0 (2s):
Boom, shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs On Fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network with great shows like My First Million. Today, we're pulling a timeless EOFire classic episode from the archives, and we'll be talking about leveraging a powerful social media strategy in a digitally driven world to drop these value bombs. We brought Ryan White into the EOFire studios. Ryan is a seven figure digital entrepreneur influencer investor, press contributor and speaker. He founded the globally recognized social media marketing company, Social Revelation, which helps businesses and personal brands increase their digital footprint and brand awareness online.

0 (43s):
We'll talk about getting involved. Don't spend your life on the sideline. We'll talk about what a lead looks at first when they come to your website and we'll talk about researching your competitors and the model that's working for them. Don't try and reinvent the wheel and so much more. When we get back from thanking our sponsors VistaCreate is a graphic design platform where anyone can easily craft professional and unique visual content for social media and digital marketing in minutes. Visit VistaCreate.com today to try it for free and see how easy it really is. The remarkable people podcast hosted by Guy Kawasaki and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network helps you better understand the changing world with interviews from Thought Leaders Legends, and Iconic Class like Jenn Lim, Happiness Evangelist, and author of Beyond Happiness.

0 (1m 28s):
Listen to the remarkable people podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. Brian say what's up to Fire Nation and share something interesting about yourself that most people don't know

1 (1m 40s):
What's up Fire Nation and interesting fun fact about myself that most people probably don't know is I'm actually from a small town in Georgia called Lakeland Georgia. The town itself actually has about 3,500 people, and there's not even a red light in the entire town itself. We actually only have a stop sign in front of our courthouse and to kind of take it a step further. My graduating high school class only had about 92 students, which kind of gives me the funny privilege of being able to call myself the salutatorian of the class of 2008.

0 (2m 14s):
That's really cool stuff. And I can resonate personally. I'm from a town of 2000 people, and I can remember so clearly coming home from college one day and there was a stoplight in my town for the first time ever. I'm like, when did they put this in? I can actually now say that I have one stoplight in my town. This is so cool.

1 (2m 30s):
It is. That is all. Some people don't understand like how significant that is unless you come from a smaller town. It's funny because the town I actually live in, I remember the first time we got to McDonald's and what's funny about this particular McDonald's, which is probably the only one in the entire nation, but it's not even 24 hour service because our town is so small, but I just remember it was, it was literally chaos the day that that McDonald's opened.

0 (2m 55s):
We are decades away from our first McDonald's. I can tell you that, but good for you guys. I'm glad to hear it. But Fire Nation, as I alluded to in the intro, we have a killer audio master class with a true expert in the industry. We're gonna be talking about leveraging a powerful social media strategy in a digitally driven world. And within this whole genre, we're going to be focusing on Instagram. And I can tell you right now, Fire Nation Instagram is by far in a way. I mean, there's literally not even a close second. Instagram is my personal number one social media platform. I love it. It has been that way for some time. Now it's literally where my best engagement comes with my listeners with you Fire Nation.

0 (3m 37s):
I mean the conversations that I've had with so many of my listeners and just other people via DM direct messaging on Instagram is absolutely unreal. The stories I was able to take. So many of you on my 65 day European trip, I just got back with, which is super cool, then engage you the guys in those ways as well. There's just so much power in Instagram, no matter what industry or niche you're in, we're going to be talking about how you can master Instagram and create a powerful social media strategy for this platform, Instagram in this digitally driven world that we live in. So Ryan, let's just start with the basics and then we're going to kind of build up as we go. It's got a more detailed technical stuff. And of course Fire Nation, we're going to end with a bang called monetization, cause there's a serious way to monetize.

0 (4m 22s):
And I actually have a pretty cool story in myself that we haven't talked about Ryan, but I'll be in there to get your feedback on it. And we're going to have so much fun doing this. So let's just start at the base with the basics again. How do we properly set up our bio to be really appealing to people on Instagram and to generate more reach?

1 (4m 39s):
I feel like most of my clients constantly get this wrong. So it's kinda good to start off with this little segment. So the biggest thing that I've, that I noticed is people can kind of get all over the place with their bio and there's not really a clear, concise, and to the point kind of intro there. You know? So when, when a lead comes to your page, your bio is 100%. The first thing that people were actually going to take notice of, and they're going to from that bio draw a perception of you from, from that point from reading your bio. So the biggest thing you want to do is capitalizing on this section. And so for instance, if you're a seven figure earner, we need to put it in there. Right? I know. So, so many times the clients of mine are seven, eight figure earners. But if you go to their Instagram page, there's nothing in there relevant to the fact that they are actually a multimillionaire and you know, people like to connect.

1 (5m 25s):
And so the point is, is if you're a seven, eight figure earner, you know, put it in there, let people know what you do, and you're, you're going to reap the rewards from that. Also, you want to make sure that in your bio that you have a nice point of contact. And, and what I mean by that is basically having, you know, you can drop a little email emoji in your bio and make sure that you have, you know, an email there that that brands can reach out and contact you if they want to collaborate and partner up and all those sorts of things. And I want to kind of just mention a little quick security discussion right here, because I see people kind of get this wrong a lot. And with hacking on the rise on social media platforms, one thing that we kind of mentioned in our course, we'll elaborate more on it there, but you want to make sure that your backend email actually under the settings of your profile was actually different than the front end email.

1 (6m 13s):
And so you can imagine, you know, if people were to just click email on your page and it pops up your email and that in fact is the email that's kind of tied to your account. Well, once they hack that email, you know, they can actually gain access to your account. So to avoid that, just make sure that your front end email is different from your backend email. And then, you know, the final point that I want to mention as far as is there's so many tools out there that you can actually leverage to do quite a number of things. And so for me, if you go to my page, you know, at Ryan White, you'll see that I actually leveraged a tool called link tree. And so what link tree allows you to do is you turn the one link that Instagram allows you to have, and you can actually turn that one link into multiple links.

