Hey badass, we're getting tactical today because as sexy as content strategy and high-level visionary thought leadership and planning and goal setting are, we do still have to get some really simple and basic things right, otherwise it can really sabotage our efforts.
And when I say basic, I don't mean Low level necessarily because actually it's just those things that people often overlook and it's a real shame And I'm talking about your Instagram bio today your Instagram profile that shop window because More than likely people are gonna find you through your content.
They're gonna find you on the feed They're gonna find you on the explore page, right? And then what they'll do out of curiosity if you've hooked them in, they will tap on your username and come through to your profile. And at that critical moment, they will decide whether or not they want to follow you.
And it's really interesting when you look into the world of psychology and this concept of nudging. There are all sorts of mind-blowing studies out there that show things like. If you put a recycling bin in green, the colour green versus the colour blue, it will increase recycling efforts by 50%, right?
They'll film people going by the bin and see to what extent they will actually bother recycling just by using something as simple as a change in colour. And the results in these kinds of studies, these kinds of behavioural studies are actually Insane in so many respects. And we talk about in psychology, nudging people towards the behavior that we want them to complete.
And there are many different things that might seem really no-brainer, might seem really simple. Every single minor decision can actually nudge people towards that decision of whether or not they're going to become trans. A follower of yours, an audience member of yours, and hey, maybe even one day a client of yours.
So we want to talk about optimizing your Instagram profile for success and nudging people towards higher conversion rates from simple viewer or consumer of your content, complete stranger, to becoming a follower and an audience member of yours. And this is win because When you have people following you who are your people and your ideal client kind of profiles and they find this corner of the internet that is so specific and it's so made for them and they enjoy being there then they're going to engage with your content more often when you put it out which sends signals to the algorithm hey people like this content because they show it to your followers first and they see what portion of followers Engage with your content.
And based on that, they decide how many non followers they're going to start sending this content piece out to. So if you can create the kind of system where your content is reaching the right people, those highly aligned people are following you. They become part of your audience. And. You all share the same kind of values and you're there for the same reasons and they enjoy the content you're putting out and they're engaging with that content, then you're going to be more likely to scale pretty big and blow up and become that next big thing in your niche as well.
So yes, we're talking about something super tactical, but as you can see, it's still linked to a much bigger strategic picture.
[00:04:24] Optimizing Your Instagram Bio
Now there are some fundamental things that you must do when you're setting up your account on Instagram. And today I'm going to run you through 10 of them so that you can optimize every part of that account set up from choosing the right profile picture, crafting the perfect bio, and some settings that you might not even know about.
And more, and of course, just putting a caveat on this episode that things do and will change. And so the information in this episode is pertaining to mid 2024 at the moment, principles behind the tips will still ring true. So even if there are new features or new settings, the reasoning behind what I'm going to share today will still ring true from a strategy perspective.
[00:05:07] Setting Up Your Instagram Account
Now, before we get into the tips, First up some background, let's do some context sitting around Instagram. So I love Instagram as a platform for many reasons. There are multiple different platforms. You can choose to get your thought leadership out there, get your expertise out there, start building your community.
And that could be podcasting, YouTube, tech talk, whatever. Instagram though, has been a home for me in terms of. The highest possible conversion rate sales rate. And there's this relationship dynamic. I think that is really powerful on Instagram from people being able to see behind the scenes on your stories to being able to voice note each other and send each other messages in the DMs to having all the different styles of content that you can create on Instagram.
There's just something about the platform that I've found particularly powerful, like I can get more views. On tech talk per content piece, but nowhere near as many sales. There's just something about Instagram that I really rate when it comes to the sweet spot of the quality of views, the maturity of the audience, the readiness to buy, and again, this is still in my niche, but we love Instagram and Instagram, like many different platforms is fast becoming a search based platform, a search engine essentially.
A platform like YouTube is already a search engine because it's owned by Google. So it's very much constructed around the idea of people looking for things in the search bar, looking for help, looking for knowledge, looking for insight, looking for experience sharing. They are looking for something using keywords and the content gets pushed to them in relation to what they're seeking out.
