Instagram Marketing: The Complete Guide To Growing An Audience On Instagram

1. Class Introduction: Instagram has been one of the, if not the most popular social media platform for years now, there are over 1 billion active monthly users now to sum, this figure may be incredibly daunting, but to others, it will be an opportunity whether you're a new creator to the platform or somebody that's been using Instagram for years now, there is this common misconception that there is no longer any chance for somebody to succeed on Instagram. Apparently, there's too much competition. But let me tell you from experience that this isn't the case. Last year, March of 2020, I set out on building my own personal brand on Instagram. Just a year later, I had managed to a massive following of over 40 thousand incredible individuals. And today, I want to teach you step-by-step everything I have learned so that you can achieve some similar results, your personal or business. Brad. Hi guys, My name is Ethan bridge. I'm host of the social media marketing school podcast and the guy behind the Instagram page, the marketing. Ethan and I am also an Instagram consultant whereby I assist personal brands and businesses in creating their Instagram strategies, creating their brand profile, creating great content, you name it, so that they are able to grow a following, but more importantly, turn those followers into clients. Now, today, I want to welcome you to this class. This is a complete guide to succeeding on Instagram. If you're a beginner or an intermediate, there is something in this course, you, whether that be wanting to create the perfect profile, understanding what makes effective content, how the algorithm works, how to rank on the Explore page, how to get the most out of hashtags. There is even a module on the correct mindset to succeeding on social media. And I hope every module inside this course can contribute to achieving that success that you are setting out to achieve. So I hope this has been a great introduction as what to expect in size the class. And I hope to see you in the first module. 2. Profile: Picking A Niche: So before you even start creating your account, you need to have an idea on what niche you're going to pick, what content you're actually going to create. Because you don't want to create an account that's really, really broad and targets the most people you might think originally you have, right? So let's start creating content that applies to the largest amount of people possible because that means that my audience can be the largest it can be. And it doesn't work like that. The riches are in the niches. I cool it niches, but it sounds better. Riches in the niches. You need to pick a specific niche for your content. Believe it or not. If you target a really, really, really narrow audience, ironically, that small audience are going to lead to that exponential growth in the long run. It's the concept of true fans. If you haven't actually heard of that concept before, go and check out. Ensure a 1000 true fans is all you need as a content creator to make a living. You need 1 thousand people that live and die by our product and service. They are the people that will attend every concert that say you're a musician. They will buy every course you release. If you're a content creator, they will follow you wherever you go. They are one hundred, ten hundred fans and those are the people that will promote you to that wider audience. So they only have to be very nice you are and you need a very small number of people for that then to scale up because these people speak religiously about you. That is the concept of 1000 true fans. And it just goes to show how you only need a very small number of people in order to grow your account in the long run. So when you are picking your niche, you need to be picking something that you're interested in. If you aren't interested in the content you create, you've already failed, you're not going to be able to stick out long term. You're not gonna be able to stay consistent and you aren't going to enjoy the process. Ultimately, you want to enjoy this. You want to be able to turn this into a passion. You want to be able to eventually ans money from this. So if you don't actually enjoy what you do, then you've already found at the first hurdle because you aren't gonna keep this up for the period you need to keep it up for. Because let's be honest, it's not going to happen overnight. You can't expect to start an account tomorrow. And then within a week, be at 10000 followers. It simply doesn't work like that. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of work and it takes a lot of effort. But ultimately, when you do start to get the ball rolling and you start see that snowball effect of you have been putting in the time posting daily, consistently and engaging with your audience, it all becomes worth it. So with your niche, be specific and pick something that you love. If you have a product or service already, then this is an easy job for you. You simply can go straight into that avenue, pick that niche. But for example, my Instagram page is solely focused around social media marketing, not marketing as a whole. Not just to marketing social media marketing. It's very niche and it gets people interested. So that is how you pick your niche. Go for something very specific. Don't go broad. You want to target something very niche of that smaller group of audience can then eventually help you scale up in the long run. And you also need to have something that you really enjoy doing. So if you don't enjoy it, you're not going to carry it on. So that is how you pick your niche. It's actually pretty simple. You probably didn't need me to tell you that, but I always have to start off by saying you need to pick an age before you actually go into creating your account. Because if you don't pick a niche and you start creating content on one thing, and then you decide on, I don't enjoy this, I'm going to do another thing that's not going to help out with your account because you would have already gotten some followers. You would have really gained some slight audience. And then if you change your content, everything else that you can create their forwards is going to become irrelevant to those people that you've just providing content for. So you need to stick it out and you need to understand what you're going to create your content about. So picky nation before you start anything. 3. Profile: Username: So now you've picked your niche. Now you need to actually download the Instagram app. Step one, pretty simple. Download the app can have an account if you don't have the app. But the first thing you need to do is pick your username. When you pick your username, you need to be thinking, right, if someone doesn't know me specifically, how can they still find me? Because let's say your name is as he's my name for an example, Ethan bridge. If someone doesn't know who I am and they don't know my name. They don't know why create content about social media marketing or marketing in general. So in my name, on Instagram, my name is the marketing Ethan. So someone's still wanted to find out content about marketing. And they typed in marketing to the Instagram search term. I would still come up. They don't have to know my name specifically that I need to know my name's Ethan. They just need to know that they want to see content on marketing. So that may search marketing in the search time. And I still come up even if they don't know my name is Ethan. That's what you need to think about when you're picking your username. I would always suggest that you put your niche in your username. Then when you actually go further down the line of creating your page, you also get to pick a display name. Now let's display name sits just above your bio or talk about it a bit later on when I talk about creating your bio and how you should structure it. But in that display name, you also want to have your niche again. And in that one, because I didn't want the social media marketing Ethan, that's way too long of a handle. I just had. Ethernet does social media marketing, so people know my name if they want to talk to me by my first name. And then it also know that my content is about social media marketing and that also reinforces my actual username itself in SEO terms. So SEO, if you don't know search engine optimization, you may just think that's on websites, but NO is on Instagram as well. You want to be ranking at the top of the search is when you're actually producing your content on Instagram. So people type in marketing. You want to come up at the top if your content is about marketing, that's what I have. And because I have that in both my username and my display name above my bio. They work together and they push me higher up the ranking. So someone such as marketing, I more likely it's come up, Let's say you are an artist. You can just have your name as the artist, then your name. Or if you do watercolor paints, you can have watercolor, then your name, You see what I mean. You're getting really specific with your niche and because you were having your name after it. If someone wanted to search your name because they know your name, you might still come up. But if you wanted to find new audiences who are specifically looking for the content you create, they will type in the word of that niche in the search bar. And because you have that in your username, you are more likely to show up, see you are more likely to gain a following that way. So a top tip with your username is to have your niche within it. 4. Profile: Profile Picture: So moving on to the next step now we have to create your profile picture. And for this, I'm going to dive into my computer. So I'm going to give you a quick introduction here and what you need to do. And I'm going to dive into my computer and show you exactly how you do it. So you want to have a head shot. You want to build a personal brand on your profile. So you want your face, you need to have your face on your page. Of course, you cannot build that personal brand if you're an artist, brilliant, you can have your feed about what your art, but you still want to have a face to your page. So it's great to have your face on your profile picture. Now with mine, I simply took in front of a white background and then I put it over a dark colored circle with my branding colors on it. I'm going to jump right into my computer now and show you exactly how I made my display picture so that you can sort of follow the same steps. So now that we're in my computer screen, essentially what you want to do is take a picture of yourself up against a blank wall. It doesn't need to be a professional-looking headshot like this. We have a Sue on or smart clothing. If you have a very just sort of laid back page or you are a designer, you don't normally wear formal things like ASU. It can be you and your clothes just smiling but have it up against a blank wall. This makes it much easier to remove the background, but this can be done on your phone. It doesn't have to be done on a professional camera because it is very small. The quality of the picture doesn't really matter as long as it doesn't look like it was taken on a potato. So just make sure is decent enough quality so that when it is scaled down, it still looks like it's relatively clear. So, but this is a perfect example. So what we want to do now is remove the background from this image. Now, you don't have to do this on Photoshop like I'm doing. You can remove the background for free on a website called sticker meal forward slash trace. It's a free website where you could just simply upload the image and it removed the background for you and export it as a PNG. But for those of you that do have Photoshop, I'm going to quickly show you how to do it. So essentially what you do is you click on Select and you click on Subject. And then it will select our subject for us. And you can see here, that is fine, but if you click on that, just like I have done there, the edge is going to be somewhat Jaggard when you delete the background, which is not what you want. So you can click on Select again. You're going to click on modify, and then you're going to click on smooth. This is going to smooth out those edges, smooth it to 20 pixels, and then hit Okay. But at the moment, what we are selecting this, we are selecting our subjective. So if we hit Delete now, brutally or subject opposed background. So if you click on select again and then click on inverse, switches it out to the background. We need to do now, hit unlock and then hit Delete. Now you have it. You have your subject without the background. Then you can export that as a PNG. So that then you can then transfer it onto a new document where you have your circle background so that you can put it over the top. So now you want to create your actual profile picture itself. Now it's much easier when you're creating it on a square because it's easier to format your circles. You know what you're working with them. So just create your file at a 1080 by 1080 board. Let's create that. And now because obviously the profile picture is a circle and you only see what's within the circle. You want to use the Ellipse tool. So click. And because we know the dimensions of our square, we attend AT again, hit Okay? And there we have our circle. And then we want to move that into the middle of our page. You can select it to be whatever color you want. Let's say you have some brand colors. You can select it to be a brown color. I'm just going to make it a nice gray at the moment. I think that will look quite nice with the picture I had of myself. So that will do for now. And then what we're going to do is we're gonna go over to our file that we exported earlier, drag it into our document so that it sits on top of our circle. And there we have it. We now have our profile picture within the document. Now, you can stretch this to be whatever size you want so that it fits nicely within the circle. There you have it. But when you actually upload this to Instagram, or that it will see, it will crop off around this circle here. So if we just reduce the opacity. So you can see behind the image here, you can see here that it will crop off around here. So work with lower opacity so you can see what's going to be seeing within your profile picture. But it's as simple as that. Doing it just just like that. You can create an extremely professional-looking profile picture. Within a matter of seconds, you've got your brand colors there. You are really showing your personal image because you've used a nice picture of yourself. And it's just clear and concise for your audience. They know who you are, and they can refer it to the rest of your page because it fits in with your branding. So simple as that, export that file. And then you're done. That is your profile picture. 5. Profile: Bio: So now we have two of the main things sorted. We've got your username, and we have your display picture. So now we need to actually move on to your bio itself. Your bio is really, really important and a lot of people neglect their bio. And this is what, in my opinion, will convert most of your followers after your consent. So your content is key. The content you create drives the people that want to follow you because at the end of the day, people follow you feel content. But someone normally visits your profile because they've already seen your content, let's say on a hashtag or the Explore page. And then your bio, sort of that final grab to convert them to a follower. So you really, really, really need to optimize your bio, because once this is optimized, you are much more likely to see that higher conversion rate of page visitor to followers. So if you were to head over to someone's Instagram page and you had a look at that by 0, you will see that it actually shows the first four lines before you have to click a seam or button. And then that bit of your bio kind of becomes irrelevant because you don't see it when you first visit someone's pages that you want to optimize those first four lines of your bio in order to increase that full of a conversion rate. So split it into four different sections. Each line you want to have a key point about you is self and what you want your followers to do. So all that's split up into four different sections. Number one, being a story or a little bit about what you actually do yourself. Number 2, positioning. And I'll go into all of these in a little bit more detail once I've mentioned what they are. Number three, credibility. And finally, number four, your call to action. And number four is your call to action because just below your bio sits your website URL. So you want to be leveraging your Instagram page to get people to click your URL. So if you have a website or you have, let's say an e-book link, you can direct them to that URL, but I will go into that URL link in the next course module. But for now I'm just going to be sticking to the buyer now going into bit more detail about each of the lines. So as an example, line number 1, as your story, mine is simply, I help brands with their social media marketing. People instantly know what I do and what my page is about. Let's say you are a former medical student or a former engineer, or you previously worked for Google or Facebook, but now you've turned a consultant. Brilliant. Not only does that show that you've got expertise elsewhere, and you've now done this for yourself with your Instagram page. It gives that extra little bit of credibility and it gives people something to maybe relate to someone else might have been a former medical student, or someone else might have been an engineer. Someone else might have previously worked at Facebook or people might just love Facebook. So they're going to trust you because you used to work for them. But now you are going and you're saying, I used to work for them, but now I do this. So let's say you are a Facebook ads guru. You may have previously run Facebook ads for Facebook, or you may have previously done it for another company that people may have heard of. But now you do it for yourself and other businesses. That's great for people to know because it gives you that pret credibility, but it also shows your expertise. So you really want to have some form of story, something that says exactly what you do in that first line. So point number 2, line number two, and this is your positioning. Now this is where you need to tell people what they should exactly expect from your content, what they are going to be seeing every single day. So for example, mine is dropping daily marketing knowledge bombs. People know by now post daily and they now know my content is about marketing or social media marketing because social media marketing is in my display name, people now know exactly what to expect if they don't want to see that. They won't follow me. If they do want to see that, they will. It's that simple. And you can see how already within these first two lines, we're really positioning ourselves as an expert and people were already knowing what to expect from our page before. You may have just had, I love marketing or I loved music, That's it. That tells people nothing about your page. You really need to get into the details and make people want to follow you because you've already done the hard part. You've already got someone to visit your page. Now all you need them to do is click that follow button and this buyer who is really going to help them do that. Now, moving on to line number three, and I know I've previously said that this should be credibility, but you may be pretty new. You may not have had clients before. So you could be using this third line as something to promote the services that you are going to provide. Now, in my third line, personally, I opted not to go for the credibility route because I want people to approach me directly on Instagram through DM for my products and services. So on line 3, what I wrote was DM for help slash paid ads. I personally specializing paid advertisement and Instagram growth, so social media marketing, like I said. But another great thing that you can do is now have a line for credibility on that third line instead. So let's say you are a teacher on Skillshare like this. You may have created courses on Skillshare that have gone viral in the past. Now, this is a great thing that you should mention in your Instagram bio if it has relevance, let's say you've had 30000 students before. Put that in your third line, 30 thousand plus students on Skillshare. If people see that they're going, Wow, this guy must really know what they're talking about. Or let's say you've helped several clients scale. They're paid ads, over a million dollars or you've spent an x amount doing something. This really goes to show that you know your stuff and people should follow you for that reason. If you've got no credibility or don't really know what you're talking about, then people aren't going to look at your page and go, Okay, this guy knows stuff, so I want to follow them. If you haven't got that credibility there or you haven't displayed a product or service that you offer that people can have in that bio, then people aren't going to know whether you are an expert in this or you're just full of it. So it's really good to have that third line as Eva, expertise so that credibility or referring to a product or service that people can have if they contact you via dm. So we've got our story in the first line, we've got our positioning in the second, and we've got our credibility or product or service in the third. Now in the fourth, This one's pretty simple because it just sits above your website URL. You want to have this fourth line, a call to action. So I personally have a podcast, social media marketing school. And in that URL, I have the link to my podcast. So my followers know I have a podcast, I talk about it all the time. But in that fourth line, my call to action is listen to a podcast where they down pointing hand emoji. People know that if they want to listen to my podcast, all they have to do is click the link below. And I always tell this to people that message me on Instagram or people that asked me for Instagram help. I always say you should be leveraging Instagram to direct them to a website or a product or service, a source of traffic you actually own, because Instagram could be taken away from you at any point, you are essentially renting a space on the platform. You don't own your followers, you don't own your audience on that platform because Instagram could delete the app any day. You sort of happened with vine. So it could happen to any app. Again, creators that didn't diverse on Vine didn't start owning their audience became irrelevant. Some of these creators you've never heard of since vine, but those that were able to establish audiences on different platforms and start owning their audience, whether that be an e-mail list, a podcast, just simply pushing them to YouTube channels, things like that. Technically don't own a YouTube channel because YouTube could go any day, but that one's not as clear, that one's probably not going to happen. They are dominating the space at the moment. But you see what I mean? You are wanting to leverage Instagram to start owning your traffic. So by having that website URL and directing people to that website URL, you are doing just that. So you really want to make use of that fourth line in your bio to make sure that people are going through that link and you can start owning that traffic. So now that is your bio, that is how you construct a perfect by an OH, put a screenshot of mine up on the screen so that you guys can see just how I've structured mine. I've put some emojis in there to make it look nicer, so it's more appealing, looks cleaner. I spaced out perfectly and if you notice, my lines do not go into the next line. For example, my first line about what I do about creating content, about social media marketing is literally just on that first line. If you use too many characters, it will push it onto the second line, which obviously leaves you less space for your next points. So you want to make sure you are fitting those sentences in to one line lengths. That way you can really optimize the space and increase the likelihood of that follower conversion. 6. Profile: Website URL: So we are almost there. There's only a few more points left to go through, Guys. We have our website URL, we have our highlights, and then we have our actual content itself. Now in this point, I want to talk about our website URL link. So because you only get the opportunity to use one link, I think it's really important to think about this. Shoot, you just be putting your website on there. Or as a content creator, do you have multiple places you then want to direct people to? If you've only got your website, everything is on your website, whether that be places someone can book a coaching call. We have all your courses, you have all your e-books, brilliant. Send them directly to your website. But if you don't have this in your using multiple different places, for example, I have a podcast, but I also want to direct people to my Skillshare. I was I wanted to direct people in all different areas and I can't do that just from a website. So instead, I use a link trailing. And essentially what this is, it's a website that allows you to create a URL link which will take someone to a page where you have all of your links stacked in a line. I'll leave a screenshot again, just as an example. But it is brilliant because essentially from one link, just from one-click, people were then able to see all of your links that you actually have. So it really allows you to optimize that website URL space rather than just having one. Because let's say you do have an e-book and you do have a course, and you do have a YouTube channel. But obviously that YouTube channel is in a separate place on the Internet to your course or your e-book. And you could only use one link in your bio. So you really want to optimize that space, have that link tree link, and then have all of the links within that link tree links so that people can go wherever they need to go, may even click on that link to link and go. I didn't know that person had that. I'm going to check that out as well. They may have only been going there for your EBIT, but then they see that you've got a YouTube channel when they go. Okay, cool. I'm gonna get the e-book analytic. Go subscribe to them on YouTube. It's the best of both worlds. Not only do you get the opportunity to use more links, people find more about you. So really optimized that URL space, get a link to link. Now if you have used link tree before and you don't like it, there are some other alternatives. There's camp site, there's LinkedIn profile, There's tap bio. But in my opinion, link tree is the best you're gonna get for a free product is really customizable. You can have your profile picture, you can change the background colors, you can change the link colors. And for a free product that allows you to have these kind of options available when your profile. I think it's fantastic. So if you are going to use one of these website links, please use the link tree. You will be really amazed with the results that can give you. And if you do end up paying for the premium version, you can actually track links. You can see all the data. You get more customizable options and it's pretty cheap. So link tree, in my opinion, is the best service to use. If you want to have multiple links in your website URL on your Instagram page. 7. Profile: Highlights: So our Instagram profile is nearly complete. All we have left to do now is sought out our highlights and our content. Now, if you haven't actually created any content yet, your highlights are going to have no real use. But what they do is they make your page look complete. This is really what sets people apart, I think because a lot of people don't actually have highlights. But when you look at the biggest pages, they really make use of this area on their profile. Some use it for their pay products or services. Some use it to sort of segment their content. So people can refer to different types of content. Easier. Let's say someone wanted to see something on Instagram growth. They might have a highlight simply for Instagram growth. Another highlight might be for paid ads. If they want to find that content easy, they can click on to a highlight and it's there. But for paid products, people might have sort of an introduction to what they can experience if they were to purchase one of your products. So let's say you have a highlight about one-to-one coaching. Someone clicks on that. It might be a nice, highly produced video of you talking about what they can expect to achieve from your one-to-one coaching. So you really need to be making use of this part of your profile, I think is a great point to you, point them towards your paid products because you may not want to have specific posts on your feed dedicated to pay products because you might see that as sort of promotion and it might push your followers away. So you can actually use your highlights as a police to promote your paint products. That's brilliant because it's not going to keep popping up on people's feed. People just see that if they want to see it, they head on over to your profile and they click on it and they see, okay, this person's got a productive let me click on it, see what it's about. They can't be you're not forcing it down their throats. It's just there if they wanted to see it. So I'm going to now head over to my computer again and show you how to edit a highlight icon. It's really, really simple, is pretty similar to that of your profile picture. In my opinion, I would keep the background to your profile picture the same as the background on your highlights. That way you have that congruency between the two. And it keeps your theme when you're paid, looking very clean, and it makes it really, really professional. But you need to be making use of these highlights. You can fit for highlights on your profile before it makes people have to swipe. So I definitely recommend having at least for highlights on your profile so that it does make it look the most professional. If you've got one or two, it still looks kinda scrapie. So make sure you have at least four if you want more, perfectly fine. It just obviously has people scrolling through more of your content, but have at least four highlights and make sure you do have hydrants. Don't neglect this part because not only can it convert more customers if you have a print product or service, it really does make you look more professional. And again, more professional page means more converted followers. So let's dive into my computer and I'll show you how to make a highlight icon. Now, for our highlight icons, we can use the same template that we used for our profile picture because they work in the same way for your highlight icon, you're only going to see what's within this circle, radius. So we can use the same template we used earlier will just delete our headshot. And now we're left with just the icon. Again. Again, this can be done in Canva, it could be done in PowerPoint. You don't need Photoshop. Just do what I'm doing as a process. But within those platforms, I just use Photoshop because I find it the easiest to use. I've been using it for awhile. So I'm going to continue using it. But you want to use your same brand colors as your profile picture. So keep this the same color. And now what you want to do is you want to find an icon. They don't want it to be completely random. You want it to relate to what your highlight on that specific icon that you're creating. This four is going to be about now as an example, I have a podcast, so I have a highlight for my podcast. And the icon I use for that is a microphone. So I want to use a microphone icon within this circle so that people know that that highlight is about my podcast. Yes, you get a title, but it draws the attention more. So where do you find these icons? You can head over to a website called Icon finder. See here it'll take you onto this website. Now if you're in a microphone search, they will come up. You'll notice here that you don't actually have to pay for these. You can select it to show free icons only. So if you don't want to actually pay, That's fine. Select free icons only. Now some of you might be thinking, Oh, my brand background is black, this won't show up. So that you can actually do is you can click on Open in Icon editor. It will load it. This little software they have here. You can select the whole icon and then play about with your colors here to change the colors itself. Now minds on the light gray background, so it's not gonna make much difference. So I'm going to keep it as black. If we now head over to here, we can click on Download icon. And I'm going to make it quite big because I'm working on a 1080 by 1080 background, you might be working on something smaller. So save as the source file size, it is relevant to the document. So as you're working on, on, let's say PowerPoint or Keynote or Canva. But I'm going to download it as 512 by 512. Now, now that you've actually downloaded your icon, I put my icon on my desktop so it's much easier to find, but it's just there like I had with my profile picture. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to drag it over into my document again. There we have it. And now I can adjust accordingly, make it bigger, move it into the middle. And they have a Deja vu or highlight icon. Now, I would split this up. I would probably, maybe just add, let's say, a few small rectangles behind it. Very thin. Let's make them. Why? For example, let's say you have another brown color. We can rotate them, you get the point. If I put that behind the microphone, just like that, we can then move those around. Just so say if we made it diagonal, so look much nicer across the page. You name, it gets quite fancy. You can make it look quite cool. So let's say your page has a more grunge look. You could have a grunge overlay above it. We could have a couple of these rectangles, for example. Copy and paste them. If you wanted to, you can have them all the way up. You can make them diagonal, you name it. It's just a nice way to spice up the background so it isn't just plain like this. For example, if you'd like like this, that's fine. It works. It's better than what most people have because they have both lightly have no highlights. So somehow that's a better than none. But they have it. That is how you find some icons. Use the website icon finder and then download them and put them on top. And within your circle, export as a PNG and then use that as your highlight cover. 8. Profile: Content & Brand Colours: So your page is pretty much set up now. All we need to do now is post content. Everything about your page should be perfect. You've got your username perfect, you've got your profile picture looking professional. You've got your bio 1, you have your website URL, you have your highlights, and now you have your actual content that you need to post. Now in my opinion, to keep personal branding consistent, you need to stick to some brand colors. Now in mine I have a very dark gray, I have a yellow, and then I have sort of primate colors just with just a white for my text. But in all my content, I will use the same colors. That way when people do visit my feed, it does look very clean. It doesn't have to look perfect. It doesn't have to look in macular, but it needs to have some consistency. In my opinion. I know a lot of creators will say, okay, look, you need to post content as much as you possibly can. The more content you post, the better it doesn't matter what your feed looks like. But if you're a graphic designer or you are a content creator, you're doing your feed itself is essentially a portfolio for you. So it's very, very important that you make your portfolio look as professional as possible. If people are going to be paying for services of content creation. Obviously, the content you create yourself is very, very important. So as people head over to your page and your theme, and your page itself just looks scrappy then no one is going to want you to do their content creation for them. So it's really important you do have consistent theme, brand colors that your page looks really, really nice. Now, you also want to become dome for some brown color. If you look at Dain Walker, he has this yellow and black theme. Now here's sort of become known. He's cemented themselves. People know that if they see him pop up or they see a piece of this content scrolling through the feet. It doesn't have to have his face on it for them to know it's him. So if you can have a theme in your content that you become known for, that is brilliant for when people are scrolling through their feed and engaging with content because they'll scroll across yours and go, Okay, this is that creator. I know what they're about, I know what they do. I'm obviously going to want to view this content and find more about it and consequently engage. And that engagement obviously helps you with the Instagram algorithm, helps you get more page visits, helps you get more followers. You see what I mean is all about getting those page visits. And consequently, now that you've got your profile perfect, you are much more likely to convert that page visitor to a follower. That is your goal. You want to increase your audience. You want to give yourself the best chance possible. So follow every step that I have just spoken through in today's class. That is it, That is all you need to know. But this last point I am making about your content and your theme itself is the most important. Content is key to everything. Content is at the core. Your social media marketing strategy. At the end of the day, people follow people for their content. They're not going to follow you if your content is rubbish, if your content looks awful, it has to have some form of preventability. Yes, the value of the content comes first. So it is actually much more useful if your content is packed full of value, opposed with looking perfect and having no real value at all. Because then it's essentially useless. It just looks pretty so you want to focus on that value within your content and present it in a way that's easily readable by your audience. If you can get those two things on point, you're away. You were doing perfectly. So that final point, have your content for this specific theme, have those branded colors. Become known for those branded colors so that people know your content and you are going to increase your followers. I promise content. If your content is perfect, people will want to follow you. In the long run. That is what is going to help you grow exponentially. 9. The 3 Content Types You Need To Be Creating: The three types of content that you need to be creating. If you want to build a following, establish authority, build trust with that following that you've built and actually make some sales from your presence on social media and the content that you are creating. Because it comes down to these three different types of content. And you need to be utilizing all of them, but you need to find a balance between each of them which works best for you and your business. So without any further ado, let's just dive straight into the first content type and that content type is nurturing. Now this is a type of consent that you will see most often on Instagram. There the value providing posts, the interesting post, the eye-catching posts or posts that actually teach people something, especially if you're in the niche that I'm in. So for example, I am in the social media marketing niche. If you go onto my page, you will see that the majority of my content is value adding. I'm teaching people different things. I'm making people aware of certain strategies, tips, tricks. All of these things are going to help benefit others. That is, nurturing content. And this is the core pillar of the content that I'm creating. Because what this does is it builds my following and it establishes my authority. One, it builds a following because it reaches more people. And when people see content that they value and that benefits them, they're going to want to consume more content just like that. So it encourages those page visits, encourages those follows, and grows that audience. But what it's also doing is it's establishing my authority. Because I am teaching these things. I'm establishing my name in the social media marketing space because I am providing this value in teaching these people these tips, which therefore reinforces my knowledge within that niche, so establishes that or authority. So this is the core pillar. This is the content you want to be creating the most of. Because if you don't create any of this content, you're not going to attract anybody to your page if all of your content is very salesy, which we're going to talk a little bit about later. Nobody's going to want to follow your content because they don't want to just see a sounds post every other day or every day in some people's cases, you need to be nurturing that audience. You need to be bringing in new people and keeping people around that have already followed you. And to do that, you have to keep providing them value. And I know value is this very cliched piece of advice, but you should understand what value means to your audience. For example, value to my audience is how to grow on social media, how to leverage an audience on social media, how to monetize that audience that you have built. That is the value that I am providing to my audience and that they see valuable to them. Value's going to be different for everyone. But as long as you want nurturing your audience with this value, adding content, you are going to be doing just fine because you will attract new people and you'll keep people sticking around that have already followed you. So that is the core pillar. That is the content you need to be creating the most of. But the next content type that you need to be thinking of is the personable content. Content about you. Content that's going to show people behind the scenes into your daily life. People need to understand who you are, especially if you are a personal brand, if your business, your employees. So personable content is going to build that trust. You're never going to sell anything if you don't have trust with your audience. But to build trust, they need to understand who you are. And especially as a personal brand. Because people trust people, people don't trust content per se. People do business with people. If you want to create a coaching business, people aren't going to hire you as a coach if they've never seen who you actually are before. So having that personable content gives people are behind the scenes, allows them to understand what you're like as a person, your mannerisms, your enthusiasm, get on camera. The personable content for me comes from my Instagram stories. Instagram stories are a very, very good way to just be personal with your audience. It's a much less polished content format. You want having to edit things so that they're perfect and look nice and create this lovely anesthetic feed. It's none of that. Go on your stories. Hold the camera, say what you're thinking. Show people what you're doing and they will enjoy it. It's personable. People want an inside look into your life. Trust me, people were nosey. If you could see your favorite creators. Livelihood and what they do on a day-to-day basis. Great. And even though you don't know these people one-to-one or on a personal level. In real life, they're going to feel as if they do because they see your everyday life every single day. And that's from the fact that you are posting personable content on your stories. I see the most interaction or people actually damning me from my stories opposed to my feed content. So they're a great conversation starter because let's say you like going down the gym, might I think in relation to your content. But you will have audience members who also like going down the gym. So if you post a picture of you in the gym or showing your workout or eating a certain type of food or going somewhere. And somebody else within your audience enjoys that same thing they're going to reach out to you and relate to you on another level that you didn't know beforehand, which in turn helps build that trust, build that relationship, and consequently could potentially lead to that sale, which is what you are looking for. But without that personable content is going to be very, very difficult to actually build that trust with your audience because it's very difficult to trust somebody who isn't a person. It's very difficult to trust a logo when you don't know who's behind that logo. So Get your face out there, get on video, show people what you're doing. Be personable, be you. Because that is going to build trust with your audience, which is going to really, really help close that cell should it come to it. So we have nurturing content, we have personable content. Now the final type of content that you need to be producing is call-to-action content. Content that actually sells. Because you've provided that nurture in content, you've continued to add benefits, to add value to your audience and new audience members. You've built that trust with your personable content. And now it's time to leverage that audience that you've bill with some call to action content. Content, whereby you're actually selling a product, promoting your service, telling people about your coaching, because if you don't do this, then you're never going to sell anything because people won't understand you've actually has something to sell. If people don't know you have a coaching service, then they're never going to ask you for coaching because you haven't told them about it in the first place. So that final content pillar of call to action, sellable content is key because if you actually want to make some money, which I assume if you're listening to this podcast, you do. Without this type of content, you're never go into. So you could also do this on your stories. You could be personable, be building that trust within your stories and then throw in a little call to action story telling people that if they do want to sign up for your coaching, they can and give them a call to action of how they can do so. If you want to put it on the final slide of your carousel, That's value-adding. Find by all means if you want to have a soul dedicated call to action post, do it. But the one thing I want you to be wary of is that this has to be balanced. All of these content pillars have to be balanced. Yeah, you can pose personable content on your story whenever you want. Please do. And did the majority of your content needs to be nurturing, value-adding. You can't just post a call to action post every single day because you will annoy people, people will unfollow you because people don't like to be sold to all the time. You need to give more than you take. So find a balance, find what's right, find what your audience is okay with test different things. But don't post every single day a call to action piece of content. Every now and again, once a week, maybe pick out that call to action. Because then that's a good balance between the fact that you are providing or this value. But then only asking very little in comparison for something in return. And that's it. They are the three content pillars that you need to be focusing on. Nurturing contents and value adding content, personable content, and call-to-action content. Because that nurturing content builds your audience, it builds your authority, the personable content builds trust, and then the call to action content actually cells. But those call-to-action content won't sell if you haven't posted the other content beforehand to build their authority and the trust with the audience. So you need to be doing all three, but find a good balance between how much you should be posting of each. 10. Stories: Why Stories Are Important: Now before I actually go into the details of actually creating stories and how you can best utilize the platform through hacking the algorithm using hashtags, geotags, different apps you can use. I think it's really, really important to first understand why you should actually be creating stories in the first place. The importance of Instagram stories, because if you don't really understand that, you're just going to be creating stories for the sake of it, you first need to understand just how important stories are to the platform. In my opinion, stories are one of the most popular parts of Instagram, if not the most popular. How often do you find yourself just aimlessly scrolling through Instagram stories. I personally do it far too often. They coincide, so, so well with your feed posts, but you have to use them in a different way. Your feed posts are much more polished, they're much more professional, you take time on them. Whereas your stories are something that are going to be a bit more relaxed, a bit more raw, uncut behind the scenes. This allows your audience to get to know you on a more personal level. With a video, for example, that you post on your feet. You're going to edit this in post-production. You're gonna make sure it's perfect. You're going to add captions. You can pretty much do everything to make that video as good as you possibly can. But with a story, you can't really do that with a story. You've just got to click Record talk. And that's it allows you to connect with your audience on a more personal level. And this is why I love stories so much. Instagram, love the stories feature so much that they're even at the moment, testing two rows of stories. At the moment, it's most likely that you have one. But Instagram have actually been testing two rows indescribable, willing to take up half of the home screen with stories, then that should explain just how important they are to the platform and just how loved they are by the audience of Instagram. Now, something I must say right now is that your stories need to be a completely different content strategy to that of which you post on your feet. Your stories shouldn't just be a place where you share your new posts. You don't just say, I've got a new post guys, go check it out. It shouldn't be like that. You need to have a completely different strategy. You wanted to give people a reason to actually view your story in the first place. They're not going to want to view your stories and engage with you if they are just simply you sharing your new posts, you want to add value in storage. You want to show people behind the scenes so they get to know you on a more personal level. People were nosy. People want to know the personal lives of their following. And this is why vloggers such as Casey, nice dare, Peter McKinnon. This is why they're so successful. And if you think about it this way, it's kind of strange because when people meet these creators in the street, they go on your Casey nice doll. I know you from YouTube, you, I love your videos. You like. You have a great family life and in reality you have no idea who this person is. You've never met them before. They've never met you, but they know you pretty much know everything about them. As an influencer that just goes to show how powerful and influence over someone could be. But that influenced has been established by the fat they are showing behind the scenes and they are building trust with their audience by being more rural, by being more personal, by being more emotional. And that is what you're able to do if your stories, so where your feed is much more polished, much more professional, much more thought about your stories are really where you can begin to build that relationship with your followers so that you build that trust with trust comes conversions, with convergence comes money. And that is what you want to do if you are trying to grow a business on Instagram, you want to build trust, you need to be using Instagram stories. I hope that summarizes the importance of Instagram stories. Now that we do know the importance and, and you should now know that you should be posting stories daily. Let's dive into the very, very basics of storage. If you already are familiar with Instagram stories, the next module isn't going to be for you. Just skip to the one-off that because I'm going to go into the very, very basics and go through the navigation of the stories feature so that anybody who is joining this class and is completely new to Instagram gets that introduction so that when they do begin to create, they know what they are doing. So let's dive into the next module where we're going to learn the very, very basics of stories. 11. Stories: Instagram Story Basics: So as I mentioned at the end of the last module, in this module, we are going back to basics. If you are very new to Instagram and you haven't used the stories feature before. When you first go on to the stories feature, it can be very overwhelming. There's a lot of options. There's a lot of features, and there's just a lot to know. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to head onto my phone. I'm going to take you through step-by-step on how to navigate stories. So that when you begin to create, you know exactly what you need to do to get the most out of the stories feature. So without any further ado, let's dive straight into my phone. So when you actually open up Instagram, obviously you're going to be greeted with your home screen and on your home screen, this is how you begin to access your stories. So to access your stories, you can either tap on your little face there next to the stories feed, or you can hit the plus in the top left-hand corner and then click on story. Now, when you open up this poll, you can see that you are greeted with this page here. And I'm going to first go through the side navigation bar. The side navigation bars where you can begin to select what type of story you're going to create. And then from that you can then go and create accordingly. So firstly, we have our Create button. So this will just greet you with a different background. For example, whether you want it to be a happy birthday message, a gear. Oh, what am I listened to this week's topic that interests essentially templates created by Instagram to make the process of procreation much, much simpler. Now, next we have boomerang. So if you don't know what a boomerang is, essentially what you do is you tap on record. When you use it. It will flick between the images that you have just recorded for. So that is boomerang, so we'll discard that for now. Next we have layout. This is where you can actually begin to import photos from your camera roll. So you can select one by one. You can change the grid if you want to have it in a different layout. Layouts pretty self-explanatory. Next we have super zoom. This is one way you can add different animated effects to your stories. I'm not going to show you how to do this one because it's unlikely that you're ever actually going to use this. I don't think I've ever used this before as a creative, but it's there if you want to use it. And then finally we have hands free, which is one I used all the time when I wanted to record video. It's so, so annoying having to hold down the Record button as you try to record a video. Instead, you can just click on hands-free tap Record. That is it as Oh, you need to do. And then tap Record when you finish talking, there's your Instagram story of you recording a video. So hands-free is a really, really popular one to use. But you'll also notice along the bottom you have different effects here. Now these are really, really good to use it. If you want to add a bit more substance to your photo, your video, you can actually search some really cool different effects by different creators that have created them. If you scroll along to the very end, you can see here that you can browse effect. There is an effect gallery. You can just scroll through, find out which ones you like, and then you can go from there. There are tons to pick from. So just go through there. You can save them to your Effects tab at the bottom so that you can use them time and time again. But I love to use these effects because they do add a bit more substance and make my stories a bit more interesting. So this is something you may use time and time again. So remember that it's there. But for the sake of this demonstration, I'm just going to take a very basic photos so that we can go through the rest of the navigation. So at the top here, when you take a photo, you'll be greeted by five little tabs at the top. Now, the very, very first one is save. If you tap that, it's going to save your image, the camera row. The next one, we have some more animated effects. So if you select these, for example, where they were at different effects to your photo. Now again, I don't really use these, but you might find a use for them. So remember they're there. Next we have stickers. Now this is one that I use all the time. This is one that can actually really, really develop your story and make it much more eye-catching. And you can use the stickers to increase engagement on gotta go into the different stickers you can use in a later module. But the next one is sticky, as you can see here, you can search for different stickers. For example, if I type lines, you can use these various different creations here to add a bit more substance to your image. For example, you could put this in the corner here, and that just makes it look a bit more fancy. It doesn't make it look so plain, but there you go. You've also got your location tab. Question questions, your pose it DM me stickers. Those are the ones I'm going to talk about later because you can actually use them to great effect. But they all your stickers. Next we have the pen tools. They have five different pen tools you can actually use. You can change the size of the pen by swiping up and down on that little slider there, change the color by using the bit at the bottom. But the very first one is the very basic pen. We'll just use black here and we'll make it a little bit smaller. You can see the very basic. Next we have the arrow. This one is actually quite simple because when you try and create an arrow here, sometimes it doesn't look very good and looks bit sloppy, but there's actually an arrow pen tool. You can use that perfect arrowhead, perfectly connected. Use that tool to create your hours. Don't try and make them yourself. Next we have the highlight and I'm going to select a different color for this to show its full effect and make it bigger. But there you go, you highlight the word Halakhah, certain parts of your texts to make them stand out. Highlighters perfect. Next we have the glowy pen. I don't really use this, but I've seen a lot of people use it to great effect. They was, for example, they'll put it around the subject of their image. So if you are creative, you find great ways to use that glow pen. But I've never really utilized it for my sort of niche. And then finally, we have a razor. So if you wanted to lay everything, use the eraser. All gone. So they append tools. Now finally, we have our text. Now for some reason on certain accounts I have I don't have access to all of these different texts. So you may have access 25, you may have got a new update for stories and you've got access to all ten like a half on this account. But for example, we're just going to use the word hello, nice and basic. And you can see all of the different funds Instagram has to offer. Now, I would try and keep your branding consistent. If you find a text that you like, stick to it. Don't change all the time between different texts. Be consistent between your story so that you can create a brand for yourself and you are consistent with that branding. Now, we're going to select this one, for example. Again, along the top you have where you want your text to be centered or left side, right side, you can click that one middle, you've got your colors. Now this final button, the third one along. If you tap that, you will actually give your texts that background. If you tap it again, invert it. Now, these background effects on your text and different for each text type. So I'm just gonna go through them all for you. Again, you can see here this one adds the background. This one adds it background. This one makes it glow slightly. This one adds a background. This one adds a nice electrical layered effect. So this one's good if you really want to make something stand out, I actually really like this one and use it a lot. This one's like a paint scrub. This one's really fancy. I like this one. It's bit more elegant. You can use it in more serious situations, or if you want to make something look really quite elegant, I've used that word twice now, but I think it's perfect for what you can use this for. Next we have this one here is a nice rounded effect. This is another one I use quite a lot when I'm trying to highlight certain aspects. And then finally, this is very basic square one here. But that is the very, very basic navigation of Instagram stories. If you are brand new to Instagram, I've hope that's provided you with some insight on how you can actually navigate stories so that when you begin to create, you know exactly what you're doing. So now that we actually know how to create Instagram stories using the stories feature, Let's dive into actually creating the perfect story. I'm going to talk you through step-by-step on some things to consider, some apps you can use. Then I'll talk through hashtags, the algorithm, all that fun stuff. But let's dive into the next module. 