Step 1: Identify Your Niche

One of the most important things to think about when it comes to your niche is to know what is unique about you. This allows you to put your own spin on things based on your personality and experiences. Knowing yourself and defining what makes you unique can help you build a brand based on authenticity and grow your sphere of influence. The more you care about your niche, the more successful you will become.

Trying to become a creator without first identifying your niche is like working as a personal stylist and styling your client without knowing the first thing about their taste. As the expert, how are you supposed to build their dream outfit without first knowing their preferred color palette, hobbies, or daily lifestyle? In this example, helping someone add to their wardrobe or home is a deeply personal process, because the decisions are intentional and driven by a sense of individualism and personal taste.

The same goes for working as a creator! As a creator, your audience will look to you to curate shoppable products and trends for them. Once you start to build a following, those followers will come to you when considering any product, service, or idea. Committing to a niche and staying consistent within that realm is crucial to building credibility with your audience and the brands you work with.

Some popular (and easy to monetize) creator niches to consider:

When considering a creator niche, take into account not only your skills, but also what you’re genuinely interested in and passionate about. Look to your everyday life to inspire your content! This will make content creation and your creator business feel organic and natural, ensuring you’ll have continuous long term content opportunities. Keep in mind you can always expand into new verticals in the future as your audience grows with you. But it’s always best practice to stick to a specific niche when starting out. This will help you narrow down your target audience so you’ll know how to promote your content.

Step 2: Select Your Platform

Once you’ve chosen your niche, it’s time to narrow down which platform you want to focus on. Choosing your primary social media platform will depend on the type of content you want to produce and the goal behind the content. It’s also important to determine where your niche’s audience spends time.

Typically, creators will have one to two primary media platforms they focus on to promote and amplify their shoppable content. This allows you to invest time and energy into creating the best content without spreading yourself too thin. Creating content for each media platform takes a different approach. Over time, you can add additional social channels to promote your content and drive traffic to your primary platform or shop. This will be important once you start monetizing your content!

A few of the most popular platforms on the rise for creators include YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. Here are a few examples:

Ultimately, it’s up to you to determine the best media channel for your use case and personal preference/comfort level.

Once you’ve identified your best channel(s), it’s time to optimize your profiles. This is your chance to personalize and align with your overall brand, and allow audiences to find you! What do you want to tell people about yourself? What do you represent? How do you want your audience to feel when visiting your page? Here are the first steps to getting your preferred media channels set-up:

1. Switch to a business or creator account. Most media platforms offer this as an option to access audience and content insights, monetize your channels, and receive helpful best practices or trending content ideas.

2. Update your profile with an image of yourself. This is how the world will see you so put your best foot forward with a picture that lets your audience see who you are. Avoid distracting backgrounds or images that include other people. You and your business should be the focus here!

3. Write a bio that exemplifies your brand. (We know, it’s tough to do in so few characters... but the right bio makes a huge difference!) Most platforms actually pull profiles into their search feature, so make sure to use specific keywords in your bio that explain who you are, what kind of content you produce, or what you have to offer. This way your profile will potentially show up in the search results for someone looking for content creators like you! Some creators even include details like their apparel/shoe sizes, height, other social handles, and link to their shop.

IG Bio Examples:

Step 3: Understand Your Audience

Similar to choosing the right platform for you, understanding your creator target audience is a crucial step in creating the most impactful content. Think about your audience: Who are they? How can you best connect with them? What do you know about your audience and what resonates with them? This starts with some research!

Start with a simple Google search. Try searching for a handful of keywords or phrases that revolve around your niche. From here, you’ll scroll to the bottom of your search results and see what the related searches are. These tell you what your target audience is generally interested in, helping you to navigate what to produce content around that will resonate with those audiences.

You can also run a search to see what “competitors” are posting. You don’t necessarily need to see other creators as competition, but instead look to those who have already paved the way in your niche and built an audience by delivering content that their audience enjoys. Take some notes on how they’re positioning themselves on social media and see where you can lean in!

You can do similar audience research within your primary platform as well. Search different keywords relating to your niche on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest to see what kind of content pops up. Look at related hashtags, content, and profiles that surface in results to understand who your target audience follows and the type of content they engage with. Do some digging with hashtags or related trending search terms for future content ideas as well!

Lastly, if you’ve already started posting content, use data to your advantage! Pay attention to content metrics to see how audiences are finding your content and engaging with it. What are
they liking? Commenting on? Clicking? Asking questions about? Knowing what is working well will give you insight into what audiences are enjoying. Keep producing similar content along the same theme or content type and keep an eye on engagement metrics. You can also get demographics data on certain media platforms which will tell you age, location, and interests of your audience.

