Transcripts
1. A Big Welcome!: Hello, my name is Benji am an entrepreneur and I'm excited to dive deep into an Instagram journey together. I know for a lot of people building an Instagram account can be overwhelming and a little bit confusing and find it really hard to separate themselves from the noisy crowd out there. That's why I want to show you that Instagram is a skill that you can learn. And if you focus on the right strategies and frameworks, you can get ahead of everybody else and boot a passionate community and passionate brand around something that you're passionate about. Whether this be an up project, a hobby, or a small business or brand. Instagram is an amazingly powerful tool for you to build a community around, connect with fans, and enjoy your time there. I'm really excited to go on this journey with you. Let's jump straight in.
2. Class Project: Awesome. So this Instagram class is built around a very specific project. And what makes that project up a three very specific things. The first one we're going to go through together and identify your dream account. Who is it out there that's currently running an account that you dream of having. You need to identify who they are and write them down because we're going to be monitoring them and reverse engineering how they got this step-by-step together so that you can follow their footsteps. And then ONE, your dream account on Instagram. The second aspect of our project is you need to optimize your profile. There are a lot of beginner mistakes that happened on profile pages and they really do just ruin all the growth and engagement and rural community results that you're looking for. So we're gonna go through first thing out of the gate and optimize your profile step-by-step together. So you get the most out of all the strategies and all the techniques that we're going to be building upon together. So when you do that, I'd love you to take a screenshot of your profile and upload it here to the cost to share with everybody. And the cool thing about having your profile here on the course is we can actually start to create community here as well. And go and follow and support everybody else's Instagram as they upload. I'll remind you as soon as you're fully optimized to upload a screenshot of your profile here and everybody else can go and support you in your journey. The last thing and the last part of this project in this Skillshare class is you need to create a piece of effortless content. I'm going to get into this in the class of exactly what this means, but I want to show you how you can create content that does two or three times better than any piece of content you posted so far. And also take you about a tenth of the time to create. I'm going to dig deeper into that, but that is the third part of the project. So without further ado, let's jump in and get started.
3. Affinity Ladder: Awesome. I'm really excited to introduce you to the Instagram affinity ladder. This is the tool and the secret that are really get your Instagram account growing as fast as possible with genuine and targeted. So let's jump into it. Everybody on Instagram starts in level one of your affinity ladder. This is potential audience. This is everybody on Instagram who does not know that you, your content or your brand exist. Yet, we want to make these people in level one ascend to the level two on our affinity ladder and become content view. We are going to be researching, creating an optimizing the perfect pieces of content for you to create in order to organically get in front of your potential audience on Instagram. Once we have connected with them throughout content, we really want to ascend them further up the affinity ladder and inspire them to come across and view our optimized profile. By optimizing our profile, our content, and everything on it, we are going to be ascending the right people to go ahead and click that followed button and ascend to level four of our affinity ladder. Once they hit that follow button and become part of our community, there'll be viewing our content on an ongoing basis, allowing us to build a high level of trust with them to finally as send them to the fifth and final level of our affinity ladder, branding and sales. This means they could go and listen to your podcast on another platform or maybe visit your store or buy one of your products or services. My job is to empower you with the knowledge and the ability to take action and build your own affinity ladder throughout the entirety of this course out with this, Let's jump into an example together before we create your affinity ladder. A really exciting example of this is Tony Robbins is business model and Instagram account. So let's break it down. The first step that we all need to do is define who exactly is our potential audience. Tony has defined his in this example as followers or people who are interested in oprah Winfrey, which breaks down to about 25 million people. The next step is to get in front of these people by using the biases of the Instagram algorithm in combination with rediculously high quality, well optimized content and don't stress. We will show you exactly how to do this once they've come across Tony's content that going to be encouraged to view Tony's profile, these past media. From here, they'll make a judgment on whether they want to follow him and have their content come up in their news feeds on a consistent basis. Once they see his content consistently, they build that trust. And then Tony can funnel them away from installing to his products and services on his website. In Tony's case, specifically this products infer products, experiences and coaching. I hope you're as excited as I am to jump in and build your own affinity ladder and grow your Instagram account as quickly as possible with the relevant and targeted followers. If you are, let's jump in.
4. Why Instagram: Awesome. So before we jump in on a awesome Instagram adventure together, I wanted to get to the bottom of why you'd want to grow your Instagram and increase your engagement for your posts. I want to stop by making it clear that this is not about making large amounts of money on Instagram, or it's not about taking advantage of a small loophole or getting really phospholipids who don't care about your stuff. That's not for us as plenty of courses and classes that'll teach you exactly how to do that. But here, I really want to show you how you can get your artwork or your hubby or projects that you work on an even a small brand or side hustle that you're working on. How can you actually get that the growth and engagement and build a community of like-minded people who really appreciate you and your work around you in order to encourage you to keep going and build that bigger and bigger over time. Instagram is one of the most powerful tools ever created. It really helps you connect your artwork or your hobbies or interests, or even your small business with anyone all around the world with people who really find passion and interest in the same stuff that you do. And it's really important that you know how to use Instagram in the right way. There are a lot of beginner mistakes that people make. Really just throttle and limit how far their Instagram account connects to the Greeks and how many people actually see this stuff? 99 percent of people fall into this trap. So our job is to educate you and allow you to use Instagram as a tool and use its full capability to really find that community and connect with those who it's important for you to connect with. So with that said, let's jump in and get started on our journey.
5. Profile Introduction: Awesome. So another, these interactions are the most skip lectures that please. I'll make this really quick, easy and fun. So don't skip me yet. I really want to get across the bird's eye overview of what you're going to do in this module. It's going to help you a lot. So you know that this is our affinity ladder, but trying to get people from not even hearing about you all the way up through your profile to branding and sales. Now, we want to make sure that they become followers on the weight because we want to be able to reach them at any time, which is what a follow arrays you can put out a piece of content and they going to see it. So in this course, I've decided to start really in the center, in the heart of this whole process instead of signing the bottom, Starting here, because this is the conversion process, if you can, and we will have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people discovering your profile, getting back to it and deciding if they want to follow your own naught. We want to make sure that as many people decide to follow you as possible, of course f to be relevant to your niche. So we're going to start with making sure every single step of your profiling, your bio and your photo is fully, fully optimized so that you're attracting the right people becoming and click that followed button. So let's jump straight in.
6. Account Types: Awesome, So welcome to 2.1. We're going to go through together the types of Instagram accounts that you can either create or that you already have and don't really know about. And this is really, really important because each different type of Instagram account has benefits and it has its downsides. So I'm going to make sure that you're choosing the benefits that's right for your business. So whether that's get as many followers as possible, I'll make as much money as possible. That's for you to decide based on the knowledge inside this lecture. So let's jump in. So there are 3.5 distinct types of Instagram accounts that you can start as a 3.5 because it's basically three. But the half, as we're about to go through together, is going to be the little hack that we can use in order to get the best out of all the most out of Instagram. Meaning we can take more than one of these account types and use it to our advantage. So we're getting the best out of each account type without really having any downside. I'm going to show you exactly how you can do that for your business. So the 3.5 account types are one, a personality Instagram account to a brand or business Instagram account, three, a themed account. And 3.5 is the hybrid account. So let's jump into some examples of what each one of these. So a personality account means that you are the face and the focus built up around you. And it's built up around your personality or someone, someone's face and someone's personality if not yours. So you can see Luca dungeon, which is a NBA player. He plays basketball at a professional level. And people follow his Instagram account to get updates from him specifically, and to see his personality, to see his face, and to see what he's doing day to day. Nicky French, I'm not a 100 percent show who she is, but she has a personality account. So if she's an actress or if she's a model, should we posting content about herself, about Nikki french, about what she's doing that day, about the project is working on and people follow her. For that reason. A brand account is your brand and your products are the face and the focus. So you can see a very easy way to distinguish between the two are the types of photos that they have. You can see these two brand photos of both logos where the personality accounts were, both people's faces. And we're going to get into the more detailed stuff in just a second, but I want to give you a broad overview first, so your brand and your products, or the face and the focus inside a brand or business account. And your content type is obviously going to be around your niche. So if it's Nike, it's going to be around sport. It's going to be around that brand of Nike and the clothing that they wear, the product, the shoes maybe. And it's going to be specifically a niche, your brand and your product. Adi, they're going to be around the automotive industry. It's going to be talking about cars, is going to be talking about their technology in their cars, is going to be talking about people who drive that cause it's going to be very focused inside that brand and inside that business. The third type of account is a themed account. So an overall consistent theme is the focus. So the Content-Type, again, is going to be consistent with that. It's going to be either in a theme or a trend. So here are a couple of examples of that. One is travel and leisure. So Travel and Leisure could be a Instagram that he's themed around just travel. And themed around holidays and destinations that people want to go. It's not specifically a business. It's not specifically a personal account, but it's actually around a theme that people like. So such as holidays or traveling. Cats have. Instagram is another good one. This theme is not a business in, uh, cats on a business, it's not run by a business in the cat industry, but it is around something that is very well liked. A lot of people want to see that. So to stop that, want to see the cats on their Instagram, they want to see cute cats. And the content type is going to be specifically around cats and maybe they're going to branch out into other animals, but that is a themed account. Now, a hybrid account which is very important, is a blend of any of the previous three accounts. Which means you can see you have Lewis Howes here is a great example of this. And we're going to show you exactly why. I'm going to show you some of the content that they post and what makes them a hybrid account. But Lewis Howes posts a lot of viral content, a lot of quotes, he posts a lot about him, proposal on, about his products. And he's blended that three of these accounts together in order to create an account that takes the best out of all of these worlds. And we're gonna take, we're gonna have a look at what are the best out of each of these welds in just a second, you can see my luxury freedom formula brand is a business account at hot, but I'm posting viral content and posting personal content, you know, to have people trust me and lack me and come through and be more likely to find my account and buy my products because I'm using the hybrid strategy, we're mixing a, a mixture of the three account types. So in order for you to really know what's at the core of your account. Because we're going to make sure that you're building a hybrid account. And if you don't want to buy a boat, a hybrid account, and this is then you need to choose what sort of account you. But I'm going to show you why run a, build a hybrid account and y be silly to build anything but that. And you still need a core of your account. So those, how's that a coin is a personality account. My account at a core is a business account. You can have cats, have Instagram, and you can start to build a business around that. But at its coal, it would be a themed account. So in order to choose what is at the core of your Instagram account, you really need to know what is the value of an Instagram account. So what actually determines the value of your Instagram account is literally Carlota to the amount of money that you can make from that account. So we're going to jump into this in a whole new module, but we have to introduce that here because if this is the foundation of your account, you need to know what the end purpose, the reason why you have an Instagram account, the value that you wanting to create with that, you need to make sure you're clear on that. So you can put that into every step of the way. Every building block we put into your Instagram account has that in mind. So whether you sell products, maybe creating your own brand and you selling your clothing, Lee selling your own services. You have created a product and you're selling that. That's a way that you can make money from the account. Whether you're selling advertising space, if you're building up an account like a theme to count, let the kids have Instagram. Someone can come and say, hey, I'll give you $5 thousand to post about my account. And therefore, you are selling the advertising space on your account to the audience that you built up. And that's another way that you can monetize your account or you could be doing affiliating. So instead of someone saying, Hey, I give you five grand to post this about my account. And they might say, if you promote my car brand, say I'm Audi. And you sell a car, I'll give you 50% of our profits. You may be making two to $3 thousand per car that you sell to your list. And that's called affiliating. So selling someone else's products or services for a commission. So what actually determines how much money you can make from an Instagram account doesn't matter which one of these ways that Joe actually making the money. There's three factors that determine exactly how much money your Instagram is worth. What is the value of your Instagram account? And that is follows, how many followers do you have falling it Instagram, the reach. How many of those followers actually see your content? It's very important you can have a 100 million followers. But if only 500 people see your content any point in time, you're not actually worth that much money, not actually that valuable. And affinity. So how strong is the relationship with your followers? Meaning how many of these followers are going to take action and follow your advice when you try to sell them something or when you promote something to them, it's called the affinity, which is very, very important. So a quick example of this is this three accounts, three Instagram accounts, and the side on the left. So you've got Instagram account a, B, and C. And each account is going to try and sell this $10. It looks like a cone call bubble bowl of colon and a cloud shit for $10. This is the promotional product that they're going to try and sell to their Instagram account. And the first account has a million followers a, and they have reaches 10 percent, which is pretty good. It's pretty standard if you could reach 10% of your audience every time you post. So they put out a post selling this t-shirt and it reaches a 100 thousand people and their affinity. So the relationship strength with their followers is quite low at touchy at 0.2%. And if a 100 thousand people see it and 0.2% of people purchased, they've made 200 purchases of the shirt, which is $2 thousand. Now account B have the same amount of followers, but they haven't increased reach. So they post actually has 20 percent reach and it reaches 200 thousand people. Now inside this course are going to teach you how to increase, not only follows, but your reach and your affinity because we want you to build a very high valuable Instagram account. So 200 thousand people see this post and their affinity is also much higher. They've used the strategies in this side, this cost to build a strong relationship and a strong affinity with their audience. And instead of 0.2% of people, 1% of people actually purchase, which is actually still pretty low, 1% affinity, which means that made 2000 purchases to 1000 sales at ten millibars, which is 20000 dollars. So they've solved ten times more than a 10 times more profit by just making sure they're not just focused on followers, but also reach and affinity. And we can do this through account types, making sure your account is the right type is the right type of hybrid. And you can increase your reach and affinity using these account types. Because the third one is a really good example, especially if you're a beginner. Oh, you're just starting to grow your account. You can see you don't actually need to have that many followers if you got a high reach and high affinity with your audience. So if you have 50 thousand followers on Instagram. And you reach 10 percent, it's the same as account a. And 10 percent It's pretty standard, pretty low, reach and fit 1000 now, pretty low, um, and, uh, follows. It doesn't have to be a million followers. So you only reaching 5000 people, 5000 people see it. But if you have worked really hard on affinity, which you can do through building a hybrid account, you can actually get an affinity up to 10 percent. And so for this example, we have do you 7%, which means we'd have 350 purchases and would make 3500 dollars from selling this one t-shirt in one of our posts, which means we have actually outperform the account with a million followers. So this is why it's important to make sure we choose the right account type for us. Now, here are the four of the 3.5 account types. And here is how they rate in each of the important categories on what is a valuable Instagram account. Because of course, the purpose of your Instagram account is to create value in one way of nella. So whether you want to create a lot of followers, you may want to go with just a theme to cap. The UMD account has quite viral content. If you're just posting about cats or you just posting about holidays, or you're just posting about World of Warcraft or what ever it is that your theme is, if it's already popular, you're going to get very naturally, very organically, a lot of people lacking a content and following you. You're also going to have a high reach because you're going to be able to post a very Viral sort of content that people very naturally drawn to. The problem is your affinity is going to be low. So we're looking at three, the theme to count column. Because you don't really have a strong relationship with a themed account that you follow. If you follow holiday destinations, you're not really feeling you don't get the behind the scenes on who that person is. You have no idea who you're talking to, who you're following it, just following it for the content. However, if you want to be falling a brand, you'd have a very strong affinity. You, any reason you follow it branded account if you fill in Nike, because you've chosen, chosen actually lack at Nike. And your affinity is going to be much higher relationship with them. If Nike post a promotional posts trying to sell one of their products you're much more likely to buy. Then if the theme to count tried to sell you a holiday. And the downside to the brand account, however, is lower followers. You don't have a lot less people being like, oh yes, I love this business compared to, I guess I love cats follow. So you're going to have lower followers and lower reach because the content that you post around your brand is going to not be as vital as the themed, the personal account type. It's going to be somewhere in the middle. You're going to have a high affinity because it's going to be people following you for you, you're the face and the brand. You are the face of your account. Your reach is going to be pretty high, but it's not going to be as violent as the theme to count, but it's going to be more viral than the actual brand account where you're posting about products and services and around your niche and of course your followers is going to be a little bit hi them brand because people like to see people's faces. I'd like to follow up people molded the businesses, but it's not going to be anywhere near as high as if you're following a bunch of cats having fun. So the hybrid account, of course, we'll get into in a second. I'll show you the numbers of that. But what you need to do is you need to choose your account type. So whether you choose your faces, that as the personal, which means you'll face, is the actual Instagram account. And it's about you, whether you choose brand, whether it's a business or a Brand that you're starting with, that you have, and that's at the core of your Instagram account or whether you choose themed. And you can make an account really viral and then try to monetize it from there, you need to make sure that you're choosing some one of these three account types at the core of your Instagram accounts or choose your type now. And with that in mind, we then have to look at hybrid accounts. So I want to make sure that even though you've chosen, so you have chosen the brand account, you want to make sure that you are taking into account, that you can make that a hybrid account and not only increase your followers and reach, but you can maintain that high affinity with your actual followers. So hybrid is taking the best of all the accounts and moot moving, moving him, merging them into one for you. So your account should be a hybrid account and we're going to talk to you about exactly what that means in the type of content that you can put on your account, with the mindset of it being a hybrid account because it was a great example. And if you don't follow him already go fellow Tony Robbins, he has one of the best hybrid accounts that I've seen. He's a business account. He's a business, but he's face is the is the face of these Instagram account. So he's also got the is. He's also got the elements of a personal account in here where his face is on the stories, is personalities on the stories, all the contents about him. But he also post quotes, he posts viral quotes that shareable a post inspirational stories that are very sharable and themed. And he sells directly to is consumers. He sells products using these posts. And he's the perfect example of a, of a hybrid account with millions of followers that is really, really effective in making the best of all three things that make your account, all three factors that make your account valuable. So he has an insanely valuable account because of it. Now, one last thing I want to talk to you about, if you couldn't quite decide on your account, that's okay. I want to show you this one little hack. It's called a parallel account and a firm this in as a bonus because I've done it and I've got a lot of benefit from it. But basically you can create what's called a parallel account, meaning a business account or sorry, the account on the right code of stone. He's a chef in Australia, so he is a blend of a personal account and a business because not only is he the face of it, but he does sell a lot of products on his account. So it has high affinity because he's the face of it. But he has low of followers and reach because the content that it poses around his businesses, around his cooking, it's around him as a person and it's not as viral as the account on the left, which is proper tasty. They have a very high follower and reach account because they post viral recipes. They break down recipes into 15, 30 seconds and they make delicious chocolaty looking things that everyone shares and tags everybody in. However, they would find it a lot harder to actually sell something because their affinity is low, because they're just a themed account. So what you can actually do is you can run these in parallel with each other. For example, if I'm Curtis Stone and I'm running a business and I have a high affinity and I sell products through this business. I'd have an account exactly like Curtis Stone's account on the right. But if I wanted to drive extra traffic into that account because I can't actually post viral content on there. I could take a new account and run two accounts in parallel with each other. And on the first account, I will be posting viral recipes such as proper tasty and I would be promoting. And I'm going to show you exactly how you can do that inside this Instagram cause my business account with my viral and themed account. That's another way that you can create a hybrid counties. You can split them and promote between them. But for me, I chose to actually put them all into one account to create one hybrid account like Tony Robbins. And I'm going to show you how to do the same and get the best out of all accounts.
7. Instagram Handle: Okay, so now that we know what is at the heart of your Instagram account, what is the core of it? What type of Instagram account and you're creating. We can now break down the elements that go into a perfect Instagram account to increase your conversion rate, increase your followers, increase your affinity, and ultimately increase the value of your accountant or the sales that you are going to be making. So let's start with Instagram handle. What is an Instagram handle? So and Instagram handle is basically you'll use a name on Instagram. It's used for two things. It's used to identify your account. It's a unique way to identify your account. And it's also used as your URL address. So you can see www.instagram.com port slash, whatever your handle is, is going to be how to navigate to your account on the web browser. So what you need to know and what you need to understand about the Instagram handle. It's a unique identifier so nobody else can have your handle. So if my name is Benji, which it is, and I want the Instagram handle, Benji, I can't actually have it unless nobody else already has claimed it. So you need to go and claim, you'll handle for your business, your brand, your personality count, your hybrid account, whatever it is to make sure that other people aren't using it or to make sure that people don't claim it before you do so I'm going to show you exactly how you can do that. And also in the likelihood that it's already claimed because Instagram has so many uses on it, that's most likely going to be claimed are going to show you what you could do to either get it back or to go around it and understand the Instagram handle is not the most important thing in the world and you don't want to be paying thousands of dollars to buy the handle, handle off someone. But how to add a couple of letters or numbers, or prefixes or suffixes to your Instagram handle to make it even better than if it was just your name. So the second thing you need to understand is your Instagram handle is actually searchable by users. So we're going to talk about this a lot later. But it's searchable in the terms of SEO. So SEO is search engine optimization, which means when someone types in the word sports apparel. And your handle is sports apparel, you're going to be ranked really, really highly on the results. And if someone's looking at accounts to follow and sports apparel, or they're looking to buy something in sports parallel. And your Instagram handle is ranked really highly. You're going to do exceedingly well from this because people are going to be searching for it. They going to find your account, they're going to fall you and they're gonna buy your products and services. And you need to know that it's searchable because if someone's looking for your business directly and they're not actually looking for a theme or they're not looking for a product, but they're actually want to find, do you want to try and help them find you? So if my business is turtle pizza and then I sell pizza in Miami. I need to make sure that total pizza is in my Instagram handle. Because when people type in total pizza, I don't want other businesses coming up when people are searching directly for me. So there are three rules with your Instagram handle. Three basic rules to remember, because it is quite a simple thing to optimize. Rule number 1. The simpler your Instagram handle is, the better because It's a unique identifier. So it's going to be harder to get simpler handles because they are more in demand, because they're easier to explain that better for SEO and they just look cleaner on your page. So for example, if I wanted Benji, this is as simple as it could possibly be for my personal account. Benji is my name. That would be the simplest form of Instagram handle. Most likely it's going to be taken, you're going to see a little screen like this basically says that the Instagram username is not available. What you need to do is you need to add something like this so I can add a full stop or an underscore there two characters that Instagram except that aren't letters or numbers. So it could be Benji dark blue, or I could be G, B and JI. I could add this little full stop or period to wherever I want to inside of my username, as long as it makes sense and it doesn't look too trashy, it's a good way to find a username for you that works for your business or brand or personal account that isn't too complicated or too far away from your ideal, you're going to add an initial. So I could add something like Benji J. Wilson because that's my full name. And at Benji Wilson was taken, I could add the Benji J wasn't like that in my formula name. You could use your niche shock the Benji dot entrepreneurship. And you can see something like this could be better than just using bendy because not only am I SEO for my name when someone tries to find me directly, but i'm, I said also search engine optimized for my niche. So if someone types entrepreneurship into Instagram, then I'm also going to be likely to pop up very high. You can use your domain because you can use the dot or the period. You could be Benji blue.com, which would be my website. It could be books.com or if you're selling cat colors, you'd be cat colors.com if that is your domain, because not only does it help use your actual name on Instagram, but it also gives people call to action to actually know that you're a website. You can add a prefix such a it's, it's Bengio IN Benji. Or you can add a country or state or a location such as Benji, Australia, Ozzie Benji or something like that. So here are a few other suggestions for if you're not a personality account. And you can see, the more simple it is as rule number one, the better it is. So App Engines The best then maybe at Benjamin, which are little more complex but still would be incredible, have at Benjamin 92, which is my birth year at Benjamin underscore 92. And then you just fall off the deep end when you can't find anything that's taken. And that would be by far the worst. Instagram handle a brand. They want Nike that don't have Nike. You could do something like Nike official. What have you all brand name is official on the end. You can use NOT gate parallel, you could use Nike brand and then we put underscores and then you can see it gets worse and worse and less simple it is, if it's themed around entrepreneurship, can be entrepreneur. And you can start explaining why do entrepreneur posts and entrepreneur quotes in there, entrepreneur. And you can see the bottom one down there. They've got dots and ones and pays. People use numbers as letters, which I don't recommend because it doesn't help with SEO. You just want to make sure the simpler it is, the better. That is all you need to remember. You can add any of those prefixes, prefixes or suffixes, in order to help you get an account that's not only search engine optimized, but also simple. You can see added asked issues out of that. Amazon uses Amazon Australia, this is an Australian Tourism accounts. They just use Australia, which actually they used to be australia.com. But they're mostly purchased the handle Australia from somebody and just use it and have made it simpler. And isn't Elon Musk is, I think a clothing brand. And they've put Haskins obviously taken so that all I've done is put underscore UK, which works really well because that is the location that they're in. So go ahead and create your handled, make it simple, agile location and official and the end, and add whatever you need to make sure that it's not already taken.
