Do you ever feel like a hamster,
like you're on this never ending content creation wheel just to keep up with the
Joneses of online business?
And even though you know that Instagram is the world's number one social media
platform, you might still be feeling overwhelmed,
like you have to create content for it all day, every day. In today's video,
I'm sharing with you how I plan out my content for Instagram,
for both my personal account and my agency's client accounts.
So if you're in for this topic,
be sure to hit the subscribe button and the bell so that you will never miss one
of my future trainings on how to grow your online business again and stay tuned
until the end where I'm going to share the one method that you need to adopt in
your business today so that you can finally get off the frantic hamster wheel of
content production.
Using my content planning method for Instagram has worked for my friend Natalie
Sisson, plus a bunch of other students who I've worked with too,
to save a ton of time and their sanity.
So as we're talking about content for your Instagram feed,
let's start high level.
I don't want to get granular yet because at the end of the day,
why are you putting out all of this content?
You're putting this content out there on your feed to connect with your
audience, right?
You want them to get to know you then like you and then trust you.
So how do you do that? Well, like anything in business,
it starts with giving value.
So the same goes with your feed. So how do you give an Instagram follower value?
Well, I define value in three ways.
The first way is to inspire someone.
So if you inspire a follower to take action or just have a new thought,
that is free value that you're giving them. The second way is to entertain them.
I mean, a lot of us scroll on Instagram to kill time.
So if you make someone laugh or smile, that's value that you're giving them.
And the third way of giving value is to educate someone.
So if you're teaching them something new that they didn't know before,
that is free value.
So that's the big picture for your content that you're going to share in your
feed. Every piece of content should in some way give value,
whether it's inspiration, education, or entertainment.
So let's take things down the next level and let's get a little bit granular.
What are you actually gonna post in your feed?
This plan is important to have when it comes to actually knowing what content to
share. So it's important to like go through this process right now.
Once you go through it once,
you're not going to have to do it again for at least you know, six months or so.
So in terms of what you're going to share in your feed,
keeping in mind how you share value,
what I recommend is to choose between two to five themes that you're going to
share consistently in your feed. What do I mean by themes? Well,
the theme needs to resonate with you as a brand,
whether you're a personal brand or a brand outside of yourself,
but more importantly, it needs to resonate with your target follower. So me,
for example, I'm a personal brand @EliseDarma.
And what I like to do is share certain themes about my life that yes,
they reflect me, but more importantly, they resonate with you.
The freelancer, the entrepreneur, the content creator,
you're the person that I'm really trying to connect with.
So when it comes to my feed, I've chosen certain themes to share.
Like I like to share about my life as an entrepreneur.
I like to share my travels that I do when I'm working remotely.
I like to share thoughts that are keeping me motivated.
I like to share other people or other stories that, um,
are inspiring me. So as much as they resonate with me, at the end of the day,
they're designed to resonate with you.
So you got to choose two to five visual themes that reflect your brand,
but more importantly, resonate with your follower.
Why two to five? Well, if you choose two,
it makes things pretty simple for you, right?
You post one theme one day and then you switch to the next theme the next day
and you just keep going back and forth.
What you're gonna end up with is a checkerboard pattern in your feed.
Now if you choose up to five,
which I really like because it creates a lot of variety in your feed.
If you choose five,
what's going to happen is no two themes are ever going to be right next to each
other or on top of each other in the feed. So like I said,
you get lots of variety and you're never going to have redundancy in your feed
as well. Before I move on,
I want to dig deeper into themes to give you a few ideas of what visual themes
could be. So here are some of my favorites.
One thing you can add into your feed is simply answering the common questions
that your customers or followers ask you.
So visually I'm thinking it's going to be a quote card, right?
Maybe the visual will just be their question and then in the caption you answer
it. Now, where do you get questions from? Well, if you're just starting out,
you might just want to sift through your inbox because surely some people have
asked you questions there.
Or if you want to go into some industry-related Facebook groups,
go ahead and search those groups and you're going to see what questions people
are asking there. Another place you can look is Reddit,
so subreddits are themed forums around your topics so you can go ahead and see
what people are asking in those groups as well.
Then go ahead and compile all the questions that you're finding.
Create quote cards and then like I said,
go ahead and answer their questions in the caption.
Another thing you can consider is you. You as the leader, you as the founder,
this is really great, especially if you're a personal brand.
You might notice that a lot of online entrepreneurs are showing up more in their
feed on Instagram. That's because at the end of the day,
we all do business with you, the person behind the account,
so creating content around yourself could be as simple as getting a tripod and
taking a selfie photo or you could, like,
ball out and hire a photographer to meet you at your Home Office and do a photo
shoot for a couple hours.
That way you'll have a whole bank of professional images of yourself that you
can pull from at any time.
Another visual theme that I love is tips from your industry,
so similar to answering questions,
this is where you're actually getting free education or free value.
