← Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
Best Instagram Marketing Strategy For Small Business in 2026 - 890
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If you've ever had a post go viral and then immediately thought, wait, how am I actually going to ship all of these orders? Yeah, that's the part that almost no one talks about. When your company is growing fast, order fulfillment can make or break your success. And that's why I recommend that you use ShipStation. ShipStation's intelligence driven platform brings everything into one place. Order management, rate shopping, inventory, returns, warehouse systems, and even analytics. They're saving business owners up to 15 hours a week on fulfillment. And here's what I love. Instead of juggling five to seven different tools, it's just one. You can connect to over 200 sales channels and it automatically compares rates across carriers like USPS, UPS and FedEx. Plus, over a million businesses already trust and use ShipStation. And that's why I highly recommend if you have any kind of business where shipping is required, ShipStation is the tool that I would suggest. Try shipstation free for 60 days with full access to all features. No credit card needed. Go to shipstation.com and use code BYT for 60 days free. 60 days will give you plenty of time to see exactly how much time and money you're saving on every single shipment. That's S-I P S-T-A-T-I-O-N.com and use code by T shipstation.com with code BYT Today's episode is brought to you by Shopify, the number one e commerce platform in the world for building your business and selling your products. More about them later. Also later I'll tell you a little bit more about our sponsor, which has me super excited, which provides weekly nutritious, wholesome meals that help you hit your goals in less time, energy and effort. Plus they taste great. Today's episode is also brought to you by Rella, which if you are a social media manager, is going to be a game changer for organizing and staying on top of all of the content that you are creating, planning and posting planning. But I'll tell you more about them later. If your sales posts are your worst performing posts, then good. I'm glad you clicked on today's episode because I'm going to help you figure out how to fix that. In case we've never met before, hello, my name is Brock Johnson and it's my full time job to help you figure out how to grow your small business or brand on social media and specifically on Instagram. And if you're not already, definitely consider hitting that subscribe button because every single week here on the podcast, I Release at least one episode to help you grow your small brand or business on social media. Today's episode is brought to you by manychat. I'll tell you more about them later and you can read full disclosure notes down in the description below. But today we're specifically going to be talking about making more sales on Instagram. And if you are anything like the 98% of other small brands and business owners on Instagram, then your promotional posts, or your sales posts, or any posts where you want people to take an action off of Instagram, like you want them to go click a link, maybe it's because you have a launch, a course, an ebook, maybe you just have a new blog or a YouTube video or a podcast that you want people to go check out, or whatever that link is, whatever reason it is that you want people to leave Instagram when you are promoting it, when you are posting about that thing, it is your worst performing posts. And so I want to begin by saying, number one, you are absolutely not alone. This is definitely the norm. And number two, it's not because Instagram is anti small business. There's this commonly held misconception out there that Instagram is anti small business, that they don't want you to promote links or that they don't want you to take people off of Instagram. And that's just not true. Instagram recognizes that creators and brands and small business owners are the lifeblood of the platform. And ultimately, if those people, people like us, were driven off of Instagram, then the average consumer would have nothing to consume besides ads, and then Instagram would die out very, very quickly. And while you might be sitting here thinking Instagram already is dying, Brock, it's not. If you look at the data, if you look at the statistics, Instagram is growing every single month, every single quarter. They're continuing to add millions of users every month, Hundreds of millions of users every single year. And. And if you look at the data in terms of where people are making their purchases, Instagram is actually number one. Instagram beats TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, pretty much any platform you could think of, even YouTube. When it comes to the average customer value or how much is each of your followers worth, Instagram is number one, according to a study done by Carrot Financial. Now, with all that being said, you likely feel very gaslit right now. You're probably feeling like Brock, no, it's not. There's absolutely no chance. Because every time I post about my product or my offer, I get crickets. I get my worst performing post of the month. And I, I understand that, like I already said, you are not alone. And there's really two key factors or criteria that we need to talk about today. And both of these could have an influence on the number of sales that you're making from Instagram. And those two key factors are your strategy and your tool. If we think about selling on Instagram, like catching a wave, a very appropriate analogy being here in Southern California, even if you were the best surfer in the world and you had the best strategies or technique, if