Okay, welcome to Office Hours. This is number 12, I believe. Great to have you here, this is Taylor, I'm in for Patrick this week. If you don't know me, I'm on the forum. And most recently, I've been doing some audio and video stuff on the new blog post that we just launched. It's about the mission of the company here. And what we're doing to solve the starving artist problem. If you saw that post at the top, there's a new feature in audio version of the post.

And that's me reading that thing. That's a new thing we're gonna be doing for some of our longer posts is recording like a podcast version so that you guys could actually listen to the blog post if you're commuting or you don't have time to actually read through the full thing. So, that's me. I'm here to talk to you guys about advanced Instagram marketing techniques. So, where we're at basically with the history of this new topic that we've been deep diving into Instagram, where we're at is that Patrick has gone through a lot of pains to kind of introduce it, taking it one chunk at a time. Kind of selling you guys on the idea of really, really spending a lot of time over on Instagram.

And the main thing that he repeats over and over is that that's where the fish are, that's where the attention is right now. It's actually overtaken Facebook as kind of the primary social platform for art. So, yeah, considering that, what could we do but really dive into how to perfect Instagram, how to get the most out of it.

So, I think Patrick's done a great job at setting up all of those sort of why, how, how do you get started, why do you wanna get started, what do you do when you're there. Now, what we're gonna do at this session is just throw a bunch of stuff at you guys in terms of little tactics and techniques. So, less huge concepts in this one and more just lots of little stuff. I'm gonna give you examples of different things you can post on Instagram. So, should be a little bit different of a show. It's gonna have a lot of little stuff as opposed to a few big things. And as always, we're gonna be recording this thing, so if I go through a bunch of tips that you want to remember or write down, don't worry, you'll get the email with the replay, and you'll be able to rewatch this at your own speed, and really pick apart everything that I'm gonna be throwin' out there. So, let's get into the outline of what we're gonna be talking about today. First up, I'm gonna give you guys, I believe five examples of effective Instagram stories that we've seen artists posting that I think are really great that you guys could copy and use for yourself. Because we've heard a lot of feedback. I get it, Instagram stories sounds great, but what do I post there? What do I literally post there?

We're gonna give you guys five examples of really cool Instagram stories you can post. Next up, we're gonna give you a customer success story that I just heard about a few days ago. This is really cool. One of our customer has some great kind of success going on in Instagram, so I'm gonna tell you about that. After that, we're gonna get into the direct messaging technique, which is kind of the new phase of education we're gonna be giving you guys about this DMing technique. So, I'm gonna introduce that to you, and we're gonna kind of deep dive into that over the next week. And then finally, just some random additional Instagram tips and hacks that I've thought about. Some easy stuff, some really cool stuff. I'll just throw some more stuff at you at the end that you could consider implementing yourself. And as always, Q&A at the very end. There's a question box in the webinar. If anything I'm saying here is jogging any questions, just dump it in the questions box, and we'll do what we can to get you an answer. Before we get to the content though, announcements as always, what's going up and what's going down. We'll start off with just that recap we always do, in case it's your first time here. I know that every time we do one of these, it's someone's first time attending. So, what are you looking at right now? What is Office Hours? What Office Hours is is a live webinar series that we run bi-weekly just for the ASF customers, it's just exclusive for you guys. It's not here to sell the software, it's here to give you guys our very best tactics and insights as we figure them out, as we perfect them.

This is kind of like the most immediate way that we can give you guys the latest stuff, as opposed to working up the blog post, which take a bit more time. I really see this as the best way that we can immediately recognize something that's working and share it with you guys the next Friday, basically. So, we run these things every other Friday at this time every week. You can register for them on the Office Hours site. These are hosted by our in-house staff like myself and Patrick. We'll also occasionally be bringing in experts. And the second half of the value is really that Q&A that I talked about earlier. It's your chance to get pretty direct feedback on whatever questions you have. So, yep, we got the blog, we got the podcast, this is our best stuff because it's just for you guys. That's the stuff that we don't wanna give away to the open public, to anyone, but really that we feel you guys should definitely have. So, that's what you're doin'.

That's where you are. Another announcement, new page I wanna show you, Instagram resource page. So, this thing is still being built. We've teased it a couple of times. It's in construction. I wanna give you guys kind of an overview on what it's looking like. This thing will be available for you guys to use in another week or so. So, let's take a look at it. This is gonna be housed on the Office Hours site. So again, just a private page for you guys to use. And we're gonna update this thing constantly with everything Instagram. So, you can see here, we're gonna have tons of video content, tutorials, this hashtag technique that we've talked about. This is all embedded, you just click one of these guys, and the video pops up for you to watch how to do it. We have got our podcast stuff here. A rundown of stories, I mean, we're just gonna throw everything in here. And then down here, you go into the specific tactics, and then below that, examples of stories that we like. I'm gonna share some of those with you today. So, this thing's gonna be super resource intensive. It's gonna have all sorts of video content for you to click through. We're thinking every video will be like a minute long, so that it's bite-size little lessons for you to pick up. And like I said, next week some time is when you guys are gonna be able to get your hands on this and explore it yourself. But this is really our commitment to recognizing how Instagram has really grown, and recognizing that we want you guys to be cutting edge. And right now, cutting edge is definitely Instagram. So, there is the tease on that. Finally, like I said, your questions. Submit 'em ahead of time. That's your best chance for us to prepare a really good answer and submit 'em in the question box as we're doing this webinar here. All right, let's get onto the good stuff here. Examples of effective Instagram stories. So, just a quick, brief reintroduction why stories, what are these things? Stories are the content, if you login to your Instagram account, that you'll see in the bubbles on the top of your timeline. Right, so that's as opposed to the regular timeline where you're seeing the pictures that people are posting. The main idea of stories is a way to basically post something just for 24 hours. So, it's not as important, it's not as crucial, it's not something you wanna live forever. It's just fun and engaging throw-away content that wouldn't make it on your full timeline. So, it's just what you're up to, you're painting, you're shooting photos, whatever you're doin', just show the world what you're up to, engage with them that way. And you don't have to worry about the quality. You don't have to worry about it lasting forever on your profile because those bubbles disappear after 24 hours. So, it's great for time-sensitive content, too. So, if you're running a flash sale or if you're doing some kind of thing where you don't wanna actually go back and delete it later after that time-sensitivity is closed.