8. Your Name: Awesome, welcome to 2.3. This is where we're going to be choosing our Instagram name. Now we have the handle. Now we know the account type is, we want to make sure that we have the perfect Instagram name that's optimized for our Instagram account. So what is an Instagram name? Exactly? Yeah. Instagram name is the name of your page or your account and it's not unlike the handle unique to your account. So you can share on Instagram name with as many Instagram accounts that want to use your name. So what is it useful? Similar to the handle, the US have Instagram name is searchable. So you want to make sure that it's SEO optimized, whether you're a brand themed account, whether you're a personal account. You want to make sure that you'll searchable through your name and it doesn't have to be the same as your Instagram handle. So one human nature is searchable to. The other factor that we want to optimize for is that we want to make sure that when people read the name of the account, they can understand who we are and what we do. And if it's just a name, so if your if mind Benji blue and it's a personal account, they don't have to understand what I do, but they have to understand that I am a personal account just because I've used my name. Someone like Nike, it's very easy for them to understand that they're a brand because their name is Nike. They look on the handle, they look at this photo and they can very easily understand that they're a clothing brand. So what we wanna do is you wanna make sure to optimize our Instagram account with SEO, we need to just use the name of either ourselves. So Benjamin Wilson for me, my brand. So it could be freedom formula or it could be Nike or could be Burger King, whatever it is, use the name of your brand that you're creating or that you own. If you're, if your theme is the core of your account now remember each one of these, you're gonna have a different core of your account. If it's personal call, a brand core themed call, you want to use the theme. So cats of Instagram, they had the word cats in their name and fall. You could use your purpose. So if you don't have a specific name, we don't have a specific thing. It could be save the bees. Could be the purpose of your account. Could be your Instagram name, which is basically just telling people the purpose of your account. So let's have a look at some examples of this. If you're a personal account, you can use something like your name. You see LeBron James is the name of his account. What King James is the handle of his account. They don't have to be the same, but the name is more likely to be your actual name where you are handled can be your nickname or a slang name, or an SEO optimized name. Fancy things blog is another great example of this because they handle her Instagram username is fancy things blog, which you know, she has a blog. If anyone's searching fancy things, she's coming up because she's well optimized with the SEO of fancy things in her name, of her brand. And you can see that her name is Kristen leaky. I don't know how to say that specific perfectly, but it looks like Lee and Kristen Lee here is therefore the name on her account because she is a personal account. You can see number 2, your brand. So Gucci, they use Gucci as the handle or is the username. And then you also use Gucci as the name of the account. Very straightforward. Couple of other examples there. Benji blue would be the name of my brand freedom formula or Gucci. And but three, your theme, you can use the theme. So cat's cute cats feed is the handle. Yep. And cute cat photos is the name. Obviously, you can see the photos was taken QC cat photos was taken as the username. So they just wanted to KitKat feed because they're playing off the wood Instagram news feed there, which is really cool. They get the dots in there that periods or the full stops wherever you go on forever country you're from. And you can see the name is the theme of their account. It's cute cat photos is the theme. That's why you would follow up a couple of other ones that we came across with dogs of Instagram. A very simple and related month or fruits with faces. Fruit that looks like it's been shaped into a face. Just naturally, not an apple that has, it looks like it's got a face and a very interesting Instagram account. If you wanted to go check that one out. You can see a very viral 12 because we're talking about frigid phases. We've created what's called a story gapping like what does it actually mean? We're gonna get into that later and you're likely to go check that out and that she follow that account. We'll just see what is going on just because of a really good name of the account. And of course you can use your purpose. So you can see in this one here, it's team bloody dot motivation is the username which is little bit complex, but you know, not too bad the motivation and the name is motivation slash entrepreneur. Well, not even slashes small like a line. And that's the purpose they want their therefore entrepreneurship and they therefore motivation that I'd have to use their name when it's a theme to count like this or even a hybrid account, you don't have to use your name specifically. You can put that in your bio, but more on that to come. Another example of this would be Monday motivation. So basically we post every Monday and it's motivating stuff. Now you molecular to follow than if they were cold, Tom Jones and you have no idea what they do. So creating an understanding using your name is also really important. So you can use additional descriptors such as the motivation or the entrepreneurship to help people better understand your account. So you can see here in this example, there's Burger King DE is the username, so it's a German Burger King and abuse DE for Deutschland as the username because obviously Burger King is used in the US or their main brand. And then name is not Burger King, but it's bugging Deutschland, which helps segregate and specify that people in Germany, they don't really want to be following, bugging us because it doesn't really, but 10 to them. But begging Deutschland means that that's going to be in German and it's going to be relevant to their area. So a very good example of making sure that people understand what your account does better by using additional descriptors. And you can see if we had a brand name of turtle and we ran turtle accounting or turtle pizzeria or turtle education Miami. There was an educational company on online learning company. These are all just additional script is you could have instead of just the brand name turtle, you can make sure you're adding these onto the end to help people understand what you do. The last thing you need to know is you don't need to stress about this. This can be changed at any time. Even your Instagram handle can be changed at any time. Although that one, you probably want to make sure you don't lose your handle. So if you do change it, someone can come in and grab the one that you were using. But it's again named specifically, you can go in and change it a 100 times a day. Once you do have it set, they want you to have on something like you want to leave it. Because like I said, it's search engine optimized. And if you keep changing it, then the search engine is not going to be putting it at the top because the name no longer applies to that search term. So don't stress, use one of these rules. Just put your name. It's very straight forward, very simple for you to do. And and yeah, don't stress this is going to be an easy Costco. Make sure you've got everything you need to be well eclipse, well equipped and take on the Instagram world and do exceedingly well. Bye.
9. Profile Picture: So now we're on to the Instagram display photo. So the photo that you use as the face of your account, we want to make sure that that's perfect because it really is the thing that's most seen on Instagram. And it is the only visual representation of your account that you get to use all across the Instagram platform. So it represents your account as a whole and it's critical in order to grow really fast and help people understand what your business is about, to draw, to grow your affinity with the actual customers and have a highly converting Instagram page. So make sure you check the attachment for this lesson where you can download the template and get the exact dimensions that you need for your Instagram profile photo. What you need to know in order to optimize it. And I'm going to show you exactly at live walk-through at the end of this module of us walking through and building an Instagram photo together. What do you need to know though is it can either be displayed as a circle or a square depending on where it's displayed across the Instagram website. And so you wanna make sure it's symmetrical and it fits to both a circle and a square. There are three keys to remember once you've got that symmetry down, is you need to have it be a symbolic representation of whatever it is you're trying to present. So whether your account is a personal account, a brand account, a hybrid account, or themed account. You can't have a busy logo or a busy photo that you want to make sure that it is very symbolic and it's very simple because this photo is going to be seen at really, really small dimension. So you want to make sure it pops at every single size and we're going to be walking you through some examples of this. You want to make sure there's no noise. So making sure that the, There's not a lot of stuff in the background or foreground, not more than 1 of interest for people to look at in your Instagram profile photo. And of course, you'll make sure it's a high-quality image because when it does get squashed, the high-quality image shows up a lot better because they are able to choose the right pixels in order to squash down and make sure it's really clean image for you to see. And of course, you want to make sure that you don't come across as a cheap business when you have a pixel, the profile photo, and people go onto your Instagram page. So let's go through some examples of this. So you wanna make sure that it's a symbolic representation of either yourself or your business, or your brand or your logo. So you can see here, if this is a personal page and you're a girl and that you have a following about your lifestyle. The photo on the left here is you look your square onto the camera. You're close up to the camera. It's quite symmetrical and it shows round and it shows square, shows well-rounded, shows well square. It's a very appealing photo to look at, and it's very high-quality. So you wanna make sure that your photo is something like that, as opposed to the one on the right where there's a lot of stuff going on. There's more than one person in it That's hats and sunglasses and it's not all the face or the upper torso on the face, which I highly recommend if you're using a personal account will yourself as the image. Make sure you're very close up. So you've got just face or just the shoulders and the face. Otherwise, it's way too confusing. If you're a bodybuilder, you can put some of your upper body in there as well. But I wouldn't zoom out. I wouldn't have you in full length or full profile. But just your absolute face and really close to the camera and high-quality. Even for businesses, you can see someone like Starbucks. Instead of using the actual logo, which is on the right, that's their full logo. That if simplify that, they've zoomed in and I've got rid of all the writing that got rid of old symbols. And instead they've just use the logo in the middle of the Starbucks logo as the full Instagram picture. And you'll see a lot of people like this, like Nike just have the tick. They don't have the writing, their McDonald's just have the M Walmart. They don't have Walmart, they just have the yellow flower thing. A lot of these businesses and brands simplify their logos even further. So make sure if you have a logo that's not complex, you can use that. Otherwise, if it is quite complex, just use the first letter of it. It'll just use something very simple and very appealing that stands out well and is a symbolic representation of your brand. So number two, you wanna make sure there's no noise surrounding the subject of the image, which is a U or a product, or a brand or a cat or whatever the theme of your account is, no complex color pellets stick to one or two colors, maxima and that goes the same in logos. If you have, you can see Starbucks. If we go back here. That's not Starbucks. This here, Starbucks. You can see they have blacks and whites and they have greens. And that's actually really simple. It's only three colors, but again, put it down to just two colors, blue, green, and white. And you can see a lot of brands doing that. Some people actually invest that cause which we'll be talking about in the upcoming lectures. But basically stick to one to two colors even in your photos as well. So this girl you can see it's a clear photo of her. It's a little bit more than just the face, but it's a athletic looking brand and is a clothing brand. So you can do that. Although I do think she'd be better off being a lot closer to the actual camera. And you can see the background is just white. It's bricks where the other one, you can see this goes really far away. It's a full body. She's small, you can't see a face. You don't grow a personal affinity to her because you can't see it. You don't understand anything about her. There's lots of refresh or fractions of line and marries and different angles, which is just more confusing. This was posted on Instagram. It'd be a great person, but not to be used as your profile image. Again, you can see here a couple of makeup companies, gland pay a lot of makeup that's trying to squeeze all that products in there that tried to squeeze. They use a name in there and I've even got an underscore, like it's not what you want in a profile photo when mac have simply just used the logo and the two color form stretched across the entire circle, all across the full width of the image. And number 3, you want a high-quality image and needs to be sharp. It needs to be non blurry and it needs to be close up. High-quality coffee, high-quality, far away and you zoom in, it's all blurry photo. I'm going to make sure it's very high-quality and Shop. Now we're gonna do a little test in a second. But before you do, you can actually use a hacker called a brand to theme temporary image, which is where if you're a Entrepreneurship account, you may use a really cool-looking car, Lamborghini as your photo for the first month as you grow your account because you are posing as a theme to count, even though you're a business account, because people are more likely to follow if you're a really cool car or this man in a suit and time, then they are, if you are just the logo of your business. And it also you can use photos to entice curiosity and give insight into your account and make people actually want to click your profile and go and learn more about who you are, which as we've discussed, they can then go and follow you and see your updates. All they can go back to your website and buy your products. So what I wanted to show you and ask you is, which photo should McDonald's be using as their profile photo? On the left, you've got Ronald McDonald, which is obviously their mascot, would be totally fine to use as the profile photo. And that's a question I'm not telling you that this is a question for you to understand. Do you on a2 colored logo that's really close up. Do you want their products do on their products that are really close up and high-quality. As the photo, do you want the arch to give it a little bit more lifelike instead of just having the basic logo with the writing underneath? Or do you want to buckets of chips all in one, which is again their product and main test. A little bit of curiosity. So you definitely want this on, you want this McDonald's symbolic representation that's clean, it's high-quality, it's really good. The only way that I would use any of the other ones, it would be probably the chip one, all the product one. If you wanted to split, test and see if you could create some curiosity with those, but they seem way too complex. And what you wanna do is you want to have the big McDonald's logo, the two colors. Really simple, straightforward. Make sure you as a symbolic, make sure it's two colors. Make sure there's no noise, and make sure it represents you as a brand.
10. Instagram Bio: Great, So now we're onto our Instagram bio. So what is your Instagram bio? And it's basically a short description, selling your Instagram account. And I highlight the word selling heat because that's really what I want you to focus on doing. It's not describing your account, but it's actually selling what you want people to do, whether that be follow you, whether that be to the lack of photos, whether it be to go and buy a product. So you want to make sure that you're selling your account to them and we're not just describing it. So you want to think of your Instagram bio as basically like a new school way of having a business card. You give them and you meet someone at a meeting, maybe you meet a man in a suit, had some dinner and I go, do you have a cod and yet get here's my card. You hand over your card. Now, why I say cell is because a here on the left is a plumbing business that I own for the sake of this example. And I'm selling my business in the in my business cards have benches, plumbing. We come to you in 30 minutes plus 10 percent off your first visit. So if anyone has a plumbing problem that they can get me there to fix it in 30 minutes and they can get 10 percent off their first visit where B could be the same. Plumbing service, could be the same everything but just called benches plumbing. He's a number is the website. And that's it. There's no call to action, there's no sales, there's no enticement of someone to actually use my plumbing service over the anyone's anybody else's where in a you know, there's no reason not to lose my Plumbing Service in this one. So we want to make sure that way if following this same procedure for the new school business card, which is the Instagram bio. So here's a question that I need you to answer yourself. It's why would you follow your own Instagram account? What benefits would you receive if you don't know your company, if you have no affiliation with the accompany, if you don't know the benefits already and you need someone to describe them to you. Why would they follow your account? So you need a write those things down because these are the things that, these are the value that you actually offering people when they follow your account and the value have to tell them and sell to them in your Instagram bio. So a good way to start and if you can't answer that first question is actually to ask yourself, why do you follow the accounts that you already follow? So if you use Instagram, dawn to your Instagram profile, DO two accounts you are following and go one-by-one. Why do I follow them? Maybe the friend, it could be friend, friend, friend, friend and then cool. This one is inspirational photos. That's why a fall. And this one is discounts to local supermarket which they give off. And you need to go through, and you need to go through each account and write down, why am I following this account? And it might have more than one reason, but just write down the main reason you're following the account looking at over here on the left at the list, which of these sum. Main reasons why people follow Instagram account, whether it be news, may either be pretty pitches or inspirational quotes and photos. Maybe their friends, maybe they have freebies or discounts, coupons. Maybe it's funny, maybe it makes them laugh and it's entertaining. Maybe there's a service or product that you want, you saving up for. You're not sure if you fully want. So you want to keep in touch with them and maybe their educational learning and informative. And you can see here some examples on the right of inspirational things, all funny things. So that's the good chips with the tomato sauces that being announced that look like hands. He's a product of the Raman. If you're a Raman, if you're, HE run ROM and, or somebody like that. People like, yes, I love ROM and I'd like to see photos of ramen. I like these photos of food, and they're going to follow these accounts. So once again, ask yourself, why do you follow your own Instagram account given these new parameters, given these reasons why most people fly your account. And then you have to convert these reasons into a 150 characters to convince people to follow your account all to take your call to action, which we'll get into in a second, but basically grew from reasons why people should follow your account. Now we need to wet it and put it into our buyer. And there's two main ways to do this. So one over here on the left, you can see this is a paragraph. So we write laws. We help you to pin your own civil rights into existence too. Square root of 26 laws for more than 69 million subscribers and counting. So you can see they've written the benefit of what they have tried to explain what they do. And it's written in paragraph form where dot points over here, you've got Ninja, who's basically got his name at the top, color blends ninja is all of his handles on all of these social media platforms. Now what should just shouting them out. But you can see, we wouldn't do this because we're not as big as ninja, who is a gamer, has a YouTube or Twitch gamma, and everyone already knows who he is if they're following him for us, we want to make sure that we're explaining yourself a little bit better and selling the benefits of following us. But you can see he's just laid them out in dot point format. So now I've got reasons why people should follow us. We want to make sure that we are not explaining those reasons, but with selling them. So here is a difference between an explanation and a sale or the benefits. One of them is explaining what it is. The other one is explained it benefits you get if you're a world traveler and in your body you've got traveler, then it's not really giving the person the benefit they want. The benefit that they want is travel with me and see incredible photos of the world. Follow me and seeing incredible photos. That's how you would, would if you are a travel up. If you're a restaurant, you could say restaurant or you could say Follow us with 20 percent off your first dinner. Like it's a restaurant. I'm offering 20 percent off your first dinner. And you can have the explanation and the benefit in it together, which is very important and people miss this. And if this can increase your conversion rate of people seeing your page to following your page or your account. Even 20 percent, you're going to have 20 percent more followers every single day. So if you're averaging a, AT followers a day, you're going to be having this map's a little bit of a 100 followers, a Danes of 80, which is 20 extra follow as a day which is just massive. Her the unit becomes exponential as you're getting more and more followers, you wanna make sure that every little miniscule detail is perfected and refine so that you're not leaking these followers and this momentum is really working with you and not against you. So make sure you sell the benefits of your account. So write down what they are, turn them into either dot points are at paragraph and sell them. Don't explain them. Tip to use emojis even if you are a business page. So emojis are fun. They're very commonplace in on Instagram even for big businesses. So you can see it kinda got emojis in their Fiji water. These big businesses that actually using emojis now don't overuse them. Go and have a look at the rule competitive checklist that were put together and see what they're using to see what's appropriate for your niche. But don't be scared to actually put some emojis in them. Tip number 3, use SEO rich keyword. So we've been talking about this throughout the whole of creating out Instagram account. And we want to make sure we don't skip over it here because it's still, it gets pulled by the Instagram search algorithm. Anything that is in your bio is going to be red and you're going to be more likely to show up high on those search results. So if for example, I'm an entrepreneurship channel on a mesh, other words, entrepreneurship is in my bio and I want to make sure that any other word that I think people will be searching for will be in my buyer. Even just written naturally, Hey, my name's Benji. I'm interested in entrepreneurship. I'm, I'm an entrepreneur and can help you and then insert the benefit there. So you don't have to like put them in as dot point or anything, but make sure they flow in naturally and they work for you because now these is going to pull a few people back to your account every single day just from people searching entrepreneur inside the Instagram search box. So you can also on top of that, on top of it, tip number 3, use these words as hashtags because actually boosts the skull. The SEO score you can see he's an example here. You can see hashtag Rama, and this is a Raman business. And you can see that but hashtag Raman in there and they've got RAM and not as a hashtag. And of course got the ROM and emerging too. So they've got the best of every world. And here in all these tips. And you can see that you can actually put a hashtag in your bio which makes it clickable and more searchable, more likely to rank high on SEO results. So what you need to do is you need to go and write down all the SEO rich keywords for your business. What are people searching for to find your business there, the keywords that you want to be writing down, you can use them as hashtags, so you can use them naturally in your buyer.
11. Story Highlights: Awesome. So let's talk about story highlights now. Story highlights are essentially where you save your stories on your profile and you get to categorize them. Now if you haven't seen these before, we're gonna go through them in more detail in module 7 and build these together. But just for now, this is a brief overview on your profile. They have very, very prominent, which is why we touch on them here. And a lot of people use really cool story covers. You can either make your own, which we'll show you how to do that. I'll show you how to find really awesome story covers for your profile later in the course. The big takeaway here in this module for story covers and stories is they serve a purpose because they're so prominent on your profile, they need to actually do something for your customer or your followers. There's four things that you need to keep in mind when building your stories and story covers. One, you may need to build affinity with your audience. So somebody who is just discovering your profile and following you, the longer they spend on your story highlights, the more affinity they are building with you, and the more likely they are to see your content when you post it, may want to have something engaging there that keeps people's affinity at all time highs. The second thing you can do is build some trust if you show behind the scenes footage or you show something where you're being vulnerable and speaking to the camera or behind the scenes at your house, you can build a trusting relationship with your audience who's going to be more likely to follow you, going to be more likely to click on the links and go to your website or your store, which brings us to number three, funneling them off Instagram, whether it be a podcast where the BIA YouTube channel, whether it be a website or a product, or whether you're affiliating for something. Funneling them off Instagram using story highlights is a great call to action. And number four, you want to reveal what your profile is about. You want to really polarize people. You want to make them have the choice of, yes, I want to follow this person on node. This content's not for me because as we get into it, we don't want a million random follow is we want people who actually like your content and actually believe in your brand message to be following you. So we want to make sure your brand message is very prevalent in your story highlights. Here are a couple of examples. This is sponge bulbs, official Instagram account. You can see in the bottom left, they are the story covers and got games, trivia and Paul's. Remember, you can create any topic that you possibly can imagine. You can have that as your story cover and story highlights. You can see on the right is one of the games that was in the SpongeBob. Km's story highlights. You can see it says, hopefully you can see it says chum bucket at the top. I think that it's sometimes hard to read for some people with a yellow color blindness or something. And it says, can you read the above SpongeBob phrase? And then you've got the interactive poll below. And there were a lot of these really cool games on that. Here is Subway. You can see they had a story highlight called community. And when you click on community, they celebrate franchisees and people in the subway community. Little story about themselves. You can see this is really building trust. This is building affinity right here, like we were talking about. So you're spending a longer on their stories, then you're more likely to see SpongeBob content when they post it. This one here is building trust and this one's going behind the scenes at Subway and really showing you what they're about and really becoming more than just a restaurant on the side of the road for you. This one here is Tony Robbins is, and he's advertising his products. So down the bottom left, these are his story highlights. You can see he's got his podcast. You can see it's got UP W, which is an event. It's got business mastery, which is one of his events. These are all paid events and date with destiny and other paid event. And then he's got a free challenge, which is his free event. So he's advertising to free things, he's podcasts, and it's free challenge. And then he's got these three paid events in the middle of that, which people can discoveries profile and then find the highlights in the behind the scenes footage and worn. It's like to be at one of these events. You can see on the right, this is an example of a story that is inside of his podcast, story highlights. And the thing about this is you can swipe up from the stories. So it is another way to link out from your profile. We're going to show you exactly how you can create the story highlights, covers, and remodel your entire Instagram profile. So it's ideal for your target customer to come through and climb that affinity ladder.
12. Submit Your Project: Awesome. I want to give you a genuine appreciation and proud nearness. A little applause here for you because you've done really well to make it through that first section and understanding how exactly you need to optimize your count and then going and taking action and actually doing it. To celebrate, I really need you to take part in the Skillshare project. And if you want my support and support of the team and supportive everybody else who's doing this course. What you need to do is new. Now take a screenshot of your Instagram profile. Don't worry if it's not perfect yet, we're not judging. We're here to support and come back to execution. Upload that screenshot of your Instagram profile for everybody to see. Now everybody who sees this is going to be able to discover you on Instagram gone follow you, engage in some of your photos and really just send you messages of support and build the sense of community that we're really old looking for. So please make sure now that you've gone to this lecture to come and submit your profile into the class project. I would really love to see it. And anybody who does, we're going to make sure we are as supportive as possible. With that said, we're not going to jump onto exciting things because we're built that and really strong foundation that we're going to build upon. Well-known for taking action, looking forward to seeing what you've created, Let's jump into the next lecture.
13. Algorithm Introduction: Awesome, really well done in that module, that conversion process is now mustard. Now what do we need? We need to run traffic into your profile to make sure that people are actually discovering you. So this might be my favorite module, the whole cost because we are now going through phase one together. How does the Instagram algorithm work? How can you use its biases and how can you so coal the algorithm to make sure that it's showing you a potential audience, the content that you're putting out. Now we won't get to content later in this course that used to be first, but this is the more fun stuff that once you understand, it makes it so much easier to actually create your content. So let's jump into how can you get in front of and how can you reach your potential audience using the power of the Instagram algorithm.
