#338 – Ultimate Instagram Traffic Strategy

For the longest time, I thought that while Instagram had a ton of users, it was a bit useless for business owners because you really can’t put links anywhere when you post. But it looks like I was wrong. Today’s guest, Sammie Ellard-King, has built a successful, growing online business in a very competitive personal finance niche, mostly from Instagram reels. So I got curious and invited him over to try to understand how that was possible. And let me tell you, Sammie experienced my highest level of online stalking skill as I dug deep into his business before the podcast to truly try to understand how it works and whether it is legit or not. And I did not intend it, but towards the end, it turns a bit into a funnel roast. So if you want to see some truly unhinged high level discussion on optimising funnels and conversions for your email list, I think you’re in for a treat. And it’s cool because this episode fits perfectly into the new 4C system that we presented in our last episode. And you’ll find all its elements in Sammie’s funnel. And whats great is it shows how flexible the system is and how you can plug it in pretty much any traffic source.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the authority Hacker podcast. Today I am with Sammie. I don’t know how to pronounce your name properly. Ellard-King, is that correct?

You got it. Yeah.

I feel like I have a pass to, like, mispronounce people’s names because nobody can say my name properly, so it’s like, I feel okay, but Sammie, thank you for joining. I don’t think everyone knows you and knows what you do, so why don’t you, in a few sentences, just explain what you do and how you do it and why? It’s interesting, basically.

Yeah, of course. So I run a personal finance brand in the UK, started with SEO, then have very quickly moved on to socials. With everything that’s going on that’s been amplified somewhat, really kind of grown quite a lot over the last six months and testing out lots of cool new funnels and lots of tips and tricks, and it’s really exploded my business. So, yeah, that’s kind of like a very brief update.

So how do you make money from that business? Like where does the money come from? Basically like what’s your end goal? And it regresses back to how you get people.

Good question. In honestly a multitude of different ways. So largest portion of the income now, which is actually only just overtaking affiliate is digital products. Second is affiliate brand sponsorships now is getting bigger and bigger every month because the accounts are growing and the money goes up when your accounts grow. And then we do public speaking which is now coming into play. So we’re getting a lot of that come through and interestingly like corporate work as well. So actually like going into organisations and delivering like financial wellbeing talks for the HR teams and stuff like that. So that’s been really interesting and that’s.

You know what’s really interesting is that you get paid to talk because in the SEO industry nobody pays you to talk. So.

I’ve noticed that, yeah, we’re actually like thinking about setting up some kind of event for this and speaking to some of the people in the industry. It’s like so funny, they’re like oh wow, you’re paying fees. And we’re like shit, should we not be.

The best I got is a hotel room. Honestly that’s literally the best I got for talking at big conferences. So yeah, but yeah, it looks like in personal finance, well people have money. Who knew can actually pay for speakers. That’s really cool. I like the corporate stuff as well and I like the mix of you kind of have these scalable stuff with the info products and affiliate et cetera. We’ll talk about affiliate in a bit because I think it’s quite interesting how you do it and then you kind of do the non scalable stuff for a much higher fee. And combining the two, that creates a pretty cool business with a cool value ladder basically where people can spend as little as they want or as much as they want depending on what you offer. That’s kind of cool. Now the next question is where do people come from? Like what do people that buy your stuff, what do you get them?

We started with SEO, like SEO was the main big driver. I knew that that was going to take the longest. And for me getting myself on camera, which is a shame for quite a lot of people, really like getting yourself on camera is not like it’s quite a big thing to get over. We started with the website then quickly put the podcast into play because I can have a chat with anyone and then you turn the video camera on for it. Suddenly you’re on camera and you get over this fear. And really, we weren’t really taking socials, like, massively seriously. We were trying to grow it, but it was, you know, one or two videos a week and just kind of seeing what worked. And really what happened was in, like, November when we had, like, the helpful content update last year, that was like, a big thing for me in our, I mean, it went up. It went, we actually did really well out of it. But the risk, I’m a finance guy, so, like, risk is a massive thing for me. And when the risk ratio went up, enormous amount, I was looking at ways we could diversify and concentrate and really explode in other areas.

And I’d seen so much happen on socials. And so I was like, right, double downtime. And, you know, it’s quite lucky we did.

And you mostly focus on, I mean, I’ve seen you pretty much everywhere. Like, you, you kind of tried everything. You have a YouTube channel, you have a podcast. You are on all the short video platforms. So that is TikTok, YouTube shorts, and mostly you’re on Instagram. It was kind of interesting as well because it’s like, I see, obviously you repost the same content from Instagram to TikTok to YouTube, but where it’s really exploding is on Instagram. Can you tell? Do you know why? Like, do you understand it at this point? Are you trying to fix it still?

It’s a really good question. Like, interestingly, like, some of the bigger videos will do well on TikTok, but they won’t do as well as they will on Instagram. And I just think it’s because the way that we structure the content isn’t as, like, tick tocky in a way, which is very, like, they like that rawness. They don’t. They like the person talking a lot of the time, and these are, like, they like a little bit more gimmicky style content. So, very interestingly, friend of mine, we’re trying to get him to do really well on Instagram at the moment. He’s got 1.8 million followers on, on TikTok, and he’s got 1500 on Instagram posting the exact same song content. Exactly. So we’re trying to work it out. And often because his content is quite like, you know, talking to people in the street and having fun with people, which lends itself much better to TikTok. And mine is, like, very, like, informational heavy, quite like, talk over voiceover style content, which has been very interesting and only really massively exploded on on Instagram. We’re getting there with TikTok, but it’s a different world. Completely different world.

Can you give us some numbers at least on the Instagram side of things? Like, I think the main numbers is like, number of accounts reached and number of accounts engaged when you, you check your creator dashboard, like, can you give us an idea of, like, how many people you reach with that? Because I think it’s quite a lot.

It’s a lot. Yeah. So this month’s 4.5 million and impressions is 12.2 million. And our follower growth, we were 5000 followers in January. We’re now 122,000. As of this morning. The growth was astronomical. There were outlier pieces of content which did really, really well. There’s a couple of videos that did 20, 30,000 followers alone. And you will naturally get those. Is really about consistency. And we look heavily at the back end metrics and the data we optimise for watch time over likes, follows and saves. Saves is also really, really important. But watch time is like the core of what we do. And so we just try and keep people entertained and adding payoffs and regular payoffs throughout the content. And what that does is just keep someone engaged. And it can be as simple as having like a timing metric. Or when we do budgeting videos, we have like the amount at the bottom and we scale it down as we keep reaching. And the person just wants to see it reach zero. It’s just like psychology thing. So we keep all these little tiny tricks in the videos and it helps us really kind of take those videos viral.

Yeah. Reminds me of, like, for a while, what we were doing, like a long time ago, I was doing quite a bit of clickbank stuff, and there was all these tricks in video sales letters. You know, it was like hand drawn stuff, telling the story, etcetera. Very similar. Feels like social media is like this on steroid now. You just have like 60 seconds to pretty much do the same thing. I think. I think this is super interesting. I really want to dive into your content creation process for that. And then a little bit after, let’s talk about the funnel and how you take people from Instagram elsewhere. But this fits very much with what we’re going after as well. And what I like about social these days is that followers don’t matter anymore. Like, if you have a piece of content that gets high engagement, you can have ten followers. You’ll get a million views. If the network does well, it’s not what, it didn’t used to be the case. Right? It’s like, it’s an opportunity right now, right?

100%. Like, the algorithms completely changed. So, as you said, like, someone with ten followers, their second video can get two and a half million views. And if you’re funnelling it into something, then you can make an absurd amount of money just from your second video. So that’s what we’re really jumping on at the moment. You kind of have Instagram and TikTok also give you this kind of new account thing because they don’t necessarily know who to show your content to. They use AI and their algorithm, obviously, to understand what’s in your content. They can literally pick out things that are in your room and what the content’s about. So they have some idea. But when you’re a brand new account, they’re not necessarily who is the ideal person for them to show that piece of content to. So they generally show it to a wider audience, even though it will be within that subsection of your niche. And essentially what that allows you to do is if your content is good or out of the gate, you can absolutely explode in a really short space of time. And obviously, you know, that’s. We’ve seen that on my account when you do go laser focused into these things, and there is a process to getting to that point, which I’m sure we’ll cover.

But it is amazing what’s going on right now. And yeah, the opportunity, I honestly can’t stress it enough. It is enormous.

It’s also the case on YouTube. So we started a new used channel for Toyhacker recently. It’s not viral or anything, but we can rival the views of accounts with 100,000 subscribers. Quite often we’ll beat income school, for example, with a channel that has 2000 subscribers. And so it’s all platforms right now. I think it’s considering the downward trajectory of SEO and this opportunity. I think it’s something that a lot of people should be considering, adding they don’t have to give up SEO, but they should definitely jump on that because it’s not necessarily forever. I think we know these things change over time. Can we jump into your content creation process? And starting with the ideation process, how do you come up with an idea for a real or short video?

Yeah, so there’s two real ways of doing this. One I think obviously, your listeners will appreciate is a lot of these guys are going to have large web and they’re going to have an enormous amount of data and enormous amount of content within that. Obviously you understanding what content of yours is successful what content of yours has high watch time on page metrics, which you can kind of decipher straight away that those topics are popular within your niche. That gives you a really good base to start from. And we do quite a deep ideation process and we utilise a number of different ways. The website is a great place to start. So blog content, we make big lists out from there. We will also, I’m a big fan of not reinventing the wheel because these, there’s frameworks out there that have gone viral and there’s topics out there that have gone viral. Putting your own spin on these types of things is often a really great way to explode an account. So we spend a lot of time, I have two dummy accounts and I will follow ten or 15 creators within that niche. So for me, I’ll do it like straight investing and then I have another one which is like, for side hustle content as well.