Now you have the option of pulling an image like a stock image,
which is copyright free,
or you can create a quote card that literally just says what the tip is.
The point here is to give free education that's short and snappy so that people
feel compelled to save your posts or even share it in their own Instagram
Stories.
Another thing you can consider is memes or funny videos.
This obviously falls under the entertainment value category,
but a great place to check out what's trending is your Explore page and you
could very well see what's trending.
Save it to your camera roll and repost it as curated content to your feed.
Of course,
you're going to want to give credit to the original poster in the caption.
One other theme you can consider is a client story,
a client testimonial or the transformation that you helped someone achieve
through your business, either your program or your services.
This is a really great way to drive home the value that you know how to get
people results. Now I know what you're thinking:
We don't get these testimonials or these stories every single day,
so if you only have a handful, that's totally fine.
Whenever this theme comes up again in your planning,
you can swap that in for maybe a quote of your own or something that you're
feeling that's inspiring you.
The point of this theme is to inspire your follower,
either through your own thought, your own quote,
or your own client's story and testimonial. Question,
what type of content do you like on Instagram?
Let me know in a comment below this video.
Do you like content that's educational, inspirational,
or entertaining? I'd love to know! So,
I hope those ideas got the ball rolling for you.
Go ahead and plan out what your two to five visual themes are going to be and
then you're going to have to plan out where you're going to source that content
from. So I mentioned Canva a few times.
Canva is my favorite tool where I like to create quote cards for free.
I also mentioned copyright-free stock photos.
Those are really great for when you just want a simple visual to really
illustrate your caption. And I also mentioned photos of yourself.
I'm a big fan of working with a photographer maybe once every six months doing a
nice brand photo shoots. Invite them over to your Home Office. You know,
take some photos of you and your environment.
And that really is a great way for someone to get to know you on a deeper level.
So go ahead and plan out your themes and figure out where you're going to
source, curate or create each one of them from. After you've done that step,
you're going to want to create a bank or a library where you can store all of
these images. So it could just be in your Google drive, your Dropbox folder,
or if you're a Later user like me,
you can use Later's media bank as a place to store all of your files.
If you're with me so far,
then this brings me to the method that you need to adopt today in your business
to save time. The method is batching.
Batching is basically what I'm setting you up to do in terms of content planning
for your Instagram account. But first, what is batching?
Cause I'm not talking about making a batch of cookies,
I'm talking about batch work. So to be clear,
batching is when you take a certain project or a certain workflow and you divide
it up into chunks of time so that you're only doing one thing at one time
instead of jumping around from task to task. To give you an example,
when most people post on Instagram, they'll find the image they want to use,
then they'll write the caption, then they'll find their hashtags,
then they'll post it and then they'll respond to comments.
So that's jumping from task to task. So when you batch your Instagram,
you're not doing that. You're not jumping from one task to another.
You're doing one task over and over again.
So your very first step would be to con- ugh. Okay.
What I'm suggesting is to not do the same process every single day when you
post, but instead set aside an hour,
maybe on a Monday or Tuesday where you go through that whole process in one fell
swoop. So in one hour you're gonna find all your content for your week.
You're gonna write all your captions,
you're gonna find your hashtags in that one set of time so that you're not doing
all those little tasks over and over again throughout the week.
So where are we at in our process? Well,
you know what your visual themes are going to be.
You've created a bank of libraries,
so you're already halfway there to batching.
What I recommend next is dropping in your images into a scheduling tool like
Later. That way from your desktop,
you can actually drop in your images that you want to post for the next week.
Write your captions in one go. Find your hashtags in one go, set it, forget it,
and that's it.
You're going to save so much time by batching this activity versus posting every
day on Instagram, starting from scratch every time you open up your app.
One tip that I love is to actually have a note on your phone,
so I just use the note app. Anytime a caption idea hits me,
maybe like earlier today I was walking around and I saw a horse,
I saw a police officer on a horse, so maybe that sparks an idea for a caption.
What I like to do is either go into that note app and send myself a voice note
so that apple will transcribe it or I'll just quickly type it out.
The point is is sometimes you get ideas for your content that just hits you in
the moment. You don't want to lose them,
so either send yourself a voice note or quickly write it down in your note app
so that it's available for you the next time you sit down to batch schedule your
content. There you have it.
Batching is how I get off of that annoying hamster wheel of content creation.
I do it once in my week, all in one go.
Set it and forget it for the rest of the week.
If you like this video and you want more trainings on how to actually grow your
business through Instagram,
I invite you to sign up for my free Instagram masterclass.
The link is right in the description below this video,
you're going to discover real tangible ways that you can grow a quality
following today so that you actually get more customers and sales back to your
business. To ease and revenue. I will see you in the next video.
What is batching ,
basically, what am I talking about?
To ease revenue and fun content planning for Instagram? No,
that's too long. To ease revenue and content. I'll see. You know.