14. The Blackbox: Awesome. So this could be the most important lecture in the entire course if you can understand what exactly the Instagram algorithm once and how you can give it to them. You'll be able to get as much exposure as you could possibly imagine on Instagram. So we're going to dive into this black box together. So buckle up because it's going to be an exciting ride. So the first thing we need to know is Instagram algorithm is ultimately in charge of deciding who sees what when they open their Instagram app. So that may appear on your home feed and made to appear on your Discover Feed. It may appear on whose story shows up first. It all comes down to the Instagram algorithm. Now, unfortunately, just because an account follows you, it does not mean your content will be on the Instagram feed. You've probably experienced this where you may have 1000 followers. And he pulled out a piece of content and it only gets 43 legs. And you're like, well, that obviously didn't go through 1000 people's home feed. The exposure is just not there. And on average, you have reached just 10 percent of your followers. And the longer the Instagram organic content is being rounded them more ads that they start to run, the less you will actually reach of your people who've literally signed up in order to get your updates, the less of them will really get your updates, which is where most people fall. However, we really want to double or triple this number on average for you and even show you how you can reach way more people than a following you. And that's by understanding this Instagram algorithm first and then hacking that algorithm, optimizing our content and our strategies for this algorithm in order to appear on as many people's home feed as possible on Instagram. So if this sounds good to you, Well, let's jump in. This is what it's going to look like. This is the situation where we've posted a stretching bear in the water on your Instagram page, just an example for you. And on average you get no new followers knowing you sees that content, but only people who are actually following you. And you may get 52 lacks, maybe you have 600 followers, maybe have 6000 followers, but you're not getting very much engagement on that post, no new comments either. Now, after you apply these strategies that we're going to be learning together and really understand the scope of the algorithm. You are going to be able to get something like 84 new followers in a post and 1200 and faultlines because we're going to show you how to reach beyond your current audience and not just beyond your current audience to reach everybody. You don't want everybody seeing this stuff, but you only want people who really resonate with the content and connect with your brand. We're going to Chez how to specifically target then from posting the exact same stuff, but just using a few strategies that are currently working in order to get past that Instagram gate keeper of the algorithm. So to understand the Instagram algorithm, we have to understand what does instagram want? Because what in scrim want as being coded into the ogre rhythm in order for the algorithm to go and do its work on behalf of Instagram. Now, maybe you want to answer this question. You had. What is Instagram ultimately want? What Instagram ultimately one is they want high-quality content that people love. Because the more high-quality content that people love, the mole. Instagram is, I'm going to open that Instagram app and become addicted to opening it and going there to see and feel what they really want to feel. So Instagram want people to use their Atmel because then they can run more ads and then they can make more money for their shareholders. Because Instagram ultimately as a business, it's owned by Facebook. And at the bottom line is always going to become back to how much money they can make, which comes back to customer and client satisfaction. So they wanna make, they uses really excited and happy to use their app. Now in order to do this, Instagram needed aside, what is high-quality content and what is low-quality content, they need to know that in order to display only high-quality content that people love. Now you can see this example photo on the left is the example we'll be walking through together. This may be a photo that you've taken for breakfast. You've got looks like avocado and cheese, which is an interesting combo and maybe like a little apple crumble or something on the side of that one's half-eaten. And it's a very artistic photo. But to me, a new we can tell if we think this is high, a low-quality content, just by how much we love it, how much we engage with it. However, Instagram's algorithm, they don't know, they're not human. They can't decipher if they think people will like it. Instead, they do something much smarter. Actually go and they ask people if they like it or not. And this is called a micro test. And if you can understand and micro test, you're way ahead of any of your competitors on Instagram. And I'm excited to see what you can create because this is very powerful knowledge here. Now when I say they go and ask people that don't go and verbally say, Hey, do you like this piece of content? They literally just test it to a small portion of your audience and they see if people like it based on if they engage with it. So whether they comment on whether they reply to your story, whether they replay the real, whether they scroll on their newsfeed and stop on that post, that's called time on post. Whether they share it or whether they just view it. Well, if they hit the like button, this means that they have engaged with your piece of content. In the example we're using in this cheese in avocado, Apple crumble, coffee pitcher. And how they get result is they can pay you to everybody else who's currently posting on Instagram. So in this example, we post our Apple crumble pitcher. It gets micro tested to say a 100 people. And you can see the pink people at the top. Ten people who have engaged with it, whether that be lacking in spending more time on the post, sharing the post. So 10 out of a 100. And therefore Instagram know that on average 10 percent of people who fall, you are going to like this content and they don't really push it out any further. They mark it as low quality content. However, if we posted this piece of content and all of a sudden 60 out of a 100 people in our micro test actually engage with the post Instagram's like, wow, this is a post that a lot of people like or at least spending time on n considering, therefore we need to push it out to more people. And you can see right here, it's quite a binary way to explain it. But the micro test is determining whether your content is high quality or low quality. Now, this is the best way to understand the theory upfront, but now we want to dig into a little bit more of what actually happened. So instead of being high quality or low quality, just a yes or a no, it's actually a sliding scale. And what happens in that micro test is you are going to land somewhere between a rating of say, 0 or a 100. And the more people who engage with that post, especially in that first minute or so that more recently can engage the Byetta, which we'll get into these advanced tactics. But the more people that engage with this during its micro test phase, the more people are going to see that post. And this is exactly how you can have way more people then who are following you ever seen that post that has 3.7 million views and the person and he has 20000 followers. It's because it's just performed extremely well in the micro test. And then what happens is a micro tests to a bigger audience and then a bigger audience and have it keeps performing really well. You can see here the post is going to go further and further and further until it starts failing those tests. And you can easily reach over a 100 thousand people. It doesn't matter what size your account is. If your piece of content does really well in the micro tests or anything that we're going to be discussing in this lecture and the rest of the course. It's essentially going to be, how do we get pieces of content of a phone better in the micro test phase? And there's a lot of really cool strategies that can help your content perform better than it currently is. And they forget way more exposure than it currently is. Now a little bit of background discovery here for you is, how does this actually work like why and how people finding your piece of content. Now if you don't know a law, majority of content is going to be discovered in the Discover tab. That's why it's called the Discover tab. And you'll content will come up in people who Instagram think is like the people who are currently following you and have engaged a piece of content in the micro test. So Instagram is going to be running essentially a lookalike audience where they like, wow, 60 out of a 100 people of this type of person, maybe they did breakfast enthusiasts interacted with this post that skill and display this to another 100 breakfast enthusiasts who haven't actually followed this account, your account yet, but may want to, and this is how you start to get picked up. You also come up in the Home tab and you'll see it on your own Instagram, it'll say, because you follow this person, a lot of other people who follow this person interact with this account. And this is how our photos get more engagement and more growth outside the limit of the demand of people who actually follow us. So cole of this lesson is we need to get as much engagement as possible on our content within the first couple of hours so that the algorithm can determine us as high quality. So if we want to hack the algorithm and we want to optimize your content and your whole Instagram strategy to reach more people, we need to hack the algorithm in this micro test phase. So let's go and discover the best current working strategies that are really going to skyrocket your performance in the micro test phase.
15. Hashtags for Exposure: Awesome, So welcome to hashtags. We really are going to skyrocket outposts engagement specifically in this micro test phase using hashtags. And these work. A lot of people are skeptical if they still work on Instagram. We're going to show you how I getting two to three times engagement on your posts using hashtags this year and why they're always going to work and these are not going to go out of date. So you don't want to say that hashtag is basically a way of categorizing content on Instagram that makes it discuss discoverable to the whole platform. So instead of just being discoverable to you, and instead of it just being discoverable to that you'll follow is the whole platform now has access to your piece of content because of the categorization that you've put on it. So has tags can be added to our post to it in just skyrocket our engagement during the macro test phase. So remember, this is the micro test phase. And but Instagram, I'm going to say if our content is high-quality, low-quality, and by using hashtags, we're going to give a lot of people access to this photo using them during the macro test phase. And therefore, where Instagram think they're only testing a 100 people that are going to be testing a lot more than a 100 people and they're going to have higher engagement rates using these hashtags. So you need to understand, Instagram allows you to use a maximum of 30 hashtags in your Instagram post. And the best way to think of this, and most fun way to think of this is hashtags. Basically like highly trafficked museums, where every hashtag is its own art gallery that people go and can browse the posts or they can browse the artwork inside each gallery. So when you hash-tag cat, you basically hanging your photo up in the cat gallery. And therefore, anyone who's currently browsing the cap girl gallery can come across your, the host because you're basically like nailing your content to the wall of the capillary. And there's always millions of people who are a hundreds of thousands people actually in that gallery interested in looking at cats and that's what they're doing there, that just browsing content of really cute cats. And you can see this is the same for every single hashtag. So whether it's a food hashtag or a beach hashtag, that's people in those museums as people in those galleries looking at your content and this is what the gallery looks like on Instagram. It doesn't look like an actual value, but basically they search for cats and they just browsing all these photos of cats. Now. And the museum ranks all the artwork based on its popularity. And museum being instagram ranks of its artwork based on its popularity. And we will display only the best and most popular artwork first. So if you go into an art gallery, They're going to be, well, first of all, Instagram are going to be monitoring in the accolade, what's bringing in the most people? What do most people stopping when they walk around the gallery? Whether they pose, where do they interact with them? What do they like? And those ones that they like, they're the ones that are going to be really showing to people because they know they have high engagement. The same is on insulin. So the more someone interacts and engages and likes this. Post the higher up they going to show it when people are actually scrolling through the cat hashtags. So you need to understand that most people use hashtags incorrectly. And if we can use them right, we're going to really, really take advantage of these other people and your competitors who aren't using them correctly. So in order to absolutely skyrocket our account using hashtags, we need to, I need to show you what's right and what's wrong when it comes to hashtag. So you can see over here on the left, this person has tagged Money, Entrepreneur, rich, luxury and freedom. And on the right, this person hashtag, money, money, money with emoji, motivation for life motivation 101. I don't know what that is. Motivation nation, Tony Robbins, start a business, start your own business. And I'm going to show you exactly why. But this person on the right has done a lot better job with the hashtags than the person on the left. And it's because the number one mistake that people make with hashtags is going for the King hashtag. Now the King hashtag, other ones were talking about earlier. Hashtag, food hashtag entrepreneur, hashtag cats, hashtag, beach, hashtag, love, hashtag, sunset. All these really, really popular hashtags are basically the most popular museums. Nad, stand out in an exceedingly popular museum is really, really tough. It's basically like hanging up your artwork in the loop and competing for views against the Mona Lisa. It's going to be hot. You're going to end up gathering dust at the back-end storage. You're not going to get the engagement and the view's going against these really famous paintings. So how we combat this is we need to actually start, like in the art world, in the local art exhibitions and slowly build up more recognizable galleries. And the cool thing is that you do build up as you build your following, as you build your affinity with them, you start climbing this hashtag ladder. And when he climbed the hashtag letter, you can eventually be seen next to the Mona Lisa and you'll actually be competing with it when people are posting their artwork in the museum. In the loop, when people are going for the biggest hashtags like hashtag entrepreneur, you can actually really skyrockets your account like that. Because if you rank high on Entrepreneur, all you need is one poster rank really high and you're getting hundreds of thousands of followers from that one post. And when you have the power to actually do that with every post, your account is going to skyrocket. So you can see here is the hashtag ladder. Now then the bottom is entrepreneur minds. Then next is entrepreneur actually spelt wrong. And then above that entrepreneur style, entrepreneur spirit and entrepreneurial entrepreneurs and an entrepreneur. And you can see below it, it shows you how many posts or how many pieces of artwork are in each one of these galleries. Now, we need to be using the local galleries, the one that have a lot less posts. Because even though there's gonna be a lot, let Pete lot less people in those galleries where going to be the main the main exhibit, the main piece of artwork. Gallery and draw a lot of engagement and draw loving interaction with that post, especially during that micro test. And then we're going to be able to move up the ladder as our account grows. So you want to look for things that have a lot less posts and a lot less competition with within your niche. So finding which hashtags to use within your niche is actually very easy. You first just need to start with the king tag so everybody knows what the king tags off. If you are a if you are a restaurant, it could just be hashtag restaurant. Or if you're a pizza place, it could just be hashtag pizza there, the king tags, that's going to be really hard to compete with. But what happens when you type that into Instagram? It's going to give you suggestions. And you can browse these suggestions and you can see how many posts they have in their hashtag and then target the ones that have less than a 100 thousand and stopped, then a 100,200 thousand and work your way up that Instagram hashtag ladder. You can also look at competitors tags, which accounts that are about your size or slightly bigger than you, what hashtags are they using? And then you can discover those hashtags. Click through to them and see if they're going to be the right size for you. And then you can use hashtag apps. Now there's a lot of hashtags apps you can use out there and stop making specific recommendations because hashtag apps actually keep changing. Instagram keep updating their terms of service. But all you need to do is go to the Play Store only Google device. Or if you own an Apple device, go to the App Store and type in Instagram hashtag. And it all just hashtag. And you're going to get suggested an array of apps that you can use, define the best hashtags in your niche. And what you can do is you can just test those hashtags out, manually yourself and see what a hashtag API like. But there's a lot of them that can give you really good suggestions for your hashtags. Now, you can see if you have less than 10 thousand followers, you want to start with hashtags that have between five thousand and a hundred and fifty thousand posts and you want to get an array of them. So don't just go for all hashtags with 5000. Actually start to work outside where you think you're going to be good. And you can go up to hashtags with a 150 thousand posts. Because if your post does really well, you're going to be ranking really high on quite a medium size gallery with a lot of people in this. So something like Entrepreneur minds might be a good one to go for if you're in the entrepreneurial space which has 40 thousand posts. But if you're starting to rank higher than that, you know, if you're starting to have ten to 50 thousand followers and suddenly build that momentum. Or if you really just have strong affinity, you can go between 5000 because you want to keep hidden those little ones. It doesn't matter how big your account gets. You can hit the little ones and absolutely dominate them. And then stretch yourself and go to one something like Entrepreneurial, which has a million posts. And you can start to stretch beyond that too, but basically just test it for yourself. So this is basically the lifecycle of the hashtag and how you're going to be leveling up. So you want to choose low competition hashtags to stop. You want to rank at the top of those hashtags, be discovered by more people. Get more engagement specifically in the micro test phase. And then you want to choose a higher competition hashtag for your next post. And the next post should be at level to the next post. After that you'll be at level three. And basically you keep leveling up on these hashtags. You want to keep a big sheet of these hashtags. We know what your dominating, you know what you need to stretch in order to achieve. And you keep leveling up until you really are in the loop of your hashtags. And you can use the mega, mega King hashtags and absolutely skyrocket your account. So hashtags work the same way if they use in your caption and your comments. So we recommend you actually put it in your comments. So this is someone putting hashtags in the caption. We actually recommend what happens after you post your photo. You put your caption there so people can read it and it's not really distracting with a 100 or 30 different hashtags next to it. But what happens is you, you make the first comment on your post. So you say post this photo or post this video. And then you make a comment on your own post with these hashtags. And it's going to have the same effect as if you put it in your post. So remember that's just an extra tip. You can actually use your hashtags in your comments and not in your caption. And therefore you won't dilute your caption and make it really confusing for people.
16. Captions 1: So one of the best and easiest ways to boost this engagement in the micro test phase is using captions. So before we jump in, I just want to remind you that we are going to be using the main news feed type of post as most of our examples in this module. However, every single type of media on Instagram is not only searchable by an Instagram algorithm, but remember they all go through their own micro test just in a different way. So if you're posting reals, Instagram, TVs, stories of public, couple of examples in here for you. So you can see exactly how Instagram respond to your captions, your bio descriptions, and you've written content, and exactly how you can use this to get as much exposure as possible on all types of your posts on Instagram. But remember the main examples we'll be using because the primary sort of content and the most important set of content on Instagram still is going to be that newsfeed content. So first of all, what is a caption? If you don't know what the caption is already, it's basically just the text that accompanies your image or video that you post to Instagram. It has a word limit of 2200 words, which is actually a lot of words to go along with your Instagram photo. So if we can optimize our captions, we can optimize engagement and therefore prove the performance of our micro test and then get exposed to much more people than just 10 percent of our audience. So here are the top three strategies that we're going to investigate together. And we're gonna go through them one-by-one and shave exactly how you can use story, questions and call to actions in order to really skyrocket the engagement on your posts. And not only increase the average amount of people that you expose to per image, increase the chance that you're going to go absolutely viral and blow up your account with just one post. So the first one is story. And story is basically telling a story in your caption. Now you can see this is achieved success is the Instagram account that posted this. It's not actually Will Smith's account, but they're posted a photo of Will Smith and it said a little quote from him. It says the things that have been most value to me, I did not learn in school. And then that could just be the image. They could just post that. But that would not get as much engagement as if they posted the story that they have below it. And you can see that I've posted a little. It's not exactly a story, but the person is a longer caption that tells a story that tells it has quotes and emojis and people stop scrolling on this and they read through it. So you can see they've got an Albert Einstein quote, I have no special talents. I'm only passionately curious. And then the worst crimes than burning books, one of them is not reading them. These are all just random quotes that go along with the actual quote from Will Smith. And then you can see at the bottom that were written tag someone who needs to see this. So this is a, another call to action which will be discussing in, later on in this lecture. But they've done really well to put that. Those quotes and those extra information and extra value into the bio or into the caption of this photo. And therefore, when people are actually scrolling through their Instagram feed and they stop on it, they're going to spend more time on it. They're gonna be more likely to interact with it and more likely to go and follow this account just because I've got an extra additional 300 words below it. It's the same for this one. You can see there's a photo of three ladies on a beach. And if this was just all it is, is obviously perceived by the United Nations. You can see there on the bottom right. And if this is just the image in, I would get a few lags, a little bit of engagement that people would keep scrolling. But you can see the person, the background story behind the image, which is really, really key. You'll be shocked at the engagement difference from posting a background information about the post that you're talking about, but a background information about the post that you posted on Instagram. You're going to see much high interaction engagement and therefore, much higher amount of exposure for it. So I highly recommend you try telling a story like these two examples here. And why it actually increases your exposure. Because one, the biggest one it does is it increases the time posts. So you can have people transfixed on your post because you're telling them a story. Therefore, increasing the time spent on posts, which remember that is one of the strongest engagement. Identify us from Instagram. Stories also going to be a lot of texts. So you wanna make sure you break up the paragraphs because otherwise, everyone's is going to be overwhelmed by the amount of texts you can see they used emerges and they use dots and they used Lena, fun text characters to keep you engaged because the lungs you can get people to spend on that post, the better it's going to do. And of course it boost trust and affinity and helps people understand you understand your content and want to actually like and engage with your future content. So number two, this is a really simple one as well, but it actually works really, really well on Instagram right now. So you can see this is down lock and he's asking questions in his content. So would you rather be rich or would you rather be, right? And you can see it's got a red pill, blue pill, and he's dressed up like he's in the matrix. And in the caption below you can see is written through my 20 years in business, I've noticed that most people would rather be right and satisfy, satisfy their big ego, then be rich. Would you rather be right? Or rich? Comment below. So you can see he's asking a question That's going to get people to engage. It's going to get people to actually write their opinion on this thing. I'm a little bit we're going to be writing right? Or a lot of people are going to be writing rich. And it's really a fantastic simple way just to ask that question in the bio and even to ask the question in the actual content. To get people stopping, to get people typing, to get people interacting with your posts, increasing engagement. And especially in that micro test phase where the content is going to go absolutely vital if you can get enough people to actually engage with this question. You can see here is a really simple one from Chipotle. It's who else does this. And it's just this guy shaking up his Partly ball before he eat. And some people might do it, some people might not do it. But I think the key here is that people are going to have an opinion on this because they're asked to have an opinion on it. So people like nowhere do that. That's silly or they could be like, Yeah, of course I do that. And people are going to be not only commenting, but when you've read something like who else does this, you want to see what the content actually is. So they're going to stop and wait for that video to play because someone's asked them for their opinion. So making sure you're asking people for their opinion. And he's a third, not specifically a question but a call to action, which is caption, caption this picture. So they haven't actually capturing them in photo, but they've actually got a really cool photo of a cat in front of a volcano in Japan. And they're asking people to caption it. So whether people actually go down to the comments and caption it for them and increase engagement that way. Or if they just see the call to action of caption this picture. And they'd be like, What would I caption it? And they don't even have to type it, but they scroll back up to the photo and be like, oh, what would I do to caption this? They're increasing their engaged. You can see in this next example, this is an example of a story that's using questions or prompts. Now, this one's incredible because not only will you have people stop on your story and hold there so that they can actually go through and read this form that you'll fill out. But if you use the text tool and not the writing tool to put your answers in, they will also be searchable by the Instagram algorithm. And if you are using locations, places, or plate, uh, names of books as if as in the lungs. You can see up here the last book you read, if you use Harry Potter up there, it's going to be all searchable through the hashtags that you're using to the text that you're using, and then locations that you're also using. So these are really awesome forms you can make your own, but just put long-form text in those stories to get people stuffing on and get Instagram thinking, Wow, this person really has a high affinity with this account. And they got to be more likely to show you the rest of your stories to that same person event. So question keys get people to comment because that will really, really increase your engagement, especially the way Instagram is trending. You want comments as many comments as possible. And of course, don't complicate it because people don't want to be stopping and trying to decipher what you're saying, make sure it makes it really easy for people to respond by asking questions like this. Do you agree? Red pill or blue pill like Dan locked in which door? And you can have three different doors in your photo. 12 or three, like you can say, which is your favorite way to eat your burrito? 1, 2, or 3 D and F, different options. What's your favorite flavor or caption this photo, really simple and easy questions that you can put in your content to increase your engagement. Now, call to actions again, really, really simple. You can see this is a really awesome looking getaway house thing at ANOVA. It's Photoshopped, they're real, but it's just a big globe of gloss, which I'm sure it's really tough to keep clean. But luxury empire have posted this and just written tag your better half. And instead of no call to action down there at all, I'll check this out sort of thing. And less people are going to be interacting and engaging with it because they are having a call to action like this. You can see here, this is Shake Shack and it says, looking double-tap worthy, double-tap obviously is how you like a photo. So the call to action is to like it this photo by just prompting the words double-tap in there. Here's a really cute little photo, cuteness cat for you posted and you can see someone hadn't made a replica of their cat in a mini form. And you can see they've got double-tap written in their caption. And they've also got follow curtis cat for you, which means that not only prompting a double-tap but a follow. And if you can get someone to follow you in your micro test, you're going to do really, really well because that is, that really means your content is really well. It's really, really good because people are going to see your content, have to click on it, have to go to your account and follow it Instagram and I'm like, wow, that must be a really good piece of content if they prompt a follow. So call to action keys, make sure you get people to comment, all like on your photos to boost the engagement in the micro test phase, what would you lack or tag a friend for? So ask yourself that like, what are you interacting with? What are you engaging with on your own Instagram account? And make sure you're replicating that in your Instagram account that for the, for the content that you're posting. So if I've said that in the most confusing leg possible, but basically, what's making you like photos and what's making you tag a friend, do that on your own content and make it very visible for the viewers by using emojis and spaces. Remember, don't overwhelm them with big block text. Here's a few prompts that you can use. It can be tagged friend, like if and then you put some condition in there, double-tap if, again, put a condition in there and you can actually use a piece of content with both of those. Like if you agree. I'll comment if you disagree, so I think so you can use to call to actions and have people sort of talking against each other. Follow us again, is a really powerful one. So remember, you want to keep your captions relevant to your brand. Don't go out and copy anyone that's random. That's doing really well because you don't want to hurt your brand reputation. So make sure that you are adapting what these other people are doing to your own proud process, its own brand and making sure it's brand relevant is because this is what's actually building trust.
