You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy? Just use Indeed. Stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites. With Indeed sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates, so you can reach the people you want faster. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed have forty
five percent more applications than non sponsored jobs. Don't wait any longer, speed up your hiring right now with Indeed, and listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollars sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed dot com slash pod Katz thirteen. Just go to Indeed dot com slash pod katz thirteen right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need.
Earners, Listen up. When people all around the world first started going out protesting this summer, you'd hear it over and over. This time is different, But how and who are the people trying to make it different? And give us new podcast resistance posts, SAYI T John Thomas Jr. Brings us stories from the front lines of the movement for black lives, told by the generation fighting for the change. It's a show about people refusing to accept things as they are and how we can make sure this time
really is different. Resistance is out now, follow and listen for free on Spotify.
My graduates from my school being forced back.
Drop Mike drop backdrop.
Before we even talk about growing social media, I want to make this completely, you know, just put it out there. You don't have to go to your social media if you don't want to, right, It's not like something that a lot of time people feel pressured by the numbers of followers that they have. It doesn't matter, like everybody doesn't have to have a million followers, like you know, I know plenty of millionaires that have one hundred followers, right.
I know plenty of people that are dead broke that have three million followers. Happens all the time. True, But but social media can be used as a very powerful marketing tool. So as an entrepreneur, as a small business person, as anybody, a musician, whatever, if you you want to you know, market yourself, social media is a great way to actually do that, right, So we'll talk about growing
a social media presence. I'll talk about Instagram because that's what I know, right, That's that's my thing the world. So all right, so I'll tell the backstory on this. So they started two years ago, right. I was in California with my my man Mike. I was there, Yeah, you were there, left left left. He left the day he left, like two days early. So we were there
for my birthday and like the last two days. When Troy left, we sat in a hotel room for like ten hours and we mapped out a strategy for me to grow on Instagram, right, because I was saying, like, you know, I want to I want to be like a financial guy on Instagram, but I only know how to go about it. But I feel like there was a need for it in the marketplace. So at the time, I had a private page to have five hundred followers. So we we talked about, Okay, different strategies that you
can take. Right. So first thing that we did was figure out exactly like what my goals were. Right. So the first the first goal was to get five thousand followers, right, But we had history in growing an Instagram page prior to that. We talked about a little bit fashion. Yeah, we never We never put that out though. So fashion Wave is a It was a fashion blog that we started in twenty twelve, right because in twenty twelve I saw the direction that Instagram was going in. I like
to call myself a visionary. I kind of saw it happened before it happened. So what happened is that, humbly speaking, I agree, let's go for it. I used to follow a page. I still do follow the page called fashion. What was the name of it?
Oh man, I was gonna say fashion bomb, but it's not. That's not her.
Yeah, it was a fashion page and most story is short. It's like a look book, right. But what I realized in twenty twelve was that they were putting like it would be a woman when it dressed, but then in the caption it would say where to get the dress from. So it was an ad but it was camouflaged as a regular post. Most people didn't realize what was going on. This is before it sponsored that. But I realized right away. I'm like, oh, this is brilliant, Like, this is a
way where you can reach millions of people online. It's much cheaper. I was assuming for people to advertise on her Instagram page as opposed to go to like a magazine for TV, and it's much more effective.
Right, Well, the funny thing is is to not to just hop in that real quick and we'll probably maybe go into the genesis of all this. But I had I had a clothing company for a long time before any of this. And I remember during the Instagram you know days of like the twenty twelves and up where yeah, that was the lick, like that was you know, you would go in there and you'd be like, oh, like this is you know, that was the algorithms kicked in
and all the money. But that was a period of time where it was really like, oh, I can just put this out here, and you know, even if I only have three thousand people seeing, all three thousand of them are seeing, and I put my link in and we'll just go from there. I mean that, you know, that changed. That was the that was the way, that was the method.
We sat here. It was in this house. We sat here and we were downstairs and you're like, yo, this is crazy, Like you can't I'll never forget you, Like yo, print is dead. Nobody anymore is dead. Said, this is the new wave right here.
That's the fact that twenty two our set prints over. This is this is this is what it is.
Right.
