January 6, 2016 9:52 am
Published by Kirsty Sharman
This blog post was originally written by Ruan Fourie.
I once read a Forbes article that said you have exactly 7 seconds to make a first impression. That’s roughly three words a second. So when you fire off that e-mail to the brand you’ve been dreaming about working with – best you present the best of your platforms in the first 21 words (so up until ‘three’ in this introduction).
If you utilise a social media platform to create income and want to showcase your content to brands, a credible media kit gives you far more than 21 words AND creates a professional first impression within 7 seconds.
People are predominantly visual. Creating a visual document that showcases your offerings in a professional, attractive and concise manner is the first foot in the door to making money off your influence.
How does a media kit help make you money?
Sovereign Stats
Brands aren’t going to pay to work with someone who doesn’t have an audience. Being able to show your reach, resonance and relevance in a concise manner allows a brand to determine if the spend is worth the return. A media kit allows you to display your stats clearly and neatly.
But who are they?
It’s all very well showing how many people are in your audience but you also need to communicate who these people are. How old are they? Are they male? Female? Where do they live and what do they like? Brands work with influencers to access their audience and communicate with them in a tone they find relatable with content they enjoy engaging with. The audience of the influencer needs to be the target market of the brand. Setting up a credible media kit not only lets you show off your stats but also lets you intertwine important audience insights into the information you’re displaying.
Show, don’t tell.
Much like consumers turn to influencers before making purchasing decisions, brands like to know you’ve done work with other brands. By featuring some of the brands you’ve worked with on a media kit you’re able to create credibility relating to your content but also give the current brand an idea of the types of products and services you’re most likely to align with.
Your time to shine
Sometimes you need to be allowed to brag. This is one of those times. Have a regular radio spot? Were you once tasked with tweeting from the top of Kilimanjaro? A few lines or a small image marking this highlight is a great way to better promote your personal brand to the brand you’re targeting. It shows that you’re different and have accomplished a few milestones.
In 7 seconds a media kit allows you to give a quick snapshot of your influence and, more importantly, your audience. In those 7 seconds a brand can determine if you are the influencer that will collaborate best with them to reach their campaign goals. Showing brands the content you create and who engages with that content is the first step to forming financially beneficial relationships and making money from your influence.
Webfluential now provides influencers signed up to the platform with the free tools to create their own media kits that give brands and agencies the best snapshot of your influence. Login to your profile and click My Media Kit on the left to start putting yours together!
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October 21, 2015 11:46 am
Published by Kirsty Sharman
This blog post was originally written by Ruan Fourie.
Have you ever Googled your blog’s name? Your brand. It’s important to know what results are returned when people Google your brand. The more info people can get about you by just searching your brand, the better.
There are typically 10 search results on the first page of a Google search, and every single one of those 10 results should point directly to an online property that you manage. Brands, marketers, potential new readers or followers will likely Google your brand at some point. Brands and marketers will Google your brand if they are considering including you in an Influencer Marketing campaign.
How do you dominate the page one of Google with your brand?
It’s not as hard as you think. Most influencers already own multiple branded properties online. A blog, a Facebook page, a Twitter account, Instagram account and YouTube channel etc.
All these properties can potentially appear on the first page of search results when your brand is searched. You just have to make sure that Google (and other search engines) understand that your brand owns all those properties.
You have to tell Google where you can be found
Most of these social media profiles have a field where you can link to your website. That is the first and most important step to helping search engines understand that the social media account is part of your brand.
Google now has direct access to Twitter’s data stream. Google can only crawl certain parts of public Facebook pages, and the same applies for Instagram.
For this very reason it’s important that you use the one property that you completely own (your blog) to help Google understand your whole brand and where you can be found online.
Link to your social accounts from your website
You control how much of your website Google (and other search engines) can crawl. You control where you are linking to, and from where on your site.
You control how Google interprets your brand.
You should already be linking to all of your social media profiles for your brand from your website, so that your readers can easily find those profiles.
Your “About” page on your Website is there to give your users all they need to know about you. From here you can easily link to all your social media profiles, not only for your readers, but also to help Google understand that your brand extends to those social media profiles.
But it doesn’t have to stop at your “About” page. You can also use your “Contact” page as an opportunity to help Google understand where you can be reached. Because some of your audience will prefer Twitter as a channel for communication, it would also make sense to inform your audience of all the social channels they can use to contact you.