Okay. So it's all around this concept of search and to be able to match the person's search result to the content. We have this strategy called search engine optimization, where you can optimize your content with the content. Keywords with the kinds of words or concepts that a person is searching for in order to match the search to the results and you want your content to be in the results.
And so SEO is becoming a big thing on Instagram and more and more it's important to have keywords and content and captions and of course your Instagram bio. So just laying that groundwork about why I'm going to mention SEO so readily. Because also based on what the person is consuming, there will be keywords associated to that content as well.
And if it's aligned to the kind of work you do, then they're going to start pushing your things. If it's optimized correctly, your content, your profile, they'll put it in front of these people as well. On their explore page or in the suggested for you recommended for you profiles when they follow someone and so on and so forth.
So it's all around making sure that. Instagram knows what you're about and knows about the kind of people you're trying to reach and it can hook the two of you up and place you together because despite popular belief around how much the algorithm hates you, social media platforms want people to enjoy and stay on their platforms.
They want to connect them with as many creators as possible and they want them to spend time consuming good content on their platform. So they're more than happy to do that matchmaking for you if you can get it right. Okay. So previously I think Instagram was very much viewed as the hashtag platform, very hashtag focused, but with that rise of AI and smarter algorithms, it's more and more around the strategic use of keywords that you use throughout your entire Instagram presence, while still sounding like a human being, of course, and making sure that you're getting found and recommended and pushed to your ideal audience.
And. Really important to remember that we're not trying to get any followers here. It's okay to repel the people who aren't your people. We want a super tight aligned audience of your people. The people who are going to buy into your mission, your values and are most likely to convert into clients. So we're not trying to please the masses.
We're not trying to optimize our profile so that Everyone likes us. It's about being precise and targeted and finding your people. So the more personality, the more you energy, the better keep that in mind, because we're going to be talking about, technical things and don't forget the human, don't forget the vibe.
Don't forget the mission behind that. So again, your content, obviously super important, the most important, but if your Instagram account isn't set up correctly and you're not following these steps, maybe your content won't be seen or your reach will be capped. You won't be bringing in new followers or maybe you'll bring in new followers, but they're the wrong people.
And so your engagement tanks and Instagram thinks that people don't enjoy your content or you'll get a really high bounce rate. So a lot of unfollows happening, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And most importantly, from a business standpoint, you won't be able to translate your followers into clients. So this is a big deal in terms of making sure that your.
Instagram profiles working for you, your content's working for you. And we can get started today by going through almost this audit. And I really want you to view this episode as an actionable checklist and audit that you can do of your own Instagram profile to see if it's working well for you. I'll even talk about things like hashtags, are they in or out?
And if they're in, what's the strategy we're meant to be using? I'll talk about things like meta verified. Is it worth it? Is it not? So we're going to be having a really good chat all the way throughout.
[00:11:00] Crafting the Perfect Instagram Handle
All right, so let's dive in and we'll get started with your username or your handle. So your handle is.
The name of your account, essentially. So I've got at badass careers at badass empires underscore, and that's what people see on your posts, in your comments on your story. So it's exposed to people so often, and it's very likely to be either your business name or your own name. Now I could do an entire episode on how to name your business.
That's a whole thing. However, The key thing to remember for your handle is to make it easy for people to search. If you have to include any characters because your ideal username is taken, do it at the end, right? I have badassempires underscore, not underscore badassempires. Empires, because when people are searching for you, it's front loaded in that as I start typing up what your name starts with, it's going to be suggested to you.
So very rarely will people start thinking about searching for something with an underscore at the very beginning. Okay. So if you are going to use characters, include them in the middle. So it could be a full stop or an underscore or ideally at the end, but obviously you don't want it to look messy. You want it to look clean, put yourself in your audience's shoes.
What's the easiest and shortest way of spelling your username, making it simple for them. And so you might have, for example, a username, which is badass careers. com. And that could be a way to get around it. Whatever it is that will make it as easy, memorable, simple, and clean as possible. We want to make sure that your username and handle is looking good and it is not giving spam.
