Sunday evenings are easily the busiest times of the week for me.

Between meal prepping for the week, some left over cleaning from Saturday, braiding the toddler's hair and picking out our clothes for the week ahead, there is hardly much time left to put my feet up and enjoy the rest-day, Sunday, is set to be.

You can imagine my excitement when I received a link to a Facebook Live Influencer Marketing discussion hosted by the Communication Master class's Mawuli Fui Kwadzovia with his guest, a media personality, Naa Ashorkor Mensah- Doku. That's because, I could go about my business while ‘relaxing’ to a nice little chat around influencer marketing.

So, while still braiding the toddler's hair, I put on my headphones, turned up the volume of her cartoons and plugged myself into the discussion.

Naa Ashorkor discussed her journey as an influencer from how she positions herself to be seen by brands she'd like to work with, brand relations as an influencer, to some best practices she has found to be beneficial to her brand as an influencer.

One thing that was consistent throughout the conversation was the need for influencers to stick to their niche and be true to their audiences.

Discovering your niche is one of the very first steps towards becoming an influencer and determines all other factors that follow. So, how do you identify your niche? Below are some questions, to help you filter through, to find your niche.

Interests

Yes, you may have many but which one, could you talk about endlessly if allowed? The idea here is to be able to consistently create valuable content around your interest. So if this is something you could easily get bored talking about, it's probably not a good idea to pick this as a niche.

Your Everyday Life

Perhaps like Naa Ashorkor, you are a mother, passionate about fitness, female empowerment and issues surrounding motherhood. Ideally, you may pick one of these areas or customise your niche to reflect your everyday life, in this case, you would be considered a lifestyle influencer. While this route may seem more appealing, it is important to create healthy boundaries from the onset when developing your strategy as an influencer.

Although you may be sharing content around different subjects, you need to tie them into a single focus. For instance, if you are a student but identify as a lifestyle influencer, you may want to curate content around fitness and how it ties into being a student, fashion and how this ties into being a student etc. Thus, if I were a student looking for affordable places to buy clothes, I may visit your page because I know you post such content.

Your niche should be so clearly defined to the extent that when your audience is looking for insight on a particular issue they know your page is where they would find answers. It is also easier for brands to work with niche influencers, because they can easily identify ones that share in their brand promise.

Tying it all back in, you know you are on the right track as an influencer if you can create a seamless flow between your organic posts and your sponsored posts, because you've stayed true to your niche and your audience.

There are more steps, within the sequence, to take when starting the journey to become an influencer. Well done on taking the first step of discovering your niche. Lookout for the next steps to becoming an influencer, coming soon in an article here.

In the meantime, find below a list of niche groups that you may find appealing on your journey in this exciting space of influencer marketing, this is a non-exhaustive list of the possibilities out there.

They are; Beauty, Fashion, Lifestyle, Family/ Parenting, Motherhood, Food, Travel, Entrepreneurship/ Business, Gaming, Relationship and Sustainability.