Episode two five, four Late night.

Internet marketing.

This week on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast, we're going to talk all about Instagram and how, if you're an artist and you're trying to get yourself seen on Instagram, I'm going to tell you exactly how to get that done. All this and more on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

The Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. You've been working for somebody else, but you want a business to run yourself. You want to know how to start and where to begin. Can you get out your comfort zone, my friend? Yes, you can do it right. When it's late at night, at the end of the day, your dreams burn in your sights.

Keep it up and you will find that you're building your business one night at a time and now broadcasting late at night from a little studio in the big state of Texas, your host, mark Mason. Hey, hey, hey, everyone, how are you? This is the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast and I am your host, mark Mason, coming to you from the little studio in Dallas, texas, where it's starting to look a little bit like spring. I know it's still just barely February, but baseball is happening in Texas. Ladies and gentlemen, we had our first high school baseball scrimmage this weekend and man was I excited? I was freezing. I'm going to admit that it even rained a little bit and you know what? I didn't even care a little bit, I was so excited to be back around the baseball diamond. We had varsity going, junior varsity going, my son's pitching with varsity and taking at bats down on JV. Lots of excitement there. And we were rushing back and forth this weekend between baseball and volleyball. My daughter's a volleyball player. Lots of sports going on right now down here in Texas. It's super exciting.

But today what I actually want to talk about is someone else's kid, not my kid. I want to talk to you about a conversation that I had with a friend of mine, about his daughter, her art career in music and their Instagram journey, and I realized when I was helping my friend with this issue that there are a lot of you out there that could benefit from this sort of discussion. You know that's one of the interesting things. As I've done one-on-one coaching through the years and you know I'm doing more of that here lately it's apparent to me that a lot of times those one-on-one coaching discussions really are useful for the podcast, and so a lot of times what I'll do is I'll bring those topics to the podcast in a generic way that's helpful for everybody, without revealing sort of the confidential nature of the coaching discussion. And for that reason I won't be telling you exactly who this young and incredibly talented artist is. But there's also another reason I won't tell you, and that's because I don't want to contaminate her Instagram subscriber profile, the algorithm that tries to seek out more people that like and enjoy her music and want to see more of her posts. I won't contaminate that with people like us internet marketers. So I'm not going to tell you exactly who we're talking about, but I am going to tell you her story in this episode and what I recommended to my friend, what he can do to help her get a presence established on Instagram.

So her situation, I think, is similar to the situation of so many people who are trying to make it in the music industry or as an artist, as a street photographer, as a performer of some sort. They are working independently. In some cases, they're recording their own music or performing covers. Sometimes they're doing some work on stage and their issue is simply, they need to be recognized by the people that are in a position of power in order to get the kind of contracts and exposure that they need. Now, later in the episode, we're going to talk about one of my favorite independent artists, because we can also talk about some alternative ways to monetize these Instagram followings that you can create when you're incredibly talented, like this person we're talking about. Let's call this person Jill. She needs a name. That's not her actual name but, like I said, I don't want to contaminate the algorithm for her on Instagram by filling it up with a bunch of marketers.

Ok, so if you are an artist who is trying to get your message out to the world, you want to be seen. It makes a lot of sense for you to use social media, because social media has that magical ability to reach everyone in the globe, and what's really neat about music is that music can be transmitted electronically. No longer are we needing to go down to the record store. For those of you that are my age and actually put on headphones and listen to new music and in fact, when I was a kid growing up in Houston, there were special record stores, particularly oftentimes close to universities, that weren't just mainstream record stores, they specialized in making sure that they got independent artists in there, and that was a really hard thing to even do, because in order to get your vinyl, even as an independent artist into a record store, you had to have some sort of distribution. You had to make a record and have it sent there. I mean, this was really complicated. Now it's somewhat easier because you have these tools where you can produce music in your own home sometimes, or, if you have a studio recording, you can distribute it on various platforms, including something massive like Spotify, so you can get out there. But the question is how do people find you? And so the beauty of turning to something like Instagram, like we always do as marketers, is that your reach can be massive Literally anyone in the world who happens to be interested in your particular genre of whatever it is that you do, whether it's music or poetry or marketing can follow you on social media, and so your following and reach can grow. And again, the goal is when you're an artist like this, is to get a following that's so large that it sends a signal to the record label that you would be a good bet for getting some kind of recording contract and so forth.