17. World Class Content: Awesome. So now let's talk about creating more content. Now that you understand that foundation that we're going to build upon, let's have a look at our affinity ladder because I'm telling you this lecture right here. If first of all, you had high-quality content, that's the most important thing. But the second most important thing is this lecture right here. Every single piece of content that you publish doesn't matter what type of content that is on Instagram. It's a chance for people to ascend from your potential audience, having never discovered you before, to actually seeing that new piece of content. And then going back to your profile and visiting it and discovering your business annual brand. So every piece of content you put out there is a chance for people who don't know you to ascend from level 1 on the affinity letter to level three. Now, why it's important to watch this lecture is because the mole content that you post, the more chances that we have to move people up, your affinity lambda, you can sort of think of content as like a bread crumb trail leading back to your profile. And the more bread comes you put out there, the more birds are going to have to come back and discover that you actually exists. So how does this work and how can we take the biggest advantage of this? Well, one, it's going to increase the chances of a viral hit the mole content you post. The more the chance that you're going to hit a viral hit, the more you post. Also going to increase the rate of your smaller hits. So that is this graph again that we've seen before. There's one viral hit, say out of a 100 posts. So the quickie posts, those a 100, the closer you're going to be getting to post single viral hit, the also the more you learn about what sort of content your audience likes and therefore are able to post more, but more importantly, without depending on this one piece of content going viral, you're also going to increase the rate of your smaller hits. So all these smaller hits down there, if you just keep posting more of them, what you don't understand is that these are also bringing value back then upbringing, bringing as many birds to follow the breadcrumb trail up the affinity of data, but they're still bringing some and in we're just expanding those smaller amounts of people who are finding you by having more breadcrumb trails out there. So this is the example of the viral hit that we used. Yes, it's gained a disproportionate amount of followers for this account. But the same account you can see is posting content daily and every single post that it makes is a chance for somebody who didn't see their viral hit to discover them, follow that bread crumb trail and ascend their affinity ladder. You can see this one down the bottom here. 84 thousand engagements, which is a lot of people, and a lot of those people will not be falling them already. So although it doesn't have 15 million likes, it's still going to have an effect if you can post a 100 of these sorts of contents. So in visual form, you can see that on the left is engagements. So the bigger the rectangle, the longer the rectangle, the engagement that piece of content gotten them. But these pieces of content on just News Feed post, but anything like a real IGTV story. All of the types of content that are out there on Instagram and it's continuing to grow. You can see that these 30 pieces of content got a 138 followers. Back to this example user we got, so we're going to use your Canada's as an example. Say you posted 30 pieces of content and one of them did really well. But in total, you got a 138 followers back from posting these 30 high-quality pieces of content. And FO, in the metaphor that we're using, 30 breadcrumb trails out there, 138 birds came back to visit your profile. So on average, this is 4.6 followers for every post that you make, 138 divided by 30 is 4.6. So every post you make, you can depend on average to get you almost five followers. So what's the quickest way to 11,040 followers for your account. Well, it's simply to create 2400 high-quality pieces of content. Now, I know what you're probably thinking is 2400 pieces of quality content may be impossible to create over a short amount of time. We'll get to that one. But also what people may be thinking is, this is gonna overwhelm my audience. I don't want to be bombarded with content. They want one piece of content a week or two pieces of content a week maximum. I'm going to show you in this course why that is the thing that's holding 99 percent of people back. Most people are not at 50 percent of their posting capacity. And if you can double, triple quadruple, you're posting capacity. Just to test this theory for me, I guarantee that you are not posting enough times on Instagram. So how do we speed this up? Essentially what may take someone 30 weeks to gain a 138 followers because they're posting schedule, we can just make this 30 days so we're condensing the time that it takes for us to get a 138 followers back. Now, this comes with a challenge. And the challenge is creating high-quality pieces of content efficiently. This is the, the stone that is stopping us. So the thing that is in the way of us getting as many followers as we want, which is creating high-quality pieces of content efficiently. If you could create an infinite amount of high-quality pieces of content that you'll audience loved and sought as really giving them value. There is no end to how many people would come back and discover your brand and your business. So this is the real bottleneck that we have to remove so that you can create high-quality content very, very quickly and easy, and therefore condense what you'd normally do in 30 weeks down to 30 days. Now. It starts here and this is where a lot of people get stuck. How do they define high-quality? Because normally people put their own definition on quality. I wouldn't like to see that in my News Feed. Therefore, it's not high-quality. I didn't spend enough time on that deaf or it's not high-quality. But the question that we need to answer and the definition that we need to get in our own heads to remove this bottleneck is what is high-quality? Is it a, what most people think? The Instagram post that takes three days to make it maybe a little short 62nd video that you had to go out and get all the content put together and put the music on it and you posted and 10 percent of your audiences engage with it. So say you have 10 thousand followers. 00, 00 00 00. Engage with that post. Is that high-quality content? Yes, it took a long time, but 10 percent is not that high of an engagement rates. So the audience didn't think it was actually that high-quality or worth their engagement, will be the behind the scene post that takes 20 seconds to pull out your phone and shoot and get 60 percent of your audience to engage with it. So 6000 and of your 10000 followers engage with it. The answer here is clearly be high-quality is what your users and what your target market engages with. It's not what takes you the most time. And this is a very important and critical thing that you need to identify early and it's going to remove that bottleneck for you. So let's make this concrete and let's turn this into something that you can practically take away and start using this hour on Instagram to go and test in your niche. So there are five categories of high-quality content that you can create efficiently. So please bookmark this page because yes, we're going to be revisiting this stuff in the content creation module. We're not even there yet, but we do sort of have to merge these modules a little bit and touch on the stuff. They're just for you to be able to practically understand this stuff without it all being theory. So I hope that you can appreciate that we have sort of trying to balance this thing, but this is the first time you'll be looking at this. So it's very important that you bookmark this page because this, once again, behind high-quality content, is the most critical thing that you could be doing, which is creating more content more easily. Now, the first category of high-quality content you can create efficiently is motivational. We also have viral. We have behind the scene. We have long-form content, and we have batching and outsourcing. And batching and outsourcing is essentially not taking your time to create this content. You know, if someone else took three days and you could afford their pay very easily or paid itself back in the content you're creating. Well then they can go and take as long as they want to create this content because it's not taking your time. We'll cover this later in the course, but I want to talk you through the first four piece of content and expand that horizon. And why didn't you remind them what you should be posting on Instagram in order to post more often and often, more high-quality content or more value to your target audience. So let's go through some examples together. This here. Do you know this man? His name is Jay Chetty. He has millions and millions of Instagram followers because he's been doing something very specifically, very well, which is exactly what we're talking about here. He's been using these five different categories of high-quality content to make sure that he's posting real four times every single day. Now, this here is a very classic, old school, traditional Instagram post where most people have mindsets are stuck. You have to pose, you'd have to be in the photo. You have to be holding your product. He's holding his book here. It has to be professional lighting, it has to be looking away from the camera. And it has to go with a long caption about your life and lessons that you've learned. This got 60 thousand or 61 thousand engagements on his Instagram page. What's very interesting, and this comparison here may really hopefully cause you to break through and understand what's happening in terms of high-quality content and what people actually want to see on Instagram. This post being a k, if it happens and being, and okay, if it doesn't happen is a very powerful place to be. It's a quote by Kate Ekman and it's from her Instagram. So this was posted not on Kate Heckman's Instagram, but it was re-posted from there by J. Chetty on JCIDS Instagram page right next to the photo that you see there on the left, the photo of the traditional looking Instagram image. Now how many engagements to this simple quote on a white background that he didn't even come up with gift. It got 242 thousand engagements, four times the amount of engagement. But how much shorter does it take to create something like this? If you stop batching this stuff, you could do a 100 and courts at a time. If you do a 100 cards at a time, it can take you a minute per quote to really just copy paste onto your template. And I'll show you in the content creation how to do this for you. And each had to get the templates that work for you had a put your photos behind it and everything that you need to know. But just for now you need to understand that the one on the left main take 30 minutes to set everything up and pose and then do the filtering and all the editing on the post and writing your caption. So it takes 100th of the time, but does fall times as well. So what is really more high-quality? Because I would argue the one on the right is the ones that people want to see based on the actions that they took in their response to it. Now, before we get into the other examples, because this is an example of a motivational type of content or an educational type of content in your niche, you need to make sure this is your nice Jay Chetty is talking about mindset. So this quote is relevant to him because mindset is relevant to what he teaches and he's niche. If you are a chef, you could have a fun fact about bread. If you're a real estate agent, you could post the most expensive real estate in California and a photo of it with the price of how much it costs. Anything educational or motivational doesn't have to be proprietary to you, but it's could be using other people's content such as their quotes or I'll photos of their house or anything like this. In order to tap into something that you can create quickly, that your audiences is high-quality by using the high engagement rates. What's another one? Viral content. Remember, all of these pieces of content you're going to see here we're all posted to Jascha is Instagram profile. In fact, I recommend that you open JSON is Instagram profile it now as I'm talking to you after this lecture, just to see how he lays this out and see what I'm talking about and why he's so effective in growing his Instagram reach. When someone comes at me with that negativity, you can see here is a dog riding a Roomba and he's looking pretty bad us this was posted to J shed is Instagram. Now how many engagements did this get? It's once again. Topic for Jason because he talks about mindset, so he's talking about being a bad us through negativity, so relevant to him. But once again, I'll show you in the content creation module how to adapt it to be relevant to your niche. I Scott, almost 1 million engagements. Jamie did not create this content. He did. This is not his dog, this is not his room, but he did not have to set this up. He's borrowed this from another social media page of which we'll get into the into once again, but you need to make sure you're tagging way you're getting this content from. And then you can use this content, such as this viral video that took him 20 seconds to throw a caption on anthro up onto his Instagram profile. Now, candid behind the scenes photo. Now I know some photos like this pay people Alice to choose the right one, but you shouldn't be taking hours, which is right on this occasion, his girlfriend here and he posted a photo of her on a holiday. Shouldn't take 20 seconds is to take a behind the scenes style photo. It doesn't have to be well edited or professional 80, anything you see this shadow on her back there, but should not take you long. And guess what? This one got 337 thousand engagements. You can see almost more than five times more than him posing with his product in the top-left because this one is much high-quality, it's more personal. You can seem to J shut his life. You can see into his wife or his girlfriend or fiance, not sure they have their relationship status, but you can understand him more as a person. This is what people wanted to see. They want to understand you more as a brand. They want to understand you more as a person, our personality on Instagram. And when they see this, they respond to it, when their engagement. And that's what makes high-quality, That's what creates affinity and helps people to send that affinity ladder. Now the last piece of content is long-form content. So creating something like a podcast, creating something like a vlog, a long form log way you film your days and you film your meetings or a film something behind the scenes. This is J shady interviewing Wim Hoff. And you can see he had a to our podcast with him, which he personally is Podcast get somebody batching and outsourcing, hence the fifth Sandy, to cut up and put captions over the content and make it relevant to Instagram. And therefore, he does a thorough interview. He could get 30 to a 100 pieces of content from that interview that is made in three hours. Now that is very, very quick, much better than going on a photoshoot. And all of a sudden, he has 700 thousand engagements by interviewing someone else and making a short clip out of it. Now, please bookmark this, please screenshot this. We're going to be going through it deeper together in the content creation phase. But you need to know, don't be stuck in the old Instagram world, the traditional hold your book every a photo that you put up there has to have your product and make sure you're expanding into your niche, pushing the boundaries of what is relevant to you and adapting it so that you're still reaching your target audience. But you're reaching deeper into the pool of the target audience because you meeting them with what they want, what's already in demand. And you posting high-quality content, not in the terms of the highest pixel density, is you can see that blurry dog in the video, but high-quality in the sense of what people want to see and what people wanted to share from your Instagram to their friends.
18. Influencer Introduction: Awesome. Just a really quick check-in for me this time, he doing extremely well. You've already mastered the conversion process up here, and now you're really starting to get the hang of the Instagram algorithm. In this module, I'm going to help you find other strategies for getting people to your profile. People who are irrelevant and target audience for you. And you'll niche and have them also make the decision if they want to follow you and move up to become followers and then obviously move up to Brandy and sales. So let's jump in and find out these other strategies that you could be using to get people from potential audience to profile visit is.
19. Influencer Marketing: Awesome. So another exciting topic to talk about is influencer marketing. Now this is not a new thing, but it is when it comes to Instagram. And that's why it's so powerful right now because it is a new subject when it comes to Instagram and it's really, really undervalued. I'm going to show you exactly how unaffiliated as in this lecture. So first of all, we need to know what is influencer marketing and why should we use it? Why should you use it in order to grow and monetize your Instagram account? And, and I'll give you the short answer because it's really effective and can make you a lot of money and a lot of followers. But the longer answer is influencer marketing is a way of tapping into existing communities of engaged followers on Instagram. So existing communities, people out there who are already exist in a community. Meaning if Nike already have a community of their followers who follow them and they are engaged with Nike's content. So it's a way to tap into these followers of Nike and have them engage with your content and learn about your content. So the old way of influencer marketing, We're known as celebrity endorsements. And this is obviously still done, but it was much bigger back in the day before, people started to build their own audiences on platforms such as Instagram. And you can see Sean Connery and the gene being a celebrity endorsements. Sean Connery had a lot of followers, like he didn't have a lot of obviously Instagram followers, but a lot of people knew who he was and a lot of people respected him and admire him for, obviously as James Bond, Korea and Sean Connery, he says, I drink Jim Beam and therefore the community you'll be engaged. Followers of Sean Connery started becoming part of Jim beans following now because, okay, if Sean Connery likes Jim Beam than I probably will too. And now the sudden I'm not just to Sean Connery fall, but I'm a Jim Beam. And you can see McDonald's also did this with labored and Michael Jordan. And they knew that Michael Jordan and live bird have a big following. And once again, none of this is not talking about an Instagram falling, but a lot of people like and respect Michael Jordan and lie, but and therefore, when they promote McDonald's, a lot of people I going to go from 0, microfilm likes McDonald's. I like Morocco, Jordan, therefore, I like McDonald's. Now influences of today. A very, very similar to this, but Instagram is a really good way that people are using this sort of influencer marketing. So you can see p Pi over here on the left. He has over a 100 million YouTube subscribers, which is absolutely insane amount of reach of this Preston Scott, but he's got obviously got an engaged community, a 100 million people on YouTube. I don't know exactly how many is got an insulin, but he's got obviously tens of millions of people on Instagram as well. And this phone really show the brand name of the shown. High honor.com is the brand that's basically paying him to put a post out in front of his engaged community saying that he loves this phone. And you can see it says hashtag ad that and he's put the link in the description for where people can go and get this phone for themself. Kendall Jenner on the right, getting into the groove of using my former well beauty products. So you can see Kendall Jenner is promoting former well beauty. And from a beauty is obviously paid Kendall Jenner, to promote their products and getting front of Kendall, Jenna's brand and engaged community. Because like Michael Jordan likes McDonald's effort. I like McDonald's. Kendall Jenner uses phone while beauty. I like Kendall Jenner there for I you just form a well PUT. So compared to conventional advertising such as TV ads or even Instagram ads himself, which we will go into in a second. But influencer marketing has lower costs and is more effective. This is why we are using influencer marketing, conventional ads. So say you run a Instagram ad or say you run a, you put up a billboard. The return on that is going to be about $1, spent $1 return on a good day and a very good day. And that's a lot long-term return that is not immediately influencer marketing, also known as shout-outs on Instagram. For every $1 spent, you can get a return of up to $12 and pretty immediately. And this, these statistics right here are why we are going to be using influencer marketing and shoutouts to absolutely skyrocket our account in terms of followers and monetization.
20. Shoutout Types: So in this lecture we're going to show you why the shadows are the fastest way for you to actually grow your Instagram account with high-quality, relevant, and targeted followers to your niche. So once again, this influencer marketing is going to be relevant to all media formats on Instagram are going to show you some examples of different media formats you can use. But don't just be zoomed in on whatever specific one we're showing you, whether you want to do reals or labs or photos, videos, stories. Make sure you're wondering what's going to work really well for your specific account. And then when we get into the content creation module, I'll show you exactly how to create all these different types of content. So this is the golden ticket. And the golden ticket is, it's basically renting advertising space from other people's Instagram accounts. And why it's the golden ticket, because it's so cheap and so undervalued. So for example, this is a Instagram account with 1.2 million followers. I can get my media, my face here in front of these 1.2 million people for a very, very low price, anywhere between 60 to about three to $400, I can get in front of 1 to a potentially in front of 1.2 million followers. Now if you don't have this sort of budget at all, if you don't have even $60 for this, That's totally fine. I'm going to say, hey, you can get it for free as well. But if you do have capitals and you should have a little bit of capital you want to invest in your growth, then this is exactly what you need to do step-by-step. So it's called a shout-out 0, influence of marketing. And then the most undervalued advertising in the world right now. One of the most cheapest and the most undervalued that I know. And I'm going to show you exactly why would this example. So you can see this Explorer I count has 1.1 million followers. And for the sake of the math, we're going to pretend that they have 1 million is. Now you can get in front of these 1 million followers, which means, you know, they're not going to have a full, a 100 percent people see your video that you put out there, but say you get 200 thousand views from being posted, being shouted out by this Explorer account, and then save them to a 100 thousand views, less than 10 percent of those people, which is quite a, quite a low percentage, cut a pessimistic percentage in this example, 15 thousand people then go and view your profile who had never heard of your business before, never heard of you. And now all of a sudden you have 15 thousand people. Not only enjoy your content, but enjoy your content enough to come back to your Instagram account and want to find out more about you was think of how many people now engaging with your posts. So you can now be displayed in better hashtag galleries. And all these things is really sets the snowball out-of-control when you can get boosted like this in the shadows like we did for our count. Now to do something a little fun together, I want to show you how this fits into that affinity ladder that you're trying to optimize. So you can see we want a million followers from this Explorer account. We want 20% of them to see the content. Then we want 15%, 30 percent of them. So 15 thousand people to see the profile and then 3000 people to go and follow us. So here's the affinity lattice lid in next to it. You can see it's obviously. The opposite way. So if we go ahead and we flip that letter, you can see how it starts to fit in perfectly with what we're trying to optimize. So the million followers are our potential audience who we have not reached yet, but the page of explorer has reached for us. So we're gonna get them to put out a piece of content in any form of the Instagram, different types of content. And you can see we get 200 thousand content view. It's people who now know that we exist. From there. They get pushed towards are the ones who are curious about. You get pushed towards your personal profile and then you get 3000 new followers. You can see that lines up perfectly with what we're trying to do. The question and a little bit of a test in here for you see if you can get this. Where does the shout out or influence and marketing connect into this original affinity ladder of yours. Where would you put it in order to have it connect in? If you said you would connect it here on the side, it is absolutely the perfect answer. And if you didn't answer that, That's okay. Let me explain that to you. Basically, the affinity ladder is a funnel to funnel people back to your profile, followers, branding and sales. You're putting out content on your own profile to reach a potential audience. What's going to also happen when you use this affiliate or the influence of marketing. They're going to get content viewers in a whole new funnel, in a whole new potential audience that someone else has captured. It's going to be your content, but post-Civil and different person's profile. And they just plug straight into the science and they have two funnels pumping back to your profile to follow you and then to go to your branding and your sales. So there are three types of shout-out partnerships, also known as influence some marketing partnerships. And we're gonna go through them one-by-one together because it's very important that you know this. The first one are timed, the second is permanent, and the third are affiliated. So let's jump into number 1. This one here is eight timed shadow. So you can see it's a very cool looking at and you can see why they get sales and they get attention because it's basically a little blender that you can take with you wherever you want. And they've got really cool colors there. So it's called fusion, handy fusion and food fully posted this shadow, posted this ad on their Instagram account to their followers. It says, Do you love freshmen of these wherever you are, handy fusion or made it possible the power of a kitchen blender and the size of a water bottle. Stop functioning. Now with our summer sale plus free worldwide shipping Lincoln buyer. And they link to this handy fusion as account twice. You can see. So timeshared up a page, post this advertising such as this one on their account and leaves it for 20 to 24 hours. He basically renting their space on their account for between 20 and 24 hours. And why you would do this over permanent post is because people don't actually like keeping adds up on their account because that looks a little bit any. So they like to delete these shadows after they post them. And you can be renting from 22, 24 hour just means it's a lot cheaper to actually rent a space then to fully by a position on their page. So you can also buy a position on the page. And this is called a permanent shout out or you can where you buy that spot and they can never delete that. And this is going to cost a little bit more. But you can see this example here, billion to heaven message. Chris, effects trades, which is obviously Forex trading in order to make money by trading with his group, don't get stuck at a 95 job, has been traveling and taking his work with him. And so it's a very simple post that is a shoutout that this guy has bought. And now this one won't go down because it's left up permanently and it's going to cost a little bit more money than eight timed shadow. But it's going to get more exposure and it's going to be there forever. Third type of shadow is really a partnership sort of shadow, which is where someone has a stake in hell. Well, that promoted post goes, say for example, you wanted to do a Affiliated chat out with a vitamin company. This means the more vitamins that you sell for them, or the more followers that you get them, the more money you make. Therefore, you're almost paid on a commission basis. So there is a sneaky strategy you can actually use to get these for free. Now, they're not going to be as powerful unless you've got a really big account. But if you're just starting out, you want to do this. It's called share for a share. And this is where you enter a mutual agreement with another account or with another page in order to share their content. In in response in an agreement for you sharing their content that was shared your content back. So say you have 14 thousand followers, German entrepreneurs, and you reach out to Millionaire Mindset who have 18 thousand followers and they share for a share, just S, for S, You can just DM him and say, do you want to share for a share or S for S, and they'll know what you're talking about. And then what you do is you basically shape each other's content. You can see the tag not only in the photo, but they've tagged them in the actual post. Make sure to follow this other count is what they're saying. Go follow our friend is what Millionaire Mindset is saying. And they're recommending each other's accounts in their share. For a share agreement, you can reach out to accounts who are relatively similar in your size and actually get them to promote you, for you promoting them. Now, the downside of this is you may lose a little bit of affinity with your audience because you're promoting someone else's stuff. And that's why I personally like to pay for the shout-outs in order to get, because they're really, really cheap an undervalued, remember, in order to get the best return on my investment and not actually hurt the affinity on my account.
21. Influencer Reach-out: Awesome. So now you know how valuable these influences of and how valuable it is to actually get them to promote your content. We want to know how can you, wherever you are, wherever you are sitting or walking or standing. How can you stop the process of actually getting people to promote your business and your account today. That is what we're going to be covering in this lecture. And it's actually very, very simple. Step one is that we have to find and choose the power influence and we want to promote our stuff too. We have to contact them and obviously asked to promote ESD off. And three, they promote our stuff. Very, very straightforward and simple. So how do we reach out to him? There's three main ways to do this. Instagram, DMs, emails, and messenger apps. So for example, this Instagram DM, you want to say that the thing that I should say before I go into this is that you want to actually reach out to these people in their preferred method of communication because you want to have a strong trusted communication with these people who are going to get a lot of people messaging them. And you want to be working on their ground because they're the ones who have really responsible for putting your ads out there. So you wanna make sure you have a direct line of communication to them and that's going to be wherever they prefer. So for example, if you have searched, if you're a programmer and you search the hashtag programmer and you come across program on life and in their bio they say for a sponsored post DM, or you need to do is follow them and then DM them. But you need to understand that a large accounts are going to have a lot of people messaging them and a lot of people asking for free shout outs and a lot of people really wasting their time. So I would make sure your post actually stands out. And that would start by having something like promo inquiry or paid promote inquiry in the actual message. So that when they see the preview of the subject line of your message, they know it's an actual serious person who's wanting to reach out and wanting to actually pay them or give them a lot of value for the vote they're giving back to you. So here is a sample template that we use. Hey, name. Once again, you start with promo inquiry or paid promote inquiry. And then you can do, hey, username, has it going? Can you tell me if you offer a prayer, a paid primer, and how much would it be for you to shout out my page things. You can also attach the potential shadows that you would want them to promote because a lot of the time they're going to ask, can you send me the content that you want me to promote or the creative that you want to meet to promote. And they're going to make a decision based on that as well. If it's on their brand, off, off their brand sort of vibe. So you can also attach those photos and images of what you actually want them to promote. And second way, people might want you to e-mail them. And they'll simply just put at the bottom of their bio, their e-mail address. And you'll be able to go in, copy this email address and then copy it over to Gmail, whatever e-mail provider you use, and then ask them the same thing with the same template. Do you offer paid promotion? Now, you can also use messenger apps. So something like WhatsApp or kick, kick is very popular with Instagram influences. And you can see what you will see it's pronounced kick, but a spout KI K. You can see account that it really big accounts, really big power influences broker and leveraged merciless shadows through KYC. So if you ever see kick, you just need to download the kick app and create a username and then search the username that's in these people's bios in order to connect with them. And the reason they actually do this is because someone like think Smart, Grow Rich, which has 0.5 million followers. This is probably one of many of their accounts and they can use the one kick name under say, 10 different accounts. So you when you message them on kick, make sure you mentioned which account it is that you're actually wanting these shoutout on. And it's actually really good way if they have more than one account that you can actually start brokering deals and getting cheaper rates because they're going to promote you across maybe five of their accounts. And you can get it for much cheaper than if you reach out to them all individually. And number three, if they don't link their messenger in their bio, search for their Instagram handle on Kick. And if you can see a match, you can ask if that's them. So for example, this person think Smart, Grow Rich. If they don't actually have, they're kick in this bio here. He can actually just go to kick and search that Instagram handle, which would be thanks Marc Rich. And then message the person who has that handle. And it's going to be most likely especially for longer usernames, the person who runs that account. Now, the caution and the warning to the shadows. Now, there are people out there making a lot of money off shouting out other people's content. But don't really have the account that they say they do. They need to make sure you're checking the stats and the engagements of the accounts that you're buying shoutouts from before you actually pay your money for the shout-out. So the best way to do it, to go over to Social Blade. And you scroll down once you type their username into Social Blade, social blade.com. And you see other, is the Instagram account growing or is it dying? And you need to make sure you're checking. Basically the way the catalysts trending. And if the counties trending up, it means that posting high-quality, consistent content. And they're consistently getting new real followers into their account. Now someone who's bought a lot of fake followers, he's going to have low engagement. And so the US for their stats, that's totally fine. But also their accounts going to be slowly dying and dropping off. So make sure that you're paying for the shout-outs on accounts that are trending upwards.
