• This is an interesting question. Let's say you just fall into having a following for some reason, what do you that? For a lot of you, you started your Instagram for the sole reason of trying to becoming an influencer, of trying to become a blogger, trying to give people advice, beauty tips, travel tips, cooking tips, parenting tips, whatever it is.

    Then there're some people who just woke up and had a big following, had no idea this industry existed and they're now like, "Oh my gosh, what do I do with this?" I think the first thing that you would notice from a personal feed versus a more professional feed is a lack of cohesion. A lot of professional influencers, they have a point of view. They make sure that everything they do is seen through their specific lens, like a filter on Instagram essintially. Everything they do is seen through that filter. While you may have been to Greece on your own, you haven't seen Greece through the filter of this person. This is what Anthony Bourdain was great at. A lot of you have potentially traveled to Japan or Vietnam or any other country that Anthony Bourdain went to but you didn't see it through-- His lens was so much different than everyone else's that you wanted to see what that place looked like from that person's point of view.

    Personal feeds often don't have that because it's much more just like, "Hey, this is what I'm doing," which probably means in a lot of ways you have a lot more engagement because it is personal. It's not about brands, it's about you. That would be the biggest shift. How do you take something that is about you-- That was weird, like intonation. How do you take something that is about you and start to make it about you and the life you're living, you and the brands, you work with, you in the places you travel, the restaurants you go to and the things that you love, the music that you listen to? It's about not just you, but your viewpoint. That is a pretty big jump, especially if you don't have a viewpoint.

    And we talk about that all the time. That that was a big thing in the last episode. The big takeaway was you need to be interesting enough that people are talking about you. You need to have a viewpoint. People loved Anthony Bourdain because he had a viewpoint. A lot of people fucking hated Anthony Bourdain, they thought he was an asshole because he had a viewpoint and he didn't waver from that.

    As you take your personal feed that maybe you're on a TV show, maybe you-- I don't know, maybe you're just really really good looking and you just have a following. Maybe you are a pro skater and you're not anymore but you have this following. Okay, so how do you how do you take that and start to say what is my viewpoint in the world and what are the brands I love and how can I talk about that? I think I would start by maybe writing down what are my 10 favorite brands in the world.

    Then I would do a post about those brands without talking to those brands, without reaching out to them and saying, "I want to do a post, could you send me something?" I would just do a post about those brands and talk about what you love about them and why your followers should care about them and why they should become customers. That's a good place to start.

    If you can't speak in a compelling way about the 10 brands that you love most in the world, there is no fucking way you're going to be able to talk about a brand that maybe you're a little less passionate about that is now paying you to speak about them. Start with your top 10. Work out those muscles. It's a muscle, it's something that you can learn. It's something you need to train your audience. Do that, that's a good first step.
    Episode #106
    - Influencer Diversity, Evolving Your Instagram, Affiliate Marketing