Stories are the perfect way because they'll just take care of themselves and pop away after 24 hours. And the real reason, the marketing reason why they are changing everything in Instagram, is that they live on the top of the timeline. So, think about it, if people are following several hundred accounts on Instagram, maybe over a thousand, when you post to your timeline, it gets slotted in here full size, but as soon as you post yours, someone else posted theirs, and so on and so on. So, when you think of your audience, the likelihood that they'll see your post in their timeline of hundreds of accounts posting photos, some will see it, not everyone will though. As opposed to the stories which live at the top of everyone's timeline. So, they don't have to scroll and find it, it's just living right up here in these bubbles. And I think that's because Instagram really wants to promote the use of this new feature. Who knows if it'll stay like this forever, but currently, it's just completely free to get your visibility at the very top of everyone's phone. So, it's a pretty incredible opportunity to get people to see the stuff that you want them to know about. So, the bottom line is that people love stories. They're looking at stories, so you should be there, right? It's cutting edge and it's something to really participate in if you're interested in what's happening right now to sell art. The goal, the reason to do this, is really to build a two-way street with your audience. The thing I love about stories is that they're way more engaging than the timeline stuff. And that's just by nature of the fact that they're casual photos, right? They have to be vertical, so you can't post like your best stuff in there. You can't post your actual photos. But you can just post little video clips and pictures of you throughout the day, what you're up to, what you're working with. Maybe you get some new equipment you wanna show off. We'll get into those examples next. But I think it's a great way to engage and really show a nonprofessional side of yourself. Because if your main Instagram account is very glossy, it's very professional, it's very company-based, that's fine, but I think that the stories are a great opportunity to show the other half of that side, which is that behind this business is just a cool artist creating great work. I think it's great for that, for people to really connect with you on a personal level. And by doing that, what you're doing is converting your followers into real fans of your work.

Because then when they see a story bubble pop up from you, if you're producing really cool content, they're gonna be excited to see it. They're gonna start to relate your company as a concept with you as a person, which is very, very good for when it comes time to ask for that sale, when we do the right hook. So, let's get into a few examples of what exactly you could post as stories, because everyone has gotten to this point so far, you know, I'm sold, this sounds great, but maybe I don't have anything interesting to post. You definitely do, let's go into it. The first category of effective story that we see, promote your stuff. That's the first one that you might think of, promote, promote, promote. That's what it could be used for. So, this is kind of a no duh one. But I wanna show you some examples of people that are doing it pretty well. So, promote your stuff. Here's a story we recorded from a guy named Michael Garfield. Here's a story he posted, really simple. Limited series canvas, the prints are up. Go to my website now, here's my website. And it's just a casual tease. Here's what it looks like. See more on my website. Very, very simple. Let's go to another one here. This time, they're teasing a blog post, so they're not just promoting the product. In this case, they're working on a blog post. Finishing up a big post for you.

Talking about the best acrylic paints to use. And here's just a preview of what the post is looking like. All right, so this is a very friendly approach, as opposed to the traditional promotion of a blog post where you get the link and a very serious description of it. This feels like, oh yeah, a person is building this post. It's just more approachable. I really like how this really sets a tone. So, that's the promotion element that you probably think of right away. Let's get into some more unexpected ones. Here's one I really like. It is the Wallpaper Freebie attempt or tactic. The idea with this is that you're saying to one of your followers, to all of them, I want you to look at my art 150 times every day. And the way that you're gonna do that is by convincing them to set your art as their wallpaper on their phone, because that's the number, apparently we check our phones 150 time a day. So, if your art is in the background of their phone, I mean, think of that entry into their life. They really start to get used to your aesthetic and your art being in their life. That's a great way to start creating fans. So, I'll show you what that looks like here. Let me close some of these as I go. Okay, so here's this one. First slide of the story, tap and hold the next screen and take a screenshot. It's a wallpaper. And then here it is. They just provide a low-res phone-sized image. It's already cropped to fit in perfectly with phones. They're just inviting everyone to screenshot this tab of their story, this slide, and then set that as their phone wallpaper. And then every time they open up their phone, boom, there is Ellie's art. Such a really kind of inventive way to start generating fans out of your work with Instagram stories. That's one I really like. Next up, this one's pretty cool, Question and Engage. Like I said, this is all about that two-way street, and this method really creates that. So, I actually found an artist doing this really well.

