Want to become an influencer? Or maybe you’re looking to earn more from your existing social media account? Then welcome to our guide to becoming a top-earning influencer!
If you’ve found yourself on this webpage, then you’ve already taken the first step to becoming a successful influencer: harnessing a business mindset. Step two? Creating an influencer business plan.
An influencer business plan is a comprehensive roadmap to building and launching a viable career as an influencer. It helps you define your goals, develop your content and marketing plans, and implement your monetization strategy, so you can stay on-track and earn the most from your influencer career.
Read on for tips to start raking it in as an influencer, and check out our Influencer Business Plan Template. It helps you create and deploy your influencer business plan quickly and easily, with step-by-step instructions, helpful writing prompts, and fillable tables that ensure you don’t miss a beat when it comes to building a solid business plan. Get it for free!
Why create a business plan as an influencer?
So, why should you create a business plan as an influencer? First of all, reframing your social media account as a business will help you actually run it like a business. By making business-oriented decisions about your social media presence, you’ll be able to better target your dream audience, make more strategic content decisions, and, ultimately, earn more money.
While it might be tempting to start creating content and reaching out to brands, like, right now, the truth is that creating a well thought out-business plan actually makes it easier to run and maintain your influencer business in the long run.
On top of that, there are lots of different short and long-term benefits to developing a business plan as an influencer. These include:
- Creating better content: Engaging in strategic planning ensures you’re creating content that’s aligned with your goals and your audience’s interests, which in turn boosts your engagement and grows your audience.
- Building a strong personal brand: Identifying your target market and strategically planning your content help you build a strong personal brand, which boosts your credibility and brand recognition.
- Reaching your target audience: Developing a comprehensive marketing strategy helps you better target and reach the people who will love your content — and want to support you with cash.
- Setting yourself apart from the competition: Bolstering your personal brand and creating content based on your goals sets you apart from the competition within the crowded digital market.
- Achieve your goals faster: Setting clear objectives helps you plot out your map to influencer superstardom, so you stay on track and reach your goals in record time.
Sure, each of these benefits are great on their own. Taken together, however, they’ll ensure you’re making the most out of — and earning the most from — your influencer business.
How to create a business plan as an influencer
Now that you’re aware of all the income-generating benefits of creating a business plan for your social media account, it’s time to start building your influencer business plan. Here’s how to do it in six simple steps:
- Define your personal brand
- Identify your target audience
- Build a content strategy
- Create an email marketing strategy
- Develop your monetization strategy
- Create a budget
Step 1: Define your personal brand
Before you can start building out your content strategy, you’ll need to understand who you are and what you stand for as a creator. And that’s why the very first step in creating your business plan is defining your personal brand.
If you’ve spent some time in the influence sphere, you’re probably familiar with the term “personal brand.” In case you need a refresher, however, personal branding is the practice of defining and promoting your unique value proposition as an influencer. To put it differently, your personal brand represents how you want your audience to see you, which includes things like your values, your offering, your messaging, and your visual identity.
Defining your personal brand has a number of benefits for influencers. First and foremost, a strong personal brand lends you credibility in the eyes of your following. Knowing what you stand for and how to communicate it enables you to create consistent and authentic-feeling content, which helps build trust with your audience.
Secondly, having a solid personal brand also garners you higher brand recognition, which sets you apart from the competition. In other words, having well-defined messaging and visuals enables you to create distinctive content, which helps you stand out in the crowded digital media market.
Want to define your personal brand? Our free Influencer Business Plan Template walks you through the personal branding process with helpful writing prompts and fillable tables, so you can craft a stellar brand identity today.
Step 2: Identify your target audience
Now that you’re created an iron-clad personal brand, it’s time to identify your target audience.
So, who are they? And why do you need to understand them? First off, your target audience is the specific group of people who will most benefit from your content (and any products you might create in the future). Getting a clear picture of your target audience (from their demographics to their pain points) is crucial to creating your business plan, because these are the people you’ll be tailoring your content, marketing efforts, and, eventually, your products towards.
Conduct a competitor analysis
To identify your target audience, you’ll need to engage in a little bit of every creator’s favorite task: market research. In this case, you’ll be conducting competitor research.
For this step, you’ll create a list of competing influencers within your niche, analyze their unique strengths and weaknesses, and then describe how you’re different — or better! To do this, you’ll need to check out your competitors’ social media accounts to gain an understanding of their content, marketing, and monetization strategies. With this data, you can piece together their unique value proposition and target audience.
Competitor analysis helps you determine which audiences your competitors are targeting and how they’re doing it. The conclusions you come to during your research are useful to your business plan for a few reasons. Firstly, they alert you to any opportunities for differentiation and to potential gaps in the market that you can fill with your unique value as an influencer. Secondly, they can help you identify (and target) audiences that you hadn’t previously considered.
Keep in mind that your target audience is a segment of your podcasting niche’s larger target market. This means that you’ll need to get pinpoint precise when defining it. For example, let’s say you’re a personal finance influencer. Rather than targeting absolutely everyone between the ages of 25 and 35, you might want to instead focus on single women within this age range who are living in metropolitan areas. This amount of specificity will help you zone in on your audience’s pain points, so you can create the content and products that will resonate with them.
