 So how do we get more visibility on our Instagram content is a good idea to run some ads for even our what's what's called stage one content. Those of you who have never heard of my stage 123 content creation, I will just briefly remind you what they mean. Stage one content is exploratory. It's more casual. You should take the least amount of time doing it as possible and prolific put as much stage one content out there as possible you just exploring ideas experimenting. It could be through video. It could be through carousel posts. It could be through a certain image and then with some captions on Instagram. Basically anything you post for the first time online, even if you've worked for it, worked on it for eight years. The first time it touches the online audience. It's still stage one, because that's the first time you're getting any kind of market signal, whether or not it makes sense to people, right. So stage one, if it's going to take you either eight years, or, you know, 18 minutes to make a stage one content try to take 18 minutes, maybe not 18 minutes some of you know him of us. Don't write as fast so maybe it'll take us, you know, 45 minutes to write a stage one piece of content so just put it out there as fast as you can or record a, you know, three minute video five minute video and you might you might do three takes, even with stage one content you could do three takes. So maybe it takes you, you know, 20 minutes to make a three to five minutes stage one content and you put it on, you know, Instagram or whatever so stage one that's the stage two is stage two is when you look back on your stage one content for the first month, you notice which ones made the more most impact, and you take that, and then you improve on it to say oh that one really struck a chord with people. Let me now improve on that maybe integrate some of the comments that they gave me or questions or have some other ideas for it. And let me repeat that content now with more refined ideas or you know, a better story or taking some miscellaneous of it, you know, so stage two is improving and resharing, or maybe taking a video and turning into a written piece or taking a written piece and turning into a video so that's all stage two type of actions. And then stage three is to take the best of your stage two, and turning it into a product online course, a book, a webinar, a service coaching package, you know. Anyway, so, you know Nick here is asking a good question like is stage one content like if we're just starting an Instagram audience. You know it's, it's like barely anyone is seeing our stuff. Right. So of course we put stage one things out there but how do we grow an audience when we have no. On Instagram, most of most of us actually grow our audience when we start to follow some of our colleagues, you know on Instagram, and then they some of them will follow us back right like some of your friends and colleagues. On Instagram, Instagram will ask you whether you want to connect your Facebook or, or like hey can I can I look at your contacts, contact list on your phone, and see if you know anyone else on Instagram. And that's usually the first, you know, our first 20 followers or 50 followers or whatever it may be is to follow a bunch of people you already know that you actually care about, and then some of them will follow you back. Beyond that, you can then poke around an Instagram, maybe search hashtags, right hashtags, I think of hashtags as a community. Hashtag is not, you put 30 of them, it just blasted out into hope, hopefully somebody of the 30 of hashtags will find you. I think that's a, I think that's a very in an effective way, and in an efficient way I mean come on you got to copy and paste three hashtags and by the way the algorithms don't like it, because it just looks spammy to people and by the way if you're going to put hashtags put it as your first comment, don't put it in your caption. That's, that's beginner stuff, you know, beginner mistake is put up the hashtags in the caption no no put it in the first, add a comment and put the hashtag there anyway. So I don't even use hashtags on Instagram, because I've tested them. And it's such pitiful reach on using hashtags I'm like, okay yay I reach 15 people with hashtags and you might say George 15 is better than what I'm doing now fine okay use hashtags me in the beginning. But like, I can take $5 for an Instagram ad and reach 500 people targeted people. It's like, research hashtags and reach 15 people. On the one hand, or spend $5 on the now I'm doing Instagram real right like you can imagine this as an IG real 15 30 hashtags and that reach 30 people or spend $5 and reach 500 targeted people like which one pick one what's what's better use of your time and what looks better. People don't like to see hashtags I mean, three hashtags okay you know but 30 hashtags people like yeah that's a desperate Instagram or that person doesn't know how to use Instagram. All the all the not not all. Most of the expert Instagram is don't use 3031 hashtags right. They use a few. And a lot of them like me don't even use any at all, because we know how to run ads and it's like $5 come on, you can spend $5 you reach more people with $5. Then you would a whole month of using hashtags so what's the point you know it's like, okay you can spend $10 and double that right. So, so back to the question. But I wanted to say a bit about hashtags long on it. If you will use hashtags, like I said, it's not. It's free traffic, but don't just do random stuff. I think of hashtags as a community of people. That's really the most authentic and effective way of looking at it so before you start using a hashtag you should search that hashtag. And so, who are these people that are posting here, and do I want to be net caring with these people that are posting here on this, because if I do, because guess who follows hashtags, the people who use them. I mean, you're, you're reaching your, your colleagues you're reaching your peers your niche major not reaching potential clients. You're reaching people who might share your stuff with their audience and they're your potential clients. So think of hashtags as a community, you go you research it you see if it's people you