you were surfing on a 2x4, you wouldn't catch very many waves. Similarly, if you took someone from rural Nebraska who has never seen the ocean in their life, and you gave them the best surfboard, you gave them Kelly Slater's best surfboard, they probably wouldn't catch a wave because even though they have a great tool, they don't have the strategies or technique necessary. And so today we're going to focus on both strategies and technique because you might realize that you're slightly lacking in one or maybe even both areas. And in order to facilitate our conversation today, I've broken this down into five different things that you should stop doing and their five replacements or the five things that you should do instead. And so the first thing that you need to stop doing if you want to make more sales on Instagram is stop relying on the built in link options. Or to say it another way, stop promoting your link in bio and stop using the link sticker on your Instagram stories. Now, this is super counterintuitive, and whenever I bring this up, the immediate first question is, why would I tell you not to use them if Instagram literally created them? Like, why would Instagram not favor something that they literally created? Well, in order to understand the answer to that question, we need to understand how the Instagram algorithm actually works. And I want to start by saying that Instagram is not anti link sticker, nor are they anti link in bio. You will not be penalized for saying the phrase click the link in my bio, nor will you be penalized for putting a link sticker on your Instagram stories. But let's think about what is happening when you tell your audience to click on the link sticker or to click on the link in your bio. Your audience is faced with two choices. Let's just say you made a great sales post. It checks off every box that we're going to talk about today. It uses all of the strategies and techniques that I'm going to share throughout this episode. It is excellent. It's highly engaging. It's like the best commercial you've ever seen. But then at the end of it, you say, click the link in my bio to get signed up. Your audience, the viewers of that post now have two choices. The first choice is pretty obvious. If they're not interested, they're just going to scroll, right? Their choice is, well, I don't want the thing, I'm not sold, I don't want to buy, I'm not ready right now, whatever. And so they keep scrolling. That's their first option. And that option is always there. Even the best post with the best tools and the best strategies, there's always going to be a certain amount of people in your audience who are just not interested and not going to buy. Let's ignore them and let's focus on the people who do want to buy. The potential customers, the people who were won over by your sales pitch, what they are now faced with. The option that they are going to choose is to abandon your post, scroll away from it, go to your profile page, then go through your bio, click on the link in your bio and go through the steps to purchase. Now, this isn't even to mention what if you have like a link menu such as a link tree or a stand store in your bio. So then they're clicking on the link in your bio and they have to remember which of these 17 options was the one that I wanted. And then they have to click on it, and then they have to hope that the sales page loads and they have to remember what that discount code was that you said. And then they have to do all this on their own and there's no ability for you to follow up or check in or provide customer service. Let's ignore all of those potential issues. And they have, at the end of the day, left your post. They're interested in buying because you did a great job. You did your job as a marketer or small business owner or a content creator, convincing them that they want to buy. But now, in order to buy, they are not engaging with the post. And it doesn't take a rocket scientist or an algorithm expert to know that if no one is engaging with your post because either they're not interested in your product and so they're scrolling away, or they are interested in your product so they're clicking away. If no one's engaging with your post, the algorithm is going to think this post isn't very good. And so immediately, I hope you recognize that there is an issue here and I hope the gears are turning in your head thinking, okay, no one is engaging with the post. That makes sense. It's not that people hate my product. It's not that people hate me. It's not that I'm ugly and people just hate my marketing. It's that you are using the wrong tools. You are relying on the link in bio or the link sticker on your Instagram stories in order to distribute the link. Because at the end of the day, you still need people to click right? Like you still need people to go to your website. You still need people to opt in or to sign up for whatever that thing is. So from now on, instead of telling people to click the link in your bio, what I want you to do instead is tell them to comment a specific keyword basically in your posts. Replace that line either in your caption or at the end of your post where you would normally say, click the link in my bio or the link is in my profile. To learn more, replace that with the phrase comment blank and I will send you blank comment guide and I'll send you my free guide comment book and I'll send you my ebook comment course and I'll send you the link to the course comment send and I'll send you the link to my latest YouTube video. And because you're telling your audience to do that, they are now going to be engaging with your post. Of course there is still group number one who isn't interested. They're not sold by whatever it