SNM088: 12 Ways To Grow Your Instagram Army

speaker 0:   0:00
growing her instagram following from zero toe a massive army organically on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by thrive themes, blazingly fast work press templates and plug ins. Bill to get more traffic, more subscribers, more clients and more customers to you To find out how thrive themes concern your blogger Web site into a money making work of art, go to serve no master dot com Backslash Drive Themes Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast, where you'll learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. Instagram is becoming more and more one of the stronger social media networks, and we've been talking about several platforms recently, and I kind of want to spend time talking about each different social media platform in ways you can grow in them to find the right one that fits what you're doing. Instagram is all about hosting pictures, and it's where people post pictures of their food or people post pictures of them in different outfits. And if you have followed some of the really strong brands on their people, often really good looking. People post pictures of their favorite yoga clothes and get paid massive amounts of money. They get paid massive amounts of money to advertise different diet teas and stuff like that. So Maura and Maur Instagram is becoming heavily monetized, and one of the new features they've been releasing recently is the ability to tag or create Bible products and photos. What that means is you can show a picture of you wearing like your favorite outfit and then, if they touch the shoes on the outfit, takes him right to ABI button so you can actually monetize your pictures much more easily now. And it's very interesting now. They haven't launched it to everyone yet, right? There's just certain brands like Kate Spade and J Crew, where you could do this, but it shows that Instagram is very aware that people are monetizing. I think they want to get in on that cause right now, one of the big ways people monetize is they simply sell a picture. So if you have a massive following, you get paid 25 or $50,000 to take a picture next to someone's product, because millions of people will see it. So it's becoming this really interesting platform, and there's a lot of things you can do with it. And in fact, one of the reasons instagrams on my mind. I bought this piece of software last week that lets you organize your instagram stuff from your computer so I'm gonna be growing on Instagram more and more. I just set up my new Snapchat profile this week. Instagram of Happy Weil. Ich haven't done a lot with it because I don't always remember when to take pictures and stuff. But I'm gonna get better and better at that. I'm trying to move into some really cool new things and 2017 it's gonna be really growing my social media presence and kind of expanding into that area now that the block and the podcast are so strong. So I want to take some time to talk about some my strategies for how I'm gonna begin building my instagram following in ways that you could do the same thing. And, of course, the first step, the very easiest thing you can do is use your other platforms. And this means if you have a mailing list if you have a Facebook page, if you have Facebook friends, if you have a blawg. If you have Twitter in all of those places, let people know. Hey, I'm on instagram now. Most people have a primary social media platform, so there are people who only use Facebook, but they're still on Twitter a little bit, and there's people that are on Facebook because they need to be. But really, Twitter's their primary, so you might have people that are following you, but it's not on their favorite platform, so that maybe people following on Twitter, but they'd rather before you on instagram. And this is a way to get that first little boost, and what you can do is post a picture of your instagram profile on Facebook and just have a link or just post a link, you know, minus instagram dot com. Backslash serve no master. Very simple. Some of the other things you can d'oh when you're trying todo discover ability. You know, we're very familiar with tags from Twitter, right? We see tags all the time. One of the things that's interesting is that emojis are kind of exploding right now. And the more emojis you have, the more attention you get their people. And this is so interesting because Instagram is trying to be ahead of the curve and one of things you can search on Instagram Instead of just searching Hashtags. You could actually search emojis so you could church by the little image. You know, whether it's a little person dancing, a little person crying or a little glass of wine, and people will search by those things. So you know, whatever industry you're in, the more you add those emojis or whatever you're doing. If you're fashion blogger, if you're doing a lot about shoes, then you want to use shoe. Much is a lot as interesting as that ISS. It's a really great way to start getting discovered. It's really about creating a presence and following all the rules. You know, the people that have the biggest fallings. If you look at any of the big Instagram channels, and it's almost always beautiful people or fitness people and stuff. You'll notice that in their posts they always have, like 20 hashtags, seven ATS and 20 emojis. There's a reason they're doing that and that it works. So adding that extra stuff, adding, those searchable things will really help you