And I’ll only follow the top guys on those accounts. Don’t follow yourself, don’t follow your dog. You know, all these types of things and just make sure you’re liking and seeing what the algorithm starts feeding you up, because it’s going to start feeding you really big viral pieces of content. This should take a couple of weeks before you go live. You should really spend a lot of time on that. And then we create what’s called content buckets, content pillars, whatever you want to call them, and they are really heavily problem based, ideally semi negative, with a positive outcome to them. And we drive.

I give an example of that. Sorry, I’ll let you finish, but after that.

Yeah, yeah. So we’re actually working with James Solace. I’m sure, you know, everyone knows who he is. He’s doing amazing at the moment. He’s utilising, like, don’t do these three exercises because they will make you really fucking strong. Excuse my french. Like, people immediately know that’s a positive outcome. He’s going to show you three positive exercises, for example, and during that process. But the hook is what got you, like, don’t do this. Why wouldn’t I do this? So there’s like, negativity is often really, really strong. So we will do, like, don’t try this investing technique if you want to make money, for example. And people really resonate with those types of things, it falls under an investing bucket. So we tend to create different areas that we can tap into and they’ll be very problem heavy within that niche. So what are the main problems and issues that your perfect customer avatar is? Essentially going to be struggling with. And we then go a layer back. So once we’ve got that piece of content, we actually create our perfect avatars. So we’ve got. I’ve got three people that I speak to directly, as I would speaking to you now, Gael, like, or having a coffee in a shop.

What is. Dave, 32, works in corporate finance. You know, earns 40k, wants to know about personal finance, doesn’t know how, has two kids struggling at home. I speak directly to Dave, like, in every single piece of content that we create for him, it’s designed for one person instead of thinking broadly. If you think for one person, what that does is turn. It removes your ego from the content because we all have ego. And we start creating content, like, this is going to blow up. But actually, when you’re trying to solve for a broad amount of people, it doesn’t normally work. So we really kind of nail in on what that person is. And then all of those content buckets speak directly to that.

So you find problems they have. Right. And it’s like, is that how you write your script, where you kind of, like, highlight a problem? This avatar might have in the first sentence to kind of like, stop them? Like, that’s how we write ads, for example. Right? It’s like when we do paid advertising, usually, like even on YouTube, for example, they don’t charge you for the first 30 seconds, so you get to qualify people early on so that you want people to skip if they’re not gonna watch. And that was the same way, I guess.

Yeah, exactly right. Ads and shortfall content have a very similar framework in a lot of ways, because in the ad, you’re trying to hook the person. Obviously, the next phase of when you come to start to think about creating that piece of content is you start with the hook first. And the hook is the most powerful part of that. Exactly like you would in an advertiser.

Can you give me an example of one or two good hooks that you’ve used? Something just so people kind of, because people who don’t do social media, then they struggle to visualise what that means.

So I have like a whole, like, bank. I’ve got over 280 powerful hooks basically written out, which I can then repurpose for different ones. You put me on the spot here. But I.

Okay, yeah, we can edit it out if you want to. Just.

It’s all good, man. It’s all good. I love it. But for example, like, if you own a smartphone and have an Instagram or TikTok account and you’re not making money from it, honestly. Just tell me why not. So you’re immediately hitting them hard where it hurts, really? And you could say like, it’s called human resources for a reason. And why do you think that might well be? And immediately they’re like, I want to know why he’s saying what he’s saying. So there’s text based hooks, there’s audio based hooks and there’s visual hooks. There’s three types of hooks and visual hooks. If you’ve seen any of my content before, I’m literally just sitting at a really nice table, opening a laptop, lighting a candle and the room looks nice. I turn the saturation up on the colouring on the edit so like it looks lovely, right? And that’s a visual hooked in itself because someone goes, oh, nice room. And then you match that with an audio based hook. Me saying the hook with the actual hook and text on screen and suddenly you’ve got them in two, like three different ways to stop for that 3 seconds.

It’s what then happens after that 3 seconds, which is the next bit, which is quite important too.

So you do the hook, you basically the goal is to stop the scroll, basically, so people just stop scrolling and actually watch your video. And what happens after? And how do you put your script together? How long is it, like what happens?

Yeah, so I do a lot of voiceover style content because it just performs really well. And that way you can film lots of different bits of b roll or indeed just have one bits of b roll with little text based things happening over the top but framing your content. So having like step one, step two, step three, and outcome is always a really great way to go, or I’m going to work this out live with you and then I’m going to give you the answer. So they know that the payoff is coming. So you let them know. So it’s hook into letting them know that the payoff is coming and then let’s do this together. Kind of like a beginning, middle and end. But I just say beginning, middle and payoff. And that’s how we always work it out. There should always be a reason for them to stick around and that’s how you grab them and keep them watching the video or something shocking up early, up front. So interestingly, I’m working with like a couple of people in the gardening space who are doing really, really well and we actually put the payoff up front.

So we put like, here’s how to make your beautiful garden bed in under an hour. Here’s what it looks like. And like, whoa, wow, that looks unbelievable. And then we go backwards throughout the process and then end again with the payoff. And that’s really interesting. So there are lots of different ways to do this. And often you have to research into your niche. And this is why research and having the dummy accounts is so important because you start to see frameworks which are working in your niche and essentially you just recreate those frameworks in your own style. And yeah, you tend to do quite well when you do those things.

So it’s very much like SEO, basically, you observe what works and you do, you do a lot of what works with your own spin on it, basically. In essence, that’s like all marketing, I think at this point it’s like no deal reinvents the wheel at this point. Yeah, I like the end and going back, it makes me think of, like, movies, you know, where the first scene, like, you know, in the Matrix when it starts, you know, it’s like Agent Smith running after Trinity and they’re fighting, etc. And it just goes back to like, explaining neo and all of that. It works exactly the same way. So I guess these, these things are used absolutely everywhere in storytelling. Anyway, obviously we’re going to talk about, like, it’s cool to get people to watch your videos, but it’s good to make money as well. Do you have any CTA’s? Like, do you just focus on engagement or do you actually try to bring people down the funnel inside the content of the video and also in the. I guess you also have a written part to this post, right? You have also a caption. So how does that work?

Like, how do you get people to the next step, basically, that’s a really good question.

So it varies per the piece of content, but usually because, for example, we don’t want to sell or make asks. In every single piece of content, there are pieces of content which are there for purely information or trust building purposes. So usually we have like a three to seven ratio. So three pieces will be like heavy, trying to get them to do something and usually the other way. Or you can switch. It depends on, you know, again, lean into the data, what works, what doesn’t. But yeah, it usually could be just follow us for more. If you don’t want to, like, add a CTA, but the best ones are read the caption, four more because you’ve only got 40 seconds. And that when you can jump them into the caption, this is where you can really use, like, proper tactics in writing to get them to do something you can. Essentially, it’s a second hook. So your first line of your caption should be, and I just use very simple, like, here’s what you in capital should know, or here’s everything you need to know, and with an arrow pointing down. Then the first thing is to get them to save the content, because saves are massive now on Instagram, because obviously the algorithm just wants you to come back if you’re saving.

That’s a really good metric for Instagram, to know that you’re going to bring that person back onto Instagram to watch that piece of content. So we always ask them to save, and then we just do straight CTA. If you want to learn more about x, y and z, comment the word, I’m sure we’ll get into that. This is where the fun stuff happens. Comment, the word, whatever that might well be, smartphone, Instagram, whatever that word you decide is. And we will send you x, y and z, whatever that post is about. And then we will hit them with tonnes of information and it will be very information dense related to the post, but giving them a value and a quick win, often almost in every piece of content, but leaving them wanting to know more. Kind of similar to how you would write an introduction for a piece of content where you would definitely want them to do more, which is usually read on. But in this case, we try to get them to do something, which is comment the word, to learn more about that.

So I guess the video is just here for reach. It’s just here for people to watch it and just reach as many people as possible that are your target market. You’re not really making a sell. The only call to action in a video is read the description, and that’s pretty much it. Then in the description, you get people to save for more engagement and more reach. Then you have a CTA, which is a comment. Then you give value to just kind of like the people who haven’t commented at this point. You kind of try to get them again, basically. And then you probably, at the end, you tell them again, oh, and comment this or something just to like for the people who actually read. And so that’s how you essentially funnel people down on Instagram without, like, killing your reach. Because if you’re making a big ask, usually you will get absolutely no reach. I guess even your account that has 120,000, 22,000, sorry followers as of today. It’s like if you made a sales reel that was telling people to do something in the video, probably your reach would be terrible, right? It’s like, I think that’s what people fell at social media.

Like, you’ve got a step it right, dude.

You got to be really careful. We tested this massively and we’re testing this on lots of different accounts at the moment that we’ve got some other accounts which we’re, we’ve started and we’re levelling up now as well. Really interestingly, like utilising Vas to create the content b roll style and like, really not spending much on those, but testing things and CTA’s and adding things to pieces of posts. And what we found is as soon as you say something in the actual video, the watch time falls off a cliff and it will be the exact point. And it. We’re seeing this over and over and we’ve got enough data now to really be able to confidently say, do not sell in the video. Just get them to read the caption. Because everyone’s happy to read the caption. If they’ve got to that point of the video, they’ve been accepting of you for 40 odd seconds and they’re engaged. Usually they’re really interested to know what you want to say. And that’s why the first line of the caption is really, really important. It’s not like comment, the word end straight away, like, because then they’re just going to see through your bullshit.

But if it’s like, here’s what you need to know, it’s like, well, I’ve got to know now, again, it’s a second based hook and it’s really important to get that right there.

Yeah, it’s quite interesting. Is that like a lens to your short videos? Like, is that like, did you test the length and like, did you figure out something there?