Find your target audience (today)
Want to identify your target audience, like, right now? Our Target Audience Templates Bundle helps you understand your target audience’s needs quickly, so you can start creating the content (and products) they’ll want.
Step 3: Build a content strategy
Now that you’ve defined your personal brand and target audience, it’s time to dive into the fun stuff. Yes, that means it’s time to finally start building your content strategy.
For this step, you’ll be choosing the social media platforms you want to use, determining the type of content you want to create, and hammering out your publishing schedule:
- Choose your social media platform
- Brainstorm content topics
- Define your content pillars
- Determine your upload schedule
Choose your social media platform
Before you can start brainstorming content ideas, you’ll need to decide on which content platform (or platforms!) you’ll be using as an influencer.
This choice depends on two factors: first, your audience’s preferences, and second, your preferences as a creator. When choosing your social media platform, think about where your audience hangs out online and how they like to consume content. If they prefer watching long-form video, then YouTube is the likely choice. Do they prefer bite-sized content? Then you might want to go with short-form video platforms like TikTok or Instagram, and harness the power of YouTube Shorts as an auxiliary platform.
While the typical influencer usually has one “main” social media channel, it’s not uncommon for influencers to leverage multiple channels at once, using each for different purposes of types of content. For example, many Instagram influencers have adopted Threads as a venue to showcase more off-the-cuff, informal, and behind-the-scenes content.
Brainstorm content topics
Now that you’ve decided on your platform (or platforms!) of choice, it’s time to start brainstorming content ideas. For this step, you’ll want to consult both your niche and your target audience’s interests and needs. Think about what kinds of topics your audience finds interesting or valuable. Ask yourself what kinds of questions they want answers to, or pain points they want solutions for.
Want an example? Let’s return to the personal finance influencer from the last step. If you’re catered to an audience of cosmopolitan, single women between the ages of 25 and 35, then you’ll likely want to circle topics like budgeting, saving and investing, and renting versus buying property.
Define your content pillars
A solid content strategy rests on a set of strong pillars — content pillars, that is.
What are those, you ask? Content pillars are the key themes that you’ll focus on with your content. Most influencers’ content strategies are made up of a few different content pillars. Not only do well-defined pillars solidify your personal brand (since they come to define what you’re best known for as an influencer), they also give form to your content strategy, making it easier to brainstorm new topics and plot out your content calendar.
To define your pillars, consult the content topics you came up with in your brainstorm. Note any similarities between those topics and group them together into broader but distinct content categories.
Let’s return to our previous example of the personal finance influencer. Content pillars for a creator in this niche might be financial education (i.e. lessons on topics like investing, mortgages, and more), budgeting (i.e. monthly budget vlogs and interviews about how much others spend in a month), and financial apps and product reviews.
Determine your upload schedule
The last step in developing your influencer content strategy is plotting out your content publishing schedule. This means deciding when and how often you’ll upload new content on your social media channels.
When deciding on your posting frequency, you’ll want to keep in mind your audience’s preferences along with what’s reasonable for you as an influencer. While it might be tempting (and aspirational, even) to upload content three times a day, the fact is that if you’re not able to maintain that cadence, your content strategy and audience engagement will suffer.
During this step, keep in mind that consistency is key when it comes to influencer success (i.e. keeping your audience engaged and interested). Establishing a consistent upload schedule not only helps you manage your content strategy, but helps you build trust with your audience and generate hype for new content. This all means that you’ll want to create a reliable publishing schedule that you can stick with over time.
Want to build out your content strategy easily? Our Influencer Business Plan Template walks you through creating your content strategy with helpful writing prompts and fillable tables that will take you from ideation to implementation in just a few minutes.
Step 4: Create an email marketing strategy
Did you know that even in the era of TikTok, email marketing remains one of the most effective digital marketing strategies in existence? That’s right! And we’ve even got the numbers to back it up: on average, email marketing generates a ROI of $36 for every dollar spent. With that in mind, you’ll definitely want to leverage the power of email marketing in your influencer business plan.
As an influencer, email marketing is a powerful way to convert followers into paying customers and subscribers. In addition to its income-boosting powers, e-newsletters provide you with more control over your brand. Whereas your social media following is held at the mercy of third-party social apps and their fickle algorithms, your email list is an audience (and a marketing tool) that you actually own. And no one can take that away from you.
Build an email list
Before you can begin writing and sending out your email campaigns, you’ll need to build out an email list. What’s that? Your email list is the list of subscribers who will receive your marketing newsletters.
To build out your list, you’ll need to capture your audience’s email addresses. That might seem like a tall order but, luckily, in this day and age, there are tons of tools at your disposal to do just that. These include adding opt-in forms to your link-in-bio landing page, website, and online storefronts, as well as creating lead magnets and giving them away in exchange for your followers’ contact info.
Want to start building your email list today? The Leap makes it easy.