is that you are selling and they're just going to keep scrolling. Like I said, we have to ignore those people. They're always going to exist. We can do a better job of selling to them, but there's always going to be a certain percentage of people who are just not interested. But now the people who are interested, who in the first example, they would have abandoned the post and gone and clicked the link in your bio, they are now engaging with the post. They are commenting the specific keyword that you told them to. And this in and of its itself is more of a strategy change than a tool change. So let's talk about how a tool change could fit into this system. Once you get people commenting that keyword, you have two options for yourself. You could either, number one, manually respond to each of these people. So for every person who comments guide, you could then message them individually yourself, manually sending them the Guide. Option number two is to use a tool like ManyChat that provides DM automation or direct message automation to automatically send that link to them. Now, I think DM Automation is the far superior option because while you could send it manually, I think that there are some problems presented. Number one, you are faced with two choices when you decide to manually respond to people. And your choice is either be glued to your phone 24 7, 365, waiting for someone to comment, and then instantly you're trying to, as quickly as possible, send them the message, the link, whatever it is that they wanted. Because you're a smart marketer and you know that if you, you wait 10 minutes or an hour, the likelihood that they make the purchase then, or the likelihood that they sign up hours later is much less likely. It would be like, imagine if the next time you went to buy something on Amazon and you clicked Buy it now. It was like, hold on, wait three hours. Someone will message you in three hours and then you'll be able to buy it. That would be super frustrating. The alternative option if you decide to manually send these messages yourself, is to say, I'll get to it. When I get to it. I'm not going to be glued to my phone all day. I'll respond whenever I have the opportunity. Maybe you're thinking, well, Brock, I would probably only get a. A couple of comments. I don't have a very large audience. I don't have a very engaged audience. So if I tell people the comment guide, I'll probably get two or three. So whatever, I'll just respond to them when I can. And again, you could do that. However, if you're waiting hours and hours, people are a lot less likely to buy. There are so many studies and so many statistics I could share with you that show that every minute that passes and especially every hour that passes, people become less and less likely to actually make that purchase. So instead, the option that I would recommend, like I've said already, is to use DM Automation. And the DM automation tool that I recommend that I've been using for the last five years, that is also the most popular DM automation tool in the world, with over a million active users. The DM automation tool that is an officially approved meta partner, which I want to pause and explain what that means. There are a lot of tools that access Instagram's API. You can kind of think about this as like, if Instagram is a house. Instagram has intentionally left its back door open and they've told some people, hey, here's how you get to our house. You can go through the side gate and you can come in the back door. You can kind of let yourself in. That's how Most tools and most sites and most softwares that you're probably using are accessing Instagram. Like if you're using a scheduling app, or if you're using an app that like finds trending audios or something, it's probably accessing Instagram's API in the way that I just described. The difference with ManyChat as an officially approved partner is they literally have a key to the house, they have a way to let themselves in through the front door and they actually have weekly meetings. This isn't an analogy. They actually do. Manychat has weekly meetings with, with Instagram because Instagram recognizes that manychat is such an integral part of small businesses and brands and creators growing on the platform. So it's totally safe, it's totally allowed. I actually asked Mozeri about this in our conversation a year ago. If you haven't watched our interview, I highly recommend that you do. I'll link it up down in the description below. But in the interview I asked him, hey, is this allowed? Because right before our interview there was some drama, people saying, oh, it's not going to be allowed or it's going to be removed. And so I asked him directly, I was like, hey, can we do this? Can we use Diem automation? Can we use manychat? And he was like, yeah, absolutely, you're good to go. But again, all of this exists to solve the problem that you have an engaged audience, an audience that wants to buy, but in order to buy, they're not going to engage with your posts. You are now simply allowing the engaged audience who wants to buy to engage in a more direct way. The other benefits of this are one that I kind of mentioned earlier, which is that when you tell them to click the link in the bio, there's multiple steps involved. They have to click on your profile, which is kind of a small button. Maybe they accidentally click on the audio or the location details. Now they're lost. But let's say they successfully do click on your profile. Then they have to find the specific link in your bio, which now Instagram continues to add more and more buttons to the bio, making it harder to pick out which one is the link. Then they click on the link and then you have a link menu with 17 