So, let's look at how one artist is allowing their followers to participate in their work. It's very, very cool, let's check this out. Decision time. Comment and tell me which photo you want me to edit. Comment on the photo post, and the photo with the most comments wins. So, you're doing like a mini contest here. And the idea, it says in the next slide here. Let me know which one you want me to edit for the Instagram live event tomorrow night. So, this guy is just killing it. He's incorporating all of the technology available. He's letting everyone pick from three photos, and then what is it, the next night? He's gonna be streaming himself, color correcting and image editing the photo that got the most picks. So, everyone's a little bit invested in actually attending that event if they voted for it, very cool. So, he sets that up and then he shows off your options, your three images here. So, it's this one, you want this one? Or a third one? That's it. I'll do it tomorrow night, make sure to comment. Very, very cool, you're promoting commenting, you're promoting people checking out your regular timeline to look at those photos. And they're really participating, like I said, in your actual work. That one's kind of genius, I think. Back here, these ones are a little bit easier to do even, Behind The Scenes. So, this is for a photographer's take your audience on site with you.

I've got a couple of examples of artists doing this. So, they're out here for this shoot, and while they're capturing the photos that they're gonna be selling prints of, you know, the real deal, they're just pulling out their phone and taking a little bit of extemporaneous, random footage of where they are, what it looks like. They're tagging the people that they're shooting with. Very casual like I said, makes a connection, makes you seem like a real person, not just a business. And it's super easy to do because it's not your work, it's not your photos. They don't need to be as good, obviously, as your work is going to be. You can just pan your phone around and show off the unique location. Of course, maybe you're not gonna be at such an amazing location as this. But I think you'll find that people find whatever you're doing interesting to show off your setup, to show off where you're at, I think people find all of that very interesting because they don't often know what it looks like, what behind-the-scenes looks like for photo shoots. Very cool way. Here's another example, this guy's out shooting a storm. So, in this case, the landscape isn't particularly amazing but his techniques are. So, he's showing off what it looks like when you're a storm photographer. Really cool stuff. Then at the end, you get a little sneak peak of the images that he's capturing with his camera. Super cool. All right, and then the equivalent for that, for fine artists, is the hashtag process story. So, instead of taking your audience onsite with photo shoots, show your audience how and where you work. Show off your studio, your equipment, your space, your techniques, what you're up to, works that aren't finished yet that show the work that goes into it.

This stuff is really fascinating. And don't assume that the audience wouldn't be interested in seeing this, 'cause they totally would. It's so mysterious, how does fine art get made? How does stuff end up looking how it does in the finished product? Here's an example. Work in progress, they're just working on a little detail there. Very cool stuff. Here's another one showing the layering involved in watercolor art. And this is pretty cool. All that this involves is just snapping a picture at every stage of your work. Pretty cool, pretty easy to do. And here's one more of work in progress stuff. So, you even get to see the studio a little bit, see what it looks like when they're working. This stuff is so engaging. You can really make this connection. And then when you ask people to buy your art, they already know where it came from. They can imagine the creation of it. And that really creates an emotional connection beyond just selling your art based on the final photographs and kind of a white studio space. Very cool stuff. Okay, so there are some quick ideas for you.

There's plenty more, we're going to be adding them all the time to that Instagram resource page. You'll be able to stay up-to-date with every kind of cool new story type that we see. But there's five that you can get started with immediately because they're as simple as just throwing up some pictures while you're doing your work anyway. You're gonna be doing it, share a little bit of what that looks like with your audience. Very cool stuff, disappears in 24 hours, so you don't need to think of it as like your curated collection of images. It's just throw-away stuff. So, I hope that that'll inspire you to get goin' with some stories. Next up, let's go to a success story. So, this guy, Mathieu, is a Quebec artist, and he wrote in to us actually sharing the story of how he had a huge success from Instagram ads, an epic win, really. So, he did the work. We're always preaching pressure over time. Just keep doing the work, and then you'll see the results. And that's what happened for him. So, let's tell his story here. First, let's take a look at this guy's work. It's very, very cool stuff. So, we'll go to his Instagram page since we're talking about Instagram. And you can see what this guy does is portraiture, but in a very, very unique way. It's just so cool how he has this stuff that the paint is off the canvas, very textured, very tactile and 3D. He does these kinds of warped and distorted surreal portraits. So, he's got Hemingway and Einstein in here, self portraits, very cool. So, let's look at what else he's posting though. So, he's constantly posting samples of his work. Very cool. What I like though, is that he has something like this video here. Let me pop this one open. He's showing off, like I said, that 3D element of his work, just how it really piles off of the page, very cool. He's got some processed stuff in here. You can see his studio, what's goin' on there. What I really like is something like this. He's showing off his image printed on a phone. I believe he just had this done just for him, if I'm not mistaken, he just had someone print this up and he's showing the audience. You can see right away, want, anyway to order it? So, there's already people kind of like sell me something.

