Are you looking for some helpful advice to growing your audience? As a marketing expert, and social media influencer myself, I thought I would throw out some cool tips and tricks if you are starting your own following. I actually have coached paying clients on how to reproduce the same system that I have been using. I know there are a lot of my friends in my own circle who are continually perplexed on how is it that a normal ordinary guy like Aaron M. Stephens manage to amass such a ridiculous number of fans/followers/readers? Believe it or not, it all comes down to marketing.
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YOU are the product. So, what are you selling? Preaching? Teaching? People ask me what do I sell and I tell them they can go buy a childrens book or they can buy a website. But actually they can’t, as I am not taking on any new clients right now. BUT as a new influencer, YOU will need a website. That should be your starting point at directing all your new fans. All of your social media should be on this site and they should all link back so people can find all your outlets. It doesn’t have to be super fancy. It can be just one page, your picture, bio, and links. So depending on how you are branding yourself, your site should reflect it. People buy from people that they like. They also buy from people that they feel have common ground with themselves. One key selling advantage when I applied at the jewelry store was there were no Asian salespeople working there. Well, guess what? Asians prefer to buy from Asians. It’s a known fact. That is why they all cluster together and form their own communities.
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So if you are a writer, you should have things to read. If you are a photographer lots of pictures. Beauty artist then you should have how to do videos. If you are a life coach, you should have testimonials from people’s lives you have changed. Once you have determined your “niche” then you also need to have a lot of content. Your Facebook business page should have at least 30 minutes of unclickable content. I say unclickable, meaning, you don’t want people leaving YOUR page to go read some other author’s work. Now, if you just wrote an awesome blog on your website, sure put that on your Facebook page. While you are building your content, DO NOT ASK FOR LIKES or followers. Let me repeat that. DO NOT ASK/BEG for likes. I cannot tell you how important this is. If you have NOTHING on the page your friends “might” like it out of pity, but not because they truly believe in your product or service. They might even unfollow the page as they don’t know what you are going to spam them with your new business page. IF you create great content, hashtag it, you will be default find new followers and they will like your page. This is true with all media channels. Don’t announce or ask for anything until your product launch day. Set a day you are going to “open for business”. You can preset every single post in Facebook for a future day, or days. How cool is that?
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As part of your branding, you should always let readers know who you are, in addition to the things that you can do. There is a big difference. Your website really shouldn’t be your LinkedIn profile. It should be entertaining. It should be easy on the eyes. If you are selling something on your website, you should outline pricing clearly, or give ballpark figures. If something seems too expensive right off the bat, people will just close and leave. I highly recommend you incorporate a blog into your site. That way you can write articles, reviews, and updates for your readers. Some websites don’t have a blog, they are old and outdated and they probably never get repeat visitors. As I have talked about in past articles, when you write a blog it keeps your site the most current and when people do searches it maintains your site comes up first. Now of course you need some SEO, tags, headers, and hashtags, but WordPress makes it easy. Remember, your website is the one piece of social media that you control. If Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, or whatever decide to ban you, … you – are – screwed. All your content you wrote on those platforms are gone forever. Your site however, you can backup daily.
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You fans/followers are typically NOT your friends. They are strangers who know nothing about you — other than what you share with them. Whether you have 1 follower or 100 thousand followers, you have made a decision to be in the public eye and the things you think, say and do can have amazing or horrible outcomes. So determine why you want to have a following so you can detail your marketing messages appropriately.
