- Right now one of my favorite content platforms
is Instagram.
A lot of you know me from YouTube
or maybe even from Twitter but even though Instagram
isn't my largest platform, I have to say
it's definitely one of my favorites.
And Instagram blogging is a big part of the reason why
and it's a very powerful content strategy
if you're trying to grow your personal brand on Instagram.
So, let's get into some tips to help you
get started with blogging on Instagram.
Hey, everybody, this is Roberto Blake,
helping you create something awesome today.
Welcome back to the channel.
For the new people here, first of all, welcome,
my name's Roberto Blake, I'm a creative entrepreneur,
public speaker, and today I wanna talk to you
about Instagram marketing and how you can use blogging
in Instagram to help you build a deeper connection
with your audience, get massive engagement,
and build your brand.
Believe it or not, I haven't pulled directly
from my YouTube audience to grow my Instagram following.
In fact, I purposefully, for the last 12 months,
set out to do that natively, to get myself
to 10,000 followers on Instagram.
I'm almost at 15,000 as of making this video.
And there were several reasons why I didn't wanna siphon
from YouTube, even though I'm sure
some of you followed me over there.
You know, I didn't wanna siphon for YouTube
for a couple of reasons.
One, I wanted to really study the Instagram algorithm
and two, I wanted to do something completely different
on my Instagram than my YouTube channel.
In my YouTube channel, I do a lot of marketing,
mindset, motivation content that specifically
is to help you market yourself in social media,
grow your online business,
and leverage online video marketing specifically.
But in Instagram, I wanted emotional connection
with my strongest supporters, my 1,000 plus,
in this case 15,000 plus true fans.
I really wanted to have an emotional connection
with my audience and I found that
by doing motivational and encouragement
and that type of content almost exclusively
in Instagram, that it was a lot better.
And then it was therapeutic for me
to do Instagram blogging because I actually started
my online background with doing webdesign
and starting a blog, my robertoblake.com website,
we have a blog over on the awesomecreatoracademy.com website
as well at this point.
But, I started blogging about my experience
in the creative services industry.
I did a lot of interviews and I even went on
to be a free lance writer for different publications.
I wrote for How Design, and Print Magazine,
and Creative Pro.
I'm even working on some new relationships
with paid writing today as a paid contributor
to some publications.
And I've always loved communicating and expressing myself
with the written word.
Now, a lot of you will say, "Well, blogging
"is dead in 2019."
I disagree with that.
I'm gonna do a whole dedicated video about that
but here's where I really felt like blogging could shine.
Instagram is known as a visual platform, and that's true.
This is a very powerful visual
direct access mobile platform.
It's mobile first, for many people it's mobile only right?
But, one of the things you can hack in
the Instagram algorithm is time spent on a post
and a page and a long form post is going
to usually trigger and activate your audience a lot more,
get more calls to action and this has been
very successful for me, not only on comments
and engagement, but it's also helped convert people
for my business, for discounts, product sales,
coaching, merchandise.
So many other things.
And I'm gonna do a whole video
about Instagram story strategy but here's
where I think Instagram blogging
and doing long form post is very powerful.
I think that if you communicate well
and you tell stories very well,
or if you share some more personal details
about yourself through the written word,
that you can activate a very powerful relationship
between you and your audience in Instagram
and get them to open up and to share things
with you as well.
And then you can support each other.
And so I love the communication strategy here
that deployed through writing.
A lot about what the real experience is
of being an online content creator,
writing the real experiences that I've had
as somebody that's an introvert
or somebody that's been bullied
and just being able to tell and share that part of myself
in a completely different platform from YouTube
and a completely different way with my audience.
And then, also, I've gotten so many great DMs
and gone deeper with people and engage
and it's created stronger relationship,
stronger bonds between me and the audience
than I think I ever had even here on YouTube in many cases.
So, it's a reason that I'm a fan of Instagram and Twitter
because I feel there's stronger communication platforms
instead of just broadcast and distribution platforms
the way that I feel like YouTube is more
of a broadcast platform.