[00:12:47] Choosing the Right Profile Picture
Now let's talk about your photo. So your profile picture is another way to express who you are, what your brand is about straight away. You have a first impression, you have a vibe. Especially if you're building a personal brand based expertise based business, like we are, you don't want to use your logo.
Humans want to learn from other humans, right? We're disrupting this whole concept of people wanting to go to anonymous companies. For their services, they want to work with real human beings. That's how you can get around concepts like being the most qualified on the market, people will work with you because they respect your story.
They like your style. They enjoy following you and they'll want to work with you. On this topic, even if there are people who exist in the world in a professional capacity with PhDs in your topic, they will still choose you. Okay. So humans connect with humans and we want to make sure that your profile photo is doing that.
So you want to use a really close up headshot, like shoulder level and above. And you can bring your brand into it by removing the background of your photo and adding a color in. This could be a nice gradient, it could be a flat bright color, and that's nice and eye catching and in your brand colors. So essentially you can take a nice selfie of yourself, make sure that it's eye level, it doesn't have that sort of top down selfie angle, but a nice photo of yourself or just get a friend to help.
And you can upload it to remove dot BG and get that background removed. And then I highly recommend uploading it into Canva. And you can create just a kind of square dimension post. It can be when you go into Canva, it has different templates. So you could just take like a square. Thousand by thousand pixels, kind of ratio or a square Instagram post or whatever.
Click onto that, upload your photo, and you can change the background color. Again, you can play with gradients, textures, all sorts of great things, and you just want to make sure that it's nice and clear, high quality, smiling, approachable, or whatever suits your brand. Okay. If you're not a particularly smiley person, if your brand is very serious, maybe you don't have a shot of you where you're bursting out laughing, but typically research does show that photos, whether it's on LinkedIn, on Instagram, whatever, where the person is smiling, they do have a higher conversion rate than not.
Now, remember, there are a thousand different ways to do this thing, okay? There are people who will have their photo in black and white with a bright pink background. There are people who will have a color photo with a cool gradient. There are people who will have an entire black and white vibe. There are people who will have themselves looking away with a cheeky smirk on their face.
None of these minor details will make or break the entire ecosystem. It's about them all working together and all being cohesive. So it depends on the personal brand you're gunning for, the energy and vibe of your profile, the initial impression, how you want people to feel. So just making sure that any decisions you make, these micro decisions reflect that.
[00:15:50] Creating an Effective Instagram Bio
Now let's talk about your name. So your name is different to your handle. It is the text that sits below your profile picture and your handle sits above. So it's not your Instagram username. It's a fully editable line and it only appears in your bio. And when it comes to writing out your name, you don't necessarily want to repeat your handle because you've got a whole new opportunity for some new real estate.
So you can really bring a human touch here to your account by including your actual name, which is nice. You're building a personal brand. You don't want to be a faceless business. You don't want to feel cold and distant and anonymous. You want people to get to know you and know who they are connecting with.
And then you can bring that strategy to your name by then including keywords to increase your chances of appearing and search. This name field is heavily search geared. So the algorithm cares about the keywords that are in this field. So you can use it to further explain what it is that you do and who you help.
You can also hear include a signature emoji. If you have one, and I say one, one is best to add any personality or connect visually with your brand. So for example, in my name fields, I have badass empires with Rosie, then my crown icon that's in my logo. And that's my key emoji. So badass empires with Rosie.
And then it says purpose driven online business. So it's got purpose in there and online business in there. For badass careers, I say career coach dash rosie. And I put career coach at the beginning because often people are Directly searching career coach as a concept. It's less the case with something like purpose driven on my business, right?
But for career coaching, that's quite a high search volume phrase. So career coach dash Rosie. And then I have my lightning bolt, which is my signature emoji. And it's in my logo as well. And then it says design and land your dream career. So it's got land your dream career, design your dream career coach, all within that name field.
You could also keep it super simple. You might have your name, Sarah Smith, and then just a bar or a dash, it doesn't have to be an emoji. And then you might say Wix web designer, because if people are looking for a Wix web designer, that's probably what they will type into the search bar. So think about that.