So, like I said, this girl, jill incredibly talented. She's a pop-y kind of artist Reminds you of Ariana Grande or Taylor Swift or anyone like that in the early days of their career. Right, she's trying to get started. She has a stage background as well, so she's incredibly talented. She's got a great look for social media, so she's got all of the piece parts that she needs. In addition to being a talented singer. She looks great on Instagram. She is an interesting person and she's you know, she's got all of those things where you look at it and you go, wow, this person has the potential to do well on Instagram.

So when I looked at Jill's profile, the first thing that I noticed was the profile wasn't quite optimized, and this is the first thing I always look for is what does the profile look like. If I click that bio link on Instagram, what do I see? And the two things that I want to see are a compelling bio that's interesting Maybe it raises more questions that it answers. A great profile picture to go with that. And just this thing that looks compelling and professional. I want to hit that button and go wow, this kid's got it going on. Maybe I should follow this account.

So in the old days, I think it was a little bit difficult to create these bios in a compelling way, but now artists can use things like chat GPT, where they can just pour in a bunch of information about themselves kind of without regard to copywriting or what it sounds like and then ask chat GPT to take all of that information that they've put in and create a compelling bio that's specifically designed to get people to follow them on Instagram. And what's even better is you can tell chat GPT to give you 10 possible bios. You can cut and paste and edit until you get something that sounds like you, something that you're confident with. And another pro tip that I'll give you is when you do this in chat GPT, as you start to use a chat GPT conversation to help you with Instagram creation, which is we're going to talk about that a little bit in this episode. Stay in one chat GPT conversation so that the algorithm can learn from the corrections that you make. And that chat GPT conversation. You go back to it over and over and over again. We'll get better and better and better creating content and the bio and all these things in your voice as we go forward. So that's that's.

The first thing is a compelling bio. The second thing that I always look for is a link that I can click to get more information. Now, if you're a new artist, you might not have much out there, but I think everyone who's trying to have a public persona needs to have at least a small website that has information about them, how they can get in contact with them. If you're someone like an artist, you probably need a one pager, some information about whether or not you're available for gigs and how so, and the way we do this on social media is with a very, very simple webpage to start, so that when you're on a cell phone and you click that bio link, you go to something that has five or six choices. What do you want to do next? Do you want to read more about the artist? Do you want to buy the latest album? Do you want to listen to the latest song? Do you want to go to the YouTube account? Do you want to see the website, that sort of thing and the tool that most people use for this is link tree.

Instagram currently limits you to three links in your bio. I think you should probably just have one, and that one should go to a webpage, a landing page, as we say, and that page should have five or six options. And if you go to my Instagram account, which is linked in the show notes, but it's markmasonlnim because it's my late night internet marketing account If you go to my bio, you'll see this example. When you click on that, you go to a simple webpage. The tool that most people use for this, as I mentioned, is called link tree, and link tree is super cool because it's super easy to use and you can get started for free. If you want to do more and have more links, you need to pay a little bit each month, but my observation is that most artists are on a serious budget and that serious budget shouldn't include recurring costs if you can avoid it. So if you've already got a website. You can just make one of your pages on your website, this landing page, and in fact, you can see on my bio I've got this link tree style page, but that's actually on one of my websites. I'm not actually paying link tree for that, but if you want quick, fast and easy link tree is great, okay.