different links in it. So even if you're using that system, it is still not necessarily the best. It's actually so much more intuitive and easier for the consumer when you use DM automation because then they don't have to go through this multi step process to find the link, they just comment the keyword and they are instantly and automatically sent the link through your DM automation tool. A big concern that a lot of people have is, oh my gosh, I don't want to automate everything. I don't want to lose my DMs, Brock. I don't want someone to try to send me a message about one thing and they suddenly get a message about something else. So you are basically able to serve the link up to them on a silver platter. Additionally, something that we haven't even talked about, something that I haven't talked much about on my Instagram because it's just a little bit too high level of a topic to talk about on organic social media. It's a little bit too good or deep or juicy of a topic to talk about on a reel. But you'll understand this because you're listening to a podcast is that with DM automation, you actually don't even necessarily need a link or a landing page. So for the last 15 to 20 years, the way that you've gone about doing business online is you try to get people onto a landing page. A landing page is a fancy term for like the website where you put in your email address, right where you sign up for the thing, or you get a discount code, or you're like, hey, I want this free thing, here's my email. That's a landing page. It's also known as a sales page. But something that you can do with DM automation is you can actually collect names and emails and even phone numbers or any other data that you may need. Any other data that you might normally collect on your landing page, you can collect it right in the DMs. It's so much more intuitive and it's so much easier and you don't have to worry about websites breaking. Myself personally, oftentimes I will send people links because sometimes I get lazy. Sometimes I use DM automation and I'm just like, hey, here, go click this link and sign up. But when I do that, I recognize that there's going to be a certain amount of people, certain percentage of people who the link isn't going to work for, the page isn't going to load properly, their browser is going to time out, whatever. But instead something that I've started to do more and more because it's just so much more effective is I ask them for their name, their email and all of the other data that I need in the DMs and so they're able to respond right There, they don't have to click on a link, they don't have to go to a page, you don't have to have anything load. They can send me their email address, their name, whatever, right in the DMs, and then I can have that automatically connected on the back end to my landing page or to my email flow or whatever it may be. So again, they don't have to leave Instagram, they don't have to go to a different site, they're able to stay on Instagram, which is where we want to stay, right? Getting people to change, getting people to go to a different platform, that takes a lot more effort than allowing them to just stay where they are, which in this case is on Instagram. And all of that can be facilitated through direct Message automation. And that is why direct message automation significantly improves pretty much every category. I have yet to find a statistical category that using diem automation doesn't improve. And that's even with using the exact same marketing, the exact same posts. And so, yes, as you're listening to this, you could actually, like, la, la, la, skip the rest of this episode and use all of your existing sales posts, all of your existing promotional posts. You could redo them or reuse them, and instead of saying click the link in my bio, you could just swap out the DM or the call to action at of that post to say DM me this word or comment this word. And I bet you'll see an improvement in your link clicks, in your engagement, your likes, your views, your follows. All of that stuff is improved almost automatically when using DM automation. And like I've mentioned, yes, this works on both feed posts where you can tell people to comment a keyword, and it works on your Instagram stories, so you can tell people to reply to your story with a keyword. And I know not a lot of y' all go live on Instagram, but it can actually be done on Instagram Live as well. So if you go live on Instagram, you could tell people to comment a keyword while they're watching live, and again, they'll instantly receive this dm. There are a million other features that I could go into and a million other things that I could talk about today. If that's something you want, let me know down in the comments at the time of recording this. Totally honest, I'm not quite sure where you're at in terms of your DM automation experience. On my Instagram, half of my audience is using DM automation and they know what it is. And they're ready for advanced topics. And half of my audience doesn't even know what DM Automation is. They've never heard of it before. And so let me know down in the comments if you want me to do a more advanced episode in the future going into some more technical or more advanced ways of using manychat and DIEM automation because there's a lot of tools that most people are just hardly scratching the surface with now. I know I have a lot of social media managers who listen to the show every single week and so I'm so excited to tell you about our latest sponsor, rela. RELA is an all in one social media management tool which is going to make working with your clients so much easier. Everything from planning, getting approvals and posting your content all in one place is so