403 – Advanced tips to grow FAST: Tom talks Instagram

Episode 403 - Instagram
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode four hundred and three of Screw the Commute podcast. This is another one of those do as I say, not as I do episodes. All right. I'm going to talk about Instagram today, and I pretty much hate all social media every time I see it as a necessary evil to get people on my email list. Right. Maybe, maybe I'm old fashioned. But to this day, the big money and if you ask all the people at my life, all have been around as long as me, the big money still comes from email. So I'll admit right up front by my own Instagram has been terrible. But that doesn't mean I don't know what to do. And if you really feel the need to have a great Instagram account, well, that's all we teach our students. And so do as I say, not as I do. But still, I want you to overridingly get him the heck off of there onto an email list. So that's still an overriding principle.

[00:01:31] But today I'm going to concentrate on some of the relatively new and little known features that will allow you to go to 50000 good quality followers if you want to, or more. I mean, the techniques I'm going to show you a little later, I mean, one post could get you thousands of followers. And this isn't any kind of hype.

[00:01:52] I'm going to show you the exact techniques. I hope you didn't miss Episode 402. That was David Meerman Scott, I have promoted his concept. He actually invented this term newsjacking, for years to my students.

[00:02:06] And he sold 400000 books in English. And I don't know how many and twenty nine other languages. He is a really great guy to know and know. He's got all these books out. The latest one is called Fanocracy because of the shift he's seen over the years. So really good episode. Anytime you want to hear a back episode, go to screwthecommute.com and the episode number. In his case, it's 402 and this is 403.

[00:02:35] So how would you like to hear your own voice here on screw the commute? Well, if the show's helped you out at all in your business or given your ideas to help you start a business, we want to hear about it. Visit, screwthecommute.com look for a little blue sidebar that says send voicemail, click on it, talk into your phone or computer. Tell me how the show's helped you. And hey, put your website in there so you can get a big shout out on a future episode of Screw the Commute. Grab a copy of our automation ebook. We give this to you free as a thank you for listening to the show. It's a 27 dollar book. We sell it all the time and it saved me millions of keystrokes and allowed me to ethically steal customers from competitors because they're too slow to get back to people. So check that out at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And while you're at it, grab a copy of our podcast app at screwthecommute.com/app, where you can put us on your cell phone and tablet and take us with you on the road. Now, I really want you to think about what's happened over the past year and how it's affected you and people that you know and young people in your life that can't find jobs. And they're going to four year colleges and blowing a lot of money to learn how to protest.

[00:03:54] And that's about it. And then they're competing for jobs at Starbucks. So I've been teaching online marketing and I mean doing it myself. Twenty seven years since the commercial Internet started, been teaching it for 23 years. And about 13 years ago, I formalized it in the form of a school that's called the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia. But you don't have to be in Virginia because it's good quality distance learning, unlike these schools. Like all of a sudden, you know, they've been ripping you off for years with student activity fees and all this other crap that they try to charge. And then all of a sudden they got a distance learning program. Well, no, ours has been operating with high good scores for years. So check that out at IMTCVA.org. And a little later, I'll tell you how you can get a full scholarship that you can either use yourself or gift it to somebody, you know, to be one of the best gifts you could ever give to a young person, because they will actually have skills that are in demand by every business on Earth. They can start their own business. They could work for others or both, and they won't be coming home live in. In your basement and mooching off you, you have their own money. But I'll tell you about that a little later.

[00:05:12] All right, let's get to the main event. All right, I'm going to talk about Instagram and like I said, I'm no kind of Instagram obvious guru with millions of followers. I just haven't paid any attention to that other than I know what to do. And I teach my students what to do, but I don't really care about it that much myself. I'm going to do it just just to prove I can do it, you know, and but I'm going to do it to grab email subscribers. OK, let me I'm never going to get away from that until email is no longer effective, but it still is and it has been for years. So anyway, let's review a few of the basics now. There's tons and tons of information. You might already have a halfway decent Instagram channel, but here's what I want you to think about. The value of your account has three main parts.