like. And if it is people you like it's a post that you like I want to show up here to it it makes sense. Then yes, you might then actually follow some of them. Right. And they'll beg out who's this person they go look at you. And then they they might follow you a few of them I follow you back okay. So, that's how we get our first few followers right friends colleagues and maybe the hashtag people that we want to connect with. And follow hashtags to right because then you'll start to find new people as as they post hashtags. And then, step two, if you want to use you find some hashtags that you really like the kinds of people that are posting there. Go ahead and use it. Like I said, three hashtags proposed doesn't look spammy. It looks respectable. Go ahead and do it, you know. But, like I said, you know, you could do all that for years and still just be reaching a few hundred people, when you could spend $10 and reach up to 1000 people. You know, are targeted people fans of Brené Brown fans of Eckhart Tolle fans of Pema children or Tara Brock or Tony Robbins or name the influencer you want to reach fans of theirs. You know, so the answer is sorry for such a long answer Nick. Yes. Tell us are going to grow your audience. I mean, I'll say one more besides hashtags and paid ads Instagram ads Instagram boost, etc. The other common way of growing your audience on Instagram is collapse collapse are basically you as so many ways of doing it and you'll see people doing it but the most common way of collab collaboration on Instagram is to do an Instagram live with somebody else. I mean, you probably have seen people doing that. So it's like, okay, you set a time together, you announce it to each of your audiences, you know, you create a nice image or whatever. It's, oh, I'm going live with Nick on, you know, Thursday at 10am Pacific time, you know, maybe give a couple time zones. This is a mistake people make 10am Pacific like 20% of your audience isn't the correct time zone. So 10am 10am pack slash 1pm East slash, you know, 6pm BST slash middle of the night Australia, you know. Yeah, okay, announce it. And then once the time comes, one whoever the host is right whoever is helping the other really the host is the one promoting it essentially the other person can promote it later through their stories. And maybe download the video and upload it themselves but you the host starts the IG live. And of course the other person has to be ready on IG like waiting waiting for the host right so the host starts IG live and the other person waits, waits for the host to start and it goes and joins the IG live as a viewer. And then once the host sees that the speakers there as a viewer, they can invite that viewer to become a speaker of the IG live and now now you've seen that before that's like, you know, two people up top and bottom they're talking to each other. So that's the most common way and Nick, you know, how we do collapse, you know who we reach out to is basically people with a similar sized audience as you. Yeah, this is free. Right. You know how to pay money for this. You just have to pay for some potential rejection when you reach out to somebody because not everyone's been say yes in fact it's been a minority of people will say yes, unfortunately. So you pay for it in time spent, you know, DMing, like 10 people and getting, you know, three people writing you back and one person saying yes, you know some kind of ratio like that. It might be worth doing it. Now, you're going to get a higher yes rate. If you if the message you send them is more thoughtful than generic. I get a lot of generic DMs and make a tell they basically copy pasted that to a thousand people. Okay, but it's like, George, I am just, I'm so grateful for your for your kind of content out there. I really like your recent posts about authentic this or blah blah blah. And you know, I have a similar audience, you know, I think we both share audiences of blah blah blah blah. And, you know, and we have a similar sized audience as well and I wonder what if what if we do an IG live together. I think it will help grow both of our audiences. And even even if you even if you have only, you know, 100 followers on Instagram, right. And someone else has between 50 and 300 followers, some kind of ratio like that. Okay, so if you have 100 look for someone between 50 and 300. I usually 50 and 200 that's, but it's like you can stretch it, you can stretch on the high end a little bit if you're bold enough to reach out to someone with three times the size your audience. If you have 300 people, you reach out to someone between 100 and 1000. You know, you see what I mean. So you just keep on doing that kind of IG live. And when when when once that happens. By the way, not, not all of your speakers that you interview or have a conversation with are willing to promote it so don't pressure anybody, but just let them know when it's when it's up when it's recorded. And they can easily share it as a story or you could even give it to them as a video file you download the IG live you give it to them as a Google Drive video file and say hey you are welcome to upload this as an IG TV IG video as well if you'd like. And if you do please tag me I love to see that you know. But that's so so long story to free ways of growing your IG audience hashtags, thoughtfully, as a more of a community feel and collapse. Most people just do it that way, because people don't know how to do Instagram ads. But if you can do Instagram ads, you're just saving your shaving years off of your audience building this, you can reach thousands every month just targeted, you know just like So yes, it's still worth doing now, you might say well George, I just have stage one content so. But Nick, the thing is, remember, we start off with our colleagues our friends and peers right that follow you back. And we might start off with some hashtag colleagues that we started to get to know and they might follow us back. You're going to get. And let me ask you Nick, are you getting at least one like proposed. Do some of your posts get at least one like. Yes, I, of course, average song, at least five to 15. Oh, well there you go. Okay, well that's better than that's better than someone who's