I'm like, we got we gotta do this. So we started a fashion blog called fashion fashion Way, fashion Wave, fashion Way, two of these. Yeah, so we had the fashion wave right, and we built fashion Wave to like ten thousand followers and we got to thirteen. Yeah, it was pretty sizable. How we built fashion Wave was we did that. We kind of cheated on that. So this, yeah, it's full transparency. So there's there's websites and his apps
where you can actually like other people's pictures. Yeah, and so the theory is that you liked enough pictures, then people see that you liked it, they'll look on your page, and then if your page is decent, then they'll fall turn around.
It actually worked Instagram. I can't reiterate this enough. Before the algorithm kicked in, if you were any kind of like, you know, at any kind of savvy on Instagram, like it was so much easier to grow following or so much easier to monetize it. Like it was like my inbendingly easy compared to.
Me, and it was so okay so we were doing that and it was growing at a pretty fast rate, right, and then we actually even paid for a shout out the shot out page. The shoutout page is too, so we paid for a shoutout that helped us, Like we paid for it was a shoutout page, like eight hundred thousand they shouted us out, and they off that shoutout. We got like two thousand followers.
Yeah, and it's.
Crazy, oh for sure.
Yeah, it's so phone stopped working.
It turn off after like a couple of months. Like we like I said, we got up to around twelve thousand followers. Now this is this is a cautionary tale though, so there's wait, so that's the this is the first experience with me growing a page, us growing a page, right. The only thing that we didn't do. That's another thing that you can do is you follow people and then
you unfollow this app. This apps for that also. Now all of those ways work, shot pay for shoutouts, paid to like other people's pictures, paid to an app to follow some body, then unfollow them. Although they actually all work, but they're not effective because what happens is that you get followers, but they're ghost followers. Right, So what happens is that now they're not engaged. So you have ten thousand followers, but you might be getting fifty lights on your picture.
Yeah, oh you get you have like fifty thousand followers and there's like two comments.
Yeah, it's just crazy. It's not it's not it's not effective. It's a fast way to grow up page, but it's not effective. Right. So learning from that experience, fast forward like five years. When I was starting my page, I said, I don't want to do it that way. I want to do it organically. So I did it organically. And so the first thing I did was I talked to Valencia. She was a gift show. Yeah, so val she had a page when she had one hundred and sixty thousand,
thousands followers something like that. She was She's mastered social media. So the first thing that she told me was, look what everybody else in your industry is doing, and do the complete opposite. The other way, do the complete opposite.
Right.
I didn't fully understand her first. It took me a while, but now I definitely understand that. So, right, A lot of it for me was trial and error. Right, So I was posting the first thing you have to do is post very consistently on Instagram. That's that's the biggest That's the number one thing you got ask the content. That's that's the first thing that will knock out ninety percent of the people right away. They're not consistent. It sounds like it's easy, but it's not. It's not not.
So that's the first thing you have to do is post content, right. The next thing you have to do is actually figure out what kind of content you're gonna post and how is it different from everything else, and how is it going to be intriguing to the to the audience. Right. So, like for me personally, it took me a while to figure that out because at first I was just making like random selfie videos about finance
and stuff like that. But even for me, it was kind of boring and it got some traction, but it was boring. But as I was doing that, I was still growing the page. It wasn't grown a lot, but it was growing, right. It would go from like a thousand two thousand three because I was just putting out constant content.
You had clips of the classrooms.
Yeah, I was pointing out classrooms when I was teaching financial literacy and stuff like that, and you know it was it was starting to pick up. But when I when my page really took off is when I completely rechanged it. So the first thing that Val told me to do was go look on your page and eliminate anything that is unrelated to what you're doing. So she told me that, like your Instagram page, if somebody just looks at it for the first time without reading your bio,
they should be able to tell what you actually do. Right, a lot of times people have a lot of random different things on your Instagram page and you don't know what the person does, right, specialization exactly.
How to get real art like white, white, black.
Exactly. So that's that's one of the first That's the first thing that I did was I eliminated all of the things on my Instagram page that wasn't really related to what I wanted the public to see in that regards, right. The next thing I did was I started to dig deeper and offer more value than almost anybody else I would see it on Instagram. So I found my niche in sports and entertainment, but the financial backstories on it, right.