much more than just a scheduling tool. Is truly an all in one management suite for your social media management business. RELLA even now has an AI tool embedded called ella which knows your content better than you do, allowing you to plan entire content calendars and create on brand content. So much easier. Easier. Go to getrella.com and use code BYT to get 10% off the first three months of your annual plan. Again, that's G-E-T R-E-L-L-A.com to claim your 14 day free trial and then use code BYT for 10% off the three months of your annual plan. And find out why social media teams are ditching the tool chaos. As many of you know, when I first started this business I was a college student athlete and at the time I was eating like five meals a day, over 4,000 calories. And I was eating exact same meals every single day. Same breakfast, same lunch, same first dinner, same second dinner every single day. And it was super boring. But it was what I had to do because I just didn't have the time to make different meals, to get different ingredients and to experiment with different recipes. But that has totally changed since I graduated college for two reasons. One of those reasons is my wife Tay and her constant encouragement for us to diversify what we're eating. And the second reason is because of HelloFresh. HelloFresh allows you to choose from over 80 global recipes every single month so you can constantly change things up and meet your protein goals and be able to make your food faster and more efficiently without having to waste time meal prepping, planning, grocery shopping and all of that. And I don't know about you, but every single time I have food delivered, I'm a little bit dissatisfied because it costs so much and it's usually not super healthy because let's be real, nothing quite hits like home cooking. That's why we use hellofresh and you should too. Go to hellofresh.com forward/byt10fm to get your first 10 meals free and free breakfast for life. One per box with active subscription free meals will be applied as a discount on your first box for new subscribers only and it varies by plan. That's hellofresh.com forward/BYT10FM to get 10 free meals and free breakfast for life. I remember when I was starting my very first online business way back when I was a freshman in college and I was very lucky to have my mom as a partner by my side. She could kind of mentor me and guide me through the initial setup process and building the business and coming up with the name and the products and what we were going to sell. And some of you may know that that was helping moms keep their kids safe on Snapchat. And I would imagine that when you are thinking about starting or in the early stages of your online business journey, you are likely faced with all of the same challenges, all of the same doubts and fears and concerns. Is my product right? Is anyone going to listen to me? How am I going to market this? How am I going to sell it? And you need a partner by your side as well. And that's where Shopify fits right in. Shopify will help you get the word out by allowing you to easily create emails and promotional posts so that you can reach your customers wherever they are. And Shopify can be your commerce expert with world class level expertise in inventory, international shipping, handling returns and warehousing and all of that. Plus if you ever get stuck, they don't just have customer service, they have world class customer service that is available 247 and that's something that even my mom couldn't provide for me. And Shopify has that iconic purple shop pay button which is used by businesses around the world and is the number one converting checkout option in the world. That means better conversions, less people abandoning their cart, and more customers for you. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com forward/tribe, go to S-O-P-I-F-Y.com forward/tribe. Again, that's shopify.com forward slash tribe. With all that being said, the second huge mistake that I see people making when they are promoting or selling or offering something on Instagram is they're using generic graphic designs. I think Canva is a great tool. Don't get me wrong, Canva, if you're watching this, Adobe, if you're watching this, I think that you have great tools that make life so much easier. However, I think a lot of people have fallen into the easiest option is the best option for creating their promotional posts for Instagram. And you end up creating these really generic cookie cutter looking graphics. Don't get me wrong, they look professional, they look really well made. But the problem is, five to 10 years ago, a really professional, well made graphic was rare. It was the exception. There weren't Canva templates and downloadable presets and Adobe that anyone could just use for free super easily. Nowadays it is super easy. And so because it's become so easy and so widespread, it's lost its luxury. It's not as premium anymore. It still looks really nice, still looks really pretty and professional, but it also kind of feels corporate, it feels stale, it feels lifeless, it lacks personality. It's the same template that you've seen 70 other people use on Instagram. And so it just doesn't connect in the same way. It's not as engaging as it once was. And this might be a little bit of a stretch, but I feel like there's a similarity here between the generic promotional posts and graphic designs that we're seeing on Instagram and kind of this current state of popular animated movies where I don't know if, again, I don't know if this is too much of a stretch, but if you've seen any animated movies or a lot of animated movies in the last few years, they all kind of look the same. They all kind of look, look and feel the