They're asking for the sale. So, this guy's in a great place because he's got really cool work, but he's also putting in the work in Instagram to create fans. So, he's showing off his life, what it looks like where he's at, and his work. So, how this all paid off enfolded into this huge win. What he had done is advertise this image as an Instagram ad. So, this is just a detail shot of one of his images. You can see like I said, how the paint is just gobbed on top of the canvas in a very unique way. So, he advertised this image. And what happened was a curating publication saw that ad and decided to repost it on their site. So, let's take a look at what happened. Here it is, it's called the Hi-Fructose Magazine. They reposted his ad, they linked back to his profile on Instagram, and they have a far larger reach than he does as an individual artist. And as a result, he got 20,000 likes on that image. And right at the top of the fold here, they can click in and go to his profile, too. So, this was kind of a half luck, half strategy play for him. It really worked out. Let's go over to Facebook and see this publication, because they posted it over there, too. So, you got these wins just like on Instagram, you've got 2.6 thousand likes on Facebook, and the tag that goes right to his profile, so you're driving people there. But it gets even better than this, I think. Let's look at the next stage. Even bigger as a win than the initial one is the comments. So, likes are one thing, a bigger thing is comments, 'cause that shows people care enough to really get in there and add a comment. 52 comments, and what I love about this guy is if you go into the comments, someone said, "How long do these take to dry?" You'd expect to not really get an answer from that, but he's in there. He found the post and he's answering. He says, "It's not dry yet, it could take a year." The guy responds, he's comin' back again.

So, he's in the comments, he's engaging with people. He's making one-on-one relationships in these comments. And of course, he's got the plug here in the comments, as well. See more of my work here. Actually, I think this is his first mistake in all of this. Mathieu, you've gotta go back, edit this comment. Shop for prints of my work here. Don't just say, "See more." Shop for prints of my work here. That's what you gotta say, really sell it there. But I think you've really lucked out with this one. I think it worked out really well. Let's keep looking at the wins. They keep stacking up. So, what's better than likes and comments is 300 shares. So, if you think all of those 300 people share it, and maybe their posts, their sharing of it gets seen by 100 of their friends. I mean, it's just exponential how epic this is. And then let's continue, huge win, that's good. But it gets one step better with him. And the full epic win, they wrote a blog post about his art. So, let's check that out now. Here it is on their magazine website, The Distorted, Absorbing New Portraits. And they wrote up, so what this is is a backlink.

And these are the hardest wins to get because it's someone talking about your art positively somewhere else than your website, and somewhere else than you posting on another website. It's completely independent of you. So, when you're talking about SEO, or even just your distribution of good words about you online. I mean, this is the biggest win you could get, is someone actually writing up a post about you free of any kind of your involvement. They're just doing it because they discovered you. And this all was because of the Instagram ad. They wouldn't have seen it without the Instagram ad. Very cool, very impressive ad. Let's go here. So, here's what he had to say about it, because we talked to him about this. His kind of conclusion of this experience was, it's nice to have small wins. I intend to advertise on a continuous basis. I see it as an investment now and less as an expense. And man, is that exactly what we've been trying to tell you guys for as long as we've been talking about advertising on Facebook and Instagram. He hit it on the head, an investment in your career. The same as buying good equipment so that your images last. It's the same thing, it's an investment. And it's not just a business expense. I'm really happy that he said that, and it clearly is a true thing for him. So, the round-up of what he got for advertising on Instagram was over 2,000 Instagram followers, over 400 Facebook followers, 30 plus emails captured on his site, so that's where it gets really valuable, 'cause now he can start to contact those people via email and romance market to them. And even one sale from Ohio. So, he's a Canadian artist and he got a sale from Ohio. Very cool. And that's just one sale so far, because as we know, the whole game is long term. It's capturing their email addresses so that over time you can get that sale, six months, 12 months down the line. So, the fact that he attributes one sale already to it, just phenomenal, a knockout. So, let's move into talking about how you can replicate this, because I'm not just sharing all this to brag about him, although he pulled this thing off very well. Let's talk about how he did it, so that you can learn how you can do it. I think the how he did it is that he followed Instagram best practices, the ones that we've been most recently teaching. He put 'em into place immediately. He trusted us with info for that, and he started with those best practices. In addition to that, he had good work that's in a strong niche, so we can't just chalk it up to Instagram ads. He also has work that kind of reposts really well, has kind of a cool element to it. And then you've got the time plus luck equation. It's pressure over time, it was the right time and the right person saw it at the right time. And that's the whole game here is you have to be consistently doing all these things, you know, your $5 a day Instagram ad that we expect you to run, or we ask you to run. It's because you never know when the time is gonna be right. You can't engineer that. There's no way to do it. He happened to find the right place at the right time very quickly, I think. Because we only started with this Instagram discussion this month, last month. It could happen at anytime. It could be after 20 days, it could be after several months. And with that kind of results, with these kinds of results, it's worth it no matter when it comes. This is huge and it's not just for fine art. It's not just for abstract art. It's for everything. There's curators for absolutely everything in every niche. There's all sorts of stuff. If you go to a city, you're a photographer. I just traveled to Spain last month.