So what do Instagram accounts need? I mean, we've got this Instagram account. It's properly set up. Instagram accounts need content, and when I looked at Jill's account initially, what I saw was there wasn't a ton of content. So I see this trap a lot that artists fall into, particularly that they think of Instagram as a place to showcase their work. And it certainly should be that you should definitely have short and long form content on Instagram that's showcasing your work, but that's not really, at least in my observation. In the way I think about it, that's not really where you should stop and in fact, that's not even hardly where you should start. What people want on Instagram is to be social, and when I think about the artists that I actually follow online even the thought leaders in the internet marketing community and the online business community some of the best, most viral, fun and exciting content that they create is content that is either around their creation process, kind of behind the scenes content, or they're creating content about their life and talking about how hard it is to be an artist, what it's like to be an artist, what the recording process is like, what they're doing for Valentine's Day. You know. This kind of stuff that makes them real. That's what makes people want to follow you. I think it's one thing to have a hit song and everybody follows you because you're just this amazing artist, but I think the other thing that people will follow you for is to get a sense of what your life is like, to get to know you, to develop this relationship. People feel like they know you and I think that's one of the keys to great Instagram accounts.

You know my 14-year-old daughter is a massive Taylor Swift fan. I enjoy Taylor Swift. I actually think she's pretty talented. That's not really my genre. Okay, so I don't listen to a lot of Taylor Swift and, trust me, when I'm in the car with my 14-year-old, I get all the Taylor Swift that I need. So I'm good.

But I do pay attention to what Taylor's doing on social media, and I have for years. You know what I remember? I remember a social media story about Taylor that went viral, I don't know, five or ten years ago, where she was sending Christmas gifts to just a few of her followers and I thought, wow, she was in her pajamas on the floor wrapping Christmas gifts and sending them to her followers and I thought, wow, this tells me about Taylor Swift. I didn't need to see the music video from some track off of 1989 or whatever that is, or red, let's go with red. I didn't see that. What I saw was something that told me about Taylor, the person, and I think that kind of content, especially for independent artists, is really compelling and I'm going to get to an example in a little bit where it really drives this home, where I went and studied what a true independent artist that I really like is doing, and I'll tell you why I follow her.

But my recommendation here is to not just create content. That is the content that you're creating anyway. Your art it's to tell the story behind the art, tell the story of your life. That's what people really want to see. And then the corollary to this is create lots of content. I mean you've got to be consistent showing up, and in Jill's profile at that time, and she's improved this considerably since then. It was clear to me that she hadn't created a lot of content, and I think maybe it was because she didn't understand exactly what content to create.

This used to also be very hard. Where you used to have, you needed a lot of tools, and I have tools that help you with prompts for social media, but one of the things that you can do on the cheap is in the same conversation, the same chat GPT conversation. You can go to chat GPT and say give me 100 ideas for Instagram posts, give me 100 ideas for Instagram reels, and it will give you 100 ideas, and you may only like 20 of those ideas, but guess what? You can ask it for 100 more, and so on, and you can tell chat GPT which ideas you decided to keep and you can say give me more that are along the lines of this. And so once you do that, the sky is the limit on the amount of content that you can create and how you can express yourself on Instagram, because you're never at a loss for something to say. When you've got a friend like chat GPT, that's helping you decide what it is to say.

Now you know, once you've started creating this content, there's a couple of things you need to do. You need to create engagement. Now, the first place that we can create engagement is by always making sure that we have good hashtags with all the posts that we create on Instagram and make sure that we're being open minded about what those hashtags are and test different hashtags. Again. Chat GPT is your friend here. You can tell it what you're about to post and ask it for hashtags and it will give you a bunch of them and you can choose 10 or 15 and experiment with different hashtags at different times to see what really works for your account. The other thing that you want to do is, whenever you do get followers starting to engage with your account, is that you engage back with them.

