← Call Her Creator with Katelyn Rhoades
Call Her Creator with Katelyn Rhoades
Ep. 49: How I made my first $10K on Instagram and grew my following to 170k followers
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What's up, everybody? Welcome to another episode of Call Her Creator, powered by Stan. I am your one and only Kaitlin Rhodes. And today I've got a really good episode that hopefully answers a lot of questions for a lot of people. This is the most frequently asked question I get in the dm. So we're going to go over how to actually monetize your account and grow it, like both of them, because I, I did them both cohesively together. So I want to teach you guys the tactics that I used and the step by step guidance that you need to make money. Because there's so many programs out there that will charge you thousands of dollars to learn what I'm about to teach you. So stay tuned for that. If you are new here, please leave me a review over on Spotify or Apple Podcast download this episode. That is the best way for me to get support from you is my podcast download. So please, please, if you love what I have to say, download the podcast. All right, y'all know that lately I've been starting the show off with some mentoring and it's all from the Wealth Money Can't Buy book from Robin Sharma. It's just so good that I have to share what I'm reading with you guys. So this morning's I told y'all. I think I told y'all. I start my mornings off trying to not really meditate, but just kind of calm my heart and my nerves for the day that's ahead. I get really bad anxiety. It's been a thing since I was a child. I really knew to get back into therapy, but I just haven't had time. I know everyone says that. So I try to mentor myself. And so this book has been helping me in the mornings to just start my morning off right and to just kind of shed those insecurities and anxieties that I get on a daily basis. So. So that's why I share this stuff with you guys. And I'd love if y'all let me know if you like it or not. If you think I need to shut up, then just tell me. But I think it's really motivational for someone like me who can relate to any of you that might just have like a little bit of anxiety in your head. I know starting your own business can just feel really scary. Doing things that are out of your comfort zone, they're really scary. But that is how you grow. And I just want you to know that when I started my online business, when I really went for it, I was Sick to my stomach for three months minimum. And then finally, things just started to kind of smooth out a little bit for me. My stomach stopped being all crazy with the butterflies, and I just kind of chilled out, and I was kind of like, you know what? This. What? Stop thinking about what can go wrong, Caitlyn. Think about what can go right. And so from then on, I've been okay. Not to mention, I mean, I told y'all, I'm. I always have anxiety, but it just. It hasn't been as crazy as it was when I first started. So. Okay, enough about me. This was what I read this morning, says, stop saying these two bad words. And I was like, ooh, what bad words are we gonna say? So tell someone to read the book that changed your life. And they'll often reply with two words that amount to dirty swearing in my mind. Recommend that your best friend watch a documentary that taught you how to build the skill that upgraded your artistry and maximized your productivity. And. And they'll sometimes deploy the same bad words. So what are those words? The two words are, I'll try. And it's so true. Last night, I. I'm a quitter, guys. I'm a quitter. And I was at the gym, and I was there to cancel my membership, and there was. It wasn't even the guy behind the desk. The guy behind the desk was, like, helping me cancel. He was ready to go. He wasn't going to fight me on it. I was like, cool, yes. Love this, cuz. I know. When I walked in, I was like, I was scared they were going to try to sell me to stay, but a person working out actually walked up and he's like, no, you're not quitting. He told the guy, stop. Stop what you're doing. Leave her membership. She's not quitting. And I was like, no, I really am. He's like, nope, you're. You. You. Let's work out right now. You're gonna feel so much better about yourself. Come on, let's just. I. I was wearing sweatpants, guys. And slides. And he's like, all right, we'll. We'll work out your upper body. And I was like, no, I don't. I don't want to. And he's like, come on, just call your husband. Tell him you only gotta tell him. Him. You got 15 minutes. Let's go do it. You're going to feel so much better about yourself. And I. I know he was right, and I wanted to, but I just couldn't. And I was like, you know, I'll try tomorrow. I'll try to come tomorrow. I don't even know if my gym membership ended up getting canceled or not. I think it's. I. I don't know. It was a debacle. I slowly backed up to the exit door and I left. And I don't even know if it really canceled or not, but it's true. I kept saying, I'll try to come tomorrow. I'll try. And so those are the two bad words. I'll try. Oh, my, oh, my, oh, my. I'll try means you won't commit. Can we just think about that for a second? You won't commit. You'll try, Will you? Will you really try? I'll try means you're not really that invested, so true. I was not invested in working out. I'll try means you won't hold yourself accountable. True. I'll try means you aren't seriously that interested. 