Every single day, when people search something that they want to wear, something they want to buy, or a place they want to travel to, they’re gonna be able to see your post, and see your page, and see your products every single day. I’m super excited to be here. It’s my first talk ever in Asia. But I’m excited to teach you guys how to elevate your brand presence, get you guys seen, get you guys known all over the place on Instagram.
Before I get started, I actually just want to tell you a little bit about myself, where I came from. I was actually born in South Korea and then adopted by my parents in the States. I grew up in this place called Iowa. Does anyone know where that is? And so you know growing up for me was hard, why? Because one, I look different and two, I spoke different. I had this speech impediment. I couldn’t say the letter R until I was in my 20s.
And I know that it sounds kind of weird and stuff but I remember going to speech therapy classes that I hated going to, told the speech therapist that I was you know gonna quit. And she’s like, Zach if you quit, no one will be able to understand you, you probably won’t amount to much, and you’ll never be able to say the letter R in your whole life.
And I was like 7 years old when I heard that and I literally just never talked. I never participated in class, had a 1.6 GPA in middle school. I always getting in fights and in trouble, and so my parents thought I was going to become a juvenile delinquent, and so life wasn’t looking too good for me until I found dance. And dance became my super power, became my passion, became something I was really good at . And I started practicing and practicing and practicing, you know working and working and working. Eventually I started traveling the world, eventually started winning competitions. Eventually I made it on to So You Think You Can Dance. Who’s heard of that show? Awesome. And so that kind of kick-started my career and I taught dance all over the world, and towards the end of my career I was making $1,000 an hour just teaching workshops, which is pretty sweet. But you’re like, dude how did you do that? I figured if I taught three different age groups, three different studios every single week, $50 per student, I’d be able to make six figures.
And so I was living life, I was making a lot of money doing something I loved, until I injured my back in India, which ended my career. And so I was rushed to the hospital. I remember the doctor coming in saying, you know I don’t think you’ll ever be able to dance again. You’re gonna have to have surgery. And so I had two surgeries, my discs on my back all fused together, and with no plan B, I didn’t know what I was gonna do.
And so the same friend who got me into dancing called me up and was like, Zach you like you got to get in on this Instagram stuff, like me and my brother are making a ton of money growing people’s accounts. And so with my last $10,000, I invested in an Instagram account with him. I owned about 10% of that account. And we basically just shouted out other people’s accounts until they got their followers and you know rinsed and repeated the process. Fast forward today, we have a 220 million network on Instagram. We’re growing some of the biggest brands in the world like Ritz Carlton is a client, Robert Kiyosaki, Russell Brunson, all of those guys. Life has really changed but I’m excited to teach you guys how to growth hack your Instagram accounts to get you thousands of followers per month, and also how we’re monetising it.
Alright so as you guys can see, these are some of our accounts inside analytics. We specialise in making things go viral right. This post got over 20 million impressions, over 14 million views, and so we really know how to make things go viral. So I’m going to teach you guys the exact strategies that we use to grow some of our accounts and our clients’ accounts. These are the three secrets I’m going to be teaching you guys today okay. I’m going to be teaching about Instagram SEO, teaching you how to rank for different keywords that people are searching for.
I’m going to teach you guys how to research hashtags the right way so that you can rank at the top posts. And I’m also going to teach you how to use engagement groups so that you can get your content seen and in front of the right people. I know you guys are like super smart in here, but like the tension shift just from Facebook to Instagram is moving faster than ever before right, with the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica stuff, the data leaks, you know Instagram is just killing it.
Like medium organic reach-wise, impressions-wise, Instagram is beating Facebook. Of course they’re owned by the same company right, but there’s a lot of organic opportunity here on Instagram. There’s over 48.8% of brands use it, over 1.2 billion active users using Instagram every single day, 700,000 using Instagram Story. So if you have 10,000 followers on your account, you can do an Instagram Story swipe up right. You can send traffic, you can drive traffic to a website, or anything that you’re trying to promote or sell when you have 10,000 followers and a business account. You know Instagram influencer marketing is like a 10 billion dollar industry right.
