Three things I learned this week.
- Instagram is making a huge change to its algorithm.
- The Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, has been making a bunch of Reels and Stories about this. In short, Instagram is redistributing impressions to give creators with low followings a higher chance of having their content seen. More of a meritocracy of content, similar to TikTok.
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- This means now is an even better time to make Reels and posts for IG. My theory is that the algorithm works in waves both for users and for the retention of creators. Some quarters, new creators get more views to increase their follower counts and get them addicted. Other quarters, creators with bigger followings get more views to increase their activity.
- What this means for you: if you don’t have many followers, you have a higher chance of having your content seen on Instagram than before. The algorithm is more accommodating to those who are just starting and learning. Adam Mosseri has said this algorithm update will “meaningfully affect reach.”
- You can put moving Gmail profile pictures to increase open rates for email marketing, cold outreach, and newsletters.
- Nobody does this, so it’s an easy way to stand out.
- This will be most prevalent on the Gmail mobile app, where the default view shows the icons. Gmail has a “53% market share in the United States” and “in the US, 97% of Gmail users access their accounts on mobile devices, while only 3% use a desktop.” Very meaningful.
- To do this, just replace your Google icon (under ‘Manage your Google Account’) with a GIF. Here’s a video I made showing how I created the one I’m currently using.
- Start with the hook.
- I’m always looking for best practices for ideation. You could spend the same time, money, and effort on two pieces of content. Typically, the one that performs better is the one that is more thoughtfully ideated.
- I make videos daily. On Thursday, I said to myself, “I’m going to sit down and brainstorm hooks, not subject matter. Just the most engaging hooks I can think of.”
- I ended up only writing one hook. The first hook I came up with got me inspired. I wrote the whole script immediately after coming up with that hook. The video made from that script took me 12 minutes to shoot and 30 minutes to edit. The video just surpassed 250K views and keeps going. It’s also made a bunch of affiliate sales on a product that gives me 40% commission. It’s a product I was going to recommend anyway (I’m a testimonial on its landing page), but since they have an affiliate program, I just used my affiliate link.
The video just surpassed 250,000 views on TikTok. I’m sharing the Instagram mirror as TikTok is not available in all countries.
- Quick side note: If you make videos and want to recommend longer links, here’s what I do. I buy short, memorable domains and redirect them to the longer links. This way, I can say this memorable domain on a video, and then it redirects to the link that is too long for people to remember directly.
- As an example, the backlink tool I recommend is BoostBenchmark.com. That URL redirects to my longer affiliate link.
Hope this all was useful. Thanks for reading.