[00:06:08] Followers, how many people follow you? Reach, how many people actually see your content? And what's called affinity, that's how many people take action on your content. Now, the first thing to think about before you post is what is the purpose of this post?

[00:06:33] The purpose should be aimed at increasing the followers, the reach and affinity. Ninety percent of the posts purpose, whatever field you're in, should be towards increasing the followers, the reach and the affinity, only 10 percent is to sell your stuff. If you go higher than 10 percent to sell what you have, you're going to find it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to increase those other parameters of followers, reach an affinity.

[00:07:13] Now, if you're a superstar, you know, if you're Kim Kardashian, you know, you can get away with murder. But I'm talking about the normal way to grow a very powerful account.

[00:07:24] Now, one of the things you got to think about is the algorithm for Instagram, probably for others, too, but here's what happens is soon, the instant that you make a post, what happens?

[00:07:41] Instagram tests out your content on a small group of your followers.

[00:07:48] Sometimes these are called mini or micro tests, so let's just pick a number, let's just say they give it that content to one hundred of your followers. Well, if the response is poor, in other words, the engagement is poor.

[00:08:06] You're pretty much dead in the water right there. You just wasted your posts, say. And this all happens within a few hours after you posted one of the things that a lot of people don't know, you know, they just put stuff up any time they feel like it and then see how it goes.

[00:08:23] No, you must get your engagement early to pass your micro test, OK, because if you pass your micro test.

[00:08:36] Instagram will show and increase the reach of your post to show it to more people if you don't pass the test. It's over right there.

[00:08:47] All right. Hardly anybody is going to see it now.

[00:08:50] What is engagement? Engagement is the following views. Somebody looked at it. Likes they click the like thing or double clicked on your picture there or your your whatever your post was.

[00:09:05] Comments that's engagement shares his engagement, but here's one a lot of people don't really realize time on post is very similar to YouTube is a percentage of watch time. They once you're watching it longer on YouTube, well, Instagram wants people longer on Instagram. And if you do things that make people stay on longer, Instagram likes you because you're helping them sell more advertising. Basically, the longer people are on there and more engaged, boom, they can show more ads. Say so.

[00:09:45] You got to do things to increase us, one of the things that you can do is post at the right time of day, typically. All right. Now, in general, if you're just starting out and you haven't figured this out, that specific for your account. Typically, you want to post between 10 and three in your time zone. The thing is, you also have to think, OK, what's my time zone? If you find out that most of your people are in California and you're on the East Coast, while 10 to three in California is different than 10 to three on the East Coast. So you want to find out where the bulk of your people are coming from. If you got people worldwide and a zillion people while you just, you know, post several times a day. Now, I'm not saying ten to three is the best time zone for you, but I'm just saying that when the bulk of the people are on Instagram is when you want to post. And your people, that is not everybody you want to post in that time, so that gives the chance for more people to see and engage with your content. Now, I saw a chart that indicated that, you know, a lot of people are at work. I mean, it appears that they were at work and doing a lot, the most of it at lunchtime. And then you get a big drop off as people get ready to go home after three o'clock. Now, for entrepreneurs, this might be different, but still many entrepreneurs with families cut off work and have family time. So so I would start out between 10 and three, whatever time zone you're in, and just go from there and then start watching your post and see if time of day makes a difference. So you can go outside of that time frame a little bit on the earlier part, in the later part, and start seeing if there's any kind of trend that the same a similar type of post is getting more engagement.

[00:11:46] Now, if you're not doing anything special, like some of the stuff I'm going to tell you about today. I've seen averages of of like five new followers that you should get per post, so if you want to go to slow and steady route, then I'm not against that at all. Just make good quality post. Good quality means they get engagement.