So what I would do is I would research articles about different you know, topics, trending topics, and I would write I became like kind of a journalist, right, Like I would write like in depth, three paragraph write ups on it. And people really found that intriguing.
Right, that did not have to cut you off. But like that was the part. I was like, wait, they didn't know these stories. I'm like, like you saw that post. I'm like, yeah, they didn't know. And when we saw the feedback, it was like.
It was probably just your conversations. You're like, oh, this is what we know.
And then and then some of them he posted, I'm like, wait, I didn't know that right now you got something.
Yeah, So that and then I also fixed. So I'm learning as I'm going, right, So I said, okay, I found a nice niche with this. Then I also figured out that people like headlines, right, So I kind of as to the clickbait thing. Right, So in all my articles that I was writing, I use the app where I actually put the caption on it. So the caption is very important, right this. I can't stress this enough.
The caption. If you're writing something, the caption is extremely important because that's what's going to get people's attention.
Right.
So I'll see an article. Now you have to be creative with this. You can't. I can't tell somebody how to actually make a caption that's going to get people interested. But you have to think, right, use your brain short, you don't. People don't like to read. This is something that is extremely important. People don't like to read. So the least amount of words that you can use the better, even with write ups. Right. This is something that Valve taught me. Also, At first, I was writing very long
write ups. Anything more than three paragraphs, in my opinion, is too long. Even three poographs might be too long, but it might not be as long as it's intriguing. The key is to make it very detailed in a short amount of time. This is why the Instagram sixty second videos are perfect, because they say the average person's attention stand is like ten seconds or something. You lose
people's attention very quickly. Right, So as I'm doing that, I figure I figured out how to capture people's attention by writing about sports entertainment. I use sports and entertainment because it's like a trojan horse, right. I know that people are interested in sports and entertainment pop culture more than anything else So if I'm a regular finance guy, I could talk about finance. I know that ninety percent
of people don't care about that. But if I can talk about Alan Iverson and then talk about taxes, or if I can talk about Lebron Jain is entire and with entrepreneurship, nine times out of tend people are more likely to click on that or watch that video as opposed to something.
That is built in, like the medicines in the candy.
Exactly.
I mean that's just the way any of it works. You know, you gotta in order to give them what they need, you gotta kind of them what they want.
It works, yeah, exactly. And sports entertainment come naturally for me because those are two things.
That I like, we argue about that that I love doing that.
I've been doing that my whole life, right, So that's why I use sports entertainment. So I say that to say, as far as somebody going to an Instagram page, you have to think outside the box. It's a finance page, but I use sports and entertainment, which are directly related to finance.
But it can be definitely is I mean it's a sports business, so.
Exactly, definitely is so Another thing with that is now you have to figure out timing to post. Timing and post is very important. I see people posting at one o'clock in the morning. You have to figure out the top times to post. So me personally, my schedule usually on average is like eleven o'clock in New York East. To stand in the time eleven o'clock in the morning, I'll have a post, maybe like a write up right
or like a picture or something like that. One I'll stretch it out three I'll do three hours right, so maybe like around one two o'clock midday, I'll post something else. I usually try to post videos at like five to six after people get off of work, because what I find is that a lot of times people work, it's hard for them to listen to videos while they're actually working. So I don't usually try to post videos. Sometimes I do, but most of the times I don't post videos during
the daytime. I post videos at night. Not too late at night, though, Like right when people get off six o'clock is prime time, six seven o'clock Eastern Standard time, it's prime time, and post videos. That's just what works for me. Everybody's different. That's what it works for me. Everything well calculated. No, you have to be extremely calculated. Also as far as the Instagram, you gotta treat Instagram like a job. So my sleeping pattern has been off for the last two years.
