Growing A Loyal Instagram Following with Tyler J McCall

Your Dream Business

English - November 19, 2018 00:48 - 48 minutes - 88.5 MB - ★★★★★ - 34 ratings
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Previous Episode: Achieving Your Goals with a Vision Board (and What’s On Mine!)

Next Episode: 20 Tried and Tested Tools That Will Help You Achieve Social Media Marketing Success

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCASTIt's okay to be the person that has all the ideas, but who struggles to put them into fruition. It’s okay to be good at carrying out ideas, but awful at coming up with them. It’s okay to stop doing things you don’t want to do.Instagram is the most engaging social media platform as the app makes it easy for people to interact and engage with you easily. The swipe up feature on Instagram stories isn’t as people think it is it is not a traffic driving platform. This means it’s better to focus all your interaction, content and engagement within the app itself.Growing your following on Instagram takes completely clarity other who you want to follow you. Once you know who you want as a follower, you’ll know what content you need to post.It’s important to engage more than you post. This includes engaging with people in the discover tag and engaging with them – almost like a virtual tap to say, ‘I’m here!’.When using Instagram Stories, it’s important that your stories have a beginning, middle and end.Often the pictures that generate the most engagement are the pictures that feature you and although it may seem scary to share yourself on your feed, it gets easier the more you do it.
THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…Above all else, it’s better to have 500 followers that engage with you and care about what you post, rather than 10,000 followers that don’t want to follow you at all.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISSIntroducing Tyler and his story – 03:40Don’t overwork yourself – 15:05Tyler’s start on Instagram – 19:20Growing your Instagram following - 22:30Success with Instagram Stories – 28:00Creating amazing Instagram content – 31:30
LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODETyler J McCall’s Instagram Tyler J McCalls’s Membership
Transcript below

Hello, and a super warm welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. As always, I am your host, Teresa Heath-Wareing. I hope you've had a great week, and it's been super productive. After my last week's episode, it was all about driving forward and trying to take action. I'm really interested to hear from some of you who have mentioned the sorts of things that you have done to drive your business forward. Super excited about that. If you haven't yet let me know, then please come and find me. I'm mostly around Instagram a lot, but on all the platforms. Come and connect, and tell me how you're getting on, and what your big amazing plans are for the rest of the year.

Today's episode I am interviewing the super lovely, Tyler J. McCall. If you've not heard of him, he is an Instagram and Social Media Marketing Strategist Coach for creatives and online business owners. He teaches students how to use Instagram with intention, to grow their community online, and grow their business. Tyler focuses on using Instagram and social media to tell stories, build relationships, and convert followers to fans. Drawing from his 10 years experience in non-profit marketing, and management of a community organisation, he's taught thousands of entrepreneurs and managed dozens of Instagram accounts since getting into the online marketing game back in 2015. Tyler is based over in Chicago, and lives with his partner Eric.

Today's episode is a really good one. We had such a great chat. He has a great story to tell. Some really big things happened in his life, and quite sad things that made him reassess where he was with his business. Overnight, he fired all his clients. As I have a business or part of the business that has clients, boy could I understand how terrifying that would be. But anyway, his story is so good he fired his clients, and he started the online membership that he now has today. How his business has grown has been phenomenal.

He also then shared with us some great tips about Instagram. He walked us through why he thinks businesses should look at it. If you're not on it, or you're not using it for business, then definitely take a listen to this one 'cause I think he'll change your mind. He then talked about how he uses his Instagram, how he gets more followers. That was a really good conversation because followers is something that people always struggle with, so he gave us some great tips about how to get more followers. Then he talked about how he uses Instagram Stories, which again, has been some different conversations to the ones I've had in the past. Some really, really good advice and story from such a nice guy today.

I'm really hoping you're gonna enjoy this one. What I want you to do is once you've listened to it, I want you to do an Insta Story, 'cause I want to see that you're putting this stuff into practise, and make sure that you tag both myself and Tyler J. McCall in, and basically tell us what you thought, and tell us what you liked about it. We'd love to hear. Anyway, I'm not gonna go on any longer. I'm gonna jump straight in. Here's the interview with Tyler J. McCall.

Introducing Tyler and his story

I am so excited and have the absolute pleasure of introducing Tyler to this week's episode of the podcast. Welcome, Tyler.

Oh my gosh, Teresa. Thank you for having me.

No, thank you so much for joining me. This is a really apt time to have you on because we've just been chatting before we came on, saying that I've just been out to the states to do Business By Design, and you were a Business By Design student. That's how I found out about you. It's really exciting, that all this has happened at this point. It's great.

I love it.

Tyler, I've been following you on Instagram. I love watching your Insta Stories. They're very entertaining. I have recently had the pleasure of listening to your story, and how you got to where you are today, which is a phenomenal story. For the likes of us who are maybe not right at the start of our journey, but working towards trying to get somewhere amazing, you are a great example of what's to come. I'd love it if you could share with my audience just a bit about how you got started, and then how you got to where you are today.

Yeah, of course. I got my start after college, in the non-profit world. That was the thing that I studied in school, that's the thing that I wanted to do. I went to work in the YMCA right after college. The YMCA's different all over the world. Here in the states, the YMCA is typically gym, and swim, a child care, those types of organisations. That's what I did right after college, I went to work for the YMCA, managing an office, ordering toner for the copier, making sure we had enough staples and stuff.

The important ...

The important things. Yes.

But over time in the YMCA, I was able to work my way up, and working in the membership world, and started doing more marketing, and running the Facebook page for this thing, or helping out with Twitter here. Eventually I spent about six years in the YMCA, and the membership, and marketing, and operations world. All my time there was really about relationships with people, relationships with members, and donors, and volunteers, and communicating the Y's mission to other people.

Toward the end of my time at the YMCA, I started getting antsy, because my personality, I'm the type of person that loves to start things. I have huge ideas. I'm a visionary and thinking about the next big thing, but the follow-through is not where I'm skilled.

I love your honestly.

Right? It's cool being in my business now where I can say, "You could just hire people to do the follow-through." That's a really great thing to think about, accomplishing business.

I started getting antsy toward the end of my time at the YMCA, and I started a business making a handmade product. I made a room and linen spray using essential oils. I was just selling it at trunk fairs, selling it to my friends, my dad loved it. Every day he was like, "Do you some more of that spray? Can I get some more of that spray?" He was my favourite customer. But spoiler alert, you can't really build a business as your dad as your best customer. But he loved it.

I started sharing about it on Instagram. I had built these relationships with influencers, and bloggers, and home décor folks on the platform. Oh gosh, this was like four years ago, before really any of the idea of an influencer was really a thing on Instagram. I had all these relationships with incredible people on the platform, tens and hundreds of thousands of followers. I introduced my handmade product, and I just started messaging them and saying, "Hey, I made this thing. I'd love to send you some for you to try it out. Just let me know what you think." The all said, "Yes." I was like, "Oh, okay. I'm onto something here. Real relationships with real people." They all tried it, they all loved it, thankfully. Or at least they told me. Who's knows if they really did.

They could have hated it.

I know, right? Then so many of them bought it, and then so many of them shared, promoted it on their platform. I was like, "There's something here. There's something to this, having real conversations with real people."

Toward the end of my time in the YMCA, I started freelancing, and managing other peoples' Instagram accounts, working with local businesses, creating content for them, managing their accounts, growing their followings, doing all of that. Eventually I was able to leave my full-time job and do that full-time, so doing social media management. That's what I did for about a year and a half. Then I reached this pivotal point in my business where I was working a lot. Like a lot, a lot, a lot. But I didn't really have much to show for it in terms of money, which was this measure of whether or not this was working. My time was stretched pretty thin.

While all this was happening, I was working a tonne, managing accounts, coaching people, writing social media strategy, my dad got sick. He had this weird thing happen with his back. We found out it was something much larger than that. He had to have major surgery. All this went on for months and months, and then at the end of June 2017 ... We're in 2018 now. You reach a point where you can't remember what year it is.

I have no idea what day it is, let alone year.

No idea. No idea, #entrepreneurproblems. End of June 2017, my dad passed away very suddenly.

Aw, that's so sad.

Thank you. It changed everything in my life, and my business. I had this wake up call in my business that I was not running a business that was the kind of business I wanted to run. It was taking up too much of my life, and I wanted more freedom, I wanted more space, I wanted more time.

This is a very short and sweet story. It gets very long and drawn out. I apologise for the length of the story. This is the short version. What ended up happening at the end of 2017 is I actually did that big scary thing that so many times, so many of want to do but we never do. That is, I fired all of my clients. I stopped taking on the work that was draining me. I burned all those bridges in my business and started brand new, with a brand new product, which is an online membership community. Which is what I do now, educate entrepreneurs on how to market online using Instagram. That was a little over a year ago. Everything has changed in my life and my business. I used what I learned in Business By Design, and how to create a leveraged offer, how to get an alignment with my offer, how to get that offer out to the world, to my audience, how to launch, and then have gone on from there.

I love sharing my story because I think there are a few key things that are really valuable for people. I think the first thing is the realisation that it's okay to be really good at certain things. It's okay to be really good at starting things, and having ideas, but struggle with the follow-through. It's also okay to be really incredible at following through and getting things done, but having trouble with coming up with ideas or solutions to problems. Both of those things are totally okay. It's okay to build a business with those in mind as well. It's also okay to stop doing shit that you don't want to do anymore. It's okay to do that, that you should do that. It's okay, yeah. Yeah.

[inaudible 00:11:14]. I think it's so interesting because actually one thing that strikes you when you start your own business is you've got to do all these things that you never knew how to do. The thing that you know how to do and that you're good at, is only a part of what you do every day. Like you said, there's all these other things. I'm a little bit like you in that sense that I love coming up with ideas. But if I'm always the holder, like I'm the one who takes forever to do them, so I don't finish as well as I should. I think sometimes we think to ourselves, "We've got to be brilliant at this." But actually, why? Why do we need to be brilliant at it?

I love your story. I love the fact that you started your life working, which actually is interesting. 'Cause when I hear so many other entrepreneurs' stories, they're always a case of, "Yeah, I did it. From a child, I remember trying to start my own business." I never did. I literally started four or five years ago. It was interesting to go from that transition, then to literally fire all your clients. Obviously I love my clients, but I can't tell you how you must have felt. That must have been crazy good, but terrifying at the same time.

So terrifying. So terrifying. But so necessary.

One thing I realised about myself is when I left my non-profit job and went to work for myself full-time, I did all the things that you're supposed to do. I saved money, we had paid off all of our credit cards, we had all this space, we were able to pay our bills for six months of I can't get a single client, we would be totally fine. Which is smart. You should do those things.

What I found for myself is that it made me very lazy, and that I had too much of a cushion. I didn't have enough of that pain or anxiety to do the dang thing. When it was time to transition to my business, I was like, "I'm not gonna do that same thing again," because what I knew myself and what I would do is I would just drag this out and keep making it easy for me, and then never give my full attention to the thing that needed my full attention. I was like, "Okay, this is happening."

This is also at the same time, we moved to Chicago at the same, from North Carolina. All the things were happening. I'll be honest, we got here, we paid our first month's rent and we were broke. We were out of money. I didn't know what we were gonna do next. Fortunately we had launched this thing that's worked really well since then, but for me, I needed that pressure to actually see the results that I ended up getting.

That's so funny because I totally agree with you. I started my business, I had no savings and my husband had just left me. I had got a daughter to look after, and a house to keep paying. I literally had one month's salary, that was it. Like we said, you don't have a choice, you've got to do it. Whereas I would be the same, and I'm almost ...

The new part of my business that I'm trying to transition into is actually going slower because of the fact that I've still got money coming in from clients, and I have a business. Like you said, that pain isn't there, that fear, or panic, or, "Oh my God, I've got to do this." Sometimes I think you need that to actually get your backside moving, don't you?

Yeah. Yeah.

'Cause otherwise we're just like, "Oh, we're okay."

Maybe not every one needs that, but Teresa and I need that.

Yeah, [inaudible 00:14:42]. Maybe I should fire [inaudible 00:14:43].

We want to start stuff and not finish it, and we need to not know where I our next meal is coming from so we can actually do the work.

Basically put ourselves through sheer panic all the time, and our businesses will be amazing.

Yeah, just see what we can create.

Maybe I should take a leaf out of your book. I should just fire all my clients tomorrow. My husband would have a heart attack. [inaudible 00:15:02].

Don’t overwork yourself

Also, I remember you saying, when you read your story to me 'cause I like to listen to things. When you talked about your story, one thing that really hit home for me, actually, about the whole working so hard, and at the point where your dad was in hospital, and at this point you didn't know it was gonna end the way it did, did you?

No.

He was getting better.

Yeah.

You were in hospital, and I remember you saying that you sat there working. He was like, "That's fine, you've got work to do. That's okay. Carry on." But I just think back to all those times where my husband and I have just been in Laguna Beach, and I was at the conference, then I spent Saturday working on my laptop, in a bar. It's not the worst place in the world to be, but I'm still doing work. Then my daughter would come home and mummy, terrible mum girl, where I take her up to bed and she's like, "Will you stay with me for a bit?" It's like, "I will, but I've got to go downstairs. I've got to finish that thing." I totally ...

When you said that, I just thought, "Oh wow." That for me was not a surprise that you went, "I can't carry on like this. I can't do ..."

Yeah, yeah. That was the last time that I spent time with my dad. I was on my laptop the whole time, sitting in this hospital room, after he had had this major spinal cord surgery. Of course, he was like, "That's fine." He loved the fact that I was an entrepreneur. He loved the fact that I had my own business. Every time I did a launch or anything, he wanted to know all the details 'cause he was so excited for me. Even when my business transitioned, I wasn't taking clients as much anymore, he was always sending me, "I talked to a random delivery guy that sells this thing at work today, and they need help on Facebook." Connecting me with people. I'm like, "I don't do that, but okay cool. Thank you, Dad."

Thank you, Dad.

Yeah. But that was the last time I got to spend with him, and in person. I was working. That's not the kind of life I wanted.

You know, you couldn't have known, could you? But like you said, it just makes you go, "Oh man, do I want to feel that I'm pinned down to this?" Again, we were just saying before the call, that one of the things that James Redmore talks about all the time is the less you work, basically, the more you earn. Which is not a concept that I'm sure most of the listeners to this podcast are familiar with, 'cause it's drummed into us as children, or from our parents, or from the world that if you want to earn money, you work really hard.

How amazing to get that revelation of, actually this is the best year you've ever had. This year is gonna be the best you've ever had.

Oh yeah. I mean financially in the business, yes. It's a game changer.

Actually considering what you did before to what you do now, it must just feel like a dream.

It does. Something else that I think a lot too, and I share with folks is ... I mean, the money is incredible, having a leveraged offer like a course or a membership, group coaching. The ability to bring in revenue and income just increases exponentially. But for me too, it's the realisation that my...