12. Stories: Storytelling: So now we understand the very, very basic navigation of Instagram stories. Now we really have to consider what we're actually going to create. Now this is where I think a lot of people for sure, because Instagram stories need to have substance. They need to be something they can't just be thrown up randomly and you hope they perform. You want to have people actually interested in view in your stories. You want to keep them coming back if they view at once and they don't like it, they're not going to view it again. So you want to have them be engaging. And for them to be engaging, You have to have great storytelling and a fantastic narrative. This is where a lot of people fail and it's one of the reasons why you wouldn't see a lot of people not even post Instagram stories in the first place. The reason being they don't know what to create. You need to know every time you open up a story and you post something, what you are going to do, Don't jump on a story and go, uh, let's talk about this topic. Have something in mind, make sure it's valuable in that it has substance. That storytelling aspect is going to keep people engaged throughout. Now, you could almost have a mini vlog every single day on your story. From the minute you wake up, you take people through your day, is a perfect example of storytelling. People are interested in what you do day-to-day and people will follow you because you've either entertain them or you educate them. If you educate them, they obviously are following you because they are at B, they are following you because they want to bridge the gap between B. If they can follow certain tips or things you do throughout your day, they are going to do that. So if you were doing like a mini vlog throughout your day, every single day as an educator, as a business owner, that's going to inspire people to take action and do similar things to what you were doing as a creator. So that many blog is a perfect example of storytelling in great narrative because you're literally taking people through your day step-by-step. That is a story you are living story. So it's just an example of how you can provide a really good engaging Instagram story. Now you don't have to take people through your whole day. You can just have a certain thing every single day, a topic that you stick to, for example, today, you won't see it because this was posted a while back. I recorded an Instagram story about the importance of patients. And now today I'm going to stick to that topic home, my story of talking about patients. So having that narrative, having that storytelling aspect keeps people engaged. Because if people are engaged with what I'm talking about, they're going to keep referring back to my story to learn a little bit more about it as I continue to post. So when you are creating a story, make sure you know what you're talking about. That way you can tell a great story and have a good narrative that people will want to continue to follow and engage with having people that are consistently engaged with your stories as well as perfect when it comes to hacking the algorithm. When it comes to stories, if you don't know how the algorithm works, watch social dilemma, but in very, very basic terms, or the algorithm wants to do is keep people on the platform. The longer it can keep people on the platform, the more ads it can show them, more ads it can show, the more you can charge it, It's advertisers. The more you can charge It's advertisers, the more money they make the premises, they want to keep people on the platform so they can show more ads. If your stories are engaging and people are watching them the whole way through from start to finish every single day. Instagram is going to push your stories to more of your followers. So if you want to increase your story view is you want to make sure that each of the stories you post are really engaging and they are having people watch them the whole way through. Because that tells the algorithm that people are enjoying your content, that it's keeping people on the platform and therefore they can make more money because if your content and people are staying on the platform because of it. So making sure you have a good story to tell and a great narrative is key. So before you even begin to create, make sure you know what you're going to talk about. 13. Stories: Layout: So in this module, we're actually going to begin creating our stories. We understand the importance, we understand the basics, the navigation, and we know that we need to have a great story to keep our audience engaged. So now that we know that, let's start creating. Now I'm going to dive into my phone again. I'm going to firstly running through some stories I created within the past 24 hours to give you an example of what I do, then I'm going to run you through how I actually created those stories. Now, I do want to say, I don't get overly technical and fancy with my stories, with my content, I educate. So with my stories, I don't want to take the attention away from the content itself with loads of fancy effects. So I try and keep it as basic but clean and on-brand as possible. So I'm gonna show you how I do just that. Let's dive into my phone. So if we tap on my story, Let's go through some of my stories here. So first one, this was me just promoting a new post I posted. This is one thing I do amongst a lot of other content. It's okay to post about your new post as long as it's not the only thing you are doing. You can see here, I'm literally just sharing the post. I've got exactly what it is and why people need to check it out. And the little squiggle to make it look a little bit more fantasy. Was that necessary? Probably not really, but adds a little bit more and it makes it look a little bit more professional in my opinion. You might disagree, but I like it. But you can see from the texts there, your hook is the most important aspect of your post. That's what the post about getting people in trade. They're like, okay, if I'm creating content, I really need this. And then here's the complete framework tells people why they need to check out and consequently they will. So we move to the next one. This is where I begin to get into the more educational part of my story. I record a video beforehand in my camera, import it to stories and edit it. That way. I like doing that because the camera quality on the back camera I find is much better when you're recording on the camera itself. You can change the for k, you name it, and then you can import onto story, history, or camera. So you can see here how basic my story creation actually is. If you see him really design driven and you name it, you can get really creative, you can do just that and I'll show you different ways you can do that. I just choose not to because I don't want to draw the attention away from the content itself. And that's me actually talking in educating. So you can see here, I've got the video in black and white off-center to the left. I've added captions. Captions are key. I cannot tell you how important having a caption on your Instagram story is. You need to remember that not everybody has their sound turned on. If somebody doesn't have their sound turned on, but you're talking in the video. Your video is essentially useless because they aren't getting any value from it because it's silent. So how do you counteract that? You make sure you add captions that mention what you were talking about. That way you can cater both for the audio listeners and the non audio listeners. And no matter which one they are, they still get the value that you are providing. So I encourage you if you're posting video, even if you're just talking, it doesn't even have to be educational. You might just be talking about your morning. Still add captions. The quickest way to add captions. Click on the text, click on the speech to text button in the bottom right the keyboard and talk the caption, because you listen to yourself talk, you just repeat it. Desi caption, done. Simplest app. You can see here, keep it slightly off centered again, up to the right, consistent with brown colors. Swipe through it a little bit of highlight. Again, I make it look a little bit more fancy, but keep it simple. Next story continues on for the previous ones, I'm still talking about the same thing. Prime mover over to the top right. To keep people engaged, keep people's eyes moving, encouraged to listen on. If you keep it in the same place every single time, it can get a little bit boring. In my opinion, you want to keep people engaged by drawing their focus to other points of the page and making sure that they are staying consistently engaged. So again, you've got the same thing here, post in the top right. Texts in the bottom highlights white through. Simple as that. Again, continue again with the left caption text. Highlights work through. And you can see here again, this is today no, same layout, different story. Posting, the top-left highlight through Caption button, like you can see here, how important consistency with your branding really is. If you're not being consistent, then people won't know when they are stumbling across your story in the story feed unless they are looking at the usernames in the top-left. You want people to know as soon as they stumble across your story that it's yours. How do you do that? You have a brand, you have brand colors. You have consistency with the way you create your content. Now when people are engaged with you, they trust you, they love your content when they stumble across your story because they know it's yours, they will engage with it, they will watch the whole thing. But if you're all over the place with your branding and your stories, people aren't going to realize that when they do stumble across your content, that it is actually yours. So that just goes to show how important consistency with your branding throughout your story actually is. Now, I know this is very basic my story design, but it works, it works for me and that's why I've continued to do it. Now I'm actually going to go into stories and show you how I created this piece of content. So head of stories now. And you can see that I'm going to import the video from the camera. So I'm going to click the bottom left-hand corner and upper part my camera roll with all my videos. I'm going to use this one here. This is this one I posted earlier. Show you again. Now I want to make it black and white. How do I do that? I swipe on the screen and that'll give me all the different filters. Now here's the black and white Tokyo. Then I want to make it smaller and off center it. So to make it smaller, you pinch it and then move it. Simple as that. Now because I have got my sound turned on. I don't exactly know what I'm saying, so I'm just going to use some example, text and forgettable. Hello, my name is Ethan. Thank you for joining my Skillshare class. Exclamation mark. Now, I use a gray background with yellow text for my text. So firstly, I want to make sure it's over to the right because that's how I sent to my text. So I use that top left one. And then to make my background color, I choose the selector and of my text, click the little a with the stars. There we have it. That is what I use. And then to actually change the color of my text, I highlight all of it. And then I'll go to the yellow. And then I'll click Done. Now I want to make that slightly smaller so it fits in at the top. So use the slider, use the guidelines up there. And there we have it. Now I know I've got a little bit of extra space there. So I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make the video a bit bigger to fill it up, but then I add the highlighted line. So I'm gonna go across to the gray, make that a bit fatter, swipe across. And there's my story. Now I have to do the same for every single one because it's going to break it up into four parts because stories that limited to 15 seconds sections. So I'll go to the next one. Do the same. Tokyo, make it smaller, different area of the screen, same text, same design. But it's as simple as that as for creating more stories. Now you can make your stories a little bit more fancy to emphasize design skills. Now, something that I would possibly do is head over to the sticker tab, type in square or type in, let's use corner. Use corner is an example. We can select this corner one here. We can put it in the corner of our post, just like that. And although it's only very minimal, it makes it look a little bit more fancy. Again, you might want to add something down the side here so we can go into stickers and we can go dots and find something that goes quite well with our feed. This works perfectly. I actually will use that and we'll just put that down there like that. But you can see now that I've got quite a lot going on on the screen. That corner one was just fine because it's very minimal, but I've now got those dots and all that. It looks good. It's kinda drawing the attention away from the content itself, which is actually me speaking. And that's why I like to keep it as minimal as possible. But if you want to get creative, do just that. This is a perfect example. It looks quite nice, looks very professional, opposed to me holding up the camera and just speaking into it and then leaving it just does that and adding a caption. I like to get a little bit more creative. Show my design skills in some way to make it more engaging. Now, you can experiment as much as you possibly want when it comes to designing your stories. There are so many different stickers. You can use so many different filters, you name it. And you can make some incredibly stunning Instagram stories. But I completely understand some of you may be thinking, I'm not very creative. I didn't think I can do something like that. Even though you, some people make it look so easy and they get really fancy, I don't know how to do that. I'm not very creative, so I want to make it a little bit easier. You're in luck. Because in the next couple of modules, I'm going to go through a few of my favorite apps that allow you to create really, really professional Instagram stories. With these. Let's go into the next module and talk about a few of those apps. 14. Stories: App 1 - Inshot: So the first step I want to talk about is an app called in shot. Now, this is essentially a Premier Pro on your phone. It's very basic, nowhere near as advanced as Premier Pro, but what you expect for a free app and something that you can just grab on your phone and edit on the go. I primarily use it however, to get the right dimensions for when I'm posting certain pieces of content, specifically Instagram stories, because sometimes you may shoot something in landscape, but want to post it as a portrait story. Or you may shoot something in square and what's compress it and put it in as the correct size for Instagram stories. Ensure allows you to do just that with their dimensions feature or show you some other features it has, but that is what I primarily use it for. So again, let's dive into my phone and I'll walk you through the app. So if I head over to the little app, so I'm gonna show you through today. These are the three apps I'm going to talk through. But in short, the logo for this, if you're looking on the app store, looks just like this. So if we open up the app, you can see here, you are greeted to whether you want to create a video, photo, or collage. Now for this purpose, I'm going to use video. So again, New and we'll select the video I was looking at last time. So this one here. Now once you've imported the video, again, you're greeted with this screen. So the very first button is the one I used this platform for the most and it's Canvas. Canvas is going to be able to rescale your video to the size you want it to. So you have one by one, which is obviously the classic square for Instagram. Four by five, which is the salaries you should be posting on Instagram because it takes up the most real estate. And then you have of the YouTube and all the other things. But the one for Instagram Stories is 9 by 16, but it's also shown on this app as the Tiktok one. You can see here that it compresses into the Instagram story format. Now this is a slightly poor example because this video was already in the correct format for stories, but you can see how it would compress it if it were to be a video show in landscape or square. So that is what I primarily use this app for. But if you want to actually use it in a little bit more detail as a video editing app. You can. So we'll click the tick there. And Firstly you can see, you can add music, so you can import music, you can look at different tracks. It will come up with different tracking import from iTunes, you name it. You can import music. Next, you can add different stickers. You can add gifts. You name it. There's loads of different things you can go through. I'm not gonna go through the more books it would take forever. So download the app and explore for yourself. You can add loads a different stickers on. Next you got text. This is another good one. If you want to add captions, you may not necessarily like the texts they have on offer in Instagram, so you can add your text on in short and go from there. This is the free version. I must stress all of these three apps I'm going to show you are free. They have paid versions, but I'm gonna show you the free options so that they are accessible to all no matter if you want to pay for them or not. So again, filter, you can adjust wherever you want it to be. More contrast edge, you can adjust the brightness. Basically you can color correct it the way you exactly want it to be. And then finally, you've just got all the classic things such as your crop, your flip regime, or burst, your split, which is one I really like if you want to actually go through and split different things and other things in place. This is why I added the comparison to Premiere Pro because you can actually go into much more detail with your video editing and you can pre-cut things and you name it, you can get really, really technical with this app. But as I did say, I primarily use this app for the dimension purposes. If I shoot something in landscape, I wanted to be in the story format. I go on to ensure I go on two dimensions. Use the dimensions tab to re-size it and then I save it. So it's perfectly formatted for Instagram stories. So download in short, haven't experiment is a really quite powerful video editing app. As far as iphone video editing apps go. So if you want to use it for a bit more detail, wants to make your stories a little bit more professional and add some pop-ups and things like that coming in at certain times of the video. You can do just that with info. So download the app, have an experiment, but that is app number one. 15. Stories: App 2 - Unfold: Now app number two I want to talk about is an app called unfold. If you look in the App Store, the middle one unfold is what it looks like. So if we open up on fold, this is essentially an app where you are given a bunch of different story templates to use if you want very creative and you want an app to get you good results of the get-go download unfold. You will not be disappointed, I promised. But if we go through to the app, you can see here, you click Add. You can create your first story. So I'm just going to call it Hello, exclamation mark, create story. And now it pop up with this page here. And if you click on the Plus sign up will pop an enormous amount of templates. If we look at Classico, scrapbook, plastic, mood board, you can just see how many different templates there are to use. So you can just go through the whole app essentially, and all your stories will look incredibly professional. It's a no brainer. If you don't have a creative mind or you don't think you have a creative when everyone has a creative mind, the more you experiment, the better you get at things. But if you want to be assured that you're going to have a professional-looking story download unfold because it's got a ton of these different apps for you to use. This is, again, free, has a paid option where you can get more templates, but there are a ton of free templates you can use. So let's just look at this one for example. We can see here up pops our template. Now we can select the image or video. We want to go within that template. I'm going to click this one here, for example, can resize it however we wish, and then edit the text. However we wish. We save that. And we have a really, really professional-looking story with minimal wether. I had to put no effort into the design of this because it was already done for me. So if you want to have really, really professional-looking stories, download, unfold, no thought process goes into the creation, but it still looks professional. I've been using unfold for very, very long time now and I get people come to me and go, how on earth do you make your stories look so professional? Your design skills are incredible. When I go, I'm going to let you into a little secret here. I use an app, couldn't vote. None of those designs are mine. I use templates, but they clearly work because you think they look incredibly professional and that's what I wanted. So I'm glad you really like them if you want to create similar ones, download on phone and they go, Okay, I'm definitely gonna download unfold because I want my stories look awesome too. So if you want to create awesome professional-looking stories with minimal effort through templates, download, unfold. Brilliant app at number 2. Make sure you get it. 16. Stories: App 3 - Mojo: Now at number three, and this is the final Apple going to talk about in today's Skillshare class and his mojo. Now, mojo is another template app you noticed in unfold all of the templates, we're still, they didn't move around. You just imported your video and photo and it changed texts, you name, it just made it look fancy. But mojo is an animated Story App. So they'll move around and grab attention and make it look really interesting because it's not just still. So let's open it up. So if I open up my job, you'll be greeted with a screen here. Again, it's free. There's a pro version. With the pro version, you get more templates, simple as that. You can see here, we scroll down. There are a good amount of free templates for you to use. So for example, let's use this showcase template here. Let's have this post again. So we can change the text to new post available on all platforms. Bam, that animated. That looks so much more interesting than if I were to put new post on top of a screenshot from the Instagram itself. Now it's grabbing attention because it's standing there and it's people looking at it and go, Oh wow, that's actually quite cool. That's interesting. I'm going to go and check that out. Animation can bring a lot to your Instagram story creation. Our mojo has so many different templates that you can use to do just that. There are ones where you can, if you have a carousel, your whole carousel, because it lets you select multiple images to import. And then it will show like an example of a slide across a show people through every single slide. And it will have other slides common in slide and in left, right and center. You name it. There's loads of different templates that you can use to make your stories or mojo and make the animations that really, really interesting. So if you're a bit bored of those still templates that don't really do much and there's only just text, but it makes it look really nice. Download mojo, because then you can begin to create animated templates which add that extra substance and engagement through your stories. Now I could spend all day going through the different templates and given you examples of how you can generate them. But kind of defeats the objective of you need to experiment yourself and work out what works best for you. So download the app and find out what works best and just go with that, go with the flow, find something you like, and continue to run with it. Download my joy. That was app number three. And they are the three apps that you need to download to up your Instagram story game. 17. Stories: Stickers: Now this Skillshare course is coming to an end. But the final thing I wanted to talk to you about is utilizing four different stickers within your stories to encourage engagement and make people interact with you a little bit more. Because at the moment we are only really creating stories that people were consuming. It's all are doing. They're not interacting with them. They can't do anything with them. But if you utilize these for stickers to I mentioning, this will increase the likelihood of viewer engagement, which in turn makes it a bit more interesting for them. They don't want to just sit there and scroll and listen to you all the time. Sometimes they want to interact and these four stickers allow them to do just that. So we have the post occur, we have the question sticker, we have the DM mistake, and we have the quiz sticker. I will leave a little bit of a recording coming up here, just which walks you through a few of them very basically, but I'm going to tell you how you can utilize each of those stickers to their full potential. So the post occur, the post Decker allows you to ask a question or a statement and then gives you two different options which you can change starts off with yes and no, but you can type in whatever you want. Now, this is really good if you want to decipher between two different things, obviously, because you have those two different options. But for example, you can have a pole where you ask which content do you like CVE more for me, video or single image? Now, depending on the results, you can then adjust your content creation strategy accordingly. Let's say more people say video. They clearly like you posting video content. So you should post more of it. I know we're only has two options for them to choose from. But if you ask the right questions and you are wise about the two different options you give your audience to select from. You can really find out quite a lot about the question you are asking. So be specific with your questions and be specific with the responses you offer. So Paul is the first one. The next one you can use is the question. Now, the question sticker is perfect for setting up a Q&A. You can have a question sticker that says, asked me anything. Now when this question sticker shows up on one of your followers feeds, you'll come up with a little response box. You would have seen it in the little walk-through. But that just allows your follower to pretty much respond with anything. So let's say, you've said Ask me anything. They might use that as an opportunity to get to know you a little bit more. Or let's say you are in a certain niche, I'm in social media marketing. They'll give them the opportunity to ask a question about social media marketing. Now these are giving you not only content ideas, but you can respond using the questions that they ask in your stories. They have it, they have a story series for that day. So you could use that questions to get a Q and a. And you can also use it to accumulate content ideas and put up a question saying, what content you want to see from me, or what are you struggling with? Question mark. They can respond with whatever they want. Those responses, they have their content ideas for your main feed. Use the questions they're going to set up a Q and a, or find out more about what your audience wants to see. Learn a little bit more about their struggles, so then you can cater your content going forward accordingly. Next, we have the DME sticker. It has never been easier to get someone to the DMs on Instagram, especially with stories, weave stories, you can use the damn mistake as soon as they tap on it, it will take them to the DM. They can send you a message. They can also swipe up and react. So with stories, I have to do to send you a DM is one step. I say I can swipe up or tap that, dear Mr. Rucker. It's not like they have to go to your profile, click on the message, then type out the message just once. Why? Purple, one tap and they're there. So if you want to get people into the DMZ, That's how you do it. And the reason I'm saying you need to use this one is because the DMZ or where you build that relationship. If you want to sell anything on Instagram, you have to build a relationship with your audience. With that relationship comes trust and you can't sell anything without trust. But to build that trust, you have to get to know your audience, know more personal level, and that means talking to them in the DMZ, you can't expect to build that relationship. If you just post content and respond to comments, doesn't work like that. You have to show the time of day, you have to reach out to them in the DMZ, you have to be concerned about them, ask them about them. They are following you. And if, imagine if your favorite content creator reached out to you and started wanting to know a little bit more about you as an individual rather than them asking you a lot of questions, you'll be okay, this person's really, really consider. And in turn that builds that trust. And once that trust is built, you can sell them something is simple as that. So if you want to sell something, you need to build that relationship. You need to build that trust. How do you do that? You get them in the DMZ. How do you get them in the DMZ? You post stories that they can either swipe up and he is the DM sticker so that they can just tap that. And DMU done damn sticker. Make sure you use it is perfect for building that relationship with your audience. Now finally, we have the quiz sticker. Now, I personally use this as an alternative to the poll sticker when I have more than two options that I want my audience to choose from. And so with the postdoc or we hired me, had two different options. With the quiz sticker. We can have more than that. We have three, we can have for you name it. You can ask question in a four different options and then they can select accordingly. Now because is put together as a quiz, it will show there being one right answer and the recipe in Rome. But if you're using it as an alternative to a poll, just let your audience know there's no right or wrong answer. You just wanting more options to choose from. And you can do it that way. Or you can test your audience and actually use it like a quiz. If you want to find out the level of knowledge within your follower base asked quite a complicated question. You can also easier questions about a certain topic and they can answer accordingly depending on what they think. From that, you'll be able to gauge the knowledge of your audience. Then you can tailor your content accordingly because you might be making some really, really complicated content on your feet at the moment. But your audience may only understand the very basic terms. So that complicated content you are creating for them has no real relevance because they don't know what you're talking about. But if you use quizzes, you are able to gauge what level they are out with regards to their knowledge on that niche. So you can then go and create your content accordingly. So all of these different stickers are making your audience engage with you more. It makes it a bit more interesting for them on your stories. But ultimately, you gathering data, you get to find out so much information if you use the stickers to their full potential. But at the same time your audience enjoys the process because it allows them to engage. So it's a win-win in both situations. So make sure you are utilizing those four different stickers. Not just posting stories where he dictate and educate the whole time. People do want to get involved. They want to get to know, use and use that DMZ Decker. They want to have some input into the content you produce it. They make sure that they are consistently learning what they want to learn. Use the pole and the quiz for that. Make sure you are using those stickers and your Instagram stories are going to improve dramatically. 