I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Instagram for many reasons, but lately I’ve been more curious about it as a business tool. A friend of mine mentioned that something like Instagram was made for businesses (now, at least), so I might as well try to get more engagement/visibility through it if I’m passively on it all the time anyway.
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Seems like it’s all about building community
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Clearly it’s about working smarter, not harder — so monetize Instagram -.-’
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Breaking down 6 figures into smaller goals and chipping away at it consistently isn’t that hard — 6 figures is 5 product sold 55 times, 20 book 14 times, 300 product once. Makes it more achievable if it’s framed this way lol
Things to unlearn:
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You need degrees/credentials before scaling. You can be successful without any experience. You’re capable.
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The market is oversaturated and you won’t stand out. There’s 500M daily users on IG, it’s possible to tap into a percent of that. There’s room for you in the market.
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You need a huge following to see results. You don’t.
Create a content game plan
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Plan it — you can steal content, don’t reinvent the wheel
- Review and look for inspiration from competitors, pages in your niche, go to the explore tab and save things with high engagement
- Do not plagiarize — don’t copy someone, take inspiration
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Creation — schedule content days to create material for posts. Do your research and plan, it won’t take as much time as you think.
- Create a routine — ie., Sundays for content creation then have content for 3 weeks
- Post it during lunch break
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Management — Use content calendars or content schedulers to automate the process
- Set your goals
- Generate 10 quality leads in the next 30 days
- Gain brand awareness and recognition as an expert in my niche
- Prepare audience for a new product launch in 60 days
- Plan the content
- 6 posts per week: 3 educational, 2 inspirational, 1 promotional
- 3 stories per day: MWF are mini-training days, T/TH engagement (question sticker, polls, etc)
- 1 IG Live per week
- Manage content
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Schedule posts ahead of time using FB Creator Studio
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Engage with all comments within the first hour
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Assess if content performed well by checking metrics (how many shares, saves, etc)
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Do more content that resonates with the audience
Create a community
- Build relationships; turning followers into buyers
- Create valuable content
- Educational
- Building authority and expertise of knowledge (how-to, tutorials, methods, research, stats)
- Inspirational
- Motivate and connect with people (transformation storeytelling, before and after photos, quotes)
- Entertaining
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Go through relationship building process (getting to know you, like you, trust you)
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- Educational
Turn followers into buyers
- Showing up consistently with valuable content that persuades them to buy your offer
- Small snippet of what you offer, but not all of it
- Have a clear purpose for each piece of content
- Brand awareness — these posts are meant to reel in new potential clients (behind the scenes, storytelling, BTS)
- Engagement — increase and foster relationships in your niche (more people interacting with you through questions, comments, polls, tag your friends, save for later, etc — point is CTA)
- Sale — meant to secure the bag, promotional (ask for the sale, use call to action)
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Example: call/email to schedule a consultation; type YES if you agree; tag a friend who needs to see this
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Engagement Strategy
- Determine when you can commit consistently towards your engagement
- Schedule alarms on your phone that remind you to engage 3 times a day — build relationships
- Create template messages for common questions and comments
- How do you make money with nothing to sell?
- Affiliate marketing — percentage of a purchase
- Productizing knowledge — turn what you know into a coaching service, ebook, workshop, etc