Creative Hive

Creating buzz for your business

How To Work With Instagram Influencers To Multiply Your Following

How To Work With Instagram Influencers

Are you on Instagram promoting your Etsy or handmade products shop?

There are several tried and true methods for quickly growing your Instagram following.

Collaborating with Instagram influencers grew my Instagram account to my first 10,000 followers in just a few short months.

You can achieve rapid growth too with your Instagram profile!

In this 80 minute Blab video, Beth Anne Schwamberger and Sarah Korhnak from the amazing group, Brilliant Business Moms chats with me and Cheri Tracey of Orglamix on how we both successfully worked with influencers.

In this video, we chat about:

  1. How to grow your Instagram following
  2. How an influencer can impact your business
  3. How to reach out to influencers
  4. Sending blind packages to people you admire
  5. What to say in your influencer pitch
  6. Using Instagram Direct Messages to reach out to an influencer
  7. How to identify influencers to work with
  8. Influencer follower count vs. engagement
  9. The cost of working with an influencer
  10. Streamlining tips for Instagram
  11. How to track sales from Instagram

Watch or listen to the video now:

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Want more sales? Come join me at Creative Live – Crafty Marketing Techniques

Want more sales? Come join me at Creative Live - Crafty Marketing Techniques

Leap before you're ready

When I started Creative Hive Co., in 2015 one of my big dream goals for this business was to teach a class on Creative Live.

If you've never heard of Creative Live before, it's an amazing resource where you can watch live online workshops – for free – and interact with instructors in real time.

I knew Creative Live wouldn't come knocking on my door.

Good things don't just fall from the sky.

So I knew I had to set some things in motion.

Just a few months into this new business, I scoured the Creative Live course list to see what wasn't already being taught and what I knew I could teach.

For a while when I started Creative Hive Co., I didn't feel good enough because my consulting business was so new. I knew I wasn't lacking in experience with marketing know how, but I was intimidated because I'd never done something like this before.

I could have waited until I was more ready and feeling more confident.

But I knew the longer I waited, the slimmer my chances were because my class ideas would get snatched up by someone else.

I mean, there are only so many ways you can talk about selling wholesale or marketing with Instagram.

So as nervous as I was, I sent an email to Creative Live.

I didn't tell anyone about doing this except my husband. I was so worried I would jinx it!

A couple of weeks go by and I hear nothing.

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How to respond to “I could make that” in your handmade business

You're busting your butt doing a craft show on a hot and humid Saturday.

Your booth catches the eyes of two women and they walk over.

They look interested!

They flip your product over and look for a price tag.

Oh uh, sticker shock.

They don't quite notice you standing there in your booth.

One of them whispers too loudly to their friend, “I could make this myself” and walks away.

Kind of stings, doesn't it?

This is definitely one of those roll-your-eyes moments.

Or imagine for a second what it's like in my handmade jewelry business, where my primary medium is polymer clay.

You can buy 2 ounce blocks of polymer clay in any color you desire at virtually any craft store in the US for under $3 each.

The price of my material cost is a known fact to many polymer clay hobbyists.

And hobbyists know that I'm only using a small fraction of a 2 ounce block of clay to make one $28 necklace.

People balk at my high end prices all the time.

They also think they could make the jewelry that I make for a living.

This is an important discussion to have, especially with the recent viral video where an art curator explains why you couldn't really make that art.

I bet at some point in your creative business, you've had someone say this to you too.

“I could make that.”

I asked a few creatives in my private Facebook mastermind group how they would respond to this

Here are a few brilliant answers (that I think are better than the response from the video linked above):

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