Think about in your niche, in your field, are people searching for something in particular to find you? And if so, can you integrate that into your name field? While keeping your actual name as well, and then adding a little bit of personality if you can now for the biggest, I would say make or break area of your profile.
Let's talk about your actual bio, the actual biotext that you use to describe who you are, what you do, how you help. So you only have a few lines in your bio. We're talking about like limited characters here, like about 150 characters. And so it's very important that you are intentional in the word you use, trying to explain in a snapshot, what you're all about.
So there are some really important things that you don't want to be doing here. You don't want to be vague. What does mindset mean when it's a word all by itself? Mindset coaching for women to step into their power and thrive and live their best life. What does that mean? Even if you get more specific, mindset coaching for new mums so they can live their best life still don't know, still don't know, even though you think you've niched down because you've said new mums in there, I have no idea what you mean.
What is mindset coaching? What does it feel like to live your best life? In what way? How will things change? It's just Too generic, everyone wants to follow their dreams. Everyone wants to fulfill their potential. Like it doesn't actually tell me anything about what you do or how unique it is or why I should choose you or why I should choose to follow you.
So you've got to get really nice and specific. And I'll give you some examples in a second. You also don't want to include irrelevant personal info. So adding a bit of personality is fine, especially if you think it will help you with your personal brand. So my question to you is, Does your ideal client care that you as their social media manager is also a wife, a boy mom and a coffee addict or not?
Is that helping you? Is that really the best use of your precious real estate? Or is that something that you can show behind the scenes on stories and speak to when and if you want to, is that going to be the thing that makes them say, Hey, this is awesome. I relate. I'm going to follow or not.
Again, you can put personal info in there, but only if it's helping your ideal client to find you and say, wow, this is my person. Otherwise do not be wasting that precious real estate. You also don't want to pack it with emojis. Or symbols and I know that this kind of like that vibe is like a kind of more spiritual witchy vibe with all those symbols and there are, emojis, which is a certain energy as well.
And I love an emoji, but I use them sparingly. So I use them as bullet points and it does help to get. A message across quickly and to make each sentence pop and stand out. But my personal opinion is that bios littered with emojis and symbols give MLM vibes hard and it doesn't look as clean and clear and to the point.
You also don't want to include hashtags in your bio. It looks cluttered and it doesn't help you. The algorithm will pick up the keywords in your bio without you needing to hashtag them, so don't bother with those. And also, don't try to be too clever. I see a lot of experts trying to be fun and clever and use slang or Find this roundabout, funny way of saying things.
And you don't want to actually write anything that people are going to have to try and figure out or understand. They'll just leave your profile. You have to get the point across really quickly. So what do you do in your biotech? Do you want to make sure that you explain what you do and who you help for badass careers?
I say helping goal getters love their work and land the job being in capital letters It's another way that you can emphasize things and badass empires I say for coaches course and content creators to build freedom first digital businesses with purpose and profit So straight away what you do who you help so the person can figure out is this place for me?
You Then if it's not clear from the previous line, or you want to build on that or get even more juicy keywords into your profile, you can expand on that. For example, for badass careers, my next line then says career clarity, resumes, LinkedIn interviews, and salary, just amazing keywords essentially that I wanted on my bio and allows people to see straight away the topics that I will be covering on this account.
It's also handy if you can build your authority in some way and share some kind of win. So for Badass Careers, I say that I have over 3, 000 students. And I used to say that I had these students from all around the world, but then I ran out of characters when I changed some things up. So I use the globe emoji.
So straight away, again, influences the perception globally, 3, 000 plus students. Cool. So that's great without taking up too many characters. And for badass empires, I say something like 3 million in four years over at badass careers. So again, any kind of experience or authority build or a win you've had or why people should trust you is going to be really great.
And then you want to include a call to action pointing down towards the link that they can click on in your bio. And ideally that's going to one key lead magnet and it's nice and clear and it's simple, but for badass careers, I might say something like free trainings with the little emoji finger pointing down because I have several trainings on the go for badass empires.