The slogan for YouTube used to be broadcast yourself.
But, with Instagram, with the ability to do DMs,
with the ability to have a more intimate relationship
and community there.
With the ability to do group DMs,
with the ability to do voice memo DMs,
I think that that's extraordinary
and I think that it's something that separates
the platform from YouTube completely
and from other platforms, even from Twitter.
And even from Facebook, really.
Facebook has similar features but it's not nearly
as, I would say, intimate and personal as Instagram.
And a lot of people are leaving Facebook
but you'll pry Instagram from our cold dead hands.
It ain't happening, right?
So, I just really feel that if you approach
this Instagram blogging strategy,
if you have a story to tell, if you do very well
with communicating in your writing,
I think it could be very powerful for your content strategy.
My audience has flat out told me
that more than the great, you know,
coffee table like pictures in my Instagram
and the fact that they love seeing me so happy
in the selfies that what they really come for
is the personalization, the stories,
the motivation, and the fact
that with Instagram, even though I get so many replies
on YouTube and I try very hard
to reply to as many of you as I possibly can,
it is much easier for me to reply
or even to DM and voice memo people in Instagram.
And so, for an audience that might be looking
for a deeper relationship with a content creator
and it will not be the majority of your audience.
I would encourage you to really look
at Instagram if what you're looking
at is relationship building, if you don't
wanna feel alone in your journey,
if you want to share experiences
and you want true community, I think
that Instagram is one of
the most powerful platforms for that
and I think that when you write and people sit
there and they read it and they're engrossed in it.
I think that that is still very powerful.
Video is an asset.
I love video, it plays very much to my strengths,
but I will tell you flat out, I have missed writing so much
and just being able to conveniently do it
at any time on the go and know that there are people
who are gonna read it, absorb it,
and it's gonna mean something to them is amazing.
Like I said earlier, it's not just about,
you know, sharing these things and going deep,
it's about the simple fact that this is
something that triggers more engagement
in the Instagram algorithm because
the more time you get people to interact
with your profile, like chronological time.
We don't have a tracker for this
the way we have watch time in YouTube
but it has been published, it has been something
that has been talked about over and over again
that it really matters and that's why
they say make engaging content.
But engaging comment isn't limited
to your slideshows, your videos, your memes,
your selfies, your beautiful, gorgeous photography,
it's not limited to that.
The captions do matter as well
and through contextualizing a story,
you get the ability to use hashtags
in clever and creative ways.
I seed hashtags throughout the story that I write
in the captions in addition to putting it at the bottom,
in addition to doing it in the comments,
so there's an opportunity there strategically too
and then when I combine this with my automations
for if this then that, ifttt.com,
if this then that, it's an automation
that for me sends out a truncated version,
you know, 240 characters or so with the link
for my Instagram post to Twitter,
and if I'm smart enough to put a hashtag early enough
in the caption, I also get that benefit in Twitter
of reaching people for that hashtag and siphon from Twitter
for Instagram which can be a very powerful strategy
for a lot of you.
So, now I think you have a better understanding
of where I'm going with this Instagram blogging strategy
and why I'm an Instagram blogger.
Now, Roberto, why wouldn't you just post
a blog on your regular website, why wouldn't you
do that and siphon the traffic there?
Well, the reality is that as we've said,
having your own website is important
and it does mean you aren't beholden as much,
say to an algorithm, but the facts are the facts.
If you haven't built a name, a reputation,
if you don't have a bunch of SEO content that ranks
then you're not gonna get a lot of traffic
to your own website and to your blog.
If you want someone to read your words,
posting it in a social media platform
that has almost two billion users
is a really good way to do that.
So, since there are literally over
a billion active daily users in Instagram
and I can pull a good fraction of that
and get engagement and real meaning from it
that I want to do that.
I mean, that's why I'm doing it.
I don't think in terms of legitimate comments,
I don't think on any blog post I've had,
even ones that got 30,000 traffic visits,
I don't think that I got 100 comments that weren't spam.
