154: Crush It On Instagram: Build an Audience, Generate Leads, and Increase Sales with Luke Bender

Robert Plank: Luke Bender is going to talk to us about Instagram. He's an Instagram marketing expert. He helps businesses and online entrepreneurs build a targeted audience, generate leads, and make sales using Instagram. Luke, what's happening with Instagram today?

Luke Bender: Oh exciting things are happening.

Robert Plank: Cool. I'm glad to hear and I can't wait to get all the details on that. Instagram. I know next to nothing about it. I know about Facebook, Twitter, maybe a little bit of Pinterest. I know that Instagram is a place where I guess people share photos and they can like stuff and there's hashtags, but that's about the extent of my knowledge. Could you explain to us what is Instagram exactly and how does it fit in with Facebook and Twitter and all these other platforms?

Luke Bender: Yeah. Instagram is a huge social media platform. It, I think, just recently reached 500 million users, so it's about second to Facebook. It's strictly photos, so you upload photos and it goes into a feed. It's a great place to just connect with your audience and build an audience and grow your business. I'm really excited about it and I think the future of Instagram still looks good.

Robert Plank: Awesome. It seems to me like one of those weird sites, sort of like Snapchat or something where maybe I'm too old to understand it. Like you said, 500 million users, and I see on some of these sites where there's a lot of people using them, a lot of people just really cleaning up on it. Okay, so Instagram. You can only post photos. In the context of us, internet marketers, business owners, stuff, people who have things to sell, what do we do there? Because I can understand if you're Kanye West or Kim Kardashian or like a celebrity, but if we're a business, what kind of photos are we posting on Instagram?

Luke Bender: Yeah, definitely. It is interesting because it's mostly photos. You actually can't post a link in the caption. You only get one link on Instagram and that is in the bios. When you're on the main page viewing someone's Instagram page, you get one link there. It is interesting in that aspect. I would say if anyone's creating educational content or content around a certain niche, you can take like, what I really like to do is take quotes. If you're writing blog posts, you just take original quotes that you create and you can kind of use apps, there's one I use called Typorama, so you can actually create quote pictures within this app and those do really well, especially if they have to do with your niche and you're providing value or motivation or inspiration, any type of those pieces of content.

Then I like to, if anyone's building an audience around their own personal brand, I really like to encourage people to give a little bit of their personal life and actually really establish that I know I can trust with their followers because I think that's key when people start following you. You want them to really know who you are. That way, you can engage with them and they'll be more interested in your stuff. Mix it up between, I really like quotes and then personal life stuff. One thing to keep in mind is that content on Instagram does need to be good pictures because it's primarily pictures. It needs to be good looking stuff. I would just encourage people to maybe learn how to do a bit of editing on their phone and frame up a picture nicely, but yeah. Those are some tips on how to post good content.

Robert Plank: Is Luke Bender your Instagram user name? Is that right?

Luke Bender: It is, yup, just Luke Bender.

Robert Plank: Cool. I have it pulled up right now and I'm seeing like your water skiing, you're doing a back flip. There's like surfing. There's all kinds... Like you said, there's some cool shots to begin with. Then there's the color or the filters or whatever make it look even slicker. Then on top of that, I'm seeing that you have your quotes like "Adventures are the best way to learn" on top of one. "You can stop the waves but you can learn to surf them." I mean yeah, I'm getting what you're saying in that the photos have to look pretty slick.

Luke Bender: Yeah. It's not too difficult to create those quote pictures if you check out the app called Typorama. That's what I use. Yeah. You can kind of take pictures. All those pictures are mine, even the ones with the quotes. You can use your pictures and then use your quote. That kind of really is a unique piece of content that will do well on Instagram.

Robert Plank: Right, because I have seen on Facebook and Twitter, I've seen people take like a generic picture, like a picture of a mountain or of the ocean and then grab some Zig Ziglar quote or something and put that on there. I guess that's a pretty good way of generating content, but what you're saying is on Instagram, it's better to have something that's completely original. Is that right? Your picture, your quote, all that stuff.