Every city that I went to in Spain has an Instagram account for that city that's constantly reposting images that photographers there have shot of their city. And there's so much attention on that page that if you were to get reposted onto one of those city pages as a photographer, those are hittin' 10 and 20,000 likes, too, and all sorts of follow traffic is happening because of that. So, there's all sorts of curators out there. And the way to get in front of them most easily is with Instagram ads. So, what I imagine you're saying right now is that time and luck, I don't wanna wait time, I don't wanna wait for luck. Give me something I can work with, something I can proactively take and start doing today. That's where I would be if I was on your end of this. I understand that completely that it's hard to hear that you just have to keep working and wait. So, here's one thing that you can actually do proactively. And we're going to be getting into this a lot over the next week. It's the Direct Messaging Technique. So, like I said, next week, podcast is coming. Patrick's gonna give you his full rundown on this technique. So, that'll have even more details in depth. But I'm gonna introduce it to you here. Direct messaging is a way for you to make a direct and personal connection with another user on Instagram. So, it's like a comment that you're sending to just one specific user. And this is a feature that I think everyone kind of knows is built in. Like of course, I could send a message to someone, but I don't think people are really unlocking the marketing potential of that. And what the deal is, I think, why this is really cool and a hot thing right now is that it's a totally different platform than messaging someone via email. Email's a very business sort of space to contact someone from. The direct message in Instagram, I mean, everyone's on Instagram to build an audience and to a certain extent to have some fun there, to see other cool images, and to post their own stuff. And it's a very fun experience to see yourself getting responses, and more likes, and all that stuff. So, it's a different atmosphere, I think, when you message someone on Instagram, and there's some risks there, too. Because it's not just all fun. You have to be aware of how you can annoy people on Instagram. But overall, I think it's very cool to be able to contact people directly on Instagram, where they're not in a business state of mind like they are with an email. So, there's two types of direct messages that we want you to think about. The first one is direct messages to your followers. New people follow you, you send them a quick message. We'll get into that next. The other kind is a direct message to try to create business opportunities. That one's less straightforward. So, let's dive into each of these at an introductory level, basically.

The first one, to your followers. First, here's how it is actually done as far as practically. So, what we've done is this video is basically from the point of view of if Art Storefronts started following you, and you wanted to send us a message. So, here's on your notification screen, you see Arts Storefront started following you. So, it's like, oh great, I'll send them a message thanking them and making a quick introduction. So, what you need to do is go to that profile. So, Arts Storefronts in this case, but whoever follows you, go to their profile, top right corner you've got these three dots. That is what you press to pop up the send message button. Three dots, send a message. That'll open your one-on-one direct message conversation with them. In here, you can send them an image, you can attach temporary images, permanent images, videos, or you can just send texts, which is what we recommend. So, you pop in here, send them a quick message. Hey, thank you so much for the follow. I love your work. I would love to work with you on future projects. Check out my account and let me know. Just a quick friendly message. The first kind of method of this To Your Followers, we're gonna get into it on that podcast episode, but the basic idea is just message all of your new followers. You get a new follower, send them a direct message. Say, "Hey, thanks for the follow. "Hope you like my work." Maybe ask them a question like, how'd you hear about me or what do you think? All that sort of stuff. Don't use it as an opportunity to plug too much of your work or try to sell anything. Just start a conversation, ask a question. This is the same sort of strategy as with the stories. Reveal yourself to be a person behind the account, because those little mini relationships make a huge deal. If people have just one interaction with you personally and they know they actually talked to the artist, think of how much more likely they are to pay a bit more attention when they see your images come through their timeline. Because it's not just one, maybe they're really into abstract art so they follow 50 of cool looking abstract artists. If you're the one that reached out to them and made that little connection, and you had a quick back and forth where they asked you like, no problem, I really like your work, but what kind of paint do you use. And you responded and they got some insight from that. If you have those little messages going on, man, it's so great, just you're gonna really stand out in their timeline verse everyone else that doesn't take the time to do that. So, what Patrick's gonna talk about in the podcast is like confronting that this technique, the direct messaging, you can't really do it scale. Because say you blow up and you do get 2,000 new followers in a day, how do you do that? The main idea is don't worry about that yet. We'll have something for you when you get to that point, but for now, if you guys are gettin' 15 followers or less a day, 20 followers or less a day, go ahead and message all of them. Get a nice thing that you copy and paste, or you change the little details of, but reach out to everyone. It's a very nice way. I don't think people are expecting it, it's not too common yet.

So, that's what I would say to do. I think it's a really great way in cooperation with the stories to get your personality and your humanness out there. So, let's go to the second type, the direct message that is designed to create business opportunities for you. And when it comes to that, allow me to introduce to you what I have called the button. This is the button. The button is the button that you press when you message someone on Instagram. And what's to know about the button is that it might shock you. It might be literally electrically charged, and you might get a shock if you press the button. So, the question is, should you press the button? When do you press the button? Because when it comes to your followers, send them 100% of them, 100% of them, send them the message. When it comes to reaching out to someone for a business opportunity, you have to ask yourself a few things before you press the button. So, this is kind of a warning of sorts. Keep the button in your head as your direct messaging. Think, am I gonna get shocked if I press the button right now? And the answer to that is kind of a cheesy corporate thing I made up, The Three Fs. Ask yourself this before you press the button to send someone a direct message. Are you a good fit for what they do? Not just you like them, because that's one thing, but do you like them and you also think that you're a good fit for them. Think from their point of view. Are they gonna be excited to get this message from you? Next, is there the potential for a fruitful relationship? You need to think geographically. You need to think about what you're asking of them. Ask is this a realistic, fruitful relationship for both sides? And finally, is your message friendly? And what I mean by that is, is it not a straight business request? Don't forget what I said before that this is not email, this is Instagram, so it needs to be super casual.