starting out. But I was just speaking to the person who's starting out I'm like, if you're starting out. Do you get at least one like sometimes on some of your posts and the person will say well yeah of course I get one like no not not from your mom. Not from somebody else other than your family, you get one like. If so, that one like is more than the others that got zero likes. So the three stages of content still apply. The thing that got one like made an impact because remember every single one like you get represents multiple likes, because multiple people enjoyed it just only one person bothered to click like others like oh wow that's cool and then kept just always remember that one like equals who knows between two to 10 to 20 people who like to enjoy it. Okay, one comment, positive comment is even more representative because someone has to actually type out a comment represents you know five to you know 30 other people who enjoyed it but didn't come out of the comment. So yes, even one like represents who that one is worth running an ad on you see what I mean. Obviously Nick you're if you're averaging five to 15 you have plenty of data, you know this one got this one got five likes. This one got 15. Now you know. So, yeah, hope this helps. Alright and a couple of related comments I'm going to bring forward. Thanks to Chris says that Brock Johnson was explaining that hashtags are like a folder like a filing system yeah hashtags yeah can be seen as that so it's a community of content creators who are saying hey everyone. This is about this topic, and you might get inspiration. So really think of a hash like I said hashtags the community of net caring. Find find peers that you can collaborate with, but it's also a community of inspiration content like hey other content similar to this topic might inspire your own say help. I have my thing to say about that to right like that's how you can get content ideas is through through hashtags and faith also said some hashtags are really bloated like several million followers right or several million posts for a very generic hashtag like hashtag boss babe. I don't really like that or hashtag winning. Come on. Yeah, like who are who are remember, like, even if you're one of your hashtag winning just remember the people you're reaching are really generic and, and you don't want to you don't want people following you that are not really your ideal ideal clients or ideal collaborators because if you have generic people following people who are not your ideal clients or collaborators, you will run up your ad costs over in the future when you say George I'm ready to run ads. I'll be like, Have you been using hashtags or like hashtag winning, because now you have to pay a lot more for ads, because your warm audience is now huge. You know people who have checked out your account is now in the tens of thousands and you have to pay a lot more. Sorry, you didn't take my class because no you want to keep your Instagram audience small and targeted. No one ever tells you this. You don't want millions of followers are you kidding me like you then you're going to reach them again you would even pay thousands of dollars per campaign. That's in madness. I'm always trying to push people away who are not my ideal people I want. I want 10,000 10,000 ideal clients or ideal collaborate great. Otherwise I don't want you there, because you're going to eat up my costs, you know for for paid ads I don't want that. So anyway, that's why that's why you should use it like faith is saying you do do a smaller hashtag where it's really more of a community and you're reaching people that are really, you know, good people you want to actually reach more of. So, we're calling great question. Before starting to run Instagram ads, should I already have a certain amount of content. Absolutely not. I'm glad you asked it. I started running ads for a partnership I was working with where we were starting and I ran ads from day one we have one post one ad, you know, put it out there, and then just just build it up over time. Obviously, some people who look at your most people who look at our ads Instagram ads are just going to engage right there, like they're not going to go to your profile, they're just going to, they're going to engage and comment or whatever and then they're going to keep moving on. And reach them again because the fact that they either liked it, or they scrolled on the carousel, or they commented any of those are engagement signals that then allow you to run ads to them. Again, it's called a warm audience ad, which is why you want the right people doing that, not just people doing it, right. So, you know, they don't they don't have to go to your profile most of them don't. So you can run ads, warm ads again, you know, another $3, reach my really tiny warm audience it's fine $3, you know, have your warm audience see your stuff. Once a month for $5 $10 really good deal, you know you continue nurturing the people who have commented or liked or whatever so. But yes, over time, obviously you're going to post more and, and once you have like three or six posts, that's enough. But even starting with one like I said you know that kind of extreme example I think it's really, really fine as well. So, let's see here. Okay, and colleague asked me any tips I want to share for IG ads. Basically, take your stage to content and run IG ads with them. So in other words, that's the most efficient way of doing it because you already see that it's making an impact, especially ideally content that has at least one positive you know, and if you have like a buddy of yours, and you're like doing some IG ads together and you can buddy up and say hey, hey, Mira, I'm about to run an ad on this one. Would you mind just adding a positive comment like, and ideally more than amen, you know, amen explanation mark or more than more than like a heart or a fire icon, like just try to add a few words. Like if it's a few because basically thoughtful comments beget more thoughtful comments. And so when, when people see it, they're like, oh, that's the etiquette of this post and I'm going to. So yes, that's that's my biggest tip is stage two content and try to have a thoughtful comment if possible.