same. Like you could see a screenshot from one and it could easily be plugged into any of these other movies because they're using such a repeatable, formulaic style. And they're doing that because they realized that it was cheap, it was easier, and it was a style that people really responded well to. But because of this, we've lost a lot of variety in animation and we've lost a lot of depth and character and uniqueness from different animation studios. Think about back in the day where you had like watercolor animations and claymation and all these different animation styles. And that's why movies like into the Spider Verse perform so well, because they are animated in a different, more unique comic book style way. So I digress. I didn't mean to Go off on a rant or a tangent there. But my point is simply that using the pre made templates, while they look pretty and they look really nice and they're put together well, they're boring, they're overdone, they're very corporate. And so instead, of course, the replacement of this is to create hyper engaging content. Now, of course, that's pretty much what I talk about in every episode of this podcast. How do you make better posts? How do you make more engaging content? One thing that I just want you to get in the habit of is I want you to save your best ideas, your most viral ideas, the stuff that you're like most excited about. Try to see if you could use those as promotional posts. Rather than making the promotional posts, the things that you kind of just like squeeze out, the stuff you kind of just force instead make the stuff that you're most inspired about and turn those into your promotional posts. But I understand that that is a challenge. And so of course you can check out any of the other episodes of this podcast if you're not already. I encourage you to subscribe. I encourage you to subscribe, check out any of those other episodes. But I do have three ideas for you that I want to share right now that I have seen working really well as highly engaging content that you can specifically use to help you make more sales. And the first one is the super raw and real. If we just spent all this time talking about the polished, perfected corporate graphic design, the opposite of that is the raw, the real, the authentic, the in the moment content. And so I want you to just experiment with this. I want you to try this for yourself. I want you to sign up for diem automation. And then I want you to create a post where you're in your car and you're just filming one take. No edits, no cuts. You have to do about 45 to 60 seconds of continuous speaking with no filler words, no ums, ers, ahs, and try to limit your pauses. But if you can do that, and you can do it without any cuts again, no transitions, no effects, no fancy editing, that will be very honest, very authentic, very low filter and low effort, if you will. And I want you to at least start the video by holding the phone in your hand. If you want to set the phone up on the dashboard or on your steering wheel and then finish what you're saying, that's fine, but it needs to at least start in your hand. And this sort of raw, real, unpolished content is in general something that's performing much better in 2026 because, again, the average consumer, the average person in the Instagram population is so over it with the perfected, polished, overdone, filtered, Photoshopped crap. They're looking for what is real and what could be more real than a video with zero cuts that you filmed in your car? The second idea is something that takes a lot more time, energy and effort. And it's something that I honestly wouldn't recommend for most of you, but for some of you, this might be what you've been missing, and that is to go to the opposite end of the spectrum and create super polished, cinematic level stuff. Now, I know that this might sound kind of contradictory to everything that I was just saying, but if you can truly make a cinematic masterpiece, a Lady Spider man, into the Spidey verse, right, where that is a masterpiece, that is something that took years of animation and creativity and professional editing to create. If you can create something that is that unique and that is that polished and that is that cool, well, then, sure, people are going to watch. But the level that you have to get to is so much higher in 2026 than it even was in 2023 or 2024. Because of tools like AI and because of the widespread use and adoption of so many of these professional tools, it's become much harder to make make even better content, but it is still possible. And then the third idea that I have for you is to use creative formats. I think that a lot of us have kind of fallen into the same old routine where we're only creating two kinds of reels. We're creating B roll reels where it's like seven seconds long, it has a trending audio, it has some big bold hook on the top and then it says read the caption. Or we're creating talking head reels, which is kind of like this podcast, right, where it's like a little bit professional, it's not super polished and edited, but it is one person talking directly to the camera with a professional microphone or some sort of lighting or something. And, right. It's usually scripted. It doesn't feel raw. It feels like you're listening to a mini podcast. But there are so many other formats and other ways that you can create content and present your education, your information, your stories, whatever they may be. And so, with that being said, here are three creative formats that you could try to boost your sales. The first one relies on a strategy called gamification, where you basically turn your content into a game. And specifically, I want you to create a scavenger hunt. And there's