[00:12:09] And do engagement techniques and and another thing I'm going to talk about the later post consistently at the right time of day. And some people do multiple times per day, but it's hard to make sure your quality is up if you're just starting out and just blasting out four or five posts a day later. All right. I'm going to tell you how you could get several thousand new followers on just one posting. All right. But for now, let's keep after this. So. One thing you can think about is you can use content from other people, just tag them when you do and you can take successful content. If you see something that was really big somewhere else, make it relevant to your topic and tag them as the original source. Another thing, and this is interesting, because the guy that was on Episode 402, which is the last episode, David Meerman Scott, actually invented this term of newsjacking. It's actually in the dictionary now in one of the dictionaries. So I've made my whole career like that before the Internet was even around.

[00:13:27] I would tie my topics into some current news thing, get on radio, TV and in print and get speaking engagements out of it so you can do the same thing with Instagram.

[00:13:39] In part, some of your posts can be things that are trending and you can go to trends.google.com and see the kinds of things that are trending. And then you got to get good. You can't just slop it in there to try to news Jack, if it doesn't make any sense for what you do. So you got to get good at making something relevant to what you're doing. So I don't know. An example would be. You know, picture of Michael Jordan, let's say one of the greatest basketball players and maybe you talk about adversity, well, you could say something about, look how great this guy is now, but maybe you don't know about the trials and tribulations he had as a child. Now, I don't know if that's true or not. I don't know much about him. But I'm just saying that's how you would twist that highly popular picture of Michael Jordan into something that's relevant for you. So you've got to get good at that. That's newsjacking.

[00:14:38] All right. Back to the topic of consistency. You got to be consistent in scheduling your post. And maintain high quality content and here's the thing, the more often you post high quality content, the better. I have seen a ton of graphs of the most successful Instagram people.

[00:15:03] And the the number of posts and the number of followers virtually are exactly the same slope up, the more they posed, the more followers they get. OK, but you have to maintain the quality. That's the things they. And I also saw a graph of a guy that had been doing that for years, then he got sick of it and took a year off and you could see the graph, his followers hung in there for a little bit and then boom took a massive nosedive.

[00:15:37] And then when he got back into it, started posting a lot. Again, the number of followers started increasing. So the more you post good quality content, the more followers you have. There's some people that post four or five times a day and have millions of followers. OK, and but they started out with nothing. OK, so you can do this, too. Now, here's another thing you should know. Videos on average get 38 percent more engagement than plain images and approximately twice like two point one times more comments than images. So the more you can do video, the better.

[00:16:20] Now, let's switch to another little topic on captions on your post, if you just use the standard Instagram app and type your caption in, especially if it's a little bit long, it's just going to be one big blob of dense text. And you've heard me on other episodes talk about readability. We have a whole episode on readability and usability. So nobody's going to read it. There are third party apps that can make really nice spacing for your captions. Now in the old days or I guess you can still do this, we'd have to put a period.

[00:17:02] You know, just just emojis to force some space between the paragraphs and it looks stupid, but now you can go and there's loads of free apps, you just go to your Google Play or your app store and you say you type in Instagram captions and boom, you'll find a whole bunch of free ones that you can write to caption in the app and then paste it into Instagram. And it looks beautiful. Some of them. You can also use nicer fonts than the standard Instagram ones. I don't bother with that, but I do use I don't even remember the name of it. Some app that makes spaces between the captions because you get lots of characters.

[00:17:46] I think you get 2200 characters or something. So you can captions really help. Like you can tell a story. You can give extra information.

[00:17:57] Like, for instance, I just put one out on Antion Associates on the sound booth that I've built. So I did a series of pictures on the sound booth. I'm going to put a video up now since it got so much traction. And then I explained, OK, where do I get the.

[00:18:13] The blankets to put over it and here's a tip for us, instead of using glue on the the joints, what to do, you know, so you can take it apart easily and just a whole bunch of stuff there, captions or really grab people more and pass reading them.

[00:18:28] Remember I said time on the post? Well, it takes longer to read that than it does to just look at a picture and and see sound booth and then leave. OK, so good captions that are interesting will help your time on post say.