I only had enough room to say start, but something that will activate them to take action. Remember here, the whole point is the more niche you can get in fewer words, the better. So you're not going to say nutritionist. You're going to say nutritionist specializing in PCOS and endo for fertility. Very clear, easy to use template.
I help X do Y through Z, okay? I help who do what through what vehicle, what kind of methodology or approach. Now that final call to action is sending traffic to the link in bio. So let's talk about your link in bio. So underneath your bio, you're able to insert a link and this is where people are able to go further.
Now, something to note is that you don't always want to be pushing people to the link in bio because Instagram wants to keep people on their platform, so use it in balance with other strategies. DMs at the moment go hard. You can put a story up on Instagram and say, DM me the word freebie and I'll send you my freebie, and then you can chat to them in the DMs and send the link out, plus you can, for a more massive message.
Traffic approach. You can say, check out my link in bio. Okay. But you want to be making sure that you're mixing it up. And for the link itself, you want to make sure that it has a vanity URL. So we don't want an ugly URL. That's like P Q S five, seven to five. No, we want it to look sleek and clean and professional, and it can give people yet another nudge to engage with the link.
So Lincoln bio could be, bad ass careers. com slash. Start here, slash freebies, slash result, for example, slash clear skin. Those are the kinds of active words that you want to be using for the vanity URL for your link in bio. And if you already have a website, you can create a basic mobile friendly landing page within your webpage builder for your link in bio.
But if you don't have a website, there are so many free options out there or cheap options out there. Linktree is a good option. Standstore is a popular option. Linktree That makes everything look really cool and really good looking. And it is a paid platform, but you can do so much more with it, like emails and host a mini course and all sorts of cool stuff.
So there are other options out there. If you don't actually have a website, it is all good. I've even seen people link to. A Canva PDF, like they create a link in bio using Canva and they just have the buttons that they've created on Canva be hyperlinked towards where they want to send people. Okay. So you can keep it really free and simple if you want to.
Also a good idea to make this link traceable so you can track how much of your traffic is coming from this specific link in bio. So you can actually use a free link shortener like bit. ly, bit. ly, B I T dot L Y. And again, you make sure that you update it to a vanity URL. But using a website like that, you can actually see how many clicks this specific link is getting if it's not already integrated into your website analytics.
In terms of what to actually include in your Lincoln bio, keep it as simple as possible, because confused minds don't buy, and I mean that even for freebies, it's overwhelming for people if they have to make decisions, decision fatigue is real, so I recommend to include your main freebie, your main lead magnet, and that would be visually the lead and it would be visually taking up most real estate or using brighter colors or something to really direct people there.
And then depending on how your funnel is set up, you might also want to have it really explicit how to work with you. So check out my courses, apply for private coaching. That is a personal decision based on your business model. And then in a more low key fashion, you can point people towards other social platforms, especially your longer form, richer content platforms, if you have them.
So the YouTubes and the podcasts and the blogs. And then when you have special marketing campaigns happening and launches happening, you can have a pop up link in bio that has a special link in bio directing them specifically to a live event or that masterclass you're running or something that's there for a limited time only.
And that would be at the sacrifice of let's say more evergreen traffic, but it's all about making it super clean and simple and easy for your person to go to one place and have one destination. So that's also a strategy to keep in mind if you want to up that conversion slightly as well for special periods where you really do just want people going to one place.
Now let's talk about the part of your profile where it shows who you are following. So this is actually another way to teach the algorithm who to push your account to. So ideally you want to avoid following all of your friends and family on this account, unless they happen to be your ideal client. You want to make sure that you are following people who are related to your niche in your niche.
So people who your ideal client might be following, just as a side note, never ever use follow unfollow. It is a seedy tactic. It doesn't work. It's gross. People see straight through it. Just don't do that. Don't follow people and then unfollow them with the idea that the notification of you following them would have them check out your profile and follow you back and then you unfollow them.
No, just Don't do that. That's weird. But you can be following people who, again, yeah, your ideal client might be following people in your niche, competitors, that kind of thing, if that feels okay for you, otherwise don't bother, but accounts related to the kind of work you do and, or the people who you already know are your ideal clients.