18. Hosting Instagram Lives: Recently I've been hopping on lives more and more often. They are a fantastic way to engage with your audience on a more personal level. Because again, it's live. People can see you and talk to you, live in the moment, and people appreciate that. So going live every now and again is a great way to connect with the audience that you've already built. But going live is daunting, especially if you haven't done one before or know how to host the best live. So today, that's exactly what I'm going to teach you. I'm going to teach you everything you need to be doing on that Instagram live you are hosting. So without any further ado, let's just head straight into the first tip. And that is as soon as you start your life or before you start your life, you need to be titling your life accordingly. What are people going to be learning in that live you are hosting. You shouldn't be hopping onto a live, talking about anything and everything. You need to have an idea of what you're going to do whilst you are going live at that period. So having a topic that you are going to talk about, or it could just be a Q and a to be fair, you could just title it questions and answers or Q&A 15 minute Q and a. But I would go into a live knowing exactly what you're going to talk about. Some of the lives I have joined that have been incredibly unstructured and no plan behind them. They are very attention-grabbing. They don't retain why attention either. By prefer the lives that are structured have a plan and the host knows exactly what they're going to be talking about. And it just has that consistent structure to it. They may have a topic that they're going to talk about for 15 minutes and then have another 15 minutes where people can ask questions that the host then answers. Having that structure and know what you're going to talk about is key. So go into your live, knowing what you're going to talk about. Title the live accordingly. That way, when people join that live, they know exactly what you're talking about and they don't have to guess for five to 10 minutes whilst they taking everything you're saying. So title your life accordingly. Step number 1. When you join that live, post a comment and pin it and make that comment instructions of what people need to do if they are joining your life. For example, it may be a Q and a. So what you're going to do is you're going to pin a comment saying, comment your questions in the question box below, or we are talking about XYZ. Leave your comments or common in the live feed. Giving people instructions of what they need to do is key because remember, not everyone is going to join the live as soon as it starts. So these people that join ten minutes in, 15 minutes in, they need to know what they need to do if they want to have their question answered or if they went to know what you're talking about, or if there's anything that they need to be doing to interact with the other audience members. So having that pinned comment on your live makes these people aware of the instructions they need to be following. So pin that comment straight away so that you don't necessarily have to keep repeating yourself, but I'm going to talk about that a little bit later. Tip number three, you need to be interacting with your audience. This is the good thing about lives. It allows you to interact with your audience in real time, which is what makes them so effective at relationship building. So if you aren't consistently responding to comments, to discussions in the chat, to questions that are being asked, then I don't personally believe you are doing a good job as a host. Yes. You may have a set period. You say to your audience, right? I'm going to be talking right now for ten minutes about XYZ. I'm not going to be looking at the discussions because I want to give you the best possible explanation of what I'm talking about. So please save any questions for after. But if you're gonna do that, make your audience aware because you don't want to come across as rude. If you're talking about something, lots of people are asking questions and you're simply ignoring them. You want to be as professional and as approachable as possible. So if you aren't going to be responding to comments or questions, make sure you tell them and tell them when they can answer questions or comments. Being interrupted, constantly checking that comments feed, constantly making sure that you haven't got any questions or that you've answered all the questions is key when you're hosting a live, because this is what it's all about. You are interacting with your audience in real time. So you need to be making the most of that function. Keep an eye on the chat, keep an eye on the questions, and make sure that you have that conversation flowing with those who are watching. A great way to do things. For example, if you are doing a Q&A rather than just having people comment in the question box, you can now invite up to three others to speak in the live with you. So you could just have people pop in and out. To answer their questions, that makes the life, in my opinion a bit more exciting. Getting people to hop in and ask their question rather than just them commented it in text because I felt as if when people ask a lot of questions, they aren't getting the entire point across. And that means that the host doesn't answer the question in the most effective way possible. But getting that person to come into the live on camera as well and allows them to explain their question in greater detail. So as a host, you can answer it in the most effective way. But to round up the point, just make sure that you were always check in that feed, making sure you've got those questions in that you're actually interacting with your audience. There's no point in going live and not interacting with them. You may as well have just recorded what you're going to talk about as a video and posted it that way. The whole point in the live is that you are interacting with your audience in real time. So make sure that you are doing it. Now, the next thing I want to talk about and it closely relates to that pinned comment that I was talking about. But you do also need to be reminding people of your court actions. There may be a reason that you are doing your live in the first place. It might be a new product launch. And you might be giving out a discount code, for example. But to get that discount code, people have to visit your profile and do certain steps or send you a DM asking for it. So you may be talking about your product or service. And again, you need to remember that not everyone is going to be there from the very beginning. So if you've given people instructions, they may not have heard those instructions. So making sure that you are repeating these instructions, resetting the live, making people aware of what they need to be doing to get certain things that you may be highlighting is C0. O guys, for anyone that is new here, I just wanted to mention bloody, bloody blah. Makes those that have joined recently who weren't there at the beginning aware of what you're talking about, what they need to do, call to actions. Whether you've got a new podcast episode out wherever they need to subscribe to your YouTube channel, join your Facebook group. Any of these different things please make these individuals are whereby consistently repeating your call to actions. Now I don't mean you need to do it after every 30 seconds or after every minute, every five to ten minutes, depending on how long the life is, reset it make people wherever those call to actions, refer them to that pin comment. Tell them they may need to just be asking questions in the question box rather than leaving them in the feed because you may not see them. You want people to always be aware of what they need to be doing on your life. Tell them. You cannot just expect people to know out of thin air what they need to be doing. Make them aware, reset that live consistently make them aware of your call to actions every five to ten minutes. Now there's one more thing that I do want to talk about. And I completely understand that going live can be very, very daunting, especially if you're on your own. You may be camera shy. You may not feel confident enough to talk and answer questions on the spot. It does take a lot of practice. By all means I've Recorded this is episode 136 of the podcast. Do you think I was able to sit down and consistently talk about a topic for 15 to 20 minutes? Well, when I first started, no. It was the first time I'd ever really recorded a solo podcast episode or a video. It takes a lot of practice to get used to these things. So I understand that going live for the first time or maybe even the first 10, 15 times can be daunting. Being able to answer questions on the spot effectively is difficult. So the final thing that I do want to talk about is invite guests. If you're not confident to host a live session on your own. Thankfully, instagram gives you the opportunity to invite up to three other people to your life. You can have an effective live session, if not more effective, of a live session with more people, it sets U 0s because it's not just you having to answer the question or keep a conversation going. You've got someone else. There are multiple other people there to hold you up to keep you accountable, to chime in when they need to, to answer the questions more effectively, people may ask questions on your speciality, but this person that you've invited to your life may be more of an expert on that topic than you are. So that question may be more suitable for them to answer. So you're actually giving your audience your view as a better service because you're able to answer their questions and interact with them at a higher level than if it would just you by yourself. That is obviously gets better and better and better the more people you have and the better experts that you have. So utilize the fact that you do not have to go live on your own, especially if you aren't comfortable doing so because you should be going live, in my opinion, you should be interacting with your audience in real time. Going live is essential when it comes to your Instagram strategy. But if you ask, it does get someone to do it with you, it will settle your nerves because they're probably going to be nervous as well. But having someone else there has always felt more comfortable even though I am comfortable talking solo. I still like having someone there because if people aren't asking questions or if people aren't interacting, if your view counts low, all of a sudden, you can still have a discussion with this other guest or guests. It gives you, it opens up the other avenue for discussion and makes your life much more enjoyable. 19. The Best Tools For Content Creation: The tools I use to create my content on Instagram from start to finish. So from the idea generation all the way through to actually posting and analyzing my content so that I can improve on it in the future. So I will give both paid and free options. So if you guys do have a budget to invest and you want to invest in some paid tools. Great. Because a lot of the tools I use are paid, but I will make sure that I do give free alternatives where they are possible and where I feel as if they are worth the free versions opposed to the paid ones. Because at the end of the day you do get what you pay for. If you pay for a product most of the time, it is going to be better than that of a free product. But for example here, content creation products, Canva is phenomenal and you can use Canva for free. You don't necessarily need Photoshop or Illustrator, but I'll get into that later on, but that's just a quick example. So without any further ado, let's just dive straight into where I generate my content ideas, the tools I use. Number one, core, core is a Q and a platform whereby you can search for specific topics and then sort by questions. So then pretty much the questions that are being asked become your content topics and the answer to those questions become your content copy. Question equals headline on answer equals the bulk of the post. Pretty simple. So just go onto Quora, search your niche, for example, one would be social media marketing. Sort the results by questions. And then every single question related to social media marketing is going to come up. Every single question asked. I know is a targeted content to my specific audience because I know it is related to social media marketing. And because I know lots of people are asking these questions, I know that it is a common problem that people need solving. And therefore, a piece of content related to that question is going to perform relatively well over on Instagram. Now, I do also love to use other social media platforms for content ideas. So for example, Instagram rows, you can find some phenomenal content ideas for rails on tiktok is exactly the same content format. But content on tiktok is, in my opinion, are much higher quality at the moment because the app has been around for far longer. So people have established what works well and what doesn't wear. A lot of people who are still experimenting with rails at the moment. And a fill is if the barrier to entry is still relatively low because the quality of content on embryos in comparison to Tiktok is very low. So do some research on tiktok for your Instagram, real ideas, for other carousels to have a look on LinkedIn, have a look on Facebook. You can find so many content ideas on other social media platforms that you can then adapt to your audience keyword being adapt, please don't just copy. Don't copy. People will realize people will catch on. Just take inspiration from these other pieces of content and adapt them to your niche, your style, and your messaging. Another website that I actually like to use for content ideas is answered the public.com head over here. Trust me, it is incredibly, incredibly helpful. It's more or less just a Google search. So it will come up with this search bar. You can type in your niche social media marketing, for example, click Search and then up will pop. So many content ideas is unreal. How many potential headlines it comes up with? And this is just in a matter of seconds by typing in a single keyword. So you can do this for multiple keywords, relate to your niche. And then it's going to populate a bunch of headlines, a bunch of questions, a bunch of house. What's 2x's, when's, where's all of these different question examples and headline examples so that you can instantly just pick out a few and create content on them. It's that simple. And another very obvious one. I know this isn't a tool specifically or these content generation ideas other than a quarter and onto the public on tools is down to your own intuition, is just looking at other Instagram creators taking inspiration. What is working well for other creators within your niche? How can you take the best performing pieces of content and innovate upon them and improve them. You don't have to reinvent the wheel, find out what's working well. Take that as inspiration, innovate, make it better, make it yours. And then you can go on from there. And then finally, my favorite one is just own experiences. Not a tall at all, but I just thought I'd want to add it in at the end here. Your own experiences, they are unique to you. They are very applicable to others because if you've been through a problem and you've overcome, it's likely that other people will come to that problem or are currently going through that problem. And therefore your piece of content solving that problem will be very helpful to them. But that rounds up pretty much where I get all of my content ideas from. So now I've got all my ideas. I need to plan content and I plan my content into different places. I either do it in a markers of Word document or just on the notes section of my phone. I've got the idea we're ready because I've got that, So that's my headline done. Now I need to write the copy. So in the Word document or the notes, when I'm creating carousels, I will write down bullet points for one to eight because my content fills up eight slides. Eight slides because the first one is actually the headline cover and the final slide is my call to action copy. So you get 10 slides of the carousel, but two of them are taken up by the headline and the call to action. So that leaves you with eight slides for your piece of content. And then I will just write out line by line my copy for my text. But we use different structures. Back to a previous episode of accorded about structuring your carousels. And then you will work out from that how I actually start to my parents house and knew how you can do so as well to make sure that it flows nicely and has some aspect of storytelling to it because that's gonna keep people engaged. But I use Microsoft Word, which is a paid tool, but you could also use notes as well, which is completely free. I'm not sure what the Android version is of notes, but I know on iPhone is very good because you may write in your notes on your phone, the slides, and then you can, if you've got a MacBook as well, just head over to your MacBook and then the notes that you've made on your phone actually go through to your MacBooks and then it's just a case of heading over to note copy and pasting. As such, when we go into the design stage. Now, for the design with my content, I personally use Adobe Illustrator. Yes, this is a paid tool, but it is incredibly, incredibly powerful, very complicated to begin with. Don't get me wrong. But as soon as you begin to get the hang of it and understand what you need to know to create a good post, you can really, really make this content creation process seamless and very quite efficient. I can create a week's worth of content in three to four hours. By doing this content creation process I'm talking through right now and using these tools because I will have my template set up. And then I will simply copy and paste my text copy that I've just written, either in notes or Word straight into my templates I've already pre-made in Adobe Illustrator, but you could do the same with Canva. You can have Canva templates already set up so that you can just simply copy and paste the texts that you've written for the copy straight into the templates. So pick either one of those two. In my opinion, if you don't wanna use Canva, I personally started using Keynote, Apple's version of PowerPoint, but it's already pre-installed on max where it costs absolutely nothing as well. And believe it or not, if you actually look into PowerPoint and you find out all of the different tools that you can actually utilize, and especially on Kino as well, is really quite powerful. People don't realize some of the stuff that you can actually do on the platform. So when you properly learn it and find out all of these little tips and tricks you can actually do. You can create phenomenal, phenomenal content. You may have heard of a creator, quote Dave towers. All of his carousels are created on Keynote. But if you look at them, the quality looks like they've been created in Photoshop or Illustrator. It's quite incredible and fair play to him that he's been able to use a free platform and really work out how to get the most out of it to create the quality of content he does. And he's got well over a 100 thousand followers and incredibly, incredibly engaged community. So he's definitely someone that you should check out for content creation, ideas, inspiration, or just if you want to learn Instagram growth and the content topics he talks about is adapted over time. So I'm not sure exactly what he's talking about now, but he's an incredible creator to consume content from. But it just goes to show that you don't need Photoshop or Illustrator to create your content. You can simply do it in Keynote or Canva and have equally high-quality content that we're still perform incredibly, incredibly well. So we've got our ideas now. We've written our content copy, we've copied and pasted our text into our templates or however you may want to create your post is good to have some imagery. Now, if you look at my content, I actually, on every single cover slide, make sure I have some visuals. I just feel as if on a headline slide. This is really, really going to help grab that attention. Having a complementing image to the headline that you have chosen really just helps draw that attention in a makes people want to continue reading. It can really compliment well and get people excited for something that they're about to learn. But now you might be thinking, I don't want to pay for images and I don't want to be copyright striked and have my content taken down. There are two websites you can use for phenomenal images that are copyright free. One being Pexels and the other beam free pick. I use both of them and they are brilliant. So just head over there, completely free. There are pitches for pretty much anything, thousands upon hundreds of thousands, millions of images uploaded to these websites. So if you are looking for a certain image, you will be able to find one on either Paxos or free pig if you're looking for icons, another one as well is Icon Finder. Just simply Google it, search for a type of icon you want. Click Download. You can choose what size you want it. You can choose what color you want to, and then just simply import it into your design. It's not difficult. You don't have to over-complicate these things and you can still achieve remarkable, remarkable results. I did also want to touch quickly on video because you will see if you go onto my page. So I do actually create some video content. And some of you might be thinking, Oh, what tools to use to create your video content. So I'll quickly run through these. For the editing process, I will record obviously the audio and video audio separate video audio be recorded on Audacity through a professional microphone and Blue Yeti. Record the video separately on my Canon camera, or will then take the two. Into Premiere Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro synchronize the video with the audio so that it matches up so that I then have high quality sound matched up with the video that has been recorded on my camera. Are we then add backgrounds in, but this is all done within Premiere Pro. For the background music, I use a paid website, assigned it to a subscription on a paid website called Epidemic. Sound is 10 pounds a month, but you get access to millions of songs, millions of royalty-free music that are not charged, music, not music that you're hearing by Dre or whatever music artist you may listen to. They are individually submitted by artists onto the platform. So you can also find sound effects on there as well. But the library of audio on Epidemic Sounds is phenomenal. So if you're looking for that royalty free music, I strongly, strongly suggest you do sign up to Epidemic Sound and that way you will never run out of royalty-free music. But they are, the tools are used for video editing, Premiere Pro epidemic sounds. And then I will just take in separate images and stuff from free pair complex. It was just to spice it up and make it a little bit more fancy and interesting. So now we've created the content, but it's really, really important to make sure that you're analyzing your content so that you can adapt, improve, innovate, make it better so that you are continually improving your content marketing strategy. Now, for analyzing analytics, I use the app ninja lipsticks completely free on the App Store. And it is brilliant. You can search by any account. To be honest, you can search up anyone's account and look into their analytics. But I would strongly suggest that you download it and make sure that you start tracking your own accounts. It tracks your engagement rate. It tracks your average comments or average likes. It tracks your follower growth, pretty much everything even tracks what hashtags you've used recently in the rankings of your post over a certain period of time. So that you can look and you can compare and make sure that you can then pick out which posts perform well, which ones didn't perform so well, so that you can take that and make sure you are always, always, always improving and it's free. And obviously the other simple one to use as your Instagram insights. But to be honest, I find that the ninja lipsticks analytics are far, far more interesting and easier to read as a much more user-friendly layout for you to actually look at it. So download and analytics and have a look at your analytics over there. But that rounds up pretty much all of the tools that I use for creating content on Instagram. It's not that complicated. I don't use any post schedulers. I don't use any hashtag analytics tools. None of that. I just use that very simple, basic, common apps that most people can use or that are accessible to everybody. Content idea generation, completely free, paid apps. Yes, I use Premiere Pro and I use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to edit some images, but they are the only paid hours that I would recommend. You don't need anything else, you don't even need them. Use Canva, use Keynote, use PowerPoint. You don't have to over-complicate things. That's all I'm saying. 