Creating Influence Online

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Influence online is key to success for any digital marketing campaign, from getting traffic to a website to making online sales. These days it's not just enough to have a loud voice because the internet will only magnify what's coming out of that voice, so if it is rubbish, then even more people know about your rubbish.

There are four key important pillars to creating a powerful online presence which in turn will influence people. These have to be applied together in a organic fashion to allow them to work harmoniously together. If you miss one of these pillars out, the whole equation falls apart, just like any building would if you remove a key pillar.

The first of these is creating the social connection with other people online. Social connection is touching as many people online as possible, and by touching I mean interacting in some form. That form could be through social network conversations, it could be through Twitter or in video form through YouTube. Whatever the method is, the key here is to keep that connection alive at all times.

You may think that this sounds like a lot of work, and true that is at the beginning when you are setting up your online systems to manage this. However, once you have a few management systems in place to handle your social activities, it soon becomes easier, more fruitful and fun to connect with people. A service like LinkedIn is a great management system for maintaining your professional contacts and have them connected to you.
Remember that social connection is a two-way street; you must interact and create points of conversation in order to generate that trust that more and more these days, people rely on to judge a person or company, before doing business with them.

The second important factor is the ability to manage people's perception of you online. I like to call this part ‘dominating Google’ because for the most part, people will often type your name into a search engine to do their research on you before doing business or even conversing with you. The internet has given everyone the power to be private investigators, and people are certainly taking up this new power to do more due diligence than ever before.

What this means for you is that to create great influence, you need to make sure that you are managing your profile online so that people get the right perception about you. This means you need to have enough web collateral so that when someone searches for you, they find exactly what you want them to find.

In the case of search engines, not only does this mean you need to be found on Page One of search engine results pages, you also need to own positions two to ten. To do this you'll need to maximise your own websites, and anywhere else you might have a profile, especially those on social networks as these will get found by search engines.

Have all these in place and you'll soon be "web famous" as I call it. The third pillar to understand is that once you have the connections in place and you have a decent social profile and presence, you need to fuel that perception with delivering highly valuable highly sharable content.

There's no point building a fantastic online presence and a channel to share your message if what you are delivering is not useful and not shareable. These 2 are key to creating a highly valuable and influential online profile.

Imagine you created incredibly great and valuable content, however it was very difficult to share it. Your message wouldn't get very far because those who do become advocates won't have the tools to tell other people about your message.

Equally if you have created highly shareable tools, if your message does not bring value to other peoples' lives, then they will not bother sharing it with their network. The 2 must work in unison.
This means you have to start creating content that other people can easily consume. These could be in the form of media, software, video or even a PDF. Don't underestimate how useful a document could be to someone if it teaches them exactly what they need to know.

In fact one of the best ways to create ongoing influence is to write a highly valuable workshop piece that you can give to people online and allow them to email it to one another. A workshop piece is a piece of content that teaches people a part of the solution to their problem, and then has a set of workshop style brainstorming questions to get them to come to their own answers that relate to their specific circumstances.

The last and arguable most important pillar is maintaining congruency throughout all your online channels, networks and media. This means keeping the same branding, style and core value message throughout your different online profiles.

It's no good having a different profile on Facebook to the one you have on LinkedIn because people might think you are two different people. People with fantastic online profiles will always have the same message across all their channels.

This is so that if you encounter them in one channel, say for example on Twitter, when you go to their YouTube video channel, you get the same message. That clarity and specificity of what your brand and values are will serve as the glue that binds your entire online strategy together.
With all these elements in place, a person can easily create a highly influential voice and profile online. The next part to consider when this is achieved, is that there comes a high amount of responsibility when you can influence so many people as such incredible speeds.

The internet is the fastest mechanism to get a message out there, so be sure that what you are saying will help other people and help the planet as a whole.