If you can meet these three things and you happen to find, say a gallery that you would be a perfect fit for because they show your work, your type of work perfectly, and if you believe that it would be fruitful if your work was in their gallery, and you've constructed a message that in a friendly way says, hey guys, really love what you're doing. I've stopped by a couple times or I've known a few people that have appeared in your gallery. And I happen to think that my art would fit in there perfectly. Go ahead and check out my account, take a look at some of my images, and if you like what you see, let me know and maybe we can do something in the future. You know, super casual, remember you're on Instagram. You're a good fit. Then hit the button, 100% send them that message. What you should be doing is sending messages like that every day. Dedicate an hour to just sending messages like that. So, the main thing I'm trying to get you to think about is just don't spam people, all right. Because no one wants to get a message from someone where it's like, this isn't even gonna go anywhere because we're not a good fit.

So, if you can answer these three Fs, do that, direct message for business opportunities because no one's expecting it, and everyone's in a casual space, a very friendly place. You'll make a lot of contacts like this and if you direct message 100 people and one gallery gets back to you or whatever, then it's paid off, it's totally paid off. So, we're gonna get more into this half of things much more in the future. But I wanted to introduce to you and give you the button warning of just be careful of who you're messaging, and that they'll want to get the message from you. But other than that, 100% of your followers get a message, and occasionally when you see the right opportunity, do use direct messaging to contact business opportunities. All right, so that wraps up the direct messaging technique introduction. More on that later. What I wanna do now is assault you with a bunch of miscellaneous random Instagram pro-tips. So, these are things that I thought of over this week. Some of them are super simple, user interface little tips. Other stuff is more obscure that I think you'll really benefit from. Hopefully, about half of these are gonna be new to you. That's my hope at least is that you haven't heard of all of these yet. So, let me rattle these off really quick. Tip number one, bump your story to the top. So, like we said, stories ride in the bubbles along the top. What you may not know is that they are organized from new to old, running left to right. So, you've always got your story in that first spot. And the one next to your story is the most recently updated story. So, if you've got some good action going, if you've got a really cool story that you really want people to see, add another slide to it and it shoots back to the front of the list at the top of everyone's timeline. So, you can actually bump up your visibility as you add new slides to it. So, if one's going really well for you, a couple of hours later, add another slide, whatever it is. Maybe try to extend why that story was cool in the first place with one more. Tip number two, rotate your bio link. This one is an important one because it's your one opportunity to provide a link, a direct link, because Instagram is not great at all for linking out to websites. You can't do it in the descriptions. People have to manually type it in. You can't do it unless you have a lot of followers in the stories. Hopefully, that'll change in the future. We're really hoping it does. But for now, you can't link out of the stories. What you can do is link somewhere from your bio. You get this one opportunity where they click the link and go somewhere. What we're saying with this tip is rotate that link, don't just keep it to your main site. The default if you've got nothin' special going on, keep it to your main site. But as different things are happening, keep that link rotating and tell people about it. Tell 'em in your images, like hey, new thing is up, link's in the bio. So, to actually change this link if you've forgotten, you just go to your profile, you go to edit profile, that'll pull up this screen on the left where you can just tap into here and change the link. So, change that link out. Maybe you wrote a blog post about your top five favorite paints, or whatever it happens to be, or your top five tips for getting better landscape photographs, or whatever romantic content you come up with. Maybe the story of what inspired you to create a certain work. As you're creating these romantic blog posts, you can show them on Instagram by saying, "I wrote this blog post. "Here's a little preview of it. "The full link is in my bio." Change that out, allow people to click right into it, very smooth.

Maybe you have a sale coming up, that's a huge one. So, I'm running a huge Black Friday sale, link is in the bio. Then you set up a landing page where it's like, my Black Friday sale, welcome. Very smooth interaction from there, as opposed to maybe the home page where people don't know what they're landing on. Finally, another good default if you've got nothin' else goin' on is just highlight a piece. So, post to your regular timeline a screenshot or whatever of one of your photos or one of your art pieces. Tell a quick story about it and say, "Links to purchase prints of this image in my bio." And then just link directly to that image, on the product page of that image. Who knows if you'll get any takers, but if someone is finally in the right space, you know, pressure over time, if they're in the right space, maybe their friend's or spouse's birthday is coming up, something like that, and they see your image and go, oh my gosh, that's the perfect image for them. I'd love to buy this. And then they read, oh, I can just click the link in their bio and that'll shoot them right to the product page. They can check out from there. Very, very smooth. So, keep that thing updated. If you've really got nothin', throw it back to your homepage, your main site, but otherwise keep that going. That really refreshes kind of what you're calling attention to, and showing off that you're really creating new stuff all the time. Tip number three, you can post to your story from your camera roll within 24 hours. Most people don't know this. Most people think that you have to take an image in the moment to post it onto your Instagram story. But you can actually post images that you previously took. Here's how it's done. Top left is how you get going with your story, how you start your story.

