A Strategy Centered Around Solely Gaining Followers is Not a Solid Strategy

I’ve found, in my career as a strategist and designer, that writers and bloggers often want the benefits and rewards of influence without first building the framework for having influence in the first place. It’s the equivalent of having an amazing book to share on the subject of social media and having only 24 followers. You have great ideas, but you haven’t done the work to foster a social media presence to have even an ounce of influence online. People will not take you seriously. You need to get it together if you want to have influence and make sales online, which means you have to do the work.

Taking Shortcuts /= Quick Strategy

Where writers and bloggers tend to take shortcuts, which dynamically impacts their influence, is their visual content. Many use stock photos online that are overused. They’ll pick any image that fits and post their article. There’s no strategy in place if you’re doing this. You are going to continue to fail at social media and having an influential presence online (whether you’re a romance writer or a lifestyle blogger) if you don’t focus on things like this. And if you don’t fail, you could be doing soooo much better if you put some effort into it.

Do the Work

Doing the work to have a solid visual content plan in place means you have to spend time cultivating your visual assets – choosing your pictures wisely for a consistent theme, designing your posts for a vivid presentation, and scheduling everything at the appropriate times using scheduling software.

You need to get it together.

Here’s the good news and bad news: No one is going to do the visual content work for you unless you pay them., unfortunately. You will not reap any rewards of sales and followers – books or product or otherwise – if you do not work on your visual content. So either you need to do it yourself or hire someone. Fortunately, there are people out there (like me), who excel at this kind of thing. Visual content (digital media producers) providers can whip up amazing graphics – dozens of them – to get you going so you can focus on other things. So be sure to check out my shop for Canva templates that are easy to use and will help you get the job done quickly.

Regardless, people are not going to just come to you to buy your book or product or follow you online if you don’t given them a reason to do so. Having excellent visual content to entertain your audience is the key. If you post consistently, format your images for each social media’s style, use fresh, stylized images that are popular and representative of your brand, and put out good content, you’ll be successful.