Luke Bender: Yeah. I would say for the most part, try to keep it original, but at the same time, it is definitely okay to curate content for your audience if you find something that will really be valuable for them. Then definitely curate a good picture and a good quote, even if it's not yours. Definitely try to come up with your own unique content that people can really start to notice your brand and you can continue to build on that.

Robert Plank: I can see that, kind of clicking through your page here, I can see that I can, if I see a photo, I can like it, I can leave a comment, but there is no re-tweet or re-share on your own page, is there?

Luke Bender: No. There is not.

Robert Plank: Okay. It's kind of like old school stuff where the stuff on your wall is all yours and only yours, right?

Luke Bender: Exactly.

Robert Plank: How much of a time commitment are we talking about with Instagram? How much time would you say that you spend on this? And how often do you update your Instagram page?

Luke Bender: Yeah, so I probably spend more time than maybe someone in your audience needs to just because I've really chosen that as my main social media platform to focus on. But you can get it down to 30 minutes a day of just engaging your audience and building your follower base. I think that's doable.

Robert Plank: When you say 30 minutes a day, what actions specifically would somebody be taking to build that follower base and engagement? Would it be a matter of replying to comments? Would it be liking other stuff? In those 30 minutes, if someone were to like repeat the same say 3 or 4 actions every day, what would they do for 30 minutes every day?

Luke Bender: Yeah, definitely, so posting is the first one. I would say at least posting every other day. You can post once a day on Instagram as well. I wouldn't go more than once a day. Posting is something that you gotta do and creating the content. Besides that, what you really want to do is find out where your audience is. You can use hashtags to research and I would just say find big pages within your niche. If it's like business motivation, you can find tons of pages on that. If it's travel, there's tons of pages on that as well as health and exercise. Find big pages, find out where your audience is hanging out. Then what you're going to do is go to the latest picture that that account has posted. You're going to go to all the people who have liked it. You click on the likes for that picture. Then you want to start following people who would be your potential audience.

This works well because then they'll get a notification that you've followed them, and almost 100% of the time, they'll click your profile to see who you are and if you have content, and they can see that there's someone they'd want to connect with and be interested in your stuff, then they're going to follow you back or they're going to click on the link in your bio to your website or your lead magnet. That's how you're going to build your email list and build fans and build your brand.

Robert Plank: The way you're describing that, it kind of reminds me of LinkedIn a little bit where every day you go in and make new connections or view some of these profiles and things like that.

Luke Bender: Yeah, exactly. Some people feel weird about following people just to get followers, but it really is you have to notify people that you actually exist. That's just the best way to connect with your followers. You make tons of connections, and you can do... With LinkedIn, it's a little different because you can only do a few, but with Instagram, when you go to those likes, thousands of people liked this picture, you can follow 60 people per hour on Instagram. You can get a certain percentage of those people will be interested in your stuff and then follow you back.

Robert Plank: When you do this technique, when you go and follow all these people, do you have a goal or a set number of follows that you want to do? Or is it just a matter of however many feels good?

Luke Bender: Well I try to hit 100 new followers per day, but usually I'll follow around 60 per hour and Instagram will block you from following more people if you do it too much. Yeah, I would say my main thing is the targeting, to figure out where my audience is hanging out. If I can target them and then get a good amount of engagement and people that follow me back, it just varies so it's not too specific.

Robert Plank: When you personally, when Luke Bender goes to find these high traffic Instagram pages to see the popular stuff and follow all these people, what keywords and what hashtags are you personally looking up on a given day?

Luke Bender: I am looking up a couple different pages, but I like to look up any type of motivation or luxury pages. There's a ton of those ones. A big one is millionaire_mentor. He just posts a bunch of motivational stuff and I just find those people to be really active on Instagram. They really like checking out anyone who's providing valuable content. If anyone is educating people on personal development or business or things like that, that's a great page to check out. One thing to note is when you find a big page that really lines up with your niche, you can click the drop-down arrow next to the Follow button on that account and it will give you all the similar pages. Once you find one, you just click that drop-down arrow and you'll find all the similar pages in that niche. Once you're on one that has a large following, all those other ones will also have large followings. It's just an unlimited supply of people that might be interested in what you have to offer.