20. Writing Instagram captions: Captions, Instagram captions because some people love them. When you read the captions, it's almost like an essay. It's just packed the low-value and they're great. But then again, some people hate them and they will just simply put an emoji or a song lyric. Today, I want to teach you how to write the perfect Instagram captions so that your audience begin reading them, loving them. I'm wanting to learn more so without any further ado, let's just dive straight into some tips. Tip number 1. People always ask me, how long should my caption be? Should it be? Should it be long? Because I'm seeing all of these different people and they have various different caption strategies. In my opinion, go long, it's there, you've got the character count. Use it to your advantage. You've got to remember the people who actually read your captions are the ones that will be the most interested in your content. Let's say you create carousels like me, for example, value-based posts that people have read through 10 slides. Not many people are going to want to go and read that capture. But those that do are expecting good things from that caption because I have just consumed a value-based post that took them 10 slides to read through. So you've got to deliver for these people. It doesn't matter if people don't read it. What you're doing is you're providing this fervor value for those that actually do. So, don't just have an emoji. They use it to your advantage. To tell a story, to tell people how it applied to you. Go long. You've got the character count there to do that. So in my opinion, you need to. But the second tip, I do want to swiftly move onto compliments this first. Sure. Have a long caption. It will work great. But this caption has to complement the post that you have just made from consume. It baffles me when I consume a piece of content, going read the caption, and there's no relation between that caption and the post I've just read confuses me. And they're almost stops me read in that caption because it makes no sense. So your caption must complement. Well, these people have just consumed in the post itself. For example, when I create a value-based post, what I'd like to do in my caption is say how it's applied to me in the past, relate it to something. So people can then get that emotional connection or understand the context in which this value needs to be used. Or it could even be an extension from what you have already written. But the thing you need to avoid is repeating yourself. People have just read your post. If you're talking about Instagram growth and you've mentioned that they need to engage a lot. You don't even need to tell them again in the caption that they need to engage again. Instead, what you could do is provide them with an applicable engagement strategy. Because it leaves them wanting more. And this solves another problem. If you've told them in your post that engagement is the key solution to growth, then that leaves them on a bit of a cliffhanger. They think in Kuwait know that I need to engage, but how do I do that? What's the best strategy? How should I be engaging? Who should I be engaging with? Use your cat Michigan to solve that problem. So now you'll post has not only become enlightening in the fact that you've told them they need to engage, but you've also solve their problem on how they actually engage. But that wouldn't have been possible if you hadn't used the caption to your advantage to do so. So the captions that you are arising, please make sure they complement what you have written. Add further value. Tell a story, make it relatable, add some context, whatever you wanna do, just make sure it relates back and write something that people actually want to read. But don't repeat what you've just written in your post. So the next thing we wanna talk about, if we're writing long captions. If we're writing multiple sentences, we don't want this to just be one big block of text. The human mind is going to look at that and go, I don't want to forget that. I can't be awesome to read what looks like a chapter from a Harry Potter novel. Instead, you want to break it up and make it look as easy as possible to read. So what do I love to do is I actually use an app called flocked. It helps you wrote your captions and it formats to them in a way that when you copy and paste it, the caption will appear exactly as it does on my app. Because I know that on Instagram some people have some trouble where you may hit Return and it goes down a couple of lines, but when you actually post it, it doesn't have that same formatting. So you've just spent all this time writing your caption. To post it. And then it look all our form, which is very frustrating because it takes time and then you have to go in and you have to edit it again. But this app called flocked. Once you go onto it, whatever way you see it on the app when you copy and paste it, that's how it appears on your Instagram caption. So what I love to do is I'd love to go into this app. Now when I'm writing out, after every full stop, I will have a line break. So it breaks it up very, very nicely. So there's no long paragraph looking text. It's simple, it's broken up. Easy to read. And when you've just got one sentence broken up every single time, it's much easier for someone to look at that and go easier to read. There's not as much texts that because even though you've got the same amount of text, just because it's not bunched up into one big paragraph. People look at that and go on. There's not much, there's not as much sex there. When in reality there's exactly the same. But because you've formatted it in a better way, it's easier to consume. So if you're writing long captions, break it up every full stop out a line break. Just easier to read and you'll actually get more people to read in the first place. Now the final thing that I want to mention, and it relates back to a point I made earlier because I said that those that read your caption, the most interested in your content out of anyone else. Because if consumed everything within the post itself and then they've gone on and consumed even more within the caption because I sold a value in the post you provided. So these people were primed. So you need to have a call to action at the end of your caption. Give these people were next step. Send them in the direction you want to send them, because they will most likely do so because you have just provided them with all this valley, you may have solved a problem, provided a solution to something that they've been looking for, for a well that could potentially revolutionize their business. If you create content like mine, of course. However, if you don't, then tell them where they need to go next, they're just gonna go on to the next post in their feet. And we don't want that. We want to retain the attention and have a call to action, send them to your website, get them to book in a cool, direct them to another social platform you may use. For example, I sometimes send people to the podcast, them into my Facebook group. You name it, but make sure that there is a call to action there for those that want to take that next step. And another example of something that I do quite often at the end of some of the carousels I create, I ask my audience a question and then a simple call to action of your thoughts below. Now, if these people read my post, see that comment below, cool to action. But then they read my caption. It's likely that by the time they get to the end of my caption, they would have forgot the question that I asked them in the post. So I like to do is repeat that question again at the bottom of my caption to remind people of the question I was asking. And again mentioned that same call to action. So it refreshes and sends them to the comment section. Now that could be the same with anything you do at the end on the final slideshow carousel, you may send them to your Facebook group. Make sure you repeat that call to action at the end of your caption for those that read it so that they own reminded of what they need to do. But use that caption. Use it as a chance to direct people to that next step and have that call to action that does just that. Now you might be thinking, Oh, this is a lot of text, this is a lot of writing. Well, if you get to that call to action point, you can break it up. What I'd like to do is just have a few dashes which breaks up the caption itself from the call to action. And then I have a few more dashes, and then I have my hashtags. So it just separates everything so that people can read each part and understand what each part is in more detail and more clearly. So break it up, make it look as neat as possible. Use the app flocked to help you format that caption exactly the way you want it so that when you post it appears in exactly the same way. That wraps up my caption tips. So number 1, we had go long rolling as much as you want to write, getting all of your chest because those that read it will number to make sure that the caption you write actually compliments the post. But don't repeat what the piece of content has just said. Number 3, Volume breaks. We don't want one big paragraph of text. We want something that's easy to read, something that is going to entice people to read in the first place because they're going to look at it and go about it simple or read that now rather than vassal of the text, I don't want to touch it. So break it up, makes it look far, far easier to read. And then final point, make sure you have a call to action. Give people that next step they need to take because those that do read your caption or the most likely people to take that step. And that's it. That's how you write the perfect Instagram caption. 21. Engagement Strategy 1: $1.80: So strategy number one, and if you follow Gary vasculature, you would have heard this one before. It's the infamous dollar 80 strategy. Now if you haven't followed Gary vanish OK, and you have no idea who he is, then you're probably thinking what the hell dollar 80, what is that? But don't worry, I am going to explain it. A $1.80 is basically this overall value. You want to reach every single comment or a piece of engagement you have with someone that counts as your $0.02 to sense as in 52 cents, adds up to a dollar to sense as in the currency. That is what each engagement counts as. So in order to reach dollar 80, you have to be engaging 90 times a day. If you engage 90 times a day, every single day, and I mean every single day, you can't just do this every now and again. You will see phenomenal growth. But this engagement I must stress cannot be a fire emoji, great post exclamation mark. Nothing along those lines. You may as well not be commenting a tool if you are engaging with that. Trust me, people do. On my page, I take no notice whatsoever. I don't even reply most of the time, no one's going to click on to your profile because you're not interesting. You're adding no further value to the post whatsoever. Don't post at all. If you're going to do that. Instead, you need to be genuine. You need to take note of what the people have been talking about in their piece of content. You need to talk about something like this. Hey, this was a great post about topic, whatever they did, I particularly liked your point. You made about blank something that you have picked out from the post. You can then put that into the comment section there. And then you can go, in my personal experience, bloody volleyball, I did this that shows that you have really, really consumes their content. And then you are adding further value that might increase your chances of getting a pinned comment as well. If you have been on Instagram recently, this is a new thing that they have introduced. Pinned comments are when craters can actually pin three comments to the top of the comment section. So at three favorite comments, and they will show up at the top of the comments section that every single person that comes and look at that post. So if you were being completely genuine with your comments and providing as much value as possible, then you increase that chance. So not only are you gaining exposure, food, just commenting in the first place, you have that chance of actually being a pinned comment. And as a result, you make an even more page views. Especially. Imagine if you've got pinned to Gary Viner, juxtaposed his 8.7 million followers, something around that range. You would have the opportunity to be exposed to millions of people just through being pinned on his post. So be as genuine as you can if your engagement, no fire emojis, no strong arms, no great post. Know I love this pure, genuine engagement. That is where you see the results. That is where you succeed and say that's the dollar 80 strategy. You need to be commenting or engaging whatever you wanted to, at least 90 times a day, every single day. That is 90 times naught point naught two, your $0.02 dollar 80, that dollar 80 strategy introduced to so by the man himself, Gary vanish Jack. So that was the first strategy you could implement if you didn't like that, don't worry for tomorrow for you. So let's jump into the next module where I give you strategy number two. 22. Engagement Strategy 2: 10x2: We are now going to be talking about strategy number two. And I like to call this one the 10 times to strategy because you're going to be following 10 different things on two different topics. Now, that may sound confusing right now, but let's jump into my computer. Well, I can tell you a little bit more about the strategy and actually walk you through how to do it. So the Tenex to strategy, let's dive in. The ten X2 strategy may sound like some complete gibberish year the moment, but don't worry, I am going to explain it. So the 10 accounts for the fact that you are going to be following 10 different things in each of these two categories you see at ten x t2. So you've got creators and hashtags. These are your two different categories. And within each, you are going to pick out ten different creators and ten different hashtags. Now, you may be thinking, Okay, where do I find 10 different creators in my niche? If you look at my niche, for example, I am within social media marketing now you only need to know one big creative within your niche to begin with, to then find others. So I know for a fact, Dave, tell us, is a big creator within the social media marketing niche at the moment, a 152 thousand followers. So he's a great person to engage with, because if I get is pinned comment, monopolies pieces of content or I get highlights, I go to the top of the comments section, then people are obviously going to be exposed to my page. So here's a great person to begin with. But if I click this down arrow here, you can see other people that are closely related to his content. Now I already follow all of the other big pages. But this for you, if you don't follow them already woke, show up with all of the other larger created within your niche. Now I know personally the other creators that are large, as I mentioned, so I've already noted these down in my notes sections. If I head back here, you can see here I've got Dave talus, the hurry Needham marketing Harry, Danny Allen, crystalline Incas. And I can just click through on all of these. And when I need to engage with them, all, it takes us a click. It takes me through to their page. I can engage accordingly. So actually having these different creators noted down saves a lot of time. You can just click on one engaged twice, click on the next engaged twice, and go through by step. So a good way to find all the web links is obviously to go over on the Instagram web page and do this. You can then copy and paste them into your notes, which will then obviously go onto your phone if you are on iPhone. And then you can just click through on the link. And it will take you when you're on your iPhone to the page on the app that you need to go to. So that is how you find your creators. So you can see I have 10 different creators listed. So when I went to engage with my ten different creators, I will then just click through on those. Now hashtags. Do the same for hashtags. Now, to find hashtags, again, you can just go onto people that you follow and you can see which hashtags they are using. I know Lucas here is a quite a large creator and my name, if I click on More, I can see the hashtags that he uses. Obviously, if I go on these hashtags, there will be other content creators with him when nature, I can engage with those hashtags. And those hashtags will be great for growth for my account. So I can just copy and paste ten different hashtags within which he is using as a great way to find hashtags have in your niche and those which you engage with. So again, what have I done? I've headed over to the web page for each of these hashtags, for example, social media expert copy and pasted the link headed back to word. And there we have, we have 10 different hashtag links. So now we have are 10 different creators and ten different hashtags. Now what does the tool stamp for? The two stands for the fact that each time we engage with either one creator or one hashtag, we are going to engage two times, two times. So there we have it. We have 10 different creators, we have 10 different hashtags. And each time we engage, we're going to be engaging twice. Ten x two. So now how do you structure this piece of gear engagement? Now I split it up into different timings. So what am I won't engage with the ten different creators. And then at 10, the hashtags, 12 creators to hashtags for creators, you get it. And it's nice to break it up between these two hour chunks because it doesn't then fill is tedious. If you were to just sit here and engage for hours upon hours upon hours, you would just get frustrated, you'd get bored. Your engagement will become lethargic and it just wouldn't be as effective. Whereas if you split it up into different sections, every time you come back to engage, your feeling refreshed and ready to engage with value and genuine engagement. So I split it up between two different hours. But if you can see here, we are having eight different periods where we're actually doing this. And within those eight different periods, we're engaging 20 times. So that totals a 160 pieces of engagement within a day. Now, ties way more than the dollar 80 strategy that I made before. But it may feel like much less, and it may be much less strenuous or new because you already have these processes in place where you've got everything is saved and you can just click through. So this, I would probably say, is more effective than a $1.80 strategy because you're getting 70 more pieces of engagement per day. And it may not feel like you're putting in as much effort because you're doing it over a more prolonged period of time. So there you have it. A 10 X2 engagement strategy. This is one of my favorites. So it's definitely one that you should be implementing. 23. Engagement Strategy 3: 3 Hour Split: So moving on to strategy number 3, the final strategy that you guys can implement as your engagement strategy. And this is just a three hour split. As I did mention at the beginning of the course, you should be engaging for at least three hours a day. So this is the strategy I actually used to getting to that 100 photos and 30 days. So I know for a fact this one works. The other two definitely work because they have been used by other creators and they have been proven. But this one is a phenomenal one. I completely enforce it because it worked for me. So that will likely work for you as well. But it's basically a three hour strategy. So our number one, this is going to consist of outreach to new accounts. So like this strategy number two, this could be going on to new hashtags and scrolling through those hashtags and commenting on lots of different creators, lots of different posts that have created content for that hashtag that is reaching out to a new account. Or you can be going on to the followers of big creators just go into their following feed because obviously people are following them because they've got your content. If you post similar content is likely that they're going to like your content as well. So you can go on to the following list and engage with content from people on their following list. Or you can go on to people on their comment section. If you want people that highly engaged with your content, see which people engage with other people's content, engage with this. And if they then follow us, likely that they're going to engage with your content. They are the people you weren't following you because they are engaged followers. But this is all outreach to new accounts. New accounts being key for the first hour. So moving on to our number 2. And this is going to be engaging with people that you already follows, the people that are showing up in your feed. Now it's important to keep relationships with people that you are already following, with people that are already engaging with your content because it's no good having someone that just engages with your contempt for a week, I'm follows you or then just stops engaging. If you found someone that said loyal follower, a loyal fan, you want to keep it that way. She need to make sure that you continue to engage with their content to keep them engaging with yours. And this is what it's all about at the end of the day, it's all about building relationships. The more you can build that relationship with someone, the more likely they are to become a friend, friends, or people you want on social, the kids in the name, you have to be social on social media. So the more people that you can make friends with, the more likely you are going to have that loyal follower base and people that engage with your content on a daily basis. If you are posting daily that you should be, then you want to have people that do engage with you daily to maximize that return on your content. Because if you've got high engagement, that boat well with the algorithm, and the algorithm is going to push your content out to a wider group of people, you get increased growth in your audience. Or one big cycle works really well for you as a creator. And that's all because you have built a really loyal follower base with your followers. So you need to make sure that you are reengaging with people that already engaged with your content. Make sure you spend at least one hour a day, also engaging people within your feed. So now we have done one hour outreaching to new individuals. And then with our two, we are engaging with individuals that we have already built relationships with because we want to maintain those relationships. So now we have done two hours in our number 3, you are going to be responding. So so within hours, number 12, you are going to be getting a lot of responses when you were engaging with a new audience. You may have been asking these people questions, they've responded. You might need to respond back. If you've been engaging with people in your feeds, again, you might have put a question, they might have asked you something back, you respond. You might have DMZ, this is where you respond in a DMZ. Dms are everything, especially if you've got a product or service, this is where you can actually begin to sell things. I could probably make another course on examined on selling in the DMZ. But you want to actually build those relationships in the dam. So you don't want to just be engaging with people with, if you've got a follower that consistently engages with your content on a daily basis, reach it out to them on DM. When you reach out to them on DM, you can learn more about them as an individual that would then in turn make them more likely to become loyal. Fan engagement will continue. So you need to be making sure that you are responding to your DMs on a daily basis. Answering those questions, finding more about your followers and just building those relationships. And then another thing I also do in this responding stage is respond to people's stories. Stories are a huge part of Instagram nowadays. Instagram constantly testing different ways of presenting stories in your feed. For example, at the moment they're testing two separate columns, not just the one that you may be used to. So the fact that in Scrum actually testing two columns and taking up almost half your screen where the story features shows how important they are to the platform. So you need to be using them as a creator, but you also need to be responding to stories with your engagement strategy. Turn. When you respond. Obviously that sends the response as a TEM. The dam is where you build the relationship with the individual, like I've just mentioned, and then you can continue their own. So that rounds up the three our engagement strategy. So just to quickly recap, our number one is outreach to new accounts. Our number two is outreach to accounts you already follow an hour. Number 3 is all about responding. So there you have it. There are the three engagement strategies you need to implement into your Instagram engagement strategy. Now let's head over to the next module where we have the course conclusion and your project. 24. The 1-Hour Engagement Strategy: I get a lot of complaints from people who say that I can't follow all of this advice the Instagram experts have given me. They're telling me that I need to engage for three hours a day every single day, and I simply don't have the time to do that. Now, realistically, if Instagram isn't your full time thing or building your own brand on social media to build a business isn't your full-time gig and you have a regular nine to five and you have other things you need to do if your day engaging in trying to grow this account for three hours a day is somewhat unrealistic. I completely understand that soon as someone tells you that you need to be engaging for three hours a day, it sort of hits you in the face and you're like, well, I can't do that. It's just not reasonable for me. So a lot of people were then got a case. I can't do it. So they'll put it to the side and they won't pursue that thing that they wanted to pursue. Because they tell us if they don't have the time to put into it. But that doesn't have to necessarily be the case. And that's why I want to tell you guys what I would do if I only had an hour a day. Because an hour anyone can find an hour a day. There's no excuse to not find an hour a day to try and build a brand on Instagram. It may be just sacrificing watching your Netflix series. Or you could just get up an hour earlier in the morning. Or you may do it on your commute to and from work. It's really as simple as that finding time isn't difficult when you cut it down to this hour time block. So Today's episode is going to be what I would do if I only had an hour a day to spend on my Instagram account. So the tips I'm actually going to tell you are going to be broken down into 415 minute time slots. So without any further ado, let's just dive straight into the first time slot. That being 15 minutes of engagement with potential clients. Clients being the key word here, not big accounts, clients, people who will actually eventually buy a product or service of you. And you're going to find these people through niche hashtags. You've gotta remember, at the end of the day, you are building an Instagram account for the followers. You're building it because you want to leverage the audience You Cuo to build your actual business. So if you aren't going out and reaching out to potential customers and clients than the audience you attract, won't be people that will buy from you. So this engagement is arguably the most important part of this, our engagement or growth strategy that I'm going to tell you. Now when I say niche hashtag outreach, I mean you're doing is you are searching for hashtags through the search feature that your potential customers or clients are likely to be using on the content they post. So for example, if you're a coach that teaches other people how to grow a monetize their audience on Instagram. I'm just using myself as an example here. I would look up hashtags such as business coach, personal trainer, life coach, anybody who is likely to need to be building an audience on social media to help leverage that and then grow their business similar to what I do. So think about the potential hashtags that, that audience maybe using, search for those hashtags and spend 15 minutes engaging with these potential customers or clients. That way, you will attract these people to your page and grow the audience that you actually need to grow in order to make sales. So that's the first 15 minutes. Next, we want to be spending 15 minutes engaging with other big creators within your community. You want to become a part of the wider community in your niche. This is how you're going to attract the social proof to your page. This is how you're going to gain that social proof. Fire more followers via more engagement. Because when you engage with these bigger creators, you tend to see the other accounts that love to engage with other people. So if you engage with these big creators and respond to their comments to other people who have engaged. Also, it's likely that they are going to come to your page, follow you, and then U2 will begin interacting with each other. But you've engaged with this person because they are a frequent engagement of other people's content. So when you engage with these potential customers or clients within the first 15 minutes, these people are going to come to your page and see that you have solid amount of engagement on your content. And that's because you are engaging with the other big creators in your community and within their comments section so that then other people then come and engage with your content. The community become your social proof for the potential customers and clients that visit your page through the previous set of engagement. So it's vital that these two work hand in hand because without the social proof, people won't trust you. But without actually reaching out to potential clients and customers in the first place, you aren't going to just have people randomly stumble across your page and want to buy from you. So you've got the social proof combined with the page visits from the potential customers and clients. The next 15 minutes, I want you to start engaging. Within lives and responding to other people's stories. This is where you can build real relationships with people. Being an active member within the community, especially in lives is an easy way to get people to visit your page, hop into big creators lives. You might find someone that goes live every day and does some interviews, especially in my niche that is the case, hop into their lives, make yourself known within that smaller community. If the person of the people that do check in and out of these lives, believe it or not, this is one of the really, really easy ways to get people to know you within that smaller community. And it makes you known by that big creator as well. There's no easier way. They may not respond to all of their DMs because they get an absolute ton of them. But if you constantly check back in every time they go live, they will recognize your name and all of their followers who are also watching that life will recognize your name. So if you do this with a lot of various creators, you will become known within their follower base as someone that is a consistent engages shows up and therefore people will visit your page and want to follow you because of that. Now replying to stories. Another thing that I like to do just to get the conversation flowing with all the people that I follow. And they may follow me and return already, but that's fine. Building relationships is really, really important with your potential followers if you want to retain them for an extended period of time and keep them engaging with your content. You want to become friends with these people. You want them to be true fan. You don't just want them to be another number on your follower count. Because if they're just another number on your follower count to three weeks down the line. Now stopping gauge in they won't care about the content you produce. But if you become genuine friends with these people and show genuine interest In these people that follow you and the people that you follow, then it's much more likely that friendship will build and you will consistently engage in grow together over a longer period of time. It also helps build trust as well. Trust is a really, really key word when it comes to social media, because unfortunately, there are a lot of fake people out. And people who have had bad experiences buying products from other creators that are just not lived up to expectations. So if you were able to build genuine trust by showing genuine interest with these other creators because you've been messaging them over a period of time, showing genuine interest, adding more