How To Build Your Influence Online When You Are Just Starting Off

Welcome to the Freedom Business Podcast. Your host, Siddharth Rajshekhar here. Great to have you here. This is where we are going to be talking about how we can redefine our education system by building vibrant learning communities. Take your knowledge out to the world and be awesome. Let's get in.

I totally get it. It's quite difficult when you're starting and you do not know how to build your influence or build your brand and you're starting from scratch. This podcast will help you because the first part of the podcast I will talk about what are the three pillars of influence. Second is I'll talk about 11 different things or the 11 steps or ideas that can help you build your influence online, even if you're just starting off today. And then the last part is I'll talk about platforms like what is LinkedIn ideally good for, what is Instagram good for, what is YouTube good for, how do you use Twitter and how do you use Facebook? I'll keep it as simple and to the point so that you can pick any platform and start building your influence. Now, before I start, I want you all to understand that Today is my seventh day out of my 90 day challenge and we are over 200 episodes and counting. So if you have not subscribed to this podcast on Apple or Spotify, please do that because I'm going to go daily podcasts and I'm going to be giving value on all different topics to help you take your knowledge, make that into a business, build your influence, build communities, and, you know, basically live an awesome life by helping others. So let's get into the first part. What is influence? There are two kinds of people you would see online. Those who are attention seeking and those are true influencers. Now, people who grab attention are the ones who may seem to have influence, but they actually don't influence people. They just get more eyeballs and, you know, they just get more people around their content. But true influence is if the particular creator is able to make people take action. Meaning if you are somebody who even has a small YouTube channel with say 5,000 people, 5,000 subscribers, but if your subscribers are engaging really high and they're buying your products and they're actually so loyal and they're coming back all the time, it does not matter. Even if you have millions of views in that, in that particular channel, you are an influencer. Whereas if you're somebody who has even millions of channels of views or whatever on your subscribers on your channel, but nobody's willing to buy from you, then you're just somebody who's grabbing attention. You are able to entertain people, but nobody is being actually influenced by you. So this is how I look at influence. Now, when it comes to influence, there are three pillars. Number one is authenticity. People need to see through you. You need to remove those masks and those filters and just be who you are. Second is logic. When you're presenting information, it should connect with an audience at a deeper level. And number three is empathy. You really need to care for people because people don't care about how much you know until they know how much you care. Okay, listen to this podcast once again. So what are the 11 steps? If I have to say, if you have to literally build your influence from scratch, considering that you have absolutely no experience in this right now and you're going to be starting today. Now the first step is you got to identify what is your niche or your topic that.