1000% not interested in working out. I'll try mostly means you're worried about making the necessary changes that you need to be made to lead a life you love. Oof. And do remember that you cannot have the world you want without doing the things you must, if that makes sense. I'll try. As a reason bordering on an invasion offered by the majority to remove themselves from responsibility. This phrase dishonors your talents and disrespects your genius. I'll try. As a violent robber of human potential. Do or do not. There is no try. That's advice from Yoda of Star Wars. I do believe he was correct. Robin says, so if you're feeling like me right now, like, oof. He's right. I say I'll try, but I'm not invested. I say I'll try, but really, I'm not interested. Like, it's true. It's true. So maybe what can we say instead of I'll try, do we just be real with ourselves and say, well, I'm not gonna do that and think and, like, just go along with our lives? I don't know. I don't know. Something to think about, something to ponder on. If that little mentorship of mine for Robins, if that really, like, just sets something off in your brain, your heart, please send me a dm. What can we do? Instead of saying, I'll try, what do we do? I don't know. I don't know what we do. So it's something to think about. Hope that gets Yalls wheels spinning. Definitely got my wheels spinning. I don't know. I know that my body. I'm 30. How old are you? I'm 34 years old. I know that I need to work out not to be scared, skinny, or fit because I'm already little, but I need to work out to be more healthy, to work my heart, to make it healthier, to live for my kids, to live for my husband. Like, I know I gotta do it. It's just, like, I don't want to. So maybe we change our thinking around these things. I don't know. I don't know. Something to think about, something we can talk about next episode. I'll think about it too. But I just thought that was really something that I wanted to share with you guys. Okay, enough motivation. Let's talk about making money and growing your Instagram account. Let's talk about making your first $10,000 from Instagram. That's a jump. We could just talk about making your first a hundred dollars. I don't care. Let's talk about making money from Instagram. I mean, I was happy when someone bought a $10 guide from me in the beginning. I'm still happy. I'm so happy when people buy stuff from me. But imagine making $10,000. Like, what would you do with $10,000? That's a lot of money. So Instagram's a powerful, powerful platform. We all know that. And some of us will complain, like, oh, it's so saturated. There's so many people doing it now. It doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. You've got people out there that want to hear from you. They need to hear your story. They probably have something in common with you, and you need to share your story. And that's how. That's how I kind of got started with all of this. I just knew that I needed to talk about the things that happen in my life and share those things with people. And it really started nurturing my community. So it all started with me trying to teach people how to grow their business online using social media. Social media is a free tool. Everyone should be using it. We all have a phone and our fingertips. I wanted people to understand that they could be doing it, too. And then I started making money teaching people how to do that. And then I'm like, oh, shoot, this can. This actually really does work. Like, I kind of proved to myself, I had already proved to myself that because I had worked for companies and attracted leads to them through social media, but doing it for yourself was a whole different ball game. So me doing that and making money from it, then I started thinking like, okay, I need to tell people about my background. And that's where I'm going with this. I started telling people my story about, you know, I couldn't afford rent when I was in college. I should not have moved to another city to go to a big university when I couldn't even afford rent. I could barely afford groceries. But I did it anyways because I knew, like, you only get one life. And I really wanted to experience the University of Florida. I had been a Gator fan. My family was Gator fans. It was just something that I had to do for myself. So I made it happen. And I struggled so much during those times that I kept telling myself, when I get older, I'm not gonna. This is not happening. I'm not gonna struggle like this. My kids, my future kids, they are not gonna like this. And so when I did finally start making more money than I've ever made in my life, that's when I was like, okay, this is why I need to do this. This is what I need to tell these people. And so that's when my story started getting shared on. I was super duper broke, and I believed in myself. I went all out on myself, and I started making money, and now I'm not super duper broke. And you can do it, too. So what I'm getting at is that everybody has a story. We've all got these businesses. True. But we've also got a story, and storytelling is where it's at. And I think that's really how I became successful was because