1 (6m 55s):
And so what's cool about this feature is, you know, you can leverage link tree several different ways. You know, so for, for myself, you know, I use it to draw people to my website, to drive them to my eBooks. You know, you can create landing pages for people to go to, you can sell impulse buys for people. And then of course, you know, you can direct people to, you know, follow your, follow your other social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat.

0 (7m 19s):
These are all incredible points, Fire Nation. And again, the beauty of podcast, if you want to rewind, come back and listen to these a couple more times. You can do just that. But of course, everything that we talk about, all the tools and the software and the hacks and the tactics are going to be in the show notes page. So make sure you check that out too, but just going to recap a few things that Ryan talked about, number one, do you have that point of contact on your app, on your profile, on your page, your email, and you got to make sure that it's the front end is not the same as the back end, cause you don't want that hacking possibility. So just make sure it's different, make sure that email that people can see. Isn't the one that you're using to sign into Instagram. That's so critical. And one thing about the profile, let's just remember you get one link and I probably got this from you, honestly, Ryan, cause I'm using it to, would I be using it for a few months now?

0 (8m 1s):
And that is linked to, I've been using link tree and as critical Fire Nation. So like think back like maybe before I was using LinkedIn, it could be like, Hey, if you want to learn how to podcast with our free podcast course.com, that could be the one link I had. But now I can say, Hey, I have a bunch of free courses click on the link below and you can check out all my free courses. So they click on that link. And now through link tree, it pops up and there's free podcast course. There's your big idea. There's my free webinar course. There's all the free courses right there in this one, incredibly mobile responsive. It's beautiful ways. People can just click on it. And I can also just put, Hey, subscribe to my podcast below. And so many people make the mistake when they say subscribe to my podcast below of just looking to apple iTunes, and guess what?

0 (8m 41s):
Not everybody has an iPhone, not everybody uses Mac. So now I have it opened up into a luxury, whereas apple iTunes, where it's Stitcher works, Spotify, where's Pandora. They can click, they can choose whichever one they want to use. So maybe people love pocket casts, you know what that, so they can choose the actual way that they listened to the podcast. It's so much better. So just to recap there, Fire Nation, just Google link tree, you'll be able to go through it, check it out. It is critical to see and a very important to use. I personally love it now, Ryan, one thing that I see people just don't do enough. And I actually have a specific question I want to follow up with after you kind of go through this the first time and that is hashtags because you can utilize hashtags very effectively for more exposure, but there's a right way to do it.

0 (9m 26s):
There's a wrong way to do it. So talk to us about hashtags. What is their purpose? How do you do it, right? How do you do it wrong?

1 (9m 32s):
For sure. So Instagram, the platform itself is kind of categorize by these hashtags. And so for instance, if I was to go onto the platform and I wanted to search and only find photos that pertain to baseball, you know, I could go type in hashtag baseball and, and click that hashtag. And it's going to categorize every single photo that was uploaded to its platform with people using that particular hashtag. So hashtag baseball and their photos that they would land there. And so the cool thing is just knowing how to properly leverage these. A lot of people kind of missed the boat on this. And so, you know, we actually provide hashtag utilization and research for our clients that come over to us. But some major points I want to hit with hashtags is just, you know, number one we want, we want to diversify.

1 (10m 15s):
And, and by diversify, I mean, you know, we want to kind of take the 30 hashtags that Instagram allows us to have. So I don't know if you don't know, this Instagram only gives you 30 hashtags, that you can kind of leverage, you know, on a particular post and then you want to take those 30 and you want to break them down. So kind of my rule of thumb to people is, you know, we want to create, you know, 10 hashtags with over 5 million hits. And of course we want these hashtags to be within, you know, a relative niche. So, you know, if we're posting a baseball photo, we want to make sure we're putting tags in that pertain to baseball, same with entrepreneurship. You know, we want to make sure that we're using entrepreneurship, digital marketing hashtags, if, if we're an entrepreneur and posting that sort of content.

1 (10m 58s):
But the biggest thing is, you know, 10 tags over 5 million hits within your niche. And then we want to break it down again into another layer of, of 10 hashtags between 250,000 hits to about 5 million hits. So we're kind of hitting that the layer right beneath that 5 million and then kind of the third tier is we want to have 10 hashtags that are less than 250,000 hits. And by hits, I just mean how many uploads, you know, have been sent into that particular tag. So, and if you just click the hashtag, it will show you, you know, there's a clear number there that you can see how many people actually uploaded with that hashtag. And so, you know, again, just to recap, we want to have 10 over 5 million, 10 between a quarter million up to 5 million and then 10 less than 250.

1 (11m 41s):
And then kind of the little last thing that I tell people to kind of is just create maybe three to five hashtags kind of geared to your brand. You know, so for, let's just say Entrepreneurs On Fire, you could brand the hashtag, you know, Fire Nation. And so every time, you know, you reach out to people and have them repost something, you could have them hashtag Fire Nation. And that's a cool little way that you can kind of just be a popularity around your brand. So it's just branding and coining specific hashtags for you. And the reason we do this, so it goes a little bit deeper than just, well, you know, cause people ask me all the time, well, why do I want to have this particular strategy? How does it help me? So, you know, we want to make sure that we hit each tier because if, for instance, hits or hashtags that have over 5 million hits, you know, those are very, very, very popular.

1 (12m 27s):
They're getting uploaded all the time. It is very hard to get in the what's what is considered the top nine posts for that particular hashtag. And so if you go to a hashtag, you're going to see, it's kind of broken down into two sections, the top section being, you know, top nine post and then below that you have your most recent. So, you know, again for you to kind of rank high in, in, in that hashtag, you know, you can be featured in those top nine posts, but with 5 million hits or more, it's very, very, very hard to do that, especially if you're kind of a smaller account, but we want to make sure that we include them because if we do land in one of those top nine, you know, your exposure that you're going to get from, from, from landing in one of those is going to just produce massive rewards.