Robert Plank: Awesome. Just to make sure I'm following along, what you would do on a given day to build these followers is you'd go to... You log in to Instagram. You go to the search box. You type in pound sign motivation or hashtag motivation, and then there are all these high ranked photos. One of them is this millionaire_mentor page and then I could click on a button and follow them, or next to this follow button, there's an arrow that drops down a lot of similar popular pages. I'm seeing like a think and grow rich page, ask a millionaire type of stuff. Then you can just add those to your hit list, I guess. Is that right?

Luke Bender: Yeah, definitely. That's exactly right.

Robert Plank: There's all these daily actions to be taken, and I'm seeing near the bottom of the page that there's some kind of API or a way to hook into things. Are there tools the same way there are tools for Twitter but for Instagram to schedule posts and follow people? Is there stuff like that?

Luke Bender: Yeah. There's a tool that I use called Later. It's an app and also it's a helpful website as well, got some helpful information. It's just later.com. That is an Instagram scheduling tool. The thing with Instagram is actually there's no third party resource that can automatically post to Instagram, so you have to manually post on your phone. You can schedule your posts out with the pictures and the captions. Then it will send you a notification when it's time to post. You just slide that open and it will put it into your Instagram and you just click post. Yeah, you can organize things that way. At the beginning of the week, sometimes I'll schedule out posts for certain times when your following is active. That's one, you got the scheduling.

Then there's a couple other tools, like analytics tools. One called Iconosquare, which gives you all your Instagram analytics. Also something interesting is Instagram just came out with business profiles, so you can link your Instagram to your Facebook business page and that is super easy to do. You just go into the settings and you go down to Link to Business Page. You get actually analytics about your followers, what time they're most active, what day they're most active, countries where they're from and cities where they're from, so that's a really helpful resource if you haven't already switched your Instagram to a business profile.

Robert Plank: That sounds awesome because you could just start off and as you're picking up speed, you could kind of post things any time of day and try things out, but once you have your analytics, you can say okay now that I have some content, now that I have my followers, here's what they like the most. Then you can just optimize for that.

Luke Bender: Yeah, exactly.

Robert Plank: Then looking around this, is this next thing correct, that there's no way to post... Is there a way to post via the browser or do you have to use the app for this?

Luke Bender: You have to use the app. You can't post from a computer.

Robert Plank: Interesting.

Luke Bender: Yeah it is interesting.

Robert Plank: One of those little quirks I guess that they probably did on purpose for some reason.

Luke Bender: Yeah, so then you do have to... It is a good thing to note that most of the engagement on Instagram is going to be done through mobile. If you are linking to your website or a lead magnet, it's been talked about that mobile's huge, so just make sure everything is mobile-optimized.

Robert Plank: Okay, yeah. Fair enough. If they click that one link that you're allowed off of Instagram onto your webpage, it wouldn't make sense. If they're clicking using the app onto your webpage, it wouldn't make sense if the page wasn't optimized for mobile.

Luke Bender: Yeah, exactly.

Robert Plank: Are you doing anything with outside traffic? Or is this 100%... To build up your Instagram, your following and your traffic and your likes and stuff, is there anything outside of Instagram coming in or is it all just marketing within Instagram?

Luke Bender: I just build up my Instagram following using Instagram. Now it depends if you have other social media platforms that have a big following. I know a lot of YouTubers build up their Instagram from their YouTube, or if you have a big email list and you want to work on your Instagram, you can always promote it to your email list and make sure people are following you on Instagram. Yeah, it just depends. If you have reach elsewhere, you can utilize those, but I didn't have reach elsewhere so I just built it all from Instagram.

Robert Plank: Fair enough. I'm looking at your profile and some of the other ones. What's a decent following? What should... If someone's new to Instagram, maybe what should they shoot for in the first couple of months? Is 1,000 followers good? Is 10,000 good? Is 100,000 good? What's a good number to shoot for?

Luke Bender: Yeah, if you're starting from zero, I would say just focus on getting your first 1,000. Don't worry about too much after that, but, I mean, 10,000 is the first big goal after that. Then from there, the sky's the limit. Just focus, if you're starting from zero, get to 1,000. Figure out where your audience is and your content strategy and your branding. Then just take it from there, from 1,000 to 10,000.

