How to find paying clients on Instagram

by Dominika Tracy | Oct 27, 2019 | social media, Instagram

How to find paying clients on Instagram

Have you ever tried to explain Instagram to your parents?

I still remember the look of disbelief on my dad’s face when I showed him a site with 2 billion daily users who were genuinely interested in finding out what I had for lunch that day.

Even more surprising – for my dad, and for many of the entrepreneurs I speak to – is how anyone manages to actually make money with this thing.

But it is done. Forget Kylie Jenner cashing in hundreds of thousands for chewing on hair vitamins in a photo. If you want to find out how to find paying clients on Instagram, this is the post for you.

I run a web design and digital marketing agency, Speedbird Media and I find most of my clients on Instagram. Or – more usually, they find me. But more on that later. First, let’s discuss what YOU can do to start booking paying clients as a result of hours of work put into getting that perfect selfie!

How to sell with Instagram

Before anyone, including paying clients or customers can find you and your profile on Instagram, you will have to do quite a lot of work to make it worth their while. This starts with creating really high quality, engaging content, a well written bio and perfecting your nice, cohesive feed. Think of it this way:

A person sees your post, looks at the photo and then decides if they can be bothered to read the caption. If they like the caption, they might click through to your profile
Once on your profile page, they will first skim read your bio. If it looks like you might be the type of brand they’d be interested to hear more from, they will look at the rest of your feed.
Without scrolling down too much, they will see the top 9 of your photos. Based on how those photos look next to one another, they will then make a decision about whether you will make a good addition to their daily scroll or if your photos are going to fill their feed with horrible graphics and blurry photos. That’s a quick decision to make so make sure you make it easy for your potential new follower.

So after all this work – baaam – hopefully you have a new follower.

Unfortunately, this is not where your work ends. All this means is your numbers went up. But numbers don’t mean much if they have no $ signs in front of them. You want those new followers to become paying customers but all you’ve done so far is moved them along the path of Know Like and Trust. You have their attention; you now need to capitalise on that!

It is a tricky balancing act, that most of us get wrong and end up never finding paying clients on Instagram. There’s two ways you can screw this up:

You come across as your followers’ new fun best friend. You post about the parties you’ve been to, your dog and about how you like your caipirinhas. Your followers will be entertained and want to know more but they wouldn’t trust you with their money.
You become the boring professor, always lecturing your followers about what they should be doing and trying to teach them a lesson at every opportunity. They will respect you and perhaps learn from you this way but they will never like you. And if they don’t like you, they are never going to give you any cash.

So, how do you strike the balance between those 2?

Remember that all of your content needs to deliver value – but not all value comes from educating. Yes, sharing knowledge is one of the most important things you will do on Instagram but you can also bring value to your followers by sharing your personal journey, letting them in on your private life, sometimes sharing something strictly for amusement, even if it’s nor really related to what you do.

After you have all of this in place, all you need to do is keep turning up daily and letting your followers see what a wonderful, fun and knowledgeable person you are.

I created a free mini course on how to plan 30 days worth of valuable Instagram content to help you come up with ideas of what to post. Drop your email here and I’ll send it to you!

And this is how you find paying customers on Instagram!

Have you enjoyed this post? Don’t forget to pin it to your Instagram Pinterest board!

I created this free Mini Course for product-based business owners to master creating engaging content for Instagram. Would you like to receive it?

How to get your Facebook page seen more by cutting your reach down

by Dominika Tracy | Sep 26, 2018 | social media

It sounds crazy, right? Getting enough eyeballs on your Facebook posts without paying to boost it, is a struggle enough as it is. Why would you want to limit your reach even further?

Here’s the thing – if you aim all your content at all of your fans, you’ll be lucky to reach maybe 10% of them. But if you tell Facebook which of your fans exactly might be interested in your new post – well, that puts you at an advantage. If you try to please everyone, you’ll end up pleasing no one.

I have found that if I target a post at specific audiences, instead of just publishing to all, I get a much broader reach. Did you know that Facebook gives you the option to target each of your updates according to gender, relationship status, age, interests, education and age? Just this small change is enough to double your reach.

But how do you do that?

While some business pages have this function enabled automatically, most page owners need to activate it manually – and here’s how:

On your Facebook page settings tab click on Audience Optimisation For Posts, it’s just under Reviews.

Once enabled, with every post you publish, you will have the option to optimise the audience. It’s the little compass icon there at the bottom.

What’s really cool (well, for marketers, anyway) is that you can choose to show your post to your audience depending on their interests, but also gender, age or location. So, for example, if your page is dedicated to animal lovers but your post is specifically about cats, you can choose to target cat lovers exclusively – and reach more of them than if you had spread the message across your entire following.

So here’s how you can specify who to show your post to. Select audience by interest…

Or demographics…

It doesn’t always work (because Facebook like to mix things up a little every now and then) but when it does, you’ll see a great boost in your reach. I got best results with location targeting for my posts and was able to reach a lot of my audience without paying a penny for ads!

Hi, I'm Dominika

Add me here: