Dear friends, if you’re a photography entrepreneur (or if you just want more followers), I highly highly highly recommend you to not get so distracted with accruing more Instagram/social media followers. Instead, I recommend that you start your own email newsletter, via MailChimp.com:

Okay some basic #facts

The “click through rate” (CTR) of a Facebook post or an Instagram post is abysmally low. For example, even when I had around 60,000+ followers on Instagram (before I deleted Instagram), I only got on average, 20 clicks to my biography link to my blog a week! 20 clicks out of 60,000 followers! That’s horrible. Similarly on my Facebook fan page (with around 90,000+ followers), I might get only 100 clicks through a post I put on the page (also horrifically low numbers).

The thing is this: Facebook and Instagram (Instagram is owned by Facebook) nudges you into ‘boosting’ your posts, which costs a lot of money ($25-100 USD) to ‘reach’ more of your followers. Currently Instagram delivery rates are quite good, but honestly– in the next 5 years or so, I predict the percentage of your followers who will get your posts will become abysmal (similar to Facebook), unless you pay lots of $$$.

Solution: Make your own email newsletter

Now, the practical solution is this: invest in starting your own email newsletter. I personally use and recommend MailChimp.com. When you start off, I think your first 1,000 subscribers are free. After that, you have to pay usually around ~$25+ a month (I have around 10,000+ subscribers to my email newsletter and pay around $75 a month). Totally worth it, considering that my email newsletter (and this blog) have been BY FAR the best channels to promote my products, my upcoming workshops, and my books and new articles.

Now, the great thing with email newsletters: the open rate and click through rate is so much higher! My newsletter has around a 30% open rate, which is fantastic by industry standards (I think industry standard is around 10-15% open rate).

Anyways, this is great, because let’s say you want to announce something important (your upcoming exhibition, show, book, magazine, ebook, product, workshop, etc) — you will be able to directly access your fans and followers! Fortunately (and unfortunately) email is still one of the best ways to communicate to people. Why? If you send someone an email, it is guaranteed to be delivered into their inbox, whereas on Facebook or Instagram, it is kind of a crap-shot if you end up in their news feed or not (it is controlled by the Facebook News Feed Algorithm). And I think algorithms are ruining our lives.

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Now, I would recommend you to always promote your email newsletter before everything else. Before you promote your Instagram or whatever. If anything, the biggest problem with Instagram is this:

You end up prioritizing your Instagram (getting more followers on Instagram) than promoting your own newsletter.

Now of course, you can promote both. But in life, to focus means to NOT scatter your attention. This means, don’t get distracted by Instagram/Facebook. My practical suggestion is this:

Focus 90% of your efforts on building your email newsletter and sending out well-crafted newsletters, and only 10% of your efforts on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc).

Also the great thing with email newsletters: you have more control!

How to get people to signup for your newsletter

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Biggest suggestion: offer FREE stuff! Free ebooks, free presets, free information, etc.

Put links to your newsletter wherever it is applicable, and send emails however often you find fit– whether daily, weekly, or monthly. Follow your own gut.