A Webfluential profile page is a gold mine of info for Google and your audience
Your Webfluential profile page gives a lot of information about your brand and your audience. Things like your audience demographics, links to all your brand social media profiles and also a link to your Website. Google loves pages like a Webfuential profile that provide a lot of information about a search.
By simply linking to your Webfluential Profile page from your website, you will be giving Google a great resource to return relevant information for your brand. So make sure you also link to your Webfluential profile from your “About” page, your “Contact” page and even your “Advertise” page if you have one.
It’s not just about the search results
You are doing a good job with your brand. You have an audience and that audience is still growing. You create cool content for your audience. Now brands and marketers want to start working with you so that they get access to your audience.
The first thing a marketer is going to to do before reaching out to you is Google your brand.
When your brand is searched it’s a sign of a strong brand if you dominate the first page of the Google results by not only showing your blog, but also all your social media profiles and your Webfluential profile.
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July 3, 2015 7:05 am
Published by Kirsty Sharman
This blog post was originally written by Ruan Fourie.
Webfluential creates opportunities for influencers to work with brands and share branded content with their audiences. We currently have over 2800 influencers, many of which have received campaign work, but some have not yet received their first brief. This blog post aims to identify some tips to ensure you can be shortlisted in the near future.
Most importantly, the likelihood that you have the time to sell your influencer services to brands is limited. Big brands don’t even know who you are, no chance they are going to let you in their door to do a pitch. Plus, you hate admin and paperwork, don’t even say the word invoice.
So you’ve done the smart thing as an online influencer and signed up with Webfluential. That way there is no paperwork, we handle the invoicing and we pay you. Even more important than that, you don’t have to come up with a pitch or even do the pitch, we do that for you too. We work on your behalf, often without you knowing it, and meet big brands on a daily basis, and we tell them why they should work with you.
We do all this, without you even having to ask us to.
Yet, it’s been a couple of weeks and still you haven’t received a single job offer. Now you want to know why you haven’t gotten any job offers yet?
In most cases the reasons for influencers not getting jobs through our platform is more or less the same. Thus it would be wise to break down some of the most common issues preventing you from getting your share of the $ 280,000 we have payed to influencers over the past 6 months.
7 Reasons you might not be getting Influencer jobs
- You have not completed your Webfluential profile. This first one is a really easy one to fix. Make sure your Webfluential profile is 100% completed. This means you have identified your target audience’s age groups, you’ve added the right keyword tags and that you have connected all the different platforms you use to your profile.
- Connecting platforms? That means you have Google Analytics on your blog and you connected your blog to your Webfluential profile. You also connected your Facebook page, your Twitter profile, your Instagram profile and your YouTube channel. All platforms that you can charge for.
- You have not set the price that you will charge for every platform. We make it really easy for you by telling you how much you should be charging. Obviously you can charge what you want, but if you stick closely to our guideline-prices you are way more likely to get all the monies into your pocket.
- You have NSFW (Not Safe For Work) content on your site or social media platforms. Sharing controversial content will obviously scare off a lot of brands that might have been thinking about using you as part of their influencer marketing strategy. A brand might not want to be associated with you, purely based on the content you produce and share.
- What is seen as NSFW content? Swearing like a sailor is certainly frowned upon by some. Scantily clad or naked people will also raise NSFW-flags. Off colour jokes, even though they are jokes, might make some people feel uncomfortable or offended. At the end of the day you can do as you please, but just keep in mind that controversial or NSFW content will certainly cause the jobs to be few and far between.
- You are not getting engagement on your content. Brands like to work with influencers that really have influence over their audience. For the brands it comes down to return on investment (ROI). If they are going to be paying you to do a job, they want to know that it is going to give them returns.
- If you tweet about something, does your audience actually believe what you are saying? If you share a link on Facebook, do people click on the link or just let it slide by in their timeline? When you blog about a cool product or an event, does your readers then actually go out and buy the product or a ticket to the event? Do you influence your audience’s actions and behaviour?
In the coming weeks we will be introducing you to some of the influencers that have received jobs from brands because they are signed up with Webfluential. You can have a look at how these influencers do what they do, and hopefully learn ways to get yourself your first job, or more jobs.
We are also going to start educating and helping you guys with how to be the ultimate influencer you can be. We will be sharing tips and tricks on how to increase your engagement, optimize your blog posts, create Facebook posts and tweets that leads to clicks, traffic and return on investment for the brands that have worked with you.
So login to your Webfluential account right now and check that everything is it should be. If you run into any problems or have any questions leave a comment. If comments are not your thing, we would love to hear from you on Twitter or Facebook.
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