So Instagram are really pushing above 32nd reels at the moment and Mossieri put out a reel he does once a week at the moment. And he was talking about how they’re really pushing sort of longer form content. So it’s really interesting. We’re testing now like up to 90 seconds, but our kind of optimum range is about a minute and that’s like where it really does the best. And if we go over that, our watch time goes down just because there’s too many opportunities within the video for someone to turn off. So 45 seconds to a minute seems to be the best way. But interestingly, the posts which drive the most revenue are like seven to ten second long videos and they are so simple to create and often they’re the ones that are more powerful because you can hone in on such a small targeted topic for that area. And they can be very like emotional based. You know, I do ones where I’m like, here’s how I made 4000 pounds in the last 30 days doing this one trick. Read the caption and that’s it. And then they read the caption and the caption again is where you provide the value.

And then the video is so simple to create. It can be me sitting down, me walking out of a door somewhere cool, you know, you want it to make it look nice and they like, you can knock that out in 20 minutes and have that up. And then when you Instagram, when you use the funnel, that’s where they can be extremely, extremely profitable.

But I guess you need to do a mix, right? It’s like, I hope people don’t go away and just do 5 seconds reels on Instagram for a whole account. I guess eventually it’s going to kind of dry off.

So one of our students, Daniel Green, he’s done an amazing job of this. And when we worked with him, we essentially created three content buckets and one was very focused on short videos, short, sharp videos. Because if you want to grow an account, one reel a day is like the optimum range for you to get to this point. But creating a 45 second to a minute reel a day is a lot of work. And, and also so, you know, it can be quite like, you can go, quote quite close to burnout quite quickly if you’re putting that amount of effort into it. It’s a lot of work. You know, even though these videos only take 90 sec, 90 odd 90 minutes to a couple of hours to create, they’re still time labour intensive. So having the seven to ten second videos that you’re sort of feeding into your content is a really nice way of just sort of keeping the things going. And then once you’ve got something to sell, that’s when it can really like ramp up. You don’t even need many views on those videos for it to really sort of do well for you.

It’s quite interesting. I didn’t expect such short videos to do so well, actually. Do they have evergreen value? So you make a video on YouTube, if the video has evergreen value, it will get views for four years, potentially. Is that the same on Instagram or is it still very bursty?

It’s a good question when I first doing Instagram. So I’ve been a marketing director for nearly ten years before all of this. And we’ve taken digital tech startups, hospitality businesses and Instagram was like our number one thing. And back in the day when we used to put videos up, even when, you know, you used to have the like wide videos and they didn’t have the month nine by 16, they would literally spike up, spike down, you’d get 24 to 48 hours. But it has really elongated quite a fair bit. And I think where they’ve added search into things now and the four year and explore sections, this is really kind of extending the life of these videos. So we’ve got one video now that we put out in the beginning of February, which is still sort of doing 20 to 30,000 views a day. And it’s really interesting. And that’s just simply because Instagram is just consistently feeding it to people within the explorer. Once you’ve clicked into the reels bit on a video and the next video comes up, if they feel like it’s relevant for you or it’s got high watch time, so they know generally you’re quite likely to watch the whole thing and keep them on the ad, which means they show you more ads and we all know the score there, basically.

Yeah. It’s quite interesting because it’s like, I think a lot of people kind of are reluctant to, to do social media because they feel like, like, you know what I mean? There’s no compounding effect. The thing is like, first of all, the compounding effect of SEO is so much worse than it used to be. So it’s like already less that. Like, there’s no platform that compounds extremely well at this point. YouTube’s probably the best one, I would say, at this point, but the other platforms, like, I would say SEO is like not what it used to be. It’s not like publish and forget at this point, but it’s cool to see. Instagram is definitely one of these. How do you record? You just record on your phone? Is there like how much equipment do you like? You know, how does it go? Like, how do you. I guess you do b roll and you just do voiceover after, right?

Yeah. So literally use this. Sure. Mic, 100 odd quid. My iPhone 13 pro don’t need anything. If you’ve got above an eleven, you’re absolutely fine. You don’t need anything else than that. A cheap 15 quid tripod from Amazon. I have quite a good light, so I invested in. I don’t like ring lights because they give like a shine to the face. This is a softbox light that we’re using at the moment. And so it said you can get a softbox light like the mid range is for like 40 quid and this one was 150 pounds. But it’s a worthy investment because I utilise it everywhere. I can take it in different areas of the house and just light me as the subject and it looks crisp and nice. And that’s it, dude, that’s it. Like you don’t need anything else. You could literally do have a whole setup ready to go. Just using your phone and the mic on the phone you can get to like sound pretty good.

And actually, yeah, there’s these AI tools now that like improve the sound a lot. Right. It’s like Adobe podcaster. I think it’s free and all. Like if you use a proper video editing tool, like you know, DaVinci is probably pretty good at this.

That’s what I use. It’s so good, like for free as well. I don’t even upgrade to the paid version, so. So it’s just like you don’t need to. The only thing you really get is like very professional added things in and the ability to add captions and that’s the only thing that DaVinci is frustrating for if you want to add your own captions. I do have a premiere pro subscription where I just also pimp up the audio on premiere Pro because it has really good audio, really good compressor and EQ on there and also has a mastering tab where you open up and you can just add a master. And when you export from DaVinci, you have to raise the sound levels a little bit on externally because it can be quite quiet and you are uploading to Instagram. 50% of video is the audio. So you like getting that bit right and so it’s loud and nice and. Yeah, and clear.

I think people could even get away with like using something like this script for example. Like it has, you know, it can do the captions, it can do like the basic editing. It’s not DaVinci level definitely, but I think it’s less intimidating for a lot of people. I think video editing for a lot of people is a little bit intimidating. Like did you have to learn actually doing this or like did you know how to edit videos before you started or did you pick it up?

I studied music, so I was used to the music production and really similar. DaVinci is really similar to like logic and Ableton and so like the layout and timeline of these types of things was super, super similar. So it was quite a nice transition over. But honestly, dude, like four to 5 hours on YouTube and DaVinci and you literally be have everything you ever need. Like, and watching someone like you just do a walkthrough of them, creating a type of video like 45 minutes long and just literally you’ll be up and running. Just do it live with them.

I am excited to use so like the things like I don’t know if you saw but I could OpenAI release the desktop app on cha. So it’s gonna be able to like watch you on your tool and be like, hey, I want to do this effect. Like how do I do this? It’d be like, oh, click here, click here, this, this etcetera. Pretty excited for like technical skills on that. I think it’s gonna make it quite easy to a lot of people thanks to the desktop app. How long does it take you to edit a reel? Like how long is the shooting and how long is the editing? How long does it take to get the finished product? Basically.

So like one of our like breakdown videos. The thing is, once you’ve built it depends if you’re like starting from scratch. Day one, the first budgeting video took me a couple of hours to get to the point, maybe even like 3 hours. But then the following videos that are breakdowns from there I just have all of the fonts, the right sizes, the colours, everything’s already added. So I’m just copying pasting like blocks of text over onto new projects.

You repeat the format, right? You repeat the format and then you just like basically change the footage under it. And then you just move the text around from the previous project after duplicating it, I guess something like that, right?

100%, dude. And like this just saves hours. And so now my whole thing is you can be doing this with 90 minutes a day. And that’s what I have blocked in my calendar every morning is 90 minutes a day on content. And that is it. That includes me being on the app, posting, responding to DM’s if I need to, 90 minutes a day. And that’s it. And that’s why it’s such an attractive thing for someone who is either has a website or is building out YouTube or, you know, is doing other things because you can still put the time into your, what you would say main project. But interestingly, if you just really drill down on this and keep consistent, this can very quickly become your main project as it has for me.

Yeah, it’s kind of cool actually. I like the idea of the templates. Like the repeatable process is, I think the key because I guess you find the hooks that work for you. The script templates that work for you and then you repeat with a different topic or something. I think I saw you talking about how to retire with fifty k a year, how to retire with 60k, etcetera. You kind of can do these things so they become evergreen. It’s literally the same video, slightly different.

Numbers, and we’re doing that for like the gardening space as well. Like, it’s how to create this with 50 pounds, how to create this with 70 pounds, how to create this with a hundred pounds. And they’re flying. They’re absolutely flying because people just naturally gravitate. They’re like, and even the people that do not and not have more money or have less money are nosy to see what you would do with that amount of money. So it’s quite interesting when you do monetary values kind of.

I’m telling you, the reason I’m watching these, for example, is because, like, I know, like, how much of people I know earn, I kind of like, project myself as well. And like, oh, like, how is that gonna work for them or something? It’s like, even if I’m not in the, in the bracket, you know, it’s like I still feel like, oh, how would my uncle go about this? Or something like this? And it’s. I mean, I personally love personal finance as well, so it was kind of fun for me to put this podcast because I got to watch all of your stuff, so. Okay, so it takes you 90 minutes a day for one reel a day once you’ve done some templates, I guess so maybe, let’s say after a couple of weeks of doing this, maybe. Do you have a checklist before you launch, Aurel? Like, what happens? Like the video files already, the captions written. Do you write the captions with AI, by the way?

No.

At this point, no.

No.

I think you could train it. No. You could train and edit it. No. I use assistance a lot these days to do first draughts.

Actually, I’ve thought about it a lot. I’m. Luckily, I’m quite a fast writer. I have that in the bank and so, and now I’m in a kind of a bit of a routine with it. I can just, I know already what I’m gonna say after creating the video. So it becomes a lot faster than me having to retrain AI. But 100%, you could just do AI at that point, adding, I don’t think.

I would use AI and post it. But like, for example, I’ll tell you, for the news channel, Toyota news channel at this point, like, we have written like a dozen scripts and I’ve trained and I’ve trained an assistant, the GPT basically with like the scripts and then it has like a huge prompt on like, you know, styles etc. Like how we want it, the brand, like lots and lots of information. It’s not like we shoot the video with what it gives us, but we’ll just like generate it and just take the bits and pieces and drag and drop them into the final script while tweaking it, for example. So it’s not like, it’s not like AI does the job, but it’s like we make high engagement videos with some of the work being done by AI. Like it’s assisted by AI, not done by AI.