Step 4: Create A Content Strategy

Now that you know which niche you’re focusing on and who your content will be geared toward, the next step is creating your creator content strategy.

Your content strategy should align closely with your overall personality, skills, and brand. The most successful social media marketing is a result of the creator’s presence fitting seamlessly into the audience’s feed. Keep your daily schedule and lifestyle in mind when developing a content and posting strategy.

No matter what platform you’re focusing on, you’ll need to determine the format, schedule, and overall goals of the post.

Format
When selecting the appropriate format, you will want to consider how much time you need to adequately deliver your message, which will help you narrow down your options:

Will you be promoting something that can easily be touched on in a couple of quick but visual Instagram stories, like a new face mask you’re trying? Or is the product best displayed in a longer video format that features you explaining how to use it -- such as a YouTube or IGTV video? Maybe a blog post is necessary if it needs to be longer form content. This all depends on the context of what’s being shared!

Schedule
Keeping a posting and promotional schedule will not only help you stay on track, but help you plan content in advance so you’re never left scrambling at the last minute to come up with posts on the spot. This will become especially beneficial during busy seasons like the holidays or when you start accepting brand partnerships. The most successful creators are posting at least daily, and up to
ten times per day. Experiment with different posting times to identify when your audience is most engaged.

Overall Goals
Determine what your overall goal is for the piece of content you’re posting or promoting. Is your goal to drive sales? Are you looking to drive awareness to a brand? Is the post intended to promote another channel such as YouTube, TikTok or your blog? Determining your goal of the post ahead of time will help you craft your caption or description so you know how to position and promote the post.

We have some great resources to help guide your content strategy including a monthly content planning calendar that includes seasonal content ideas based on trending topics in the LTK App. We also offer the option to schedule your posts in advance so your followers are most likely to see and engage with your shoppable content. Our goal is to always provide you with best practices to continue to grow your business.

Step 5: Post Consistently

Now that you’ve developed your personal brand, know the audience you’re targeting, and have agreed on what and how you’ll be posting, it’s time to plan out your content!

As mentioned, planning out your content is one of the best ways to stay organized and remain consistent with your posting. Growing your creator business and becoming a full-time creator takes time. The more consistent you are with content across your platforms, the more followers you’ll grow over time, along with a dedicated audience that engages with and shops your content.

You want to create both a posting schedule and a promotional schedule to ensure you’re taking advantage of cross-channel promotion. Every time you post one of your primary platforms, be sure to promote that post across your other channels. Whether it’s video or images, you can easily promote your content cross-platform.

For example, if you post an Instagram Reel, be sure to promote that within your Instagram Stories, add it to your Instagram Feed, pin it to Pinterest, or post the video to TikTok! You can use different hashtags, keywords, or tactics to gain traction across all channels depending on the type of content to help increase visibility and bring in new audiences.

Content promotion is also a great way to stay active and consistent on platforms, without having to create brand new content every time. And remember, each platform has a different audience which gives you the opportunity to repurpose content across different channels.

As long as you stay consistent, you and your personal brand are bound to thrive!

Step 6: Engage With Your Audience

While consistency is key for growing your audiences, engagement is crucial in order to maintain your following long term. It’s important to think of your following as a small community. Taking the effort to build trust and loyalty among that community just makes it stronger and able to thrive more over time! Here are some unique ways creators can grow their audience:

Step 7: Start Monetizing Your Content

At LTK, our goal is to provide you, as an creator, with all the tools you need to build a successful creator business. Whether you’ve just begun your journey as an online content creator or have fully submerged yourself into the creator industry for some time, with these tried and true steps, you’re well on your way to becoming a full-time creator:

1. Identify Your Niche

2. Select Your Platform

3. Understand Your Audience

4. Create A Content Strategy

5. Post Consistently

6. Engage With Your Audience

Once you’ve completed these steps, the next step is to start earning money for your shoppable content. Creators earn money in a wide variety of ways:

1. Commissions via affiliate links where brands compensate a creator when their followers use their links to purchase products - this is where LTK comes into play! We provide you with the tools to create links to your favorite products to share with your audiences across any platform including the LTK shopping app, where millions of app users can shop your content!

2. Brand Collaborations where creators are paid an agreed rate for creating and/or sharing content; this could be sponsored blog posts, IG Stories,YouTube videos, etc. At LTK, we connect you with top brands across the globe who are looking for creators just like you that can drive earnings and brand awareness.

3. Brand ambassador or representative, where an creator and brand enter into an extended contract that is mutually beneficial.

4. Co-creation of product lines, where creators partner with a brand to launch a product collectively.

This article includes content originally published for LTK by top content creators @mossonyi, @nadiaanya__, @amelialiana, and @wearetwinset.