Yeah, this is this is yeah. No, yeah, it's a fact. No, it's a fact. I haven't had normal sleeping in two years. I told you that, man. Yeah, Like no, let me tell you. I can't tell you. So, like most people don't see this man, but like the earner leisure like really is a testament to what you're doing. So, like I know, like you're up till three in the morning most nights like this, this guy doesn't sleep like legit
does not sleep, is up all day works. So sometimes like we'll be talking and I'm like, yo, like wake up, man, Like right, he's either here like super dedicated here or he's like typing up things like and we could be doing anything, like we could be having a conversation or we could be at dinner and he's constantly doing it. So like my thing was like I'm watching him grow and this is a testament too that people should learn. Like I want to see my brother win. I want
to see him win. One hundred percent. So it's like, how can I make this a little bit easier for him? So I was like, you know what, you don't have to search anymore, right, anything I find I'm sitting were gonna get to page right right? You know what I'm just saying, like the testamentto what he's doing. Like legit. Like his mom came out to me and was like, Yo, listen, Troy, he gots to get some sleep. I'm like, yeah, I don't know if he knows how to anymore.
If someone isn't concerned a little bit, I don't know.
I don't know if he knows how to anymore, right, right, legit?
Because like I always say, when you really scrambling, there's no there's no work hours. That's the difference. See people talk about being an entrepreneur and having their own business and really, but you got to understand the average person. We're trained for a schedule as humans. We go to we start school, and from kidneergarten to college, we have a schedule of like eight o'clock in the morning to
like three o'clock in the afternoon. Even if you're in college, it's still kind of some schedule that you have to go through for classes, and then when you get a job, it's either nine to five, ten and six. Those are like usual hours jobs, right, So that's what we're trained to think. It's very different when you wake up at any time you want, you go to sleep anytime you want, and then you figure out the day as you go. You have to have a different type of mind and
do that, right. But if you aren entrepreneur, that's what it really is. So for me, there's no workours. So I have the financial planning business I do during the day, the Instagram social media I do during the day, but also I do a lot of that at night, so I work better at night. So what I do is that from like from like eleven o'clock to like three block in the morning, that's when I work, you know what I mean. So I'll research stuff, then I'll have all my posts ready for the next day. It's like
mail prep, right, I have it ready. So now okay, I have three posts already planned for the next day. So now we have two pages, and now I gotta have six posts planned for the next day that I know. I'm a post eleven, three and six, right. But then also with that you have to learn So I've seen a video with Nipsey Hustle before when he talked about in the early stages, he was his own engineer. He learned every part of the process. That's the same thing
with me. I learned every part of the process. As far as how to make a post. It's not that easy. So it's different apps that I learned how to use. So the first thing I learned how to do was edit videos. So this app called Splice. So when you see a video, it's like if you watch a movie right in sixty seconds, for like the podcast, when we put clips on Instagram, that sixty second clip might be from a three minute video. I got to cut out
the dead spaces. So a dead space is like this, like if I'm talking and then it's like five seconds of that little pregnant exactly five seconds means a lot for Instagram posts, right, so you got to cut that out. Or if I'm making a good point and then I just talk about some nonsense for a minute, but then I make another good point. Now I got to cut out that one minute, right, So and I learned how to do just by myself. I just it's not hard,
but that's the app twice. Also, another app that I use is vont Viant is the app that I put the captions on the videos. Yeah, so that's that's the app called vaught. Sometimes you want to speed up a video, so video Speeder is a is an app that I use to speed up videos. Right, It's like you can have like a a video might be a minute in ten seconds, but you want to make it a minute. You speed it up so it actually fits in a minute. That's another that's another useful app as well. Then there's
another app called Perfect Video. Perfect Video allows you to add music and then it does some other stuff. Right, So I say that to say that learning about apps, and this is why this conversation is valuable. Leading into apps is extremely important because you literally win in a day and age. Now where you can make you can teach yoursel how to make a movie. If you really are dedicated facts, dedicated enough facts, you don't have to pay anybody do anything.
University of YouTube is what it is.
I'm like, I'll tell you this episode is brought to you by P and C Bank. A lot of people think podcasts about work are boring, and sure they definitely can be, but understanding of professionals routine shows us how they achieve their success, little by little, day after day. It's like banking with P and C Bank. It might seem boring to safe plan and make calculated decisions with your bank, but keeping your money boring is what helps you live or more happily fulfilled life. P and C
Bank Brilliantly Boring since eighteen sixty five. Brilliantly Boring since eighteen sixty five is a service mark of the PNC Financial Service Group, Inc. P and C Bank National Association Member fd I. See erners, What's up? You ever walk into a small business and everything just works like The checkout is fast, the receipts are digital, tipping is a breeze, and you're out the door before the line even builds Odds are they're using Square. We love supporting businesses that
run on Square because it just feels seamless. Whether it's a local coffee shop, a vendor at a pop up market, or even one of our merch partners. Square makes it easy for them to take payments, manage inventory, and run their business with confidence, all from one simple system. If you're a business owner or even just thinking about launching something soon Square is hands down one of the best tools out there to help you start, run and grow.
