Become An Instagram Topical Authority (Grow Your Followers Faster) | Benji Wilson | Skillshare
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Become An Instagram Topical Authority (Grow Your Followers Faster)

teacher avatar Benji Wilson, Social Media & Entrepreneurship

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      0:58

    • 2.

      Instagram Profile Ranking

      4:00

    • 3.

      Choose Your Topic

      4:13

    • 4.

      Create Your Manifesto

      7:40

    • 5.

      Topical Coherence Boost

      2:28

    • 6.

      Your Next Steps

      1:17

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About This Class

Through this class we walk through how instagram's new SEO algorithm works. We show you how this affect your ranking and your Account

We cover:

  • Choosing your Topic
  • Topical Coherence
  • Topical Authority
  • Instagram's SEO
  • Your Profile
  • Your Bio

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Benji Wilson

Social Media & Entrepreneurship

Teacher

 

Thank you so much for visiting my profile!

My Name is Benji. 

I am a passionate creative and entrepreneur from Melbourne, Australia!

I love pinpointing the difference between what makes people successful and what makes people fail in all arenas of life and then share with you!

Apart from building and creating... I have 4 cats, I love working out, skating, playing basketball and reading. 

Be sure to reach out to us if you want to connect!

- Benji

 

 

See full profile

Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: awesome. So I'm really excited to work with you during this course to get you more Instagram followers coming through consistently to follow your brand or personal profile. We're gonna do this by optimizing for the new INSTAGRAM search algorithm that allows you to rank very highly for search key words and topics of your choice. So if you're an artist in Oklahoma, you can rate very highly for artists. Oklahoma off yourself can knows you could be recommended very highly in candles and get a lot of traffic back to your profile and to your brain. So in this course together we're gonna break down. Exactly what topic do you want to rank for on instagram and start having these floods of people come back to visit your profile. We're gonna find out what the people who are already ranking doing really well and show you personally how to replicate that for your own brand. And we're gonna Bruce, what's called a topical coherence got it's all very simple. Once we get into it, I'm looking for it. Explain it all to you and helping you rank higher on instagram and therefore get more followers faster 2. Instagram Profile Ranking: excited to jump straight into this and teach you the first strategy that these big accounts that growing so quickly the celebrities and these big 89 figure brands are using to absolutely skyrocket past normal people. We're going to start with this one Gonna teach You had a rank your profile using Instagram's new S E O algorithm. Now, before we jump into any of these strategies and super important that you know the purpose off the purpose is to get hundreds of people hundreds of people who are out there using Instagram searching for people and searching for trends and searching for hashtags toe. Have hundreds of these people be suggested by Instagram to go and click on your account and then, of course, have the option to follow you. So if you want to organically attract hundreds of people from inside your needs to go back and follow your account every day, then this is the new S E o algorithm strategy that you need to pay attention for. So we're gonna start here when you open the search box on instagram. So when you click the magnifying glass and you start typing something like a hashtag key toe. You're gonna get suggestions from Instagram now, if you type in hashtag beauty, you obviously gonna get different suggestions. But the key in the real tricky A in this secret is why is Instagram recommending the specific recommendations when you type something it? So when I type in hashtag beauty, I got recommended hash tag, beauty, hashtag beauty counter hashtag beauty influencer and hashtag beauty bloggers. Now this is Instagram trying to guess what I am trying to type and trying to guess and suggest thes suggestions for me off something that I might be interested in So I can click on them and spend more time on the app and therefore see more ads by Instagram and Instagram make more money. So that literally got these computer algorithms out there which tried to guess what you want to see based on what other people are enjoying seeing and also based on your actions. Now most people know that this happens for hashtag. However, Instagram is now using this new and improved search algorithm to rank the best and the roast most relevant profiles at the top of its platform. So you can see when I type in key tow. It won't just recommend the best content and the best hash tags, but actually recommend people for me to explore and people for me to follow that this is the secret. In a nutshell you can actually get. We can actually hack the instagram algorithm to have instagram suggest your profile for people who type in keywords that are relevant to your niche and relevant geo profile. So the people that come up for these search terms are called topical authorities and a topical authorities is essentially the idea