And you know, sometimes I hear this thing, this crazy thing. It's like oh, I can't handle it. What? What if 10,000 people respond to my, to my Instagram post? How will I reply to all of them? I don't want to be spending all my time replying to Instagram comments and I'd say, okay, great, let's cross that bridge when we come to it. What a great problem to have if you've got tens of thousands of comments on every Instagram post you are in, as we say here in Texas fat city. I mean, this is like I don't want to have to pay taxes because I made too much money last year. This is craziness. We want those comments. We want to get completely overwhelmed with followers here. So engage people. The algorithm will reward you for that, but, more importantly, so will the followers. Pat Flynn's a good friend of mine and you guys know that Pat and I've been in a mastermind together for almost 10 years. In fact, we were playing virtual poker together with the rest of our mastermind just this weekend one of the things that Pat says he's written and spoken about this many times.

You really only need a thousand true fans in order to be successful at whatever you're doing. That doesn't sound too terrible if you think about it that way. Maybe it takes you an entire year to get a thousand true raving fans that are sharing your content and getting things out to other people. Building the snowball well, that's fine. I mean, where were you a year ago? You were nowhere. So slow and steady wins the race. You can build the snowball, but in order to do that, you need to build real true raving fans. In one way to do that is, to engage with them.

Another thing that you can do I think this is super underrated is look, there's a whole world of people just like you that are also out there trying to make their artwork. Go find those people, collaborate with them, share audiences, put stuff on their channel. You get on your channel with them and get some cross pollination. It's a super huge mistake to operate from a position of scarcity here. Trust me, there are plenty music dollars and plenty of fans to go around. Right, there's an unlimited supply of music fans out there. You can share your fans with other artists and so forth in an effort to find your true fans. You will love the way that makes you feel when you're collaborating with other people that are in your situation and, more importantly, it'll help you achieve your goal of finding new fans. And then the other thing that we really need to do is make the ask right.

Anytime you've got an opportunity to mention your instagram channel, like like I just did earlier in this podcast, right, I found a reason. I mean, I didn't manufacture it, but when I saw a reason to take you to my instagram channel over at mark mason dot l in I am, I mentioned it because I want you to go there and I want you to follow me. I post to instagram reels every day and I want you to see that. So I did that and see, I just did it again. So whenever you're creating content and you have an opportunity whether you're on the stage as an artist, or you're sending out a newsletter, or you're putting together your website or you happen to be in another channel drive people back to the channel that you're trying to grow, which, in this case, is instagram. So now we've got a great bio, we've got a website, we're set up and good to go, we look super professional and we're creating content.

I recommend that you create some kind of content on instagram every day. We've got great ideas. We're not worried about getting too fancy. We're connecting with our audience. We're making sure we talk to them. Whenever we have the opportunity to interact with them, we're taking that opportunity. Now we've got some other things that we can do, and one thing that you can do, after you've been publishing content for quite some time, is make sure that you're looking at your insights and the analytics in instagram to understand what posts are working for you, where are you getting engagement and when you find those things where you get engagement.

You did a reel and that reel got 7 000 likes. Well, you need to be doing that again, and not exactly the same thing again, but something really, really similar to that. What was it? You need to ask yourself what was it about that post that got people excited and got likes? Let's do 10 more like that in that genre, right, and start doubling down on the stuff that's working and replacing the stuff that's not working so well insights and analytics and doing that and I recommend that you do that weekly. You look at your analytics and write down two or three things that you're going to do that week in response to your analytics. So, let's say, monday you get up, the first thing you do is you go to instagram, you look at your stats and you say, oh, that post I did last week really did. Well, that that reel is blowing up. Here's three or four more ideas I can do this week that pile on top of that so I can do more content like that and try to feed the algorithm in a way that makes sense.

Don't be afraid of doing the same thing more than once in a little different way. People are not going to complain, I absolutely promise you and more likely, they're going to be excited to see more of the stuff that they love. I'm not talking about continuously reposting the exact same video. I'm talking about a different take on the same thing. People like a thing because they like it, and usually that means they'll like more of the thing if you do more of it. Of course, another way that we can grow is by effectively promoting your content on other social media platforms.