So, on Instagram getting 100 people
to actually comment and communicate
and I'm gonna give you guys my engagement strategy
because there are people who get like 6,000, 10,000 likes
and they never get 100 comments.
I can get 100 comments even with 400, 300 likes
on an Instagram post.
I can get a massive ratio on the comments
and I'm gonna show you exactly how I've been doing that.
There's multiple tactics that I
think you guys will really enjoy, so like
and subscribe for that video.
Hit the notification bell.
But, I think that it's very practical
to put content where there are eyeballs.
Do I think you should siphon some of that
for your own website traffic?
Yes, that's why in my Instagram bio
I drive people to awesomecreatoracademy.com
where they can buy something from me.
Way too many of you are trying to use Instagram
to siphon for YouTube and I get it
and you wanna grow your YouTube
and you monetize that or whatever.
I'm telling you, take it to your website,
take it to your email list, take it somewhere
where you can convert a direct sale
or have access to your audience instead
of making everything revolve around YouTube
and social media.
That's a whole nother video I can do.
I really want you guys to stop using Instagram
to siphon for your YouTube channel
and use it if you're going to pull people
off of Instagram, drive them to somewhere
that puts money directly in your pocket
or gives you direct access to your audience.
Take them to your Patreon page.
If you don't have Patreon, sign up, link's down below.
Also if you wanna get onto mine,
I'm doing some exclusive content there
that doesn't fit in my other content platforms.
Would love for you to be one of the 1,000 true fans.
But yeah, send people to your Patreon,
send people to your merchandise,
send people to a sponsored link,
send people to your own thing,
get them on your email list and then you could
maybe convert them down the road.
Do something wildly practical here.
Do not put all of your eggs in the YouTube basket.
I'm trying to tell you.
Some final thoughts when it comes
to Instagram blogging and Instagram marketing.
I really love the idea
of being able to get feedback from Instagram stories
by you sharing your Instagram post
into the Instagram story and
then getting people who may have missed it.
I think that's very powerful as a tactic,
it's something I've been doing a lot more
and I've seen that it actually works
and can get me more likes, more comments, more engagement
because I can film an Instagram story before,
telling people what I'm talking about
and asking them some questions and ask
them in the comment.
And then the next Instagram story
is the post for them to able to take action on that.
So, it's just another tactic that you can use.
I'm also gonna link down to, I think it's called Planoly,
it's one of my favorite apps for Instagram.
I hope I'm pronouncing that right.
One of the reasons I like it is because I can
actually see how many characters I have left in this post
before I run out of characters.
I can see how many hashtags I've used.
So, I really like using this app.
I'll link it down below and I'm also
going to do a video coming up
called I Bought 500 Dollars Worth of Instagram Apps
So You Don't Have To.
And I legitimately have spent over $500
on yearly subscriptions and bought
all the best Instagram apps and I've been using them
for a couple of weeks now so I wanna talk
to you about what's worth it, what I use,
why I used it, give you some options,
tell you which ones are great, which ones suck.
So, hopefully that will be helpful.
Like I said, you wanna hit notifications,
hit the subscribe if you care about that content.
That's it for this guys, I'm going
to wrap up the video here with a question of the day.
What is your content strategy for Instagram?
Are you more focused on the captions?
Are you doing memes?
Are you doing repost?
What is your Instagram strategy?
I would love to use some of these as examples
in future videos so make sure you're dropping
that in the comments down below.
Also, feel free to check out my Instagram,
it's @robertoblake.
Also, you can check out my new Instagram brand
for people who care about gear, if you're a gear head,
check out @creatorgearguide, I'm gonna link
both of those in the description for you.
Probably will also be maybe the pinned comment or something.
Like this video if you like it,
don't forget to subscribe.
Check out the other awesome stuff on the channel.
In fact here on the info card, I've got
a lot of my other Instagram videos
and a playlist for you.
As always, you guys, thanks so much for watching
and don't forget, go out there
and create something awesome today.
Take care.