By TRISHA VELARMINO | psimonmyway.com

(PART 1 OF 2 PARTS)

I have witnessed a lot of Blogger A followers vs Blogger B followers face-offs that were truly entertaining and at the same time off. As a social media marketer, I find audience behavior a very amusing (and interesting) subject so I keep up with the business trends by focusing on this model.

When an Influencer builds a loyal following, that troop will do anything and everything for you come hell or high water. Even if we don’t have any idea where they are getting the time and energy to spend on a person they don’t know, they will still do it.

Why?

This is a very solid proof that social media influencers are running this world. Advertisers often find it difficult to gauge the real relationship between a follower and an Influencer as “follower buying” is very rampant. But for some social media influencers who have built a tribe, everything comes easy.

Building a tribe

The first thing I learned when I built this blog was having a tribe is important. I wouldn’t know how my blogging life would be if it wasn’t because of the loyal readers who have supported and loved me throughout this journey. I don’t have millions of followers because I don’t want a lot – I want a loyal troop. I want people who will not treat me as a celebrity, but as an equal. A friend. A confidant.

Every day, I reply to hundreds of emails because I don’t want to ignore the people who took time reading my blog. Come on! They tell you they’ve been spending three hours on your blog and you can’t even give three minutes to answer back? Not cool. Remember that when you answer reader messages, that’s when they get converted into a loyal audience.

I am often called the woman who doesn’t sleep and has time for everything and anyone. I had the itch to know my “followers” on a personal level so I created a Facebook group where we can all chat as normal people and share the same hopes and dreams.

No, no, no… The group is not all about me. The group is not about asking people to like my Instagram photos, or share my blog links. This group is small and I am very happy to see that everyone is very interactive and friendly. To the point that some of them already became friends and travelled together just because of the group!

Aside from creating a Facebook group, I made sure to arrange a meet-up wherever I was in the world. I didn’t even think someone from Slovenia or Georgia was reading me! It’s refreshing to put a face on the overwhelming comments I receive. It helps me become a better travel blogger because meeting them personally gives me the opportunity to know what they want and to take my content in different levels.

If there’s one thing I learned about the Influencer-follower relationship, it’s about attracting the person that you are. Sure, we all write good content. But when we are promoting the posts, we will never get everyone to follow us because it’s not their cup of tea. Every blogger will have his audience that will favor his content. We can’t have everyone.

‘How to be you po’ gone wrong

There’s this writer dude over at Thought Catalog (Sorry, I couldn’t find the link) who kept trash talking the rave about traveling and travel bloggers. He said that traveling is not the future, and that you could do greater things by staying in the corporate world. He even said that travellers do nothing and that got my eyebrows raised. But the remark that ticked my patience meter off was about travel bloggers posing in bikinis just to get shitloads of Instagram likes.

While I don’t often post pictures of me in bikinis, I have friends who do and it really bothers me when you question what other people do for a living. As always, this is free journalism – the writer dude is entitled to whatever he wants to write about, even if the whole world won’t agree with his opinion on traveling and travel blogging.

Damn it, I wish people knew that our life as travel bloggers is not easy.

But I also realized there is some truth in what he wrote. No matter what we do, sex sells. People will always like nearly nude photos and girls in bikinis. The world is becoming more and more radical that this type of content is acceptable anywhere. As social media influencers, one thing we have to ask ourselves is: How do we want our followers to look at us? How do we want to lead a good example?

(To be continued)