And once you start getting clients and students coming through, you want to be following them because then your staff will be recommended to more so people that they interact with and so on and so forth. So again, you don't want to be following your personal friends and family. You don't really want to be using your account to follow celebrities, sports teams, brands, those kinds of things that you're personally interested in, but they don't relate to your niche.
Okay. So you want to make it relatively targeted here. Now, when it comes to your account type, obviously don't even consider a private profile. You just won't be seen, but I would recommend using a business account. So you could have a standard sort of personal account or a creator account, but a business account, we use them for a few reasons.
Firstly, because you can get verified with a business account using Meta verified, which comes with a suite of benefits and features, which I'll speak to in a second. And also it unlocks. Music in a way that other account types don't. So depending on your account type, sometimes you can't access popular songs because of copyright and things like that.
Whereas on the business account, I don't have any issues with that. And it also gives you access to really valuable insights and great analytics about your account and your content, which are really crucial, obviously, for making those data driven decisions about your content strategy. So that's typically what I would recommend.
Now, when it comes to the account settings, There's this sort of subset of your account type, which is the category that you choose. And you need to choose wisely because there are a number of account types that will limit your access to certain features. And this can be including the music and things like that.
So in terms of your account settings, I recommend using either entrepreneur or business consultant as the kind of subcategory, or have a poke around and see if there's something that, that suits you, but you want to make sure that you have full access to copyrighted music for reels and for stories. And I know that with those two subcategories, if I go to create a story, go to put a music sticker on that story and see if you can find really popular songs that are in like the top 20 right now. And if you can't find them, then it means that the category that you've just chosen is going to limit you with certain features.
So just have that in mind. Now you can choose to toggle the category on or off in terms of its public visibility on your profile, and that's a personal choice, and your category can be found in, you go to edit profile category, and then search for the category, and then you get to choose whether or not it appears on your profile or not.
Again, no right or wrong here. And another account setting that I recommend that you get right is enabling the suggestions feature. So this will suggest your profile to people who follow similar accounts. And when they hit follow, usually a row of suggested profiles pops up down the bottom. You actually have to turn this on to make sure that your face, your profile can appear in those suggestions.
So it's not something that is available to update via the Instagram mobile app at the time of recording. So you actually need to open Instagram from a non mobile browser, so your desktop. So essentially you visit your profile, you select the edit profile button, and you scroll to the bottom of the screen and you check that.
The box to enable similar account suggestions. So it says similar account suggestions include your content when recommending similar accounts that people might want to follow and you check yes. So make sure that is toggled on as well. Okay. So those are some important account settings out of the way.
Let's talk about. Underneath your profile, again, this is your shop window. You can see your biotech. You can see your link in bio.
[00:33:24] Utilizing Instagram Highlights
Then you've got underneath those little circles that Instagram highlights. Now your highlight section is a way to extend the life of your Instagram stories, which of course expire after 24 hours.
The ideal set up for your highlights is to bring people through a nurture cycle from brand new follower all the way to engaged follower and hey, maybe even client. So some good highlights to have on there could be about me or my story. So this could be the kind of stories that talk about who you are, what you're about, your mission, your movement, why you do what you do, who you help.
So really nice kind of introduction to your profile. It's also nice to have a behind the scenes highlight if that's relevant for you. So bringing people into your world, sharing behind the scenes snippets of you working with clients or you on set taking photos, if you're a photographer or you developing some new mini course or free content for them and teasing and talking about what's coming up and sharing about a day in your life and all of that kind of stuff.
Anything that's kind of day to day stuff. You working on your thing, you building the thing. That's always a really enjoyable highlight to have other great highlights include things like a testimonials or client wins area, obviously by building that trust and sharing that social proof, make sure whenever a student of yours, whether it's coming through a freebie, a free mini course, whatever it is, or a paid program, if you ever get positive feedback, have the reflex to screenshot it and share it to stories.
And thank people because not only does it encourage other people to do the same, but you can add it to your highlights and have really nice, big, juicy highlights around wins or feedback or testimonials. And obviously that builds mega trust. Okay. FAQs can also be a great highlight to have if you want to share some responses like chatting or just putting text in response to question boxes in terms of frequently asked questions that come up time and time again from beginners in your audience.