I leaned into my story, and I want you guys to lean into that too. Okay, off topic. So let's get into this. Let's how, like, cool. Caitlin, thanks for sharing your story. Now tell us how to make money. There's three main things when you want to grow your account and make money from social media. It's defining what your offer is, creating that offer and then growing an audience to sell it to. The those are your three main things that you need to keep in mind. So first and foremost is nailing down your offer and your audience. Who is it that you want to speak to, and what is it that you want to provide them? So the best way to do this is really to think in your head, like, get a piece of paper out, write down, you know, your top one or two things that you are super duper passionate about that you are educated on that you think you could help someone else do. And so for me, that was social media marketing. That's all I had ever done. I'd been doing it since high school. I was listing my dad's RVs over on, on Craigslist, writing about them on Facebook. And I, I knew that it was a way to help businesses. So I knew that I could talk about that all day long. So that's where my knowledge came from. And so from there I'm like, all right, if this is what I'm going to be teaching, who is my audience? Oh, it's business owners. But I got more nitty gritty than that. Like, okay, business owners. But I wasn't trying to reach like these corporate people that have thousands of dollars to spend, spend on ads. I knew that I wanted to reach those little people that didn't have thousands of dollars to spend on ads, but they had a phone, they had a social media channel that they could post on for free. So that's a big deal too, is like, yes, you might have this, like this general audience that you're trying to reach, but really out of that general audience, who are the real people that you really want to talk to? So nailing that down is going to be super duper important for you. And you can ask yourself questions like, you know, what do they look like? What do they do for a living? What are some of their interests? Where do they live? All those things can help you understand really who your audience is. So mine was, my general audience was business owners. And then I nailed it down to like smaller, medium sized business owners. And then like, since then, three years now into my owning my business, I've really went down even further. And I'm trying to target women business owners. And it's not that I don't like men, but it's just that I feel like I connect more with women because I'm a mother, I'm a business owner, I'm girly, so I just, I lean into that. So you gotta understand who your audience is. Who do you really want to talk to? And that's going to help you with your messaging and all that jazz whenever it comes time to actually make your offer. So once you have your ideal customer, you start to understand, all right, what is their pain points? They want to spread awareness on their brand and their business. They want to reach more people, they want to sell more products. They want to create these cool videos or posts that help them sell their product or their offer. So like, that starts telling you your ideal customer in their pain points. And once you have their pain points, then you can decide, okay, this is their pain point. Here's what I can Offer them. And that's when your offer comes into play. So instead of jumping on the air train and reselling other people's stuff, really think about, what is it that you want? Who do you want to help? What are you good at? This could be helping people with social media marketing. This could be helping people buy real estate and make money through homeownership. This could be, maybe you're a mother and you have an autistic child and you know there's other women out there with children with autism and they don't know how to handle it, so you want to help them. Like, there is so much out there. There's something for everyone. There really is. So you just need to find out what is most important to you. Once you have that all that's your first step in making money on Instagram. Once you've got that nailed down and you start posting about it. Sorry, my nose. Once you've got that nailed down and you start posting about it, then you will start to grow your audience because you're going to start sharing these stories, sharing these tips, educating people. People are going to start to understand, like, okay, I see Caitlin on my newsfeed. She's probably talking about social media marketing. Okay, I see Lisa on my newsfeed. She's helping women with children that have eczema. You know what I mean? So, like, they will start to connect you to that specific topic the more that you talk about it. And if you are new to marketing and you don't really know how to talk about these things, you can always go to my Instagram page, the Katelyn Rhodes. I will tell you how to market them to listen to. Like, go through my podcast episodes and find one that resonates with you. I've got stuff on content pillars, I've got stuff on writing captions. I literally have everything you need to do all of this on my podcast, and it's completely free. But go through those and educate yourself. It is gonna take some time. It's gonna take some perseverance, and it's gonna