The best way to take charge of your career today is to take it into your own hands. Side hustles have always been a go-to solution to help bolster income and give you an interest that you’re passionate about to focus on. Today, you have more resources than anyone before in history at your disposal. You can create a thriving online audience that you sell to directly or monetize in other ways.
Not only does this audience give you the opportunity to earn a side income, they can actually be critically important to your career aspirations. Having an audience means offering value to your employer. It also gives you the unique ability to strike out on your own and try a new approach that feels authentic to you.
Creating a winning digital brand is a great way to take your professional career to the next level, and you can start today. As a minimum, your efforts act like a multi-media resume that will attract the attention of recruiters and potential employers. Keep at it and adapt your approach to find the winning formula that works for you, and you may even be able to use that platform to create a unique career path that suits you to a T.
While the tips in this guide can help anyone, they’ll be particularly important to those in creative or media fields. If you create content of any kind, then having a digital presence can increase the worth of the work you do automatically.
Take journalists, for example. With the ability to have a platform of their own, journalists today can now establish themselves in a niche and create an audience that supports them and gives them the negotiating power they need to get their work published by top magazines, journals, and newspapers.
When you come with an engaged audience, you can take your career to amazing new heights. There’s no reason to wait, either. Even if you’re just at the start of your career you can use the tips in this guide to help you get started developing and curating your own online platform.
Why You Need an Online Presence
It takes time and patience not only to collect an audience but to truly find the unique approach that your audience finds most engaging and, of course, you find most natural. That’s why it doesn’t matter when you start. In fact, it’s often best to start at the beginning of your career, since you can learn as you go and won’t feel so much pressure to get it right.
Having a thriving digital presence has become an integrated component to many different degrees as well. The online journalism degree today, for example, doesn’t just cover the traditional skills of writing, editing, and reporting;, it also goes into coding, marketing, and using analytics.
You can click here to learn more, but in general, today’s online journalism degree programs cover topics ranging from how to report stories in real time, to how to build up a personal brand, to even how to use marketing and analytical skills to improve audience engagement.
Journalism is an excellent example of how having an online audience and platform can do wonders for your career. In the past, journalists had to work as a staff writer. After several years, if not decades, then they might have developed a big enough name that they could have then made their career independent.
Today, journalists can focus on a niche and start to build their platform independently right from the start. Having an audience means being able to monetize that audience and use them as a boost to any application or story you submit.
Getting Started: The Essentials
For those just getting started, there are a few platform essentials that you’ll want to invest your time in creating:
A Website
A website is a great place to get started, especially since there are so many different platforms that let you build stunning platforms with minimal experience. In the future, when you grow, you are going to want to upgrade your website. This will likely mean having your own domain name instead of a hosted one (for example, www.websitebuilderexample.com/yoursite) and also self-hosting your website to stay in control over security and speed.
No matter what field you’re in, you’ll need your website to look good, be formatted correctly, and be updated regularly. If you leave your website stagnant too long your domain authority (DA) will drop. Inactive websites are the most populace kind of website online, so keeping it updated is the simplest, most effective way to keep your ranking high to increase your visibility on search engines.
Not only will you be more visible online, you’ll also give your audience more reasons to go back. Once you have good traffic running through your site you can then start looking into monetization options, like advertising, sponsorships, or merchandising.
One of the best ways to keep your website updated is with a blog. You can keep your audience updated on events you’ll be attending, can create articles they can enjoy, can post videos, and so on. You’ll also want to create and manage a newsletter that works to direct your audience back to your website so that you can get repeat visitors.
Social Media
Social media is a powerful tool. When it comes to growing your audience, your best bet at doing that is online. Having high follower counts, however, means nothing. What’s more important is the engagement rates. If you only have a few thousand followers, but those followers actively engage with your content, share it, and talk about it, you’re actually in a good position. Not only is high engagement a good way to boost your content through the For You or Search pages, it’s also how you can actually get value out of your audience.
The social media platforms you invest in depend on your audience. In general, of course, the big platforms today are Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. You’ll need to create unique content for each of them, as they have a different focus. Instagram is very visual, and despite the push towards video content there’s still demand for images, infographics, and guides. On TikTok the entire focus is on short-form video, which can be very useful for those happy to create video content in their niche.