It's not just about payments, it's about giving you time back so you can focus on what matters most ready. To see how Square can transform your business, visit Square dot com backslash go backslash eyl to learn more that Square dot com backslash, go backslash uyl. Don't wait, don't hesitate. Let's Square handle the back end so you can keep pushing your vision forward.
You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy? Just use Indeed stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites. With Indeed sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates, so you can reach the people you want faster. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed have
forty five percent more applications than non sponsored jobs. Don't wait any longer, speed up your hiring right now with Indeed, and listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollars sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed dot com. Slash pod Katz thirteen just go to indeed dot com slash pod Katz thirteen right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms and conditions applying Hiring Indeed is all you need.
You flat out, you know, because everything I'm gonna need about all of those everything I do. I mean, I handle all the social media and everything and all the content for quick Track, and I mean I just I'm Premiere Pro and I just do everything through there. But like I mean, I have people who have gone to you know, LA Academy of Film and have been like, how'd you do that? And I'm like, I just YouTube this.
Like what you're talking about?
Everything everything like there.
Is you know.
My thing is, especially with creating any content, you just have to be able to formulate the question you want answered because there's an app for that.
When they say there's app for that, there is. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's a fact. So then okay. So then also all right, so now we got to the content content. I can't struss this enough. The big one of the big mistakes that people make on social media is that they think quality is more important than content. It's not true. Content is more important in quality, right, What I mean by that is that you see a lot of people in their videos is it looks like Steven Spielberg music behind it,
and don't they're not talking about anything? Right, Our videos shot on the iPhone with a five ninety nine app that I use to write the caption on it. It's not the best quality. Hopefully we will we will improve our quality.
That's good too, though, because like the our audience gets to see us grow.
The thing about that is as well as you know some wise people once told me this, but once you invest in upping your quality, you can never reverse. You know, you can never go back to just getting off the iPhone and going to work. So you want to stay in there as long as you possibly can.
But yeah, yeah, that's true. And then also people care more about content that The example I always use is Bobby's murder, Right, That video was shot on an iPhone. Right, It was a catchy dance. He threw his hat in the air and never came back down. I literally looked up it never came back down. It was a good beat and just a good song, and it caught wildfire.
It wasn't even his by the way, fun fact.
It was, But I say that to say he didn't spend a million dollars on his video.
Didn't happen. I mean those fire exactly.
The people want what's authentic, they want what's real, and they want content. Content is more important. That's why we want to tell people all the time, like content content. It doesn't cost anything to pull your iPhone out and just start recording. Right, You're gonna figure it out as you go. But if you if you're waiting to like have the perfect lighting, have the perfect budget, you're always gonna be waiting because it's never nothing is ever going to be perfect. Right.
We find that, I mean, we know that it's part of the game, that it's part of the content.
Content is king, and you have to figure out content for yourself because nobody can tell you what kind of content you're gonna make, right. It got to be something that is unique and solely you. Right because even with me, like so when I started doing videos and then I started doing here's how like, I didn't see anybody else doing Here's how Nobody here's how like it would be like how to make a million dollars? Here's how You're on Instagram right now, you see a bunch of here's
how video. But that's that's dope though, because that's saying that people find value in it.
Right at first, it was like yo, I was like, yo, it's cool though, doing the impact.
With with how connected we all are. You haven't done anything until someone copy.
Yeah.
But the thing about it is that because I even see seeing in doing it, I saw seeing.
I got that, Yeah, that that would make me know, I'll be a little tight.
But the thing about it is that they can never duplicate your brain, so it's nothing for me to come up with a new idea at all. So that's why it's like it's not even because things move so quick on the internet anyway, right, So that's another thing too. You have to be you can never stay stagnant and you have to stay up up to speed. So like now I'm noticing that Instagram TV is getting more views than Instagram videos. I think Instagram is doing that on purpose.
