Instagram Basics For Personal Brands

1. Introduction To Course: Hi there and welcome to Instagram, one-on-one mosque class for personal brands. I'm Mr. practical, and over the past couple of years, I've worked with several clients, in particular personal brands to help them grow on social media, and that includes Instagram. The structure of this class will be in slides form and giving you actionable insights. And the main skill I want you to take away is to learn the foundations that are needed to grow a personal brand on Instagram. So who is this class for? Is for people who are new to Instagram, I want to grow a personal brand. Now, if you are already on Instagram, you can use this class as a refresher, but really it's targeted to those beginners who want to get started on the platform. And you don't need any prior knowledge or any access to specific tools. So what you're gonna get from this course is Instagram fundamentals. You're going to understand the platform and how to actually build on the platform. So we're going to start off with explaining Instagram growth and what are the two main things you should be concentrating on them. We're going to go on to set up your IG account and the four key areas you need to concentrate on them. We're going to move on to hashtag basics. And I'm gonna be giving you the two main types that you need to consider when putting hashtags on your Instagram posts. And then we're gonna go over converting followers to customers and one specific channel you need to utilize to do this successfully. Um, when it comes to the class project is a very simple one. It's all about creating your very own personal brand Instagram channel. Now, there's four things I want you to actually create on your Instagram profile. Is your profile picture slash logo is choose your title or slash your name. Create your bio, and create a link to your personal website or wherever you want people to go to. So let's get started. And hopefully by the end of this course, you should feel a lot more confident in tackling Instagram. 2. Instagram Growth EXPLAINED: Alright guys, so this is the next lesson, and this is a very important lesson, is setting up your Instagram account for success. So first off, we're gonna be talking about SCO and specifically your bio, your Instagram bio. So here we have four main points and this has to be considered anytime you're Stein and Instagram account and wants to grow. So the first one is play head shot for. So if you started a personal brand, you're not going to put an image of a logo. You're going to put an image of yourself. Why? Because people buy from people, especially if your personal brand. So you want to clear HD photo of yourself and you want to be preferably smiling, you won't actually be in a good mood. You want to project that happy feeling a positive aspect. Because people will feel more inclined to listen to if they want to be like you. The second one is keywords in your title. So this is very important for Instagram. If you want to rank for entrepreneur and travel, as you can see in the pig below, you need to put that as your title. The title is what you can see is the bold solve, put, travel slash entrepreneur. Now, keywords and emojis in your bio, you want to spice up your actual bio description with emojis. Why? Because this grabs attention and at the end of the day, attention as again, you want to get people's eyeballs on your profile, on your feed to eventually get to your products or services. So one way is using emojis and again, using keywords, you need to use keywords here. Again for the same reason the title and allows Instagram to see what you're about. Where to put you. Say if you're on the Explore feed, where to put you in to explore fleet, where to put you when someone types of Hashtag. Now, this is one little tactic that have started to use and it is called link tree. Link tree is an actual software that you can get for free. There's a premium version, but allows you to list different links in your bio. So it will be one bio link. But once they click it, they able to go to different contents are different magnets. This is so, so, so powerful. But overhear. This is what I used to do. I used to just link to YouTube videos. So this is one thing that not many people know about Instagram. But what they do, the classified into two groups. I will put you in the personal account group or the influencer account group. So what is a personal account? That is when you post irregularly, when you just taking photos of your personal life, say if you go on an IR and you want to just take a few pictures with a few friends or newborn babies or massive life events. That is a personal account. You do not want this as a personal brand. You want to let Instagram no. You own influencer. And how do you do this? Well, it reverts back to the actual Instagram growth explained where you need to be posting on a regular basis, at least once a day, preferably more, but at least once a day. And you need to be pulling coat actions in your captions, in your comments. You need to have high engagement, unlikes. And then Instagram will start to realize this will take time, but they'll start to realize you are an influencer and start showing you two people interested in your niche. So here's another myth that people have, which is upgrading to a business profile. You'll hear a lot of information whether or not to upgrade business profile. The simple and clear answers. Yes, if you are a personal brand, then this is essential. Why? Because it allows you to go to the analytics, allows you to see where your traffic is coming from. And the other thing that I always say is that if you go to a business profile on Instagram, there will somehow decrease your engagement or decrease the amount of people that will see, which is total rubbish, couldn't be further from the truth. Instagram want you to be an influencer on Instagram. Want you to grow. They grow. They will promote you more. If you have viral content, you put call to actions in your comments or captions to increase engagement and you post regularly. So that myth about being a personal account instead of a business account is a total myth. Become a business account. 