More brands are pouring a lot of money into working with influencers like The Rock or Conor McGregor, some of these super mega stars, that even like people who are just starting out that are micro-influencers that have a really engaged following. This is how you make a lot of sales on Instagram. Enough about that. I want to kind of like dive right into the the secrets okay. Step number one, this is one of our fashion/makeup/beauty accounts okay It’s called Glamour Ideal. This one video got almost a million views. This is a repost account. Basically what we’re doing is reposting other people’s viral content onto that page, giving them credit, and then using the strategies that I’m going to teach you guys today, making it go viral right. And so we do a lot of like promos on this account.
The secret and secret number one is actually ranking for different keywords that people are searching for. Instagram has over a billion active users right, we’re ranking on the first and second page for these keywords, so think of Instagram as the new Google. Basically when people type in glamour, they type in beauty, they type in make up, our page is actually showing up first, which is driving a ton of traffic to our page, and that’s how we’re making so many sales and monetising this page so well. This is one of my, this is my personal accounts called, zachvacay. I’m always like another country, another culture every single week. I’m always traveling so this one’s all about travel. Travel and nature and life stuff right.
And so as you can see, we’re ranking at the top for these keywords as well. It’s a super powerful trick. Now I want to kind of describe the trick. Let’s go back to this page glamorideal. Everybody has a username right? This account is called glamorideal, this is the name. But then under the username, you have the name right. When you edit your profile instead of putting the same username twice, you can actually rank for like two to three different keywords related to your page. This page is all about glam or makeup beauty tutorials, and so we wanted to show up for those words. Is this making sense? All you have to do is like simply go into your your Instagram app, edit profile, write two or three different keywords that are related to your page, and you guys are going to start ranking at the top for these keywords, which just going to help you guys drive more sales for the products that you’re trying to sell. This is just another example.
You know it could be maybe like a fitness supplement that you’re trying to sell or a beauty product or anti-aging or Keto health shake. You know the list goes on and on. Think about the different types of contents that you post and the different keywords that you want to rank for. The next step that I’m going to be teaching guys is about hashtags okay. There’s a lot of misinformation about hashtags. People are using the hashtags that are super generic like super basic that have hundreds of millions of posts on them right. If you open up your Instagram app and you type in the hashtag travel or motivation or beauty or fashion or fitness, these hashtags have hundreds of millions of posts on them. The likelihood of you actually showing up for that hashtag are like zero right, especially if you’re just starting out, you only have a couple thousand followers, maybe like 50 to 100 likes per post.
The likelihood of you actually ranking for fashion or fitness supplement is super slim to none. I recommend that you guys start off with a super generic basic hashtag. You type that in and Instagram is going to show you all the different hashtags that are related to that basic one. For example, travel. I typed in travel. You can kind of scroll left and right and up and down and Instagram is going to show you all of the related hashtags to that, make it hashtag travel right. And so I found a couple like travel and explore and travel there next. These have 100,000, 120,000 posts on them. And so what you want to do is you guys want to use hashtags that have smaller number of posts on them, so I recommend creating multiple sets of hashtags, using hashtags that have between maybe 10 to 25,000 posts, 25 to 50,000, 50 to 100,000, 100 to 200,000 posts right.
And so what you’re going to do is create multiple sets of around 20 to 25 different hashtags, and you’re going to rotate these hashtag sets throughout the week to see which ones perform the best. And as you’re rotating hashtags and using these different hashtags that have different number of posts on them, you’re gonna start to be able to rank for the top nine posts in that given hashtag, which is super powerful. Every single day when people search something that they want to wear, something they want to buy, or place they want to travel to, they’re gonna be able to see your post, and see your page, and see your products every single day right. And so it takes multiple exposures before somebody actually buys something right. We’re creating multiple touchpoints right here to get the user seeing your page, familiar with your content, giving value, and then creating trust for your type of content you post, which will lead to more sales. step number three, so now that we’ve talked about SEO hashtags. The next thing I want to talk about are engagement groups.