That'll open up your camera so you can take an image to post to your story. But what you can actually do is drag up from the bottom of the screen, you know, that gesture dragging up from the bottom of the screen. That'll pull up this panel, last 24 hours. So, that's a very easy way if you want to post something later, whatever it is, whatever time situation you have where you would have a need to not post a story image immediately. You can capture them with your regular phone camera app, and bring them over to your story later. You just have to do it within a day. Keep in mind with this though, that the whole story experience is optimized for a vertical image because Instagram wants everyone to just keep holding their phones vertically while they're looking at stories. So, you do wanna make sure your images destined for a story are shot vertically. Other than that though, that's kind of a cool way to bring in images from throughout the day. Tip number four, you can tag people in your stories. So, let's say this is an image you've taken and you're about to add it to your story. On the top right, you've got the text tool where you can add whatever text you want to it. But that text tool actually detects tagging. So, if you hit the at symbol and start typing, it'll pull up accounts that match what you've begun typing. So, if you start typing @a, here's Arts Storefronts that pops up. If you tap that one, it'll fill in the tag. And then when you post this to your story, all of your followers can tap that and go to Arts Storefronts site in this case, or their Instagram account, not their site. So, you could use this if you're out working with other collaborators. You can start to kind of get that collaboration action going on by linking to their profile and showing people who you're working with. Maybe your work's at a gallery, so you can tag the gallery and say, "Come see my work at this gallery," and then they can tap through to that to get like the address and things like that. So, another kind of cool way to do more community elements with your stories. Number five, you can cross-post a story image to your timeline, to your full regular permanent timeline. Here's how that works. First you post your story, just like usual. After you've posted your story, you wanna view your story. That, always like I said, is locked in that first position. So, if you go to your timeline, hit your own story bubble, that'll open up your story. You'll see the three dots at the bottom right. That's what you're gonna hit, which is gonna pull up the menu to show share as a post. As soon as you hit that, you are in the regular timeline posting area of Instagram. So, this is really cool to tease your story.

So, if you're doing something especially cool like that one guy was with the voting for the image that he would edit live, that's such a cool event that I would go ahead and do this, share an image from that story onto your real timeline and say, "Doing a sweet contest in my story right now, check it out." That way if anyone isn't looking at the stories right now, but they do happen to see your timeline image, you're directing the traffic into that. Alternatively, maybe you just have a really cool image in your story that you forgot to save, and this is another way to get it onto your main profile. Keep in mind, you do have to crop it, because the story images are very tall, taller than the timeline photos are allowed to be. So, you'd have to crop it a little bit. But that's a cool way to drag that over and maybe promote your story. And like I just said, where you might wanna save your stories, you can actually set that up to be automatically done so that every image you post to your story just saves to your camera roll, too. Maybe you wanna show on Facebook that you're running stories on Instagram to try to drive some of your followers from Facebook over onto Instagram. That's one example. You can set that up to automatically happen, a lot less work involved. Here's how you do that. Go to your profile, top right is the settings cog, you'll go to your story settings, and then the bottom option there, save shared photos. You turn that slider on and then you never have to think about it again. All your story photos are being saved to your phone. All right, the last tip, I've saved the best for last, my favorite tip here. Use bookmarks and bookmark collections to save posts that inspire you or keep tabs on artists or galleries you wanna DM in the future. So, this is how you can use one of Instagram's newer features and hook it up to our direct messaging technique. What I'm talking about is this. When you see someone's post on Instagram going left to right on these symbols here, you have the like symbol, the comment symbol, the send this image to a friend symbol. And then the newish one that people mostly completely ignore, which is the bookmark symbol. So, if you hit this one, it'll save this Instagram post to your profile under your bookmarks so that you can go back to it in time.

So, say you like this guy Brian's image because maybe you wanna remember what hashtags he used, or maybe it's just inspiring to you, whatever reason, you wanna refer to this particular Instagram post at a later date and time. What you can do is just tap that to save it, tap the button. Or hold the button and it'll allow you to create a collection. This is really powerful now because you can start to group your bookmarks into folders, basically. So, like I said, hold that button, pops up this screen for a new collection. Let's say in this case, you're gonna start collecting images of landscapes that inspire you and give you ideas for images you can shoot in the future. So, just type in this is gonna be your landscapes folder. Done, now every time that you go to a future image that you wanna save and you tap the bookmark button, it'll say do you wanna add to your landscapes folder or not. Now, about how to get back to this at a later date, how to actually view your bookmarks. You go to your profile, right, so this is our profile. When you're logged in go to your profile, and then you got that same bookmark symbol here kind of sneakily put in there. And if you tap that, it'll show your folders where you can actually get back to the post that you've saved. So, we recommend to do this for that inspirational stuff, whatever you have reason to wanna save. And then the really powerful one is to push that direct messaging work to later if you're not able to do it right now, but you know it's gonna slip your mind if you let go of it. Maybe you see a gallery post, a call for submissions or something really cool like that, but you just can't do it yet.