3. Setting Up Your Instagram Account : Instagram growth, but especially for personal brand. So there's a lot of myths out there about how to grow following, how to increase engagement, how to just increase your presence on Instagram. One thing you really do have to understand right from the beginning, especially if you're starting from zero followers is no one cares. That is just the honest truth about it. No one really cares about your personal life. Why is really about is what you offer to them. So your content has to catch the eyeballs as to be viral content either has to give them something, whether that will be entertainment or educational. It can't just be about your own personal life that will come later. But initially, the whole focus has to be on catching eyeballs. So the first thing you have to do is create eye catching content. So one way on one strategy to do this is going to your competitors or people that are similar to you in your niche and see what's working, see what has more engagement, more likes, and literally model that content. So say if you're in the business niche, you find photos in Thailand, live in that sort of laptop lifestyle. If that's working for someone, you really want to create that content and put that on your own feed. Initially, because the initial focus with a new Instagram account is again, eyeballs, getting that engagement, getting more likes because an Instagram knows that you're serious account and that you're not just there, sell products you're there to grow. So once you have that eye-catching content, then you can go into your own personal content where you probably do your own promotions. You sell your services, you sell your products. That is when, but first, to get the ball rolling, you really want to just create eye-catching content, doesn't have to be own. You can almost get someone else's content, but then give them that show respect and give them the credit that they deserve or producing that content. So the famous one is the follow on follow. Whether it still works. Well, it used to, You used to be able to follow masses of people, get bots to follow everyone, your competitors following and then unfollow the ones that haven't followed you, but that is a big red flag. You can't do that anymore. Instagram, they're smarter now the algorithm works much better. They can catch this and then you'll either be banned or shadow band, which basically means your account will not be shown to the people you want it to be shown to. That is shadow band. You'll get less engagement and less likes. What you really want to concentrate on. For Instagram growth is two things. You want to post more regular viral content. You won't have call to actions in the comments for engagement. So with those two posts, the more regularly or viral content will get you more likes. And having calls to actions in the comments will get you more engagement. This will tell Instagram that you're serious account that you're trying to grow. So that is the key. You want to increase your likes, increasing engagement by post and more viral content on a regular basis. And having calls to actions in the comments. 4. Hashtag Strategy Basics: Now we're gonna be talking about the hashtag strategy. This has been talked about through the ages. But here I'm going to clear up for you. So back in the day when Instagram just died, it was the main way it knew how content was related or how content was relevant to its users. So it was very, very important back in the day. But what about now that Instagram is much smarter? Well, is still useful for two reasons. One is that Instagram still use it today to see how relevant content is to a person. So say if you go to the Explore and you go to the most recent, these are all handled by the hashtag that will organize by the hashtag. So that is one reason. Another reason is that Instagram needs to know what your profiles about. It needs to know what the themes, what niche RUN. So it does that by one way with your hashtags. So if you're talking about business, you need to be putting in some business hashtags. You need to be put in startup. It needs to be pulling entrepreneur, you need to be pulling in whatever your actual niches say. If you have a Shopify store and you're promoting products like fashion brand, you need to have fashion in there as a hashtag. Just making sure Instagram know what your actual account is about. So just to clear things, the first reason is that Instagram use hashtags as the sole method to show relevant content. And the second one is Instagram, uses hashtag to understand your account. So this is one strategy I use, and I call it 15 by 15. So we want to use is 15 popular hashtags. These are hashtags that are 100,000 posts and above 100,000 searches and above the sky's the limit. So usually entrepreneur has millions. You can use those Entrepreneur magazine. They probably have less. And that is what I call a low-hanging fruit. So the way I differentiate this is have 15 popular hashtags with 100,000 or more posts and 15 low hanging fruit hashtags that have 100,000 or less. So that way, you'll get the initial engagement from the 15 popular hashtags just because they're so popular. But it won't last on the Explore page or literally just get knocked off in about matter of seconds. But then you want to add 15 low hanging fruit hashtags, which will stay on the Explore on the most recent, four bit longer. And then you'll get that salt. More long-term engagement, you'll get that solve more dragged out engagement, which will show Instagram. That's a very popular post, which means it is more likely to go viral. 5. Converting Followers Into Customers Explained: In this lesson, we're gonna be going over converting your followers to customers. It's all well and good, having 100 K followers, 200 K. But if only one of them convert to a customer, then you don't have a business, you have a hobby, you have a community, yes. But in order to get paid and actually build a business, you need revenue. So that is why we're talking about followers becoming customers. So in here, instagram Stories is where it is, that is all well and good to have in the feed. Yes, you need the feed. You need to keep that updated. But in the Instagram stories here is where you can do those light pitches of your product or services and you really can build a really nice rapport with your followers to eventually convert them into customers. So it's all about the Instagram stories. So the first thing is you need to shop every single day. You need to be in your customer's eyeline. He needs to be in your customers subconscious. Every single day you need to be pointing up at least one story. Preferably more, but at least one. Because you need to be able to build that relationship up with videos on your stories. So what can you actually put in your Instagram stories? Well, the first thing is it day-to-day life. What you're doing? Say having a nice meal. Say you're out and about in a nice location. You can put that on your Instagram story. And then the next ones are where the magic happens. So you can put your actual business life. Are you at a meeting? Are you speaking to a client? Are you on your way to a client? You would just document your day in your business life. I'm one of the key ones are sharing your wins and successes. So if you've landed a client, if you've done a deal or if you've made a cell, you can almost put up as a story, then what you'll find is that when you do show your business life and your wins and successes, people will start DMU, who are interested in that sort of life. Who wants to be like you want to ask you questions. And this is when you can really build a nice report and lead them to a cell. We could put them down the funnel to a cell. But they've come to you first. You're not pestering them. With DMZ. They've come to you. They actually want you to help them. They want your service or product. The next one is using polls for market research. So this is a great little height that you can use on your Instagram stories. Instead of just putting your business life on winter successes all the time, use pose. These are really important because then you can find out exactly what your audience or your followers pain points are. What could you make a product? And that could solve that pain point or a service? And also you can ask them, what do they want to see? What sort of content would like to see? Here, you can really allow your audience, your followers, to dictate your content. So then they will be coming back to you because you've given them exactly what they want. And the last one on the list is getting traffic to your funnel. So your sales pages of your personal brand. By doing this, you probably need at least 10,000 followers because you need to activate that Swipe Up feature that allows a link. But this is only at the moment when you have 10,000 followers. It might change in the future, it might not. But this is why I wanted to make this course Evergreen. I didn't just want to show something that is Graham had already and then might change. So traffic, you could send traffic by having to Swipe Up feature on your Instagram stories, but that is only when you have 10,000. Or you could actually bring awareness to your YouTube channel or Facebook group. I've got another two courses on a YouTube channel, how to grow it. Facebook group, how to grow thriving community. So with these free Instagram, YouTube, and phase, you can really create a nice omnipresent with these free. But if we're going to stick to Instagram stories for now, you can at least show awareness by showing little videos of your YouTube channel or little videos of your Facebook group of people talking to each other, communicating. Overall. Instagram Stories is where you really want to start the selling process, what you really want to build that personal rapport with your followers. Now this is a golden hype. You really want to be uploading testimonials to your Instagram stories. This can be added texts which you can do with testimonials that I've put on your Facebook group when they bought your course or service, or this video, a video testimonial that someone has done for you. This is essentially so powerful because it's social proof to the highest degree. Where someone's looking through their Instagram feed, they checkout your story and they see some getting value from your true services or products. There'll be intrigued to see what you're about. And then they'll start following you, getting to know you. And then knowing that other people have benefited from your service or products, There'll be intrigued to the point where they'll end up buying. This is a great thing to do at the beginning. This is to show screenshots of your core cells. This will have masses of people curious about what exactly is you do. This is such a golden hack. So put your core cells as screenshots on your Instagram stories. Because then people will be like, Hold on. Are people actually buying his product or service? What is actually about what they buy and why is it so good? There'll be wondering so much about your course, your products, your personal brand that will start to fixate on you and start to be interested in you. And the last one is a crucial hack if you want to take your followers to customers and it is to take it to the DMZ. What might end up happening is that because you've consistently update the stories about your business life, but your day-to-day life about your wins and successes, but your awareness to your YouTube or your Facebook group. If you have one, they will end up starting to DMU. But if they don't, you should still DM them. Why? Because this way you can get on a one-to-one with your potential customer. And this is where the real magic happens, where you can actually gauge what this specific needs are, what their specific pains are, and start to lightly sell them, um, because you're on a one-to-one conversation with them, this is much easier than if you were to just post a link, post an image of your product or service. This allows them to ask you questions and you touch the answer those questions. If they come with objections, you can actually answer those objections. And this is almost cooling someone in some regards, but you're not cold calling them. They're already warm to your products, your services. So it's much easier to close them. 6. Summary Of The Course: There you go. So hopefully you've enjoyed this course. Hopefully you've gained a lot from this course, and I really do hope that you've gained enough knowledge that you feel confident enough to tackle Instagram as a platform for your personal brand. So in this video, I'm going to be going over the course itself. So providing a summary, an overarching view of the course, and each lesson that was presented to you. Instagram growth, explain now, this is a video you should come back to roughly every six months, just so you can really understand how the platform works and how you can grow on the platform and with any personal brand. Yes, it's good to have a nice feed. It's good to have your brand congruent with how you want it to be. But ultimately you want to build an audience on this platform. This will help you grasp the base knowledge on how to grow on Instagram. What's up your Instagram account now? Yes, a very basic lesson, but something that is really needed because if you don't set up your Instagram account properly, you have to go back setup again. You may down the line, find that your Instagram account isn't working. How you would like a book could use sets it up incorrectly. So this is an important lesson for you to set up your Instagram account correctly. Hashtag strategy. Now, hashtags are very interested in, they always change. And it is something that you will have to look up via Instagram directly to see what the next coming trends out for hashtags. But this should give you an overarching view on what you can do with an hashtag strategy. So watch this video from time to time just to get a refresher of how you can go about implementing a hashtag strategy. Followers the clients. Now, this is ultimately, if you are a business as a personal brand, is what you're looking to do. Turning follows the customers. And this video will show you a few ways in how you can do that.