[00:18:48] Ok, now here's another thing a lot of people don't know this don't put your hashtags in your posting caption. It just makes it look junky and spammy and hard to read. A lot of people don't know that if you just put them in the first comment. It works just as good and it doesn't mess up your caption. Now, I caught my social media person not doing this, so you might see some of my old posts making that mistake. But now the first. I make the first comment on my own post, and it's all hashtags. All right, while we're talking about hashtags, if you're just starting out and you don't have many followers, don't try to go for the big, massive hashtags. That's no way on Earth like you are going and you hardly ever played baseball at all and going out and trying out for the major leagues.

[00:19:49] Ok, I mean, they won't even see you because there'll be a whole bunch of people with credentials ahead of you that have played minor league baseball.

[00:20:00] And they've they've had a great batting average and all these things that make the pro baseball look at you.

[00:20:10] Well, they're not going to look at you if you walked in and you don't want. No. Which ended the bat switch. So so that's what you're doing when you're trying to go for the major hashtags when you're beginning. So here's kind of a rule of thumb for you.

[00:20:25] Use lesser hashtags, so if you have like less than 10000 followers, use hashtags between five thousand and one hundred and fifty thousand searches, that way it gives you a chance on the lesser known ones to start building up your reputation.

[00:20:43] In other words, now you know which side of the bat. Now you're starting to get a little batting average. I'm not having played baseball since I was a kid, so I don't know why I picked that that analogy. But but anyway, you got to work your way up to the ones. And now once you start getting above. Ten thousand followers, hey, then you can start, you know, still use a lot of the lower hashtags because that's still people that can follow you. But now you can throw in a couple bigger hashtags. You may be the ones that get a couple million searches a month, say don't try to go shoot the moon right off the bat with hashtags, but use them, but not in your caption. Use them in your first comment that you make. And it's OK to have the phrases in your caption, but you don't have to put the hashtag symbol in front of them. Just use them in the normal description of your post.

[00:21:42] Ok, now there's a lot of people to tell you how to write nice bios, but just remember at the bottom of your bio, you get one link off of your site and try to make it so it has a call to action to entice people to do it like 20 percent off or get a free so and so, you know, to get him to click on that link, because that's really the only one that's real obvious, unless you have applied to have a shop and that's another thing. So anyway, try to entice them to click on your link to go off your site, get their freebie, opt in or do something. Remember, I want to get him the heck off of there into an email list.

[00:22:26] All right, so here's some advance then and some new stuff. One topic that I want you to keep in mind is something called content stacking. This is where you make a post. But then you immediately make an Instagram story or an effective Instagram TV video that introduces the post. You know, because you get live viewers right there on those things.

[00:22:54] But it doesn't reveal exactly what the Post is now, if you've followed my copywriting stuff, copywriting901.com and we've got episodes here about it, we got whole webinars teaching your copywriting because it's the most important skill in my entire business career. But anyway, one of the techniques is the Zeigarnik technique. That's the the one that causes curiosity. So you use your content stacking. In other words, your your live Instagram or your TV to make people want to go look at the post and you want to do this like right away as soon as you make the post, because remember, you're in that micro test period. So the more people you can get there to engage and you can even in your life and your TV, tell them, please comment, please, like please share now because people will do if they like what you're doing, they will do that. But you got to remind them, say so. Now you can't do that on every post. That would be kind of ridiculous. But let's say one out of five or ten posts, you do that content stacking technique and a lot of people never even thought of such a thing. All right. So that's an interesting advanced technique.

[00:24:14] All right. Now there's a new thing called guides and what guides will guides are a compilation of posts on a certain topic. And now they can be your posts and they can be other people's posts.