get discovered. Something else it's very important is to have a theme or have a consistency. So if you post pictures of cars then shoes than hats than a spaceship that a rainbow and yours posting random, random images, people won't follow you with strongly. People like to follow a theme. So if your theme is yoga than you want to post all yoga photos, there's that company frustrated post of different bikini picture every single day. That's their business model. You want to just follow a very simple theme of consistency so that people know what they're gonna get. The Maur you establish your brand, the better things are, and brand building is very important. So I often see people with really small businesses that are really worried about doing things that would damage their brand, and I don't want to send you in that direction, brand building is more about being consistent across platforms. So in all of my different platforms, I'm serving a master. I think on Twitter it served No Jonathan conserving master. Someone bought 20 years ago did nothing with it. It's a dead account, but otherwise I have this consistency. And if you Google serve no master, you know it's all the listing on the first page or all about me. They're all about books I've written. They're all about my block or this and that different presences in my Facebook page. That consistency of message and naming is part of brand building, and it's just about making it easy for people to know what they're gonna get. So it's not as much about brand protection as it is about helping people to know where they're gonna get. And so, as I build my instagram presence out and think about how I'm gonna do things, a lot of my pictures will be heavily about I little living and traveling, and more and more. That would be what a lot of my instagram is, because that's what I can take pictures of Who wants to watch me take pictures of just inside my office. It's not exciting. So I've been thinking about how I'm gonna d'oh! And part of that is to always crop your images in same way. Always have them have a similar look. You may have noticed that all of my block posts now all the new ones, especially I'm still finishing the back catalog. They all have the same size. They're all this specific size, which is like 12 or three by 406 100 exact size. That's the easiest sized for Cheryl across social media platforms. I did a bunch of research, and they said this is the best size to use to make it easier to share this image on different places. So all of that banner images are the same size on my website for a reason, and they all have the same style of text. That specific font that I use is part of my branding within the website. You know, I'd use different funds on Amazon, but anything on the Web site on my products use that same font for the product names, so it creates a little bit of consistency. It's very tempting to use a different font every time you don't want to do that. So however, you're gonna draw text on your photos for Instagram. However, you wanna add those other layers of information maintaining consistency so people can tell when they're looking at one of your images and that will help you build out your following. I mentioned this before, right? Hashtags air so powerful and what's cool? Is there some tools? There's this really cool called hash tag. If I that will help you find the best hashtag sad your images. So I with everything I post, add the hashtags serve no master whether posting on Twitter and Sir Graham anywhere else That's my hashtag right And some people actually use the hashtag that have nothing to do with me. Okay, if you do a search for certain, Mr sometimes just find a couple of random post. But mostly it's me and what I do there is critic consistency So someone wants to follow me. They could type of that hashtag and find my messages anywhere. However, for someone to find me, that tag is worthless because unless someone already knows me, they would never type that in. So you want to use hashtags that are very valuable and relate to your business. So you goto hash tag if I And in fact I'm gonna load up hash tag if I right now and let's do a real time search, we can kind of see what happens when we type something in. And what's cool is it tells you the all time top 10 hashtags related to something so I can type in, for example, author as a tag I want to search, and it would give me what the top 10 hashtags related to being an author, and I can see what's very interesting. Some of these are really good am reading I r T G I N one, which is actually a hashtag I just heard about recently For authors, that's actually really strong hashtag and reading is a great one. So people talk about what they're reading, and writing is for authors entrepreneurs here I thought I would see a nano ni mo hashtag because that's one of the popular ones, but so that's what you could do is whatever your area you're in, you could just type in your primary hashtag and I'll show you the 10 best ones related to it. So you really capture a wider audience. So searching and finding that right audience, for example, if you were doing yoga, it would tell you yoga pants, fitness, health, Yogi are all really strong. And by adding these extra hashtags, you'll capture more of an audience. More people will find you organically because people really do often search my hashtag when I go on Instagram. Actually, I searched my hashtag two I go, This is what I'm interested in seeing stuff about. You can also connect with your