that your INSTAGRAM account is an established expert over an entire topic on our entire search term. So these accounts that rink when you actually search for these things at the top. For highly such topics get thousands of views and thousands of potential relevant followers every day. So once again, our goal. We got a little spy guy here. This is gonna be yesterday and put a little spy hats on and we want to make sure that we're hacking the INSTAGRAM algorithm to the best of our ability, given the size of our current instagram accounts, to make sure that we're getting suggested to people who are relevant and now niche every single day so they can come back and follow us that we'd get a ton of new followers in here and a big funnel. That's a consistent funnel of these followers coming back every day and seeing our profiles and therefore increasing our engagement on their purse, which feed in to the other secrets inside this course. So the question is, how do we hack the algorithm to become a topical authority? 3. Choose Your Topic: The question is, how do we hack the algorithm to become a topical authority? Number one, you first have to decide and pinpoint the topic. If you are trying to take on too many topics, you're going to get basically outbid for this position and Instagrams come back. You know what? This person is not a specialist here for this topic. So we need a pinpoint your exact topic that you want to rank for. And then you want to make sure it's the right sized topic for your account size. So, for example, going off the topical authority for cats or dogs or cooking or health there such broad categories and they're such highly searched turns that's going to be extremely competitive and very hard for us to rank our accounts for these massive terms and even if we do, is gonna take a lot of maintenance to hold on to that. So that's why I highly highly recommend that we need each down within the big. In each, we pick a sub niche such as Ansar picking cats. We pick sleeping kittens instead of picking dogs. We pick poodles. It's a quick picking cooking. We pick fat burning recipes. We want to make sure that we are in a micro niche that we can actually dominate. Unless you already have millions of followers, then you can pick one of the bigger ones. But even then, I still wouldn't go for the biggest cause just cause it takes so much to actually maintain . So you may be thinking awesome. I know I need to pick a small niche, but one had. I find the size of the niche and to how I find ideas of potential niches that I want to choose from. So to answer this question, you need to open your instagram, basically go to the search bar. So which is just the magnifying glass and then typing basically the main topic off your nature, a suggestion that you think that humane lack and you'll see Instagram actually recommending other suggestions for you. So if you're typing in like beauty at the start in recommends beauty blogger, maybe it makes I recommends makeup brushes. Maybe it recommends makeup tutorial Um, and you want to see what Instagram is recommending because you'll be able to pick one of these that you know. Instagram's already recommending to other people and actually be the topical authority on that. So make sure you use the daughter and it's gonna be a big thing we do in this course, making sure we using what already works to help us get ahead and not trying to re invent the wheel and trying to hack something that doesn't already exist. But trying to force it into the instagram algorithm, we're gonna use what already works. Probably the biggest take away you can take and just make sure that that starts to work for our accounts and not just these massive accounts at a growing really quickly. So when you do at this hashtag search, make sure you have a look at this size off the suggestion, so you can see the 1st 1 here is hashtag Travel has 478 million purse. Now that he's probably wanted the biggest topics you could possibly try and thankful unless you have 50 million followers, we don't want to rank for travel. We don't want to try and rank for travel. We definitely want to ring for travel if you can, but we don't want to try that instead, Maybe we're in Oregon and we want to start ranking for something like Travel Oregon, because that is our niche. And in C, it's almost 500 times less competitive. So that's how you sort of sub nish, and you can see the size of your sub nations. You can see how many posts are in that knee, so travel friendships is an element 2500 posts where if you're really just starting out, you have very little followers, say less than 100 followers and lower engagement on your post, which is fine when we start. You know, everyone has to start somewhere way level up, one level at a time, and that's what we're here for, the level you up. You want to pick something with a few 1000 posts instead of a 1,000,000 post for a medium sized account. So you have about 5 50,000 followers, and you can start to go into those millions. But make sure that you be very specific with the niche that you pick, and we won't go too broad too early. But I'll show, and later in the course how we can start expanding that once we get some momentum 4. Create Your Manifesto: my favorite phase the metamorphoses. This is where we start to see things actually start to pay off because we picked what needs you were trying to rank for. So this is a beautiful little