22. Shoutout Content: Awesome. Now this is shout out contents. I'm going to be showing you what to actually post when you are getting shoutouts from these other accounts. Not only what you have to consider about where you have the purse, but also how should you be getting them to post it? And there's one really big thing that a lot of people miss. And I'm going to show you exactly what that is in this lecture so you can get the most bang for your buck. You're paying for this. And if you're not, you're promoting other people's stuff in return for this. So you're going to make sure that we're not wasting your money. And when actually growing your account as big as possible and working on that momentum on our account. And being able to keep doing this. Because if we can put a dollar in and we can get 25 really engaged, amazing followers full that dollar. We want to just keep doing that over and over again because amylose 25 really engage amazing followers. Maybe five of them might buy a product. And it means you're getting someone to buy a product for just $0.20. So it's really, really powerful and I'm going to show you exactly how you can make sure you don't waste your money. And the focus of this and the reason that I'm telling you there isn't that I've included this lecture is because you need to entice people. This is the key to click through to your profile. If they just watch your content on someone else's page, you don't gain anything from that. You don't need exposure then remember your brand name. It's not helping you actually need people to see your shadow on someone else's page and then click through to your profile. We're going to build affinity with them. And we're going to be able to sell them products and services. So the key once again, is to entice people to click through to our profile. So what's really important that you know here is we have a very powerful Instagram content creation module coming up for you that we're going to deep dive into content creation specifically for growing your account. Here we are, however, we're going to be touching on some of the strategies we'll be talking about. But it's all very specific to shout outs and influencer marketing. So don't worry about going too deep on this yet, just make sure you take the main points away. So let's dive into that. Before we can do this, we need to understand that there's three best types of shadows content in order to first grab their attention. Once we grab their attention, then we can get them to click through back to our vector how profile from our content. So the three best types of shout-out content in order got their attention is one, a story gap or a cliff hanger to a super interesting piece of content That's going to be quite naturally viral. And three is story videos. So the first one. So I'm not sure if you can hear that too clearly, but basically there's sound in this and I'm playing the sound because it's very, very important when you post a video or when you're posting a shadow that you do include sand with it. And the best thing is to actually put subtitles because a lot of people won't be playing with sound. But you can see what this is, is it's a clickbait or a cliffhanger. So what's this before you spend a whopping $15 for a job ROM and bought at the store. And if we go back to this, to this actual video. There we go. You can say this guy's holding the jaw of raw almond butter at the actual store or supermarket. And he's basically telling them that there's so he's actually telling them that they need to check out flag City, which is a another account because this account is Quito account. Fluff city to uncover the truth of what he's talking about. And this is just a shout out to flap city, but you can see what it is. It's a story gap. People have not, don't know what the truth is and they're like, Wow, okay, he's in the supermarket. He's got a point to make about this 15 million almond butter, which I actually buy. Let me go check out flap city to make sure I know what the truth is and they leave that story gap open in order and you can see that tag them in this post as well. Not only in the post but in the actual video of the post. And they are getting people back to fluff cities account to then follow flag city. Actually have this shout-out be worth it. Now you can see this on is just interesting content. So this is obviously quite a phenomenal video of Cappadocia, turkey. And you can see that this hot air balloons flying around and there's ago in front of them. Now fiscal sent her name is Gypsy lust. She's getting a shadow from this account called vacations. Now people falling vacations are obviously travel related. And this is a very interesting video, very travel-related. It's in Turkey. And people are obviously going to be inserted in this content and want to see more of this content. So then they can go and click through to gypsy lust and actually see her profile page and convert. So if you have very naturally viral viral content such as this one or something that's very interesting. You don't actually need the story gaps as much as just having this incredible content, but you have to be very sure that that is already going to go viral. And you can test that by putting them on your page and seeing how well it goes. Once you have a piece of content that does really well in your own page, you know, it's gonna do well on related pages and that's what you can start using for your actual creatives and for your media that you're getting other people to promote. So, so you can tell them a story and a quick video as well. So this is for story and video, real shut outs. You want eye-catching and really good music. And you want to be able to tell them a story and engage with them so that they're going to click back to your profile and remember contents decking, we can actually use content stacking here as well. And it's really, really powerful when they, when you get promoted in a post and a story at the same time, remember it increased our views by double. So therefore, on these shout out accounts, if you pay for both a story and a post, you're going to have double the exposure on their account, such as this one. The billionaire playbook has promoted this guy, Nick legend. And you can see that he's got a very engaging video with a very simple call to action. It's basically how an Ivy League dropout made seven figures. And if you want more, go and click on his profile in the link, in the description of the actual real posts. And you can see the one on this story, actually blood out no, didn't blare at his face, but they're hiding his face with the actual logo. So. And they've got a swipe up call to action which leads to his account. So this is a double shadow that is actually very, very effective and we don't actually need to play the sound on that one. But you can see the sound actually really helps capture people's attention when they're scrolling through their stories. So make sure that you're using the double content stacking technique and asking about that when you're reaching out to people as well. So this one, thankfully, it has no sound. It's a lot more complex when we're recording this with sound. This one on the left. This is a cool story content that has more than one video for people to look at it and be engaged with, which keeps them on it longer. More likely it is to read the call to action and then swipe up this one over here. It was actually one that we use to grow. I can't really quickly. It started with a Ferrari with a really cool key. And then it just has people doing really awesome things all around the world. You can see the cold actions swipe up, which takes them to our account, and we actually give them the cold action to follow our counts. So these are really good story shout outs that you can copy. You remember the videos work the best to put time into a video and make sure it's really high-quality and quite naturally sharable. And you can go and get your power influences of people who you're paying to promote your content, to promote these really well-crafted video. Now, this is where a lot of people fail. People go to a lot of work creating that video, a lot of work finding the best account to promote it to an OT. And they've got their high converting profile. But they forget to link up their account. And if they link up their account, they only do it once. What you wanna do is you want to put your account on the, on the actual content because a lot of people are going to be borrowing and stealing your actual content image really high-quality. So you wanna make sure you've got your username on the content. You also want to make sure that you've tagged it on Instagram, on the actual post. It's tagged first thing in the bio and tagged at least once. See a lot of people tag the content two or three times, just undo each other. So because you've got to obviously tap the link to go that profile. And so they put the link to that profile three or four times. So it's really easy for people to navigate back to their profile. And it's also really easy for people to accidentally click on their profile if you're using real shout-outs or something like a live shout out or even like an Instagram TV or even a DM group shadow or any other media. Make sure you're always putting your profile handled in there so people can find you and find the original source of this content. And obviously you want to put it in the caption, then you want to put it in the story as you saw with that Nick legend on it, ribbons or whatever that guy's name was in the story we watched. Make sure you've tagged the post in the story. And then you also want to tag your profile in the swipe up call to action. So making sure you're tagging it wherever it is possible in order to get as many people back to your profile as possible. Because once again, if they don't go back to your profile, It's a waste of money and a waste of time dedicated. So the key is keep tagging on every area you can. The chance to go back to your page and the chance to be converted to a follow-up on your account.
23. Advanced Shoutouts: Awesome. So we're going to now look at some advanced shadow IT strategy. So if you're not quite up to this, that's totally cool. You can skip this lecture or you can watch it just to get an overview of what the advanced accounts out there at doing and you can actually work up to. So these are going to be for advanced shadows strategies, omnipresence, BOC, shout-outs, schedule, and share for a share. So we're gonna go through these one by one. And if you are already doing shout-outs, you need to start doing these four strategies. And if you're not yet, you need to keep these in the backend mind for when you do start doing these strategies. These are going to be what separates your account from the many, many accounts out there who are your competitors? So number one is omnipresence. And it's the strategy of using a selection of your accounts to run shout-outs for you at the same time or simultaneously. Meaning this person right here. You can see his name is Richard tell official. And what he's done is he's gone and reached out to multiple influences in his niche. And he's actually scheduled them to posted the exact same time, the same ad. Therefore, people following a cross these accounts, people who, which is a lot of people in a, in a niche of people are going to follow a lot of different people. If they see this come up at least once in their news feed. If they see it come up two or three times and you can see he's done it. You can see out in people's tag posts actually when they do this. And he's done a lot of times at once, people are going to be much more likely to click on it because they've seen it more than once, it's gone more social proof. And he's gonna get a big rush of followers all at once by having everyone doing this at the same time. So you can use on the presence and making sure that when you schedule these things and when you get people to statue out, that it's, it's one big push and that will really give you a great kick-start for your new account. If you do have a new account. Now, when you buy shadows, It's a strategy number 2, which is just bulk buying. Never buy just one. Because what you should do is you should buy more than one shout out from an account as long as you've done the research and they know that they're a good account to get shadows from. And it's going to be much cheaper for you. It's going to be much cheaper for you to actually buy three shadows. So say $350 instead of a single one for a $150. Because not only are you getting a cheaper price per shadow, and therefore a cheaper price per new follow that comes and follows you. But you're actually building more trust with the other person's followers because they've seen you more than once. And if they don't follow you on that first shatter, they may actually follow you on that next shadow and come back and follow you and then bio stuff just because they've had more exposure to you. So the next thing is, you want to. Make sure you tell the accounts who actually shouting out your content when to post. And the really cool thing that people do with the big advance accounts do is they set them up. So say you've bought an array, array of shout-out. Say, you can see below they've got a, B, C, and D. That's for cancer bought shoutouts from and throughout the week. We can have them post one day after another. So this is sort of similar to on the presence whether a person at once, but they all post on a different day that week. Meaning, if you're following multiple ones of these accounts every day that you log in, you're going to see this person's account being promoted by accounts that you follow. It's going to build so much trust. You can add them, post the same content on new content. And they'd just going to learn so much about you and be very likely to go and follow your account. Now, the fourth one is what's called a chef, a Shia group, or shut up for a shout out group. And this is really, really high power, high leverage, sort of like the Dm groups. But once again, you're going to have to do quite a bit of work to get this up and running if you're going to create it for yourself. So it's basically where you are all sharing each other's followers and shed out. So you're going to have a group of people who all have similar amounts of follows a day one ever and puts a story out that promotes the green dot. Day to everyone, puts a story out that promotes the red dot. And then day 3 ever and puts a story out that promotes the pink dot. And basically, if you can do this and you can have 10 accounts in your niche that you're promoting just in a single story. He put out nine promotions for other people. But on the 10th day you have 10 accounts, which means you're reaching ten times the audience that you could reach on your own. All promote you. You're going to see a rush of followers for free. You don't have to actually put out your own cash and money in order to get these from the group. But you can actually get these for free by putting out your own promotions to these other people. And you'll see a rush of a couple of thousand followers come in in really, a really short amount of time. So the key here is to make sure you're making yourself valuable, whether that is money, whether that is organizing the group. You need to offer value in order to get this value. But once you do, you start to get accounts or you start to get our results like we did with our account. And it's really easy if you do want to do the legwork and do want to set up this account for yourself. You can just DM people with a simple template like this. Hey pink dot, whatever their account name is, would you be interested in joining a shout out for shadow group currently have I have a group including, and you'd list the people who are in that group. And you build that up over time until you have a really powerful, strong group of people who are shouting each other out and you are reaping the benefits because you may not even have to shout out these other accounts. You may just be the one orchestrating it and therefore get into the shadows. So these are full of the advanced strategies. And if it's a little too advanced for you now, don't stress you can come back to this lecture anytime once you've got your first Shattuck going, the key here is to get your first shadow going. And once you get your first shadow going, that's really when things start to go downhill in a good way, things start to get smoother and easier and the momentum starts building for you. So make sure that you have reached out to 20 people and you should see a very good response rate to that. But we don't want you to waste your money. So a couple of things you need to do is you need to make sure that you're not just using the current account that you're reaching out to as a representation of what you think the account has always been. So you can actually check and Instagram accounts for me usernames to make sure that they are in the niche that they've always been in. So you can see this one which is called now called billionaire's club, used to be called DIY hacks, which means they may not actually be our audience. So make sure you click on that little button that says form a usernames in the, when you're viewing their profile. Because they may not be the who they are, who they are, saying that they are. And you want to make sure you're not wasting your money. That's what I don't want you to do here. So remember, you wanna make sure their accounting is growing and active. Look at their most recent posts. Look at Social Blade. Make sure they're on their way up. And make sure the engagement in their purse is really high. You don't want to see an account with very small or very large amount of followers get a very small engagement. You want to see an account with very small amount of followers get very large engagement and an inconsistent engagement is actually better than a consistent engagement. So remember, ask for their stats before you purchased, before you commit to buying. And they'll stand new screenshots of the actual statistics and the behind the scenes of their account. And the best pages and the best accounts will be asking for what content you want to promote before agreeing to a shout out. So if they are doing that, you know that they are quite trustworthy and they do know what they're doing. And that's why you need to have your content ready, like we went through in the last lecture, in order to be ready for them to quote you for their shadows.
24. Off Platform Marketing: Awesome. So I really want to expand our perspectives together because if you can grasp this strategy, you're going to put yourself ahead of everybody else who's just focusing on Instagram. One of the best ways and I'm going to prove this to you to grow on Instagram and grow your following on Instagram is to do off platform Instagram marketing. Let me show you why. So we have 0.5 million people on Instagram. This is your funnel. This is your potential audience in your affinity latter which have been through a few times. Now for doing shout-outs on Instagram, we can also add extensions onto this ladder to help preach other people's audiences who are also going to be part of your potential audiences. But we can also start adding more extensions onto this ladder by marketing off platform. So you can see we can have another piece of content going out on another platform and I'll get into that in just a second. And then a piece of content going out on another platform and potentially reaching more and more people who aren't on Instagram directly or who haven't been able to get in front of on Instagram directly, but they have Instagram accounts. Sometimes it's much easier to reach them, not on Instagram, and therefore you can double or even triple, you'll potential reach and therefore your growth rate if you learn how to master this off Instagram growth. Now, there's a couple of ways we can do this. We can stick with us shout outs or influencer marketing, meaning we can leverage other people's lists and we'll get into specifics in a second. But just to give you one to make it as small concrete fully. Now, we could go to someone with 500 thousand subscribers on YouTube and do a video with them, maybe making a recipe together or doing any sort of cool video that is relevant to your audience, relevant to that audience, and links back to your Instagram profile that would be massive for you in terms of your growth. I'll give you some more examples this as we go. But before we do this, I want to show you just how important it is to make sure that you are not solely focused on Instagram. And there's so many people out there who want to get more Instagram followers become famous on Instagram or build a business solely using Instagram. But you have to realize there are very, very few, just a handful of small, small handful. And I could barely think of any examples while making this for you. People who've come up solely on Instagram. And to show you this, I want to show you the funnels, meaning the lattice that people have used in order to grow their Instagram accounts for the top 50 most followed Instagram accounts. So this is at the time of making this the top 50 most followed Instagram accounts, most of these with hundreds of millions of followers. Now, I can see on the left hand column, so column 1 and column 3, we can see the handles, that is the username of the account. Next to it is what they do as a profession. And this is very important because what I'm going to show you is that no, none of these and there's maybe one exception which I'll go through in just a second with you. None of these people got famous or grew their brains and followings on Instagram exclusively. The majority of these hundreds of millions of followers have come from somewhere else. So I've categorized them for you can see everything highlighted in yellow here. These are all businesses. So you can see we've got Nat Geo, National Geographic, we've got Instagram themselves being in business. I've got Nike, we've got room Madrid, we've got an LFO book club, FC Barcelona. We've got Victoria's Secret. We've got football club, but nasa and we've got nine gag. So these are all businesses and brands, which is great because if your business and brand there's no, there's no limit to how far you can reach on Instagram. You can see they are in the top 15. There's a lot of businesses and brands in the top a 100. But you can see none of these brands started by marketing on Instagram. They didn't start an Instagram account and all of a sudden have 10000 followers. They started a business, a real business, whether that be a sports team or sportswear company, a really popular awesome magazine that's been around for decades, or Space Agency. They're all really, really world-class at whatever their business and brand is. The second category of people almost followed. Instagram accounts we have here is spot and athletes. Again say this six athletes up here, we've got Cristiano Ronaldo, who got Leah messy. We've got a name. We've got a cricket of the rat out. We've got LeBron James and we've got David Beckham's. So obviously, none of these people started an Instagram account to try and get a following. What they did is they go absolutely world-class at their craft. They got world-class at soccer or basketball, cricket. And therefore people look for them on Instagram, off to seeing them on TV or seeing them in the Olympics. So seeing them the World Cup, the distribution wasn't exclusively Instagram and we're going to show you, I know none of us really want to be on this list. Maybe some of us do, but that's not the point of this course I'm showing you at the far right end of the spectrum at the top of the pinnacle. No one is using just Instagram to grow. And it's the same the whole way down. And you'll see in your niche, anyone with a really awesome Instagram account have a lot of funnels or affinity letters leading back to their account to get followers. Here is the next category, and you can see it's the biggest category and it's music. So a lot of music is distributed and used to be on MTV now it's mostly on YouTube or Vivo. Even Tiktok is a lot of music distributing over there. And you can see people like Ariana Grande day as Spotify's a really big one actually. Beyond say Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Jay, hello Nicky manage, Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Demi libido. You can see all these people have come up with music. They're all once again world-class at them music. Now, that does leave us with one person GGE had DID. And while I was making this boy, I'm like, did Gigi had did come up on Instagram. She is a model, but what does it actually mean? Model is not a distribution methods. So I did some further looking and I looked on, you can see in the top-left here, the 2013 to 2016 was Gigi had did breakthrough years. You can also see that she did appearance in a Taylor Swift music video in a song, Bad blood. She has a sister who is also very famous, I think a mom and a dad who's very famous. She also appeared in Victoria's Secret fashion. So she was on the cover of a magazine that yeah. And I think her mom was on Housewives of New York or Housewives of something. And I've compared this to her Google Trends search data which ranks have popularity. And you can see she definitely did not come up on Instagram, but she came up in sort of a mix of family relationships, TV, Victoria's Secret. But either, either way, none of these people came up on Instagram and no one in your niche or no one who's doing really well comes up on Instagram, but they get really, really good at this skill, really good at their craft. And then people look for them on Instagram very organically. And you can see this is what it should look like and this is what it looks like for a lot of people in the top 50, sorry, this is not what it should look like for you. But you can see an Instagram. They are getting some potential audience by posting content there. We saw that you need to post content to get followers. But maybe at TV show, maybe a music video as another way that people are actually getting followers this. But for you, sure you could do a TV show, but it's very costly and probably won't return what it used to return when these people became famous. One it would, would turn that is something like YouTube making viral videos or doing shout-outs or influencer marketing on YouTube by partnering with other YouTube is in your niche and doing say, a cooking show with them and then highlighting your Instagram so they can go to your profile straight to level 3, follow you, and then by a products and services, the same if you wanna do SEO marketing and blog posts, you can do SEM marketing for how to bake healthy vegan chocolate cake. And people will be looking for that on Google that we're looking for that on Amazon, Alexa, or even Siri. And you can come up in search engine optimization marketing. Now, we're not going too deep in this lecture. We do have a very incredible deep digital marketing course here on Udemy. If you're not a part of that already, you can check that out to see hake instead of other funnels to really help you Instagram growth. But the moral of the story here, if you don't wanna go into specifics, is make sure you are exceptional at your craft. Work equally as hard or much harder on your craft. Whatever you Nietzsche's, whatever your businesses and your brand is, B so good that people can't ignore you. Say really good, steep mountain quit. And once you get exceptional, you're going to naturally grow really, really fast.
25. Content Introduction: Awesome. First of all, a big message to you. Congratulations, you are doing extremely well, smashing through this course together. I hope you're really enjoying it. So the good news also is we are up to content view, is we are going to be creating this world-class incredible content together that's extremely high-quality and takes you 1 tenth of the time that other people are spending on their content creation. We're going to go through that altogether in this module and get your mind around that because I hope that so far you've seen the importance of content and how it really is the missing link between people who don't know that you exist out there on Instagram, whether they're following someone else or whether they just browsing the Discover tab, getting into your profile, really the only way there is having something that they can, can shoot. So let's go ahead and work out the best sort of content that you can make feel Instagram as quickly and as efficiently as possible to convert this potential audience into profile visits.
26. Content Purpose: So this is the exciting stuff. Now we're talking about Instagram content. And of course, we need to start with what is the purpose of the Instagram content? A lot of people go out there and they just stop posting random things on Instagram. Random photo is random things about that business or brand or about themselves. And they're not actually asking themselves the question, why am I posting this? What is the purpose of me posting this? And we need to make sure that we're answering that question so that we can improve the content that we post on Instagram With the understanding of what it's trying to achieve for us. So there are three reasons that you will be posting content on insignia. And this is a really cool framework that you need to keep in the back of your mind. And anytime we post a piece of content, you need to be asking yourself, are you optimizing for one of these three reasons, or one of these three purposes of posting content. The first one is engagement and reach. So 70 percent of the content that you're going to put out there on Instagram is going to be to increase your engagement and to keep, to increase your reach. 20 percent is going to be increased in your trust. And the u infinity, how powerful it is to increase your affinity with the audience, the man of people that actually take action on your product because you've got that base level of trust. So that's why I would dedicate 20 percent of all that content to make sure that we're building up this just with that audience. And of course, 10 percent of your content and some, in some cases, 5%, in some cases a lot lower than that. But I think it's safe and very powerful. You have 10 percent of your content pushing down your sales funnel to actually buying your products and services. Once you've reached new people and engage them, you built that Justin infinity, then you really do want to sell them a product because they need to make sure they're there for a reason. You don't just want people around your Instagram account lacking in photos or that does increase your engagement and your reach. You want. Actually, people have take each step of the process one by one, all the way down to buying your product. So let's go through a couple of examples of this. On the left is a photo that we posted in our luxury freedom formula account. And you can see it's a really cool Lamborghini that changes colors based on the remote that's in this person's hand. Not sure if it's real or not, but it looks amazing and it's an incredibly viral piece of content. And the whole purpose of this content is to get people to find out page so, so viral that people are going to be tagging their friends, tagging their family members in. Then say, Hey, check this out. And then all of these people are going to start actually finding an organically discovering in the Discover tab in there, Explore tab out content, coming back to our profile and then obviously following us. So we're getting increased reach with this content. The mama cat club is the same as an incredible photo of a cat in front of the Eiffel Tower. And basically people want to share that, people want to like that. And that's going to organically go very far. And you can see they're having awesome cocoa actions in the bio which will be designed to go viral as possible. Now once you've got some content going as viral as possible, you can understand that people in that coming back to your account and following you, that means the next 20 percent of your content should be focused about building trust and affinity with these people. So you can see in the left, there's the smoothie of the month by Juice Press, who are basically just showing people their products and showing him how good their products are. And the one on the right, I'll show you at the same time is dead mass is showing you some behind the scenes photos of inside his studio. He's a music producer. And both of these photos really good at building trust. You know, one of them shows the product of without a hard push for sale and just lets the customer and the follow on Instagram see your product build trustworthy. Understand what you do. Understand that you are high-quality service. And the one on the right shows you that you're just a person and you know, it's very casual photo not well, lead is not facing the camera. It's just showing you that he's a person that someone you can trust and you sort of get an affinity built with them when you see behind the scenes photos like this. And we're going to show you how you can do that on your account. And lastly, you'll want to have 10 percent of your content pushing towards sales. So low baby, out the mud is a open by little baby underscore one on Instagram. And you can see this is a salesperson. He's obviously put lots of stuff up there on his Instagram account, reaching people and love a lot of content out there, building trust and now comes the time to actually sell. So he's just got the album cover out there. And he says out now on all platforms which when gene gun listen and they can go and bind all platforms. And this is the sales pitch. This is how he makes money and this is where he wants to drive traffic to. You can see the FaZe Clan on the right have posted this cool animated photo. And it's of a shirt that they actually sell in real life. And this is basically their sales pitch to cut the shutter, FaZe Clan.com, go get the sheriff face cam.com. And that's just a salesperson, literally just selling this shirt. But if every one of their posts were sales, people are not going to be engaged and trust them and they're not gonna be able to reach new people. So this is just 10 percent of your content. So I want to make sure that you understand these phases. There's three categories, but they are actually done one after another. So phase 1 is to reach a targeted, relevant audience if you can go and with your, with your content of engagement and reach, reach a targeted and relevant audience that you haven't actually reached yet with Instagram posts, then you're going to be pulling them back to your account and they're going to hit that followed button. And they're going to see your content and selling their friends. So face to once you've gotten them to follow, you, build trust and build affinity. Now this is member is 20 percent of your content will be behind the scenes. Little insights into your products and services and what you do. Any charities that you support, or even just your day-to-day can put some stories out, then we're going to be talking about exactly how to do that. But once you've got them back to your account, you need to introduce yourself, introduce your brand and product, and build that trust and affinity that showed you a so powerful last module. Phase 3 is then finally, once you've got that trust I, once you've got that affinity, you want to convert them to sales. So you really just need to push them as hard as possible into your, into your website or into your store, or even they're on Instagram, whatever it is that you sell, whatever service, whatever product, however, you monetize your account, that's when you can push them them. So a good example of this on Instagram is Tai Lopez. So you can go and follow Tai Lopez if you wanted to see some really cool content that he's creating based one, He's done something that's supposed to go viral. So you can see it's a $10 thousand giveaway and all you have to do is follow his account and he has entered. It says hints you can increase your chances by liking commenting, tagging fringes in the hashtag, pay it forward over time. Now every time I post. So he's getting people to not only come and follow him, but give him engagement on his person. He's giving $10 thousand away in order to do this. Base two is obviously building trust. So here he is now as an authority with his arms crossed, what you want out of life is probably six to 18 months away from happening. If you keep working for I just read that really. I'm sorry about that. What do you want to have? Life is probably six to 18 months away from happening if you keep working for it, be patient. That's a better way than to read that out. But it's an, a motivating entrepreneurial life advice quote that's getting people to lack it. It's not going to go as viral as a $10 thousand giveaway. But it's really good at building trust with his audience and seeing his face. And then when he can post something that's a direct sales, or he can go to his Instagram bio and you can see he's got a direct link to his website where he is selling products. That's when you can actually sell people and that's when 10% of your content should be focused around the sale and even having in your bio, go and get my new Instagram course or go and get my new Cryptocurrency Cause or whatever it is that he's selling at that time. Link is in bio. I can go back to Tai Lopez biochar because at one reached his reach them with viral content that they liked and avoid is count to his built trust over time that this doesn't happen in just one post, but this happens over the period of say, a month when they've seen six to ten of these person and you really start to like you meant understanding. And then phase three is when they take action and go and buy his products.