audience and you want to be interactive. I always want to do better. I wish I was more and more interactive with every member of my audience. I do reply to every e mail and I'm trying to expand more and more platforms and I'm actually working on a new idea. I'm always working on new content delivery ideas I'm working on. I'll tell you this right now, isn't sure if I was gonna mention it just starting yesterday, I started working on a magazine. I'm gonna put out serve no master magazine. I don't know that I could do it every month because I create so much contents will be 20 podcast episodes a month, doesn't block post two products. Amazon Book every month, and doing a magazine every month might be too much. So I think I'll just start off doing like, four issues a year as I build up the magazine. But I started working on this digital platform, But one of the things that's important when you're designing your content is finding out what your audience wants. And so the more you interact with your audience, the better. And the easiest way to do that is to simply see what they respond to so you can look at which of your posts. And whichever Instagram stories got the most shares the most likes the most followers, so you can see. Oh, this is what's the most interesting part of my audience. You can grow your audience simply by falling what people are doing. Every time you post something new, you want to give them reasons to follow you, and you want to show them that you're listening. For example, if you're doing a serious of post or your poster all about golden retrievers, right, you're all about you picked a dog breed. That's what you're really growing on and That's a strong thing. You might discover that posts of dogs sleeping get a lot more shares than post of dogs playing. So that's what the content people like. More more. It might be in the other ways around one of the other things you can dio as you listen to your audience and giving them what you want. You can also find other people that are doing similar things to you. So maybe you find other people that are doing going a retriever stuff or other breeds, and you do a share for share all share one of your post and you share one of mine, and you can do, ah, really cool exchange that way. And that's a way for you, each to double your audience. And what will happen is if let's say I had $50,000 you have 50,000 and we swap, we're gonna end up. We might both end up with 100,000 followers. We might end up with $75,000 each, but aren't total number of engaged followers will go up because now I have access to that group of 100,000 people, but the people that are really interested in My message will be following me, and you might lose some of the people that were following you, but they weren't as interested in you. You're actually dialing in and getting a more connected, more specific audience. My audience is very, very specific people that follow me. And if you're someone, listen this year, Ah, follow me or tribe member are very into me. I have a very strong, high strength bond with my following because it's very much a two way street. I respond to every e mail again. I'm constantly sending people advice and trying to answer his questions, whether they bought something or not. I try to be there for people that follow me, and that strength of connection means that I have a very strong falling, but not 100% of the people who listen to this podcast or who read my blogger that into me. So there's people that are super engaged early adopters, the really big fans, and that's a percentage of my audience. But if I do in exchange the people that were only mildly interested in, they'll find a voice that's better for them. So it's a win all around. I'd rather you find the best voice for you. It's not me that I definitely want to help you find it. So, doing what? His exchanges can really help you to swap and get a great fall and get more engaged following and also get access to new people. I'm a big fan of running contest, you know, I use gleam mentioned gleam before green dot io. It's a really cool contest software. I've used it before, and you could run specific contests for different platforms. You can run, ah pure instagram contest, share this image or do this hashtag and when points and cynical prize the power of contests. And I don't talk to him a contest because they work for every every social media platform, running contests always work. It's kind of like a go to answer because it's so effective. But beyond that, going into our next is make sure that your profile is really dialed in, and I don't want to give you universal rules for how to do your profile, because it's different for everyone. What I recommend you do is look att. 5 to 10 people that are doing what you want to do but doing it better and then create a profile that's similar to theirs. That's my approach to everything. My real secret. The reason people think I'm such a genius is that I just always reverse engineer. I look at what people are doing well and I copy it. I look what people want and I do something that they want to give people what they want. Those are my two main philosophy. So we've already said Give me what they want by looking at which of your posts and shares they respond to the most now for creating your biography, creating your image, all of that stuff, that message. You simply look at what someone else is doing better than you, and then you do something similar. You can then take from there and create your own ideas. But that's