graphic that have whipped up. Uh, this is us at the moment, this on the left for Ah, beautiful little caterpillar. But we do want to become a butterfly. We do want to go through this madam offices and go from a non topical authority where we'll currently to becoming a topical authority when they we want to join those topical authorities who are already out, then ranking and getting suggested by instagram so that we can get the benefits and all the followers and all the engagement from actually doing that. So how do we go from us being the cute little caterpillar to being a beautiful butterfly? So, basically, like I said a second ago, the big focus is seeing what already works. We're not gonna be redefining the wheel at any point in this course. We're gonna go see how wheel works, and we're gonna then recreate it for ourselves. So to do this, we want to go study those butterflies and The biggest thing here is there are hundreds of millions of these butterflies, meaning there's a topical authority in 100 million different niches. We need to go find al niche. So whether that's cats or whether that's cooking, whether that's traveling whether that blogging, we want to go find the niche that is relevant to you specifically, and then we're gonna find the top 50 current topical authorities in that niche, the butterflies who are already in that need we're going to reverse engineer what they're doing so we can get the same results. So for the example, I'm gonna walk through So you get a better idea of what I'm talking about. It's gonna be cute. Kittens, Cute kittens is a niche that I'm gonna go for. So the first thing I do is I go when I find the top 50 topical authorities. And I do that by searching cute kittens. And I see the top 50 accounts that Instagram is recommending me on the list of recommendations I just scroll through and I can put these in an Excel sheet. I can copy them into unopened. I highly suggest that you go and do this. This is the research phase, which is key, which is critical to see what already works. So once I know what Instagram is favoring, which is the Top 50 Council, it's recommending. We then do a little bit off daughter analysis. Some really fun stuff actually do really enjoyed dot analysis, but it sounds boring to most people, and basically, we put this in a wood frequency calculator. Now you only need a Google Word frequency calculator. You can shoot anyone there. Don't have an official recommendation. Very simple. Go to Google Go would frequency calculator, and what you need to do is you need to copy the buyer and the user name for the top 50 off topical authorities in your niche, and it's going to spit out the top 50 authority would frequency for you, meaning it's going to show you what words are most frequently used by the top 50 topical authorities in your niche just to clarify. So all on the same page, we found the top 50 people who are ranking in our niche, and in our topic, we copied their buyers, which is the description about their profiles, and they use the names as well. Is very important, which is the their name and after the at symbol. So their instagram handles. We pasted all of that into a word frequency calculator, which we got from Google, and we pushed calculate, and it basically told you how frequent the words are all those top 50 people's buyers and names, and this is what came up. So there were 54 instant incidences off the wood kitten. 39 of the word cute 33 off the word cat 22 of Curtis. And all I down to a dog was there four times out of those 50 accounts, best was there four times out of those 50 accounts. Now I have excluded the word my because it's not relevant to the actual needs. You can see everything else is relevant to the topic of cute kittens, and you'll see some words like I or the my pop up in yours as well. You can just exclude those, but basically don't lose this list. Copy and paste it into your Excel, Doctor, into your notes. This is your topical authority manifesto. This is the key to becoming a topical authority because we figured out what Instagram want to see in their bios and in their names. This is how instagram this is 90% of how instagram index your account and decide to rank it or not. So you've got your topical authority manifesto. Now we begin metamorphoses. This is how we become a butterfly. And if you know up, If you didn't understand exactly what happened, just please go and watch that again. So now we have a manifesto we need to rewrite out bio user name and that name to an instagram profile. So the number one term for me was kitten, so you can see in the name and they use the name. I've got kitten on the left and it says a cute kitten named chuckles. So cute kitten and cute kitten are in both my name and my using it. Now you can see I've done another example for you. Peter Bones. Peter, the chiropractor. You can see he's got burns and chiropractor both in his using him and his name. These are both highly highly ranked words on his topical authority manifesto. Now, remember, if your user names aren't actually popping up, you can put periods or full stops. Whatever you call him and hyphens in there as well To help put your keywords in on Dhere. A few examples of that you can see the period or the full stop is at the top. Fluffy dot heaven Doug Dash the Dash pug dot adventure You want to make sure it looks aesthetic as well, but we're trying to balance aesthetic and being able to