You want to be known for. Because if you do this random stuff online, people will not engage with you. They will not connect with you. And the best niche is to scratch your own itch. I'll repeat that. The best niche is to scratch your own itch. So if you are having a particular problem, let's say you want to really become better in analyzing the stock markets and trading and stuff now that is your niche. So as you're learning and going and, you know, taking it on the go, you'll start to get better. So the second step is if you want to build your influence online, you got to start creating quality content now. Quality content is stuff like what I'm doing right now. I'm going in depth within a few minutes. I'm sharing as much to the point information that I can. There's also an entertainment factor. You want to keep coming back for it. And it and my audio format is slightly different from my video format, different from my reels, different from my webinars. So each content type, I deal with it in a different way and I ensure quality is maintained. Now third is platforms. You don't have to be on every platform. When you're starting, pick any one platform or maximum two platforms to start building your personal brand. Which leads me to point number four is you need to start branding yourself. If you Notice, the best YouTube channels in the world are all personal branded channels. They have the name of the person even if it's a brand. But it's still the name that is driving for the YouTube channel. Okay. It's very rare that you would see a company YouTube channel doing very well even if it is A company or if it's a brand name, it is a personal brand that is driving the YouTube channel. Same with Instagram. All the top Instagram profiles are personal brands. So personal branding is like putting yourself on the front, the front face and actually doing it. That's why my all my ads that I run on Facebook are on Sidharth Rajika fan page, on YouTube fan page. And I don't have an Internet lifestyle hub YouTube channel. I do have it, but I don't do much on it because I know that my personal YouTube channel is doing much better than others. And same thing even on LinkedIn. It's my personal profile. My personal profile, Facebook personal profile. And that's how I've been growing. So the fourth step is if you want to build an influence online is brand yourself. Number five is you got to learn the art of networking. And I'll share that a little bit later in this particular podcast. Number six is value. Okay, how do you define value? Value equals solving another person's problem. That's how I look at it. And solving it in a simple way. Like even this particular podcast, I'm trying to solve the problem for many of you here who want to build an influence online, but you do not know where to start. Yeah, so I want to solve that problem. So value equals what people are looking for. Number seven is engagement. Now if you see on my podcast on Sidharth Rajkar.com There are so many different. I've had more than 12,000 comments. Okay. Over the years and every time I publish a new podcast, a lot of people engage and I like the two way interaction. Even when I send emails to people, I'm, you know, have a large database and I get tons of replies, thousands of replies every single day because of the two way interaction engagement. And I also evoke that kind of response when I'm publishing content I want people to share below on what? And even this particular podcast, if you're listening to this on my blog, I want you to share your notes below that. Engagement is important to build your influence. Number eight, no matter what you do, you have to be consistent. Bruce Lee says, I'm not scared of the man who's practiced a thousand kicks once. He's scared of the person who's practiced one kick thousand times. So those of you who want to be really good, you got to be consistent every single day. Put one piece of content. Okay, ninth idea. If you want to build your influence when you're starting off, let's say you don't have any influence you can associate yourself with other influencers, maybe interview them or get them to interview you and suddenly you get discovered. And that's what is happening in the online space right now. There are many people who are totally unknown and they just come up because of some influencer talking about them. Okay, so how can you get influencers to talk about you? That's another strategy altogether. Number 10 is keep updating your knowledge on what is happening, what was happening two, three, four, five years back on social media. Platforms are very different right now. So you got to keep updating yourself on what's working. And finally, number 10, number 11 is if you want to build your influence online, you got to start with this, but you got to analyze and understand your data. What kind of topics are your market resonating with which media are you more comfortable with? Audio or video or text? Analyze everything and then take it forward. So now I'm going to come to platforms. What are the platforms to focus on and what is good in each platform. And as a disclaimer I'm going to tell you that you don't have to be on every platform. Pick any one that suits you and start with that. If you look at LinkedIn as a platform, the good content type that works there are like image based content and even textual content. If you go and see my, my LinkedIn, I'm only posting textual content and LinkedIn is the best place to outreach through messaging and networking. So you open up a like a conversation with somebody, keep open loops, I mean ask open ended questions, have two way interactions, network build relationships. And the true power of LinkedIn is to get your return on relationships that you built. Instagram on the other hand is very good at getting into a new audience. You have a far reach and wider reach and the best media type for Instagram are posting reels under one minute reels. And of course you can also post stories and also share images. So Instagram also recommends its users to try all different kinds of media for you to get better reach. But of course you got to find what's your style when it comes to YouTube. It's very simple. Two videos per week or even one video per week going above 10 minutes in duration ideally like 20, 30 minutes duration is good. And the metric for YouTube is average view duration. The more people watch your videos, the higher ranking that you'll actually get on those videos. And again it's not about how many views you get, it's about how engaged are you keeping your audience and if it's a relevance that is there now if you look at Twitter again, I know people who post two, three times a day, tweets, Twitter, the quality of the audience is much more mature audience, meaning that they are more tech savvy, they're more tuned to the latest trends. You have, you know people in these influencers, you've got journalists, you've got actors, superstars, cricketers, they're most of them actually take charge of their own Twitter handles and they, they keep voicing out their opinions and stuff like that. So Twitter, the good thing is if you're able to share your own opinions two, two to three times a day and you do strategic outreach with influencers or key decision makers and again like LinkedIn have open ended conversations and networking that will help you leverage Twitter better. And Facebook, even though people say Facebook is dead, definitely this 35, 40 plus generation, they are more on Facebook. I mean they have started off on Facebook, they may not be as active on Facebook as usual. But again when it comes to Facebook, start up with your personal profile, then start to use Facebook groups and then of course the Facebook page, you can do a whole bunch of stuff over there. So I hope I've been able to give you some clarity on the three aspects like what are the three pillars of influence, what are the 11 steps to grow your influence when you're starting off and what is each platform good for? Of course there are many other platforms like Pinterest, you've got, you know, TikToks, which is not so popular here in India. You've got many others platforms that are coming every single day. But the key here is irrespective of what platform you choose, pick one where your audience is there. And here is the golden nugget I want to give you. You need to own your digital assets by you just depending on Instagram or LinkedIn or YouTube or Twitter or Facebook. For your audience it does not matter because the algorithms keep changing. And I know many influencers who have built huge influence and they've suddenly gone down to zero. So right from day one, build your own email list. I have an email list of close to 300,000 people that I've built over the last few years. This is my clean list. Otherwise it's, you know, I've generated over a million leads now. This is my own asset. I can promote whatever I want to this list. I can communicate whatever I want. And it's not, and it is very personal because you may be thinking, okay, many people don't open an email, but that's not true. It's about how you communicate in the email. If you're only promoting, promoting, promoting and pushing flyers there, people will not be engaged. But if you're actually sharing valuable pieces of content, building a relationship with your list, you will be able to pull money in out of thin air. You know, I can just send one email and generate a lack 2 lakhs. But I don't do that all the time because I'm not there to just push and sell to my list. I'm there to build a, you know, a relationship with my list. And as I'm building the list, suppose there's a festival offer or some offer I give, people are ready to respond and buy. That is what will give you control over your influence. True influence is not just grabbing attention online, but it is by building a relationship with your list, building a relationship with your audience and getting them to go to go through a journey with you where they're going to be your customer for life and they'll follow you, they'll do whatever you do, they will do whatever you ask them to do once they know that you are in it for them. I hope you found this podcast useful and if you'd like to know more on how you can get on a three year journey with me on certification, we have something called the Diamond Certification. There's a link below this podcast. You can go and check it out or you can go to sidzsids Co diamond and jump on board my three year diamond certification where I'll help you build skills over the next three years to become a digital leader, a digital mentor to others where you'll be able to create an impact in other people's lives. Wish you all the best. Catch you in the next episode.

Sam.