simply want to go out there and make money, you can do that, too. Just do it in a really cool way.
As an influencer, when you’re getting started, you don’t want to wait around for someone to reach out to you. You want to go out there and actively find ways that you can help your audience and earn money while doing it.
Check out socialprofittools.com if you want to learn more about influencer marketing. You can put your name and email in the boxes on that page, and we’ll send you all kinds of cool things about influencer marketing and social media marketing, and how you can get involved. How you can make a difference, or at least make a few bucks—maybe even more.
For more information, visit www.SocialProfitTools.com.