1 (13m 11s):
And then again, we want to have 250,000 hits to 5 million hits simply because it's a lot easier to get in the top nine. So instead of just, you know, hoping to get, you know, in have one of my tags rank in the over 5 million here, we may be able to get two or three of our hashtags where we're in the top nine of that particular tag. And so exposure again is massive. And then obviously, you know, anything under two 50, again, it's just really a lot easier to become it kind of in that top nine, under 250,000 years. Because again, it's just not as popular. And so it's an easier way. Like if people go to that tag to get noticed inside the top nine, but at the same time, you know, if you do land one of the tags or one of your posts on the tags with over 5 million hitch, I mean, you could probably gain a few thousand followers from that.

1 (13m 60s):
So that's kinda how I tell my clients to kind of break down their has tag research.

0 (14m 4s):
Wow. Lot of gray stuff, air Fire Nation. Let me recap a few things. Number one, think about the diversification you want to diversify. And a quick question for you, Ryan, before I kind of continue this recap is are these hashtag hits total or the over the last week or the last month? Like where are those numbers coming from?

1 (14m 21s):
So it's total hits. If you go to any tag at all, you're going to see a total number of here for the lifespan of that particular tag. I think something crazy like hashtag wedding has like over 72 million lifetime. So my point is, if you were trying to get in the top nine of the hashtag for a wedding, you're going to need some major, major, major influence in virality to make that happen.

0 (14m 42s):
So Fire Nation, you get 30, 30 hashtags per post. That's the max. So you want around 10 to be over 5 million hits. You want another around 10 to be between 250,000 up to 5 million and then another around 10, less than 250,000 heads. And then use like three to five, if you can. And you want, if you're trying to build a personal brand for that personal branding, quick question, because I used to use my iPhone text replacement as a great way. So I used to have hash, a hash B hash sheet, hash C hash D all this stuff. When I would type that out on my, on my iPhone, it would then text expand. So those 30 ones that I always wanted to use into rotate. So it was a great way for me to do that quickly and effectively.

0 (15m 24s):
However, the new iPhone updates this, not doing it anymore. I'm not quite sure why. I honestly haven't spent too much time, but so of texts, replacement's not working. Do you have any other tools to like really quickly save those 30 hashtags and upload them

1 (15m 37s):
A hundred percent? So I actually just learned something from you, John, which is actually kind of cool because it makes perfect sense when you said it. But for me, the way that I do it is I just use my notes section inside my iPhone. So if you go in and kind of just type out your 30 tags and you can kind of break them down again, however you want to do it. But what I do is I bring up, you know, my Instagram app and then I'll actually go and copy and paste from my note section of my iPhone and then paste them in to the Instagram app. That's how I do it a to F to just save time.

0 (16m 6s):
Yeah, I think it's going to come back and it'll be like, it used to be, I'm not sure why this latest update kind of blocked it out, but it was pretty easy. Pretty awesome. I could just literally just type as in a comment hash a and boom, all those 30 hashtags would just pop out. So I don't have to do like go out of Instagram or do anything else, but it was pretty cool. Yeah, that is awesome. I kind of want to talk about now is, you know, we are doing this because we want attention. We want people to look at our photos and our videos, people to like them, people to comment people, to engage people, to do all the things. So how do we actually get more attention when we're posting to our Instagram feed?

1 (16m 40s):
That's a great question. So the biggest thing is just, you know, having a clear vision and knowing your niche again, a very common problem. I see with clients who come to us, they're kind of all over the place with their posting. And so if a client comes to me and I, you know, I take a look at their feed, I need to be able to have an instant connection and know what particular niche that the client is in. Because if I don't have that connection, then a future potential follower coming to that page is not going to have that connection. So the biggest thing we want to do is have vision, you know, know where we're going. Kind of know what we want our feed to look like. You know, not only today, but in two weeks and you know, 30, 60, 90 days, and then know, you know, get real clear on what your niche is.

1 (17m 21s):
And so the second point is just being consistent and by consistency, I mean, just taking the time to out worst case scenario, you know, be posting at least once every three to four days, I try to push my clients into posting daily because the Instagram algorithm actually rewards your activity. Of course, you know, they want people to be on their platform, you know, using their stuff. So, you know, how do they kind of incentivize that, you know, people who are posting daily and even this is why you see bigger brands posting even, you know, two to four times per day is because they actually can reach, explore page and kind of go viral a lot easier because they're getting rewarded in the algorithm for their activities.

0 (18m 3s):
Is there too much?

1 (18m 4s):
There definitely is. And so, you know, kind of one little point, I was going to kind of touch on this later, but it was a great question. So we'll jump into it, but we want to make sure that we're having, you know, obviously quality over quantity. And so a rule of thumb that I give my clients is if you're under 10,000 followers post once per day, if you're between 10,000 followers and about a hundred thousand followers, you can post up to twice per day. And then, you know, of course, if you're bigger than a hundred thousand followers, you can kind of get up to that three to four posts per day range. And the reason for this is, you know, if you only have 10,000 followers and you're posting four to six times per day, you're just bombarding, you know, those people with the same content, every time they scroll through their feed, they're seeing you. And it's kind of, it's just, you know, it pushes people away.

1 (18m 45s):
And so we want to make sure that we're doing quality over quantity, but to me, you know, for, for the mass majority of counts posting once per day is going to be perfect, you know, and it just goes back to that, you know, the algorithm does reward activity. And, you know, I want to mention here because I get asked all the time, well, how am I, how am I supposed to structure my feed to make it look good? You know? And so I like to give an example here and, and kind of, of what I do and, and even my fiance does on her page. So you can break your columns down to different categories. And so for instance, you could have one column that's personal, you know, your purse, your you're, you're posting personal things about your lifestyle.

1 (19m 26s):
You could have a middle column, you know, about motivational quotes or just motivational videos that you come across. And, and then, you know, you could have a third column about your business. So anything related to business, you can kind of put in there. So let's take my page for an example, I'm in kind of digital entrepreneurship. So column one, I post, you know, activities that I do, my lifestyle, my lifestyle stuff, you know, activities, hobbies, all that good sort of stuff. And then, you know, second column, I post motivational quotes, obviously just to encourage and inspire, you know, other digital entrepreneurs who land on the page. And then my third column is anything business related. So if I get a new article, I get a new podcast, that column has kind of tiered towards that.

1 (20m 9s):
And it just gives me structure and it gives me vision and it gives me consistency. And so, you know, if you do that with your own page, it's going to be a lot easier down the road to stick to that theme.

0 (20m 19s):
Okay. So I really want to move into stories, AKA the Snapchat killer, because it's a really interesting topic, but before we do move into it, I just want to make sure that you don't have anything more to share just about the drawing attention to your posting feed, because this is really critical. I love the column idea. I mean, that's something actually that I have not been utilizing enough that I want to, but I want to really have some time for stories, but I want to make sure we close this topic out first,

1 (20m 43s):
For sure. I think the final thought, and this section is just, you know, research your, and kind of model what you see working for them as with most businesses, you know, don't try to reinvent the wheel, you know, you know, just do a little recon on people, maybe in your industry who are killing it and just kinda model what they're doing. Yeah.

0 (20m 59s):
And a lot of times foundation, when you find somebody who's killing it, quote unquote, then why don't you just identify, well, how can I actually do that better? How can I go one step up? Like, how can I find what they're doing? And just add a little more, a fire of whatever I'm doing to that. So, awesome. Last tip. Let's shift to the stories now, because this is again, a great way that you can really connect with your audience multiple, multiple, multiple times per day. In fact, I think my stories today are over 20 as we're sitting right now, and you're not posting too many because you know, you're just letting people have these 15 seconds snapshots of that part of your day. And again, when I was traveling 65 days in Europe, so many, my audience was just loving, jumping on my story feed and checking out, you know, Rome and Vienna and barter, Slava and Budapest and Edinburgh and the cruise ship that I was on.

0 (21m 44s):
Like all these different places I was there. I was, I was able to bring my audience with me on those. And again, it wasn't intrusive because you only had to check it out. If you wanted to check it out, you have to actually click on my face on my Instagram feed to watch my stories. You can skip through them. If the 15 seconds is too long for you, you can do all the different things. But to me, stories are so much fun. They give you a lot of cool options. Their swipe up features. There's a bunch of other stuff. So Ryan, you're the expert here. Let me turn it over to you, give us a breakdown, you know, just starting from square one, but then quickly get up to some really cool tactics about what are stories, why are they awesome? And what's the best ways that we can utilize them.

1 (22m 20s):
So stories is nothing more to me than, you know, kind of giving you a behind the scenes, look into your business or your lifestyle. What I love about it is it speaks connection. You know, when people like connection, you know, it's also that you have 20,000, you know, views on your story because again, people connect to you. They want to be, they feel like they're a part of,

0 (22m 40s):
No, I didn't say I had 20,000 views. Let me rephrase. I have 20 actual posts to my stories today. Cause my kind of point on all that was is, you know, with Instagram, you want to max out a one to two per day, like you said, whatever area you're at, but with stories, you can just go, oh, I'm by the pool. Oh, almost there. So I had like 20 different leg, you know, snaps of, I call them snaps, you know, that's how good Snapchat did, but 20 different stories that are on my feed right now because my owners can choose a watch or not. So I have 20 of them. Right. Some days I may have five, some days I may have 40.

1 (23m 12s):
Gotcha. And yes. And that's a great point and I apologize for the miscommunication Arizona, my bad, but, but yeah. And, and, and that's, that's the beautiful thing about stories is sometimes it's hard for people to post daily. Like we talked about, you know, they they're like, well, I don't have enough content or it's just tough for me to create the time to go in and make a quality post with stories. It kind of frees you up from that because you know, there is really no limitations on how many stories you can post. And so we kind of get into that, you know, daily story usage versus your daily feed posting, you know, because although I may not be able to post every single day, one thing I can most definitely do is upload a story and even multiple stories because it takes, you know, 15 seconds to do so. And so, you know, it's a great way to again, give people a behind the scenes, you know, behind the scenes, look, it gives them great connection to you as a person or, and if you're a brand it's a great way to kind of mix, you know, the behind the scenes faces to, you know, and, and, and not people not just see kind of a logo, you know, and they can actually kind of connect, cause people just are more relatable to people than actual brands or logos the majority of the time.

1 (24m 15s):
And so that's a really cool way that you can kind of leverage stories. And then again, if you want to kind of learn how to increase story views, you know, obviously it's just, it's utilizing the tools that Instagram allows you because again, Instagram rewards activity. So you want to make sure you're using hashtags. You know, you're using a geo location. You want to make sure that you're using polls and Q and A's and all these tools that Instagram provides for you, because if you use them, you know, they're going to reward you in showing it to more people for doing so. And then a nice little trick that I tell people as well. And I just kind of recently stumbled upon this little trick about two months ago, but, you know, you can type out on your story hashtags, the same way you can with a feed.

1 (24m 60s):
And so for me, when I post, you know, I may hashtag, you know, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, entrepreneur, life, digital marketing, social media tips, and then what's beautiful about it is I can even add an Atlanta, Georgia location and I can make those things really, really, really small. And then I can actually overlay on top of that, a Q and a or a poll, and it'll actually remain hid all my story. But in fact, it works the same way as if you posted it on a normal feed post. And so it's cool because it just exposes you to that. You know, many more people can find you and see you through the hashtag utilization. And it works the same way as a feed post, but I noticed most people just post a story and they never really leveraged the hashtag usage or

0 (25m 44s):
I don't at all. And that's such, such a brilliant idea. And I never thought about it in Fire Nation. This is why we talk to people like this. And we listen to people like this because you know, this is what Ryan does. He sits around and he, you know, fumbles around stumbles around and he stumbled across something. Awesome. Because he's just doing the thing he's living in the world every single day, and then boom, he's doing it. And like, it just kind of made me chuckle a little bit because when he was talking about like, you know, putting like 30 hashtags in a story, then shrinking it down to tiny bit and then hiding behind something else. What is that? That's called 1996 when you would actually write the word, you know, like sports a million times in white on the back of your homepage. And then you would make the actual page white so nobody could see it. But now what are you doing?

