Want to become an influencer? These 4 principles matter more than follower counts

Want to become an influencer? Why not? Everyone else does.

According to a 2023 Morning Consult survey of 1000 young people, 57 per cent said they’d choose it as a career. Even more surprising, 41 per cent of all adults surveyed said they want to become influencers too. And with good reason. It pays well, looks like fun, lets people do what they love, and often comes with free products, travel, perks and status. What’s not to love?

Unlike many from the legacy media era and older generations, these up-and-coming founders understand something many traditional businesses still don’t: attention is the new currency.

I recently interviewed 40 of Australia’s top online entrepreneurs and content creators about how they built their audiences and businesses. One thing became very clear: in today’s digital economy, visibility matters.

Despite what many people think, you can build a following quickly, but there are four principles worth understanding first.

1. Just post

As difficult as it is, you need to post consistently and frequently. Yes, you might be talking to the void and get no likes, shares, or comments at the start, but that’s part of the process.

Look at Alix Earle. She posted ‘Get Ready With Me’ videos on TikTok for years with very little traction, then, seemingly overnight, something clicked and she went viral. She’s since appeared on America’s Dancing with the Stars, has more than 5 million Instagram followers and a thriving beauty business.    

Adele Samus was a Sydney actress working in a fashion store while trying to land an acting agent and paid work. She turned her observations about fashion and customers into funny social media skits that quickly resonated with audiences online. Those videos led to an agent, paid stunt work and eventually a role in Ryan Gosling’s film The Fall Guy. All because she kept posting.

2. Pay to play

If you’re serious about building a global business, then it pays to hire a serious influencer. That’s what Shaun Wilson did when he wanted to launch his Bondi Sands tanning business onto the world market. He paid Kylie Jenner $300,000 for one post, it went viral and landed in the feeds of the buyers at Walgreens and Walmart in America – the exact market he wanted to crack.

The retailers knew the brand before the sales meeting even began, which meant he went from being seen as a low-level contender to a serious partner who could deliver a new generation of customers to their pharmacy door. He sealed the deal and went on to sell his business for $450 million after just 12 years of operation.

3. Find your passion

My friend Jen is a cat lady. She has eight of them (and five dogs as well). You could say she loves her pets. She’s not an influencer, doesn’t have a media profile, and only posted for fun and family. She simply cared deeply about rescuing cats and helping them find foster homes.

To spread the word about her foster cat program, she started posting videos about the elaborate cat enclosure she’d built on her regional NSW property. It had multi-level climbing walls, rope bridges, hammocks, tunnels and outdoor runs. It was the Taj Mahal for cats. Within a few weeks, she’d gone from zero followers to more than 10,000. She’s since had pet companies clamouring to work with her, offering brand collaborations, free cat food, litter, accessories and even an offer for her to feature on the cover of a pet magazine.

Jen never set out to build a profile or source brand deals, but she succeeded because she had the courage to speak from her heart and solve a problem that was real and meaningful to her and others.

4. Be authentic

Journalist Kate Halfpenny writes for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. A while ago, she wrote an article about her ‘reverse sea change’. She’d moved from Melbourne to the coastal town of Ocean Grove, but missed city life, so she and her husband rented a small apartment back in Melbourne as an urban base so they could visit family and friends. To her, the article was a stock-standard lifestyle piece.

Readers saw it very differently. The backlash was immediate and brutal. More than a thousand comments flooded the masthead’s Facebook page accusing her of contributing to Australia’s housing crisis and rental shortage. Death threats followed, to herself, her mum, her children and her dog.

“It was harrowing,” she said. “I double checked the gates at night and spent a long time thinking about: was it worth it?”

She decided to not let the trolls have their way, to persist and just keep writing what she knew. Besides, she had to. “I needed the money,” she said.

A few weeks after the article went live, a publisher got in touch. “You’ve clearly touched a nerve here,” he said. “Would you like to write your memoir and tell your life story?”

That memoir became Boogie Wonderland, and it launched a whole new chapter of her career. Would she have been offered that book deal had those thousand people not posted comments? Probably not, but she did, and the book deal followed because she wrote from the heart about a topic that was authentic to her and it cut through.

In a world drowning in content, attention has become a valuable business asset. The people and brands winning today understand that visibility is no longer vanity, it’s leverage. Whether it’s a cat rescuer building a loyal following or Shaun Wilson turning Bondi Sands into a $450 million global brand, the principle is the same: attention creates opportunity.