So interestingly, when I create hooks, I will feed it like 50 hooks. This is the style that I’m looking at and I’ll feed it. It’s amazing for video ideas at this point, once you’ve got going and I’m like, here’s these videos, these ones went viral, they did these amounts of views, these were the engagement rates on them and really feed it loads of information. What am I missing at the moment within personal finance? That could be something cool for me to jump into or whatever, you know, insert niche within that prompt. And what come back was a month’s worth of content ideas legit and you probably use about a third of them. But that was 1520 minutes work, whereas that would normally spend me three, 4 hours of research and sort of deeply going into the creator network, which, yeah.

It helps us for titles of videos as well. Like it does a pretty good job. Once you feed it good ones, it’s decent because it’s challenging sometimes to come up with a good title on YouTube. And so like, for example, like the video that we just published, like, I did not take the title from the air, I just changed one word. Like I felt like I picked a better world and it’s just was fine. Let’s just go back to the publishing. Like the video project is ready. I mean, the video file is ready, the caption is ready. What happens?

Yeah, good question. So there is a small checklist, but it’s not as in depth as people need to think it is. I would always upload the video. I would preview it as well just to make sure you’ve actually put the right one on there. Because that can happen sometimes. It can like cut little bits and bobs you don’t know, especially if you’ve like done v one, v two, v three, v four, version five and you end up uploading version three. That can be like horrendous. So just always check it at that point and then add the COVID for the video as well. So I tend to try and basically have the hook within the caption usually. Obviously it’s at the start and it’s always good to have your hook on screen from moment one. I can’t stand it when I see hooks come in after like half a second because people are gone by that point. I tend to move as well. So for your feed you can then get the square and I move the, I move the, basically the square up and down just like so the hooks like perfectly in the middle and that’s it.

So it just looks nice when it’s on your page. You don’t need to have, you can add your own cover at that point. A lot of people do, a lot of accounts do. I don’t feel it’s necessary. I just feel like it’s one added extra step. You can just use the video to do that. If your hook isn’t on screen at any point, I would then probably add a cover just with a small hook just to draw people in and then adding your captions, making sure that’s good. If you’re collaborating with anyone, if you need to tag anyone, add them at that point. And then the topics is really important. So really, really, really important is add a topic. Now, a lot of gurus will say add up to three topics. Don’t add more than this. I actually only had one just because I want Instagram to be just super clear about what the video is about. Because. Because if it’s a video, that could be kind of construed as business or investing or both or entrepreneurship, like, if I press business, entrepreneurship, investing, like, Instagram are going to be like, well, what is it?

Right? And if it starts showing it to business people and it doesn’t perform, that’s going to be worse for my video, right? So just pick one and go with that. So add a topic. There’s tonnes on there from every single type of news you can think of pretty much on there. And then I don’t add a location. Interestingly enough, a lot of people do, but I don’t on my videos. And there’s a reason for that, and that’s simply because Instagram could actually localise my content. So if it shows it in my county or the south of England, I don’t want that to happen. I want it to go across the UK. So we don’t add locations for that region. But if you want localised content and you’re creating a service based business into your content, absolutely add a location at that point and that is it, dude. And then you literally just press post. But interestingly, what we’ve started doing is working five or six videos in advance and we use the Instagram scheduler at that point so you can schedule the videos and we just let them do their thing. And, yeah, then we just check it once.

Actually, a pro member was asking me, like, because like, there’s kind of like rumors online that if you schedule those, you get less reach. Did that.

Did you notice that third party? Yes, absolutely. I’m not a fan of third party for any type of social content at all, other than Pinterest. The. But on Instagram, it has a native scheduler on it now, so just use that one. And equally as well, if your VA is posting, this is really, really important. If your VA is making the content in the Philippines, do not let them post it.

I was gonna ask, do I need a VPN? I’m in Hungary. Do I need a VPN?

I think so. Unless your content is international heavy. I just wouldn’t like third world countries. I wouldn’t let them do that final step. I would just have someone in the country that you want to serve, you know, us, if it’s us or Canada, if you’re in Hungary, maybe a VPN might be useful. Or having someone in the US post the content for you, even the UK, because it will cross border if it’s SEO related. I just would be careful with Filipino VAs or, you know, South African VA is essentially like, posting the content for you if it’s for a specific country.

Okay. Yeah, that’s quite interesting, I think. Yeah, they probably use that. It’s maybe not a huge signal, but it probably matters. And in such a competitive marketplace, like, these tiny signals can actually probably make a big difference. Is there any promotion going on in stories at all? I see you’re posting stories as well. I want to know how this connects to everything, basically. How does that work?

So I go heavy on stories because actually, I think it’s such a fantastic way of driving traffic to wherever you want it to go to. Interestingly, you probably didn’t doing your research in our most quietest period and stories because we’re building something and so. And we’ve just come off the back of a launch. So we were really heavy problem based story arcs. Now, I interestingly treat stories like a newsletter, rather than it being an actual, like, here’s what I had for breakfast this morning. You know, look at my boiled eggs. And for lunch I’m having salad and a pint. Or, you know, we’re english, we drink early. The main crux of it is to feed in lifestyle content around that. To make them trust you. Yes. But then your actual pieces of content should be three to five block stories, basically explaining a problem within your niche, like you would in a newsletter, a topic. And within that you can do some cool things, like adding polls, adding questions. So we do like question round on a Friday, which we restarting again this week. And that, again, builds a lot of trust up with people.

So people ask me finance questions, I answer them live on Instagram, just basically replying to each one. So this is all opportunities for you to build trust, but equally as well, you can send them to YouTube videos, to podcasts, toys. Yeah, yeah. So this is where your big affiliate articles that you’ve had ad smashed by Google still have life if you utilise them in the right way. Because I’ll be sending things to best investing apps UK. And that page I know is optimised really well. It’s just not getting any more organic traffic because Google doesn’t like me. But it’s still a great page and I spent a lot of time on it. So suddenly you’ve got opportunities to send them into blog articles. You know, there’s so many things you can do straight to affiliate links, links and newsletters or products.

How much traffic does that generate? Like, let’s say you do a story to either a blog post or an fit link. Like you’re like, yeah, you were saying 122,000. How much traffic? Obviously, I guess it varies on, based on engagement. But like, what am I looking at? Am I looking at 20 clicks or am I looking at 2000 clicks?

It very much varies on how good of a job you do within those story arcs, you know. And there are two ways of looking at this. If you do do a story arc and then you add the actual link button feature on Instagram, your reach won’t be hit hard. So what could, let’s say for 122,000 if I just post a story of me with a selfie just being like, hey guys, how are you? That’ll probably get about 15,000 people see it if I post the same story. Hey, how are you? Here’s a link to my podcast today. Probably about four or 5000 will see it. So it gets severely cut. Yeah, so they don’t want you to leave the platform, but there is ways around this. You can use ManyChat, which I’m sure we’re going to get into in a second.

That’s next.

You can use DM automation. So like here’s, I’ve got a new podcast out today. Dm me the Word podcast and I will send you the link to the podcast. That’s very different. That will get 15,000 views because you’re not asking them to do anything. And in fact actually you’re in get asking them to engage with you, which is a positive signal for your stories. So it’s very interesting. But I have a trick as well. If you really want to push them link off page and not use the automation, don’t post anything for 24 hours, let your stories go dead and then post one single story with a link in it and using the link button feature. And that will do just as well as a normal story. But you can’t post anything after it or before. It has to be clear on its own. Yeah. And it will work fine.

Okay. Yeah, I was gonna ask actually, because if you ask people to comment like, yeah, you get more rich, but obviously it’s more difficult. So I guess like it’s like it probably evens out or like you still find it to be better when you do that.

It’s a tough one, I suppose if you’ve done a good job of like the thing is, with these story arcs, is it? You should put them in a problem state even if they don’t necessarily know that they are in one at that point. It’s like, oh, shit, that’s me, man. Like, damn, I didn’t think about that today. Oh, look, there’s a solution for this. Let me find out what he’s saying. If you’ve done a good job of that, similar to like a very tiny mini VSL, I call them micro sales letters, essentially. That’s what they are and that’s a really great way of getting them to do something. If you’ve not done a good job of that, if you’ve not invoked any emotion in that person, then you’re going to get a shit amount of clicks go through. It’s just the way it works.

Yeah, it’s like you get instant feedback on how good of a job you’ve done on these things, which I enjoyed. I feel like I improve faster on these platforms. I improve in SEO because of the speed of the feedback loop. It’s more engaging. Like, you do something, you get something back right away and you see if it worked or not. And you can try again a few hours later if you want to. Last beat on Instagram. It’s like we talked about stories, we talked about reels. I see that your Instagram account is set up in a very particular way where you have these kind of groups of stories at the bottom with your podcasts, your reviews, etcetera. And then the link you have also in the description. What’s kind of like the top five things to do on your Instagram profile to maximise conversion?

Really good question, man. Like this is what a lot of accounts don’t do very well. They post amazing content and they get such great views, but they haven’t optimised their page for the user. So there are three main things you should do just to make sure that your page is super optimised and positions you as an expert in that space. Even if you’re not necessarily, you know, a bigger expert, you could still position yourself like that. Now your picture is really important. A lot of people don’t like putting their face on there. So if you are you, if you do, if you don’t mind your face being on there, nice coloured photo background cut out on Canva will do the job. If not, a really nice punchy logo. Bright colours usually work better than just a like or, you know, black and white. But just think about, you know, the way that your brand’s position in the picture, it does make a big difference. Second thing is utilising the name of your brand. So there is a bit of SEO here, because people do search in the, in the, in the search bar for things.

