If you’re like me, you hate seeing your Klout score drop. It happens, however, and is pretty much unavoidable that your influence online is either going to plateau or decline. The law of entropy and all that.
It seems like some people don’t have a hard time with this. They share and post content daily that is absorbed by a loyal network, and they make it look like a breeze. A lot of factors go into why some people are more influential than others, but it usually comes down to how valuable your content is.
Increasing your content’s readability and value is, in fact, the simplest way to become more influential, as long as you’re sharing it effectively. So, how do you become better at producing valuable content?
One way is to narrow your focus. You’ll hear this everywhere. People say that the more specific your message is, the more people will respond to it. That’s definitely true, but it’s only half the battle. What you really want to do is become an expert in that category (we love to skip that part).
We need to be absorbing valuable content from other people constantly in order for us to become real opinion leaders. The reason is because people will see through you if you post a bunch of articles about cooking when you know nothing about it or even if you don’t even make an effort to making your cooking unique and remarkable.
Opinion leaders become what they are because they pick a topic they love, learn everything they can about it, and share their unique perspective on it to a correct audience. This is an intricate, yet overall simple way to look at it.
Let’s say you are doing a music blog like I have in the past. You’ve picked music because you’ve loved music all of your life and you want to share your tastes with others. Maybe your mission is to help people discover new music that is hard to find. Another mission could be to show off how good you are at predicting what songs will become hits (that’s a fun exercise). You then attend concerts, watch tons of music videos online, and have frequent discussions with likeminded colleagues. You’ve then created a network of people you have interacted with online to attain your goal of learning about your topic. You then have the resources you need to launch your full-scale music blog and the followers will flock to you.
The best part is that picking a topic you are passionate about propels you to maintain and keep your blog up-to-date, mostly because by then, this has really become a part of your lifestyle.
JN
I’ve just started my blog… and my posts have varied from procrastination (a big thing), to writing, to inspiration, to poems and to quotes… I want to write about all these, but it seems, as you said here, that’ that’s bad for a blog. Suggestions?
Absolutely not. Being general isn’t necessarily a bad thing and it’s great to write about multiple subjects, which is what I love it do. It’s only bad when you have a lot of topics, but you don’t have multiple articles for each one. You may do one poetry article and then not do one again for a month. This makes it harder for you to find an audience. If you are doing two or three articles a week on several different topics that you are passionate about, however, then you won’t run into that problem, especially since writing is a pretty specific category and the topics you mentioned are cohesive.
Thank you for the follow and the advice – I will make sure to do that! That makes a-lot of sense.