rank. Locate the wolf dog is all words squeezed together, which instagram will index, but not as much if you put the dots for the periods between. So once we've done that, we also want to use this manifesto because it's so powerful that we're gonna be using it throughout all of your instagram account. Now that you have this, you be putting in your captions. You putting bio be putting everywhere because we want Instagram to index us as a topical authority. And this is currently what the topical authorities are doing so you can see poodle dog lover, daily dose off, cutest, fluffy and tiny puppies who love treats. Follow us for daily dog adventures. Thes all keyword rich keywords from out manifesto for the poodle lover account. You want to rewrite your buyer to the ones highlighted in pink. Here are those words you wanna make sure that it flows like outflows and you don't gent every single word in this is not something that you can spend to something you need to do very naturally places many of those woods in as possible to your buyer. Now this is us have sprouted some wings were not quite a butterfly yet because instagram haven't re indexed us, and I'll show you how to get re indexed and what that actually means in less complicated terms. But basically, we're now appearing as if we are a topical authority because we are matching. And we're using the key words that these topical authorities using to rank by instagram. And now all we need do is increased the topical coherence. 5. Topical Coherence Boost: No, it's a lot of words that you probably haven't seen before. Topical coherence. It basically means we need to make out account, coherent or more consistent with that topic. So we've optimized at bio our user name and the name. However, we still have things like the media, the photos and videos repost and the hashtag we put out there is what we want to make sure that our hashtags and captions and the media is coherent or consistent with the topic that were chosen. So you can see this example the rescue poodle love up. It has on the left hand side what you need to do, which is content off poodles with captions about the poodles and putting in all those keywords that you went and mind out of the top 50 topical authorities, the ones they most frequently used. You want to make sure you're using as well. We want to see what our most successful competitors most successful, um, current topical authorities that using and then go and replicate that sort of content, replicate those of captions and use thes key woods. Now this is the fun part. Instagram use a pixel scanning software and post that have a high top cougar here in school , which is once again slang for just saying if we are topical authority on poodles were posting about poodles. You know, Instagram can actually see inside the photo they have scanning software that sees inside the photo, compares it to your hashtags where we've got a hashtags which are the words once again that in that manifesto and then when we stay consistent and instagram Bree Index al account, they're gonna Pervis, They're gonna be like, Let's see, Do we rank them anywhere? The answer is gonna be yes. This is the end of our metamorphosis. Our can't get scanned. It is actually worth being in the topical authority because we have knuckled down with seen what they want for a topical authority in this specific niche. Replicated that. And all of a sudden, Instagram is going to stop showing your account to people who are searching these keywords that matched your profile on match Your niche and all these people who are interested in a topic that you purse about are gonna be flooding in organically and consistently is the biggest one. They're gonna be consistent over time and you're going to see an extra 30 40 follow is an extra post engagement every single day come in, which is massive. That's going to start the momentum that we need to really skyrocket your account and really push you to where you want to be. 6. Your Next Steps: awesome. Congratulations on mastering how to become a topical authority on INSTAGRAM and therefore get many followers and many potential customers back to your business and your brand or even your personal profile on Instagram. What you want to do from here? I've got three awesome steps for you. Number one Make sure you common check is out on YouTube. We post micro bits of content that are big enough for a course. But it's still really amazing strategies to help your INSTAGRAM account grow as quickly as possible. And we're gonna post 3 to 4 these a week. Therefore, you get in the most up to date information such entrepreneur academy on YouTube and hit that subscribe button number two. Make sure you continue your learning here on skill shit. We put a lot of effort and energy into these courses and we're coming out where they cost a week designed to help boost your instagram even further, but also your digital marketing presence as a whole. So come over to our course library and choose what course is right for you. Toe learned next and finally I asked for a massive favor from you if you could please leave me. Feedback will take just 10 to 20 seconds of your time on love to know what you learned and what you liked about this course and helps my course get out there further so more people can enjoy it. So thank you very much for your feedback. Looking forward to seeing you on YouTube and in the next skill share course.