27. Content Types: Awesome. So now we know the purpose behind our Instagram continent. Every time we post, we're going to be asking yourself, what is the purpose of it? I want to walk you through the actual types of content that you can post on Instagram. So everything that you're publishing on Instagram, from a direct message to an Instagram comment, maybe on someone else's photo, can be considered a piece of content that you're putting out there to the world that people can actually come across and discover your content and your profile through. There's actually 10 different types of Instagram content over ten types. And we're going to be investigating most of these in module seven, because what we really want to focus on are the four main types of content that are going to get you the growth that you want on your Instagram account. The other supplementary types of content we're going to be discussing in Module 7, just so we can add the final touches onto your account and really get the most out of it. But the four main types of content we're going to talk about here in this lecture. I, your photos and your videos that get published directly to Instagram profile, instagram stories, and Instagram Reels. These are similar to the photos and the videos, but they have a little bit of a twist because they don't live on the main homepage of your Instagram profile. So what our Instagram photos. Instagram photos are an image that you post to your Instagram profile. It's very straightforward, very basic. I'm sure you've seen a lot of Instagram photos on Instagram being a user of it. You can see there's a tram and that's pretty tram in Melbourne. And there's a plate of cheesy stuff, french fries or curly fries or something like that. There's a Kellogg's loops is a digital artwork. And Nat Geo has posted this amazing photo of a shock videos as similar to photos. And they will also go on your Instagram profile page. And you can see there's topologies posted. This person making a burrito bowl really efficiently. You've got BuzzFeed tasty, posting a recipe here in form of a video. And then ESPN's got a video of some go running on a baseball field. So essentially, the photos and the videos are both going to be posted to your profile page. Here are the photos. And here the videos all going to be posted to profile page and then Instagram stories. So Instagram stories and are ephemeral form of photos and videos, as you can see in the examples below, you've got videos on the left and the right, a photo in the middle, and they disappear after 24 hours. So the linkable and they have a very high engagement rate and we're going to show you exactly how I going to use them to grow at your account and sell your products. But you need to understand they can be both a video and a photo, and they disappear after 24 hours. Instagram Reels are essentially a blend of stories and videos that are fun and educational way to share content. A lot of this content is less behind the scenes and more catchy and viral. And we're going to be considering reals to be very, very similar to just videos that you will be posting straight to your Instagram profile. So I want to walk you through the pros and the cons of each type of content that you can post to Instagram. So you can see at the top we've got photo, video, Nemo, we're talking about videos. Of course we're talking about videos that you can post your profile and things like Instagram, real story, which we just went through together. And I want to go from left or from top to bottom on the categories of why we would actually use that type of content. So you can see that photo's very easy to create, where videos and not easy to create, it's going to take a lot for you to create a video, a lot more effort that goes into that. And the story is, again, easy to create this it can be a photo or a very casual video into putting your video inside of the story. Photos don't have high engagement rates, but video and many people are going to stop and watch a video because they autoplay on the Instagram news feed. And stories have ridiculously high engagement rates, high virality. So photos, yes, you can go viral with a photo, post it to Instagram account, more likely to go viral. And this is a really cool strategy by posting high viral, virality videos to your Instagram profile, such as the Lamborghini one that we showed you in the last lecture. And stories don't have the ability to go viral because they're not as shareable and not as discoverable if you don't follow an account as the other two types of posts, casual Trust Builder is a very big ones. A casual trust-building is basically showing behind the scenes content, showing very casual content that has, that can improve trust and improve affinity with your audience. And this is where stories really do Excel. There are much more casual laid-back type of content that you can post. Descriptive caption. You don't get a descriptive caption, caption on your story, but you do on your photo and video. So you do want to be making sure that you're taking advantage of this one. My posting, photos and videos and linkable member photos and videos aren't linkable, but stories, you can actually put a Lincoln there and have a call to action for people to go visit your website or go off site wherever you want them to go. So what does this actually mean? This means that the stories are really, really good for increasing trust and affinity and making sales for your business. One, because they disappear and go away. So you're not have stuck with a bunch of sales stuff on your instagram profile too, because you can really have something laid back, something that's very easy to make and something that gives people an insight into your business and builds trust with them. Videos are great for reach and trust that much better for reach and photo as much benefit trust. But both of these photos and videos Excel in the first two categories, whether you want to reach more people, we want to make your Instagram page really discoverable by relevant and targeted people that don't know that you already exist. And then you want to build that trust and affinity with them so you can push them towards the sale. So when we're making our content, we want to keep these in mind. Instagram stories, I going to be used for trust and sales. And a videos and photos are going to be used for reach and trust.
28. Quality Defined: Be the quickest lecture of the whole course, but we need to add the sin because we need to talk about quality. Posting. This two reasons why we need to talk about quality. Now, we're about to talk about creating the content that goes out on your Instagram profile all different times, whether it's a real with its story or whether that's a page post. And you need to know that these the bread crumbs that people discover your profile, the root you can see content comes at level 2. Profile goes to level three, so people find your content and then go back to your profile. So we want to make sure that these breadcrumbs are as delicious as possible to make sure we reach deeper into level 1, the potential audience, and get as many people to discover your content as possible. And to do this, we need to have high quality content. Now when it comes to quality, a lot of people don't actually understand what that means. And I know we've touched on briefly, but the takeaway from this lecture here, and we're going to go deeper into this in this module, is that your audience defines quality, your audience, and only your audience defines what is a high quality Instagram post on your account. So quality is essentially quality content is essentially giving your audience exactly what they want. And the best part about this, and this is how this whole module is designed, is knowing that your audience will actually tell you what they want. No, they weren't message you on your DMs and say, Hey, I want you to post like this. But what they will do is they will speak with the actions. You can remember this graph here. One post goes insanely viral and gets lot of people to view it, a lot of people to follow you and a lot of people back to your website, your products or your services, that is called high-quality because people have shed it, lacked it, and take an action on it. That is what a high-quality post is. A low quality posts are the ones that people don't share. Because behind the algorithm, you'd say actually the algorithm determines what's high-quality. The algorithm is designed for people to stay on Instagram as long as possible. So therefore, the algorithm is designed about your audience's desires. And that's why your audience really dictate what is high and low quality and not you once again, because that is a massive, massive mistake. So we can remember this slide just to go over it quickly again. There's a photoshoot with a book that most people waited until they have those pitch a perfect photos to put up there in order to put on their Instagram. But they don't realize that things such as this very simple quote is much higher in quality than the original one. Yes, with talking about needing a blend of the two and we'll go deeper into that. You want lots of different types of images. But if we could just question and just allow us to poke a little bit of a hole in what you currently perceive is quality on Instagram. Well then you are going to allow you Instagram account to take off because you're gonna give the people what they want. And how we do this is we go to the people who have already told us what they want. And that's where I introduced you a theory and an idea and an action step for you in the next lecture called modelling. So let's jump straight into that.
29. Modeling Content: So let's move on to how can you find content for your Instagram account. So just a quick aside tip, we're talking about modelling high engagement posts. Now this can take shape in a lot of different ways. Typically, it takes shape in likes, how many likes a photo got. Instagram are constantly evolving and changing the way that they display things and show things, and even the way that people can actually engage with the post. So we're viewing engagement as more than that. And you need to realize what resources you have access to most people. And quick hot tip here for you can access how many likes Post got by going to the desktop browser on a laptop or a PC computer. And most of the time, depending on what geographic region you and you won't be able to see the exact amount of light you get in the Instagram app. However, other ways of viewing engagement include comments. How many times did people comment on the actual photo or post if you can't get the likes from the browser. The third way to measure it is how many people are sharing, how many people are tagging their friends inside those comments, these are all really good indicators of what is a high engagement post. So we firstly, let's start with understanding that there were two ways to produce content for Instagram account. A lot of people struggle with this, and this really is the goal of increasing urine reach on Instagram. You need to make sure that you are putting out high-quality content for people to actually discover your Instagram profile. There's two ways you can do it. You can one, find Instagram content, or you can create your own Instagram content. So finding other people's content and re-posting it. And this is how you find Instagram content. So fin final Instagram content allows you to see if it will be successful based on the results of the original posting. That's a really big upside to it. It also is a lot easier than creating a lot of content. And the other way to do it is obviously creating your own content and personal amending and editing already successful content, which we'll be talking about in the next lecture. And why we had you create our own contents of just finding it all the time, would be the personalized up further to specifically target your market and promote your own business. So what I need to talk to you about before we jumped into this lecture may already be on the mind. It's we're going to be finding content, which means we're going to be using other people's content on our Instagram profile. So we need to talk about image ownership and licensing. And do you have the right to do this on your Instagram accounts of dedicated an entire lecture to this for you to understand the image licensing and video licensing on Instagram right now. And I want you to assume at, until I talked to you about that, that we have full rights to use everybody's content. So how do you hit a golf ball as far as possible? A random question that may seem like, but it's very critical in understanding how you can get as many lakhs as possible or get as much engagement as possible on your Instagram posts. So how do you hit a golf ball as far as possible? There are three main factors that determine how far you can actually hit the ball. One is the ball, two is the club, and 3s the swing. So what we need to know is we need to actually know how far people are hitting golf balls. So if you're a professional golfer, you're actually hitting a golf ball 300 yards on average, which is incredible. So they've obviously got a good ball, a good golf club, and a good swing. However, there is a world record drive and it's 515 yards, which is almost double the professional golfers average. And this here is an anomaly when you look at a lot of professionals and a lot of big people, the golfing world driving Gulf was 300 yards. And me looking at a nominally such as Mike Austin in 1974, you hit 515 yards. You gotta be asking, what is he doing differently? How does he outperform his competition so vastly when it's hitting a golf ball. And this is the world record Mike Austin swing when he actually hit the golf ball. And you can see frame-by-frame exactly what he did in his swing to hit it so far this year. A couple of amateur golfers, I don't know if you can tell who have not hit the golf ball very far at all. And you can see the difference between these people is 515 yards and 0 yards. So you need to be asking yourself, what are the three factors go into driving the golf ball as far as possible? Like in Mike Austin's 1974, Gulf hit golf swing and the shortest Dr. checklist. So if you want to get a gulf audios short as possible, you want to use a plastic ball and childlike swing and a toy golf club like in those examples, if you want to, the golf ball go as far as possible, you're going to need whatever ball Mike ASA news. So we're going to say it's a top flight ball. You're going to need his exact swing, and you're gonna need his exact club. And if you can match these three factors, u2 can hit a golf ball as far as Mike Austin. So similar to this, because this isn't Instagram cause for maximum exposure on your content, you first must model the content that is already proven to be successful. So what is your longest dr. Checklist for your Instagram content? Here is a post by Gary V, which has gone a long way. You know, it's got a lot of engagement on it. And you need to understand what factors went into this to get it to go as far as possible. A shorter stride checklist. And you can see that it did not get a lot of engagement on this Post. It didn't, it was not very successful. And you need to then break these factors down into the shortest Dr. checklists. So when we're doing this to content over and over, we're going to start to see a pattern. So I want to do it for you. For you, I'm not going to run your Instagram account, boys, But I want to do it with you to show you how you can go off and do it on your own. And how we get such incredible engagement strategies, engagement numbers on L contents. So we need to know what factors determine a successful viral piece of content for you. Have to say, before we do break this down a little bit further, that you have to remember, it's going to depend on your niche. So whether you're in the chemistry, the basketball, the chicken, or the cooking niche, it's going to be very different, which is why you need to be able to have the skill. Find the mike Austin, swing the fund the longest drive in your niche in order to see what's working in your niche. And you can replicate those results in your niche because every single niche is going to be different. So that leads us to the question, how do we actually go out there and find the best performing viral content in your niche or the mike Austin's Women of your niche. One, we can use viral discover, which I'm going to break that down in just a second. Too. We can use hashtags or three, we can use the success cheat sheet that you've put together in order to shortcut this, a shortcut these results. So one that is Guevara or the Explore tab is the little magnifying glass that you can see. And what happens here is Instagram curated posts that are selected on things you like and people you follow. And it's also based on what people you follow a liking and what is popular in your niche. So this is exactly the place we want to go to find out what's popular in your niche. Because we're going to be able to see it. Just like this. It's going to spoon-feed us what has been successful, what people have liked that in a niche or not? What has gone viral? That is in our nice. So all you have to do is you have to go over to that Discover tab and you'll see a grid of images like this. Now for this example, I'm using a Entrepreneurship account that we run, and this is what the grid looks like for that account. So this tab, by just clicking on that magnifying glass, it opens up a whole new world of possibilities. And just every time you click on an image, every time you click on the Discover tab and refresh, you're going to see a whole new world of ideas and potential content that you can model and post for yourself that you know has proven to have already been successful. But before you go ahead and start using this content on modelling this content, you actually need to ask yourself, why did this post do well? So is it because a, it's from a large account? Or is it because B, it's viral content? You have to remember that logic counts are going to get a lot of engagement on their content really, no matter how high-quality of violet is. So remember, we're looking for viral content. We want to reach as many people as possible. So we need to know that this post wasn't just made from a really big account because then we can't actually replicate the results. It's got just using the content. We also need a big account, so we need to find these this content that does well regardless of the account size that it comes from. So how do we do that? All we do is we go into the Instagram profile. So we then click from the content back to the profile that posted it, and we can compare it to the rest of the posts that that Instagram account has actually posted. For example, Example 8, they've got 2 million followers and all of their posts have really high engagement, except for the SUR1 that you've clicked on and discovered. Or even if that had equally high engagement, you can see that it's just another post that's done well because the Instagram account is big. In example B, you can see it's an account that's much smaller and the rest of the content doesn't have the engagement that the actual viral content does. So you can tell that you've actually struck gold because it outperforms all the other content that that account is posting. So here it is. The process laid out for you very simple. Had, have endless viral content for your Instagram account in your niche. One a, you go to the Discover cap, Discover tab and choose your post. Atreus, your postal choose a post that performed well. Be you look at the user who posted the image and see you test it to see if it's gold or just another okay, post from a large account. Once you have this, you will be having the viral content and the golden content that you can go and share on your own account. So two hashtags are incredibly powerful way to find viral content in your niche. Incredibly powerful. So hashtags, a searchable ways to categorize content on Instagram. For example, hash-tag cat. It's a searchable way that you can type in hashtag cat or click hash-tag cat, and you'll see photos of cats. It's basically categorizing, categorizing content. So you need to know or categories and words are relevant to the content of your business, because these are the ones that'll become relevant hashtags that'll help you grow your account. For the example of mine, I've got hashtag, entrepreneur, hashtag, lifestyle, hashtag motivation. And we can use these hashtags to actually go and see which accounts are similar to us. And they're also using these hashtags and therefore see WhatsApp or content they're posting. And use their content, find and share their content. So once again, if I search hashtag entrepreneur, it's going to open up another world of opportunity for us to explore. And what you can do is the exact same process as with the vial and Discover tab. So all you need to do this time is go to your search tab and actually search for the hashtag. When you do that, you're going to have the whole new world of content, an opportunity for you to explore. You're going to be able to click on the content on the Discover tab. Look at the user who posted the image and search for gold. Is it performing really well because it's a big account? Or is it performing really well? Because it is actually the golden viral content. So this is where you can go now and use your results booklet to find gold. This is the third way that you can actually discover how to find viral golden content that's going to absolutely take your accounts reached to the next level. You go into your booklet and you use the counts that you've written down already, ones that are similar to you in your niche. And you can actually go and have a look how well their content is performing. So before we move on, It's very important that you don't actually just go and look for content that has the most engagement. And this is really only good if you're trying to post engaging posts to increase your reach and increasing man people who follow you. You want to also be out there looking for content that you can model, that is building trust and affinity, or ones that are shown to create sales in your competitors and then people in your niche. Because finding content, we need to find all three types of content. In the example I walked you through was the best one to find high engagement and high reach. But you have to remember. You can also find hi trust and high sales content that are really effective and going to help push people through your funnel. So learning the mike Austin swim, you need to make sure that you are decoding what it takes in your niche to be successful. So the moccasins, when you need the same ball, you need the same club and you need the same swing. And if you have those three factors and you hit the ball the same way he hit it with the same club and the same bowl, you're going to get the same result as he got. So you need to, inside your niche, learn the code of what succeeds as you go through and you repeat this process lots and lots of times and get a lot of viral content for yourself. You're going to actually be able to see the factors underlying what makes it successful. So maybe it's good music in the backend of a video, maybe it's motivating and fast-paced video with a really good hook, meaning on the text about the video saying you'll never guess what happens at 25 seconds of this video. And you've hoped people in for 25 seconds now. And you need to actually keep your eye out there. Keep your eye on that. Make sure you're keeping your eye on what is the underlying factors that are making a content succeed because then you'll become a homing missile for viral content. And you'll be able to really identify really quickly what is making that account grow really quickly. And you'll be able to model your own content and create your own content around what is guaranteed to be successful once you've decoded exactly the factors that go into a viral piece of content for your niche.
30. 3 Content Keys: Awesome, So welcome to the top three Instagram content keys. We are going to show you the three main content keys that you need to be mindful of when starting all growing your Instagram account to boost your engagement in, boost your reach, and to keep people trust and affinity strong and to be able to sell them. These three keys are going to apply to everything including stories, including your reals. If you're going live on Instagram, all different types of content. So let's jump into those. So we've got three main content keys and a bonus one for you as well. So this is them in symbolic form. We're gonna go through them one by one. And if you can master all three of these keys, your content is going to perform incredibly well. So the first one is consistency. You need to have an insanely consistent schedule, which means you need to post at least a minimum of once a week. You want to be posting more than that. But once again, you wanna be modelling one of the successful accounts in your niche doing and post to that schedule. But consistency is key at a regular time and maintain high-quality content. If you can do this, then Instagram can trust that they can promote your account further into their marketplace. Because if you're just posting very sporadically, high-quality content, low-quality content, high-quality, low-quality. Instagram is going to be more nervous to promote your account to the general public in the Discover tabs and in their viral sharing ways because they know that it's a one-off piece of content and not something that is consistent. So this is probably the biggest one that you can do is make sure that you are posting as consistently as possible, high-quality content that Instagram can then rely on you to be doing that and therefore consistently promote your account. So I want to read you this quote by Neil Patel. He says, if you make a habit of posting several times a day and then transitioned only a few times a week, you're going to lose followers and gentlemen, less engagement per post. This means that the best poker posting frequency for insulin is the posting frequency that you can consistently maintain for the rest of your natural life. So this is a really, really good quote because I want to make sure that you can see, don't post three times a day if you can't maintain it. Because Neil Patel has had this experience. He says, basically, the more often you can post, the bigger your account's going to get. But if you can't maintain that schedule, if you can't maintain that habit, then your account is going to eventually die. And Instagram are going to be not focused on promoting your account because they can't depend on new to consistently come up with these high-quality content and share that. And once they shared, if you no longer doing that, then ECMO going to go onto someone who is and start promoting them. So the second 1, second key to your content, posting videos. Now this seems a little bit of not like a key, but more like we should post videos anyway. But I wanted to show you exactly how powerful videos on Instagram. They get 38% more engagement than images. And they get double the amount of comments than, than images get. And of course, I always put in him maintain high quality content because you don't want to be putting out anything but high-quality content out there. But on average, if you can produce videos really quickly, because that's the only downside to videos is the production time. But if you can find or recreate and improve videos really quickly and post them. And you're going to get far more engagement than you would on photos. And your account is going to grow much quicker. The trust and the affinity is going to grow much quicker because people can actually see people moving in the photos and it's much easier to trust them. So there's just a plain video of Speedo, of someone swimming through a pool in a Speedo swimsuit, that gets 38% more engagement than any other post on the page. And you get a photon that page because that is just on average how much more engagement videos get. So make sure you're using videos as a big pillar of your content. And that is if you are comfortable creating them or you can find them on other people's pages. So the third key is to start a conversation. Now this is a very quick and easy key, but you need to do it because it's very powerful. So you needed to start a conversation. You can ask your question or in engaging comment in your caption like who's out in Vancouver to that. And then you can continue that conversation by replying to the comments. So this is going to increase your engagement through the roof. People wanted to see a lot of comments on Instagram posts. So if you're a someone in Vancouver, maybe your bar in Vancouver and you put a photo of your binds at who's out in Vancouver tonight? People are going to be like, I'm out, I'm going to this place. They're going to answer those questions that you're asking. And so make sure that you can always ask a question in the description of your photo and then continue that conversation and boost your engagement even further by replying to those comments. Now the bonus tip geotags. This is a shocking fact, but there's a 79 percent higher engagement rate for photos that get posted with geo tags. And it's very easy to geotag the photo when you're about to hit publish. There'll be at a location place there, or you can add the geotag of whatever location you are in. You don't actually have to be in that location too. If you need to add a location that's not near you, totally fine if you want to increase your engagement using this geotag strategy. But make sure you are geotagging your posts, especially if you're a local business, especially if you're a business in a specific country that only operates in that country, make sure you're tagging that when you post and you're going to see much higher engagement and much higher success with your Instagram content.
31. Best Times to Post: Awesome. So now we're going to be talking about the best times to post on Instagram. So the big question is, why is knowing when to post on Instagram important? So if you can ask yourself that now, why would you want to know exactly when to post on Instagram? The answer, which I'm sure you have said in your head is that you are going to first of all, increase engagement on your posts if you can time your posts for when more people are online, but not too many people online. So there's a lot of competition, competing posts for people to see. You're going to increase engagement after 20 and 30 percent, meaning people who already follow you are going to be more likely to like, interact with and share your post and therefore increase your reach an additional 20 to 30 percent. So our reach is to people who aren't already following you on Instagram. The chances of gaining new followers because you've got a higher engagement when more people are online, is much, much higher when you post at the right time. So that leads to the question, when is the right time for you, and unfortunately can't tell you exactly when is the best time for your niche or your business, because every single nation business is different. But we can tell you how to test this for yourself and come up with the best time so you can consistently post when it is best for you. So a very good and safe initial strategy to follow is Wednesday at 11 AM and Friday at ten to 11 AM Eastern Standard Time in the USA. If your customer bases, of course, from the USA. The other time that post is Monday to Friday tend to 03:00 PM. This basically during work hours. These are good initial strategy for you to follow if you want to write these down and start your posts at these times because they're going to have the best chance of being successful. But you also want to split test. And you want to see for yourself which posts are doing the best. And you can actually do this in your analytics, which we'll get into in a second. But you can see this is on average the Instagram global engagement. So this is the Instagram as a whole. The highest engagement or in the middle, the lowest engagements you can see on the sides of this graph. And the highest engagements are, of course, during work hours, wherever handset work, they seem to be an Instagram during lunch break is a big one. They seem to be on Instagram. You can have a look at this graph and you want to, you want to really schedule your posts and have your post going out in the middle of this graph right here. So you need to know there's no one size fits all strategy. You need to know your audience, know exactly what sort of business you're in and what sort of time your specific consumers are online. Because basically, the more people that are online, especially if you can get right in before people get online. The more engagement you're going to get and the bigger the reach is going to be on your post. So you need to know your audience. If you're efficient ship shop in London, you don't want to be timing your posts for the workday in the US. If your travel inspiration blog, maybe you do want to be timing yourself when people are stuck at work and really just dreaming about going on a holiday somewhere. Or if you're a fashion blogger, you need to know one of the best times for you. Are you supposed to be posting early in the week or is personally posting when people get their paycheck, you want to make sure that you're timing it perfectly for your needs. So how do you do this? You first of all, use your analytics to find when your audience is most active if you go into your Instagram analytics and we'll show you this in a walk-through. You can see exactly when your audience is most active and exactly when the best posts that you posted have performed the best. So that's how you test it. So basically you want to start with the safety of posting during the work hours Monday to Friday when most people online, It's 10:00 AM to 03:00 PM. I wouldn't go really pass three. Some people always get excited and start going home and they're no longer on that Instagram. But you can see that the global engagement was between 103, which is the best, safest times to start posting and getting high engagement rates, then you want to start testing and maybe go one or two posts outside of that time and just see if they're doing better. Tested. Use your analytics in your Instagram, on your Instagram account and just making sure that you are optimizing every aspect of your Instagram account posts, including the time that you post.