kind of how you begin. The next thing you could D'oh! It's amazing to me. It's so fascinating to me how people are obsessed with sharing quotes. They don't understand. So what? You can do really, really well and do really well with IHS. Take a picture of someone and put it there. Quote next to them this works unbelievably well. Last year for a while, every single girl on social media was retweeting. These Marilyn Monroe quotes, you know, and it's like I get that she was a figure, but, hey, I wouldn't do it. James Dean quote. Why would you quote someone who died so young? Sure, they said cool things. But people often only don't have to quote, you know, people don't know that the full quote of people who fail to learn history are doomed to repeat it. Most people don't know what that quote actually about. They don't know the sentence before the sentence after, so they misquoted all the time. And I've even seen situations where people quote something and they don't know who they're quoting, For example, classic quotas. In order to build the future, you must tear asunder the past. I've seen someone passed that quote around, not realizing it's a Hitler quote. So it's amazing that as long as it sounds, quot people love it. Now. One of the things you may have noticed as I am building out and expanding kind of doing some new things trying to grow my business in new ways is that I include a treatable or like a click to tweet on all of my block posts and podcast episodes. Now you click a little button, it sends a tweet up. The reason I do that is because it's a quote, and I know that people like quotes and you can create quotes to have a certain cannons to them that quotes sound like quotes, don't they? And sometimes quotes are quite short, you know, and sometimes they're quite long. Sometimes they just want to hear half a sentence, and sometimes we can get away with three or four words. But sometimes people want to see a nice little paragraph, and it's interesting. I'm always researching quotes, actually research, quotes, a lot four different projects I work on. If you've read, serve no master. You may have noticed that each section starts with a quote from someone historical, And what I found is that when I research quotes, it often comes up with masses of images, So what you can do is become someone who does. Lots of inspirational quotes are lots of quotes in your area. You know, if you're doing yoga, you could just quote different yoga instructors from different books. Most people don't know how to find a quote that's not in a quote list. People can quote two or three sentences of Martin Luther King, but they can't go. The rest of what he says they can't do anything else from any was other books. Most people don't even know that he wrote books. Okay. Most people don't know that he was famous for writing hundreds of letters. People haven't read a lot of those materials. They just know that I have a dream speech, which was a variation on a message, he'd said. Before most of it. That speech wasn't completely original. That was in the first time you said that message. But people don't know that. So people don't know. You know, if you have a great quote, of course you'd say multiple times, right so they don't know how to go and read a book and grab quote. So every time you read a great book and see a great quote, write it down, saving in a text file, and then when the time comes and you're throwing up images, you can do more on one instagram with that and really build a following you can do whatever you're in, whatever you're niches. You know, you could quote people talking about dogs. You can quote every professional wrestler with one of their quotes. There's tons of great quotes from personal wrestlers in the eighties when they used to do those The thing we're going to be talking on camera before the fight, that would be talking smack to each other. Very powerful. Now you may have noticed that I'm talking about quotes longer than almost anything else on this page. That's because this is the most effective technique, and it's the easiest. Most people just copy each other's quotes, but if you take a little time and get a little bit creative and find cool quotes, then you could do amazing things. And sometimes we remember things wrong. My favorite quote for a long time because it was so overly dramatic from Lord of Illusions, I remembered wrong. I always thought that the end of the movie, the bad guy says death is agony. Living is worse. But then one time I looked at the script and that's not the line and it happens, you know, we hear things wrong and they become better quotes so you can create your own quotes because it turns out what you heard was something you imagined. It turns out death is agony. Living is worse is something that I invented. It's similar to what the line is in the movie, but it's much better than the line in the movie. I used to listen to ST Matthews Band Song. I always thought he was saying You might die tonight and I was like, Whoa, that's intense to say the concert from people driving home, But it's the lines actually might die trying. Sometimes we here a line wrong, but we hear batter, and that's how you can generate your own quotes. We know what a good quote should feel like. So more and more with Instagram just too graphic quotes. And another thing you could do is push for responses. Ask a question asked for shares. Seo share. If you believe in this, you know, share. If you love national parks and people will take actions. The