So mine is Samuel r King dash financial education, and that’s very important. If you’re a gardener, then you put, you know, Bill Smith gardening tips, for example. So you’re utilising that in the name section of the, of your account. Your username is very important as well. So don’t have John Dot Smith dot Steve dot Graham. That’s really not hard. It’s got to be smooth in one word. So up the gains, money or gardening tips UK, whatever that might well be. I’m liking gardening today for some reason. I don’t know why, but.

It’s just.

Because I come off a call with someone. It’s a cool dish. Yeah. I’m really excited for this lady. I think she’s going to do really well. Second part is your bio. This is really, really important. So your first line of your bio should be what you do in five words, or, yes, I help blank, do blank. If you can’t think of anything else, like mine is helping Britain get financially fit. Couldn’t really get around that. I can’t really shorten that any further. It’s like to the point you get what I’m trying to do and then your second line should be social proof. So we had a million website visitors last year. For all you SEO people listening to this, for example, there’s like really useful stuff. We were, as seen in Forbes Daily Mail or whatever you might want to add. I recently won an award, so I put the award in there, as in money content creator of the year 2024. Just validation of that point. And then your third line is your CTA. So this is like what you want that person to do. And then underneath that is your linking link where you want to send them to.

Now, very interestingly, this is what we’re exploring at the moment is we actually moved all of our low ticket digital products off the main page and we’ve put our higher ticket products at the front. We keep them as landing pages on the back end, so we can still send pieces of content to them. But you want as little links as possible upfront. So you want ideally, like Max of five, ideally three. So this is really what you want them to do, which is like, listen to my podcast, visit my website or sign up to my newsletter.

Is that like a Linktree page or is it like within Instagram?

So I use Stan Store for this because we can house digital products, courses and sales pages and take the payments through stripe and do all the distribution from there, which is super, super useful. And then we have Zapier linked up for the emails that run into, but.

You send people to a page that is hosted there. It’s just like you have one link that then has links to things for people. So they get to pick a lead magnet or book a consultation or something. Exactly. Okay, makes sense. Super interesting. I’m pretty bad at this, so I learned a lot. Okay, let’s jump into, we teased about the lead, the people commenting to you, dming them, et cetera. So we’re going to jump into that now and how you essentially take people off the platform, because like while you’re getting amazing reach on Instagram today it’s still a social platform, which means tomorrow they might change the algorithm and you need to figure it out again. And it’s not just google that does this stuff, fits every single platform on the Internet, unfortunately. Which is why I really like that you’re taking people off platform to somewhere that is not nearly as algorithm ruled as Instagram. And so that’s why we call the capture phase. And so how does it work for you? Because Instagram, as we say, doesn’t like to send traffic out of the platform.

No, it doesn’t. And so utilise ManyChat. And this is a super, super cool DM automation software. And what it does is it highlights a certain word that you can perhaps put in your caption for them. That person to either DM you or message you or comment on the post. So you can utilise it on stories and in your videos too. And very interestingly, this can help in a multitude of different ways because once that person is DM’d generally like a text message. If someone messages you on these social platforms, you are very highly likely, likely to open it. Our open rate is like 90% plus because they have already interacted and often immediately just interacted with you regarding said topic, the information that you’re sending them. As long as you haven’t like, completely hashed up your DM, you can then send them to a link. And this can be any link in the world. So your affiliate links, email newsletter links, digital products links, brand deals, anything you want to push or promote, blog posts, podcasts, YouTube videos, you name it. And so this is where it can get super, super interesting. You can start following them into multitude of different ways.

And we have, we, we are playing around heavily with this at the moment.

Yeah, it’s basically your main traffic engines through Instagram. Like, that’s how you take people off it. So I was checking ManyChat, actually, before the podcast. So I see it works on Facebook, it works on Instagram, it works on WhatsApp. So if you were posting, I mean, like, you mostly focus on Instagram, but you also post on TikTok and YouTube. You can’t really do that there, right? It’s only for Instagram and Facebook, I guess. How would you do that on these platforms then? Like, how do people, can you apply your system on TikTok or YouTube? Like, how does that work?

Yeah, so very interesting you asked that because this is something that we have struggled with and are now working on a brand new system, having, like, gone deep into this and found some creatives which are doing really cool things. So we’re at the moment, we have courses we’re launching high ticket off the back of it. And the high ticket is where we’re going to focus all of the TikTok. So actually, we’re going to split the focus of two accounts. So TikTok is going to be our very heavy, like, side hustle focused content and simply leading into a longer YouTube case study, VSL, which will link into a cool book call feature. And then we’ll have done a lot of the job for us at that point because it’s very easy to say linking bio on TikTok. They don’t necessarily flag that as much, but you can’t do any kind of automation tactics, which when we’ve tried to do anything that’s like drop us a dm or anything, no one cares. But it’s like if they will happily go on your profile and click a link in bio, which can just be a YouTube video, which we’re testing out at the moment.

And that’s what we’re doing at the moment. And then our front end Instagram is going to be there. You know, Sammie does personal finance led stuff because it’s working and we can’t really touch that. But, yeah, so it’s a tough one, man, trying to get him to do anything on there. And in YouTube, we just do related post in the short.

Related Video, you mean? Yeah, okay. Same as the podcast for us. So, like, we cut shorts for this podcast and then we will, like, link it back. And then it’s like, if a shot takes off, then it’s. But it’s. I’ll be honest, the traffic sent from shorts to long form video, it’s pretty low and it’s probably not worth a tonne of effort from my experience. And actually talking about conversion rate, what percentage of views translate into comments translate into people clicking on the DM link, basically. How does that look in terms of drop off?

Yeah, sorry, we got sidetracked a little bit. There’s a 90% click through is what we would expect if we’ve done worse from that. That’s usually our fault in the copy. And then CTR rate can vary between sort of 40% to 65% depending on the actual DM. And then obviously wherever you’re sending from there, there’s another layer of conversion.

So you have one that’s a squeeze page, right? That’s how the squeeze. Like, like how much conversion rate would you expect on a squeeze page, for example, do you mean the email? Yeah, yeah. Where you ask people their name and email when they click on the link.

That’s amazing. That’s like 40 something percent on ConvertKit. So that’s doing pretty good. It’s a lot higher than when we’re just sort of sending paid ad traffic to it, for example, which can be like lowest, like 1012 percent sometimes.

Ooh, that’s. That’s slow. Yeah, it is really.

It’s not easy, but it really varies. Some posts will do like 70, 80% and it would just be how the emotion, like it will be your job from the video and in the text, and suddenly they’re just so bought in and then some are like 20, 30% and they’re just like. And you’ve just not done a good enough job to make them want to buy into you at that point. So there are lots of nuances to this and you just got to lean into the data. And as we get more and more data, we get more strong about what works and what kind of emotional triggers we can pull within videos or captures to make people really want to buy into these things.

I think it’s a really good point. It’s like, it’s the pre selling. It’s like everyone’s focused on how many clicks they get, but in the end it doesn’t really matter. You’d rather have half the clicks, but quadruple the conversions because people are more wound up. And it’s actually something that we’ve said in the podcast that you haven’t seen yet because it’s not released. But people will have seen where we talk about how we’re changing our business model around the authority sites, etcetera. And we’re actually saying we’re taking the same site off the centre of your business. Basically. And then it’s like the engagement is everything, and it’s like, it doesn’t matter where people are, they don’t need to be on your site, and traffic is irrelevant. What matters is how warm people are when you put them in front of the offer. And I think that’s something that paid affiliates used to be very good at because it’s expensive to buy traffic. So I used to hang out on, like, stack that money, et cetera, and, like, look at how the other side of the industry was doing things and they wouldn’t care. They would send like 15 clicks to a landing page per day, but, like, still make a fuck tonne of money.

And it’s like the SEO side of things has been sparked with so much traffic from such. It’s a hard concept to grasp. So I think it’s really good that you mentioned that.

Yeah, 100%, man. And what, like, if I just, we’ve managed to, like, in four and a half months, five and a half months. Now it’s middle of May. We’ve done more in this timeframe, more subscribers, more affiliate relationships, more brand deals, more money from digital products, then the entire lifetime of our two years of site, even though it’s getting 60, 70,000 sessions a month. So it just goes to show that, like, SEO, you know, is great and it’s a fantastic source of traffic. Yes, but it’s not the only one.

I agree. We talk about the. So we have a pretty sophisticated, like, a value per lead tracking system actually on our side. So I can tell you exactly on the page level where people opted in how much I’m making per lead on average. And I’ll tell you, we’ve tracked that for years at this point. And I’ll tell you, the value per lead from SEO has heavily decreased over the last few years. So it’s like, it’s not just the volume of traffic that has decreased, it’s also the quality, except most people don’t track well enough to be able to tell you that. But I’ll tell you that Aledi has, like, even before HCU, etcetera, because you could argue, okay, autoiacker, maybe it’s less relevant after HC, etc. Fine, that was before that, right? I’m talking the two, three years before that, value per lead has decreased around 35% around that time. And so that, and my guess is that ad platforms are just better at capturing buyers. And so that, like, on the other side, when we run ads, we get better and better results with less and less efforts. And so that traffic has to come from somewhere, right?

And in my opinion, it comes from the free traffic pool and ad platforms being much smarter, taking the clicks from people who buy, giving you the leftovers of traffic.

That’s wild, man. Do you use Microsoft clarity on your pages? Is that what you’re using?

No, no, no, I use them. I use a tool called Segmetrics. And that tool, you should check it out, actually, with UTM parameters, you’ll be able to tell exactly where people come from, your value per lead, and then you’ll be able to see what part of your marketing is the most profitable. So you can focus on that which is not perfect, obviously, like cookie shoes, etcetera, and privacy on iOS devices. But it’s still pretty decent. So yeah, it’s one of the things that I think nobody talks about. And so that’s why I’m very interested in all these other things as well, because I’m seeing the value very much even now and sometimes being surpassed, despite the fact that traffic numbers may not look as impressive as is the case for probably Instagram. I don’t expect you drive 100,000 visitors per month from Instagram, but I don’t think you need to. That’s the thing. And one thing that’s cool as well is like a lot of people listening to this, they’d be like, okay, that’s, that’s cool, but I don’t have a product. And the thing is you do that for affiliate marketing as well, right?

