21: Become a Social Media Influencer with Forbes #4 Gen Z Marketer Mehak Vohra

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Mehak Vohra cracked the code to becoming a social media sensation on three major platforms, and turning her popularity into a full time business. Starting out with YouTube, moving to Quora with hundreds of thousands of views, and most recently hacking virallity on LinkedIn, turning her influencer status into real money. Mehak shares with us her secrets to creating viral content and becoming an influencer, as well as the model for leveraging that to create a business. She also shares with us a very relatable struggle of consistency in business, specifically in regularly posting content and keeping up with your audience when you have a lot of other things going on, even when posting content is  what created and builds your primary business. The solution to this dilemma might surprise you.


My Guest: Mehak Vohra

Mehak Vohra is the founder and CEO of Jamocha Media. Mehak works primarily with early stage startups in user acquisition and social growth. She was #4 on Forbes Top 10 Gen Z Marketers list of 2017. She is the host of the internet show Daily Deck with Mehak where she talks about daily tech news.

At Jamocha Media, Mehak aims to be the conversation of Silicon Valley. What started off as an agency, is now an incubator for voices and talent around Silicon Valley. We use our voice to push conversations and narratives forward. We create content for our team, and for companies. Today, we are pulling in 4 million hits a month, and are on a path to grow even more over the next year. Our influencer label is the first of its kind. We develop thought leaders and help them create their own conversation in tech. Our influencers work together to create content and leverage each other’s audience. We also work with brands looking to reach our audience.


Pivotal Moments

  • In her senior year of high school, Mehak created a daily vlog documenting her story of going to college.
  • She became the top result on YouTube for anyone who searched for her university, Purdue College, by leveraging SEO and by vlogging daily.
  • Realized she could monetize that and she charged money as an influencer for people to reach that audience.
  • Started getting 150-200,000 views a month on Quora.
  • Dropped out of university to head to San Francisco to see if she could make a business out of being an influencer –  and failed miserably! But she did make a lot of connections on the tech scene.
  • Her friend Josh Fechter (a major LinkedIn influencer) convinced her to get rid of Quora and start using LinkedIn.
  • Transferred her Quora skills to LinkedIn and turned into a real influencer for business on the tech scene.
  • Really took off on LinkedIn when another influencer friend, Suzie String, got access to LinkedIn video before she did. They teamed up to leverage Suzie’s access and Mehak’s video skills and got 120,000 views – the first video to go viral on LinkedIn! This made LinkedIn look at her as an influencer.
  • Got 1,000 likes when she commented on posts and began to leverage that for money.


The Advice

  • The magic formula to write viral social media posts on any platform:
  1. Start immediately with the hook, answer the question in the first sentence
  2. Two more sentences of a more in-depth explanation
  3. Then tell your whole life story as it relates to the above
  • Create pods so your influence grows through other influencers commenting and liking your posts. (Reach out to Estie and we’ll create pods.) Additionally, the LinkedIn algorithm currently treats all likes and other interactions in the first hours at a much higher value than later hours, so get that early engagement using pods.


The Struggle

Mehak voices 2 struggles. Firstly, entrepreneurship is really lonely because the only person who can really make you successful is you.

Mehak also struggles with being consistent. She sees herself as running a business and not as just a content creator. Recently she hasn’t been creating content because she was busy with her business. But, her followers want content and she feels that she just needs to buckle down and push it out.


The Breakthrough

Being successful is not just about buckling down. Instead, you can build a system to complimet your weakness. Mehak can hire a VA to help her be professional, to set a schedule, post and re-post existing content to ensure consistent posting, and to nudge her to answer emails. Today, creativity and energy is valued more than tedious consistency, although consistency is important to be professional. So if you are aware of a weakness that is challenging for your business, hire to compensate. This is an affordable option at every stage, even in its most minimal sense.


Quotes

“Simplicity is complex – it’s never simple to keep things simple.”


Resources and Links


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About the author, Estie Rand

I love turning ideas into money, and helping others do the same. I help small business owners with everything from marketing to fiscal management, business plans to staffing, database architecture to work/life balance coaching and I love it all! What do you need help with today?

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