two ways that you can do this. The first popular way that I've seen this done is by hiding messages in your reel. So the most popular is you hold up a sign that says don't look in the upper left corner. And then when people look in the upper left corner, there's another line that says don't read the third hashtag. And then when they read the third hashtag, it says don't read the pinned comment. And then when your audience reads the pinned comment, it's like, whatever you do, do not read the second line in my bio. And then they go to your bio. And the second line of the bio is like, like, haha, you did it. You won the game. You ended the scavenger hunt. Here's 15% off our spring sale. In the example that I just gave, there's also a reverse psychology angle because you're telling people, don't look here, don't look there. And so it's making them like even more tempted to look there. But you could also just say, read the upper right corner, read the third line of the caption, read my bio. And it's just fun. It's different than the norm and it kind of breaks the pattern that most people expect with reels. The second creative format that I would suggest for making more sales on Instagram is to use what's called a hook swap, something we've talked about here on the podcast before. But it's essentially using a pre existing viral video, a popular, already trending clip, and then seamlessly transitioning from said clip into your own reel. And the key to making a good hook swap is that the frame or whatever's on the screen at the end of the first video matches or is very similar in terms of composition, what's on the screen to the first frame or the beginning of the second video. That's really how you create a seamless hook swap. And so for those of you who struggle to come up with hooks and struggle to make your sales content engaging, like the whole time I've been talking today, you're like, okay, Brock, but like, I just struggle to even talk about what I'm selling. Like, I feel so boring when I talk about it. I would encourage you to use a hook swap. And if you want an entire library, we have a free library of 40 of them. And if you DM me the word swap on Instagram, I will send you that library. And it will actually be facilitated through DM automation. So you'll Get a little test of what that looks like. You'll be able to send your email address right in the dms and then I will be able to send that library to you. Again, my Instagram is Brock11Johnson. So just DM me on Instagram with the word swap and I will send you that library of content. And then the third creative format that I want to suggest for you specifically for making more sales on Instagram is to do what's called cloning content. Now, I am not talking about AI clones. I am not a fan of creating an AI twin avatar of yourself to sell. That's not what we're talking about here. What I am talking about here is, and maybe you've seen these before, the really creative reels where there's like two of you on the screen or maybe even three of you on the screen at the same time and there's multiple of you because you're playing the role of different people. Maybe one of you is the beginner and one of you is the expert. One of you is the novice and one of you is the professional. One of you is how you used to be, one of you is how you currently are. And so it's a great, powerful way to kind of show your audience, hey, here's what someone without my products is or does or looks like or acts. And here's what someone with my products does or is or looks like or acts like. The third mistake that I see so many people making when they go to sell on Instagram is they're doing feature based selling. Feature based selling is talking about really talking about all of the numbers, it's talking about all of the features and different components of your product or your offer. So it's talking about, oh, hey, I have a 12 week coaching program and every week you get two coaching calls with me and you get one office hour session. And throughout this process, you're gonna get 150 templates for your workout routines. It's like you're focusing on all of these numbers and people glaze over when you focus on these things. And I understand why you do it. It's because as a business owner, you love these details and you understand that it's these details that are going to make the difference for people. But they don't understand that yet. Instead, what you have to do is to do what's called benefit based selling. Benefit based selling is focusing on what's in it for them, what are the outcomes, the transformations that your customers or your students or your clients are going to have when they click on the link, when they sign up, when they put in their email, or when they become a customer. And so it's going to take a little bit of a reshaming and a reframing of how you think about your products. But I want you to really lean in to the benefits rather than the features. And one of the most famous examples of this is Apple. Apple has great marketing, let's face it. And when they first launched the ipod, one of the things that they did was they put up these billboards that said 1000 songs in your pocket. Now that could have been said 16 gigabytes of storage or 3 hour battery life or however many files you could actually fit on that ipod, but those would have been features. And so what Apple decided to do instead is again to say 1000 songs in your pocket. That tells us what the benefit is. That makes it clear that if I can fit a thousand songs in my pocket, I could go anywhere, I could listen to all my music, I could take my entire catalog, I can listen to every song I've ever heard in my life and take it with me on the go. And so again, I want you to reframe how