[00:24:28] If you have a bunch of posts that are on, let's say you were into health and exercise and fitness and nutrition and stuff like that, so you could have one of your guides would be all your posts about nutrition or your best posts about nutrition. Doesn't have to be all of them. It's almost I would equate it to a playlist in YouTube. So you can have as many as you want. You just make a guide on then exercise like upper body exercises or lower body exercises or handling injuries, you can have a guide on all this stuff and that's going to get you a lot more people binge looking at your posts, say. So that's a relatively new thing called guides. Now, I might remind you, sometimes you won't see this stuff if you haven't updated your Instagram app and sometimes a split test. Instagram is actually split testing and something I tell you looks a certain way on yours, looks different on mine because they're trying to see which one works the best. So sometimes you have to look around for these things. But anyway, guides is something. But make sure you keep your Instagram app updated because they change things frequently.

[00:25:44] All right, the other thing is you can apply to actually have a shop now, I'm not suggesting you do this if you're brand new because they really scrutinize you like crazy to make sure no shysters are getting into the shopping function on Instagram.

[00:26:03] You can go to their help section and they will tell you all the parameters. But the thing is, if you're brand new, you're probably not going to get approved because they want to see a history that you're actually in that kind of business and they want to know that what you're selling and they want to know that you're legitimate. So you can go through that if you want.

[00:26:23] But I would I don't even bother with that right now because I you know, when everybody buy directly off of my site, but I will eventually fool around with it. But don't bother if you're brand new, but it wouldn't hurt to start building towards that if you have products you want to sell.

[00:26:45] Ok, now another thing, it's called Reels. Now, these are more entertainment oriented and everybody's saying that the kind of the purpose of them is to keep people from going to TikTok. Tiktok is very addicting and it's going crazy, too. So this is Instagram's effort to keep people on Instagram. Now, it's different than stories, I mean, stories are kind of snippets of your day and they disappear after 24 hours, Reels can be either 15 or 30 seconds.

[00:27:26] A lot of people don't know. You can jack it up to 30 seconds.

[00:27:30] And of course, like I said, you got to continually update your Instagram app to make sure you have the 30 second function and there are more entertainment oriented, like I said, that almost everybody says they put this in there to try to keep people from going to tick tock.

[00:27:47] All right, now, the next thing I'm going to tell you is if you really get serious and you want. Hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site, and this is not B.S., but before I tell you about that, I want to remind you about my mentor program and how if you're in it, you can get the free scholarship to my school, which you can either use yourself for extra training or gift to somebody. But I have the longest running, most successful, most unique mentor program in the field of Internet and digital marketing anywhere. I have no trouble saying that I've I've tripled dog dared everybody on Earth to put their program line for line up against mine and nobody will do it because mine you know, I'm a fanatic, I'm a crazy fanatic. And sometimes it's good to deal with fanatics when they're working for you. So one of the things I did was everybody at my level was charging 50 or 100 grand up front to teach you this stuff. And and I knew this. A lot of them are rip offs and they'd never help you. So I kind of made them all mad and I charged an entry fee. But for me to get my 50000, you have to net 200000. Well, people just love this. And seventeen hundred plus students later and 23 years later, it's still going strong. So that's a unique feature. Another thing is you get an immersion weekend that the great Internet marketing retreat center in Virginia Beach where you actually live in the house with me and my staff's here helping you. It's this very small group. It's only five people or so. The most we ever had was 10, but averages about five. And we have a TV studio here where we shoot marketing videos at any one of which would cost you five to seven hundred bucks on the open market. So when one couple was here, they shot 53 of them. Okay. And my guy added some puts the graphics on and just sends them to you when you get home. So that's a unique feature.

[00:29:54] You get the scholarship to my school. That's another unique feature. But one of the most unique features is that. Everything is one on one except for the trip to the retreat center, because I hate group training, because the advanced people were bored, if I'm talking to the beginners and the beginners are lost if I'm talking to the advanced people. We even tried to break it up to beginner, intermediate and advanced. And people would say that their intermediate or advanced and they were not even a decent beginner and it just was a mess. So. So we quit doing that. Everything is one on one with both me and all the people that work here, the subject matter experts. So you get high. I mean, you can't get this high level of of access anywhere. So and like I said, I triple dog dare to tell some guru that, you know, to come on and let's let's go line four line and see who wins. So anyway, check that out at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. And then remember, you get that gift of that scholarship. That would be the best legacy gift you could ever give to a young person in your life, because not only will they have a skill that's in super high demand, every business on Earth needs it. They won't be home living in your basement and mooching off of you forever. Okay, so. So check it out. GreatInternetmarketingtraining.com.

