Do any of these scenarios sound familiar to you?

  • Your friends and colleagues always ask for your advice every time they encounter problems or if they are having difficulty in making a decision.

  • Your boss or your company's HR head often asks you for new applicant referrals. They believe you can recommend good people to work in the company.

  • You are flexible at work and can do almost anything your boss asks you to do. You can multi-task and you can easily adapt to new changes.

  • You can easily build long-lasting relationships with your peers, colleagues and even people from your acquaintance circle, and you keep up with these key relationships on a regular basis.

If you can relate to any of the above statements, then most likely you have what it takes to be an influencer. If you are already aware that you can influence people, you need to learn effective ways to improve your ability to sway people's opinions and also encourage them to become good influencers themselves.

Yesterday, Promotional Consultant Today shared four key qualities of a highly effective influencer. Today, we wrap up this series with four more.

1. Improve your interpersonal relationship skills. This is a basic foundation of being an influencer. If you want to influence more people, you also need to learn how to deal appropriately with various types of personalities.

2. Maintain strong principles. Authority and credibility are just two of the most important factors that affect your reputation and effectiveness as an influencer. Maintaining strong principles and taking a firm stand on your beliefs is an effective way to gain more credibility, thus helping you become a better influencer.

3. Follow your most loyal followers. This is more appropriate if you are a social media influencer. Follow your loyal followers, especially if they are also influencers in their field. Influencing the influencers in the online marketing world is more preferable as this can result to higher network reach, an increase in referral traffic and better social signals.

4. Make yourself available. The more you get yourself out there and gain exposure, the more people will think of you when they need the opinion of an expert. You can do this by sharing your expertise through blogs, industry presentations, leadership roles in your industry associations and interviews. Share your knowledge and make yourself easily available to others by making your contact details easy to find.

If you follow these key steps, you will soon be an influencer with the ability to affect positive change in your work and community.

Source: Qamar Zaman is the chief visionary at Oxygen Marketing Group.