you're thinking about how you're positioning and how you're selling whatever it is that you're selling. And I want you to focus on the benefits rather than the features. The fourth mistake that I see a lot of people making is what I'm going to call GRQ selling. And GRQ is an acronym that stands for Get Rich Quick. And I know this probably isn't you. Like this doesn't apply to you. It probably doesn't apply to anyone listening. But I'm going to talk about it anyways. Get Rich Quick selling is I'm selling something because I took a course or I signed up for coaching or I bought something and they're teaching me how to sell the thing. Like business coaches coaching business coaches on how to coach business coaches to coach other business coaches. It's kind of like a pyramid scheme, if we're being honest. And it's get rich quick, right? It's people who are teaching you how to make money from home, but they've never made money from home themselves. Ultimately, I believe that you don't need to be an expert, you don't need to have like a college degree in whatever it is that you're selling, but you need to have experience, right? If you're going to teach people how to run their first 10k, then you need to have either run your first 10k or you need to have at least coached multiple other people to run their first 10k. You need to have experience either doing the thing or coaching the thing. If you have neither and you have just learned about, you have learned about growing a business, or you've learned about running a 10k, or you've learned about losing weight, or you've learned about these things, then it's going to be really, really hard for people to trust you. And that's ultimately what we're getting at here, is that when you are selling these things that you don't necessarily have experience with, the audience feels like they don't trust you and it feels like you're just trying to get rich quick. You're just trying to sell something because it sounds easy to sell and you're not really in it for the transformation. You're more so in it for the transaction. And so this is really just a shift in how you approach things. This is service based selling rather than sales based selling. And again, I know this is something that probably doesn't apply to you. Like you're probably got it. Your heart's in the right place, your mind's in the right place. But, but I needed to be real for a moment and just tell you that if you are just in it to make money, it will be hard to make money because your audience will be able to tell. The BS detector, the sniffer on their face is a lot more keen and a lot better at detecting your BS now than it was even just five, 10 years ago. And then finally, with all of that being said, one of the most commonly overlooked strategies or mistakes that people are making on Instagram is they're not selling enough. And so the opposite of that is you need to sell more. I think most people think, oh, I don't want to overwhelm people. I don't want to talk about my product too much. I don't want to sell too often. Oh, I don't want to be salesy. I don't want to be that person. I don't want to sound desperate. You're a business owner. It's your job to talk about your business. It is your job to promote your business. Every single time you hold yourself back, every single time you delete a reel, every single time you have an idea for something you want to talk about and then you end up not talking about it. Your competition is out there talking about their stuff. Your competition is out there posting, out there growing and out there siphoning customers and followers away from you. And So I want you to get in the habit of overselling. I want you to get in the habit of over promoting. I guarantee that if you try to do that, 99% of you won't even get there. I guarantee even if you post about your stuff as many times as you can, you still won't get to the point where you're annoying and overwhelming your audience. One of my favorite examples of this is when Justin Bieber launched SWAG2, his most recent album, and he or his team, whatever, they posted about the album in some way or another, 97 times, 97 times to his feed in a five day period. Even the biggest beliebers on the planet would have been overwhelmed if they saw all 97 of those posts. But something that we need to understand about how the algorithm works is that the algorithm only shows people the content that they would be most interested in seeing. And so even as someone who is a big Justin Bieber fan myself, I probably only saw maybe five of those posts or seven of those posts, like one a day, maybe two a day over that five day period. But he was posting 97 times during the album's launch to drive attention, to make it feel like, oh my gosh, the album is everywhere. And to increase his odds of any of those posts reaching my feet, if he had only posted once or five times, the likelihood that all five of those would end up on my feed is very low. But because he's posting more, he has more at bats, he has more opportunities, he has more chances for one of those posts to blow up, one of those posts to do well, or simply for the algorithm to decide that I might be interested in one of those posts. And so I want to encourage you to post about your product more. I promise you, you will be okay. And if someone is going to unfollow a business or business owner or a brand because that brand or business owner or business is posting about their brand or their business, why was that person following in the first place? Right? Like, don't let the door hit you in the butt. See you buddy. And so please do not shut up about what it is that you have to offer on Instagram. Thank you so much for watching today. And as always, happy networking. Sa.