0 (26m 24s):
You're ranking for the word sport, because that's how the algorithm used to work. So you stay cutting edge. You learn from people who are doing it right, and are doing it right now. And guess what? That may go away at some point, but now it's not. So utilize it, leverage it, grow your audience, bring people in and create great content. So Ryan, before we move on to the next topic, what do you want to really close down on this whole story feature

1 (26m 47s):
With stories, the final kind of final thoughts here is just really leveraging the swipe up. So we didn't talk a whole lot about swipe up, but swipe up just again, allows you so much opportunity. You know, you can lead people to external links, landing pages. You can even build email lists through this. You can, you can do shout outs, paid shout outs through this. And then again, it's just, it's just a great way as far as, you know, even monetization. And we'll kind of talk about that again in a later segment, but you know, swipe up feature. You must be using this every single time if you're over 10,000 followers. So I just want to throw that in there. You get the swipe up feature. Once you reach 10 K

0 (27m 22s):
Yes. You've got to get to that 10 K Fire Nation, make that a goal. And how are you going to get that while you're falling? The strategies that Ryan and I are talking about today, you're going to post quality images. You're going to do it. You know, often you're going to be consistent, do it at least daily. You're going to use hashtags and or do all these things. You're going to get to 10,000 and then you're going to unlock all these cool new features in Fire Nation. If you think all the value bombs have been dropped in this episode, you are dead wrong. We are going to come back after we thank our sponsor with more fire bomb. So we will be right back. Mark your calendars, Fire Nation Inbound at 2022 is happening September 3rd through 6th. And there are three ways to attend to the hybrid inbound experience. Number one in-person which will be in adherence to all government and state compliant rules and regulations.

0 (28m 7s):
There is a limited capacity for the in-person portion, featuring new stages, exceptional talent in deep dive sessions. This will take place at the Boston Convention Center and Exposition Center. In addition to surrounding locations within the facility, number two, the online immersive experience. This is a paid online experience that provides all access to breakout sessions, networking, spotlight, talents, and access to on-demand library, post events, and number three, the free online immersive experience. This free ticket is geared towards someone who is new to inbound. Just getting started in the marketing advertising customer success sales industries is an entrepreneur and who is a less concerned about the breakout contents. This ticket type provides access to all spotlight talents. Remember to mark your calendars for Inbound of 2022, September 3rd through 6th, learn more inbound.com.

0 (28m 51s):
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0 (29m 37s):
And you're all set, never worry about design. Again, just use Vista, create visit VistaCreate.com today, to try it for free and see how easy it really is. That's VistaCreate.com to start creating your own unique designs that look like they took hours made in minutes. So Ryan, we are back and something that I honestly have failed miserably at. I mean, I think I have two total right now and it just kind of bothers me cause I just know there's there's potential and possibility and opportunity here. I G T V so Instagram brought this to our world and you know, it's there and I don't even really know how it's doing in general. Like, are people succeeding at it?

0 (30m 19s):
How are they succeeding at it? So, you know, just like you did with stories, take us back to what it is, how you use it, how you think people should use it. Pros and cons. Let's hear about IGTV

1 (30m 29s):
For sure. So I tell people when it comes to IETV kind of thing, YouTube, so, you know, the same way that Instagram pulled stories from Snapchat, they pulled this IGTV feature from YouTube. It's just another way, you know, that Instagram is trying to kind of become a major player in every single segment when it comes to digital marketing. And so when thinking similar to YouTube, you know, Instagram's kind of future goal is they will be paying per views for ad space on your IETV if you're reaching a big enough audience. And so right now, because it is so new, it is a great time to kind of get a head start own this particular feature because not a lot of people are doing it.

1 (31m 10s):
You know, you have, you see YouTube influencers all over the place, but you know, you see few and far between people who are actually leveraging and doing it successfully. The I G T V I know right now, a few bloggers major bloggers that my fiance and I'll follow and, you know, they're reaching a hundred to a quarter million views on their ICTV. And it just goes to show that, you know, if they're not already, they're going to make massive sums of revenue just from this IETV. And so when I'm speaking with people, of course, we always like to give takeaways. And so they asked me, well, how can I, you know, really leverage what, what are some ways that I could leverage this IETV? And so one thing that I like to do is I like to kind of focus on my IETV as like a little mini series, which we can kind of host interviews.

1 (31m 56s):
And for you, John, it would be really, really easy because you can kind of use it to host podcasts. And so think of it as if you, if I did an interview with someone once a week, that would, that could be considered a new episode on my IETV. And kind of the same for you with podcasts, you could easily kind of put your excerpts or kind of, you know, promotional little videos for your podcasts inside your eyes IETV and it would blow up for sure.

0 (32m 20s):
Do you have any recommendations? Like I just love the tools that people can use, where they have like the images and then there's like the audio waves going over it, or just video editor tools and softwares that you recommend. I mean, is there anything that you use to like get this 10 minute video, like looking good?

1 (32m 37s):
We use a couple of different things. I have an app that's called Phonto and you can do pretty much anything and everything with that. And we kind of leveraged a little bit of Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom to kind of create like our hitters and our, our little, our cover photos, if you will, for this. But I've come to find that most people, again, connect with video. I think video draws in like an extra 65% more engagement than a normal photo. So, you know, if you're, if you just can capture video in a special way, especially if you're traveling the world the way that you are, John, it would just be amazing, you know, to post some of that stuff on your, I G T V. And I think as far as virality goes, you know, it's going to just take off for you.

0 (33m 16s):
So Phonto is that P H O N T O.

1 (33m 19s):
It is P H O N T O.

0 (33m 22s):
I asked Phonto, Fire Nation, P H O N T O. So Ryan let's keep the chat going because we are just building and growing into an amazing conversation when it comes to scaling and growing more effectively, more efficiently. So let's talk about that. Now let's talk about scaling and growing and leveraging everything that we're doing, because we've talked about the buyer, the feed, the stories IETV how do we pull this all together and just keep

1 (33m 50s):
For sure. So, so the biggest thing, when people ask me, how do I grow faster is, is really, you know, number one, you've got to understand there's, there's going to be work involved. You know, there, although, you know, a lot of people kind of look for the shortcut, unfortunately, to be successful. You're going to have to do a little bit of work, but we want to make sure that the work we're putting in is obviously directly correlated with us being able to grow in the most effective manner. And so one way to do that is we want to make sure that we're interacting with our target niche. You know, if we're in a specific area, we could also interact with people within our community, right? Our geo location. And we want to make sure that obviously we're going in and we're doing this manually right now.