value, asking actually how they are, you will build that trust, which will help convert that potential customer into a client. So this conversation starting is important when it comes to interacting with those potential customers and clients that you engaged within the first 15 minutes that I mentioned. But it also helps carry through that social proof with the people that you follow within the community, which helps consistently provide that social proof for your content. So we've got 15 minutes of engagement with potential customers and clients. We've got 15 minutes of engagement with the bigger creators and applying, responding to comments within their posts. We've got 15 minutes of hijacking Instagram lives, showing people that you exist and responding to other people's stories. For the final 15 minutes, you need to be responding your direct messages. Throughout all of these things you've done, It's likely that people will be responding to you. Or people may look at your content that you've posted and they may respond to you. And they may then contact you via DM because they are curious about something that you've spoken about, what they may be interested in, your product or service, be a potential customer or client that you've engaged with earlier. So it's important, really, really important that you are prompt him responding to these people. Because if you aren't prompt, people would just forget that they DM job in the first place or that trust may be broken because you didn't respond quickly. They were expecting that quick response is almost like customer service. At the end of the day, you need to be on it. You need to make sure you are responding. So set aside that 15 minutes to respond to all of these people that have sent messages. Because when you respond to people's Instagram stories, that sends a DEM. So if you've responded in a way that promotes a conversation, that person is likely to reply to you. So if you then just don't reply to them, they're going to be confused because you've actually start the conversation with them in the first place. But the DMZ of really where you take that relationship to the next level. And it's one of the best places to sell your product or service. Should you have one? Because it's where you build the relationship and where you can really build that trust, which in turn, is much more likely for you to be able to book a discovery call or prompt someone to buy that product or service. So that's your hour. We had 15 minutes engaging with potential customers and clients. We had 15 minutes of engagement with big creators and responding to other comments on their posts. We had 15 minutes engaging on Instagram lives. I'm responding to stories. And then the final 15 minutes you are spending responding to your DMs, that is one that is your one hour quote strategy and there's no excuse for you not being able to implement that. You don't have to do the whole hour at once. You can do 15 minutes in the morning, 15 minutes at lunchtime, 15 minutes on your commute home, and then just 15 minutes in the evening. Break it up. You don't have to do it all in one hour burnout and not want to do it again. Split it up into these manageable chunks, which is why I've also split it into four different categories to make it easier for you guys. If you can't do that, our strategy, then, I'm sorry, there is not much else. I can tell you. 25. How The Instagram Algorithm Works: I want to talk about exactly how the Instagram algorithm work. Because in the social media marketing space, no matter what the platform may be, whenever the word algorithm is mentioned, there's uproar, there's confusion, and people don't really understand how the algorithms on all of these different platforms actually work. They get confused, they get frustrated, and then they complain when their content doesn't perform well. But today, I want to teach you exactly how the Instagram algorithm works. And this is information that has come from Instagram themselves. They split it into three different pillars. And I'm going to talk about those three different pillars one by one to help you gain a greater understanding of how the algorithm works so that you can work alongside it to help grow your account. You're following your audience, your influence at a faster rate. So without any further ado, let's just dive straight into pillar number one. Pillar number one being interest, interest. Now you might be thinking what on earth interest is such a broad word. But when I say interest, the algorithm will only show your content to people that are actually interested in it. So this myth, the algorithm shows your content to a random 10 percent of your followers, is a myth for a reason because it's not true if you've got people who are following you or just doing follow on follow. And they aren't actually interested in the style of content you create. The algorithm knows that. So it's not going to push that content to a random 10 percent with people who are monks that 10 percent B and people who have no interest in your content whatsoever, it's going to be pushed to people that are genuinely interested in the content you create and the topic you create content on. So for example, it's going to show it to people that frequently engage with your content because that highlights to the algorithm that they are interested in the content you create. Or for example, if your piece of content is being shown on the Explore page to people that don't follow you. It's going to be shown to people that interact with other content in your niche because it displays to the algorithm that they are interested in that type of content. So interest is the first thing that the algorithm is going to look for. It wants to keep people on the platform at the end of the day. So it's not going to show them content that they aren't. I'm actually interested in. If they aren't interested in the content that they are being shown on their feed, the chances of then coming off the app are high. And the reason the algorithm wants to keep people on the platform is because the longer people stay on, the more ads they can show, and the more ads they can show, the more money they can make. So by showing content that people are actually interested in, it's going to keep them on the platform for longer. So it's going to show them content from creators that they have interacted with before or content that is similar to the content they normally interact with because then they are going to be interested in it. So interest is paler. Number one, pillar number two is relationships. So the algorithm is going to push your content to people that you have built a good relationship with. If you talk to people in the DMs, it's going to show your content to the people that you frequently talk to in the DMZ. If there are creators that you follow on Instagram and you frequently engage with each other's content, then the algorithm is going to see that as a relationship between you and the other creator. And because you have that relationship, It's going to show you each other's content. So now you might be thinking, oh Bert, I don't really have a relationship with anyone on Instagram. Technically, you might do. You may not realize it, but if you do have a solid engagement strategy and you are frequently engaging with other creators, the same creators over and over again, and they are reciprocating that engagement. The algorithm will see that as a relationship because you two are frequently commenting and engaging with each other this content. But this will teach you a very simple rule about social media. The clue is in the name. You have to be social. You have to build relationships on these platforms in order to work with the algorithm. Because when the algorithm knows that you have built relationships with people, then it's going to understand that you want to see content from these creators that you are frequently engaging with, talking to, showing an interest in. Because the algorithms not going to want to show you content from someone that you've probably never heard of or two that you just genuinely interested in. That's why when you go onto your feed and when you first go on to the app, those posts that appear at the top of the feed tend to be from people. You talk to you the most, your closest friends, your closest common creators, because the algorithm understands that you have built rapport with this person and therefore probably want to consume their content. So your tip here, start talking to people on social media. If you don't give, on social media, if you don't start building these relationships, the algorithm isn't going to be able to understand who you have these relationships with. And therefore it won't show your content to other people dependent on that pillar. So start engaging more frequently, start DM and people start building those relationships. And the DMZ, the more people that you do build relationships with, the more people that your content is going to be shown to in the feet. It's quite simple when you think about it. So we have interest, we have relationships. Now the final pillar is timeliness, and this is quite a simple one. The algorithm will favor new content overrode. So it's not going to show you a piece of content that was uploaded two weeks ago. It's going to favor content that was posted two hours ago. So that's why I recommend people have a frequent posting schedule. And it's why I posted daily for a very, very long time. I will never go more than days without posting because then I'm not going to be appearing in people's feeds as much you want to be at the forefront of people's minds. So if you are uploading frequently, let's say for example, you post once every week or once every four to five days. You are only going to appear near the top of people's feeds for probably the first one or two days that you have uploaded that piece of content is going to drop off very, very quickly. After that, it's going to want to show all of the people that are scrolling through their Instagram feeds. Far more recent content from other creators that they have built relationships with because they are more timely, they are newer stuff people haven't seen before. If you want a chance to keep popping up on people's feeds, you do need that consistent posting schedule where you are posting every day, every other day, at least four to five times a week. And if you are uploading once a week, you aren't going to be at the forefront of people's minds met very often because after that first day or two, you will simply just drop off. And when you drop off, that then doesn't help with the other two pillars either because you aren't building relationships with people and people will probably aren't as interested in your content because you don't post nearly as often. So that sort of explains why people do recommend posting quite frequently on social media. Because the, when you do, the algorithm's going to favor new content. So the more you post them, more of a chance that you have for your piece of content to come to the top of the feed and for people to actually see it. And that's essentially how the algorithm works. It's not that complicated when you actually think about it. It just looks at those three things. And they all have a very, very similar goal of wanting people to stay on the app. The longer that people stay on the app, the more ads instagram can show them more ads. Instagram can show the more money they have in their pocket. But that is how the Instagram algorithm works. 26. How To Rank On Instagram Explore: For years on Instagram, we have always wondered about how to actually rank on the Explore page. The Explore page is where all creators would love their content to end up. It's full of organic reach, new potential followers, more engagement for our content, pretty much everything good about Instagram and posting content on the platform. However, ranking on the Explore page has always been a bit of a mystery. It's never been set in stone by Instagram themselves and it's always simply been based on launched coup guesses, pretty good logical guesses to be fair, but we've never understood what is completely accurate. Until now, just last week, the Instagram page, creators, essentially an account that's been made to assess creators by Instagram themselves, released exactly what is considered for content to rank on the Explore page. So today I thought I'd just discussed what they said so I can pass this information on to you. And I must say that they also mentioned that the things that I'm going to mention now are in order of their importance from highest to lowest. So what I mentioned first is the most important thing to consider and the last thing is considered less. However, these four things I'm about to mention are pretty important and are exactly what they look for in content so that they can rank it on the Explore page accordingly. So as I said, let's dive straight into the first, and that is the initial performance of the content. And to be honest, this was a pretty gray area. People didn't know wherever this initial engagement on content as soon as you posted it was really that important or not. Some people would say no, it's just an evaluation of your engagement over time on that piece of content and how well it performs. And others would say, no, that initial engagement really, really does make a difference. And it turns out it does. Instagram has said that they assess initial engagement, the amount of likes, comments, shares, and saves you are getting when you first post that piece of content. So those first hour or two, a pretty important now. So how do we think about this engagement? Does matter? Getting people to like it, getting people to comment on it, getting people to share, getting people to save, all of these engagement factors are important. So we need to be thinking about this when we are creating our content. How can we maximize the amount of engagement we are getting? Obviously likes, the better the content you create, the more likely you're going to get that. How can we encourage comments? Are ask some questions. Actually build conversation within the piece of content that you are creating. Shares, ask people to share it, make relatable content, value-based content, trending content. Those are things that will increase your shares and saves content that people are going to want to come back to. Highly informational, value based problem-solving content that people will want to come back because they will need to implement it later down the line. You need to be considering all of these factors from now on when you are creating your content. I hope you've been doing it anyway. But we need to start increasing that initial engagement we are getting. Because if Instagram is seeing that we are posing a piece of content and those first hour or two, that piece of content is performing extremely, extremely well. The algorithms now going to think, Okay, everyone seems to like that post, Let's push out to a wider audience because it's likely that others are going to enjoy it too. So that is the thinking behind it. So yes, engagement, and specifically the initial engagement that your post gets is really, really important. Now, the next thing that Instagram mentioned is the history of your interaction with the person that posted. So if you were to go onto your Explore page, you are going to see people that you don't necessarily follow. However, if you are going onto people's accounts, not necessarily following them, but interacting with their content. Or you've sent them a DM, or you view desk stories in the past, those people are far more likely to appear on your Explore page than people you haven't come across before. So as a creator, as someone who is posting the content that shows the importance of building relationships with your audience and engaging with those outside of your audience. And that makes sense as to why people mentioned when you are doing your engagement and having an engagement strategy, you need to consider people outside of your current audience. Because if you're engaging with content that you find on hashtags, for example, you are interacting with somebody there. So if that person then responds to your comment, comes through to a page, maybe sees what you're doing. It's likely that if you post a piece of content in the future, your piece of content is now going to appear on their Explore page because they have had previous interaction. With you. So the more you interact with people, the more relationships you actually build, the more likely you're going to just keep appearing on these people's explore pages that don't follow you. They're gonna keep seeing you. They can keep seeing your content. They're going to keep enjoying your content, which then makes them far more likely to come and follow your journey thereafter. So you do actually gain that extra audience member. So although this person may not initially follow you from that first engagement that you're doing. Because you are building that history, because you are building that slight relationship with that individual, your content may now appear on their Explore page. And to get that second chance for them to come through and visit your profile and follow you from that point. So don't get too discouraged if people weren't following you straight off of the engagement you do. You might appear on their Explore page later down the line because of this history you've built, and then they may come follow you. So it just highlights He extra importance of engaging and building relationships with people outside your community. Now the third that the creators account mentioned is that it's going to consider the previous interactions that you're having with certain types of content when you go on your Explore page is pretty obvious. All of the content that comes up is pretty much content that you're interested in. Mine is Instagram content, Instagram growth strategy, social media marketing, F1 content, because I'm very much into the formula one and gulf. That is all my Explore page is full of. And that's because that's the content I personally like consuming. Now it might be different for you. So when you go onto your Explore page, it's going to be content that you enjoy consuming. Instagram, know what they're doing. Now this one is a little bit harder to take a grasp of as the creator wanting to appear on people's explore pages. But it allows you as the creator, to tailor your own Explore page to see content that you actually want to consume so that you can find new creators. And it also makes that engagement process far, far easier because you aren't having to dig deep for the content that you're really interested in. You can just base the content that you engage with on what appears on your Explore page. Because Instagram already knows that these people are closely associated with what you do and actually like consuming. So you could consider being the creator going, okay. These people like this content, therefore, I should create more of that so that my content is associated with the content they like so I can appeal with it on the Explore page. That's how you can exploit it as the creator. But I would look at it from the other perspective. Tailor your own Explore page to content that you want to engage with so that you can tailor that engagement strategy. So you're engaging with people outside of your audience, like I mentioned in the previous point, which increases the chances of you then showing up on their Explore page. Now the final point that the created account mentioned was the information of the poster. So this was a very vague point, but they did mention that it's based on the recent amount of engagement that this person is receiving. So if over the past two to three weeks as a creator, that's done very, very well. Their content is seen far more engagement than normal. So essentially their own, that upwards trend, they're seeing far more success than they were previously. These people's content are far more likely to appear on the Explore page than somebody that was just at a plateau or weren't seen as many likes as normal. It wants to push trending content, trending creators so that more people are seeing more of what other people actually like. It's pretty self-explanatory. And all of these points are somewhat points that people were making logical guesses as to how you rank on the Explore page anyway, but it's just nice to know that those thoughts and assumptions have now been set in stone and proven correct by Instagram and themselves. So if you want appear on the Explore page, you need to keep improving your content. So we try and relate this to the final point of the information of the poster, like I said. So if you want to constantly see increasing engagement on your account, so that Instagram's looking at us, this trending creator, It's down to you to continue with that engagement. Bring more people to your page so that you are getting more engagement. And then the algorithm's going to continue to see your engagement increasing over time, seeing that you're on that upwards trend and see that, okay, Other people are liking this, create a more and more that's continued to push out their content to a wider audience because more people going to like them. So you can capitalize on that. And that's gonna consequently help you rank on the Explore page also. So it is pretty simple. And as far as I'm aware, it's pretty close to the assumptions that people were making with regards to how to rank. So just to recap, we had number 1, the initial engagement that your posts receives. So yes, those first two or so hours of your post being live are pretty important. You want the maximum amount of engagements are coming up with that consistent posting schedule so that people know when you're posting every single day, so they know when to come in and gauge maximizing the features within your content that actually encourage engagement. These are all extremely important number to the history of interaction with the poster. So if you want to appear on other people's explore pages, your engagement strategy has to consider people outside of your audience because if you're engaging with people and that they've engaged with you also, but don't follow you. You're more likely to appear on their Explore page because of that, number 3, we had previous content interaction. So the Explore page will show people content that they are genuinely interested in is going to show them content that they have recently interacted with and similar content to those types. So tailor your Explore page so that you can continue to engage with other creators or base your content on what other people are actually interested in, which increases the likelihood of view ranking on their explore pages. And finally, number 4, trending creators is going to look at the average amount of engagement these creators a receiving over the past few weeks. So that it's going to push the creators that are performing well over others, the arm. So it's important to keep attracting those eyeballs to your page that your engagement is constantly increasing. Coupling that with the previous points mentioned, which is going to increase your chances of ranking on the Explore page. And that's it. Pretty simple. 27. Increase Engagement: Creators Who Thrive: So let me ask you this. Do you prefer to follow content or people, the individuals who have the highest engagement rates have their masks off. They are genuine with their audience. Their audience knows about them personally. You aren't following a brand, you're following a person. And this is why influencers nowadays are so, so valuable. They have built an incredible amount of trust with their audience. And that trust is pretty much what a lot of companies who spend their whole marketing budgets, so on. They aren't spending the influencer marketing budgets on a brand page to promote their product. They're spending it on influences. You have personal brands, they have their faces to their pages. People are following them. They aren't just following their content. So this is what you need to think about when you're producing your content and structuring your page. So why do people actually like to follow people opposed to content? And people follow people because they like who they are or they aspire to be like that individual. It's as simple as that. And especially in the entrepreneurial space like I'm in or marketing, people who follow me because they want to know about the advice. I am sharing, the advice I'm using, and I don't want to sound cocky or open noxious, but some might want to be in the position that I'm in. Have an account like mind one day that has a great following, has a great community. So they are willing to follow my content because it is the content I am producing that has allowed me to get to that point. So if they can see that and act on that and use that in their own journeys. One day can get to the point that IMR with my page. So it's as simple as that when you think about it. So when you are creating your content, when you're going about structuring your page. Take that mask off. Take that mask off because people wanted to see you. They want to see a page that has a face behind it. Now let me just give you some brilliant examples of this because there are some people that would say, okay, look, Instagram is impossible to grow on. Nowadays there is far too saturated. You have got no chance in starting an account from scratch. Now we're not using paid ads growing organically and getting to a 100 k follows. I will tell you now, for a fact that is wrong. There were multiple creators out there that have grown to a 100 K followers in less than one year, just because they've built fantastic communities and they're posting content to cater for that community. Dain Walker, Dave talus, the Stephen Miller, they have all gained 100 thousand followers in the past year. They've started their accounts less than a year ago and they've all got over a 100 thousand followers. Now one thing they all have in common is they have a strong brand presence to their page. People know who they are. They're not some logo and they're not hiding behind Pexels and free pick images on the headline page. Their face is present to their page and that's what makes them so appealing to the people that follow them. People get that extra connection. People understand who they are and they are showing behind the scenes on what they're actually doing day-to-day. People see this and then they adapt that into their own lives. That's what people want. They want to know how you can get from step a to step B. Step a being where they're at, step B being where you are. So if you're able to take your mask off and show people who you really are, how you're doing different things, then that is how you're going to succeed. And that is going to be what gets you that increased engagement rate. So now I've shown you some brilliant examples of people who do it great. Go check them out. I probably would have left some little tags of them of their pages so you can go and see what they're doing. But now we know who does it best. Let's just dive in now to how you can increase your Instagram engagement. 28. Increase Engagement: The True You: So tip number one, your audience needs to know the true You. And I don't mean they need to know your cat's name or your dog's name. They need to know about you personally. So you need to show them some behind the scenes of who you are, your day-to-day life, what you're doing. And that essentially builds that trust. Trust is the key word in all of this. The more trust you can build with your audience, the more likely they're going to engage with your content. And let me put it this way, which you ever buy from a brand that you didn't trust? No, you wouldn't. You would never buy from a brand that had a bad reputation if you've got a great reputation as a creator and people trust you, people are going to shout about you. People are going to engage with your content because they know you were genuine. They know what you are saying is valuable and it's true. So the more your audience knows about you as an individual and about what you do day-to-day. That is what builds that trust. You are being transparent. You need to be as transparent as possible from day one. Can't put this massive guard up and expect people to trust you because you don't want to show them your journey. It's those individuals that are willing to share things for free for a long period of time without asking anything in return that are able to build that trust in a shorter period of time. You will see a bunch of creators posting the standard content and holding back premium content to pump out in an e-mail list or put in a course or sell in an e-book. Don't do that. Don't do that straight away. You need to build that trust first before you can go and sell that e-book. Because put it this way, if you've got 3000 followers and you've posted mediocre content for a long period of time and you've been holding back all of this valuable content that possibly could have got you that increased reach or increased engagement and wider audience. You've really, really hold yourself back. You need to make sure you were posting everything. In my opinion, those that hold back their most valuable content are somewhat insecure about what they're talking about. You need to be willing give away your best quality content because it's that quality content that will bring you the leads. People will see that and go, Okay, this guy, he knows what he's talking about. So I'm going to reach out to him. And you could potentially even get a paid client from this individual rather than just a fun OEM bit of engagement. So to summarize, make sure your audience knows as much about you as possible, be as transparent as possible, and show them everything about your journey that builds that trust and in turn will increase that engagement on your account. 