take some. What's the word I'm looking for some self discipline, I guess. But you can learn all of these things. It's out there. It's free information. And once you really start leaning into that and educating people on that, you will start to get better and better. And there's something called the rule of three, which helps me when I'm creating content. So I might have this one idea, but then I'll break it up into three different videos so that's that's a lot of content for you. If you do that times all of the different ideas that you want to talk about, you've got loads of content there. So the rule of three is where you basically break up that topic into three different things. So the first one is going to be you explaining it talking head video, it's you talking. The second one would be you talking about that subject, but you're using a trending audio and you're doing the trend that goes with it. And then the third one could be you still with audio, but you're going to put all of the information in the caption of that reel. So that's three different ways to share about a specific topic and makes you have a lot of different content there. So that's the rule of three. I talk about that too in a lot of my podcast episodes. So if you need more information on that, I also have a reel on it on my Instagram account. You can go back and really educate yourself on that. But the rule of three will help you. You make more content around a specific topic. So once you've, you've got your audience, you've got their pain points, you've started talking about it. Now it's time to actually create something to sell. And that's why it's so important to understand who your audience is and what your niche is, because that's going to bring you clarity to create that specific offer that you want to sell. So there's so many things that you could sell. Maybe it's a PDF guide, maybe you create a course, maybe you create a community, a membership, maybe you just sell your time and do coaching calls. Those are pretty much the main ones that you can do to start making money fast. But I think the easiest one to really get into is to create a PDF guide. That's going to be something you make one time in Canva. Yes, you can update it later on if you need to, but it's like it's one and done. A course is really good too. And you can price a course more expensive than a guide. But a course takes a lot of time and effort. You have to create the course, then you have to record it, you have to make a presentation on it. There's a lot that goes into a course not telling you not to do a course, but I'm just saying the best way to break into this industry is to start with, start small with a PDF guide. And that's where I made my first $10,000 was a PDF guide. I was Posting a ton and a ton and a ton of content on social media marketing. But I really started leaning into reels and I would post videos all the time and I was good at it and my account grew because I was good at it. So that was my easiest offer to bring to the table was how do I make these reels? And how can you do it too? So that's when I created the Reels challenge and I put that together and I started promoting it by posting reels and talking about it. And I made $10,000 like the first week or two that I launched it. It was, it was a 30 day period. But I think like the first week I was, I made a lot of money really fast and that was new to me. So it was exciting. So for you guys, again starting out, that's, that's where you can start. I priced my guide. I think it was like 25 bucks at the time. So imagine like I had these followers, they bought it times 25 bucks each. That's how I made my money. PDF guides can be priced anywhere from $7 to $50 to $150. It really depends what's in that PDF guide and the way that you're going to price that is by looking at what other people are pricing their stuff at. You're going to do a Google search on the offer that you have. You're going to go look at competitors who are already selling something like this. What are they pricing it at? What does their PDF look like? You can take inspiration from them. Don't copy them, please don't copy them. But you can take inspiration from them. Do your market research to be able to price that out and sell it. Now you have to understand when you're selling something like this, you have to talk about it a lot. And it's going to feel like you are a broken record that just keeps going in a circle, a hamster wheel talking about the same thing over and over again. But that is what works. One, only a small percentage of your followers will even see your content. And two, like they need to hear about it over and over again before they pull the trigger to make that purchase. So that's just, that's just how it's got to be. And the more you're posting about it, that's too, that's when you're following will grow too because you're posting these reels, you're putting out content content. You start showing up in the Explore feed or you got, you start showing up as a recommended post and you get in front of more eyes and you grow that audience. Now you do need to make sure that your content is optimized when you're posting it. Using hashtags, using SEO, really kneeling in on your hooks. If this is something that you struggle with when it, like if you struggle with content