1 (34m 31s):
There's a huge rise. And just automation softwares that Instagram's trying to pull the plug on. You know, they're, they're constantly locking down on this stuff. So like with our team, we have a team of people who are in direct management with your account. And, and what we're doing is we're taking your account. If you're a niche page, let's say you're an online boutique and you're selling e-commerce or through e-commerce, you know, we, we could basically interact with people in that community who would be interested in, you know, if it's gym clothes, we could make sure we're interacting with athletes and people who are in the fitness world, CrossFit, those sorts of things, and direct those people, you know, back to your page for sales. Same thing. If you're in, in, in say Atlanta, Georgia, you're in a particular geo location, I have a brick and mortar business.

1 (35m 13s):
So a gym in downtown Atlanta, I could do the same thing. I could make sure that I'm going out. I could search for the geo tag, Atlanta, Georgia. And then I want to make sure that I'm just basically spending my time there to interact with people and interact can mean several different things. You know, I could follow the account, you know, I could drop them a like, or a comment, and I could even, you know, send them a personable DM in hopes, you know, to create a quality relationship there. Another thing that I like to do is, you know, I like to build what I call network and community groups. And so what that basically means for me is, you know, I'm in the entrepreneurship field. So of course I'm not the only person on Instagram who wants to grow and is in the entrepreneurship niche.

1 (35m 55s):
So, you know, through that, I went and network through the space with other people who are kind of similar in terms of follower count as myself. And, you know, we can create a, what we call again, a community group of say, 10 influencers that have around, you know, a quarter million followers would just kind of wear on that. And, and it's just basically using the power of networking community to, you know, every time that I would make a post, I could have these people come in, you know, and leave a, again, there has to be interested in and usually mean genuine interest and they need to be within your niche for this to work properly, but we could have those accounts come in, you know, in like my photo, when I upload it in return for when they post, I could go in and like their photo as well. And then you could do the exact same things with comments.

1 (36m 37s):
And so it's a neat little way to kind of scale because I don't know how many people know this, but a huge player in the Instagram algorithm. The reach explore page is basically, you know, quick engagement in a short period of time, 15 to 30 minutes after you actually upload a post. So by creating these community groups, these manual community groups, you can actually really scale yourself to the explore page, you know, pretty often, you know, actually I've gotten kinda to the point to where almost every single post op make reaches the explore page for at least some period of time. And then of course we have a couple other ways that we can grow, but I don't know if you kind of want to kind of recoup what we just talked about there, John

0 (37m 16s):
Real quick recouping. I mean, I think you just said such a good message, which is there's no real shortcuts Fire Nation, like you need to put in the work. So be careful with automation and the promise of like, Hey, install this software, I click this button. And before, you know, it, like you would have a million followers, like you need to do this, right. You need to do this manually, otherwise all your time, all your efforts could be for not because Instagram may pull the plug, so just do it right. And I really loved what you had to say about the explore page. So something to definitely think about and explore yourself, Fire Nation, because that can be super cool for a lot of different ways. And of course we promise monetization and we're going to finish strong with monetization, but before we do Ryan, what else do you want to share on this topic?

1 (37m 57s):
Okay. The biggest thing kind of final thoughts again, is just, you know, study the algorithm, you know, look and see what accounts seem to almost be reaching to explore and going viral over and over and over again, reach out to those people, you know, try to give them something of value instead of just saying, Hey, how do you do what you do, but try to, you know, really engage in a real conversation with those people and see if you can kind of collect, you know, their thought process and some of the methods that they're doing in order to kind of go viral each and every time. And if you do this, you'll be surprised how many people want to actually help you do the same exact thing that they're doing. And, you know, again, there's just, there's just so many ways I have a little quick story here, very quick story, but you know, I've actually had a celebrity type figure that I actually just shot a quick DM to one time and just asked, you know, I tried to give them some value of, you know, basically going in and saying, Hey, you know, they were, they were actually kind of in the digital publication world.

1 (38m 54s):
So I said, Hey, you know, do you mind if I help you out? I know you're probably super busy when it comes to, you know, time each and every day, but I'd be more than happy to write a 303 to 500 word, you know, little article for you. You know, I actually contribute for Forbes in exchange for, you know, some value from your end. And it was fun, oddly enough, you know, they were like, of course, you know, this is great that you sent this timing is perfect because I actually have a lot a load on my plate, you know, three or four articles that I'm writing would love to see what you can do. And so in exchange for me, literally delivering a little three to 500 word article, kind of like a draft for them would probably took me, you know, 20 minutes to a half hour. I actually got a shout out promotion on this page with like 4 million followers, which was super, super cool.

1 (39m 38s):
And it was just massive results again for, from our brand. So it just shows that, you know, just putting in work always leads to great results. You know, it's just the grant Cardone thing, you know, 10 X energy will lead you to results,

0 (39m 51s):
Fire Nation. You need to think outside the box, don't just do the same thing that everybody else is doing. You know, work hard, uncover different opportunities, explore them, see how they work out and always be working hard in doubling down. So we're getting to the last topic, Ryan, which is monetization. And there's definitely a lot of ways to monetize. I'll share my quick story that I kind of teased a little bit earlier. I had Dove's men's soap reached out to me and they were doing a campaign. It was called something about the five to nine, meaning like 5:00 AM to 9:00 PM. Like for people that, you know, work hard and work long, like you need to stay clean and stay fresh shows like dove. So was doing a campaign for that. And they said, Hey, we've identified your page. We think you'd be a great influencer for this.

