HOW I POST ON INSTAGRAM STORIES

So I just read an amazing message on Instagram in my direct messages from Bynay, so thank you so much, Bynay, because you have inspired this video and she said, "You're so good at stories. Did you already make a YouTube video on how to be a bad ass storyteller? " So thank you for the compliment, first and foremost, and I have made a video on my little apps that I use for Instagram Stories, my secret little tricks and hacks, which you can watch here.

We'll put the link in the description, but I've never actually made a video on the strategy behind my Instagram Stories and how I come up with the content to be active on it pretty much every day. You guys know, especially if you watch this video on my five minute rule about Instagram that I don't post every single day on my feed. But I do use my stories a lot, and I use them not only to grow my audience, but to interact with my audience because if you watched this video on the Instagram algorithm, you know one of the biggest factors to dominating on Instagram and actually getting seen is building real relationships, so that's a big part of how I create my stories.

So I'm really, really excited to dive into this and show you exactly how I create my Instagram Stories. So I'm going to head over to my office, we're going to go through the whole thing. I'm going to make a story along with you, and I can't wait to see yours, so let's do it.

But first, tea. So how do I make great content on Instagram Stories? Well, definitely very strategic, like I said, so obviously there are times where I'm just posting my story for fun and it is just a great way to sort of show the behind the scenes of your life and your business and what you have going on.

But the interesting thing about how I use stories is I rarely ever post just out of the blue. Whenever I do make any kind of a post, I usually am planning it and I actually sit down and map out the time that I'm going to create that story because I'm a big fan of efficiency. I'm a big fan of blocking my time so I'm making the best use of it and when I want to make a story that's actually going to have an impact on you, I generally will spend time in actually creating it.

So I, like I said, I'm going to walk you through exactly how I create my Instagram story step by step, but I wanted to share a few other tips before we dive in. So the biggest thing for me is that I create what I like to call expert content across social media platforms. And what that stands for is I like to educate my audience, share my experience in what I'm talking about, to show that I'm actually an expert.

I problem solve. So make sure that there is some sort of transformation and a zero to hero journey. And I'm problem solving with my content as well.

It's relevant to my audience because if you're making content that's not relevant to your audience or the people you're trying to attract, then you're not making the right kind of content. And I also always ensure that my content has my audience take action of some kind. So that's my expert acronym for how I create social media content no matter what the platform is.

So for Instagram Stories specifically, if I want to make a really good story and I'm sitting down to do so, there's just a few things that I absolutely make sure that I do. So the first one is I set aside the time to post on Instagram Stories. And like I said, I barely ever do it in the moment because I want them to be an actual story.

I want them to have a beginning, a middle and an end. So it's cohesive and it makes sense to my audience. So I will take imagery and I will post it later.

Like I have a lot of photos that I just take because I go, Oh, that would work well for an Instagram story later. So on my phone I store those photos and curate content that I can then use later. I will also use something called We Heart It, which I'm going to show you in a second, which is an awesome website for beautiful imagery that you can use on your Instagram Stories and then I curate really beautiful visuals just from other accounts from things that I see online and I'll save those things and use them at a later date on my stories and one of my favorite, favorite, favorite apps for Instagram Stories is called Mojo.

I'll show you how to use that in a second when I create my story as well. Now the next thing is, my computer's over here, which is why I'm looking at it. The next thing is I use mixed media, so I think this is a really, really important part of creating good Instagram Stories.

You don't want to just do video or just do texts or just do images. I find that my stories pop more when I have text, image, audio, etc. Because that way I'm kind of differentiating each story that I do to make the audience stop.

Because, you have to think about how people use Instagram stories. They're generally just going tap, tap, tap, tap, tap until they find something that actually pops and grabs their attention to make them stop. So I like to use mixed media, which I'll show you as I create my own story.

And like I said, this video has all of my different sort of hacks and tricks to make my story stand out with all these little Ninja things that you can do, but we're going to show you some of them today as well. The next thing is in order to actually grow my audience through Instagram stories, I recommend using and I always try to use my location so that locally people can pick up my story and my story can get picked up on Instagram for that location and I can get geographic followers. And then also I grow my audience by using the right hashtags on my stories.

Now, you might not even know that you can use hashtags on your stories, but you can. And I made this video on how I post to Instagram and I shared all the hashtag strategies that I use and this amazing, amazing tool called Flick, which I highly recommend and it is the best tool I have found on getting the right hashtags to find your audience. And it's honestly just getting better by the day.

So highly, highly recommend checking that out and checking out this video on how I post Instagram. But that's where I find my hashtags and I take you through that whole strategy in that video for which hashtags I use on Instagram. Now the next thing is I curate.

I curate quotes on Instagram like it's my job. So I don't follow a lot of people on Instagram and it's mainly just to save my own sanity. I only follow accounts that make me feel good.

So when I'm using Instagram and I find things that make me feel good or that spark my curiosity. I will save them on Instagram and I will then use them on my story at a later date. And oftentimes those quotes that I curate are the things that people love the most.

So that's a good little tip as well. When you see something you like that you could use on your own story, save it and use it later. The next thing is I integrate interactive features whenever I can, so I'll do polls.

I'll ask questions because like I said, if you watched this video on the Instagram algorithm, relationships is one of the biggest factors to getting seen on Instagram. So actually building real relationships, talking to people in the DMs, doing interactive polls, answering people's questions, all of those things matter to getting more eyeballs on your content on the platform. So very similar to YouTube videos in the sense that engagement really, really does matter.

Now, also very similar to my YouTube videos is how I actually create my Instagram stories which we're going to do right now. I use what I like to call the hot script formula across platforms, whether I'm doing written content, video content, whatever. And this video explains what the hot script formula is, but it's my formula for creating really solid content that gets people to watch the whole thing through.