Don’t assume that any job is too boring to be put online. There are people who want to learn about your niche who will be thrilled to find a content creator out there that creates simple explanation videos or graphics. All you need is to try it out, and then adapt your approach so that you can find and build an audience organically.
Relevant Accounts
Social media isn’t the only external platform you’ll want to get on. There are many directories and sharing websites that can help you build up your online presence and boost your reputation all at once. If you’re an artist, create profiles on the top portfolio or art sites like DeviantArt and Behance.
In some cases, the directories you put your profile on will even be professional lists that can help you get found.
Regardless of the type of directory, these accounts can actually help search engines understand who you are and what your niche is, which in turn can help more people find you.
Establishing Your Niche
There are so many different content creators and professionals out there that it can be hard to stand out. That’s why you need to find your niche. The niche you choose could be a topic, it could be a certain type of media format, or it may be even be your persona. Regardless, it’s important to have a clearly defined niche that will help you stand out. As you grow you can absolutely expand your niche to encompass more, but making your platform straightforward is a good way to get people to follow you.
You have a few seconds at most for someone to decide whether you’re worth following, so making your niche obvious can help expedite their decision. They can see your niche in a glance, and can make a decision whether your content is right for them.
Don’t worry about not being right for someone, either. Developing a niche works because it attracts fewer people who are more likely to actually engage with your brand. Engagement is the key, not traffic numbers or follower count.
Boosting Credibility
Unless your platform simply relies on you being a source of entertainment, it’s important to boost your credibility where and when you can. This is particularly true if you are using your platform to teach or inform others. Journalists, for example, will have a hard time establishing a platform that can help their career if their audience doesn’t believe in what they’re reporting.
This doesn’t mean that you have to source everything in a short video. Instead, the credibility indicators will come elsewhere. A journalist, for example, can use their degree, the publications they’ve had their work published in, and even their background as a way to pronounce their credibility to their audience.
The more work you do to get your name out there on multiple platforms, the more your audience will trust you. This doesn’t mean you need to be a staff writer, however. Instead, it means you establish yourself and are vetted by other names.
A good way to boost credibility regardless of your job type is to collaborate. Engage and talk with other leaders in your field. See if they’d want to do an interview with you, or if they’d want to work on a project together.
Just as in a traditional career path where networking is great to help you get jobs or open up new opportunities, collaborating is a great way to establish a thriving online presence.
Get Out Beyond the Screen
Another great way to increase your credibility and improve your career is to take your marketing and PR efforts beyond the screen. Ultimately you’ll want to work towards being a guest speaker, a panelist, or even to those events and workshops of your own. Teaching others can quickly mean becoming a leader in your field, because other companies and professionals look to you for guidance, not the other way around.
Know How to Leverage Your Online Brand
Having an audience is great, but if you aren’t leveraging that attention properly it can end up being a wasted effort. You can do so much when you have engagement. You can use your audience to help you get a top job position, or can even use them as the support that you need to finally break away and try to make a career in your field of your own.
In today’s economy, you won’t want to settle on just one career. Having multiple income streams establishes you as a professional and gives you the buffer necessary to try new ventures that will make your career your own.
Accept Direct Donations
One of the best ways to monetize your efforts at establishing a digital brand online is to accept direct donations. One of the most popular platforms that lets you do this and offer value back is Patreon. On Patreon, your audience can pledge to donate a monthly amount. The more they pledge, the more rewards they get in return. The rewards can be VIP content, the ability to access a Q&A, or even merchandise. There are a lot of ways that you can thank your supporters for making it possible to take your career independently.
Sponsorships and Advertising
Sponsorships and advertising are classics. Almost every online brand today that offers content for free pays the bills through advertising or sponsorship. So long as you make it obvious what products or services you’re being paid to advertise, and which ones you actively just recommend, you can earn a good wage with this method.
Networking
Your audience is a collection of people in the same field as you! They are therefore a great network to have, and not just to help you get new job opportunities. You can work with your audience to collaborate and create new and exciting projects. You can meet new people, or expose yourself to unique new platforms. When you consider the fact that an audience is just a one-sided network, you start to realize that there is a lot you can do to extract valuable information and opportunities from it. That’s why it’s important to engage with your audience as an active participant.