32. Licensing : So a very important lecture here, photo licensing, an image ownership. So we need to talk about this because we are modelling other people's content where re-sharing other people's content isn't allowed on Instagram. What is going on? Why is everybody else doing it? Let's chat about it, guys. So here's the official statement from Instagram. We can't provide you with any legal advice if you're not sure what you are legally authorized, if you are legally authorized to use the content, do not post it to Instagram. Posting copyrighted content without permission might be a violation of law if you're already person that you should remove it from Instagram. Now, that is Instagram's official statement. And they have to be as harsh as possible because Instagram are liable for any content that gets posted on the app. Now, what we need to ask yourself is, do we need promotion to post other people stuff? The answer is yes. It's important to always ask permission before posting anyone else's intellectual property. So you need to understand that officially and Instagram are not enforcing it, but they are saying that you need to have permission to post anyone else's stuff. But where does that leave us? So this is where we really need to chat about it. We need to know, we need to ask for permission. We need to know that we need to credit the original artist and the creator if we ever use something that is someone else's photo. And we also know that there are plenty of sites to use public domain images and public domain videos. And we can just get all our stuff in there, never even have to worry about that. And there's a list of them in the downloadable guide of all the places you can get those public domain images and not have to worry about this stuff. But what we need to tell you is everybody on Instagram is sharing everybody else's stuff. So for example, if you created a really cool graphic and you share it on your Instagram page and someone reaches like, Hey, I'd like to share this with my audience. Do you mind if I posted on my page and tag you so people can come back and follow you. You'd be like, absolutely, please go share my stuff and tag me so people coming back and finding the original artist or the original creator of it. That's why you need to tag people in it. But the thing is, nobody asks on Instagram, I'm not I'm not saying that you shouldn't ask, but I'm saying that nobody asks and everybody just seems to be stealing other people's content out there and re-posting it as if it were their own. What I need to advise you to do is share the content that works that is viable if you ask permission and if you tag the person who posted it originally in there, most of the time, matching going to not be the original creator of that content. But what you need to be aware of is you need to ask permission and tag that person or to your best your knowledge, who was originally creating that content. And then three, go ahead with re-sharing that person's work and be prepared if someone reaches out to you with image ownerships or a claim that wasn't the person who asked permission, that you can take it down straight away, but you need to go out and you see what your competitors are doing. Because a lot of people aren't even asking for permission. And at the moment there's no consequences to that. So if you wanted to play closer to that side of the fence, that is your choice. And I don't I don't officially recommended, but it's very, very successful in growing your account and it's very successful in making money from Instagram. I would very highly recommend you ask permission. And very high recommend you tag the creator. Even though most people are not doing either of those things. The last thing is this is a great example of Airbnb who have a lot of liability and they have to actually get permission to ask for to use people's content. So you can see on the left, black bird fly instead, home, sweet home. I think I'll stay awhile. This was a photo of an Airbnb apartment. They stayed in. An Airbnb, said, we'd love to share this shot on Airbnb, social channels and materials, migrate OTO conditions. So there's LinkedIn photo like they're basically asked, can we use this photo? And Blackbird fly replied with a link to the photo and the hashtags they needed. Then you can see AirBnB then posted it on their own account and credited the original post up back Blackbird fly. And you can see they go little description of it. They've got the exact same photo of someone else's content that I've posted on there. But they ask permission in the first place. Most people don't ask this permission. And once again, if you do want to err on the side of not actually waiting to get permission from someone. A lot of people are doing it and it grows your count really quickly. But I can't officially recommend that now officially recommend that you do ask permission. And no matter what you're doing, always tag the original creator. Just because that is what you should be doing. It's their original work and it doesn't detract from you. It actually adds to your photo when you tag the original creative because people obviously aware that you're not creating all of this stuff. And they think it's very nice and ethical and moral, which it is to actually tag the people who came up with it. And if anyone ever reaches out with any copyright claims or anything, always take it down straight away.
33. Ads Introduction: Awesome, a quick one for me again, this is going to be paid ads, a monetization. So we have incredible content and we have a potential audience that we're reaching organically using the biases of the Instagram algorithm. But how can we speed up this process by paying a little bit of money? I'm going to show you how you can harness the power of Instagram ads to get even more people who are relevant and targeted to you and your business and your brand. Up to visit your profile, which have already optimized so that they can become followers. And then finally, the next module we'll be talking about how to convert these followers up into branding and sales. But remember for now, paid ads to really throw the few on the fire of your content. Let's jump straight in.
34. Power Of Ads: So welcome to this amazing lecture that I've put together for you. This is going to be really, really incredible because we're going to talk about the power of Instagram ads and why that's so, so powerful and how you can absolutely scale your Instagram account through the roof. The moon, and beyond has fires. You wanted to go with Instagram ads. It's absolutely an incredible tool. And if you're not using it and you do have a little bit of a budget to grow your account with, then you're missing out. So first of all, we're going to go and go through what is the purpose of running an Instagram ad? Now, the only purpose of running Instagram ad is going to be increasing your reach. So whether you're increasing your reach to sell a product, or whether you're increasing your Each to grow your audience. It doesn't matter. Your ads are going to be there. You're going to be running ads to reach people that you wouldn't have normally reached without using the ads. So when you put content out, that we have three reach strategies, because content is only going to reach the amount of followers that you have unless you use these additional reach strategies. Now, this rich strategy can be scaled as far as you want. You can actually scale this reach strategy to the entirety of Instagram if you have enough budget, which is why it's so unique and so phenomenal compared to the other recharges. But more than that, Instagram give you the ability to not only reach everybody on their platform, which has over 2 billion people, but they give you the ability to filter it down with location, age, gender, interests, what they buy, websites, they visit other Instagram accounts that they like. You can hyper target your audience. You know who your purchaser is, you know who your customers, and you can make sure the insulin doesn't show your ad to anybody. But this very specific person who you're pretty confident will buy your product or service. So to have an example of this and just to show you how incredibly powerful this ad is, if I ran the store Pizza by Benji, I can very hyper target people who my target audience, for example, the location, it's in Miami. I can put a two mile radius around the city of Miami. Where my oh, no. Even the city of Miami, but the two mile radius around my pizza store, I can have people aged 18 to 30 because I know, and this is all hypothetical. Of course, I don't actually have a pizza store, but I know if my target customers 830, I could put that age range there. I know they're mostly male. I know they're interested in football and Domino's Pizza. And then they also buy napkins. And I know that they have visited my website before so I can retarget them and make sure anyone who's visit my website can see my ad. And I can go and find other Instagram accounts that they have already likes, such as dominoes or Pizza Hut. And then put my pizza, put my ad and my content in front of them, and therefore have them discover me, potentially engage with my account, follow me and then buy my products or services, which is in this case pizza. So the key, and this is what I'm going to keep reminding you of this. But the thing you need to remember is that value is the most critical thing here in the whole of marketing, in the whole of boosting your Instagram profile and getting out there to the world, always need to offer value. So the ads are a megaphone. And all these strategies in this course are a megaphone, meaning if you have something of value and we can run that animation one more time if you missed it. If you have something of value and you put it into a megaphone, you're going to reach happy people. You have something that people don't like. And he put it to a megaphone. You're going to make people unhappy and not actually buy your stuff. So what do you have to remember is that you need value and the megaphone, and then you're going to make people happy. Now adds, in a nutshell, the three best thing about these ads and the three things we're going to go through in this lecture together. Once we have something of value, remember the head is the key. I'll keep reminding you, but just rather than if you're taking notes, right, key, drug vote of a key and this right, you need to offer value in every single step of this process. So once you do have that down, you can then go and hyper target your audience. You can get them really cheap. I'm going to show you how to get into $0.01. And you can scale these to the moon. You can absolutely have no limit to the amount of people you reach and member once you've got value there. And then you have hyper targeted your audience. You can do for cheap and you can reach as many of them as possible. You're going to be making a lot of money and growing your account by a lot of followers.
35. Types Of Ads: Awesome. So a really important lecture and why it's important is because we're going to go through the different types of Instagram ads that you can run. But more importantly, and surprisingly enough, there's actually an ad type out there that is 60 times cheaper than the other ad types. And that's the one that leads you to know about that one I need you to run on your account in order for you to grow as fast and as cost-effectively as possible. So you have to understand there's two main types of Instagram ads. One is a feat of recently, it appears in the news feeds and appears in, on people profile pages. And the other one is a story at it which is going to appear at the top of your Instagram account inside other people's stories. So the story adds a things like this. You can have videos, you can have photos. You can have the ability to swipe up or insert the link sticker, which people can tap on and then navigate to your website through Instagram. Go back and forward between the swipe up call to action and the sticker called actions. So just use the one that's available to you. These three here are all examples of really good story ads. And you can tell this story ads because of the word sponsored under the username. And because most of the time you're not actually going to be following these accounts. But you can see that they are quite eye-catching and they're very well put together. So these are, these are the top types of ads from really big accounts has spent a lot of money on advertising. And this is why you want to go through your ads and see what you see. And I want you to make sure that you're not copying all ads, but you're copying adds a actually work. So you need to make sure that these people have really strong ads in order for you to replicate that for yourself. But the story ads are going to be seen in the story section of Instagram, where you can swipe up and you can have a direct call to action to their website or to their profile and we'll go through that in just a second. The other type obviously is a feed ad, which will come in the news feed on the home screen of your Instagram app. And it will come through as a sponsored posts like this example here. You can come through as a photo, could also come through as a carousel where you can swipe across the images and you can see the different images that this person is promoting for this one, there are many different items in their store, in a carousel. And There's also a video. So you could actually watch a video as an add inside of your Instagram app out this video is not playing right now for us, but you can see the little icon in the bottom left, which shows that it is a video. And remember, you need to actually put subtitles on your videos for the people who don't turn sound on. This is that you're really cool. This is a translate voice. Translate the voice of your cat in an app and you can see what they've got underneath the actual ad. The video is an Install Now button which takes them to the App Store where they can go and they can actually install this app. So here's the video. Really cool eye-catching video that you can go and install pretty quickly. That's a very quick add. A lot of people who are at home pretty bored, be very easy for them to now go and install that app. So there are different types of ads, both in your feed and in your story. Now you need to know the, that on all of these ads, all these different types of ads you can promote to two different things. One you can promote to your website or your store. And two, you can actually promote to your Instagram account. Now, this is the ultimate question. You may want to test both of these for yourself. But with our account, we had really, really incredible results, not pushing to a sale, that pushing to a follow. And I want to show you exactly why. So in the first example you've got an add and it's going to promote directly to your website, which is of course, trying to promote to a sale. So you're normally running the code traffic people who haven't seen this stuff before that really know you. They don't really trust you that much. And then you can't actually get in front of them again, if they don't buy or if they do buy, there's no way that you're capturing this person's information. He better way to do this and this access though we had with our account, was to run an ad, pushed to a follow, then build trust with our content, and then get a sale. And remember, if they don't get a sale, they still follow you, still have them getting updates on your information. You can run more ads to them. You can put organic content to them, build the trust, and then get a sale later on. So this is why we always try to push not to a product, but back to our Instagram account first. So whether that is a feed or a story, remember at the start of this lecture, I said that one ad is actually 60 times cheaper than the other for us. So we ran both these ads, you know, to push back to a follower. So we were trying to get as many followers as possible for as cheapest possible, making sure that genuine, they're relevant and they're targeted. And our feed ad and our story ad performed very differently. One cost is $0.61 per follower, and yellow and costs us $0.01 per follower. Now, if you can have a guess, if you're playing along at home, which one do you think was cheaper the story at all, the feed ad. So I think you probably got this right and the story ads that actually 60 times cheaper for us in our results and we're getting $0.01 followers using story ads. And I put this down to the higher engagement in the stories, the better chance to actually show someone something cool. So we had a video which Sam was automatically on. We had a very eye-catching video, which I've actually showed you the video inside this course already. And I'm going to be going through the exactly what content you can put into your videos and your ads. Remember, videos work so much better than photo's story ads work so much better than post ads. So the best, most powerful and you can run is a video story add to your website, but to follow your account back, link back to your account so that they have the chance to convert and follow. So you can build trust and affinity and have contact with these people in the future if they don't buy your stuff straight away. So hope that makes sense. If it doesn't please watch this one again, because this is a really, really powerful lecture that you need to graphs, that you need to do a story ad in video format with a prompt to follow you. And then later on, we monetize these followers.
36. The Ad Keys: Awesome. So now we're going to go over the five keys for the perfect ad. Now if you're running ads and you don't know these five keys, you are going to be bleeding money. You're going to be losing money and losing results. So once you understand these five keys and once you put them into action, you can get started having really good success today, like right now today with your ads on Instagram. So number 1, and we keep coming back to this because it is at the core of everything. You're not going to get anywhere if you don't give value. So make sure you'll creatives, which is the actual media that you're putting out there, offering value to the people that they're reaching member thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people are going to see this. And you need to make sure that these people are actually feeling like you're offering value and not just trying to take their money or their attention. So on the left here we've got the burger project. You can see new daily specials, woods, world's best produce. Well it equals world's best burgers. I've got a two for one. So they're offering to burgers for the price of one from the burger project. And you can see that's pretty incredible. They got twice the value, four. If you all of this burger, I'm sure you can call it an ordered on an app or online and have it delivered to you as you're sitting there on Instagram. And they're not just like, Hey, check out the world's best burger, That's our burger. They like new daily special. This is the best produce and therefore the world's best burger. And you can get two for one. And they got the photo of what that actually represents, how it looks like it tasted delicious meal, even if it's not a 100 percent healthy, people are going to be going for that because they can see the value in it. The other one is the Gabriel along and it's going to go back so we can watch that ad again. Wo video add a conversion. So you can see it's got subtitles in there, which I keep saying work really, really well. The says use this roadmap, Free Download. This is him giving value through a free download. Now, you don't have to do anything. You probably going to give him an email address or you messenger link or something like that. So we can contact you again. But apart from that, he's giving free value away for you in this ad and he's not just like go buy my product and I'll help you out. It's free download upfront. So that is examples of how you can give value and you need to figure out what people want in order to figure out if it's valuable, you can't be like, Oh yeah, that's very valuable. That's a free download. It to be like, is this what people want? And if you don't know, you just need to go ask them. So number two, the structure of your creative or the structure of your media. You need to ask yourself this question, what problem are you solving? Now this goes back to exactly what I was just touching on. You need to ask your audience, Hey, what is your problem? What are you struggling with? What can I help with? And if it's something simple like, I'm hungry, cool, we're the world's best burgers. I'm going to solve that problem with the world's best burgers. That is, the problem you're solving. You're solving hunger. You're very convenient because the problem might also be I don't want to go get something. So you can get up and get out there, get delivered to you in 20 minutes. That is the problem you're solving. You need to be very clear on that and have it simple, streamlined and customer focus. So their problem is they're hungry and lacY. Your solution is, will deliver you a delicious burger in 20 minutes. So because you're solving that pain point, because you are addressing that problem, they're going to pay you, say, 20 or $30 to get the burger delivered. That might be a little bit high for a vagabond, say 15 or $20, to get that burger delivered in the next 20 minutes. And you're going to be making money and that's the value that you're offering. So you need to make sure that whatever the value is that you're offering, you've got it streamlined. Meaning we do Amazon FBA, and there's two ways that we can actually sell it. We can say, we help you make $10 thousand a month working from your laptop. Big tick that big checkmark. That's what we want to be doing because that's what people want. Their problem is they don't want to go to work. They want to work from their laptop or anywhere that they are, where they are in the world. And they wanna make $10 thousand a month. They don't want to be pole. And the wrong way to say it is we are going to use Amazon FBA, which this is all true. The stuff on the left that the same thing, but it's just too detailed. It's not streamlined enough. We're gonna use Amazon, PA, YouTube, Instagram, and other platforms to help you choose what best suits your lifestyle. We're then going to show you how to build a business on that platform and outperform our competitors until you are financially for NC, live anywhere in the world that you want to basically. And that's too much like people don't know what that actually means. The end sentence is pretty good, but the star that's confusing, that's not streamlined. There's not one way to do things. It's we help you make $10 thousand a month working from your laptop. That creates the curiosity in the ad that creates peoples, people wanting to click through and learn more and you just need to grab their attention, the add and you can explain how you do it. And in the next step, which remember, a good next step is actually to go follow your Instagram account and then you can educate them from there. So number three is a very, very simple one. Use Facebook ads manager. Don't use ads on Instagram. Don't push the boost post button on Instagram, but login to Facebook Ads Manager. Now if you don't know what this is, it's worth finding out about go and use Facebook ads manager, not Instagrams. Actual boost post manager because you get much, much, much cheaper rates and much better targeting on Facebook Ads Manager. So that's a quick tip for you. Number four, make sure you know who your ideal demographic is. Now. Everybody's, he's going to be different. And the cool thing is, is that you, once you set what your goal is, you can then work backwards from there. And it's very easy for Facebook ads and Instagram ads because you're gonna be using Facebook Ads Manager for Instagram because they're owned by the same company. And you can promote your Instagram content on Facebook. Using Facebook, on Instagram, you can target any one you want. So whether you want to target a global audience, which means they're going to be very cheap, $0.01, that each, they're going to have lower conversion to both following you and to buying your products. But because they're so cheap, you can run a whole lot of these ads and get a high social proof. You can get the first ten thousand followers very, very cheaply. Using these strategies. But you have to realize that they're going to have a lower conversion for buying your product and engaging with your content. Otherwise, you can use local, which could be moderately priced people. So people are actually interested in your stuff. People are actually living in your local area, local country, wherever it is you are. They're going to be very high conversion. They're gonna be more expensive and less social proof because as you know me less of them, but you're going to get a really good return on your money there. And you didn't know, is your goal social proof is you go to actually sell products and build a big, high, highly engaged audience, you need to make that decision. That's tip number 4 before you run your ads and have your ads reflect that. Number five might be the most important tip out there. You need to come from the mindset that every ad that you're running is just a test. Nothing is final. Don't be perfect. Don't suffer from analysis paralysis, but go out and get actual data and information behind your ads. So in even though it's impossible for you to know which ad is going to perform the best for you. This is Alex Becker above and this is his wolf mug add, which absolutely made him millions and millions of dollars for it looking like this, very, very cheap, very simple, but it resonated with his audience. So you don't know what your audience wants until your audience tells you that you want to. Otherwise, you're just making it up. It's in your head. It's just all thought experiments. Stop waiting to put yourself out there and stop putting yourself out there and using people's feedback in order to perfect your message. So this is really important and I want you to do this because this will make this, we'll get rid of a lot of friction that you may be having around actually getting started. You need to go and create five creatives, five ads, they can be similar. I can just change some photos, some words around. If you're doing photos, you can do three creatives, but go and get 300 to five creatives done. Then target five different demographics using your Facebook manager. And then you're going to have 25 different ads running, which means you got five different creative. So say, I'm a burger place and I got a video of a burglar. I've got a photo of a burglary is my second creative. I've got a really high value, two for one offers my third created, my fourth grade IV is I've got me eating a burger. My fifth grade is a paid a model to eat my burger. And we've recorded all those on video, so we have five different videos. We then need to go and test those five different videos to five different demographics. So demographics maybe we have 40 year-old people, we have 30-year-old people. It could be the second demographic. We have males, we have females, we have, we have doctors. And you find five demographics. And then you show five of those ads that you've created. Two to each of those demographics. They will give you the data that you need. You put $2 to $3 on each of these, and you wanna go see how many followers let came from, each creative and each demographic. And all you need to do is pause the demographics and creatives that aren't working. Put more money into the demographics and craves that are working. And you've got something that is insanely scalable. And this is how we blew up our count so quickly, we just double down on what's working and what wasn't.
37. Ad Structure: So to give you a little bit more of a foundational structure before you go and start making your creatives. This is what we use. This is what a lot of big accounts are using to really get low cost effective ads out there to grow their account and then monetize them that new audience from their account. These are the structures that you can start copying and you can start innovating on your own. Once you get these working for you, you're going to find what your audience wants the best. So what are the characteristics of high performing Instagram ads? Now this is thing called a four step story. And I'm going to walk you through these four steps stories together. So you can see here, this is a Instagram ad that me and Evan put out for our freedom formula account. And this is a video we took in Bali. It was basically a easy video shoot that we did and we had colored smoke bombs basically. But you can see in the video format, it was a four step stories. So these are the four steps in the story. Step number 1, learn how these 25-year-old guys number to make seven figures on Amazon. Number 3, while traveling the world. Number 4, the call-to-action swipe up or click the stippling. And this is a full step story that really helps people break down your ad into digestible frames where you have a long-running video, but you put text in four different areas. And we can watch the ad one more time together. You can see is a lot of different video behind this and you can have whatever video you want behind it. But there's only four steps in the actual text that we put on here. And it keeps people's attention. It makes it really easy because the video actually hold people's intention and the textures keeps popping up on top in the four steps which eventually end people and people up at. That's exactly right. We're going to say people eventually end up at call to action where they can go and learn more, which means they get linked back to our Instagram account where they can follow us. So another way you can do this is just talking to the camera cylinder. That one's not going to play for us, but that was Grant. God don't literally just turning on the camera and talking to it, telling them what they need to do. And there's a caption you can see down there says You'll never be rich. And people like, Oh, I'll never be rich. What does that mean? They listen to whatever grant CUDA and says. He can see there's a learn multistage cycling or swipe up where you go to his account and you can follow him all. You can go to his website and buy one of his products. This one here was our ad. This is the ad that we use to really inspire people. Now inspiring people is that one of the best ways to get them to actually take action and follow you. Because once they're inspired, they looking for more like Wow, I'm really inspired to do something like that. What are the action steps? And what you can do is then you can give them the action steps by following your profile, click the stippling and go and follow that profile. So inspiring. You've got talking to the camera. You've got four four-step stories, which is the way you have four different frames of text. Member offering value is really book. His book is really big. And you can see the arrow over here on the left. Here. In fact, HIPAA, we want everyone to enjoy some good old-fashioned gluttony. So we have created a menu with a whole range of vegan options to choose from. Click the stippling to book your table so you can see the value here that they're offering is the new range of vegan options. It's not just like Hey, Chiquita were a regular burgers. It's check out this vegan options that we have created for you. Click the stippling to book your table. So they're called actions directly to the apple, to their website where you can actually book a table and start to eat. The next offering value. Is this how you can fly to Bali for $464 round-trip, really good ad because in order to figure out how you have to click the stippling and that's the value and the story gap, all at once. Cheap flat. So the value, the story gap is how to do it. And that's obviously going to this person's page or going to that person's Instagram page or website. So number four is a hook and I might actually play that one again for you. You can see as soon as these come on the screen that both very, very flashy, very, very fast, and it captures people's attention and you have to hook these people as quickly as possible. Otherwise they're going to scroll through because they know it's an ATS and make sure it's fast-paced, make sure it's things and moving. Make sure you are hooking people in whether it being story or flashing. You'd want to capture people's attention. That's what your painful. So remember, you can ask yourself, if you don't want to use any of these structures that you just saw, what are your competitors using? What are you seeing on Instagram from people you're falling, what do you resonate with member adds all about testing different creative. So feel free to come up with your own creatives, to imitate others, to use them as inspiration. And really stop putting out a lot of different ads in order to see what works best with your target audience.
38. Big Insights: Also. So once your Instagram ads are up and running and you're studying the test them. You really need to do the things in this lecture that's going to be nice short lecture for you in order to maximize the results that you're getting from them. So the steps you want to make sure you monitor and checking on your ads every three to four days. And you wanna make sure you're keeping your objective of your ads in mind. So The objective is we want to maximize our Instagram followers and minimize our ad spend. Remember, the best objective is to grow followers and not sales straightaway. So we want to really get our follows down between one to $0.06 each. And when you do that, that's when you can really scale these ads. And that's why I'm going to show you how to do here. So if it's performing well, if you're getting followers for between one to $0.06, and those followers go and they engage in your other content. So not just getting the followers, but they're actually active followers on your profile. You need, you know, that the ad is then performing well. So what you need to do in the Facebook ads manager, each need to duplicate that ad and then increase the budget. Because as long as this is in your budget, those results are really good. You want more of those results. You want to grow this account. And wall Instagram ads a, so underpriced. That's when you want to take full advantage of them. So what you need to do is duplicate the ones that are working, increased the budget and I got a tip for you about that in a second. But the ones that are underperforming, the ones where the follows a too expensive or not really connecting with the audience. You need to pause that campaign and never unpause that again. Because remember, they're all, all tests. That's the point of this lecture, is having you understand that every edge you put out there is a test and the test to do well, that's when he put it into another test. That's when you duplicate that and make sure you running more of those tests and less of the tests that are costing you money and not getting you follow us. And a Jew coming in and refining this every three to four days. That allows you to be able to have really, really cheap follow is over the long-term. So when testing and you campaigns, remember there are only two changes you can make. You can make creative, creative changes or you can make audience changes. And you need to know that maybe at creatives really good. This is why you test all creatives against all audiences. But the audience is bad. So you can keep that creative on and test a new audience. Or you can keep the audience and testing new creative to them. And basically just keep tweaking your creatives and keep tweaking your audience until you hit the perfect combination that like we were saying before, you want to scale so you duplicate them and increase the budget. But the key here is that you never increase your budget more than 20 percent. This is a cardinal sin of running Facebook or Instagram ads only. Do horizontal scaling, which means you duplicate that ad. You increase the bid by 20 percent. And if you want more than that, you can duplicate that out again. But don't duplicate your ad and then increase the bid by 200%. And don't pause the original ad, just have these ads running in tandem. So make sure you duplicate the existing working ad and then change the budget in the new ad because you don't want to lose your best-performing ads. But if you're not up to this stage yet and you've just watched this lecture, that's totally fine. This is a good mindset that have what with your whole Instagram accounts. So whether you just putting cool content up there and you're seeing what's working. You want to double down on all that stuff that's working. Whether you putting ads out there, were they doing shouts out there, whatever it is that you're doing to grow your Instagram account, make sure you're measuring it. Because when you measure it, you can see where the high quality lax and follows a coming from. And you can do more of that stuff. But if you're not measuring it, then you don't have any insights. You don't have any way to increase the results that are coming in. And when you do measure it, you can literally double your results by just doubling these ad budgets. Remember, not all at once done in one thing or doubling the amount of shadows you do a doubling the amount of a certain type of content you post.
