Influencer marketing is now growing faster than digital marketing, according to research from Quora.

So it prob­a­bly comes as no sur­prise that many peo­ple are now scram­bling to become dig­i­tal influ­encers — look­ing to stake a claim and reap the ben­e­fits that come along with being a dig­i­tal influencer.

But how, exact­ly, do you do that? How do you stand out and get seen when every day there are 2.7 mil­lion blog posts pub­lished and 432,000 hours worth of video uploaded to Youtube? When you add up all of the posts, pins, tweets and Face­book live videos, that’s a mind-bog­gling amount of con­tent cre­at­ed and shared each day.

Still, becom­ing a dig­i­tal influ­encer is pos­si­ble. But you have to have a strat­e­gy, and you need to work it daily.

I write from per­son­al expe­ri­ence: Three years ago, I was a com­plete unknown. Now, I have a half mil­lion dig­i­tal fol­low­ers. I was select­ed as an Inc. Top 100 Lead­er­ship Expert and speak­er. I have a top-ranked lead­er­ship blog. And I was one of the “Top 241 Push But­ton Influ­encers” in 2016.

Here are the five things that helped take me from obscu­ri­ty to dig­i­tal influ­encer which will also help you on your journey.

1. Create your own tribe.

It does­n’t mat­ter how much con­tent you cre­ate and share; if you don’t have a tribe of your own, that con­tent of yours is just nev­er going to get seen.

You can’t rely on organ­ic audi­ence growth, either, not unless you’re already famous. You have to build your own fol­low­ing. You have to find peo­ple inter­est­ed in your area of exper­tise, in the niche in which you want to become an influ­encer, and con­nect with them.

If you’re build­ing a Twit­ter fol­low­ing, fol­low peo­ple in your tar­get audi­ence so that if your pro­file and con­tent res­onate, they will fol­low you back. The same goes for Face­book, Insta­gram, and Linkedin.

What’s more, you have to do all this on a dai­ly basis. You have to be relent­less about build­ing your fol­low­ing until you get to that point where organ­ic growth kicks in; and even then, I would con­tin­ue build­ing it.

That is what has allowed me to cre­ate a fol­low­ing of half a mil­lion in just three years.

2. Share strong, relevant and resonating content regularly.

Build­ing a tribe is fair­ly easy. How­ev­er, once you’ve got­ten their atten­tion, you need to focus on keep­ing it, and the best way to do that is by shar­ing rel­e­vant con­tent that res­onates with them.

There is so much com­pe­ti­tion for their atten­tion that you need to be doing this on a dai­ly basis. It does­n’t have to be 100 per­cent your con­tent either. You can curate and share good con­tent pro­duced by oth­ers as long as it’s rel­e­vant and res­onates with your audience.

How­ev­er, if you want to be rec­og­nized as an expert, you have to pro­duce your own con­tent, too. This can be in the form of videos, pod­casts, memes and of course blogs, and don’t for­get you can repur­pose one piece of con­tent as video, audio and writ­ten con­tent, to tre­ble your output.

Blogs are a great way to show and share your knowl­edge: In the past three years, I have writ­ten more than 1,000 blogs on lead­er­ship and busi­ness. I appre­ci­ate that that sounds like a lot, but it’s only one blog a day.

You might be think­ing that writ­ing a blog a day is too much, but the stats show that blogs that post dai­ly get five times the amount of traf­fic than those that post less fre­quent­ly. The more con­tent you cre­ate, the more influ­ence you generate.

3. Share, share and share again!

Once you’ve cre­at­ed your con­tent, don’t just post it on your blog and hope that peo­ple will come. They won’t!

We are in a push econ­o­my; you need to be shar­ing your con­tent, tweet­ing it, post­ing it and pin­ning it. And don’t just share it once. The major­i­ty of posts/tweets, etc., get seen by only a frac­tion of your tribe. You will be very lucky if more than 3 per­cent of your tribe sees any spe­cif­ic post or tweet.

So, use tools like Hoot­suite and Social Juke­box to share your con­tent reg­u­lar­ly. When you have a large enough tribe that you are con­tin­u­al­ly build­ing, your old con­tent will always be new to some­one, so con­sid­er re-shar­ing it.

If your audi­ence can be found on LinkedIn, then look for groups where you can share your con­tent. The Har­vard Busi­ness Review LinkedIn group has 1.3 mil­lion mem­bers. Using groups like that can real­ly help increase your reach and visibility.

The more times you share your con­tent, the greater the num­ber of peo­ple who will see it.

4. Leverage other large platforms.

Once you have start­ed to build influ­ence, and increased your author­i­ty and cred­i­bil­i­ty, it’s time to start to con­tribute on oth­er platforms.

While it’s easy to build an audi­ence of your own, why not ben­e­fit from audi­ences that oth­ers have built as well? Con­tent is king, and if you have a good rep­u­ta­tion and good con­tent, you will always find an audi­ence for your content.

Find out who the oth­er influ­encers are in your niche; then ask to become guests on their pod­casts, or offer to write guest posts.

5. Engage, engage, engage.

It’s all about the engage­ment. Hav­ing peo­ple that read your stuff is great, but an engaged audi­ence is what real­ly gives you influence.

Engage­ment is a two-way street and if you don’t engage with peo­ple who reach out, either through com­ments and ques­tions, then they will quick­ly become less engaged.

On many of the social media plat­forms, such as Face­book and Twit­ter, there are algo­rithms which con­trol how many peo­ple see your posts and tweets; and these ana­lyt­ics are all pos­i­tive­ly impact­ed by engagement.

Addi­tion­al­ly, peo­ple are more like­ly to engage with Influ­encers who they see engag­ing with their audiences.

Engage­ment is win-win. It helps more peo­ple see your con­tent and encour­ages more peo­ple to engage, all of which increas­es your reach and influence.

SOURCE