Now who’s heard of an engagement group or a comment pile? Okay a few of you. So you know Instagram and Facebook they make money with ads right, so they have to promote, they have the boost button right. But I see a lot of people doing that and it’s money down the drain if you don’t know how to really run ads. I’m going to teach you guys how to get to your content seen in a free inexpensive way. And so this is one of our engagement group accounts. We’re in hundreds of these engagement groups. Think of an engagement group of you and 14 other people liking and commenting on each other’s posts throughout the day, and what happens is when you get enough engagement in a short window of time, it creates this algorithm effect right, and it boosts you onto the explore page. The explore page is like your homepage.
As soon as you open up Instagram, Instagram shows you what they think you’re interested in based off of people that you like, stuff that you comment on, different things that you search for. It kind of categorises your feed right. And so the goal is to actually hit that explore page and once you do, you have viral potential right. Just from a single post being on the explore page, could gain you thousands of followers and thousands of dollars in sales. I want to break down the exact strategy that we used when we didn’t have a lot of followers. When I was just first starting out, what we did is we reached out to really big accounts that had hundreds of thousands to millions of followers. We DM them, we sent them a direct message, we sent them an email, we said, hey I love your content. I see that you’re in a bunch of engagement groups. And you know word on the street is engagement groups are where it’s at, that’s how everybody is growing. And I said, for each engagement group that you can get me into, I’d be willing to pay you like $5.
What I realised is a lot of these big accounts that had millions of followers were like teenagers, like kids, you know 15, 16, 17 years old. And so to them making a quick 50 bucks was cool. They’re like, oh sweet I’ll put you in all my groups. We just kind of did that over and over again and that’s how we built such an incredible network. This strategy still works today. Think about the types of products, the types of things that you want to sell, the types of accounts that you want inside of your group, you can either pay your way in or you can be the creator right. You can take initiative, you can reach out to accounts that maybe have 20,000 followers.
You could DM them and say, hey I’m organising a group of accounts that have 20,000 followers plus. You guys qualify. Would you like to join my group? And by simply you taking the time and energy and putting in the effort to create and organise these groups, you’re going to get all of these people that are wanting to come in and join the group. And as you get into more and more groups, you start using these groups to boost your posts, you all have a chance to hit the explore page, which is going to help you guys get more leads, exposure, and sales for your pages.
Now in order for this to work, you have to be in a lot of these groups right? I recommend being in around 40 to 50 of these groups, even more every single day. I recommend hiring a VA or an assistant or somebody, who can just be grinding on your account every single day. There used to be ways where all this stuff was totally automated. You know people had automated groups, and automated like and comment groups, and pods, and all sorts of stuff.
Follow, unfollow, all that stuff is shut down. Now because Instagram’s algorithms are too smart. They can detect automation. Anybody who’s using automation, any scheduling tools, any follow and unfollow, any bots, any things that just automise stuff right. Automation. You’re gonna get shut down, you’re gonna get your account banned, and Instagram actually downgrades your accounts. It decreases your exposure. It’s going to be really hard for you to gain followers and get sales for your stuff. I recommend doing all of this stuff manually.
And as you do this manually, you’re using Instagram stories, doing the engagement groups. Instagram is going to reward you with bonus points to increase your health score, so it’s going to be better for your account and it’s gonna help you guys get more growth. We have a few minutes and I just want to talk about different ways that we’re like leveraging accounts and also getting some really cool free 5-star hotels. Who here loves travel? Who here loves 5-star luxurious hotels? Awesome, me too. I do this for a living. I’m going to teach you guys the exact strategies that we use to use Instagram to connect with really big celebrities, A-listers, and also get free travel, and how you can use this to get celebrities and influencers to promote your products and your pages for free. It’s all about creating a win-win, a mutually beneficial relationship.
I’m going to teach you how to do this even if you don’t have a lot of followers or you don’t have a big network. And you for the travel stuff, if you don’t use miles and points let me teach you how to do that right now. And this is just a fun bonus then we can get to a Q&A. But these are some screenshots of just our recent hotel stay in the Maldives. As you can see, it’s two nights complimentary for five people, three rooms, full board basis, breakfast, lunch, dinner, the whole works, everything paid for, all because of Instagram. This was another one. This one was a $23,000 a night hotel.
