How to Find Your Focus

Welcome to The Spark Show! In this episode, I’ll be covering: 

- How to find your focus as an influencer

- What you should be focused on depending on what stage you’re on 

- My top tips to keep your focus when you get distracted

How to find your focus as an influencer:

1. Know your priorities

When you know what’s important, you will prioritize what you need to do first. This comes with planning and preparation. One thing I like to do is to break down my goals by year, then by quarter, then by month, by week and then by day. 

If you know what the priority is for that day, then you can plan your day and you’re not spending your time figuring out what you’re supposed to be doing. 

2. Focus on one thing at a time

Multi-tasking is NOT a good thing. Someone somewhere said it was good to do as many things as you can at a time. But what that does is it takes away the focus from the ONE thing that you’re supposed to be doing. 

Since we have limited energy and resources, the more you split that up, the less growth and progress you’ll see happening when you’re doing multiple things. 

An analogy I like to use is the bucket of water and plants. If you have one bucket of water, let’s just say that’s your energy and resources, if it goes to just one plant then the plant will grow faster. If you split up the bucket of water, the plants will get less water and will take longer to grow. 

It’s the same with your focus. If you only focus on one things at a time. You will get more done and you will make more progress rather than doing multiple things. Another thing that supports this is a concept called context switching. 

Context switching is the thing that happens when you move from one task to another. There’s time in-between that your brain and body needs to switch to the next thing. Studies have shown that it takes time for someone to start a new task or project, that’s why it’s best to group or batch similar tasks together.

Here’s an action plan for you: write down all the tasks that you need to accomplish as an influencer: creating content (which you can break down into filming, shooting, recording, editing, publishing, going LIVE, etc), responding to emails and messages, editing, and all the other stuff. Then I want you to batch those together and plan your schedule with as little context switching as possible. 

What you should be focused on:

I wanna talk about the 5 Stages of Influencer Success: 

Stage One: Build My Brand

If you are first starting out, this is what you should be focused on. This is about building a solid foundation for your brand by knowing exactly who your audience is, getting into your analytics, surveying your audience. And knowing who you are as a brand - your mission and brand identity. 

Most influencers do not take the time to focus on this at all. They usually start with just posting content and growing their following without intention and strategy. 

Stage Two: Map My Strategy

Once you’ve built a solid foundation for your brand and you know who your audience is and who you are as a brand, you’ll want to map out your strategy. This means that you’re focused on how to deliver value through your content. 

Only after this do you focus on growth…

Stage Three: Grow My Influence

As an influencer, we want to reach more people to help more people. But we can’t lose focus on the people who are following us now, even if that’s only 10, 100, or 1,000 people. So many influencers are just wanting MORE followers and they don’t even know what to do with those people, what to say or how to provide value for them. 

In this stage, you should be focused on engaging with your audience and communicating with them on a daily basis. Once you’re building your brand, mapping your strategy and growing your influence on a consistent basis, it’s time to build your portfolio. 

Stage Four: Build My Portfolio 

If you want to start working with brands then it’s time to start building your portfolio and getting brand collaborations. If you’re doing Stage 1,2, and 3 right, then you may get brands reaching out to you directly. If you’re not, it’s up to you to start attracting these brands (this is what I teach people how to do inside The Spark Society VIP) and building a connection with them. That way, you can start adding collabs into your influencer portfolio which includes your media kit, rate card and case studies. 

Stage Five: Monetize My Influence

In this next stage, it’s time for you to start monetizing. This should only be your focus if you’re consistently working on the other 4 stages. A lot of influencers start monetizing through brand sponsorships first. At this stage, influencers can start pitching to brands directly for collaborations and partnerships. There’s also other ways to monetize including affiliate marketing, selling products and services, and events. 

If you’re already in Stage 5, one thing I teach influencers to do is to launch a digital offer in 90 days. I love teaching influencers how to do this because I’ve learned that brand sponsorships are great but it’s not a sustainable form of revenue and you also have an audience that you can help right now. 

If you’ve been thinking of launching a digital offer like a course, membership or program, I’d love for you to schedule a free breakthrough call with me or my team to see if we can help. We only wanna work with people who are serious about helping others and making an impact, and those who have already gone through these Stage 1,2,3, and 4. 

This is not for beginners who are just starting out and just want to get brand deals, that’s what the Spark Society VIP membership is for. But for those of you who are already in Stage 5 and want to launch a digital offer, I’ll put a link on this post and in the comments with a link to apply for a free breakthrough call. 

Lastly, I wanna give you my top tips on how to stay focused when you get distracted. 

We all get distracted. There’s Netflix, Hul,  social media black hole, dating apps and FOMO. One episode becomes one season and you’re on Instagram and the next thing you know, three hours have gone by. 

So here are my top 5 tips to stay focused:

1. Use time-blocking and only give yourself one task to do, one hour at a time. 
2. Limit your social media to just 30-minutes at time: set a timer, use parental controls.
3. Plan ahead. Plan out your year, quarter, month, week and days. Make a plan to plan. 
4. Only do one thing at a time. Multi-tasking is not the smart way to do things. 
5. Give yourself some slack. I know you want to get everything done but there are only so many hours in a day, you only have so much energy. So you wanna make sure that 

Listen to the full episode here:

Book a call with Gwen: 

thesparksociety.org/call

Listen to Previous Episodes: 

Stop Self Doubt featuring Aditya Jaykumar

How to Be Your Own Producer

How to Run Your Business While Traveling

To Video or Not to Video

How to Grow on YouTube featuring Erika Vieira

How to Create an Influencer Business Plan

How to Launch Your First Digital Project featuring Danielle Prahl

Answering the Question: What Do you Do?

Passion to Paycheck featuring Erika De La Cruz

How to Avoid Burnout

The CEO Mindset featuring Ali Daniel

                      Connect with Gwen Lane

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