Obviously, if you ever do a weekly or monthly Q& A where you put a question box on your stories and you respond to those questions, always really good to save those to your highlights as well. Having some other highlights around your lead magnet or ways of working with you and celebrating how good it feels to go through those free offers of yours or paid offers of yours are always going to be awesome.
And it helps people to understand how they actually work with you and how they can take that next step with you as well. Now, when it comes to the visuals, you can create custom highlight covers over on Canva. They even have an Instagram highlight kind of template bank. If you just search for that on Canva, there are heaps of incredible assets that designers have already created that you can use and put into your brand colors and make your own, but you want to make sure that obviously they are in your brand colors and that's a very Simple graphic.
They are tiny. These little highlight covers. So you want to make sure that it's nothing more complex than maybe an emoji or an icon because anything with a lot of text will get lost. Also in terms of the order in which they show up, they will show up on your profile based on. What's been the most recently updated highlight.
And so if you try to be smart, I've seen people do this and they try to put a letter on each highlight to spell out a word, but if they don't keep them updated in the perfect order, then that gets all jumbled. So just make sure that it is something that doesn't need to Live in a specific order to make visual sense as well.
Now you want to keep them updated and clear them out regularly. If a link no longer works, if you're no longer offering a certain freebie. If your niche evolves slightly, then you might want to, update it. You also want to be sure that you're not necessarily. Saying things that aren't evergreen.
For example, Hey, everyone, there are a thousand more of you in this community. And so if you're at 50, 000 followers, that's super outdated now. So you just want to make sure that you are keeping it nice and evergreen and you don't want your highlights to be a graveyard of old content. You want to keep adding to them, keep it fresh and keep it strategic.
It's always nice for people to see that you've Been around for a while and that you started somewhere. I'm not talking about that. I'm just talking about the fact that you want to make sure that there are moments that strategically tell a story and provide a journey in a story arc. They're not just there because you haven't updated them in ages.
And you can also use pop up highlights for launch periods and special promotions, but the only thing to keep in mind is to take them down whenever that launch period is over. But you could have, yeah, a special pop up highlight at the front that's most recently updated and you're celebrating all your students signing up and you're doing cool things.
And if you want to, you can just take it down once that launch period is all said and done. So yeah, the highlights are really fun. Now.
[00:38:23] Meta Verified: Is It Worth It?
When it comes to your name and the big question of meta verified, is it worth it to have a blue tick beside your name? Is it worth it to be verified? This is my honest opinion.
I have one account that's verified and one account that is not verified. So Badass Careers has, over 190, 000 followers. And I grew up to that point without ever getting a blue tick. I still do not have a blue tick. It is frustrating when there are copycats that come out and they're using your content and it's like bad ass underscore careers dot.
And I'm messaging people about crypto. Of course that is frustrating. However. I had to weigh up the risk of that compared to the benefits of getting the tick. Whereas I have decided to test meta verified for badass empires and put the tick on that account because business coaching is an interesting world and I think that it's more targeted in terms of scams and People trying to swindle people out of money and people using business accounts to create these fake kind of crypto scammers and things like that.
And so I wanted to be verified and I wanted it to be really professional and show that, I was the badass empires in that world. And I was like, Hey, let's give this a go. The thing is with Meta Verified is that it's really expensive. So I pay 50 a month just to have this little blue tick. And what they promise you is that you will have access to Instagram customer service, customer support, which is something that even massive creators do not have if you're not verified.
And they say that you have, your verify badge, impersonation protection, you have access to support, you have better search optimization, and so on and so forth. Look, I had an issue with Badass Empires, so And by the way, this is a really good learning point for you. So I had actually secured a really clean handle.
I had badass. empires. But what I didn't know is that if you don't put a profile picture up and at least something in the text. So I just secured it like two years ago and because I didn't update it or use it in any way, basically they had signaled it as an empty profile and non used profile and cleared it out in a big Instagram clear out.