Set up a folder for artists, or people, or galleries to direct message. And then every time you go through, just add a bookmark, throw 'em into that folder, and you know that you can come back and remember everyone you wanted to DM at a later date. That's how I would use it. I think it's a really cool tool that goes totally underutilized in Instagram. Okay, with that, wrappin' it up here. We covered the examples of Instagram stories that you can rip off, ones that I found really kind of inspiring that I think you should start trying out to use. We looked at Mathieu's success story. We got into the DM technique. And then these were just some random tips that I hope you found useful. So, I hope that that gave you a ton of inspiration and ideas to immediately after this thing ends, open up your Instagram profile and start working on. Let's go through the last, I got two questions that came in that I wanna hit before we get out of here. The first one's actually from Mathieu, the guy we talked about earlier. What he sent me, what he asked is, you can now create ad campaigns for Facebook and Instagram on MailChimp. And this is true, you can actually create an Instagram ad in MailChimp instead of in the Facebook interface. He says, "You can target your email list, "look-alike audiences, or target by interest." And he asks, "Considering MailChimp is a lot "more user friendly than the Facebook Power Editor, "wouldn't it be better to use it?" And the last thing he said is totally true that interface on MailChimp is way better, way more user friendly than the Facebook Power Editor. But what it lacks is a certain amount of key features. That means I don't fully recommend you use MailChimp for it. In fact, I don't at all if you're gonna be romance marketing. So, the overall thing, the answer is it depends on what you're using the ads for. If you're gonna advertise to try to sell your art to your email list, if it's gonna be about that, I think you can use MailChimp relatively effectively. The reason I'm saying it with so much hesitance is that you can't remarket with MailChimp.

And that is the powerful key behind romance marketing, is that you don't just wanna send your ads to your email list, and you definitely don't wanna send them to interest-based targets, because that can be a very deep money hole if you're targeting by interest. What you wanna be doing is using the remarketing pixel. That is tracking everyone that comes to your website, and then showing ads to them over the course of the next 180 days, or 90 days, or whatever you have it set up as. That is a huge pool of warm traffic compared to the small pool, relatively smaller pool of warm traffic you get from just advertising to your email list. Because think about the conversion funnel, all the people that visit your site, verse the people that actually opt into your mailing list. You wanna reach a lot of people that are still warm, that still have heard of you and know a little bit about you, and are actually likely to click your ad. You want the remarketing list, that's much larger. That's the one you want, and that's the one you have to use the Facebook Power Editor to reach. So, for that reason, I wouldn't recommend using MailChimp to run your Facebook or Instagram ads, because our whole model of romance marketing is based around the pixel, is based around remarketing. So, for that reason, use Facebook. The only reason I would use MailChimp is if you only wanna reach your subscribers with like an exclusive offer. Because then that's a really easy way to just jump in. And you can do this in Facebook, too.

It's not like this is exclusive to MailChimp. But it's really easy in MailChimp, for sure. So, if you wanted to do like, hey, Black Friday sale for my email subscribers only. Or say like, everyone gets 20% off, but my subscribers get 30% off. Then it'd be really simple to hop into MailChimp and just shoot out an Instagram ad targeted to just your email list. If you're doin' like that, fine. For everything else, for the romance content, use the Facebook Power Editor because you can add that pixel traffic and that's a much larger group of people, you'll have more success. Next question's from Shelley Smith from spunkybohemian.com. She says, "I'm trying to post to Instagram often, "but it seems like traffic is difficult. "I'm receiving 40 to 60 likes, "but only one to two new followers per post, if I'm lucky. "If people like my posts, should I start following them? "If I follow them, will they follow me?" And then she asks, "I'm trying to tell a story "with each post, too, so what an I doing wrong?" The overall advice I have for you, Shelley, is to zoom out. Don't pay attention to what you're getting out of each post. That's way too far zoomed in. You should be aware if one post blows up and is really successful, because then you can look at like what did I do so right? But I wouldn't even look at post-to-post beyond that. Don't worry about how many followers you're getting per post. You gotta look way bigger than that. Look per week or per month. Really, your goal here is to be consistent, not to evaluate if you get two followers for one post, and zero for the next, don't start thinking like, what'd I do wrong with that second post.

That's way too far zoomed in. All you're meant to be doing with this is posting your stuff on Instagram every day, twice a day, as often as you're comfortable doing it, as often as you can spend the time to do. Share your stories, post your stuff in the timeline. Just keep it going, that's the idea. Be around, be available for when the time is right like it was in that success story earlier. Zoom out, don't look at each post as far as what it's doing for you. Look at, am I in a better place with my Instagram account this week than I was two weeks ago? If you're doing this stuff consistently, the answer will always be yes, which means you're always trending in the right direction, and you're doin' the right thing. So, don't worry about it too much.

I'd definitely relax a little bit, and just keep havin' fun with it and postin' a bunch of stuff. You're gonna be trending in the right direction. It's gonna keep growing on it's own. Like I said, what you do wanna dig into is if you start seeing spikes of success, really try to tear apart why did you get so many likes on that thing, whatever it is. Start to investigate at that level. But other than that, you don't have the space in your head for that kind of post-to-post worrying. Just hit it, launch some stuff every day. You're gonna be doin' the right things. All right, I think that is it for all of this. Thank you for attending. Like I said, this whole thing's gonna be available for replay early next week. I'm gonna email you with that so that you can replay this thing if you wanna rewind some of these tips. I hope that you learned a bunch of stuff.

And we'll see you next time. Register for the next one. Registration will be up in about half an hour for the next one. See you next time and thanks a lot for comin'.