thing about Internet marketing, all marketing. One of the first things you learn is that people are sheep in the sense that if you don't tell people what to do, they'll do nothing. If you tell people to do three things, they'll do nothing. But if you just give people one task, then they respond to it and it's called a call to action, and it's a critical part of any business. That's why every single button on every website that's selling anything says Add to cart or by now those are orders. If I say, do you add to cart? That's a command. So we're so used to seeing them. We don't realize that there's embedded cost, actions and everything thing we see online saying to people, Hey, what do you think about this? Leave your comments below. Hey, respond with your favorite image of you with your dog. Show me a picture of your favorite dog, your dog playing with its favorite toy. When you ask for people to do stuff, they'll take action. And what's great is when people tagger images and you can say you can tack two different followers or you could do things like that and you can message to specific people. Then they'll share with their audience. Oftentimes, that's why group photos do so what? You've got you with three other people in your industry than they share their following you show with your falling. It's a great way to capture more and more of your audience. And of course, there's more and more tools that are coming out to help you. Booster. Engage on Instagram, and I'll post maybe some links below this episode to some of the cool things that are out there. But they are. They're always changing, and I'm just testing out some new software. But what some of the things you can look at, for example, is when you're designing your images and you want to add like quotes to them, you could play around with tools like Can Va and other things like that that don't really, you know, require design skills. I happen to use affinity photo For all of my graphic editing, I moved away from Voter shop 99%. Body Shop is awesome, but it's massively more expensive, and I find that affinity is very fast and very effective for me. So that's why I'm doing all my graphic design now. But there's lots and lots of different tools you can use now for your graphics and help you with your marketing as well that will help you things and some of those tools, for example, just to give you a little bonus on the back end of this episode. For examples like mentor dot io, what this does is it analyzes everything that's happening. All analyzes your audience in your engagement to show you which of your best posts or which of your best hash tags. Which ones are working for you. There are some tools as well to help you dial in. When's the best time for you to post on? One of the cool things is that Mentor will give you a calendar and say, Here's the Post You did. They got the most engagement. You'll find it. Oh, it turns out Monday is the best day for me. I also recommend creating a calendar. However you're gonna do it. I'm testing a new piece of software. I think it's called Grum that will let me counter my post in advance because most of the auto posting programs don't work very well because you have to manually do them Anyways. They just remind you. So the more you schedule your stuff and there's some other tools is while you can look at, like Schedule Graham that help youto post your stuff and plan your calendar out. I'm still playing around with these more and more and more. There is another cool tool called Only Pulled, which lets you look at your competitors instagram posts, and you can see what they're most popular. Posts are what they're kind of doing. The more you use competitive intelligence, the easier it is to succeed. Like I said, I like to look at what other people are doing. So those are just a couple of tools that I'm playing around with a nut in love with any of them quite yet, because just like you are, I'm moving into Instagram. Yes, I have a small instagram presence. I think I have some followers on there, but not very active. It is hard for me as a one man band, too. In addition to creating all this podcast episodes products books. Now I'm dabbling with a magazine and also do tons and tons of social media. But I'm trying to get more more efficient by using the correct tools to make things easy, and when taking, when you just taking pictures, thrown a quote on it doing thrown out of hash tags. It's not that hard. It's only if we let it become overwhelming that it could become a little bit too much. But I'm also testing really, really cool Twitter tool that hopefully, I'll be able to talk to you about more and more a little bit of while on a couple later episodes. Right now that tools much more expensive. So I needed to be flawless before I talk about it. I don't want to talk to you about $1000 tool unless it's really earning back the cost of its investment. But most these other things. I'm talking about our free. You're like $20 so they're not crazy. Expensive tools. Those are some of the things that you could do to build up an organically grow. A massive, rabid, powerful instagram following. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race Hit over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts. Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's bestseller. Serve No, master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. Thank you for listening to the serve. No master podcast. Make sure to subscribe so that together we can achieve true freedom.