It’s like I actually dm’d on some of your reels and I think you’re making an offer for getting a free stock for a trading account or something like this. How’s that working for you? And just explain the whole thing if you can.

It’s nuts, man. It’s nuts. We’ll do the three best investment ICEs or how to achieve financial freedom with UK average salary, for example, video and you can get upwards of like 6700 comments and obviously, as we know, with 90% open rate and then click through from there you can do the maths. And when you look at some of these guys, like the free share one’s amazing. They pay 25 pounds a pop, but the one above it pays 55 pounds a pop. And so one post can end up doing a couple of thousand pounds quite simp, quite easily. The more viral it goes, the more engagement it gets, the better it does. But interestingly, some of the smaller posts can, as we were saying, like the five to seven second ones, if you want the, the three best investment accounts right now they actually just do so well because they’re so targeted. And even though it’s only 100 comments, they all convert a lot or they don’t all convert, but, you know, they will do a lot, a lot of do. So that’s what we’re playing with. Affiliate is amazing for it. And the great thing about this is that I can then leverage these types of conversations with the brands and I can show brands when we’re doing brand deal conversations, I can go back to the table and say, hey, I’ve got this new thing that nobody else is doing at the moment and I can continually drive stuff to you.

If you want to stay in this frame, I’m going to need a higher rate or I’m going to go with an x, Y and Z. And that’s been so powerful and then that we can implement those links and those new rates across our sites, our YouTube links, our podcasts, and it’s just been a really, really effective way of just like basically taking all the affiliate income that we lost from Google and replacing it and even improving it now.

Yeah, I really like that. I think brands are very receptive to that. So, like if you start ranking for like brand terms on Google, they’re like, they basically think you’re stealing their conversions at this point and so they don’t want to help you and they don’t like you and they want to get rid of you. But if you’re doing these who kind of like engaging social posts, you’re reaching people they wouldn’t have reached in the first place and you’re much stronger place to negotiate because, yeah, it’s like they wouldn’t have gotten that sale if you didn’t help them. So it’s like even though you might not drive, like maybe the level of consistency of sales that a random review would have on Google, I think brands are probably pretty excited around that. And I guess you do sponsorship deals off the back of that. You can probably get your podcast sponsored, for example, maybe your emails as well, that kind of stuff. And that’s a cool entry door because you make sales to them before you actually come to the table.

That’s a really good point, gal. Like, that’s something which has changed everything for us where we would usually send out our brand pack and we would say, hey, we’ve got X, Y and Z now we’ve got a podcast, a YouTube channel, 30,000 plus mailing list. And then suddenly it’s like, well, where do we go? Or do we do all of it? And it just adds more value to the brand conversations. And as is, most of these brands still have not figured out that you can actually do something with a reel. It’s like an advert where they’re posting the influencer posts and we may or may not make some money out of it. Like, we don’t know. They haven’t figured out that there’s a tracking metric and ways to actually serve and say that this was a successful campaign. I. Let’s do it again next month. Or that didn’t really work with that influencer. So from a brand perspective and an influencer marketing level is. It’s super, super powerful bit of kit.

Okay. Yeah, I like it a lot. I think it’s, it’s really cool and it, and it’s the best. Like, your relationship with the brands will be a lot healthier than the SEO way of ranking for brand plus review, usually. Another thing I saw when I opted into your list is that you’re using Convertkit and then post opt in. I get recommended to opt in. You know, they have this, it used to be called Coreg. I don’t know how Convertkit calls it, but basically you recommend another email is to subscribe to and I think they pay you for that. Right. How does that work? And does it work well?

Yeah, it’s okay, essentially. Oh God, the name of it is completely gone out.

I call it Corex because this is the old way.

But yeah, I can’t remember what it’s called now. It’s just completely gone at the right pivotal moment. When you asked me the question I knew you were going to ask me this day as well, it will come to me and probably lots of people screaming. It’s a recommendation feature, but it’s actually a third party which facilitates it. And you basically instal some code on the back end of your landing pages and it will then allow you to then. So basically if you sign up up, it will suggest like Jackie’s indexes on there. There’s loads of people within the space. Everyone, everyone. Fair enough. But you can pay, basically, you get paid per subscriber. That email person will then decide like, you must have stayed on the list for 28 days, open three emails, clicked one, for example, and then you get paid. What it does is just definitely covers ConvertKit a few times over. So we’re making like three to 500 pounds depending on the month off that running. And equally as well, the person can turn off. It’s not like you must sign up. So basically as soon as you put your email in, it pops up they suggest three other email accounts to you.

You can either say yes or no. They should be targeted based on the person. Sometimes it gets it a little bit off, but that person can say yes or no and then straight away they’re in their funnel and they go off and they’re on for no it for other newsletters, which can be a good thing or an annoyance, who knows? But people seem to like it. And as I say, it covers ConvertKit and many chat costs. So just means that we’re basically just.

A little extra income source, basically. That doesn’t seem to affect your conversions. But I think it’s cool. It’s like, I dig it. I don’t like the editor on Convertkit, so I’m never gonna switch. But I think it’s pretty, it’s pretty old at this point. But other than that, this is a cool feature, actually. I think beehive about a company that does the same as all potentially can do that with another spark loop. Here you go.

Yeah, there you go.

But they got by beehive, I think. So it’s going to connect it to that. So now we’ve talked about how you get people on the email list. Obviously I did sign up. I went through, I think I signed up like a month ago or something. So I got a month of email. First of all, like how big? You said 30,000. Your email list at this point, is that mostly from Instagram?

Big portion, probably about 10-12k now from insta.

Okay. But the thing, again, it’s like, it’s not about number of emails as well. It’s about like how engaged. That’s the thing. It’s like we get lots of emails from SEO, but I find many of them are not that engaged because like an article just doesn’t do that for you. And it’s very difficult to get the level of engagement you get as from a video, etcetera. And so again, it’s like number of subscribers is not super relevant. I saw that you have two step opt in. I was quite surprised about that. So it’s like when I opt in, I have to go and confirm that into my inbox. Is that a choice from you? Like, why did you go for two step opt in? Because I’m not a big fan of two step opt in.

I have it off on the actual stand store Zapier conversion. But we had it off and we were just finding that we were, there was a lot slipping through the gaps. We were going in a lot of spam and just not adding that step was just meaning the quality of subscribers. We were having to do quite regular cleanups of the list. It just was adding another extra step of time, which I didn’t have. I just turned it back on just for peace of mind there. But I know a lot of people have it off and a lot of people scream, have it off. A lot of people scream, have it on. And so, yeah, I don’t know. We’ve just kept it on for now. It’s something we’re thinking about. If we run paid ads, then we will have it off.

Yeah. The way we do that actually is we like when you join our email list, you join an automation that basically you’re just on the wait period of like I think two months or something like this. And basically, and then after, every time you engage with an email, so you open or you click, you get back to the beginning of this automation, so you’re looping forever. And then if you do nothing, you do fall to the next step of the automation, which essentially starts sending you email like, hey, engaging with emails, like are you still interested in being on the list, etcetera? And if they do nothing, they just unsubscribes them. So that’s kind of the trade off. Like you have to have something like that so that your list self cleans basically at this point. And then it’s just about building that little loop of like this automation, starting forever and having a wait step before actually.

So when you mean start back again, how does that work? So when they click something, they go background.

Yeah. So it’s like whenever there’s an open, we have another automation that says if you open an email, then add to this automation again and you start again, basically. And, or if you click on a link in an email, add to this automation again, it takes you off that wait step and puts you back at the beginning and you’re just looping basically.

Smart, very smart. And that sends them through the funnel.

And, yeah, and you don’t have to think about it after that. Like you just do it once and then you self cleanse. Obviously that means for the first two months your subscriber quality is lower because you don’t have the two step. And so you might have people who never open your emails for two months on your list. Right. And whatever you feel comfortable, if you want it, make it two weeks. To make it two weeks, you know, but like, you do lose a bit of quality earlier. I’m not gonna debate with that. But you’re also gonna keep a lot of like absent minded people who don’t go and confirm that would actually have converted for you, which I find is an easy way to boost your business, basically. Another thing is like, so basically I opted in, I got five days of value emails. So, like, you just email me, like, cool stuff about. And it’s kind of interesting how you bridge. Basically, the way it works right now is like, you bridge personal finance in your Instagram content to essentially, like, online marketing as your main offer at this point. Right? How does that work?

Like, how do people make the jump? Like, how many people who are interested in isas in the UK become interested in digital marketing? Is that, is that something that, like, it’s interesting because it’s kind of like a new angle to tackle. Like, to sell something that a lot of people are trying to sell and sidestep your competition, which is, I think it’s pretty cool, actually.

It’s a really has been like a painful existence trying to work out how we’re going to do it because obviously we’re very personal finance heavy and I think as we grow, the brand will have very, like, personal finance based courses. But a large part of what we do is increasing people’s revenue and we’ve got a system. Right, that income, basically. Sorry. And we’ve got a system, an easy way of doing that right now in Instagram. So we basically have come up with a way of, like, training people that if you’re struggling right now, but you’ve got a bit of extra time or you want to quit your day job and this is an opportunity for you, we try and educate them in that way. Yeah, it’s not going to be for everyone, but it’s been great. Like, we’ve got 300 plus students now and that’s been, like, really cool. And that’s. We’ve started with a mini course, moved them up to then redeveloped the mini course, created a larger version with a community, and then we are now, like, in the process of launching high ticket. We’ve actually got our first few sales calls coming through now and that’s going to be like, you know, two, three grand.