[00:31:19] All right. Now let's get into the real killer stuff here. Now, let me tell you this. Hardly anybody knows about this stuff. What I'm going to tell you about is called a DM group.

[00:31:33] And what this is, is this is a group of people with I mean, you can do them at any size, but these are really serious players with anywhere from two hundred to a couple million followers.

[00:31:50] And what it is, is where they get together in a group and they promote each other's posts and they try to shoot for that micro test period. So when one of these people posts something, they tell the rest of the group and then. The rest of the group jumps on it and engages with it, and also there's a sidebar here I should tell you about a big, powerful influencer.

[00:32:20] Is worth more when they engage with something than a beginner, it's not equal like one for one that like if I get somebody to engage with my stuff that's got three followers, or if I get somebody to engage with my stuff that's got 10 million followers, that person with 10 million has way more clout with Instagram. And Instagram says algae's Tom stuff must be really great if that person with ten million followers engaged with it say so. That's a little sidebar. So you want those people, the big powerful people to engage with you. Right.

[00:32:55] But if you only got 12 followers, how happy or how excited do you think that group is going to be to let you in? All right. So so, you know, they promote you and you promote them with 12 followers. It's just not fair. Nobody's going to do it.

[00:33:13] All right. However, I'm going to tell you. Well, you can buy your way in. That's one way. So they will let you not all, but some will let you in if you pay and the money can be all over the place.

[00:33:29] I have no, you know, averages for you there. However, there's a super hack. OK? So what you do is you go on the highest level keywords that are somewhat related to you and you find all the big players there. And you contact them and you tell them that you are putting together a group from people with two hundred thousand to a million followers.

[00:34:01] And you also tell him who has already agreed to it, I mean, in the beginning, nobody has, but as soon as you do, you tell them so.

[00:34:12] There's no downside for somebody to say no to this, because if they can get in another group that's got anywhere from a couple hundred thousand to a couple of million followers, that's going to be a great group. And they're not going to do it if you don't actually put the group together with real people. OK, now you got to make sure that the real people are really real.

[00:34:35] So let me take another sidebar here. Because if somebody just bought all their.

[00:34:41] Followers, while their engagement is going to be very low and you can go to a place like SocialBlade.com And check on people, or you can just look at their account and see how much engagement they get when they make a post, if they've got a million followers and only five or 10 people are engaging with their content, you know, those are fake followers. So don't invite that person and certainly don't do any business with that person. It's a fake account. So you only approach people that are real. And a lot of them will say, yeah, I'll be in a fuckin you know, if you put this together and you can prove to me that you've got 10 or 15 people in that are equal to me in size and related to me, then I'm in. The thing is, since you put the group together, that was your payment for getting into the group yourself. So that's a super hack. It takes effort. It takes time. It takes correspondence back and forth, being professional. And and, you know, all the while you what? You should be working on your own channel.

[00:35:48] But if you put a group together like that, any one post you put out could gain you thousands of new followers. This is how people go from zero to one hundred thousand followers in a matter of months.

[00:36:04] Ok, this is not hocus pocus and these are real followers because you don't want to get somebody that's outside of your field because somebody might come and look at your profile because they gave you a shout out. But they're never going to follow you if it's something that doesn't interest them. So these these groups have to be somewhat related. OK, so that's a super hack. And you're welcome for me. Telling you about.

[00:36:30] Ok, now. Let's say you don't want to take the house or you can't afford to get into a D.M. group while you still can get shout outs at some relatively small cost. And what you want to do is you want to contact people that you want to give you a shout out. And you say, and by the way, everybody on Earth is chasing them for shout outs.

