The secret habit of influencers you need to start today.

Influencers enjoy large audiences and a broad reach with the message they distribute. It appears obvious how they attained a million or more followers for some influencers while others are not so obvious.

No influencer begins an influencer. How do they do it? Why do some rise to the top when others seem to struggle to gain traction? After all, there are plenty of pretty people, talented people, intelligent people, and even wealthy people. Yet significantly few rise to the status of “influencer.”

Whenever I speak with Digital Marketers, they tell me about the three R’s that are the secret sauce of being an influencer on Social media. These are Relevance, Resonance, and Revenue.

Relevance – If your content is just random and not relevant to your target market, then not only will people not engage but they also probably don’t even read it. The best way to be relevant is to look to add value. Not only will that be of interest, but it will also get them coming back to ask for more. The more you can be consistently relevant, the stronger your brand will be. Influencers stay in their lane. They are hyper-focused on what their audience wants, and they deliver.

Resonance – Relevant content is essential, but that content needs to resonate with your audience. It has to be something they relate to, understand, and see as applicable to them. They need to see themselves using and benefiting from the content right now. People don’t have time to read and engage with things that might be helpful five years from now. We are a microwave society.

Revenue – If you don’t have income, a goal associated with the content that you’re sharing, then even if people engage in their millions, you have a hobby, not a business. That’s all well and good, but likes and comments won’t pay your bills. It would help if you were strategic, using the relevant and resonant content to lead them to the services that you offer. Many influencers don’t monetize an audience until they have a large audience. The audience size itself can be the goal as it then creates ad revenue from whatever platform they are on.

While I agree with all that, the one piece that many digital marketers don’t get is that you need must be relentless. This is the missing R, the one that will take you from an unknown to a global influencer.

Social media is a hungry beast. It never sleeps, and you need to feed it. Did you know that there are: 6000 tweets per second, 350M photos uploaded to Facebook daily, 7.5 million blog posts published every single day, 500 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every single hour, and yet, despite all this, many digital marketers talk about posting 3-5 times per week and blogging once per week? Sorry, but that just won’t cut it. Sure, you might have a good post that generates some good engagement, but that single post will not make a ripple, let alone a splash.

Think of it this way, what if a cable news channel was only on the air once in a while at random times, spattering a hodgepodge of unrelated stories while another cable news program was on air 24/7 speaking to a specific audience with a majority of its content all centered around politics. Easy, the latter captures a substantial targeted audience it can monetize while the other dies.

You have to be relentless. You have to have systems in place to create good content and be posting multiple times a day or a week, depending on the platform or content type. Bloggers need to blog every day, and if not, your audience will forget you quickly.

It’s the relentlessness that creates the demand, has a compounding effect, and makes a habit of people reading your content. Being a relentless content produces quickly builds trust, expertise, and reputation. Otherwise, you’ll be a one-hit-wonder who is surpassed by those who know the value of quantity and quality.

Maybe your goal isn’t to become an “influencer” but instead to gain market share over your competitors. Be relentless.

Written by Monte Clark. Have you read?
GAMES: The Quest for Zero Percent Management by Benny Ausmus.
The Builder, the Maintainer, and the Destroyer: What to Learn and Not Learn from These Management Types by Tim Kintz.