Insta Creative: Documenting Your Creative Journey on Instagram

1. Insta Creative | Intro: Whether you're a maker, an artist, a designer, a musician, a jewelry maker, a photographer, or a multi-disciplinary creative like ourselves, chances are that by now you're probably familiar with Instagram. Instagram is an incredible platform. We believe that when you share not just your work but your whole lifestyle there, as a creative, you give your audience an authentic complex to connect with. Which creates a really engaging presence. We've personally been using Instagram as a way to express ourselves, share our story and what makes us feel creative in the first place. Through that, we've grown our followers but we've also made many collaborators, clients and creative friends. Such an awesome part of our lives and today, we want to share that with you. In this course, we will show you our process for defining what makes your creative journey authentic and worth sharing. Give you a whole lot of guidance on how to create engaging content, post, and many more tips on how to generally have fun while sharing your story with others. This course is for any creative person who wants to expand beyond just posting pictures of their work or anyone who wants to create a more engaging presence overall. Whether you run a full-time creative business or a side hustle, whether you're focusing on a single craft or pursuing multiple interests like ourselves. If you feel stuck behind your work, creating people connection with your audience, want to captivate them, share your story, and make some waves, this is your chance. Feel free to join us and let's show you some cool things. See you in class. 2. Self Discovery Questions: Hey there. Thanks for joining our class. We're looking forward to show you how you can improve your presence on Instagram as a creative. Over time, we've seen many creative people use Instagram as a portfolio or a gallery that's exclusively devoted to sharing their work. But the truth is, we never really personally felt like following that path. We find that it's more interesting to share your creative journey on Instagram beyond just posting your work or your product. People want to connect to you and your story, your background, your life, environment, and what makes you do what you do. Instagram offers you an opportunity to create and share that visually. Through Instagram, you can give your audience a peek into your world, which will allow them to engage with what you create. Whether it's a service, a product, or something that you're still trying to figure out. The key to be successful in this is to be authentic. To be authentic, you need to know what you stand for and what makes you special. For every creative project that we start, including our own online presence as creatives, we love asking questions like lots of questions. Some questions are easy to answer, some aren't. But ultimately, this can kick-start the whole self discovery process, giving you more clarity and helping to shape your whole presence on Instagram. Your story is something that's unique to you. It may or not be the core pillar in your creative work too, but in many cases, it's good to be aware of it as it might be an interesting topic to share with the world. Where are you from? Where did you grow? What makes you who you are? What has the creative journey been like? It may be jewelry, it may be films, it may be branding, it may be a variety of things. As a creative, what is it that you create? Do you offer a service or a product? What creative endeavors are you involved in? What are the crafts and talents that you'd like to share with the world. Inspiration is a very, very broad topic because everyone collects it differently. Where does your inspiration come from? What lights your fire? What makes you want to create? You might be a brand designer that's absolutely driven by esoteric whimsical things and cultivates that in their lives. Maybe you are botanical illustrations specialists who is inspired by all the wild flowers growing around your city or maybe you're inspired by your travels or architecture. More broadly, you may be inspired by light or color or sounds. Try to define it, because it's very interesting. What is your day-to-day made off? At this point, I want to mention that it doesn't matter if you run a full-time creative business or if you just do it as a side hustle, rather focus entirely on your creative journey itself and everything that revolves around it. You might have a space when you create, habits, rituals, or routine that helps you in creating. What parts of it would you like to share with others? Knowing for what reason you want to use Instagram will allow you to project that into your content and allow you to reach those goals. So think about it. Why are you on Instagram? Maybe it's because you'd like to document your journey and keep a diary of the progress. Maybe it's because you're creating a product and you want to share some great behind the scenes. Maybe it's because you want to inspire others to follow their creativity. Maybe it's because you'd like to meet like-minded people and get collaboration opportunities. Maybe it serves as an extension of the why and how you create for your ideal clients to get to know you better. Or it may be a combination of these things. Either way, it's good to keep it in mind as it can help to give you direction. There will inevitably be people who stumble on your profile, scroll through your feed, and love what you do. Who are these people? Why do they like what you do? Think of them as your child, think of their values, their inspirations. You might have many things in common making them an engaged audience, and for this reason, they might also be your ideal clients. 3. Defining Your Creative Journey: Once you've gone through this series of questions, you probably gained a whole lot of clarity and you might even notice that some things repeat themselves or stand out. That's not a bad thing at all. In fact, it can help you understand even more what your whole presence stands for. Now, you can dive deeper into that. How did your lifestyle, your inspiration, and your work connect together? Right down a list of keywords that define the attitude and feeling that your content should evoke. It can be words, verbs, anything. Just let your brain process all of it and put the most important ones out there. If you need a little bit more visual guidance to compliment your keywords, it can help to create mood boards. Have a look at magazines or Pinterest or Instagram itself to see what you can collect that resonates with these keywords. Set out to create the guiding vision for yourself. 