39. Growth Introduction: Awesome. So there are additional growth tools on Instagram that aren't really the primary ones. We want to cover. All the most powerful, you know, the 80, 20, the 20 percent of the tools are going to get you 80% of the results in the main section of this course. But now you're over here in the bonus section where we're covering the secondary tools that are going to drive this process and make it even quicker on she must have those first ones. So let's jump into all the additional and supplementary tools that you can use right now to grow your followers. Increase the amount of content you're putting out and increase the conversion all the way up to branding and sales for your brand or your business.
40. DM's and Messenger: Awesome. So this might be one of the most important lectures that you want. So please pay attention. I've made it as fun and entertaining as possible for us. So let's go on an Instagram Messenger adventure together. So the first thing you need to know is what most people are mistaken with Instagram direct messages or Instagram messages. And no different to any other content that you put up on Instagram. Now you can see I've highlighted content there for you because this is the mistake, mistake that most people make. They don't understand that messages being publishing texts to someone or to a group of people is actually a form of content. Same way you'd publish a photo to your stories. We publish a photo to someone directly through a message. You are publishing content to an audience on Instagram. The only real reason that they are different from just a normal piece of content in the traditional way, people think about it is because they get such a high view rate. So where you put, say, a video up on your normal news feed and normal profile, you're probably going to get about 25 percent if you're lucky of your followers to see that piece of content. Whereas if you privately message or direct messages, a lot of different words for this basically message someone directly on Instagram using the direct message tool, you're going to get a 95 percent view rate, meaning few message, 20 people, 19 of them are going to open your message and read it, which is incredible. And that's why I asked you not to skip this lecture because it is so powerful when you view it as a piece of content. And two, you realize the power that it has compared to other forms of content on Instagram. Now, what our goal is for this whole, entire Instagram training and for your Instagram account and to grow to the next level and get the results you want is always to move an individual or group of people rung on the Instagram affinity ladder. Now you obviously remember the Instagram affinity ladder put into context for the direct messages. Your direct message goal is to move someone from the place below to the place above. So if someone was a Content Viewer, you could direct message them in order to entice them to visit your profile. You're going from level 2 to level 3. Now as a side bonus and get into an example in just a second. Dmz also going to increase your affinity score with that account. So if you are messaging, say, some random person who just followed you is level four. So you just got to follow and you decide to reach out and message them and walk them done to the family. And a message back saying, thanks, really nice to be here. They are more likely to see your posts and your content in the future. As Instagram see that direct message between you guys. And they say that they, you guys must have a strong affinity. You guys must know each other well, or at least really enjoy each other because you're messaging privately. Therefore, they're going to be more likely to show you that content. So that's just a side bonus of what we're doing here. But the jump into an example, how we can move your audience up each individual rung on this affinity ladder is we are going to pretend. You own a pizza place in Miami. This is your lovely restaurant. It's a beautiful pizza place. You may also do burritos and some delivery services, but you also own a physical store and then you right there on the beach in Miami, this is our business for you. Obviously, this probably isn't your business. But you wanna make sure you take the lessons that we're using in this example. And apply it to your actual niche and apply it to whatever business or brand that you do run. So in this example, we're going to want to take someone who already follows you on level four of the affinity ladder to someone who buys your product or consumes your content. And in this example, it is pizza fans in the Miami area who are going to come into your store and buy pizza? How do we convert people who have pizza fans in the Miami area who currently follow you on Instagram to people who come into the store and actually buy the pizza. Now you can see the grayed-out areas are the rest just to fill this in foil to make it a little bit more contextual. So on level one, you have basically the entire world who's never heard about you. And which is not our target audience for him, but that's just shiny object syndrome. We're not going off to everybody, but we're going data relevant fans. So pizza fans in the Miami area who have never seen your content. That is the true level one of our business. Level two, pizza fans in the Miami area who stumble across or discover out content. And then once they do, then the pizza fans in the Miami area who click through from our content to our profile. And then once again, that pizza fans in the Miami area who decide to follow you. And then of course, the pinnacle that pizza fans in the Miami area who follow you and then come into your store and buy pizza. These rungs on the ladder for this example business. And our goal is to move people upwards, up this ladder to the next step. In this specific example for DMZ, we are going to be moving people from level 4 to level five. So let's jump in with an example here. A bad example that is do not do this. I've put the big red X over this so you don't bookmark in this spot and then copying this out because that would be very bad. This is an example of a terrible direct message descent. So we have followers coming in every day to a pizza store, instagram and say we start reaching out to these followers with a template like this. Hey there, feel free to visit asked all. It's located in Miami, whatever the addresses so people can find it. Please take a photo of Estonian, you come and upload it to Instagram for others to see. Obviously this would be amazing for us, but there is no value given to the person when direct messaging, we're not going to get a response back. We're not going to grow our affinity. We're not going to entice very many people to visit our store because there's no real reason that come in unless our pizza looks extra special and delicious, which it could, but we want to really cure rate each of these direct messages. This is the key to that person. So you want to do a little research. This is something you can see the green check with the green ticked on the bottom right that you would want to send, Hey Taylor, Oh, hey, whatever the person's name is, your content is really unique. I love the adorable puppy in your stories or you are local to the mine area. So to quickly break this down, you want to insert a genuine, genuine emphasis on genuine if you're copy and pasting, It's not going to work. You need to be doing just 25 seconds of research into this person to two minutes of research into this person, depending on how much time you dedicate to this before you reach out to them and then speak from the heart. Don't speak as if you're a business wanting to move someone up the ladder, speak as if you would like to receive this message from someone else. You can see I've added a personalized thing. I've looked at his stories and I've seen that he has a puppy or a Doug and commented on that. And that's obviously going to be show him that have actually put in the time and effort. You are local to the Miami area is a question, meaning I'm going to get a response back from them, increasing affinity and continuing the conversation in the direction that we want it. So from there, say we get a message back from tale. He says, Thank you, your pizza shop looks pretty cool to remember, we have a pretty cool-looking my knee pizza Instagram account. Yes, I live in Fort Lauderdale, I believe, a suburb in Miami. So from here now we can start to try and move someone up that letter. You can see he's at target audience, he follows us, so obviously is incident pizza. He lives in full Lauderdale and he positively responded to our direct message. That is awesome. If you want to try some of that pizza, come down to asystole on insert your address, and we'll give you a free slice in certain value there, free slice, It's going to cost what, $0.80 in order to get someone into the store local who tells you that they actually like pizza. Feel free. Feel free to bring the puppy, meaning keep it personal, keep it unique to that one person. Don't copy paste and actually be human hand that's going to set you apart from everyone else who's just spamming DMZ. You can see we have worked our relationship out of a follower. And although not everybody is going to come in and buy pizza. Some percentage of people who you DM, I'm going to stop coming in getting their free slice of pizza, either posting a photo to their Instagram, sharing it, or coming back with their family or recommending it to friends. And you pizza shop starts to get that momentum that you need. What does this look like? Because this really important to know is just a numbers game. Don't put the early eggs in the basket of Taylor. But know that there are a lot of Taylor's at them. And it's just a matter of scaling this up, but also keeping it personal. So have a look at the top of this down here. Say every day to everything here is once a day, you get 41 followers to your account. If started to take this training assignment, put the right content out there he's done and be consistent is under really high quality stuff and networking and you're starting to move and you're getting 41 follows a day, which is great because we know those followers, all high-quality people in the Miami area who interested in pizza were vetted them and were filtered them out. Now, all of these photo and follow us, say you decide to do you know what? I'm going to spend 10 minutes a day reaching out to 20 people who just followed me that day. And you send a message such as this one right here. This one, this 11, that's value giving them one that continues a conversation with a question and doesn't have an ask in the first message, but starts a conversation. Of those 20 DMZ that you reach out to ten people respond. Six of them are very positive. And local responses such as this one here. Thank you. You pizza shop looks pretty cool too. Yes, I live in Fort Lauderdale. If you just got a message saying thank you, you know, They probably not interested in continuing conversation. So six of them were saying it will be positive and local responses. People who live in Miami and can actually come and visit your store. All of them, you send the six invites to get the free pizza slice. That's the third bubble down the bottom and the white bubble there saying come get a free slice, $0.80 of marketing right there. Now, two of them, because that's quite a big say, but 30 percent of people are like, You know what, that's just around the corner. Maybe not today, but maybe sometime next week. I'll go in, I'll bring the puppy, show them the DSM, be able to get a free slice of pizza, which is pretty incredible. And if you have an incredible product which you should, there'll be wowed by the product so they enjoy pizza and they vowed to return to your store. If they don't just buy another piece, then because one piece of pizza is not very filling, they may need it by water or are they mean menu to buy a Coke or now the product in there, you basically either made a sale that they spent $0.80 and getting someone to know where you store is to like you to be friendly and love your product and vowed to return. Now all of those to people who come in that day. One of them uploads an image to the Instagram story tagging your profile saying, thanks for the free pizza. And off the followers say they have 300 and their followers who are able to see that and get your store name further out there to more people like, you know, I feel like pizza too. They click through to your profile that you follow you. And I get just store address. Well, they find you on Uber Eats and they actually buy pizza because these people are sharing. So you can see how this is a numbers game and it's a discipline. You have to stay disciplined. And he had to stay putting the input and the numbers in every single day. So let's do one more quick one together. View, instead of messaging your followers to move them up to branding and sales if you message potential audience. So pizza fans in the Miami area who have never seen your content, you can look through hashtags, you can look through competitive followers, you can look through competitor comments. You can look through our location on the Discover tool to find potential audience on Instagram. Now, how do you direct message these people in order to get them to stop viewing your content? What would you write? This is an exercise for you. How do you get people to be a potential audience to actually start viewing your content? Now, I'm not going to give you an exact template because the problem with templates like this is everyone's dots using him and they become saturated. And if you start using a template, it's not authentic, which is the key. You need to be writing this, just remembering, giving value is the only thing that you need to actually incorporating that template. Apart from that, it's all needs to be genuine and authentic From your point of view and your business point of view. So in order to get people from a potential audience. So someone say who follows Pizza Hut and lives in Miami? Never heard of your pizza still before. And you want them to hear of your pizza sold mainly through a video that you've uploaded to your profile, maybe through an Instagram real maybe through a and Instagram TV that you've put up. And what would you write in order to get them to visit your content? Now, I'll give you a clue. Don't write, hey, check out my content. Remember, how much value are you giving with the messenger and your DMZ is the key, the more value you give every step, step on this ladder, the easier it is for people to move up. They'll move up very, very naturally if it's very valuable all the way up. So an example of something, you may write Map be, hey, name, I saw you follow Pizza Hut. Do you what is your favorite type of pizza? And you know, what happens to messages like that? Falsely get a message like that. I would be like, Who is this person messaging me? I see it's Miami pizza. I click on their profile and all of a sudden started to consume the content even without replying to their DME. Now, this still might be a little bit spammy. So you could be like, hey, we're running a competition the moment, if you'd like to win a year's worth of pizza, comment on our last post what your favorite type of pizza is. There's another one. Could still seeing a little bit spammy if that's not for you, they figure out what you would write from an authentic point of view. Hey, SLA for you follow Pizza Hut and live in the Miami area. If you'd like a free slice of pizza. Demi back in, I'll, and I'll send you a voucher. That's a lot of giving member, start giving value, start workshopping this. And remember, figure out what level you are wanting to move people up to. Maybe you wanting to get more followers. So you need to start converting people who's viewing your content, clicking on people who view your stories, people click on people who view your Rails who are not currently following you, send them a message and say some insert, insert value proposition here in order to stop following you. Then when they start falling, you insert a value propositions such as the free slice of pizza when you come into the store in order to come into the store and buy a piece of pizza. So remember, it's all about moving people up this ladder, moving them up, giving value and not forcing people up because they knew was going to come across as spammy and people are probably going to block you. And then it's again, it's not going to deliver many of you messages to other people because you're not offering value. Member. It's a discipline, It's a numbers game, and it's about adding value. So go out there, I'm going to show you a live walk-through on how you can actually start doing this in the Instagram app now. So let's jump into that.
41. Instagram Verification: So in this lecture we're going to be talking about how you can get verified on Instagram and why you'd actually want to get verified. So for those of you who don't know, the verified badge is a blue check or a blue tick that appears beside your Instagram account name. So you can see here is an example of Nike with their blue checkmark. And then of course, air vapor max is not Nike's official accounts, so they don't have it. And basically, the badge exists to confirm that an account is the authentic presence. And it helps identify basically Nikkei from anybody else out there in the world who can create a lookalike Nike account. So it's based for businesses and celebrities in order to make sure that people looking for them can find them and not get confused with everybody else's version of their accounts such as this vapor max. Now, before we understand why people want to get verified, in reality like this is why Instagram verify accounts, but people actually want to get verified. Because being verified Instagram means you're going to increase your conversion rate on everything you do. You'll have more likely you'll have more engagement, you haven't followers, you have more purchases because you have this blue checkmark, which is just Instagram's stamp of approval. So if you can get this checkmark, which I'm going to show you how to get it. If you are eligible to get it. You're basically going to increase the amount of money you make an increase your account growth in every thing that you do on Instagram. So first question is, what do you need to be verified? Why do you need to be sorry. What? Back and forth? Yeah. What do you need to be verified on insulin so you must be a real person or registered business. Now, I'm going to go through exactly how to do this in the most legitimate way possible. There are some black hat strategies out there which I'm not going to be teaching in this course. I'm going to be teaching if you deserve to be verified how to do it. And if you're a real person or you're a registered business, you can be verified. However, being a registered business is ten times easier to get verified than being a real person. So if you start as a business account, you're much more likely to get verified that if you are a brand or sorry, not a brand, a personal account, the account needs to have a unique presence of the person or business. It must be your one account. And then you must make sure you've completed your bio and have your photos and posts. Have them all be real and genuine and your photos and your post. So don't be posting other people's content on your page if you're not yet verified because they need to make sure that this is your you'll genuine content that you're posting on your account. Now, this is the hottest criteria that fulfill those first three criteria, really easy for you to smash through and have an Instagram account profile there for you. Your account must be what Instagram coal notable, which is well-known and highly searched. Now, of course, the black hat strategies to do this is people try and fake this data. They try and get a lot of people to search their account and a lot of people to try and imitate the account. And then go to Instagram and say, my cats highly searched, highly imitated. Please verify me so I can share my audience, which on the Rumi is, and this does work. So if you did want to do it the black cat way, don't recommend it. I can't officially recommend it, but it does work. But if you're already notable, so whether you are a registered brand with a few, quite a bit of customers, or whether you are a celebrity or a athlete or some form of notable person. You can go onto Instagram, open your profile page, click on the menu, then the Settings, then account, and then click request verification. All you have to do is you have to fill out the required information that they offer me. Attach an ID so they can verify that that's you. And then click Submit, and that's it. Within two days, you'll be verified. Now this is if you all ready deserve to be verified. If you're already a notable figure. If you're not, the process includes becoming notable first, and that's very much easier to do if you're a business, you just need to make sure you either have a trademark or your domain name that match up to your account and you can use that. But once again, it's, you have to be highly searched on Instagram. So remember, I'm saying, I keep saying these black hat strategies because if they reject your offer to be verified, you then need to go and make sure that you're getting more searches. So you may just come back in three months after you apply the other strategies in this course and say, look now on a bigger business and now I'm highly searched. Please verify me now. Or you may go and use those black hat strategies, which I'm not going to teach. So pleased, ask questions about the black hat strategies, about getting verified. It's against Instagram's terms of service. I will be actually not entertaining that in his course, but they're out there if you wanted to Google it for yourself, little wink, wink they avoid. Now, instagram will alert you once they review your request. And I remember submitting the verification request does not guarantee you'll be verified, but they will guarantee that they'll tell you why you weren't verified if you want. Now, if you struggling with this and you can't get verified, instead of getting the verified bad straight out of the gate, wait a few months. But the other ways, you know, in the US let everybody know which account is yours. In the meantime, you can link your Instagram account to your official website or blog page, YouTube or other Twitter or Facebook or other social media pages so that they can click through and see that it is actually you and not an imitator. But a lot of you are not going to have this problem. A lot of you are just going to want to be verified to increase your conversion rate and your social status in Instagram world, which works really, really well. So do make sure that you go through that process and submit verification requests. And even if they do say no to that, that's totally fine. As long as they tell you why and you can work on that reason.
42. Verified Walkthrough: Awesome. So we're back on my iPhone over here and I'm going to show you how you can get the verified bad. So this is obviously amylases account and you can see she's got the verified beds because it's got the blue tick at the very top next to her name up there says Annalise, and then the blue check-marks. Now, to get this for our own accounts, we simply need to come over to our account. So click on your account, come up to the three lines on the top right up there, which is going to pull across the menu now. And androids can be slightly different, but you can just open this side menu with whatever button that looks like on Android. Come down to Settings, come down to a count, and then all the way down in the menu. The second last black menu option is request verification. So we click on that and you can see it says apply for Instagram verification, verified badges, a check that appears next on Instagram account name to indicate the account is authentic, presence or a notable public figure, a celebrity, a global brand or entity it represents. So global brand or global entity that is submitting a request for Eric cation does not guarantee that you're gonna be buried verified, but you're not going to be verified if you don't submit one. So if you believe you are one of those above, or if you believe you've got the right things in place to have Instagram make, to make anxious again, think that you are one of the things above. Simply type in your username, your full name, and then your known as. So if you are a stage actor and the unknown is share and not actually whatever shares real name is. Type that in there. You have to upload a photo ID of your face with your face and your full name. Or if you're a business, you can upload official business documents. Now remember, it is much easier to get verified as a business than a personal account, but they're both, if you deserve it, and Instagram is going to tell you why does it have not. So you might as well come and try it. And if, if Instagram reject you, they'll tell you exactly why they have said that you don't deserve or don't fit the requirements of the verification badge just yet. And you can work on that reason and then come back and get that verification tick because it's going to skyrocket your conversion rate and really just boost a lot of things on Instagram that you're working towards. Your growth is going to get boosted your conversions, getting it boosted your sales, meaning it boosted your social rep on this actual platform is just going to be skyrocketed with that blue check mark. It's feels pretty cool to habits. This is how you get it. This is where you come to get it. Just fill out that verification phone. And Instagram will get back to you within about 48 hours.
43. IGTV: Awesome. So now we're going to talk about Instagram TV. Now. What is Instagram TV? It's a relatively new addition to Instagram. And it's actually a really amazing way to build trust and affinity with our followers. And once we build this trust and affinity with their followers, remember, we're much more likely to be able to sell them on our products or services. So Instagram TV is actually a video channel, almost like a TV channel that's accessible from inside the Instagram app. But it also actually has a separate app that you can download and start using uploading a content once you link it over to your Instagram account. So what you can actually do is you can actually cross promote all of your Instagram TV content from different social media channels, whether that be your Instagram account or your Facebook, your Twitter, or YouTube, whatever it is, wherever you have an audience, it's actually a really cool transitional tool to be able to get them to follow your Instagram account through putting out something really high valuable on your Instagram TV channel. So why would you want to use Instagram TV for your brand? Remember, you have to know that video outperforms all other content. So you get 38% more engagement on these videos, such as the ones you put out on your Instagram TV. Then you do four photos, which means you're going to be able to increase the affinity and increase the engagement on your Instagram account for your followers. They also get 2.1 times the amount of comments. Then images and Instagram TV video is just longer in length, then a story on the Instagram app. So if you put up an Instagram story on your, in a video format, It's basically like putting up an Instagram TV video, but just in a very short length. So what people do is they actually put up a short version of the Instagram TV. So say you have a 20 minute long episode or 20 minute long video that you want to put up on your Instagram TV channel. What you need to do is you need to then put that into a trailer. And you can put that trailer on your Instagram account and on Instagram stories and have people click back and go and actually watch the Instagram TV episodes. So you can see here this is a flap city has put a roast chicken salad recipe, that full video in his Instagram TV. And he's promoted it on her story and on his actual page. People go back and they can watch him for a full three minutes and 21 seconds. And that's a really, really good way to build a strong affinity with your audiences. Get them, get people to watch you for three minutes and 21 seconds. Giving them value, giving him an awesome recipe. And you can have call to actions inside your actual Instagram TV video. So the one thing that people don't know is you can actually upload pre-recorded videos. It's not like going live where you have to do it live. You can create a pre-recorded video. You can create a whole list of recipes. You can do 10 recipe videos and put them up once a week for the next 10 weeks. And they could all be five minutes long and build a lot of affinity using these instagram TV episodes. There's also a clickable link that you can put into your Instagram TV posting in order to get people to take that call to action and either go by your recipe book or go and buy a product or down by service once you offer them and remember, you need to offer them value. So here's how to get the most points here, you need to remember when you're creating Instagram TV episodes or content. So you want to use a consistent design. Make sure it goes in the design of the rest of your Instagram account and the vibe that you've been putting out there. You want to make sure that you are using the sequential series tactic. You wanna make sure you're using hashtags. You wanna make sure you put in that clickable link. You want to make sure that you share it. Remember, content stacking to your Instagram profile and Instagram story. Make sure you use video hooks. So in the first ten to 20 seconds or even before that, even the first two seconds have a something that's hooking someone in. Say you'll never guess what happened when we tried to put these two chemicals together. And that can be the first three seconds of the video on people like, oh, I want to see what happens when you put these two chemicals together. And therefore, they're going to watch that Instagram TV episode until they get to that point. Meaning you're going to get a lot of affinity from this person. And next time you post something, they're going to be likely to buy and they're going to be very likely to engage with that again because they like you more. So Mm-hm. To add value is that last point there? The more value add, the more people are going to engage. And like you, so couple of people that you should go and have a look at National Geographic, they do this really, really well. And so to someone called Tortoise TO RTS, you can go and have a look at their Instagram TV. They using it really, really well. And you can see down the bottom there when you watch an Instagram TV, you can go and you can actually click on Recommended Instagram TV channels that come up, come up down below when you're watching the Instagram TV. And this is where you can find other people doing it well. But also remember, this is where your Instagram TV channel can be promoted when people are watching other people's Instagram TV. So to end that, I would say the biggest thing you can do is go and put out there your first Instagram TV video. And then you can go and you can check the analytics of how people engage with it, how much people liked it, and you can use that to make a better, stronger hiring gauged video for your audience the second time and put it up and keep testing these things. Keep putting up these videos and make sure that people are engaged with it, liking it. And you'll be shocked at the amount of affinity and trust you can build with your audience that you can then sell them to your products and services.
44. Next Steps: Awesome. So if you've made it this far, first of all, a genuine real round of applause and appreciation because you've absolutely crushed this course. I really hope you've taken action through relevant because it's not going to help you unless you really apply this knowledge that you learn. So please do that. The other things that I'd love you to do is one, if you could please leave me a review or take 30 seconds and it really helps me get this course further out and to more people. So I super appreciate if you do that. We also have a YouTube channel. If you want to come and get more tips and advice on Instagram or any other thing in the digital marketing world, common followers over there on YouTube. We are 14, 7 media on YouTube. Sit, come and find me over there. And also last but not least, we have a lot of other awesome Skillshare courses for you to take. So please go and pick your next adventure you wanna go on together. I've got a lot more Skillshare course, it's coming. So they should be at, by the time that you're watching this as well. Really appreciate you. Make sure you upload your project is the last one. I love seeing projects up here. So if you've done that already, has led to my keyboard. There's nothing else really for you to do, but join me in the next adventure. Big round of applause. Well done, you should be proud looking forward to seeing you in the next one.
Benji Wilson, Social Media & Entrepreneurship