creation and optimizing that content, then you can definitely join Club Influence. It is my Instagram membership. We offer weekly reels trends that are based off of early trends. We give you examples for those trends, the caption to go with it. We also have in there like a library of B roll ideas, hooks ideas. We've got over 200 captions that you can pull from for your post. We've got a monthly content calendar that will teach you step by step what to post every day for a month. And that's new every month with social media, holidays too and promotion ideas that you can post. And then we've got Canva templates in there too. So that membership is honestly like, if you're new here and you want like a low cost thing that you can have, but like have an Instagram expert in your back pocket, join the membership. The membership is only 39 bucks a month right now. So if you want to get in, hop in before the new year, we are going to be upgrading that price a little bit. But if you join now, you can get in for that low entry fee. Once you've got your digital offer, your product, you've created it. I don't think I talked about how to create it. So once you've got your idea, you can use a mix of things to create this. One, you're going to want to go into Canva and find a template for you to create all of this stuff in. Two, you're going to outline your own ideas and then put those into chat GPT and ask him to help you create that into an actual PDF guide. And from there you should have like a good, good product to put out for the world to see. Once you've got your digital product, that's when you start posting about it lots and lots and lots. Okay, so there's three parts to all of this. Nailing down your offer and audience, creating your digital product. And then you're gonna build a community and grow your audience on Instagram to keep selling that. So you've made your product, that's when you start posting about it a lot. Once you start posting, you're gonna start building that trust and you're gonna start nurturing this audience so that you can pitch your product to Them from there you'll wanna sell in stories you're gonna wanna sell on your content that you're posting to Instagram. We have something where we post something seven days in a row, but we use a very strategic strategy to sell that. I'm going to be sharing that sales in seven strategy in my private coaching that I'm launching in January. If that's something that you are interested in a private one on one coach, you should consider joining my wait list. It's over on my stand store if you want to do that. I'll pop it in the notes here too. But I'm going to be basically like what I'm teaching you right now. I'm going to be holding your hand until teaching it to you face to face on a zoom for six weeks. So that is becoming available too. I'm really excited to get back into coaching. I really didn't coach at all this whole year. I did speaking engagements which were like coaching for me. But I'm ready to get back into the rodeo of seeing you all face to face on a zoom call. Really digging into what it is that you think you want to offer, telling you if it's a good viable option for you to share and then helping you create it and market it and set up your sales strategy. The sales and 7. So that is coming in January. I would love for you guys to consider joining that too. It's really going to be fun. All right. I think this is mainly all of the, the steps you need to take when creating your own offer. Once you've, once you get in the groove of posting, that's when you can really start optimizing your content. That's when you really start leaning into your hooks and creating hooks better and better each time. Like you will get better as you go. Your first reel is going to suck. You can go to the very beginning of my Instagram page and see that my content sucked, my reels sucked. But if you look at them now, they're pretty good. And that came with practice, that came with time and doing it over and over again. So the more you do it, the better you're going to get. But yeah, the first step is just starting. If you can just decide what it is that you want to sell, how you're going to help people, what their pain points are, what you're going to offer, you're going to price it, you're going to talk about it, you're going to promote it, you're going to sell it, you're going to make money. It just starts with you. Starts with that decision to be like, okay, it's time to do the dang thing. All right, guys, I hope you like this episode. If you did, and you really want to get more nitty gritty with this, I do have an episode that says how to create your first digital offer. It's a few episodes back, but I really get deep into understanding who your audience is, the pain points they have, how to create that digital offer in Canva, how to write it. All of that jazz is in a previous podcast episode. You just gotta go back a few episodes and listen. But I'm here to help you guys make money online, grow your account, and really just live the life that you want to live, doing the things that you love to do. So thank you all for being here. I love you guys so much. If you like this episode, please go leave me a review over on Apple or Spotify. I truly appreciate you guys. I appreciate this community. Love you guys. All right, bye.