4. How to Turn It into Content: Instagram will be the place where you share a creative journey. By now, you must have a pretty clear idea of what your presence should stand for and you probably feel extremely inspired with vision that you set out. The next step is knowing how to apply that into your own reality and how to turn it into content that you can create and share. The idea here is to find ways to connect your lifestyle, your work, and your aspirations. You're creative person that's essentially choosing to let people into your world. So you need to be able to curate and share that world. What is it made of? Come up with themes that you can easily capture. What type of images would you like to create and share? What are the recurring topics? It's a great idea to think that through and see what you come up with, because it can be different for you than it is for somebody else. But for the extra guidance, we'll share some of our favorite themes with you and what we generally think works well for creatives on Instagram. Whether you create a product, offer a service, or make art, it's extremely valuable to share your finished work in this most complimentary contexts. Feel free to think outside the box and imagine creative ways that you can share your work so it can be showcased beautifully. Here, your work has to feel tangible. If you're a designer, don't just share digital mark up. Try as much as possible to print out your work and show it in a real context. Here at Jewellery Maker, don't just take white background photos of your products. You can save those for your show. Think further and style your shots. What we're trying to do here compared to a portfolio or sharp focus Instagram account is to easily blend showcases of your work into your own environment. The inspiration from this can also come by keeping it in line with your vision. So if you're an illustrator inspired by flowers, feel free to create shots of your art surrounded with the flowers that inspire it. If your designer who loves things green and sustainable, showcase your work on natural textures, invest yourself in it. Is your work come out physical in the first place like in the case of making music? Just think of interesting ways that you can combine your sounds with video or photography. The whole idea here is to deliver your finalized work and to share it within a context. Your followers will want to see you. So sharing photos of yours from time to time will allow them to put a face behind your account and connect better with your content. So don't be shy, you're the main character of your story. A great idea as a creative person is to invite them over to your space. You might have a studio, a special room, maybe you create in different places, or have a specific kind of corner, where does the magic happen? Think of how you can capture yourself there. You may look at the camera or not, you may pose or not, you may take this photo by yourself or ask a friend to take it for you, you may use a camera and tripod, or just use your phone. Invest yourself into it, do whatever you need to make yourself feel comfortable in the process. It's not an easy one, but it's totally worth it. Plus, that means you'll have more photos you can use as a profile picture and material if you get featured somewhere, why not? Your location may be an important part of your story as a creative. Perhaps, it fuels your lifestyle and inspiring to work. Perhaps, it's what allows people to understand the why and how behind what you create. We used to know a couple of musicians who lived in a wooden house in the forest, and it was connected to the music which was folksy. They would share bits and pieces of what surrounds them and that put even more context behind their work. Think of where you are based, what does your environment look like, inside and outside your home? Perhaps, it matters to you and it is connected to your work. This can be captured and represented in a variety of ways, it can be landscape, streets, your own interiors, or even a little detail that you noticed such as textures or colors that surround you. As we mentioned before, it doesn't really matter if you run a full-time creative business or if you just do this as a side hustle. Consider your day-to-day habits, think about the things that you do to maintain that create a fire, your well-being, your happiness. Take note of the moment that make life special for you as a creative person. Perhaps, it's your daily yoga, or your little ritual of having your morning coffee and browsing interests on your iPad. Perhaps, it's a love and effort you put into keeping your studio free of clutter, or your afternoon walk in the forest that mostly inspires you to sketching your ideas for your artwork, or to cleanse your mind so that you can create better. Try to capture these moments, share them with your audience. When you asked yourself what inspires your work, you must have come up with a variety of answers. It's very interesting to find a way to share that with your followers, and a helpful way to bridge the gap between your work and your lifestyle. Finished work that showcase beautifully has an incredible value especially when it comes to marketing a product or a service. However, it's always a great idea to share little glimpses of how you got there. Think about steps behind your work. What does it look like when it's in the making or before you even started it. What inspired it? Think about ways that you can capture interesting behind the scenes and process pictures of how you can make your work or how you gather your inspiration. It's so much fun to see a candidate variety of stages in how something comes together. So that's probably quite a lot of input and ideas, but we don't want you to feel overwhelmed. Allow a few of these themes or the ones that you came up with to inspire you, and try to find a routine of shooting and creating content, whether it's with your camera or your phone, just experiment every day and see what feels right. Whatever you do, let's documenting become natural within your lifestyle. Of course, in the process, you might find that not all of these things need to appeal to you, but you will find what fits best. Let this inspire you to live true to what you want to cultivate and become as a creative, this is what will bring authenticity in your content and what will make this whole process fun for you. 5. Curating Tips: Once you're all set and have a little routine of creating content, it's great idea to create it in a way that it makes sense and that really brings out the best in what you're sharing. As Instagram is a very visual platform putting the