0 (40m 32s):
You know, what are your race to do something like this? And we had never actually been approached. This is well over a year ago now, but we had never been approached to be an influencer on this kind of level. And so Kay sat down, I sat down, we kind of chatted about it and she's like, yeah, well this would be something cool. We can really share with our audience. So, you know, how will we offer something that's reasonable? So they'll say yes, and then we can go forward. And she's like, let's do 300 bucks. And like, you know, I'm worried that we do that, that like, we're just not, we're, we're selling ourselves kind of short a little bit here. So she came back and she was like, okay, well, what do you want to do? I said, let's just go for the moon. Let's say 10 K for that post, it was going to be one Instagram post. And, you know, dove came back to like, listen, our absolute max per influencer is $7,500. Would you accept it?

0 (41m 12s):
So we're like, yes, let's do it. Let's lock it in. And we went forward and we worked with them and we had a great experience. But again, you know, like if they had come back and been like, oh, what'd you do, you know, a thousand or two, we would have like, had really strongly considered, but sometimes you just shoot for the moon Fire Nation. You never know what's going to happen. And then you just kind of figure things out along the way. So that was our experience was a really good one. You know, we ended up working really to get a lot of exposure to that post. So I think it worked out well for dove as well. So, you know, we may see them or work with their agency in the future, who knows, but that's just one of the incredible, huge number of ways to monetize a platform like Instagram, because, you know, I'm always driving swipe ups to like my webinars, my courses, my free stuff, my pay stuff, all the different areas that you can do, JVs, et cetera.

0 (41m 55s):
But Ryan, you're the expert take it away for Fire Nation for our listeners who, you know, honestly at this point are probably under 10,000 followers currently. And what can they do to really maybe start generating some revenue?

1 (42m 9s):
Yeah, for sure. So by the way, great story, John. That's awesome. I love to hear testimonies and just kind of taking that a step further and kind of talking about personal testimony on my side with brand collaboration so far nation again, brand collaborations is huge. It really doesn't matter. You know, how big you are because brands are starting to kind of leverage and utilize micro influencers a lot more now here in 2018 and moving into 2019. And so personally for myself, you know, we do monthly collaborations with, with major league baseball actually. And then there's a brand it's called neuro gum and it's basically just B12 and kind of caffeine and a bite size gum. And it's kind of become a part of my daily life.

1 (42m 50s):
That's what I was actually chewing Jon before we started this podcast. But just, you know, again, it's just, you know, reaching out to brands that you believe in and, and there's plenty of platforms. Dimension of few, you have, what's called a four.four.com, which is F O H r.com. Rev fluence is another one. And then, you know, a third one being up fluence. And so platforms like this, there's a ton of them out there, but in essence, you know, you upload your profile and, you know, they take analytics and everything to make sure everything's legit, you know, for brands and then brands can come in and they can almost shop influencers and see who they would like to partner with and pay to actually put up a paid promo on your particular, you know, page.

1 (43m 32s):
And so again, brand collaborations is huge when it comes to monetization and then a second way that you can actually monetize the space is shout outs from smaller brands. So, you know, again, even at 10 K you would be surprised at 10,000 followers, how many people who are in your same niche would be happy to pay you for a shout out. You know, even if it's 25 bucks, 25 bucks is a lot. And when it comes to wind in your sales to get you moving, right, it's a momentum builder. And so, you know, don't kind of take it for granted that, oh, I can only make 25 bucks because I went in the beginning, you know, I was only making 25 bucks a post and it's kinda turned into where now, you know, I'm getting upwards of $2,500 for a post in three stories.

1 (44m 16s):
So it's just, it's just pretty cool. So definitely make sure that you're kind of reaching out to smaller pages within your niche and just asking if they would be interested in doing a shout out on your page, the third way that you can monetize this space is email list building. And, and this is a little bit more kind of advanced, but it's, it's not overbearing by, by any stretch. So again, it's just really taking advantage of kind of the highlight section in your bio. And if you are 10 K and above using swipe ups to really build your email list, you know, take them to a landing page and, you know, give them maybe a free ebook, you know, take time to create a free gift of value that, you know is a half hour that the 30, you know, 30 minutes to an hour, it may take you to decide, put together this gift.

1 (45m 2s):
But, you know, in exchange that for, you know, a leads email and build your email list, because if they sign up to your email, you know, you can leverage that for retargeting campaigns and then again, establish credibility and you can even, you know, build a drip feed follow ups and kind of, you know, nurture that lead over a seven to 14 day period, which is what we do a fourth way that you can monetize the space is what's called affiliate marketing, or become a brand ambassador. There are tons of brands out there which are looking to kind of have affiliates and brand ambassadors for their company. So what is affiliate marketing, if you're not familiar or brand ambassador, it's just basically you getting behind, you know, ABC brand.

1 (45m 44s):
And so if ABC brain has a clothing line, it's just basically you going out and promoting them in exchange for a percentage of sales, if someone were to buy because you sent them there. And so that's a really easy way. Another way is what's called. I actually kind of coined this after a good friend of mine who helped me build our Instagram course, that we'll be talking about a little bit later, but it's called the hallux Lombard method. He actually coined this and it's just, it's basically building a network kind of, kind of like a network community group, like we discussed prior, but it's, it's really building a network of influencers who have obviously credible audience, credible followers and, and just leveraging all of them together for, for one paid promo.

1 (46m 29s):
And so kind of the way it works is say your brand is interesting and doing a growth campaign. We could go out and take a portion of, of the revenue from that. And when say, instead of just, you know, spending that amount on one brand that say has 2 million followers, imagine if we broke that down into 10 pages that had half a million followers, and we all got them to post the same kind of ad at this on the same day, at the same exact time, imagine the amount of traffic flow that it would create for that brand. And so that's another cool way, because again, you can even pay for, you know, if you're, if you're not opposed to investing in your page growth, you could do the same thing for your page. You know, you can create a nice little call to action. Hey, go to this page, check them out, follow them, whatever it may be.

1 (47m 12s):
And then instead of just going to one page and paying a large sum of money for that kind of break it down into 10 influencers and have them posted on the same day at the same time. And I'm telling you, we've just had massive, massive, massive results with this, with this method. And so if you want to kind of stop right here and recoup John, we can kind of touch on the last two points.