29. Increase Engagement: Build Relationships: So tip number two, you need to be building relationships with your biggest fans. 30. Increase Engagement: DMs: We are moving on to tip number 3 now. And now I'm going to take things down into the DMZ. And we've already talked about building relationships with your biggest fans of your page. But now we're talking about people who just reach out to you in the DM for help because you will get it as you post more consistently over time, people will start reaching out to you, asking you for advice, asking you about who you are, what you do, what you're about. And you need to take time if these individuals, they may not be fans here, but this is your opportunity to turn next follower into one of those fans. So you need to give as much attention to these individuals as possible. You shouldn't just have them ask you a question, you answer it and then that beer That's conversation over. That's not what you want to do. Our answer their question, but then ask them, why did you want to know this? What do you do? It be great to learn a little bit more. That way you are showing genuine interest and these people will be thinking, Okay, this guy's got a great following. He's got a good community already, but he's taking a lot of time out of his day to talk to me on a more personal level. That is great. That is what I want from creators, that is what I want to see showing up in my feed. So if you can take the time just once, even just once with these individuals is better to obviously do it time and time again. Check in on them, see how they are what are they up to have a progress since you last spoke to them. But even just once of giving someone the time of your day to engage with them more genuinely for a longer period of time that could turn that follower into a friend. And those are the fans that will comment on every single post you're getting every step closer to those 100 true fans that I previously mentioned. One of the things I like to do most is refer people elsewhere. So if they asked me a question on increasing engagement, Let's just use this course example as an example. I will give them tips and tricks, but then I will refer them to somewhere else where they can learn more. I'd be like, Okay, look, if you loved what I've told you, Hey, maybe you should read this book by x author or read this blog, send them to a 1000 true fans, or refer them to a YouTube video, and then they'll go, Okay. This guy is actually really, really helpful, is not just helped me, he's referred me somewhere else and I am now going to go and consume that. Give it a week, then go back to them. How did you find that book? How did you find that video? Did it help? That then engages that conversation again and you fervor build that relationship. Just seeing how it works. It's not hard because these people reach out to you first. You just have to engage with them more genuinely. Talk a little bit about them, get to know them. And that turns that follower into a fan. 31. Increase Engagement: Stories: So tip number four, and this is one of my favorites. This is something I like to do a lot of time and that is to use Instagram stories as much as I possibly can. Instagram stories of phenomenon. They were a great addition to the platform and you can see how they have developed over time. Instagram really focus on these. And if you've seen recently, it's kind of actually been testing, doubling the amount of stories that are shown on your feet at the moment, it's just one bar, but they are thinking of actually doubling it to two. So the fact that they're testing this just shows how important they are to the Instagram community and how important it is for you to be using them. But you might be thinking, Okay, brilliant. Instagram stories are good, but how can I use them to increase my engagement? Instagram stories are less formal content than that of which you post and your feet. They are less polished. They don't have to take as much time or you have to do is click Record. Have yourself talking for 15 seconds, 30 seconds, however long you want your story to be. Stop recording, hit perished. There's no editing needed. Just add a couple of captions. But what it allows you to do is give your followers are behind the scenes, look into what you are doing. Your story. Content should be a completely different content strategy to that of which you are using on your feet. You shouldn't just be using your stories as a place. Promote your new post. That's what I'll see. A lot of people doing. All of their stories are just comment on my new post. I've posted something, go check it out. You need to be using your stories as a completely separate content strategy. And you need to be making the most of them. If you are creating content for the week on a Sunday, let say, and you are going through your content process. Take people through it. Take people step-by-step on how you do things day-to-day. For example, if you've got a morning routine once in a while, take them through that morning routine. If you're reading a book and you come across a great part, show them, read it out to them because it will resonate with them as well. If they follow you, they already love the content you produce and probably have a similar mindset on one to know similar things you do. So if you come across great pieces of information when you're reading a blog post or reading a book. Show other people these that might encourage them to read that because well, it may teach them something new, that is what you want. But it's a great way to give people an inside look into your life without having it to be on your feed as a more formal piece of content, let's just say you're doing something day-to-day or you reach a milestone or buy a new house. And then that's quite extravagant one, but people will be interested in that people are following you for who you are. They wanted to know about these things. People are nosy, believe it or not, people want to see these things about your life. So if you do have something that is big or a milestone, let them know if it's your birthday, let them know. It's as simple as that. Just give them an inside look into your life. That inside look really, really builds trust. Because let me say this to you. Some of your favorite influences. It may be one of my favorites was Casey nice staff. He was an phenomenal YouTube. I still does YouTube, but he was the guy that pioneered vlogging. He was one of the very first people to start daily vlogging, and I followed him since day one. I found his account before he started daily vlogging. But daily vlog pretty much took people into his life. But he didn't know these individuals yet. He would have people come up to him on the street that he have no idea who they were complete strangers. But just to think that complete stranger almost knew pretty much everything about him is quite scary concepts. But that is how he built his trust with his audience and why he was so popular. People loved his life and he shared everything with them, but he didn't know who they were. So your favor influences, That's how they do it. They just give you an inside look into their life and you think you are pretty much friendships them, you know everything about them, but I know nothing about you. But by them showing you their lifestyle is how they captured your trust and that is how they begin to influence you. So if you are using your stories to give people an inside look into your life, you are going to build that trust. That trust is what builds that engagement on your posts. People will respond to your stories, I'll say, Oh, that's really cool. How did you do that? Or I liked what you did on your content creation post there, please. Can you teach me or show me where you got that from? Or you might buy a new house now got all that is really cool. I love that ornament. It's really simple. Some of the things you show may be completely off-topic and stupid. So what you do, but sometimes that's not a bad thing. It's not a bad thing to fear away and show something that is a bit different. You might be a gym lover and you might do a workout, take people for a workout, but people who are following you and also love going to the gym, there'll be able to further resonate with your content that again, built even more trust, and that is brilliant. More trust, more engagement. Tip number 4, use your stories to give people an inside look into your life. 32. Increase Engagement: Feature Fans: So moving on to tip number 5, and that is to feature your fans. This is a little hack at a lot of creators like to use to increase the comments they get on their page. So what a lot of creators do is they feature the best comments they get from the fans in the stories and they tag them. That tag is essentially a shout-out, the individual that's commented. But those people that are viewing your story and seeing that people are getting featured for commenting on your post diagonal, think what the hell, okay, so if I comment on this person's post meaningfully with added value and I get a shout out for that. It's a no brainer. So this will encourage people to engage meaningfully with your content. And what does that do? Tells the algorithm that your content is worthwhile pushing to a wider audience. So although this tip is a little bit back handed, you are saying to your audience, look, I'll give you a shout-out. If you comment on my post and I like it, you're not actually telling them that you are bent, basically just showing that you are doing it. That encourages people to engage more with your content. So indirectly, by giving your followers a shout-out for being a great fan, you are getting even more people to engage with your content. So even though it's something small, even though you are giving someone a free shout-out is not a shout-out. You were just thanking someone for providing some great value on your piece of content. You are going to receive an increased amount of engagement. So this was just a little hack, but is a great one to use because you will see a huge amount of comments on your posts if you do so, especially if you already have quite a large audience. Let's say you have 5000 followers. Those who have one or 200 followers are going to think, okay, if I can get on this person's story that is brilliant, that is going to increase my chances of getting more page visits and getting my page of the ground. You will see a lot of smaller creators really start engaging with your content in an attempt for you to share them on your stories. So that was just a quick tip. Definitely use it though, because it is really, really worthwhile. 33. Increase Engagement: Have A CTA: So moving on to the next step. And this is one that a lot of people don't utilize enough. And it's really, really important. People often forget to include a call to action on their post. If you don't ask, you are never going to get, if you want people to comment, ask them to. If you want people to save it for later, tell them to. It's really, really simple. So for example, in my carousels on the final slide, I do pretty much all of this in the top right, underneath the three little dots, I have something that says turn on post notifications because they have to click those three little dots to turn on post notifications. If you don't ask, you won't get in the bottom right. I have save this for later, right above the little Save button. Since doing so, it's increased my saves dramatically because people then think, okay, that's where the saved symbol is. Let me just tap Save. Doesn't cost them anything to do with it. You've just told them to, so it prompts them to. But on that final slide, I have my call to action. And I think about this, it's not something I just put an edge PR comments what you thought if my post is about my content creation process, put on the final slide. What is your content creation process? Question mark, comment below. Or let's say you've made a post about Facebook retargeting ads. Do you use Facebook retargeting ads? Question mark. This prompts a conversation in the comments. You can't just expect people to come in. Some people won't think people will read. They're like they'll scroll on. But if you ask them a question, nothing. Okay, They've asked me this. I've just read that piece of content. Let me respond. That is what you want as a creator. That is going to increase that engagement rate dramatically because that one comment could turn into four or five. If they say something and respond meaningfully. And it's something that you could expand on, say, Okay, That's great. Have you ever tried this question mark, they might come back again. This is ramping up that engagement dramatically because people keep coming back to see your content because they tend to respond to your comment. Like I said at the beginning, this is telling the algorithm that more people are spending time on your content. The more people that spent time when your content, the more the algorithm is going to want to push it out to a wide audience. You've reached the Explore page, you will increase your ranking on hashtags. That is great for you. And it's all through just a few little hacks to increase your engagement rate. So please, please, please make sure you are including a call to action. If you are posting a single image posts, don't put it on that, have it in your capture. And because people will often read your captions if you're just posting a single image, posts finish off your caption with a question that relates to that piece of content that encourages a conversation in the comment section. If you are using a carousel like I do, put it in the final slide. If you are talking in a video like this one, finish of the video saying a question. It's really, really simple. But if you don't have a call to action and you don't ask your audience for response. Most of the time, you won't get 1. So include a call to action on every single piece of content you produce. 34. Increase Engagement: Engage Yourself: So moving on to my final tip, and I've saved the best for last. And it may seem like a really, really obvious point to make, but people disregard it. If you want to have an increased amount of engagement on your content, you have to engage with other people, especially when you're first starting your page, it baffles me. Sometimes people will start their page, they will post six or seven pieces of content. They'll have a 100 followers and they'll send me a DM and they'll go, Ethan, why on earth am I getting no engagement? I've posted six brilliant pieces of content that are packed full of value. Everyone needs to see them, but no one is seeing them and no one's engaging. And I simply ask them, well, if you engage with anyone yourself, nine times out of 10, the Hans will be Well, no, I haven't. Why do I need to do that? If your page is brand new, you can't expect people to just stumble across your content. You have to go out and find them. So what you are going to do is you're going to go on related hashtags. You're going to find related accounts. You're going to respond to comments in other people's comments section. You're going to go on to those commenters and engage with their content. If you engage with other people, people will engage with you in return, you can't expect to receive if you don't give in the first place. Now there are various different engagement strategies that you can use to make this a lot easier. I'm going to make a completely separate course on ness to help you guys out. There are some brilliant engagement strategies you can use to make this as streamlined as possible and really, really maximize your time that you do spend engaging. But I must stress, you really, really need to engage with other people to increase the engagement yourself. And this will be for your first 100 followers or so. You won't see that in organic engagement. Until that point, you really, really have to work hard on reaching out to those other for individuals and making sure that they come back to your content you need, seek your fans. Your fans weren't find you initially. Eventually when you can ramp up your engagement organically and people would just automatically engaging with your posts, your breaching the Explore page of ranking on hashtags, people will just comment, it's inevitable, but that happens with time when you're first starting out. You have to really, really seek out those individuals for your page. But one thing I must stress when you are engaging with other individuals. I don't mean just going over it and commenting, thumbs up or the fire emoji, great post, this was awesome. You need to be really, really detailed with what you are commented. If someone has posted something about an engagement strategy, go, this was really, really helpful. I particularly liked the point you made about blank. I tried to do this when I engage and I've seen great success doing so. By doing this, not only have you showed them that you've properly consume that content, you are then adding further value to their post that could increase your chance of getting a pinned comment. And if you get a pinned comment on quite a large page, that increases the chance of you getting more profile visits. More profile visits means more eyes on your page means growing your audience, means increased engagement. So to increase your engagement, you need to engage with people yourself. Do not expect anything in return if you are willing to give it in the first place. 35. Hashtags: Hashtag Ranking Ladder: So before we can go into how exactly rank on Instagram hashtags, on which hashtags CEUs, we need to first understand how they actually work. So I'm going to talk you through a process of which I like to call the Instagram hashtag ranking ladder. And I'm going to leave a diagram here, which I hope provide some more in-depth information and helps US understand it even further. Now, with Instagram hashtags, you can pretty much separate them into four different categories. So if you go to the search engine of Instagram, type in a hashtag, you want to look up, click on it. It will tell you how many people have actually posted a piece of content using that hashtag. Now you can split these amounts up into four different categories. You've got category number 1, which is less than 50000, then that bumps up to fifty thousand, two hundred thousand, category 300 thousand to a million, and then you've got a million plus. Now is pretty self-explanatory on which ones are the easiest to rank on is obviously going to be naught to 50000. But these are the most important hashtags that you are going to be using on your content. Because these notes of 50000 hashtags are the ones that Instagram are going to test your content on first, if you begin to rank on those notes to 50000, it will bump you up to the next category. Your ranking on those bumps shop again. If you're ranking on those, it pumps you up again. So that nor to 50000 is incredibly important. It may not seem like a lot and you may just be thinking, right? The first thing I'm gonna do when I use Instagram hashtags is I'm just simply going to use the ones that have the biggest reach possible. I'm going to use the hashtags like hashtag, Instagram, hashtag, shout out for shout-out hashtag, follow for follow because they have millions upon millions of posts. And these are the ones that people searching for. Wrong, wrong, wrong. You won't rank, you will know rank for these hashtags because they are so, so competitive. You've got people with the likes of fifty million, sixty million followers using these hashtags. So they are the ones that are going to take the top spots there. You have your 1002 thousand followers, have no chance. So you need to make sure that you are using hashtags that are specific to your industry. And those which are more realistic, those which you are more likely to rank on. So that is why you need to understand that hashtag ranking ladder, because you need to have those notes of 50000 hashtags that are easier to rank on. So you can actually begin to rank on the rest of the hashtags that you use. 36. Hashtags: How To Rank: So now we're almost there. We pretty much know everything we need to know about hashtags. We know the hashtag ranking ladder. We know that we need to stack our hashtags. We know that we need to have different sets and we know where we need to put them on our content. But how do we begin to rank? How does the algorithm determine which content to push on hashtags. Now, people talk about the algorithm being some really confusing piece of codes and confusing piece of software that no one really understands. But from my personal experience and my research is pretty simple. You can pretty much dumb it down to one simple conclusion. All the algorithm wants to do is keep people on the platform. All it wants to do is keep people scrolling through Instagram. Instagram make their money through advertisements. They make money by showing ads and charging advertisers to post ads on their platform. The longer they can keep people on the platform, the more ads they can show them more ads they can show, the more money they make. So all I want to do is keep people on the platform. So they are going to push the content on hashtags, on the Explore page on people's feeds that wants to be seen. They're going to push content that is keeping people on the platform with your content. What you need to be looking to do, you need to be looking to get high engagement. Engagement is made up of likes, comments, shares, and saves four simple things. So when you are creating your consent, you need to be optimizing it to achieve those four things. If you're no, then you've got no chance because you're not going to have no engagement. The algorithms not going to like your content, and it's not going to push it to other people. Now, out of those four things, which one do you need to focus on most, the ones you need to focus on most are shares and saves. The one that is the key is saves. Saves are the key indicator to telling me algorithm that your content is brilliant. And put it this way, I'm going to explain, when someone saves your content, they've already taken the time to consume it and they loved it. So they've saved it. But because they've saved it, that means they want to refer back to it at a future date. They've already spent time consuming it, but now they've saved it. So they're going to come back and spend even more time consuming your content. They're not consuming at once. They may consume it 2345 times. The Instagram algorithm is sinking, right? If that person wants to consume the content more than once, then more people are going to want to do the same. So they're going to push that piece of content to rank on hashtags to be shown on the Explore page because people are spending time consuming it and then they're coming back onto the platform to see it again. So not only are they spending more time on the platform from consuming it in the first place? Instagram can be sure that they are going to return to the platform either later date. And that means obviously they can show more ads, make more money, and your content has been the key indicator that displays that. So engagement is the key to ranking on hashtags. Now, This is the thing. When you are first starting your Instagram page, your engagement is not going to be very high. That is something you have to work on. And hashtags shouldn't be the main thing you are focusing on for your growth. Hashtags will not be the reason your account grows in the beginning. Your initial account growth is down to your own pace, down to your engagement efforts with other creators. That is the main thing you should be focusing on when I first joined in Instagram, you can just come onto Instagram posts and content with some hashtags expect to rank and then just organically grow like that. It doesn't work like that. Because obviously, as I mentioned, you need engagement. And to get engagement first, you have to give engagement yourself. Don't expect something in return. If you're not willing to give it in the first place, you need to build a relationship with other creators. You need to build a solid fan base of people that are commenting on your content, liking your content sharing it's saving it every single time you post. So you won't rank on hashtags, possibly until you reach six hundred and seven hundred, eight hundred followers, because you haven't built that base audience. So you cannot be using hashtags as your key to growth initially. So don't come to me after consuming this and go, right, this isn't working. Why am I hashtags not working? I'm following everything you say. I'm just going to have a look at your account on there, see that you've got two hundred, three hundred followers and your engagement is low. And that's all I'm going to tell you. I'm going to go right. I told you this in the course. You won't grow through using hashtags. Initially, hashtags or something that begin to work. Overtime. Azure account grows, the Instagram algorithm gets to learn your content. It starts to realize that it deserves to be pushed to a wider audience because it's keeping people on their platform. But until you engage with others, until you build the initial fanbase that are engaging with your content. That's never going to happen. So don't focus initially on hashtags, focus on engagement, and then start to research your hashtags. Yes, you can use hashtags from the beginning. You will get some reach from, as I said, that first 30 seconds where you post your hashtags because they will show up on the recent. And if people are searching on the recent bit for hashtags, then they will see it there. But until you do get that engagement, until the algorithm does land to light your content. They won't work. 37. Hashtags: Hashtag Stacking: Now we understand the hashtag ranking ladder. We know that there are four different categories and that you need to rank on the first ones in order to rank on the next. So how do you actually select the hashtags that you're going to use? And this is now where we talk about the strategy of hashtag stacking. Hashtags stacking is effectively you're going to end up like a pyramid and that's why we call it hashtag stacking, because you pick a different number of hashtags from each set of the hashtag ranking ladder to use on your piece of content. So how many do you actually use for each boundary? And because as I mentioned, that naught to 50 thousand is the most important, they are the ones you want the most gov, you want at least 14, Yes, 14, 14 hashtags that between nought and 50 K. On your concept. Now instagram allows you to have 30 hashtags on every single post. And I suggest you do use all of these because you wanted to make the most of it. And now you might be thinking, well, why would I want to use half of my allowance up on the lowest amount? Surely I want to have more that have the higher reach, so I can reach it a higher amount of people. As I begin to rank. You won't rank if you don't have this amount of smaller hashtags. So that is why I suggest you use at least 14 between 050 K on your post. Next, there is the 50 to a 100 K. So you've got the big section at the bottom, we have 14 and then you have a slightly smaller nine hashtags for the 50 to a 100 K. So you're beginning to rank on the naughts 50 K, the algorithm, seeing that it's going right, I now need to push this content to more people. So it begins testing it. On the next level up it begins test you on the 50 to a 100 K. And now you have nine hashtags in this category. So that's great. This is where you start increase in that reach, but it's still testing your content. It hasn't picked you up to the big fish hashtags where the real reaches out. But because you've got nine hashtags in this next section, even if you don't reach the final two sections, just still going to get a good amount of reach. So you have to use at least nine hashtags in this 50 to 100 K section. Now, a 100 K to a million, this is where we start reaching that serious amount of impressions, that serious breach. Now you want to have five hashtags, from a 100 K to a million. Now, if you are ranking on notes or fifth day and 50 to a 100 K, it is likely that you are going to then rank in the next set of hashtags. So you always want to have these hashtags in there. You could just have them split between the naught to 50 and 50 to a 100. And just understand that you're gonna get a similar amount of reach every single time because it's likely that you're going to rank on most of these. But if you really want to get that serious reached that you see some of his, some of the gurus of getting, then you need to have the bigger hashtags just in case the ranking all of these. And then it begins to push you through on the next set of hashtags. So you want to have five from this 100 K to a million. Now, if you begin to rankled knees, now, you were off to the races. Now you were talking because now you have the opportunity to begin to rank on those 1 million plus hashtags. These are super competitive. These are normally taken up by the bigger pages. You have that great engagement rate and they can pretty much rankled them straight away because the algorithm already knows that their content works. It just does that for you as a smaller page to rank on these, you need to be ranking on those smaller hashtags. So that's why you need to fill up your 30. We've mostly those, but it's always good to have at least two. You can have two in this final section, two hashtags for this a million plus because you want to cover your bases. You want to cover that category just in case you rank on the rest of those hashtags. Because that is where you're gonna get the serious reach. And if you do rank here, you're gonna see a huge spike and engagement. You're going to see a huge spike in following increase. And that is what you arguably worn for your content. So now you have your pyramid. You've got 14 in the first section, you've got nine in the next five, in the next two, in the final, that's 30 hashtags. And now you can post that piece of content. 