So let's do it you guys. Let's create an Instagram story. So the first thing we're going to start with is our hook, because the hook is the most important part of getting people to actually stop and pay attention to your story rather than just tap, tap, tapping right through your story and not paying any attention.

And Instagram stories are so powerful for getting people to actually pay attention because they are a femoral meaning that they disappear after 24 hours. So unless you save them as a highlight. So what we're going to start with here is we're going to start with the hook.

So the hook would be this visual right here that says, "Feel like your Instagram stories suck? " I know that that's something that people do have pain points around and therefore it goes right into my expert content strategy. And I'm going to solve that problem.

Again, goes into the expert content strategy by sharing my expertise and experience. So feel like your Instagram stories suck. I'm going to use that one first and I'm going to post that and then I'm going to use this again and upload it.

See, I've already created these in Instagram stories and then I'm basically now add the pole in for the next part. So yes, and I'm going to go no. And then I'm going to say I'm a pro just in case someone is no, my stories are actually really good and I hope they are.

I'm a pro 100. So I'm going to make those the options and that builds relationships because then people are able to vote. So we're going to share that.

Then the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to use Mojo, which is the app I was talking about to create something that's going to really grab attention. So I'll show you here what it looks like in Mojo. So in Mojo I've already created it.

So if I go back, you can see that you can pick all these different templates and all these different styles of font. And if you go to the very beginning, I just used an image that I pulled up from Google Drve and it's an old photo of me, but it's relevant to this and I just use that as a professional photo. And then I pulled up the font that I wanted to use and I used this template.

So I just simply use the imagery I wanted to use. Let's say it was that one image and then I basically took that and I added the font to it. So I created that inside of Mojo.

So the next thing we're going to do is have this go up. Let's make them pop. So we're going to post that to my story.

And the next thing we're going to do is we're going to go step one, use mixed media. So then we go into a little tutorial. We've already done hook and we did the outcome.

So hook, outcome and then the testimonial you can do if you feel like it. The testimonial basically is like I've already built stories that have been seen by millions of people so that's why I know what I'm talking about. But in this case I'm just going to go right into the tutorial.

So step one, use mixed media. And then the next thing I do is I use this little short clip of me that I've already created. And another little hack here is if you really want your lighting on point all the time, I use the Lumee, which you can see lights up like this and I absolutely am obsessed with it.

So Lumee allows you to have great lighting on front and back, no matter where you are. So I'm not an affiliate for them, but it's a great company and you can grab one below in the link in the description. I'll put that in there.

So then I put in the mixed media. So I have text. I have graphic like moving graphics and I have a video of me explaining.

So then I put that up. And then the next thing I'm going to post is I'm going to post if you really want. .

. So this is basically going to be the call to action. So I've done the hook, the outcome, I've done the steps and then I'm going to do the final thing will be the next step basically in the call to action.

So if you really want to take your stories to new heights, which I used an image from We Heart It, which I talked about. We Heart It is awesome. So We Heart It is this website where if you look up basically anything they have the most beautiful imagery.

So I got this image from We Heart It and I put it onto my story and I added text within Instagram and I go like that. And then I'm going to post this, which I already created. So basically just took a screenshot on YouTube of my video and then I add the video link.

So we'll go like this, go like this. I will add the video link. So copy into here and I just simply grabbed a swipe up GIF or GIF, whatever.

I know people are going to make fun of you for that. And I added it in there. And then the final thing is on each one of these, what you should be doing is you should be adding in, like I said, your location.

So Vancouver, British Columbia, proud Canadian right here. And you can hide it. So if you put on text onto this or say I picked a different swipe up, I can hide that, but it'll still be searchable through Instagram.

And then the next thing you want to do is you want to add a hashtag. So I'm just going to add one in here. But like I said, watch this video on how I picked my hashtag.

So let's just do entrepreneur, which is pretty broad, but we'll just use that as an example. So I wanted to make my stories searchable and discoverable to grow my audience through stories. I would do that and you can just keep the visible, but you can also go like this.

You can use text or you can use. . .

So let's just use that one. And I'd go like that and then it's going to hide if I did it the right way. It's going to hide everything else underneath it.

So it's still discoverable. People can still find you through your hashtags and through your location, but it still makes it look pretty by covering it up with something like that. Or you can cover it up with big block text as well that you can do on Instagram.

So I could just go swipe up, go like that, delete this guy, delete this cover up, and then go like this and this and that. And that creates just to cover up for those things. But they're still going to be discoverable and searchable on Instagram Stories as well.

So, that's how I would do it. That's how I create my Instagram Stories. So that is my start to finish and how I create them using all these different apps and tricks and techniques.

But actually it's pretty simple and the majority of what I do is inside of Instagram itself. So that's how I recommend creating your stories and actually sitting down and using stories to your advantage. Now, the final piece I wanted to share with you is I am a big fan of doing these sort of graphics as well.

So also do like a long form text and I'll do these little graphics to talk about something that's important like goal setting and if I want to really tie together my thoughts, these kinds of graphics work really well because people will screenshot them and share them on their own stories which happened when I was talking about this goal setting exercise they did and I just made this graphic inside of Instagram Stories itself so you can use a lot of the features inside Instagram Stories as well. So, that is my little Instagram Stories tutorial. If you liked this and enjoyed it give it a like, make sure you subscribe and hit the bell to be notified every single time I post a new video and make sure to share this with somebody who could up their Instagram story game.

Now, if you like this, make sure to send me your recommendations for videos as well, because I obviously do actually listen and pay attention, and I love talking to you guys on Instagram, so make sure that you follow me there too. And if you found this helpful, watch this video next on how I post on Instagram and this video on the Instagram algorithm. Thank you guys so much for watching.

I'll see you in the next video. Bye.