0 (47m 32s):
Yeah. I mean, I think you just ran through it and again, Fire Nation, the beauty of podcasts at that rewind button, if you want go through and learn exactly what Ryan's talking about, because there's only so much that we can go over and a 45 minute interview, there's only so much that you can take in right now, Fire Nation, when you're on your run, when you're driving the car, when you know, you're in an airplane right now, like, you know, trying to sleep against the window, like whatever you're doing, window is only so much you can take in. And so for those of us, Ryan that want to take this to the next level that want to learn more and better ways, how to monetize more and better ways on how to grow and how to scale more and better ways how to use IETV and stories and increase our profile and our hashtags, like everything we've talked about, you have a pretty awesome call to action for those people who are listening that want to take it to the next level.

0 (48m 17s):
Let's hear that

1 (48m 18s):
For sure. So we have a special, low offer for obviously the fire family here. We're actually given 50% off to our Instagram Astro course that we filmed. Yes. I know. Pretty crazy. We were like, are we actually gonna do this? Yeah, we love the fire family. Let's make it happen. And so anyway, we're actually taking pre-orders for our course. So we're dropping our course officially on January 1st, 2019. And so the offer for you guys is you can go to official mastery course.com backslash fire, and that's, you can sign up for our course there and pre-ordered it for 50% off. This offer is valid through December the 31st of 2018.

1 (48m 59s):
And, you know, again, I just want people to know, we, we spent a full one week, you know, of where we kind of took a step up step away from our full-time job and really shot footage. A good friend of mine, Alex Lombard flew out from Scottsdale. Arizona, stayed with me here in Atlanta, Georgia for a week and we shot this. And when we originally designed it, it was to be 100% transparent and literally hand people the blueprint on exactly the tips and strategies that we use every single day, you know, to, to literally do six, seven and even eight figures in income. We've had people do through leveraging these tips. And what's cool is Alex has been able to build a network of over a million followers. And I, myself in 18 months have went from 1300 followers, March of 2017 to a little over a quarter of a million dollars and doing, you know, seven figures from the space.

1 (49m 47s):
And so we kind of looked at each other cause you know how people usually we'll we'll build a course and they kind of leave a lot of information out. It's very open-ended me and Alex got together and we said, man, you know, are we really going to be as transparent as possible? We were like, you know what? Yes we are. You know, we, we, we want to help people. We want to, we want people to become six, figure seven, figure eight figure earners from our course because we love the testimony we love to watch people grow. And so if you're interested, obviously in kind of taking it a step further than that, just this podcast information I would, I would just really encourage you to check out official mastery course.com backslash fire and take advantage of that 50% off because on January it's gonna, it's going to double in price.

1 (50m 29s):
Wow.

0 (50m 30s):
I mean, Fire Nation, what's really critical about being part of a community and have a course like this too, is things are going to change every single day, every single week, every single month, things are going to change within Instagram, within as algorithms within what's working, what's not working new tips, new, new tools, new tactics. And just like we do with Podcaster's paradise, where, when you're part of that podcast and community, you stay up to date, you stay cutting edge. We keep you updated with the latest and the greatest in the podcasting world what's working. And it's even more important with a tool like Instagram, because it's just going at light speed all the time, mega speed all the time. So recognizing you're part of a course like this, you're also plugging into the latest and the greatest because Ryan is going to continuously be updating and he's going to let you know exactly what's going on right now, not yesterday, but right now.

0 (51m 21s):
And that's so critical is that can put you the step ahead to get, to bring you to that six, seven, and why not shoot for the moon? Who knows someday, maybe eight figures building a brand on Instagram for share. So Fire Nation, what you want to do is head over to official masterycourse.com/fire go directly there. Of course, you'll be able to click on the link on the show notes page as well, but official masterycourse.com/fire will ensure that you lock in 50% off. It's going to double January 1st. So time is already taking when you're hearing my voice right now, Ryan, before we let Fire Nation go, what do you want to say?

0 (52m 1s):
Any last takeaways, last calls to action. Let's hear it right now.

1 (52m 6s):
Sure. So the biggest thing is just get involved. You know, you don't want to spend your life, you know, on the sideline, you know, you know, get on the playing field, create success for your life. Anyone can do this 18 months ago, literally I was working a normal nine to five job just like everyone else. And it's just crazy because you flash forward to today. And in under two years, you know, to just be able to see the massive amounts of financial freedom I've been able to create for myself through the Instagram platform is just crazy. I mean, it's opened up so many doors, even the fact that I'm on this podcast with you now, John is a 100% related to, you know, my Instagram kind of persona. And so, you know, if you want to connect with me on Instagram, my username is at RYAN WHITE.

1 (52m 53s):
You know, if you want to check out on my website as well, it's just officialryanwhite.com

0 (52m 58s):
Near the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And you've been hanging out with RW and JLD today. So keep up the heat. Of course you can head over to EOFire.com type a Ryan in the search bar. The show notes page will pop up with everything we've been talking about, but your strong call to action. If you want to learn more is head over to official masterycourse.com/fire, locking that 50% make it happen. And Ryan, thank you brother, for sharing your truth, your genius with Fire Nation today, for that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you, John. I appreciate you having me. Fire Nation today's value bomb content was brought to you by a Ryan White.

0 (53m 40s):
He is just dropping fire left and right hope you enjoyed today's content. And if you want to accomplish your number one goal in 100 days, just visit the freedom journal.com and you will have the tools to do just that use promo code podcast as a thank you for listening to this podcast and I will catch you on the flip side. VistaCreate is a graphic design platform where anyone can easily craft professional and unique visual content for social media and digital marketing in minutes. Visit VistaCreate.com today to try it for free and see how easy it really is. The remarkable people podcast hosted by guy Kawasaki and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network helps you better understand the changing world with interviews from Thought Leaders Legends, and Iconic Class like Jenn Lim, Happiness Evangelist and author of Beyond Happiness.

0 (54m 26s):
Listen to the remarkable people podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.