Robert Plank: That makes sense.

Luke Bender: I would say shoot for 10,000 within a year.

Robert Plank: Okay. I'm looking at your page. You have what, about 11,000 followers and the photos get about 1,000 likes or so on average. Is that something that you've seen that's pretty consistent? If you have X number of followers, can people count on about 10% or so of their entire following liking something? Or is this just... Are the numbers I'm seeing, is this high or low, I guess. 11,000 followers, about 1,000 likes per photo. Is that normal?

Luke Bender: It depends. My engagement's pretty high compared to most other accounts that I see. That's just because of the way that I build the account, is because I only engage and get people to follow me that are also engaged on the app. I would say it's a little higher than normal. You should shoot for about 10% engagement, but I would say yeah. My engagement's probably a little bit higher than normal. You definitely want to make sure the engagement, you're getting likes and comments too. It's really good to get comments on your pictures and that gives you a little bit of insight into your audience as well. You can kind of communicate with them that way.

Robert Plank: That's cool. You just... In a lot of ways, you calibrate towards what they want from the comments and analytics and all kinds of... Also modeling based on what you see the higher traffic people getting. That's kind of cool. There's very little guesswork involved, it sounds like, right? You kind of look at what's there, and then add your own flavor to it.

Luke Bender: Yeah. That's what I really like about it. You can really tell what's going on by looking at those analytics and things.

Robert Plank: With Instagram, what big mistake are you seeing a lot of other Instagrammers making?

Luke Bender: I see a lot of people just not building their following as quickly as they can. I see a lot of people who post good content even. I see pages popping up with great content and they'll be posting all the time, but they're just not growing. I think that's the main thing to focus on, is that you're growing. By doing the research and following people who would be interested in your stuff potentially, just over and over and over everyday and staying consistent with it, just making sure you're getting people to follow you back, I think is the most important part. Yeah. A lot of people will just post and think that people will find them eventually somehow, but I think you gotta focus on actually finding them first and growing your following.

Robert Plank: That makes sense. Even kind of going back to your 30 minutes a day thing, you said that you should be spending 30 minutes a day on Instagram and do the research and the liking stuff, but only post every other day. If posting a photo takes 2 minutes, and if that's every other day, then people should only be spending about a minute posting that content and then the 29 minutes leftover doing all the marketing stuff. Cool.

Luke Bender: Yeah exactly.

Robert Plank: A lot of interesting Instagram stuff. Let's talk about you. What kind of websites do you have set up and how can you help people who are looking to increase their Instagram reach?

Luke Bender: Yeah, so right now I'm just focusing on building my Instagram and I'm working with clients and also working on using Instagram to grow my YouTube channel. You'll see that in the link in my bio. LukeBender.com is a place where I'm going to be posting helpful Instagram tips coming up here in the near future. That should be all set up if people want to check that out.

Robert Plank: That way you don't have to spell out all the links to Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and Twitter, all that stuff, so cool. Lukebender.com gets everyone there. What is your coaching offer specifically?

Luke Bender: I can do a couple things. I can do one-on-one coaching with people or consulting, or I'm even offering businesses to actually do the growth and the management of the account on a monthly basis. Either one of those. I will be coming out with an Instagram marketing course here, hopefully within the next 6 months or so. That's where I'm at right now. Feel free to message me on Instagram or email me with any questions. I'm happy to help people get started, but if anyone's interested in more in-depth coaching and really taking Instagram to the next level, I'm definitely available for that as well.

Robert Plank: Awesome. I'm looking at lukebender.com. If someone lands on this page and they want to hire you for coaching, either in the context of the done with you like you said or a full on done for you, once they get to lukebender.com, is there a specific page or link here? Or should they just go to the contact form?

Luke Bender: I actually will be adding that here shortly, so if it's not there, just do Contact Me, or I will have it listed like Work With Me or something like that.

Robert Plank: Lukebender.com. Thanks for stopping by the show, Luke, for explaining to us this mysterious Instagram thing that... It was easy to ignore up until now, but now that it has 500 million users, now it's a thing that a lot of people should be looking into to increase their traffic. Thanks for telling us what you had to say today about Instagram.