So Instagram, this is something. This, This is not a conspiracy theory. Instagram has an algorithm, right, and they change their algorithm regularly. They change their algorithm regularly, and they also they they have all kinds of tricks in place to monitor and to restrict your growth if they feel.
They want you have to pay Zuckerberg.
It's the way it is.
That's how they that's how they want. I mean, if you're not hip to it, if you don't actually strategize and go through it and kind of jump through the hoop, if you try to play the same game too long, they'll be like, all right, sick.
You know, Mark Zuckerberg says, it happened to me. They become shadow band me twice. So if anybody is not familiar with shadow band, shadow band is when they limit the reach of your post without you actually knowing that they limit the reach of your posts. So what happens is that hashtags. Hashtags is also another great way to
grow your following. Hashtags does work. They do work, but you have to be careful with hashtags, right because with hashtags, So what I was doing before is that like copy and paste, Like I think you're allowed to put thirty hashtags on a post, right, but I will copy and paste and put it in the caption because that way nobody can see it. It's kind of tacky to me to put it in your post, right, but it works.
You can see the analytics on it and be like half of the people reached was reached through hashtags, right, But what happened is that if you use the same group of hashtags that copy and past the copy and paste, what happens is that now it alerts Instagram and they look at your account. They flag your account, right, so now they look at it like it might be spam. They shadow band. The first time I got shadow band, I didn't know what was going on. I just my
post just dropped dramatically as far as engagement. How I learned I got shadowed. How I knew I got shadow band is that so I put a hashtag like one hashtag like early lesia on a post, and then I searched that hashtag and my post wasn't on there. So that means that they like they took the hashtag is on there, but it's not showing public right right right. And then I googled what that meant, and then I found out that that shadow band shadow band works. It's
fourteen days to the exact moment. This is true because I tested it twice. It happened to me twice fourteen days to the exact moments. And now I don't even use hashtags at all, Yeah, hashtags.
Are dead and that like that's a huge component. They're not dead, but it's it's you gotta mind your you know, you gotta kind of be mindful.
Of you gotta gotta you gotta be very careful with hashtag. That's extremely important. Like I said, it's a great way to grow, but if you're using the same hashtags, you will get shadow band. So another thing I want to talk about is that a lot of times people are right, you're going into Instagram to monetage, right, It's important to know the numbers of monetization and what you're looking to do. So what I mean by that is that sometimes a page can have I'll give you an example. So I
know a Instagram model bartender type. She has like let's say millions of followers, right, Like, let's say three million followers. I know somebody else who is just the regular person who has one hundred and fifty thousand followers, right the hundred. The person who has one hundred and fifty thousand followers I know for a fact, is making more money on
Instagram than the three million dollar bartender. The reason why is that the three million follower bartender is limited in the post that she can monetize, right, It's like, how many companies are going to pay a bartender post? Like you're limited to lingerie tummy t's waistbands. Yeah, maybe fashion over if you're lucky, right, a very high get to it. Get to it. So now you have you have three
million followers, but it's hard to monetize that. Where the person with one hundred and twenty followers a clean page. So now they have major corporations, Macy's, Calvin Klein, all kinds of stuff like that that are paying. Their budget is way higher, Oh for thousands of dollars. Yeah, one thousand dollars for one Instagram post. Right, So that's something to keep in mind too because also on YouTube, a YouTube channel, a financial YouTube channel like ours, make sure
you subscribe to our YouTube. A financial YouTube channel could have let's say ten thousand follow ten thousand subscribers. That's more valuable than maybe even one hundred thousand followers to a page that's cursing, that has all kinds of stuff, right, because they're not gonna get ads. YouTube is very restrictive of who they give ads to they watch it. Even with our posts, we had we had one video with
Al Harrington when we talked about the cannabis industry. We didn't get ads on that video because of this cannabis.
The fact that the title had marijuana and it was enough.
Oh no, for sure.
I mean, I mean that's one of those examples where we're learning as we got.
Move fast and break things.
So when when you look at monetizing, so when I what I mean by that is that when you look to grow a page to monetize it, it's not always all about followers. It's about the content that you're putting out and the quality of you know your post and what you're doing. And also engagement is very important as well.