Is that. Yeah, kind of like, yeah, like, done with you, basically. I saw that. Basically, the way I saw is like, you kind of have the course and then you have done with you, which is like, you essentially get. It’s consulting, basically. Right?

Yeah. So we’ll do like one on one brainstorming, you know, the high tickets type stuff. Group coaching. You get the three c’s, of course, community and coaching. Essentially you get like, a interesting thing, which I’m building out as like a twelve week programme. It’s like, do this on day one, do this day two. Basically, I’ve got it. You cannot fuck this up, essentially, like, it’s a proper handholding experience and you can’t book your next coaching call until you’ve completed the box and showed me that you’ve done the work as well. You’ve got to send it in. And so, like, it kind of means that where people think, oh, am I going to do a first coaching call on week one and then week four and week eight? Actually, that’s not the case. So because no one’s going to do a day one, day two, day three, it ends up being really spread out. So you can actually take on a larger amount of consulting clients. So, and then obviously as you get more results, you can increase the price and do it that way. But the idea is to not allow anyone to slip through the net and having the mid ticket course and community still available for the larger amounts of people.

And then if they want one on one help, they can and have the budget for it, then we have that there too. So it’s really totally. Exactly.

Yeah, I love it. But, yeah, my experience was like, it took me five days of value emails to then get invited to a webinar, basically. That’s kind of how I saw it. So it’s like, I get value for five days. First of all, your thank you page is just like, check your email, which is like, man, this is your most valuable pages on your site, your thank you pages to sell something, man. It’s like, it’s like, I’ll tell you, like, I’ve made easy seven, like mid seven figures of sales with thank you pages. I mean, I told you I would tell you where I would improve on this, but let’s just talk about this now. I would definitely have the offer right away, have a smoother process. Like, I don’t want to confirm my email, I just want the stuff I opted in for right, right here. And that bridges between the value, which is on the page where I land, and the cell that should be on the next page where there’s a big button that sends me there or something and then sell right away, usually because, like high ticket or me ticket, like hundreds of dollars.

Like your, your course is about. Is about, right? Yeah. You could do low ticket as well on that. Like, you either either two figures or three figures sells, basically. And then I would just send people right there with some kind of discount or, you know, some kind of a special offer that closes for them shortly, after. Which you can do with a tool like deadline funnel, basically. And you can close it, you can make it a legit thing, like not just like all fake, fake stuff, et cetera, but they will see a timer and it will close for them at the end. But yeah, I got invited to a webinar after two days, and then after that it was mainly your newsletter with slow burn call to actions at the end. So you share whatever’s happening in your business, share some value, etcetera. And at the end I would get a couple links that send me either to a replay of a webinar on YouTube. I have the booking a discovery call. I guess that’s for the high ticket link to the podcast and the sales page in general. But yeah, it’s like, in my opinion, you can probably double yourselves just doing these two things pretty easily as well.

Do you run ads on this funnel, like once people are there?

Not yet. It’s very much on the cards.

So it’s like, I think there’s strategic retargeting that you could take here. So everyone who gave you their email, or at least they don’t even need to give you their email, they just need to land on the squeeze page. It’s like at this point they have expressed intent. You can retarget people with a static ad image, like literally a Canva image that just says, again, the same scarcity offer that you would make. And if you use a tool like deadline funnel, you can have the link from your ads to your sales page, start a timer for them as they click on the ad seamlessly. And so, like, whenever they come back to the sales page, that countdown has kept going. So if it said five days, it says three days, two days later when they click on that ad, you know, which I think works because people go cold, basically. You know, on social media as well. People like you have people following you, but your initial followers, they probably don’t engage very much with you anymore, right? It’s like, it’s a flow of people. You don’t accumulate people, basically. That’s not really how this goes.

What we’re struggling with is quality. So a lot of people that come through, that’s why the first email is reply back to us and let us know what your problem is. And so we’re struggling with and majority of people, which is why I’m going to actually update that five day sequence. Majority of people reply back. I have no idea what to do, but it sounds cool.

Most people just want something cool to be shown to them and then they jump in if they, if they want to. But like, yeah, yeah. It’s like you imagine that when people enter your email list, they’re like super targeted and already super warm. It’s not the case. Like you’re basically starting over with a new audience. That’s why it’s like you can do value but you can do value within the sales funnel, right? So like usually, for example, your first email, like let’s say you did the five day time where people opted in the first email that you send after you have five days, like they still have time to decide. You don’t have to be super high pressure on your first email. You can and still take the time to introduce what you do, introduce your methodology, and then kind of within that, give info about yourself so people get to know more about you, et cetera. It’s kind of like low pressure cell. It’s more like usually I would say early on in the timer. So like when people have less than, more than two days left on there, I’m not pressing for the cell, I’m pressing for the awareness.

And then I press for the cell when I get towards the end because the scarcity does demultiply the level of the conversion rate. Like your conversion rate curve just shoots up as you get closer to a close. And I’m sure you’ve seen that when you do your product launch.

Yeah, yeah. It’s crazy. Literally crazy.

And that’s why you write long emails initially. So you write long emails initially because you privilege awareness. And you’ve probably seen that when you write long emails, you actually get lower clicks rate. Like people don’t click as much. Usually the call to actions are buried further away, et cetera. You get a good open rate, but it doesn’t matter. You don’t care for the click at this point. You can even put the timer on the email if you want people to remember. And then as you get towards the end of your offer, you shorten and shorten the emails to maximise your click through rate and go for the conversion. Basically that works. So your emails, your value mails, they’re great. I love them, by the way. I think they’re awesome. It’s just like, I think I would probably run a first sequence selling something to people and then just queue them after. Be like, okay, now the launch is over, let’s take some time to just chit chat and share some value, etcetera, before you do another offer and just revive your email list. At this point, after squeezing it for sales basically. I mean, otherwise pretty good.

Another, I didn’t expect to do a roast, but sorry about that.

No, no, let’s do it.

Okay. Your sales page, sales title is sales page. So when I open my browser it says sales page, which I don’t think is a good idea.

I completely agree with you. I’ve just bought a domain, so I bet basically built it in system and then it just, the actual ability to change these things on system is very difficult. So I’ve now bought digitalinfluence IO and everything’s going to run through there because once you change the domain, you can have as many sub domains on there as you like. So it will look a little bit more legit moving forward.

What are you going to build it on actually? What tools are you going to use?

So actually I will still use systems system IO, but just basically not use their on board, their on site domain. So you can just pull in your own domain and just, it will look like your own site essentially.

Okay. I haven’t tried it. I’m a big fan of doing it on WordPress. It’s one thing I want to build as well. I want to build like kind of like a funnel in a box in WordPress at some point because I have that like, you know, it’s like I use patterns. On WordPress you can build building blocks for sales pages, etcetera, without the copy. It takes me about four minutes to put a whole sales page together now on our systems actually, just because it’s all pre built, basically pre built blocks, etcetera, it’s super easy. Are you ready for another nugget that’s going to probably make you a bunch of money? You have no cart abandonment email, I think. So I went on your checkout, I put my email and I waited five minutes to make sure the system could capture it, but did not check out. And so if you actually implement that, that’s going to be your most valuable email out of all the emails in your email system, that is. So I don’t know if you’re probably, they can do this, the tool you’re using for checkout, but you should always, always have basically an automation that if people just fill the email in your checkout, most checkouts can do that.

They can trigger a sequence and it can capture that email. And then you just run an automation in your email system where within you check 2 hours later. If they’re a customer, so are they flagged? Is this email flagged as a customer? If not, start a sequence of like one or two, not long, like just one or two emails. Be like, hey, you know what? Life goes. Life gets in the way. Maybe you are in the bus trying to check out and you got your stuff or something. So I just wanted to send you the checkout link again just to make sure that you don’t miss out on this because the offer is closing soon, for example. That’s it. And then the link.

And that’s like, do you add discount at that point?

No, they don’t even need, I mean, it depends on if you’re already running on a timer, you don’t need a discount. I think if you are running like something that has no scarcity, maybe instead of the discount, throw a bonus, maybe.

And your deadline. Funnels, is that running on like, HTML? Can you pull that through?

You can put it in tag manager or anything you want, basically. So amazing. So it’s like any CMS, you use anything that it works, which.

Very cool. That’s very cool.

Yeah, I’ve used that a lot. And another thing is all the bumps, I don’t know if you checkout can do that, but I think there’s a big opportunity in terms of all the bumps actually on that checkout. I guess the course is $350. So you could do something at between 47 and 99, maybe something like this, a worksheet or even a webinar replay. Make a webinar for your members, make this a bonus or something and sell it. Like, that’s like you could increase your revenue quite a lot, actually.

Yeah, that’s a good shout. Now we’ve got like, little workbooks. We’ve actually got like, powerful hooks bank, which I’ve been building out, and all of these types of things which you can throw in as a little bundle. These are all. The thing is, what we’ve, where we’ve got to now is these are all things that are like, definitely front of mind. And it’s just been like a case of, like, where we’ve had, like, explosive growth trying to, like, work out, like, where. And the next phase needs to be like, pure optimisation and, like, redeveloping the sales pages and.

Yeah, I mean, dude, I’m talking now. But if you go through our funnels, you’ll find issues, too. Don’t worry about that. It’s like we all have, especially because there’s so many. And I think it’s something that I want to highlight to the audience is like, there’s so many moving parts in these things. Like you’re dealing with email, you’re dealing with like email tracking tools, then you’re dealing with advanced analytics, then you’re dealing with building sales pages that need to look good on old devices, which is not that easy. Quite often, you know, images can get squished and bad on mobile. It’s so much to work on. It’s like even if you’re quite well organised, you will always run with something broken. And it’s quite challenging actually, for sure.

