Your Dreams. Your Goals. Your Way.

Beginning Steps of Doing Business on IG - Part 3

My second general rule is: Service sells. If you focus on serving people… if you focus on becoming a resource… if you focus on trying to answer questions, and help people with problems, or get to a desired state, you’ll find that you will make a ridiculous amount of sales. People will literally start to pop inside your DM’s, show up in your comments, and come into your live-streams. It happens to me all the time. People come in and ask if I have a product about this, or that covers that. Or they say, I need help with XYZ, Do you have a product or a course that can help me with that. People come to me and ask to buy things from me. I don’t go out and ask them to buy my products. Yes, I make offers on my page, but, at the end of the day, by me being so focused on serving, answering questions, helping people get to desired states, and overcome problems or challenges, or just by being a listening ear, has helped me establish myself as a resource in the marketplace. People come to me asking if I have a product, service or program, or if there is an event coming up that does XYZ. 

I did the same thing with my event design and production company. I focused on what I could do to help people; etiquette, invitation wording tips, giving tips on first dances, showing different proposals, and how they can make their wedding stand out. I just worked on being a resource. Any questions I knew a girl may have about a wedding or a woman may have about a baby shower, etc, I do my best to put that information out there, and answer those questions for them, I did that on Facebook for years. I would also sprinkle in pieces of my work, and it led me to be able to create a huge company with a huge payoff. 

Content is cash. We need to be consistent with our content. Consistency is more than the frequency that you post. Many times people think about consistent, that’s all they think about. They say things like “Oh, I posted 8 times a day for several days, so I’m super consistent, but, it’s still not working. I’m not getting any sales or leads!” We need to be super consistent about the type of content. I like the 80/20 rule, it helps me in a lot of areas in my life and it will help for sure with your Instagram pages and posting on your social media. Normally, what I do is create content banks and topics that I want to cover on my page. When I consider topics, ask myself “How do I want people to feel on my page?”. The answer for me is that I like people to feel empowered, inspired, and motivated. I also want people to feel relieved that it’s not as difficult that they thought it would be. So ask yourself how do you want people to feel on your page. For example, if you have a clothing store or boutique, if I were you, I would want people to feel like “I’m a bad chick”, or “I’m a bad man”. I would like for their self-esteem to be heightened when they are engaging or interacting with me. I may want them to feel beautiful and heard. Whatever it is, consider the type of feeling you want someone to have. If you’re a comedian you just may want people to feel happy, joy, and to laugh, or make them forget about their problem when they spend the next 30 seconds watching your video. All of us are going to have different things we want people to feel when they come and interact with us. That’s going to help me figure out my topics. I already knew I was going to do inspirational and motivational topics because I wanted people to feel empowered, motivated, encouraged, and wanted people to stay on track and have accountability. That’s on top of me doing my facts and opinions and selling and things like that.

The next thing you want to ask yourself is what do you want people to do on your page. What actions do you want them to take? Do you want them to go to your website? Do you want them to buy something from you? Do you want them to tag another person? Do you want them to ask you questions? Do you want them to share your content with other people? This is going to direct or dictate what type of content you’re putting on your page and give you direction on your call to actions.

The third set of questions I’d like to consider when thinking about the topics are “How are people using our products and services or what benefit can they get from our product or service?” and “What product or service do I offer to the marketplace?”. Some of you have several products or services or you have lines of things. That’s going to help you with your content. So now I’m posting videos about my products and services, how and why they can use them, tips and tricks, how to extend or repair the usage of them. I’m thinking about everything I can about that product or service. Next, I think about how people or using them or what the desired result is. Therefore, I’m thinking about all of the challenges, pain-points, and the different questions people have, and I’m going to use that to my benefit to create highly-valuable content around it, and that’s going to lead to making more sales.

Just come up with overall topics. You may have 5 - 6 different topics that you want to share on your page. For example, people just love celebrities, but, I don’t really share celebrity gossip on my page… at all. Most of the time I talk about celebrities in a business venture, some type of new contract they’ve gotten, or philanthropic work. I think more along those lines because my page is about business, getting money, and financial stability. Most of the time when you see me mention a big company or celebrity it has something to do with business. It may be talking about the branding or their marketing. I really don’t think I’ve posted anything about a celebrity break-up or how the police were called to someone’s house, or this person was drunk in front of the club. I don’t post things like that, because that’s not my mindset and that’s not where I want my audience’s mindset to be. 

I want my audience to be focused on knowing about different opportunities and things that are around them. My topics are celebrity business, updated social media apps or tools, answering questions, my products and services, benefits, quotes, and scriptures(there are a fair amount of people in my audience who are Christian believers as well, so I try to find scriptures that’s relevant to business, cash, flow, increase, and stewardship). That’s how my little page works, and that would be my 80%. The 20% is where you have the opportunity to showcase your personal side. Me, streaming at my nephew’s baseball game. Me, having a house party or Christmas party and singing karaoke. Me, putting up a selfie because I’m looking cute and going out tonight. Me, putting up a meme about a television show that my audience likes to watch. Or live-streaming and watching the New Edition story. Those things are not related to business at all, that is personality, relationship building stuff… “this is what I do and what I’m in to”. 

If you go through those questions, it’ll help you figure out what topics you want on your page, and from there you can start building your content banks by getting a lot of quotes, pictures, images, and create and find videos, to get your page where you want it to be.