So don't always get caught up in numbers because your smaller amount of numbers can actually be very valuable if a you have strong engagement and b you have clean content or content that can be valuable to people that want to use your page as a as a advertisement. And also also I will stress the fact that you have to you have to think about long term game.
Right So what I mean by that is that people get in and that they want to make money in Instagram right away, it's obvious they get like three hundred followers, and they start trying to promote a seminar or come to my you know, online course. It's like, no, you don't. You don't even have a big enough platform.
Right.
You gotta give out samples first. You gotta give out samples first. Right, So it might take a year or two years of giving out free information, free host. You're growing your following. Now you can offer a paid product. It doesn't make sense to try to offer a paid product before you you've even established credibility. I see that all the time though. People are so thirsty for business. As soon as they get on Instagram. Two weeks later,
I see them promoting paid events. Those are never gonna work. It's never gonna work. You have to grow your following and then you get money on the back end. The back end is always more lucrative than the front. And I can't stress that enough. People need patience. It doesn't happen overnight. Patience is very key, extremely key. And the last thing, the last thing that I'll talk about with the Instagram growth is that we talked about the long game.
But also I cannot stress this enough. Either. You have to put in work. It sounds very sounds very easy. It's not. Social media is like any other job campaign that you're running. It takes time. It doesn't happen overnight. You have to sit down, figure out a strategy, figure out what works for you. Because everybody's different, right, you have to commit time into doing that. If you're not willing to commit time, maybe it's not for you. And
that's fine. Like I said, you don't have everybody doesn't have to grow a social media page.
Yeah, we got that was like a comment like somebody put in the comments when we would shouting out Mike, we shout out mic and it was like, well, if he has fifteen hundred, you have eight thousand, why then he do it for himself? And that was one of the things. It was just like, we don't he doesn't want to grow as past, right, We'd rather like if and our team is just like, yo, if the shot has this thing going, like, let's just support them.
Yeah.
So you know the funny thing is, and to piggyback off that point that I always think it's interesting because I've always really thought about like the disconnect between p people who want to grow their social media following and actually doing it. And I think it's funny because just because it's in an app they're looking for. You know, apps are mostly here to you know, automate to make things go faster in your life. So they think, like, oh, if I want to do this, there should be a
way to also automate that process. But that's not the case, you know, It's it's they don't really don't give it the proper respect of like, yeah, that dude who got you know, even a fifty thousand you know, sweat equity went into.
That and also to it, so a lot of times. So like earn a Lesia, right, So it took me two years to grow my personal page from five hundred thousand followers to right now I'm at eighty. But like, let's say, in January, I was at fifty thousand. So it took me two years to grow my personal page from zero pretty much to fifty. Earn a Lisia I started because I run the early Leisia page. I started Earning a Lesion in January. It took me six months
to scale earn Alesia from zero to seventy thousand. The reason being it's a lot easier to scale a page when you already have another page, Right, That's something that people don't realize enough either. Even with starting a podcast, people try to start a podcast with one hundred followers, you don't have an audience. What are you who's gonna list all leverage? It's all about it's easier to scale.
It's easy to scale a page from another page. It's also easier to scale a brand as opposed to a person. People are more likely to follow a brand page than they are a personal page. And your leasure is growing faster at a faster rate than my own personal page, people are more likely. It's just human nature. I don't know why. People are more likely to follow something that doesn't directly attached to one person as they are to a one person's personal page.
And that the point, it's like, your leader has seventy thousand, right, I think I might have just cracked a thousand, But I'm like that's like I'm still fine, Like there's there's no social equity that comes with that. For me, It's like I'd rather build the brand. Lets Shotty build his personal brand and just add value to what we're doing already.
People want to be a part of something right right right, you know, you know, like you're you're buying into like I said to piggyback off you if yours. If it's one person, they might like that one person, but they're trying to buy into something bigger than that. Earn your Leisure is so much bigger, you know, it's on the t shirts. It's so much bigger than just like, oh that's a good post.