And there’s always like those things, like, I know money is slipping through that crack, but if I don’t do these things, then the business doesn’t run. So you’re like, oh. And then when you have a bit more spare time, you’re like, okay, now let me seriously do this. I know the funnel needs, needs to change in certain areas. I know the five days of emails need to be updated, but it’s like, ah, I’ve got to run the content train to keep things going, otherwise we.

Don’T have to, we have updated emails too, actually. So I know, I know it’s, we have to do that too. So I’ll say it.

But these are gold, man. Thank you. The thank you page one is something I hadn’t even thought of. So that’s huge.

Just the flow, you know, like get it, get faster to the offer, but also get faster to what people opted in for.

So would you do a redirect to the sales page from that thank you page?

Essentially, it depends on what you, if people opted in for lead magnets. For me, the best kind of lead magnet is a video lead magnet because first of all, there’s more engagement. So think about one of your YouTube videos, like embedded on the page with just a button under. And the idea is like, people watch the video, that’s lead magnet. But then the last, you don’t care about platforms at this point. So the last five minutes of your video pre selling people to the offer. So like, okay, yeah, I just showed you how to do this and this and this. Now you could get this, all this other stuff if you wanted to upgrade. And because you’re a new subscriber, you hear this special offer, it’s available for the next few days. Click on the button below to learn more. And that sends people to the sales page. That’s a very nice flow because like you opt in, you get your value right away. Like the video autoplays, whatever. Bam, no need to go open your email, click on the link, go get redirected, et cetera. You just get that it sends people directly to the sales page, and then you kind of run it like a launch after that on your email list, where it’s like you introduce the product in the first email again, focus on awareness rather than on click through rate.

And then as your launch goes, you shrink your emails to get higher click through rate and essentially squeeze the last two days, which are probably going to be over 50% of your sales. Knowing launch graphs and how they work.

Basically, that’s something we need to definitely double down on. That’s been so interesting. That’s like, I know immediately what I’m going to do because we’ve just written a massive case study video, which is like how we took a guy to five k in revenue in three months, which is like, ideal for a thank you page where they’re like, oh, this guy’s legit. They’re buying into you. And within that case study, we could then send them off to a book call funnel or the course, basically.

I mean, the idea is that in a funnel, people drop off at every step. Right, right. Lots of people drop off. So if you reduce the number of steps, you get more people in front of your offer. And so, like, if the thank you page is also the lead magnet, but also the pre sale. So, like, it doesn’t feel, it doesn’t feel like, out of place because, like, you’re delivering what you promised, like, you get. People get that, but also you’re selling at the end of this, and then you just send people directly to, like, whatever makes you money. Like, they could be in front of your offer in 15 minutes, 20 minutes after they opted in. It’s quick, they’re still warm, and you’ve delivered great value because video is the best way to do that. And they’re warm. It’s like, I wouldn’t know. Like, we’ve done it with webinars as well. I used to do it on a three hour webinar that was pretty intense. It still worked like, I still did. Okay. I don’t think people have the attention span anymore, so that’s not what I would do. But, like, a 15 minutes video is pretty good, I would say, you know.

Yeah, we’ve got a 40 minutes case study. Do you think that’s too long?

Maybe consider that a lot of people who opt in on there for you because Instagram.

So we could do like a shortened version of it, basically.

Yeah, I’ll do that. Okay. This podcast took a turn that I did not expect. I just wanted to say, I’m not, I didn’t go through your cell search because I think it’s well structured. I think. I think it’s like, it’s like it’s rough around the edges, but it’s actually well put together, you know? And so, like, I think people can go check it out. We’ll probably shout screenshots of that on the podcast. But yeah, overall, I mean, I think. But overall, I really like it because you go where people are, which is Instagram, you catch their attention and you do what the platform wants, which in turn rewards you with lots of reach. Right. And then you have a cool way of like funnelling people down without killing your engagement. So while maintaining that growth machine. And then you plug these people into a classic but well put together funnel, basically. That is probably one of the best ways to grow your platform. And also I wanted to talk about, you know, you were talking about this award you got. Right, you got. Sorry, I wrote it somewhere. What’s the name of the award?

Yeah, it’s best money creator of the year award.

I want to talk about how you got it though, because I was on your email list. So what happened here?

Votes, dude, votes. It’s purely votes. So having a big Instagram channel certainly helped there, but I’m.

So you send traffic from the email list on Instagram right? To the vote page.

To the vote pages, yeah. And sent story traffic from Instagram. You know, everyone that we were dming for a couple of weeks, we had the vote here for me to win link as well. So that was another thing.

Can you read the end people when you dm them once? Like can I broadcast? Oh, that’s pretty cool. For product launches actually. That is really cool.

Very cool. When you have. This is the other phase of ManyChat which we didn’t get into is like if they don’t click, you can have timers, you can send them to different things. Sorry you didn’t click here, but maybe you want to check out this YouTube video on the subject, for example. So there are like full automations on mini chat. It can literally get as big as like days and days of worth of messages sending them on different areas based on where and what they do. So it’s quite cool.

I definitely need to explore that. That’s the one part that I learned a lot about on this podcast. Okay. I don’t want to top my own horn, but I think I did a pretty good job preparing this podcast.

Yeah, it was cool, man. I’ve really enjoyed it.

What is the question that I should have asked and I didn’t ask?

I think this all doesn’t work unless you get the content right. And I know we did, like, go into that a little bit at the beginning, but, like, what makes viral content? And I think, like, that’s really, really important to unpack. And we did do it a little bit, but viral in your niche is going to look different to my niche and this niche and this niece and this niece. But understanding that, I think, is probably, I don’t need. I think we, I think we covered it, really. But I would say, like, just to kind of recap all of this, all of the stuff after is great, but you have to get the traffic, so just spend as much time as possible. If you’re good at video already, great. If you’re not, get that up to at least a medium standard. Otherwise you ain’t gonna get it.

I agree. I think everyone should be able to create basic videos at this point and do basic video editing. The good news is, well, the new OpenAI models are actually video now, so I expect them to edit videos for me very soon, actually, and to do some. It’s not perfect, but, you know, AI level edition and do 80% of it and you finish it yourself. I think that’s coming in the next two years. But I also think that as a result, even more content online is going to be video. And if you’re not jumping on that, and that’s why I like your stuff, because it’s like, I can have a clear path between I create videos, I make money, which not many people have. And I think that’s what’s cool about what you’re doing, is, like, it’s a, it’s a very clear path. It’s easy to understand. It makes sense. It’s not woo woo, social media stuff. And. And so that was actually cool. Like, I quite enjoyed that, actually. So. Well, Sammie, thanks for joining. Do you understand people anymore?

Definitely. Follow us on Instagram, of course, @UpTheGainsMoney, and then we do have some courses and some things that you can jump on. And if you do want to learn how to do this and you want someone to hold your hand a little bit more, hopefully we’ll include the links in the show notes or something like that.

Sure. Yeah, we’ll do that. All right. Well, thanks for joining, Sammie. Thanks for everything and everyone. See you later.

So this was my interview with Sammie Ellard-King, and I hope you enjoyed it. But now, what can we take away from this and apply it to your business? Well, the first thing I’m taking away is that Instagram is a very viable email list builder. I mean, we know everyone uses Instagram. It’s one of the biggest social networks with 2.4 billion monthly active users. But I never took it seriously because in my mind it was quite difficult to drive traffic of it. However, with the auto DM feature of ManyChat, it’s quite easy to collect the email address of people who actually engage with your content by commenting and take them off to a squeeze page. If you add that to the fact that you can use a service like Linktree to add a link in bio that takes people to different parts of your funnels, and also add links in your story, actually, Instagram is pretty good at funnelling people down, especially when you consider the potential reach of the platform. Now clearly, if you rely on ads still to make money from your site, that’s not enough traffic.

And that’s what the previous podcast was about. We need to change business model to open up these new traffic sources. But if you’re selling something or you’re promoting a high paying affiliate offer, and you’re clever at collecting email, it can really work, and Sammie is really a proof of that. And what’s more is creating content that does well on Instagram is not as complicated as it sounds. As Sammie shared short reels with text on screen, maybe a quick voiceover, and some aesthetic b roll that you shot on your phone, they’re enough to actually drive lots of traffic, and you don’t need to be an editing genius to make it work. You can use free tools like DaVinci Resolve if you’re more advanced, or Capcut or Canva if you’re a beginner to edit URL’s even on your phone if you want. And if you’re afraid of editing yourself, you can hire a top notch editor from Marketing Pros like we’ve done. He’s probably the main reason why our YouTube content has seriously levelled up in the past year, and just going a bit off topic here, but they also have link builders that we have trained personally that are available to hire.

So if you want to reach out, we’ll put their link in the pinned comment below. But to go back to Sammie’s interview, what I really liked is how he made his funnel work. The despite the fact that, as you could see while I was grilling him, there are many things that he could have done better. And to me this shows that funnels don’t have to be perfect to start walking, and it should not be as intimidating as some people make them sound when they talk about them. One thing I really liked, and I think a lot of people are gonna like as well, is how he made his funnelling work with affiliate offers as well. I think it’s a great place to start. Think about it like building your Instagram account around a topic that has a high paying, high converting offer that you can use in the early days for revenue and then add your own funnel on top to maximise the value of leads and actually scale up. Anyway, I’d love to hear what you took away from this interview. If you haven’t listened to it, I really encourage you to go back and listen to it and I would like to know if you find these kind of deep dives interesting.

I know it’s a bit different from the content that you usually get from us, but personally, as you could see in the second part of the interview, I really love this stuff and I’m really excited to share it with you. Anyway, thanks for watching or listening. If you enjoyed it, don’t forget to subscribe, click the bell, drop a comment, thumb up, review us on iTunes, or tell people who don’t care about us about the podcast. It really helps us. So thanks for being here. Thanks for listening and we’ll see you in the next episode.