extra effort in great process makes a whole difference. It will not only make your feed look better and more engaging, but it will also allow you to get a grip of what kind of content is useful sharing and when, according to your goals and your needs. [MUSIC] Ideas of content might pop up anytime so make sure to write them down or plan them up when you have a moment. As you're creating content and capturing followers, have a good way to set them aside, keep them organized and handy when you need to use them. [MUSIC] You can use helpful apps such as Unum or Planoly to have an idea of what your field can look like for the next few days, weeks, or the next month. [MUSIC] Placed some of your favorite chats in there and try to move them around so you can figure out a great order of posting them that feels logical to you and your timeline. While you do that, it's a good thing to keep a good balance between your different themes. Not having too many photos from a single theme, but rather spreading them around. Feel free to remove anything that feels like it doesn't really fits with the vision that void, that it doesn't bring a specific strong purpose, and if you're editing your photos, tried to keep your photo editing consistent, and that will help you to make the colors on your field look quite uniform. This feels a little bit complex at first, but take it one step at a time, have realistic expectations. It will feel more familiar and you will get better at it with practice. 6. Creating a More Engaging Profile: It feels almost needless to point this out after we suggested that you share more photos of yourself as a creative. However, we really need to point that if there is a specific place you need to do that, it's on your profile picture. Your followers will look at it right away and will connect that to your journey, your work, or your creations. So having eye-catching photo of you where one can get a glimpse of your personality, let it align with your keywords as well. Right next to your profile pic is your bio or the description of your profile. That's another important thing that people might check out when they stumbled on your feed. So find the best way to describe who you are and what you do as a creative. What's your name? What do you do? Where are you based? Make sure to include all these informations. Your description also has a link section, and this is key if you want people to access a place where they can see more of your musics, your work, your products. Get people there with description terms, online shop, or an inviting sentence like, check out my prints. If you have multiple links to share, you can use Linktree or something similar, which allows you to create a landing page with several destinations. Where do you want your followers to go explore? These are reasons why you create and share the pictures on your Instagram. So let them be a place where you can express yourself, not just visually, but verbally. Your captions can serve to illustrate the purpose, story, or meaning behind a picture. If you're stuck on what to write, just check in with yourself. What does this picture say? Why am I sharing it? Why are my personal thoughts on it? If you're feeling extra extroverted, you might even use it as an opportunity to interact with your followers. You can speak to them as if they are your tribe, and they are eager to see what you're up to, which they are. Ask them questions like, what did they think? What is the personal view or experience on the matter? Remember to invite people to check out your work through your bio links if you have them. 7. Maintaining The Fun: When you get the hang of it, showing your creative journey on Instagram can be a lot of fun. When you've been doing this for a while, you might want to have even more fun and make it more engaging. There are a variety of ways that you can do that if you feel like it, and many ways to experiment. Here are some of our favorites. Try Instagram stories to share behind the scenes of your life as a creator. Instagram stories are spontaneous captures that feel like real life, real time version of what people see on your feed. Because of that, it is very engaging and a whole content platform on its own. It's also an amazing place to tease your followers and share new things you're developing or working on. Instagram is a community, so do use Instagram to connect with other creatives. You will see that this will benefit you enormously and it will allow you to make new friends. Speak directly to other creatives whose work or journey you love and admire, show them support. Perhaps it can also lead to an exciting collaboration hashtag community over competition. Many of you have started an Instagram account in the same way that we started a Facebook account. All of our friends are on it. If that's your case, then it's probably that your Instagram home section is filled with things that you do not care or do not serve to inspire you. That's a pity since Instagram is such a place for visual inspiration, including for yourself. Make an effort to follow only people whose content truly inspires you in your own journey and unfollow the rest. It may feel rude, but no one will notice. Do yourself a favor and keep your home section as a place where you can find inspiration and try to create and to know where you stand as a creative. Growing your home feed to only see content that you love can become a whole ritual. In fact, it's where you can save inspiration if you see anything that sparks an idea on your end. 8. Conclusion + Class Project: Personally, documenting and sharing our creative journey on Instagram, had started just as a way to share our work and yet it has evolved into a hugely positive part of our lives. We just love it. It's become a way for us to stay inspired and meet like-minded people and interact with the community of other creatives whose values resonate with ours. It's what inspired us to push ourselves into create better things. It has been of huge benefit to our business as it has brought us dream clients, exciting opportunities, and some really beautiful friendships. We hope that you will enjoy the commencing your creative journey as much as we do. We are really excited to see what you're going to come up with. We would love to ask you guys to get into this exercise and then share a screenshot of your links' Instagram feed after you have followed our content creation tips. We'd love to check it out, give you our feedback. Perhaps, we can also connect too with each other through Instagram. You can follow us there through our account @KINLAKE Thank you for joining our course. Enjoy the process and let's stay in touch.