I use a repurposing tool that you can find by going to late night imcom forward slash, repurpose. If you go to that link, you'll find the tool that I use. I only post my reels to YouTube. I you post them as YouTube shorts and the software that I have takes those reels that I post to YouTube and it adds captions and hashtags and it posts them to Instagram reels, facebook reels, different pages, tiktok, pinterest and so forth.

You definitely want to repurpose and cross promote this content, and is it going to be as effective as your focus platform, which in this case, we're assuming that's Instagram, but probably not? I mean, you're not in, you're not running a social media business, so you're not going to live over on TikTok or you're not going to live on Pinterest and try and grow that. But if 10% of your followers come from these other platforms, essentially for free, why not go ahead and do this? So, either manually or, like I do, automatically, go and post this content that you're posting to Instagram to other platforms, reuse it, repurpose it where it makes sense, and you'll just grow your audience even faster. Once you've created the content, the hard work is done. Reposting is super easy and complete can be completely Automated by using a tool like you'll find at late night I am comm forward slash Purpose.

And then the last thing I'll say is that you can always experiment with ads. Now, this isn't a great thing to talk about with artists, because artists are usually on a pretty tight budget, but you can experiment with ads and when you get to the point where your ads are actually creating revenue for you like maybe Sales of your first album, which is available for download on your website, for example Maybe you'll find that you can spend $10 to make 20 in the future. Right now, maybe you just experiment with a $5 ad and see if that brings you more followers and if, if you've got a budget for that, maybe you skip a latte this week at Starbucks and you go ahead and buy some ads and do that experiment. Just be very, very careful. Use very, very Low amounts of money to start. Make sure you don't set up ads and then walk away and end up with a $700 charge on your credit card. You want to set ad budgets at a low level to begin with and just measure your success and see what happens as you boost, post and create ads on Instagram to grow awareness and reach of your brand.

So you know, I talked about this one artist and I encourage you to go check her out. Now, this is not a place to start. Okay, she's pretty famous, but she started from the very beginning. But she is an independent artist building a brand and her name is Mary Spender, and I'll tell you some really interesting things about Mary Spender. The first thing is she's crazy talented. She is a UK Guitar player and vocalist. She plays, as far as I can tell, every instrument there is, but she has a fantastic YouTube channel now no, we're talking about Instagram today. She has evolved and into creating Long form content, which is great for her because it works well for her. She is a youtuber, but the concepts that she's using to be successful on YouTube. They apply to Instagram, right. She creates a lot of behind-the-scenes content, like I was talking about. She talks about what it's like to be an independent artist On YouTube, trying to make music, trying to sell albums, maybe someday looking for a record deal Although I think she's digging the independent artist piece of this but she talks about all of these things. She's doing it right. So if you want to be inspired by what this can become as you move forward, go check out Mary Spender on YouTube and I'll leave a link in the show notes to her YouTube channel and you can go check her out.

But a word of caution when you're looking at artists like Mary Spender and In fact, I encourage you to do that with everyone in your niche Go look at what they're doing and look what is working for them and do that. I mean Borrow from them. But don't get freaked out. When you start looking at someone like Mary Spender, you're gonna think, oh my gosh, I'll never catch up with her. I mean, I know I have felt this way in the past looking at other marketers, so that's a huge trap to fall in. Don't feel that way. Just look, take great ideas and then put your own spin on those ideas. We're not talking about copying or stealing. We're talking about understanding what those artists have done that have worked for them and seeing if you can apply it to your own Situation. Okay, here's a summary of what I want you to do in order to grow your Instagram following.

If you're an artist number one, fix up your profile in your bio and the link in your bio and make sure that makes sense. So if someone is interested enough to Contact you or to look up your information in your bio, they've got something else that can do. That's cool, like go to your website or whatever. It's double bonus points if you give them the opportunity to opt into a newsletter or give them come some kind of special thing that they can get, like access to your fan club or whatever. But make sure that bio is in good shape. You want it to be super pro.