The Leap is an all-in-one creator store with features like an AI-powered digital product builder, a link-in-bio storefront tool, and an email marketing suite. In addition to helping you run email marketing campaigns, The Leap’s easy-to-use authoring tool empowers you to turn your digital products into lead magnets, which you can offer in exchange for your followers’ email addresses. In other words, it’s a powerful tool that helps you supercharge your email list easily.
The best part? It’s totally free! Try The Leap for free now.
Click here to start building your email list with The Leap today, for free.Step 5: Develop your monetization strategy
You’re not done with those strategic thinking skills just yet! Next on the docket: plotting out your business’s monetization strategy.
There are lots of ways to earn an income as an influencer, from brand partnerships to digital products. The revenue streams you pursue depend entirely on your audience’s needs, as well as your preferences and expertise as an influencer.
If you want to max out your income as an influencer, then you’ll want to leverage a combination of monetization methods at once. This might mean tapping into brand partnerships alongside selling digital products and subscriber-only content.
Here are a few of the most popular ways for influencers to earn an income right now:
Partnering with brands
Brand partnerships are an influencer’s bread and butter when it comes to earning money on social media.
So, how do brand partnerships and influencer campaigns work? Well, influencer marketing campaigns capitalize on an influencer’s, well, influence in order to helps brands sell products and services, and maximize their profits. Through these business initiatives, brands partner with influencers, paying them to promote and sell their products to their audience through sponsored content.
Typically, brands and influencers will settle on a set rate per sponsored post. The idea is that influencers with more followers will be able to negotiate higher rates from brand deals. Just how high are these rates? According to a recent report by Later, macro-influencers on Instagram can rake in about $7,000 per sponsored Reel, while smaller-scale influencers can earn anywhere from $55 to $155 per post — or $100 to $500 per Reel. That’s not an amount to sneeze at!
The trick to forging a great brand partnership is to only partner with brands that you yourself would use and support, and affiliating yourself with products that you believe in. Partnering with a brand just to turn a buck can rub your audience the wrong way and chip away at the trust you worked hard to build with them. Totally not worth it.
Selling digital products
Selling digital products — like mini-courses, tutorials, and templates — is one of the most lucrative and low-effort ways to earn money as an influencer. Why? Because digital products are a source of passive income, which means that once you’ve created them, you can just sit back as the sales — and cash — rolls in.
Even better? The Leap makes creating digital easier and faster than ever before.
The Leap’s AI-powered authoring tool helps you create profitable digital products in just minutes, while its link-in-bio storefront tool lets you sell them without ever leaving the platform. Once you’ve put your digital product up for sale, simply promote it on your social platforms to boost sales and max out your earnings.
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Selling subscriptions
Creating subscribers-only content is one of the most popular ways for influencers to earn an income.
So, how does selling subscriptions work? If you pay for services like Netflix or Amazon Prime, then you’re probably already familiar. When you set up a subscription, your subscribers will pay a monthly fee for access to exclusive, paywalled content and other perks. And your followers aren’t the only ones receiving perks from your subscriptions. Because they’re paid on a regular, recurring basis, subscriptions are a great source of recurring monthly income for you, which provides you with more stability within the creator economy.
As an influencer, there are a number of different approaches you can take to your subscription strategy. It almost goes without saying, but the rule of thumb for subscribers-only content is to offer your regular content for free and place “the good stuff” behind a paywall. This approach is effective because it provides prospective subscribers with a taste of your expertise, which drums up FOMO and gives them incentive to pay up to gain access to more of what you’re putting down. Other subscription strategies include selling bonus content and behind-the-scenes footage and providing subscribers with early access to your content.
From YouTube to Instagram, many of the most popular social media platforms allow you to set up subscription services and paywall content with just a few clicks. We suggest looking into the creator section on your social media platform of choice to learn how to set up subscriptions.
Step 6: Create a budget
If you want to set your influencer business up for (fiscal) success, you’ll need to create a budget. This means you’ll need to get clear on how much money you expect to bring in and just how much you expect to spend.
To create your financial plan, you’ll need to break down all of your different streams of income and calculate the revenue they bring in. On top of that, you’ll want to determine your business’s fixed and variable costs, along with your break-even point,
Want help creating your influencer business’s budget? With step-by-step instructions and helpful fillable tables, our Influencer Business Plan Template helps you create a comprehensive budget, from your revenue projections all the way to your break-even analysis.
Launch your influencer business today
So, there you have it: everything you need to launch a successful influencer business, all in one place. Now, it’s up to you to put this guide (and our helpful template) to good use and begin plotting out your route to becoming a mega-influencer.
Follow The Leap on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube for more monetization tips for creators. We also make a newsletter.
Further reading
- Instagram Money Calculator: Estimate How Much You Can Earn as an Influencer
- TikTok Money Calculator: Estimate How Much You Can Earn as a Creator
- How To Find Your Target Audience (+ Free Template)
- What Is a Lead Magnet and How To Create One (10 Ideas and Examples)
- How To Sell Digital Products Online: A 6-Step Launch Checklist