[00:36:55] So right at the top of your D.M. you want to say paid shout out inquiry, something like that. You want to put the word paid because they get a thousand a day of people saying, hey, let's do shout outs and and it's not an equitable deal or they want a freebie shout out. So if you put paid, you'll get more attention. And you got to do this to a bunch of people because like I said, somebody with big followings gets enormous amount of correspondence and they might miss it. And then you just ask him how much for a first shout out, and some of them, if they are interested, are going to want to see what kind of stuff the shout out. So you might want to tell them, here's some examples of the shout outs I'm looking for, and you just ask him how much they charge.

[00:37:43] And also there are shout out brokers. I'll give you a couple of them right here. Now, I personally have never used these. And keep in mind, folks, there's a difference between buying followers, which you could do on five or get 10000 followers tomorrow, but they'd be totally worthless. There's a difference between buying followers and buying shout outs from real incredible Instagram. OK, there's a big difference, perfectly legitimate to buy a shout out from a powerful, legitimate influencer. Totally not cool to buy followers off of some fiber or some crap like that. So this is perfectly fine. So one place is called shoutcart.com. Another one is buysellshoutouts.com. Now, again, just because somebody is listed themselves there, these are what we call shout out brokers.

[00:38:46] So just because somebody listed themself there doesn't mean that the people that are listing there, it's worth your money, even if it was ten bucks, because you have to go. You know, some of these will rate the shout out person.

[00:39:04] They're on on how much engagement they get. Like, for instance, I think Shout Cart has a scale from zero to 10. Ten being the best on the engagement on that person's post, so they might have three hundred thousand followers and a score of two or one or zero on engagement. Well, you'd be crazy to give them any money at all because nobody is engaging with their post.

[00:39:30] You're not going to get anybody to engage, you know, and come over and look at yours and follow you. If they won't even follow the the owner of the account say so. Just be very careful. Use social blade and make sure the person has a real account and has plenty of engagement. That's I'd rather have a way smaller number of followers with a super high what they call affinity or engagement rate, because those people love that person and they're going to listen to them if they do a shout out and send them to your way. Now, shout outs can be just for a matter of hours.

[00:40:08] See, a lot of these places don't want to put a permanent shout outs and ads all over their site because it looks spammy for permanent. So some of them and I'm not saying this is not worth it. If they give you a shout out for two hours and you get one hundred and eighty followers out of it, you know, and for twenty bucks, let's say that's a pretty darn good deal, say so you have to just see what they're willing to to sell and what types of shout outs they're willing to do, you know, so there's a lot of different variation there.

[00:40:42] But I'm just telling you that if you did that first thing with putting together a damn group, wow.

[00:40:50] You could just go through the roof in no time flat. All right. So that's my little pain in the neck.

[00:40:56] Instagram stuff and the like said there's way more stuff that we teach our students on this. But those things that I just told you, hardly anybody knows a lot of that stuff. So if you start implementing them, you can really ramp up your followers, your engagement, your affinity and all of that supposed to lead to that 10 percent of sales. Because if you're not if you're not doing if you're doing it for any other reason of money, then it's just a hobby. Oh, it just a sidebar here. If you did build up an enormous number of followers, you know, I always want you to sell your own stuff, of course, just like I do on this podcast. But you can also list yourself at these brokers and people will start contacting you and offering you money to do shout outs to you. So that's another revenue stream.

[00:41:44] I would be you know, if I had big numbers like that, I wouldn't be opposed to that. If the person was non-competitive and reputable, that just money in the bank. But like I said, most of the time, I want to sell my own stuff. Remember, only ten percent of yours, your all the work you do here is for sales.

[00:42:07] If you exceed that, you know, all this other stuff I'm telling you about, it's probably not going to work. So. All right, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. So I guess I'll see you on Instagram. See ya later.

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