38. Hashtags: Hashtag Sets: So we now understand the hashtag ranking letter. We understand that we need to have hashtags stacking. So now I encourage you to have multiple sets of hashtags. You've got that first set, you've got that first 30. And it's working great. You're loving it. You're getting increased engagement. You're getting that increased reach. But it won't last forever. Hashtags wear out over time. Let's say after about nine posts, you will see that your engagement begins to drop again. Now that's not what you want. You can't just keep using that set of hashtags at, in the hope that eventually that engagement will come back again. Because it's unlikely, it will say you need to be prepared as soon as you see that drop in engagement, you need to have another set of hashtags. You can instantly pull on to the old content and use. So I encourage you to have 55 sets of hashtags. Now why do you need 55? Seems like quite a lot of hashtags to prepare, but it's a must because let's put it this way. First set of hashtags working great. Dropping engagement. New set of hashtags, brilliant. But then he says Your operative engagement. If you go back to that first set again, you probably haven't given it enough time to recover on your account. So you need to have more sets you can cycle through before you jump back to that first set. So you have that first set engagement drop, jump into the second engagement job, third, fourth, fifth. By the time you've done or five, it's likely that you can go back to the first and they will work just fine. It's a continuous cycle, have five sets of hashtags that you can continue to cycle through so that you can never experienced that drop in engagement because there will become a point if you just continue using the same hashtag set that they don't work at all. You would have completely exhausted the reach from that hashtag set. So don't be in denial, don't carry on using it and go, Okay, it's going to come back one day. It used to work. It won't it won't work like that. Have a second set, have a third set forth and fifth that you can cycle through to make sure that you always have the highest engagement possible. 39. Hashtags: Where To Put Hashtags: So you've now go all of your hashtag sets. You ready to post them on your content, but nothing can write. Well enough. Do I post them? Where do I put them on my piece of content? Because it's the client gives you two different options of where you can post your hashtags. You can even post them in the caption, or you can post them in the comments. So which is the best place to put them? And well, the answer is a Guzman really matter. You need to test both and work out, which works best for you. Every creator has a different strategy and it works differently for every single creator. One will have hashtags that just don't work at all in the captions, but a brilliant in the comments and vice versa. So you need to work out which works best for you. For your first 10 posts, put them in the caption, record the results. And then for the next 10, put them in the comments, record the results, but you need to record the results because you need to compare. If you can't record results you can't compare. So record those results, compare, see what works best, and then you jump in to whichever one got the better for cells. Now from personal experience, I like to put my hashtags in the caption. Now you might be thinking, I don't want to actually put them in the caption because it makes my post look messy. I've worked great. I've worked on individuals of my content. My caption looks fantastic, and now we're going to put a bunch of hashtags in the comments and it ruins it. It ruins the aesthetic. I don't want that. Now. I use an app called flocked to write my captions. You may realize that when you write your captions on Instagram, you write it out, you hit Post, and it just looks nothing, nothing like that of which you have typed when actually preparing your post on Instagram, it goes through, it's completely unformatted. Now, I use an app called flocked, floated brilliant. You type your caption out in the app. And then exactly how it appears. You copy and paste it. And then exactly how it appeared in the app is how it appears on your content. So what you can do is you can copy and paste your hashtags, which you've kept in your notes. You've got your five sets in your nose. You copy and paste your hashtag set on to flocked. But what you do is you hit the return button so that it puts it below and it's unseen by your audience, is out of the way. No one really cares, but arguably, no one really cares about your hashtags anyway, you need to use hashtags to grow in your account. Anyone that serious about their Instagram growth, they know this. They're not going to look at you using hashtags and go, Oh, I don't like this creator. They're using hashtags. Useless. You're not going to grow your account. If you don't use hashtags. And people understand this. So they'll just understand you're using hashtags because you want to increase your reach. So if you're worried about your posts looking unaesthetic, please stop. It doesn't matter. Using hashtags is for your own benefit, is going to increase your reach, which is going to increase your audience. That is what you want to stop caring about what other people think. No one actually cares about the aesthetic of your comments section. Simple. So to conclude, it doesn't really matter where you put your hashtags, but test, test them in the caption, test them in the comments and put them wherever works best for you. As I mentioned, personal experience, the caption is best for me. 40. Hashtag Tips To Remember: I just wanted to talk through a few simple tips that you need to take into account when you are using your Instagram hashtags. So without any further ado, let's just dive straight into the first tip. And that is that you should be using all 30 of your hashtags. I've said it. I want you to use all 30. I see people all the time saying you should try using five, you should try using seven, you should try using ten. Just use all 30. You want to give yourself the best opportunity at ranking as many hashtags as you possibly can. And if you want that to be the case, use the maximum amount of hashtags instagram allows you to. If you want to rank or more hashtags, you use more hashtags. If you don't want to rank on as many, then use less by don't see why you wouldn't want to rank on as many. If you use 30, you give yourself 30 chances to rank. If you use five, you only give yourself five chances. So the likelihood of you ranking or more hashtags is higher because you are giving yourself a greater opportunity to do so. Now when I say this, I don't mean just use any 30 hashtags. You still need to be making sure that all 30 hashtags you use are specific to the content that you are using them on. There's no point in getting to 20 hashtags and then making those last ten hashtags you use completely random because you can think of anything specific enough. You don't want to confuse the algorithm with regards to the content you are posting. You want to keep them specifics of the algorithm knows. So if you then go on and use 10, the work completely random, you're gonna throw it off and the likelihood of you Ranking altogether isn't going to be as high. So if you get to 20 and can't think of ten more, stick with 20. But if you can think a 30 applicable hashtags for the piece of content you are creating, use them. Instagram gives you the chance to do so. So take that opportunity and use it to your advantage. You are more likely to rank if you use more because you are giving yourself the opportunity to do so. Now the next tip I want to mention, and this is something that many don't actually pay close attention to. And that is that they need to be ensuring that the hashtags they are using on their posts are actually active. And what I mean by this is that when you go and actually look at the hashtags, you are using, the posts that are ranking at the top of each hashtags are actually recent posts. Because when you look at some hashtags, you can go and you look at the top content. The content could be from four or five months ago. There isn't new content coming into the top rankings of these hashtags and taking that top spot. And as a created that should highlight to you that the likelihood of you taking that top spot very slim because there hasn't been anything in the recent five months. I've managed to push anything offered this top spot, meaning the hashtag isn't actually very active. You want hashtags that are really active. You want those top spots to be from 24 hours or six hours ago, a day ago, within the past week. You don't want posts that are two months old appearing in that top spot. Because even if you were to rank, inactivity of that hashtag shows the Probably not many people are looking at it. So even if you were to rank, then not many people are gonna be seeing it. So you're not going to be benefiting from as much reach in comparison to if you were to rank on a hashtag that was active. So this isn't something that you can easily research. You simply have to go through your hashtags one-by-one, ensuring that the recent posts are active. Now I know this can be time-consuming. You are doing yourself a favor in the long term because if you do rank, you will increase your reach, which could increase your following. You name it all of that beneficial stuff from reaching more people on the platform. But it's a very simple thing to rectify if you aren't doing already and you may not have even thought about this before. It may not have been something that you were even aware of. So if you aren't ranking on any hashtags at the moment, give this one a check because this might be a very simple tip that you can look at, implement and change everything. Have a look at your hashtags you're using. If they're not active, switch them out, get some new ones in. If they are active, keep trying. If they don't give him a change and see what happens when you do. Please make sure that the top posts that are currently ranking on the hashtags you are using? A recent, I would say within the last seven days, maximum, probably within the last two to three weeks. But if you can get everything within the last seven days even better, the last three to four, you're on the right path. Now the next point I want to talk about is banned hashtags. If you're not familiar with hashtags, you're probably thinking what on earth is a band hashtag? And what Instagram actually does is they will ban hashtags when the content that's being posted on those hashtags goes against community guidelines. Rather than simply taking away post, if a hashtag is frequently used for content that goes against the guidelines, they'll just ban the hashtag altogether. So if you are posting content and using hashtags that are band, you're just wasting potential organic reach and organic growth from using hashtags. So let's say you're using 30 hashtags, but 10 of them a band, you're essentially only using 20. Now similar to the active or inactive hashtags. Unfortunately, there's no quick fix to working out whether you are using band hashtags or not. It's something that you're going to have to go through one by one. Alternatively, you can simply Google list of banned Instagram hashtags and just ensure that you aren't using any of the hashtags that are listed on that list. Because if you do want to increase your hashtag reach, then you want all of your 30 hashtags to be appropriate, active, not banned. Because they are banned, your simply just throwing away a hashtag and that's decreasing the chances of you Ranking. Very simple, very easy tip to understand, also pretty easy to rectify, but a little time consuming. I do understand. But it's something that you need to be aware of if you are new to hashtags. Again, this was probably a point that you probably had no idea about prior to me telling you this, you probably thought band hashtags never heard of that before, but now you know, so do not make that mistake. Now the next point I want to mention, and this is one that you may have heard of before, but you don't actually want to be using hashtags that are too large for the current amount of engagement that your content is receiving. And when I say large hashtags, I'm talking about hashtags that have over a million posts. On. Some posts have hundreds of millions. And the initial thoughts of people first using hashtags on their posts is that, oh, I want to use hashtags that are as large as possible because they have the most reach potential. Yeah, they have the most reach potential, but they are also the most competitive. And they are also being used by creators that have millions upon millions of followers. So the chances of you actually ranking on these large hashtags, these hashtags that have over a million, two hundred, hundreds of millions of posts is so, so slim. So I would just instantly say, Don't waste your hashtags using these, I would encourage you to use hashtags that are of a similar size to the amount of engagement you are getting if you are fairly new account, use hashtags that have less than a 100 thousand posts. If you have a solid, engaged audience, you could probably get away with using some larger hashtags between a hundred thousand and five hundred thousand posts. And I would may even just put one or two larger ones in there around the million mark, just in case. But if you are somebody that is using all 30 of your hashtags as the super-large hashtags, you are throwing away all of your potential reach because you have no chance in ranking whatsoever. And that's not me being harsh, it's just me being honest. So so please ensure that the hashtags you are using relate to the size of your account and the amount of engagement that your content commonly gets. Because that's going to increase your chances of ranking, which increases your chance of reaching more people, even though you may have initially for 0, if I use bigger hashtags, I'll get more reach, complete opposite. You want to use smaller hashtags to increase your chances of ranking to actually get the reach in the first place. Now the final tip I want to talk about, and this is another one that you may not have been aware of, but you actually want to look at the types of content that are ranking in that top position on the hashtags you are using. Because if you are hashtag has no correlation whatsoever to the content that commonly ranks in those top positions. The chances of you ranking in one of those top positions is very slim because the way the algorithm looks at content is gonna go, Oh, okay, What type of content currently ranks on this hashtag? What do people like to see? It's going to push other content that similar to this ranking content into those top spots also. So if every single post in that top spot is a carousel and it has interesting design, has a cover slide with Bo titles. That's the sort of thing you also want to go for if you are using those hashtags. If there are only selfies and you post one of those carousel similar to what I've just mentioned, then you're probably not going to rank because every single post that's covering the ranking and those top positions are selfies. So if you wanted to rank, you should have posted a selfie. If they're all landscape photography, you want to be posting a piece of landscape photography. You need to look at it specific for your niche. Now there could be a mixture, a mixture of selfies, a mixture of single image, post submit your carousels, you name it. So it may not be as clear, but take a look, you should be able to gauge what is ranking over and over again on the hashtags you're using. But it does play an important role. You do want to ensure that the content you are creating matches the content that is currently ranking. Because one, it's a really good indicator of what does work well. But two, it needs to highlight to the algorithm, Hey, my content similar to that is going to work well if you put it there, it's gonna keep people on the platform, which is what you want because keeping people on the platform is going to make Instagram more money. That's all the algorithm wants to do. So make sure the content you are creating is similar to the content is already ranking. And that's it. They are some very simple tips, but they are very important tips that you need to follow if you want to rank on Instagram hashtags. 41. The Mindset For Success: I wanted to talk more along the lines of mindset. Things that have to be taken into consideration every single day, not necessarily implemented into what you're doing, but just something you always have to be consciously aware of if you want to succeed on social media. So that's what I'm going to talk about, the mindset to succeed on social media. Because a lot of this stuff, I've learned the hard way. I didn't know it when I first started. And it's something I've had to work on and continue to work on every single day since the day I began. So the plants I mentioned maybe pretty eye-opening for a couple of you who may not think along those same lines, but you should switch that mindset. And if you switch that mindset to the points I'm about to mention, it could dramatically changed the outcome of your success on social media. So today I want to talk about three different mindset orientated subjects, which I hope will help you in your social media journey. So without any further ado, let's just dive straight into number 1. That being, everybody starts from 0. I started from 0, you started from 0. Gary Vee started from 0. Guang caught don't started from 0. You name it. Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos. They all started from 0, but at 1, they were in the exact same position as you or I. Nobody knew who they were. They didn't have a ton of money. Some may have had a ton of money. However, they were at nothing. So there's no reason as to why you can't achieve something like they have. You look up to your favorite creators, Gary. They may be, for example, a 7.8 million follower base seems pretty unachievable when you first start. But he's done it. He's shown is possible. One day he was at 0, he just took the time, implemented the strategies, pushed out the content, continue to work and got to that point. There is no reason as to why you can't do exactly the same. And when I say exactly the same, I don't mean copy his format copy has content because that won't work. He came up with his own style, his own voice, his own strategy, and put that into place and didn't stop. If you can do the same for you, your niche, what you talk about, your brand, your voice, message, and continue to do it every single day. You can, there is no one stopping you. It's just down to you and you only to put the work in. So when you look at these huge creators with millions upon millions of followers, or your favorite creator may only have a 100 thousand followers, which is still a lot. You may look at that and go mass impossible. There's no way I can do that. Why not? It only takes hard work, consistency, and dedication to actually achieve that goal. And that's the reason those people have done it. They have done what most won't, so that they can achieve what most Khan. So don't think from that perspective, always remembered that everybody started from 01. We all started in the same position. It's those that actually implement the strategies and do the work that end up achieving what they want to achieve. And you have to do the same. So anything is achievable. Don't put yourself down because you don't think you can reach that next big goal you want to achieve. You can, it's just down to you to put the work in and anyone can do it. Anyone can overtake you. You can overtake anyone. You could be bigger than Gary V. If you put the work in, It's not impossible. So just remember, everybody starts from 0. Now the second mindset shift I want you to think about is that you should never ever, ever compare your day one or day 10 to somebody else's day 40, 50, or a 100, 365. It's an unhealthy comparison. And this is one that I struggled with massively when I first started. So I completely understand what everybody else is thinking when they are comparing themselves to others. When you are creating all of this content, putting in all this hard work and watching all of these other creators grow at a much faster rate, make way more money than you. It's discouraging. And it causes a lot of people to actually stop putting in the work because it just seems pointless. You're putting all this work in and getting no results. However, you don't know or don't know when that person first started. They may have posted to 300 more posts, the new. However, you are comparing yourself to them when your only on day one or day 10 and very early on in your journey, and that is not worthwhile. The only healthy comparison you can ever make. And this is something like only do now after realizing just how damaging comparing ourselves to others is the only healthy comparison you can make is yourself today versus yourself yesterday or last week, yourself and your self in the past. Because if you've made progress from those two points, that is all that matters. You're on your own journey. It doesn't matter what anyone else is doing. Forget about them. This is you, you're on your own journey, achieving your own goals, setting out to achieve your own success. Forget everyone else. Doesn't matter how many followers they've got, how many likes they getting, how much money they're making. Because that's not you. Focus on you and you only when you stop caring about what others are doing, everything changes. Trust me. The minute I stopped comparing myself to others, one, I was much happier because it is upsetting comparing yourself to others when you're not achieving what they are, you don't feel like you're good enough. You feel as if you should be achieving more. Like you disappointing those around you simply because somebody else is got more followers knew what after crap, honestly is so, so upsetting. However, the mini I stopped, my happiness increased dramatically. My success increased dramatically because that all I was doing now was comparing myself to myself, understanding my floors, where I could improve, how I could make some little changes, see a little bit more success in the content that I was posting. That's what mattered. And that's how I was able to snowball further and further and further. So for example, if you're comparing yourself to me right now, but you are only two weeks into your journey. Don't. I've been doing this for years now. This podcast, for example, this is episode, I believe 180. I have created 180 podcast episodes, three episodes a week for over a year. If you're starting a podcast and you're using this podcast to learn how to build your social media accounts to grow yours. Don't compare your podcast of mine, just focus on yours. Focus on making your episodes better. Voice recordings, more interesting, the actual value you provide, far more valuable. The quality you name it, focus on that. Don't compare it to mine. Just focus on what you posted this week versus what you posted last week. I do all the time. I looked back at my first 2, 3, 4 podcasts and compare them to what I produce now. And the quality increase is insane. And that is the progress I should be looking at and be proud of, not compare myself to someone else and go, Oh, I'm catching up with them or, or Vicodin and further away from me, know what's happening. Don't think like that is going to discourage you a new we'll quit because it is disheartening and de-motivating and it's not going to help you get anywhere. So never, ever, ever compare yourself to others. And never compare your day 0 to somebody else's day 180 because they've put so much work in those 180 days. You don't know how much research they've done. You don't know how much practice they've put into their design, their copywriting, I put in hours, but somebody else may have put in more hours than me. So you cannot compare the amount of work because they've done more work than me, but I don't know that because I can see what they're doing every minute of every day. So it's not healthy comparison. So please, please stop comparing yourself to others. Now the final point that I wanted to mention, and this is another one that's really, really, really important and it's a common thing that a lot of people talk about, but so many people just don't take on board. And it's that this is a long term game. Patients is everything. When I first started, I knew and had connections with people that I thought were dedicated a year down the line. There are very, very few people that stuck around and is still producing content, growing narrower audience providing value to others. I don't know what happened to all of the people that stopped. I used to speak to people on a daily basis and then suddenly didn't speak to them again because they gave up. I now I don't know why they gave up if they didn't enjoy it, fair enough. You shouldn't continue to do something, you don't enjoy it because that's not sustainable. You won't keep things going for a long period of time. Others, they may have just got discouraged with their growth. They expected more of what they were doing. And they didn't give themselves long enough to get to the point and they wanted to achieve the beauty of social media is the, you don't know when you're going to get that next viral post or you don't know when you're suddenly going to start achieving that organic reach that you always wanted. It could be tomorrow, it could be next week. But if you don't continue to post, then you're never going to know. It could have been tomorrow that you got that viral posts that changed everything for you. But you didn't post because you gave up and we're stuck on, oh, sad because I haven't grown as many followers as I wanted to. Again, it's just a load of rubbish. You have to keep consistent. You have to see this as a long-term game. When you go in, I think I'm going to do this for the next two to three years. I'm going to give it a solid, solid effort. There hasn't worked off to that amount of time. You should probably look at what you've done and gone. Okay. This didn't work. Maybe I should try something else. You're only going to try something for two to three weeks. And at the end of the three weeks go, Oh, I should have had 5000 followers by this point. Let's just unreasonable. Especially if you're not putting the amount of work in the others are pulling in. Don't set out on a journey to achieve that follow ago that will come naturally when you put in the work and provide the value. Do it because you love it, do it because you want to do it and do it with the mindset of you have to be patient and it could take two to three years to get to the point you want to achieve, not two to three months. Because when you have that long-term mindset is far more sustainable. You won't get discouraged on the day-to-day fluctuations in the amount of engagement and followers you have. You see it from a long-term perspective and you see the growth over time and how far you've come. If I had started this podcast and after three weeks, looked at the amount of plays I was getting, after irony posting nine episodes, I would have stopped. But I knew that podcasting was incredibly, incredibly difficult. I knew that growing an audience on a podcast was hard and after nine episodes, there was almost no chance of succeeding whatsoever. However, now, over a year down the line and 180 episode hours of recording, hours of editing, hours of research to actually produce these episodes for you. I'm not ranking in the Charles. I've got a solid fanbase. I get reviews from people praising me for what I'm producing and it's so some encouraging. But if I hadn't continued and seen this long-term and continue to pump out these episodes three times a week. I would never have got to this point. It's a long-term game and I'm still looking long term. I've barely scratched the surface with what I'm doing. I'm only a year in I could be doing this for the next five, 10, 15, 20 years. Who knows something else might come up and I might change directions. But that's just all a part of the plan. So you've gotta just take every day as it comes. Think of it long-term. Don't think short-term because long-term is sustainable and you won't get discouraged from the short-term fluctuations in what you're doing day-to-day. So they are the mindset shifts I want you to consider. That is the mindset I want you to have. And that is something that I have been working on and continue to work on every single day is a process you can't so I need to switch like that. You have to take it into account if they take it in your stride and work on it. And that is when everything changes. 42. Course Conclusion & Class Project: Now that does wrap up this skill share class, and I really do hope you enjoy it if you are a new student to this course, I did want to mention that I will be consistently adding modules to this class. So I strongly recommend that every now and again, you do come back to check in to see that whether there is anything new that I have added. But I hope now you have all the knowledge you need to get out there and start growing your audience on Instagram. But now it is time for your project. And I want to set you out on a challenge using the knowledge you have learned in today's class, I want you to go out there and begin your profile, or perhaps revamp your profile if you already have one. And then I want you to set out on a 90-day content challenge. I want you to post every single day for 90 days. Now if you're new to Instagram, I want you to take that screenshot of your profile on day 0, day 30, day 60, day 90 so that everybody can see your progress. You're out those 90 days. If you have already got a page, I want you to show what it is now, how you've revamped it. And the same 30, 60, and 90 days progress pictures. Once the 90 days is up, please put them in an image and a PDF. You name it and upload it in that project section of the Skillshare class so that you can show everybody else just how well you have done over the course of the 90 day challenge. But if you did enjoy today's Skillshare class, I did just want to mention that I am the host of the podcast, social media marketing school. And it is a podcast where there is over 180 episodes as of recording this class, which includes lessons on all things social media marketing and sale was actually getting clients from the following that you have built on your various social media platforms. So be sure to check it out. It is on pretty much any podcast platform. So you can either find that by simply typing in social media marketing school or heading over to my Skillshare profile and you will find a link there. But if you've got any questions with regards to anything I have mentioned, please leave them as a discussion point in this class or you can reach out to me on Instagram. My handle is the marketing. Ethan, just send me a DM and I'll make sure I get back to you no matter what. But I just want to finish off by saying if you have made it to this point in the class, thank you so, so much for tuning in and I hope to see you in my other classes.