And so I can't actually. Have that account anymore. It says the account name is taken and that I can't log into it or anything like that. It's I don't have it anymore, but I also can't grab the name anymore. It just won't let me because it's technically taken, but not taken. So anyway, I got my blue tick and I contacted them to ask if I could change my Instagram handle towards that.
That handle because I had secured it previously. It was linked to my hello at badass careers. com email address, which I could prove that I was the owner of badass careers and so on and so forth. So I did contact them trying to figure that out. And very long story short, it was. Such bad support. I honestly, I was like, am I speaking to a chat bot?
Like it was terrible. The issue didn't get resolved. I personally have not seen any boost of reach or any kind of extra perks in terms of more followers and more reach. In fact, my account as a. Of recording this is still like pretty small, it's not getting like exceptional reach at all. Certainly not more reach proportionately compared to badass careers, which is not verified.
And at the end of the day, I feel like it's just a really great money making scheme on their side for the moment anyway. And you don't get much out of it. And in terms of impersonation protection, yeah, people can see that you are the verified one. I get it. But also people can see that you're the verified one through the quality of your content, the freshness of your content, the size of your audience, the way that they can sometimes message you in the DMs and say, Hey, is this you?
Is it a scam? And you're like, Hey, it's a scam. Just please report them. Honestly, I haven't. necessarily seen the perks for meta verified. Like I definitely wouldn't recommend it so far. And it can go up to costing people 500 a month. I don't know, I just feel like it's one of those things that's like for vanity and for ego rather than actually strategic.
So that's how I feel for now. And. Someone might steal your content, impersonate you, try to hack your account. All three have happened to me more than once, and I still don't know if it's worth hundreds of dollars per month to maybe prevent that. You can make sure that you have two factor authentication turned on.
You can block and report copycats, and you can stay focused on your mission and just know that doing a better job and doing a better job at your content and your messaging will get you clients and will get you reach. You don't need. The tech for that. So that's my humble opinion on whether or not to invest in meta verified for now might change.
[00:43:24] Strategic Use of Hashtags
Now, as a bonus tip, I promised that I would talk about hashtags. So as it stands today, so we're about mid 2024 with all of the search optimization in place, all of this account optimization in place, do you still need to use hashtags in your content? So my answer for now is yes, but use them strategically.
You're not going to be maxing out your content pace with hashtags with a big block of hashtags. You're not going to put them in comments and you're not going to go too niche and put the hashtags that no one's looking for. You go for quality over quantity, three to five. Is a sweet spot and go higher level in topic.
So before people used to say your hashtag strategy should be like purpose driven entrepreneurs who love cats, so specific. Obviously I'm being sarcastic, but it was to that level. Now it would be like hashtag entrepreneurship, hashtag digital CEO, hashtag online business, like quite broad, quite vague.
Compare that to careers. It might be hashtag career tips, hashtag career strategy, hashtag job search advice big broad topics. You still want to keep them fresh. You still want to rotate several rotations. You still want to make them specific and pertinent to the content piece that they relate to right now.
There are fewer of them. It's less hardcore in terms of niching down. And it just helps in terms of.
[00:44:45] Conclusion and Call to Action
Global general categories rather than the specificities of pushing your content into specific human beings Which will be more so infused by the keywords now I would love to see your instagram profile updated and all of this advice in action So if you have implemented what we talked about today Send me a dm and I will give you some quick fire feedback on one feature of your choice If you want me to look into your biotechs.
If you want me to look at your name, if you want me to look at your LinkedIn bio, send me a DM and let me know. And I will give you that feedback. So happy action, taking badass, keep making those moves one step at a time to create this empire of yours. And until then, we'll chat next week. Bye. A shit ton of income, crazy impact, a business that you love.
Just by listening to this episode, you are one step closer to your very own badass empire. Now I want to hear from you. Tag me in your stories or send me a Instagram so I can learn what resonated with you most. Oh, and if you're the kind of badass who is willing to help us out big time and take a few minutes to rate and review this podcast, make sure you send us a screenshot of that review at hello at badass empires dot com Transcribed So I can send you a juicy freebie to say, thank you until next time.
Keep showing up for your future and we'll keep smashing goals in the next episode.
