What if you woke up tomorrow and your Instagram account was gone? How would reach your followers, the ones that you spent years growing? We will get into that more in a moment, but first, have you ever taken one of my ? If not, here’s a little history. I first launched them wayyyyy back in the grand old year of 2009, which in online years, is like 1000 BCE. I started them because at that time, I’d been blogging for a little over 3 years and my readers were filling my inbox every week with requests for help – how to set up a blog, how to become successful at it, what platform to use, how to write a blog post, and I was answering them as much as time allowed for it – sometimes until late at night and into the next morning. That’s when I knew I needed to do something with my knowledge and my classes were born.
I’ve been teaching ever since ’09 in many creative ways – through (obviously) my online classes but also in my podcasts, blog posts here on decor8, in-person workshops, lectures, you name it – and most are free – because I truly love to help others and to teach in all formats – it’s a fun challenge and I enjoy it.
However, to earn a living, my online courses have a fee that is lower than their actual value, and I keep them affordable so that people at all financial levels can invest in themselves and in their business by taking a class with me. They are life-changing courses, my students have told me, and no just in words but in deeds as they’ve shown this as they’ve moved on to apply what they’ve learned to launch 6-figure businesses with a blog as their base.
My classes run a few times a year because they take so much out of me – when I’m finished (and exhausted!) I usually need a month to hibernate afterwards! Yet, I come back to teaching every time as it’s a genuine love of mine, I cannot imagine a time when I won’t be teaching in some capacity.
Also, my online classes are taught cohort style so I’m answering questions, checking weekly homework assignments for students, and we “meet” together once a week in a group chat for an hour. These classes give me time to do nothing but teach for 5 weeks with my students so I clear my calendar during these teaching periods to focus only on my class and it truly is an amazing experience every. single. time.
For 2022, I decided to teach a which may seem like an old-school topic but I’m teaching this for a reason. A few things are happening online right now that really, truly, concern me. First, many are drained and are becoming more and more emotionally unwell using Insta. This is a big topic at the moment and I feel like many will return to blogging as a result – still maintaining Instagram but not pouring their heart and soul into it as much. Web 3.0 is coming…
The next concern that I have is how influencers and former bloggers spend every second on Insta. Bloggers have paused blogging to build their businesses on very unstable grounds. Influencers only focus on Insta, many don’t even have a website or blog. We have to be careful to not repeat their mistakes.
For bloggers who started on or before 2014 or so, we know the importance of building something first on a website with a blog (or just a blog) then having a mailing list where we feed our subscribers interesting content on a somewhat regular basis. Regularity is very personal as it means something different for each person – some send weekly newsletters, others bi-weekly, and then there are others who send only one email to their subscriber base a month. We know the importance of owning our mailing list, and our domain and blogs/websites, and marketing through blogs in what today’s influencers may deem “old school” or simply dumb. But the truth is, most of them didn’t start with a blog, so they have no understanding of its value – they just signed up for Instagram and boom! they were off.
But is it wise to grow your entire business on a platform that you don’t pay for, that has no customer service, and that can be blocked or banned or worse, shut down or hacked? On a free platform, you lack control. In order to run a profitable, sustainable small business you have to build it on something solid. If you are a blogger who lost interest in blogging, please reconsider going back to your blog and writing once a week and most urgently, get a mailing list up and running NOW. Don’t wait.
What if you woke up tomorrow morning and your Instagram account was gone? How would reach your followers, the ones that you spent years growing?
I recently had one of my Instagram accounts hacked and I was able to get it back, but the other account was taken down by Instagram a few years ago for supposedly being a spam account and it was never reinstated and I lost thousands of followers overnight. It wasn’t a spam account. I still don’t know what happened.
I have many friends who had similar problems – they were hacked or shut down – they lost their password and couldn’t recover it – someone added them to a follow/unfollow service, they were banned, and they lost 20K, 30K, 100K followers overnight. I love Instagram, it’s a wonderful platform for sharing and finding wonderful new accounts, for making friends, for fast connections and chats, for having fun – I’m 100% not knocking the ‘gram. I cherish my followers there and am always thinking of new ways to make them smile. BUT don’t build your entire business on one platform. Have a blog or better yet, a website with a blog and most importantly, a mailing list. This is how you avoid losing your followers overnight. If many of them are also on your mailing list, then you have nothing to fear.
Another important point I’d like to address before I wrap up is this: I recently conducted a poll with over 15,000 participants and learned that over 88% go to Google and 67% search Pinterest when they need news, information, ideas, tips, and more. In fact, this very blog still has most of it’s traffic daily (87%) coming over from Pinterest and Google with about 3% from Instagram. THREE PERCENT. Millions of people search for information using Pinterest and search engines every second of the day, and from there, most end up on either a website or a blog. They don’t land on your Instagram account! You won’t be found in millions of daily searches on Google if you’re only on Instagram and that is what the new influencers don’t consider and this is what they are missing.
There are so many other reasons to blog, have a mailing list, and use sites like Instagram to grow your mailing list and market your business – that is why I created an entire class around Blogging – my ultimate . I have written an entire page about the course, what you can expect, the fee, etc. so please check it out and join us.
Enrollment will close soon, on April 16th, so please don’t miss out. There are also a few payments options and to make it easier for you, you can take 15% off by using code BLOG15.
– see you in class which runs from April 22 and ends May 27.
Hugs,
Holly
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