It’s called Soneva Jani. It’s four bedrooms, I had my own like slide. I woke up in the morning, took a selfie I was like, yo like this is how I wake up in the morning. Slid down the slide into the water. I had a moonroof so at night, a telescope came down so I could see the stars. It was crazy. It’s nuts. And then this is another hotel that I got for like 125 nights. This was our first collaboration where I got three nights in a presidential suite, and then I worked out a deal and I sealed a deal for 125 complementary nights for free, all using this exact strategy that I’m gonna teach you guys. You want to write this down but you know usually when I reach out to these hotels, the subject line is idea right. When you’re thinking about trying to collaborate with influencers and celebrities to promote your products, I always start with the subject line, idea. And inside of the text I say, you know I introduce myself, I say, hey I’m Zach.
I’m an Instagram influencer. I’m the founder of Assistagram, an Instagram growth management agency. We’d love to come to your hotel in exchange for X. I say, hey we’re looking at these dates, if you can put us in your best available suite, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Spa treatments would be nice. You know we can do the following. And so the value stack is, and then I list all of my accounts. This is very important because if you guys are starting out and you only have like a few hundred followers and you want to collaborate with really big celebrities to promote your products and promote your brands, you have to figure out a way to create a win-win right.
Some of these influencers will just simply post about you for free products, other people will charge you money. What I’m doing with this hotel thing is I’m listing all of my accounts, some accounts that I own, some accounts that are in my engagement groups. So by you guys spending a little bit of money, getting inside some of these engagement groups, paying may be $5 per engagement group. You can start to create some really big relationships with big influencers and really big accounts, and you can leverage these accounts and use these accounts to promote different things that you’re trying to get. And so as far as free travel goes, so I list all my accounts, the value stack that I give is two positive Instagram posts, we’re gonna do video, photography. I hire somebody local pay them $25 an hour, their local rate like in Thailand or Bora Bora or Fiji, and so I get all the content that I can use for my personal brand, give to the hotel, and then post on my pages.
Some of these pages I own, some of these pages I don’t own. I reached out to these pages that have like three million followers and I asked them how much do you charge for a post? Some of these accounts that had 3 million followers on them, only charged me a hundred bucks and I could do a permanent post. And that’s because I created a relationship with them. They’re in my engagement group, I helped them with some other stuff and so they only charged me $100 for a post on their 3 million follower page. I’ve used that page to get like all this free travel, like 600 and something complimentary nights at some of the world’s best hotels. It was all through this exact strategy. When you guys are reaching out to different celebrities and influencers, you have to figure out a win-win and be creative. Maybe it’s money, maybe it’s free product, and I always recommend trying to sweeten up the deal.
And so you have to think like influencers, like we’re influencers, we’re like creative, so if you can just make it super simple and say, hey for each sale that you get I’m going to give you like this exact dollar amount, like I’m going to give you $10 to $15. I mean that makes more sense than like a percentage. This is the exact strategy that I’m using to connect with. I’ve connected with The Rock, connected with Jay-Z, Beyonce, like all of these famous celebrities, using these free travel thing.
I basically use this, I get them free travel at some of these worlds’ like most luxurious resorts. Get them 30 nights in the Maldives, 30 nights in Bora Bora and I say, hey like this is just something I do, this is what I do for tourism boards and countries, would you like to come on a trip? It’s creating value and it’s a win in their eyes because it’s an extreme value, they want to go on a vacation. And after they go on the vacation, I build the relationship up some more, and then I do an ask. That’s how I’m getting some of these really famous celebrities to promote my friends and some of our products. But I want to save the last few minutes that we have for some Q&A. I hope you guys got some value in that presentation. I’m gonna open it up into Q&A if you have any questions. Let’s go ahead and give it up for Zach Benson real quick. Awesome.
Let’s go and do some Q&A. Let’s see some hands. Do we have some microphones we can throw around? Okay we got one here very good. Go ahead. Firstly, thank you for a great presentation. I own a 50k dog-related account on Instagram, and I want to slowly introduce a dog vitamin product, so what would be the best way to approach it? I don’t want to be too aggressive. I want to be slow and persistent and deliver best quality. What kind of account do you have? It’s dogs, dogs-related accounts, like about dogs about breeds of dogs. So your question is just how you can grow that? No, I want to introduce a product, dog vitamin product, a supplement. And I want to slowly promote it to my audience. I don’t want to be too aggressive. I want to be like slow. That’s a good question. I usually recommend doing like a one time a week doing a call to action, like actually on the Instagram wall directing them to the link in the bio, and then also using like your highlights and Instagram stories to promote your products.