The second thing is post a lot of content reels, regular posts, pictures and post content from all Aspects of your online personality not just the art that you're creating, but all the things that go into making the art and what you're Doing when you're not doing the art, and so forth things that help people get to know you and Be invested in you as an artist, because your goal is to create a thousand true fans that Retweet or re-ex or whatever we're called repost your stuff, who share your Instagram stories and so forth. That's what we're looking for when we create this content and when people do engage with you, that's the next thing. Make sure you engage right back with them and remember that Success leaves clues. Go look at successful artists that have done what you're trying to do or are in the process of doing what you're trying to do, that are maybe a little bit ahead of you, or a lot ahead of you in some cases, and copy what they're doing, use their ideas, but make them your own, just like you would when you're creating your art. So those are my recommendations for Jill, my friend's daughter, and I know that she's already making progress. I gave these recommendations to them over a month ago. I know that they've engaged a social media Specialist to help them and maybe we'll leave on that.

So you can spend a lot of money with Social media manager who's doing promotion and they're a social media expert, and you can probably even find a social media expert that's specific to your genre, meaning they're specifically for musicians and so forth, and they can be effective and they can also be pretty expensive. And so, while I wouldn't tell you that you shouldn't do that, I think I've given you a lot to do while you're waiting on being able to afford that, because usually artists don't have the budget for a $500 a month or $1,000 a month social media expert in the hopes that they'll be discovered so they can start making some real money with their art. Usually that's not an option. So what I recommend that you do is you go, do these things that I've recommended to you, most of which are free or very close to free, and then, if that's still not working for you or if you're just not feeling it, then you can look at hiring a consulting.

I do a lot of coaching like this, and if there's something that I can help you with, just reach out to me, hit me up at feedback at latenightimcom and I'll try to help you, either in the form of a podcast episode, or maybe you're at a place where you're looking for some coaching. We can certainly get you pointed in the right direction. Again, that's feedback at latenightimcom Until next week. I hope everything that you do just goes crazy and you just have more success than you ever possibly imagine. Ciao.

You can do it right when it's late at night. You've been listening to the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Be sure to visit L-N-I-M podcastcom today to leave feedback for Mark. Download special bonus content, access the show notes and more.

See you there. Until then, go and make some great progress on your internet business one night at a time. I know that your business one night at a time, All right, all right that was super fun.

I love making the podcast. Super excited to be into February. We've hit every week so far. That's. The goal for 2024 is to get a podcast out to you every Monday morning. So if you are not subscribed, please do that. Please mash the button that makes your iPhone or your Android device tell you when a new episode is out and downloads it automatically and makes it ready for you when you drive or when you're in the gym or when you're washing dishes. In fact, I'd love to know what you're doing right now. What are you doing exactly? Hit me up at feedback at latenightimcom.

I'm always fascinated about what people are doing when they listen to the show. I do all kinds of crazy stuff. Not all of them. I do all kinds of crazy stuff, not all of which I'm willing to admit to on this platform, but I do all kinds of crazy stuff while I'm listening to podcasts. I mean, obviously, driving and washing dishes, doing projects around the house those are my typical times, but I've done kind of all kinds of crazy things when listening to podcasts. I've listened to them in various countries as I've traveled around with my day job and I don't know.

I just have a lot of fond memories recording and listening to podcasts in weird situations in weird places. One time I recorded a portion of an episode in the sky on an airplane. That was kind of cool. I did a podcast in Taiwan one time where I got the concierge at the hotel to say some things about the show in Mandarin. That was cool. So I've done all kinds of weird stuff and listening to and I'd love to know what you're doing. So hit me up and let me know. Until next week, I hope that you're having an amazing time. I'm having an amazing time making progress on a course that's coming out in the spring. I'm watching baseball now, so I'm the happiest I'll ever be watching my children play sports. It's baseball time in Texas. We're excited about that, as I mentioned at the top of the show. So until next week, ciao.

Let's play the great night in a net marketing.