You just yeah and that and that, and that's fine because your leasure grows. I grow, also he grows. And also that The last common I'm gonna make on that is it TeamWorks. As I said, I run the early Leasia page as far as putting a post, but I have help so Troy. The formerly we have for Earn Leasia is that Troy sends twenty four hours. Troy sends
me articles in the morning, different financial articles. Then I review the list of articles that he sends me and I kind of pick which ones would be good for Earn your Lesia. I post it and then I do like a short write up of it, so now I don't have to look for articles. Troy does that, he sends it to me, and then I do what I do. So he's doing what he does best. I'm doing what I do best, and we work together as a team. It's as opposed to him trying to post that's not truly his thing.
You know. No, I'm gonna tell you, like the first two weeks, like I was like finding posts and I'd be up at like five thirty, like I told people, like I'm up at five thirty. I know he's going to sleep at three. I'm making up at five thirty. And I would try to write these things and I'm like, you know what, he's mastered this, Like why I don't have to reinvent this, Like I'm gonna let him be great. I'm gonna take some of the load over him. Like
I'll just send him everything I find. That's just a team.
Where a good team is it's not hey, I need you to learn this, it's you're really good at this, So we're gonna exactly down on what you do.
A lot of people are in trouble doing this. It's like, way, he's getting all the shine, He's getting all the shine. He's eighty that I'm like, looking, that's my real brother. Like if you see him, then you see me. That's what is how I'm feeling. And it takes a lot of maturity and it takes humility to get to that point where it's like, you know what, we're all winning. If he wins, we're all winning, you know what I mean. But like a lot of times in our community we
don't work together and we can't do that. It's like, wait, he's shining, Nah, I gotta shine too. Like nah, if he shines, we all shining. Yeah.
So that is my Instagram Growth Totorris step by step booklet for you to get I G on tech. And also one last thing, engagement is extremely important and every try to try to engage with your followers as much as possible. Instagram lives is extremely valuable. That's a good
way to establish engagement. And then also comments, just reply to as many comments as you possibly can't reply to me and dms as you possibly cant, especially in the early stages because now like for us, it's hard to respond dms because we get so many, but in the early stages when you don't have a lot, take your time respond to dms.
Every single one.
Respond to comments because a it helps your engagement, especially in the comments, and then also it's just it shows the people that you're actually.
Your care Yeah, and there's a face I.
Cannot I cannot understate that overstate that enough, like you have to you have to engage and build a community. It's not it's not just like you. It has to be a community. So, yeah, can we do one thing?
Can we do it? Like when you started your page right like after the l A trip, Like I don't know if you we spoke about this before, but there was a there was like a movie that we put together for you. Yeah. Right, it was the original hashtag and Thealisia. Can we can we put that out this week?
Possibly?
Y'all gonna thank me later. Yeah, it should come out. That's great.
What he's referring to is that. So yeah, we had, like I said, I tried everything. So when I first started the social media campaign, I had Mike. We filmed the like a mini movie, and we had like two two models and it was like a day in the life. And I was like waking up my first screenplay, like reading the Wall Street Journey, working out. It's like it was like traveling like through me throughout the course of the day.
It's my favorite thing already know.
This idea we were like working out. He was like, we like literally wrote this. It was great, and we wrote it out screen and you know what.
And I realized that we're gonna promote it on Instagram, and I realized before I never put it out, and I'm like, this is corny, Like.
It didn't pass your test.
This is a little weird. This isn't Yeah, this isn't what I want to do right, And I want it to be more substance than just me paying models to just run around with me. And you know what, I'm saying, like it's not that's important, but no, that's important. But I'm just saying that's important as far as substance. You don't have rebstence. You don't have substance. Ye, you gotta have sub so they're not gonna get it. Uh, it's it's out there now.
I don't know. I mean people maybe string it out for as long as you can drop it one day, shout out to buy the merch. They're going to do a packet. You're gonna get a DVD.
Yeah, shout out to shout out to the crew that I put that to you.
Other for.
My graduates from my school being forced back. Drop bags drop Mike, drop bag, drop drop.
You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates, fast easy. Just use Indeed. Stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites. With INDEED sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates, so you can reach the people you want faster. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed have forty five percent more applications than non sponsored jobs. Don't wait
any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed, and listeners of this show will get a seventy five dollars sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed dot com slash p o d kat z thirteen. Just go to indeed dot com slash po d kat z thirteen right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need