I recommend doing at least once a week, not more than four. Okay thanks. Awesome. Who else has a question? I think I saw a hand over here, perfect. Hi, my question is if you’re starting from absolute zero, how do you start from absolute zero? Do you buy some followers to start and kind of have that base, or are these strategies going to work from say coming up with an idea today and running with it? The strategies that I taught you guys today are the viral repost strategies so basically for example, he has like a dog pet account, so there’s so much pet animal videos on Instagram.
What I recommend is taking the most viral ones, the most viral videos, pictures, reposting them on your wall, giving them credit, and using these strategies that I taught you guys today to grow your account. You have to begin with the end in mind. Think, who do you really want to reach? You could use the viral repost strategy. I never recommend buying followers. I never recommend using any automation, it’s just bad right.
But that’s what my company does, we just grow accounts through shoutouts so we pair you up with influencers, celebrities, and that’s how we grow. I don’t recommend any buying of followers. So it would be a shoutout that you would use to kick start it? I recommend using shout- outs, reaching out to other micro- influencers, influencers, offering them free products, offering them money, and getting like a whole army of them to shout you out and promote you. That’s going to create you guys some user-generated content that you can post on your page and also grow your page. Very good, thank you.
Great question. Who else has a question? We got a couple over here. Okay one here, and then one over there. Hi, do you have companies selling Instagram accounts having a couple thousand of followers in different niches? Is it worth to buy these accounts or what do you suggest, we should start new accounts with zero followers? There’s marketplaces that you can actually buy accounts, so I recommend that you can use some of these repost accounts or these fan pages or hub pages to drive traffic to your main page. I always feel like it’s best to start your own page and have your own asset and then use these other pages to drive traffic to that page. That’s better. Okay thank you. Hey Zach, first of all nice jacket. I was kind of late here but I like the stuff that you said about building relationships with these pages.
Do you have a simple script that could point us in the right direction on how to talk to these pages? Because I’m sure they receive lots of spammy messages like, what can you do for me? What can you do for me? What’s a good value-giving message as a start? That’s a great question. If you guys want my exact script email that I send to these hotels and these influencers, if you go to my website, you email me. I’ll have my assistant send you guys all of that stuff.
But a basic script just from the top of my head you know like I said, like always like idea or like I use VIP reservation, or VIP idea. And I make them feel like I’ve done my research. I’ve done my homework. That’s how I pique their interest. Those first two lines are the most important and the subject line, to get them to open and then get them to continue reading. But I always make my emails and my DMs very short, simple, and straight to the point but full of value. And so if you’re trying to reach like a really big celebrity, you usually have to go through their agencies, and so there’s a lot of middlemen that you have to go through. But I’d focus on building relationships with them, figuring out other ways that you can help their agency as a whole, and that’s gonna get you into the door to The Rock or Will Smith, or some of these big guys.
But if you’re reaching out to like a micro-influencer or somebody who has like 100,000 followers or less, you won’t have any trouble if you just offer them money. Everybody wants to get paid. Appreciate it. Great. Okay we have time for one more question. Who else has a question they want to ask Zach? Right there in the back, thank you. So I work for a performance agency that does install campaigns and I was wondering outside of just three nights and things like that, do you actually use a lot of these campaigns to do any like CPI campaigns or get people to download apps and all that stuff? What kind of apps? We have around 42 direct apps like let’s say VPNs, like finance, like Robin Hood, and basically we’re in San Francisco, so we have all the biggest apps out there.
We work with quite a few different SaaS companies like Clickfunnels is a client, like all these other guys are clients too. If you think about like beginning with the end in mind, who’s the end user that you want to reach, that ideal customer. There’s ways to drive traffic through like different pages. You could create like a tech voyager page or all about tech, and then just simply with a sweet like call to action, you can drive traffic. It’s going to give you more downloads and installs. Thank you. Very good. Let’s give it up one more time for Mr. Zach Benson .
