[Influencer Blueprint]: Turn Your Followers into Money With Involve

Hey there, Influencers!

Are you ready to make money as an Influencer? In this article, I will reveal the 3 steps on how you can make a lot of money as an Influencer. Here’s the breakdown:

1. How you can make money as an Influencer
2. How to build your followers
3. How to start making money

Early disclaimer: Despite the glamour and perks of being an Influencer, building a loyal online following takes a lot of hard work, persistence, and patience.

Before you begin your Influencer  journey, let’s start with the end goal in mind and work your way backward:

3 Ways You Can Make Money as an Influencer

Online attention + trust = great marketing potential

With the power to get people’s attention and earn their trust, you’ll be able to market and promote products. Here are the 3 common ways you can make money as an Influencer:

1. Sell your own product or service
2. Sell other people’s product or service and get a commission
3. Get product sponsorship

Unless you already have a lot of followers, selling your own product will be difficult. So this article will focus on #2, which is to sell other people’s products or services.

But before you can earn anything online, you need to build your followers, a loyal online audience that loves your content and personality. Below are the sure win steps for you to gain massive followers in a matter of months:

How to Build Your Followers

Don’t worry too much about making money until you have at least around 3000 real followers. So if you haven’t reached that threshold yet, read on:

Pick Your Niche 

You’re not going to build a name for yourself by talking about everything under the sun. Here are some examples of top money-making niches at Involve:

• Health & Beauty
• Fashion
• Finance
• Travel

You need to be the go-to guy or gal in a specific topic (niche). For example, what is the one thing you want people to remember about you? 

Whatever it is, make sure that what you pick is something you like and what people want. The Ikigai concept is excellent to help you choose your niche:

The table below shows some examples of social media personas in Malaysia known for a specific topic. In the 3rd column, I’ve also provided you with solution examples if a niche is too competitive by niching down (getting more specific):

Great, now that you have picked a niche, the next order of business is to figure out what channel to build your audience:

Pick Your Platform

Pick a platform that best suits your content type. Imagine who your perfect audience is and figure out which platforms they hang out at most often. Here’s a summary to help you out:

The best is to start with 2 to 3 different social media platforms and see which one you get traction after a few months the most and focus on that.

However, if you only have time to manage one platform, you can start with the one you always hang out online. For example, I’m always watching Youtube, so that would be an excellent platform for me to begin because I know that platform inside out.

Create Unique & Meaningful Content 

There’s no sugar coating here. The internet is full of mediocre content. The only way for you to shine in a sea of noise is by creating high quality & original content that resonates with your audience.

Posting selfies is so 2015. Don’t make the mistake of making the content about you. Unless you’re a celebrity, no one cares about how you feel or what you’re eating. 

Your content should provide value to your reader. But you’d probably have two burning questions at the moment:

1. Why would anyone listen to you?
2. What if big players already dominate your niche of choice? 

Don’t worry, future Influencer. I got you covered in the next 2 real-life Influencer examples

[Example]: How Unique Content Got Vanessa Lau Noticed

I’ll take an example from Vanessa Lau. She is an online entrepreneur coach based in Vancouver, Canada. 

How Does Vanessa Make Money? 

Vanessa sells her online courses and private coaching fees in the online marketing niche,  specializing in Instagram & YouTube.

How Did Vanessa Get Herself Noticed?

She started to create step-by-step process YouTube videos on how to market a business online. Vanessa gave away information for free that other coaches would charge for. 

People started to share her videos, and they went viral due to their tremendous value. Thus, she began to build her name as an Online Marketing person when it comes to Instagram & YouTube marketing.

When she had a steady audience, she started to promote Affiliate products and ultimately started selling her online courses and private coaching sessions.

Vanessa’s a true Influencer worthy of being inspired. Now let’s move on to another example of how you can outshine a niche dominated by industry giants:

How Mekanika’s Unique Content Overthrew an Industry Giant

Mekanika, a relatively new car review YouTube channel in Malaysia, took over Malaysia’s previous #1 car review channel, Paultan.org in a few years.

Being a personal fan of the Mekanika channel myself, I think they did so well because they break the stereotype of car reviews being technical and boring. 

Their hosts are experienced, educational, and entertaining—the perfect blend to keep viewers entertained and asking for more.

Ever since Mekanika’s channel blew up, many Malaysians go to their channel first instead of Paultan.org. This is the power of unique content that connects with the audience emotionally.

Engage with Your Audience

Besides creating the content, you have to engage with your audience online actively. Reply to every comment and question. There are 2 reasons why you should do this:

1. People like to know that you’re a real human and reachable.
2. The social media platform algorithm will see that your post is active, and therefore, have a higher chance to show it to other people.

Keep it Consistent & Be Yourself

Your posting needs to be consistent and keep the momentum going. For YouTube, you can post once a week. But for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, you can try to post at least 3 to 4 times a week.

Get your content ready ahead of time so you won’t be scrambling to create content to hit your deadline. Apart from being consistent, be yourself. People can sense right through you, and nobody likes a fake person.

After a few months of posting consistently and steadily growing your followers (to at least around 3000), it’s time to get paid:

How to Start Making Money From Your Followers

Start Promoting Offers You’re Familiar

Now that you have around 3000 followers, you can start to experiment with promoting Affiliate Offers to your followers. 

Here’s a good strategy on which Offers to promote as a newbie:

1. Promote familiar products or services.
2. Promote generic items sold on popular marketplaces in your country (Shopee, Tokopedia, etc.)

In the example below, Berani Buat does a lot of DIY projects. In one of his videos about installing solar panels at home, he inserts his Affiliate links for the tools that he uses in the YouTube video description:

Search for Sponsorship Opportunities

Here’s another tactic that you can start using once you’ve already started making money from Affiliate links, asking for sponsorship opportunities.

If you like a specific product or have used a particular brand for a while and have actively promoted it for a few months, contact the brand directly and ask for collaboration or sponsorship opportunities. 

Here’s an example by Suyin Invest (Malaysian Personal Finance Influencer) who got a brand sponsorship with mattress brand Joey:

There are always brands interested in collaborating with Influencers, or advertisers may not realize this is another marketing source that they can use. So you can be the first one!

Log in to Dashboard & Start Generating Your Links

I hope this plan is good enough to get you started as an Influencer. We’re looking forward to seeing your progress of success. Log in to the dashboard to see available Offers to promote to your audience:

If you have not registered as a Publisher with Involve yet, click here.