Monetizing Your Influence: A Comprehensive Guide for Moms
Are you a mom who is looking to monetize your influence? You’re not alone. After working in this industry for over 15 years, one thing has always been very clear to me: most moms I speak with, no matter the social media following or audience size, consider themselves each an influencer in some way.
In fact, Forbes calls moms the $2.4 Trillion Social Media Influencers, citing that mothers control 85% of household purchases and have a U.S. spending power of $2.4 trillion.
Whew! If that isn’t influence, I don’t know what is.
But what is the best way to monetize your influence and content? Lucky for you, I have some very strong opinions on this because I have witnessed first-hand what works and what doesn’t when it comes to monetizing.
Here I share my step-by-step comprehensive guide for moms (or really anyone) to monetize their influence quickly:
Step 1: Figure out how you can help others. Some people may call this “find a niche” but I think that is too broad of a term and not what’s really going to bring you success as a mom creator – especially in terms of monetizing your influence. Regardless of whether you’re a mom or not – in order to be successful as an influencer, your content must serve its audience. It must help in some way. It’s ok to have some fun, trendy content sprinkled in but your content must be rooted in serving others. Now you don’t have to go crazy here – everyone has a gift and talent to share. We’re all experts at something in our own right, you just need to brainstorm what that something is – maybe it’s cooking or baking, maybe it’s fashion or maybe it’s homeschooling. Maybe you came up with some easy summer hairstyles. The important thing is just to pick something and take action. You can always change it up later.
PRO TIP: Start making a list of topics not just where you’re an expert but where you have personally had success and where you can help someone achieve success as well.
Step 2: Identify products, services, apps to create content about. Take a look around at the types of products you’re using every day. It’s crucial to think about the products that are associated with the things you’re an expert in or passionate about that you identified in Step 1. What are the products that have been instrumental in your transformations or successes? What are products you just can’t live without? What are the products you love talking about and organically recommend to others? What are the products that have helped you achieve success in a particular area? Grab a pen and jot anything and everything down. Envision the processes where you’ve had success in your head and think about every single thing you used to get you to the desired result.
Step 3: Pick one type of content to focus on. This is where many creators go wrong – they try to do way too much. You don’t have to do a YouTube video, a Reel, blog post while tweeting your tushy off. Just pick one type of content – be it written (like a blog post), video or images – and start there. It is really important to choose something you feel comfortable doing and enjoy. If you pick video just because you see other influencers are having success on TikTok, but you’re not comfortable in front of the camera – you won’t be able to sustain it. Be you. Do what feels right.
Step 4: Sign up for Social Commerce. Many creators want to get right into sponsored posts and working with brands that they miss the affiliate revenue opportunity. As more and more brands are looking to use performance-based marketing, you should definitely create an account on one or more social commerce platforms. All of these are affiliate marketing platforms that enable you to monetize your product recommendations and there are no fees to join. Plus you can make really authentic content about the products and things that you genuinely love, without having to say it’s sponsored (which can be a purchasing deterrent to audiences.)
PRO TIP: Even though affiliate content isn’t sponsored, you will still need to disclose that you earn commissions through your content.
Here is a list of affiliate platforms to check out:
- Audenticity
- Shopify Collabs
- Benable
- Collective Voice
- Amazon Associates
- Mavely
- ShopMy
- ShareASale
- Rakuten
- Walmart
- Indi
- Refersion
- Awin
- Commission Junction
- Impact Radius
- LTK Rewards Style
Step 5: Pick ONE social media channel to focus on. There may be no bigger threat to a content creator than trying to be too many places at once before mastering a single channel. Consistency is so key to the creator game so just like picking a single content type, pick a single platform to focus on. As you start to grow as an influencer, you can add on more channels. And again, just like content – pick a channel that YOU feel comfortable posting on. Don’t worry about what others are doing. You will only find success being consistent and you can only be consistent if it’s something you enjoy. Bonus if you already have a social media channel that you’re using regularly – don’t overcomplicate things. Start with what you have!
Step 6: Do a little SEO research. You might be intimidated by the thought of search engine optimization but these days it’s pretty easy (and free) to do a basic check. Ensuring that people are not only looking for the subject matter of your content but also understanding HOW they’re phrasing their search is critical information. There are a few free resources like Answer the Public, Word Tracker and SEMRush – each of these offers users a limited number of free searches that should be enough to get you started.
Step 7: Create content. We’ve done a lot before we get to the good part and that’s creating content. Whatever you’ve selected as your format, start creating stories around the topic where you can help someone and feature the products that you use and recommend that are related to that topic. Reference what you’ve learned from your SEO research. Have fun! Try new things. Just create and be you. If you’re creating written content like a blog post, be sure to use affiliate links from the social commerce platforms you’ve signed up for. Even if you’re not creating written content, you’re still going to want to grab all of the commissionable links related to your content because you’ll be able to use them later. More on that in step 9!
Step 8: Share the content. Since you have selected a channel already and you are comfortable with the channel you’ve selected, go ahead and post your content there. Be sure to follow any best practices of that channel (for example, using hashtags on Instagram but not exceeding the maximum number of hashtags.) Take pride in your captions.
Step 9: Create an advanced “link in bio”. If you plan to post on any social media other than or in addition to Instagram, you’ll want to consider setting up an advanced link in bio so you can feature your content. Instagram just launched the feature where you can post more than one link but most social platforms only allow for one link. Some of the most popular link tools include Link In Bio, Linktree, Milksha.ke, and my personal favorites – Stan.Store and Pillar. What you select will really depend on what you plan to offer as far as content and what you plan to implement as monetization strategies. You can also promote affiliate links in these link in bio tools as well.
Step 10: Create a digital product. I cannot stress this enough – it is really important that you don’t build your house on someone else’s land. This means not basing your entire business and livelihood on one social media channel. First of all, that audience, i.e., your followers, is not yours. Followers are owned by TikTok/ByteDance, Meta, etc. Secondly, whether it’s by a government ban or a glitch in the system, you could wake up tomorrow and your social media channel could be disabled, hacked or – worse- completely gone. This is why it’s important to create a digital product that is your own and that you can collect emails from. This can be a blog, newsletter, a PDF for download, a course – the list goes on. Let’s say you taught your child how to read in 24 hours. It could be a simple document that outlines the step-by-step process you used to do this. If you’re just getting started with digital products, I don’t recommend doing something like a newsletter or a webinar unless you know you can maintain it with some frequency. Start small like a downloadable PDF. You can make these types of digital products pretty by using a design platform like Canva or PicMonkey – but it doesn’t have to be pretty. What’s most important is that the content be so valuable that people will be willing to exchange their email address for it. If you’re mentioning products in the digital product, be sure to use your commissionable links!
Step 11: Start collecting email addresses. As soon as your digital product is ready, tell the world about it and collect those email addresses. This is where a link in bio tool like Pillar or Stan comes in really handy. You can share the digital product directly from your link in bio and collect those email addresses right on the tool. If you’ve made the choice to start a newsletter with those emails, you’re going to want to look into signing up for an email platform. Depending on your level of experience using email marketing platforms you may like Mailchimp, FloDesk, Klaviyo, ActiveCampaign or Constant Contact.
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