bret shuford 0:00
Welcome back to the creative visibility podcast. I'm your host, Brett Shuford. And I did not know how much I was going to really love having a podcast. But I have to tell you as we're, what is this 15 episodes in, it has just been such a joy getting to talk to you every week and introduce you to some people that I think are super inspiring and putting themselves out there in so many different ways. Now, if you haven't, I want to invite you to leave a review, and share this with your friends, anyone you know, who's a creative who wants to build a brand and a business and become more visible and make money doing what they love. This podcast is for them, especially for those of us who are in the LGBTQ community, I want to help lift up our community during this time is, of course, kind of a crazy time and you know, a little personal check in, I've got a lot of change happening. We have a baby being born at first time being a dad, I'm going to have a son. I mean, that's just insane. To me, it's something we've wanted for a very long time. Our surrogate crystal who's also a friend of ours lives in Orlando, so we're going down there twice in March to see her and, and then to pick up the baby and bring him home. And on top of that, you know, there's a war that started and there's some crazy homophobic laws being passed. It's just, it's interesting to see how as we come out of the pandemic, how things shift, and it can take an emotional toll. And if you're like me, you're very sensitive, and you're definitely more of an empath. So I want to invite you to just be gentle with yourself, be gentle with others, I had a client reach out to me today because she's like, my engagement on Instagram is so low, and I'm so frustrated. And like, it's okay, it's, it's okay, let's let the engagement drop right now, because people need space. There is a lot of pain and suffering happening at this moment and fear. So let's just not put the pressure to grow ourselves or push people to grow our accounts. Let's create space for others and for ourselves to just be with our emotions. And so I would invite you, if you're somebody who's taking on a little bit of the heaviness of this time, remember that doing nothing is doing something and giving yourself a little bit of whitespace on that calendar can help your heart and help your mind heal. And if you want a little bit of support around that, check out the creative mindset reset is a free 14 day training that I created at creative mindset reset.com in that I take you through different lessons every day you get an email with a video lesson. And even this is the cool part, you get free colouring pages from a company called colouring Broadway, we partner together to design these colouring pages, which is known to be a very calming and very good, you know, colouring is very good for your mental health, because it helps bring you into the present moment. And so I highly encourage you to check that out. There's free downloadable colouring pages and video lessons every day for 14 days. So if you like my voice or if you're sick of my voice, if you're seeking my voice, don't get it. But if you're want to get a little bit more support around your mental state and how to continue to move forward as a creative, these the lessons that had helped me and have continued to help me in my career. Now today's guest is a bit different. Her name is Harley Jordan. She and I met because she has grown a very successful business on Instagram. But really because she became known as the Instagram reels transitions expert, she's very good at doing transitions on short form videos. But she's also a lot of other things. She's an entrepreneur, clearly, she's a wife, she coaches and teaches people but she's also an agent. She's now created an agency where she works with influencers to help them secure brand deals, pitches, negotiate and things like that with brands. And so she knows a lot about that influencer space. I thought it'd be really good for some of you who maybe aren't quite there or who are there who want to hear about some approaches and and strategies around building a brand that gets brand deals and sponsorships as an income stream Harley is a really really great resource. So I hope you enjoy this episode episode 15 of the creative visibility podcast with my guest early Jordan welcome to the podcast Harley. I'm so glad you're here.
Harley Jordan 4:51
Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here. My new Insta friend.
Unknown Speaker 4:57
We I of course found Because I know a big part of your brand has been about your reels transitions, of course, because that's kind of, I've seen you teach other people real transitions, but you do so much more than that.
Unknown Speaker 5:12
I know, I'm known on the real tab really for my transitions, and I've been fighting tooth and nail to kind of get away from it. I was one of the first people that brought transition tutorials to Instagram. And that's what blew up my account. So I'm like, I don't want it. I don't want to teach it anymore. Like someone else can do this. I have other things to say.
Unknown Speaker 5:33
Well, what what even How did you even get to that point? Where was your intention? On Instagram? Were you building a personal brand and implements your brand? Like talking about what your intentions were before? That kind of took
Unknown Speaker 5:48
off? Yeah, absolutely. So I was actually laid off. During COVID, I was working in business operations. And it was in a luxury travel company. So travel got shot down, there was no more of that my whole department was laid off, and I wallowed in it for a while and was like, I don't, I don't know what to do. I can't get hired by a pizza company down the street, I can't get hired by the jobs that I actually have the experience for. I don't know what to do. So, idea popped into my brain, I'm going to start a blog, I'm going to I'm a good writer, like, I like writing, I want to tell my entire story I want to talk about like health and wellness and fitness and sustainability and travel and literally everything under the sun, like what's new. She's a complex girl. And, um, I didn't know what to call it, every entrepreneurs nightmare. So I jumped on Instagram and was like, You know what, I'm going to build up a personal brand. I'm going to learn how to speak to an audience. I'm going to learn about what I want to actually talk about here, how I can, like, pivot and navigate throughout this all we're eventually going to monetize. But when I was thinking about that, I was like, Okay, we're gonna embed ads on a blog. Okay, cool. I had no idea what what on earth I was doing. And I'm started moving with Instagram started growing. And, and I had eventually by 12k, replaced my nine to five income with partnerships. And I didn't realise that was such a big bold capital statement here. But I think I mentioned it on my story or something, and I was flooded with interest. I was flooded with people being like, how on earth Harley, like, I only get gifted, what are you talking about? So I started talking about that. And I started throwing some spaghetti at the wall with my reels. And one of those things was a transition tutorial. I had seen them on Tik Tok, but I hadn't seen any using the native Instagram platform. So I was like, You know what, let's go for it. Let's do it. And I remember this real got such average engagement. I had someone from college commented on it and say, Why would people need to use this, and I was like, I'm just showing my friends how to do cool things. And it hit like 1.5 mil, within a couple of weeks. It brought in 2000 followers within like, a weekend. Like it was one of those amazing, like, Miracle viral moments. And I was like, Okay, I get it, I get what you want. I can do this. I can do this. And there you have it. My my Instagram career was born.
Unknown Speaker 8:29
So you're so you figure it out. You could pitch to brands. Yep. Yeah. Find where did you find that verbiage? Like where did you even figure out like, Oh, I'm gonna just like reach out to these people and and be able to convince them to give someone who's doesn't have like a huge following yet. Money.
Unknown Speaker 8:52
You know what, it was very, very cringe worthy. My first couple of messages to brands were in the DMS, they were along the lines of, hey, do you work with micro influencers? And like nothing more than that? Why did you ask, like, just catch them. And I somehow managed to start getting these gifted collabs and I only was at you know, 3k at the time, so when that was happening, I was like, Woohoo, like free stuff. Love it. And I kind of pushed on I was doing so many collabs I was creating so much content with all of this gifted product. And eventually, I was like, okay, okay, okay, I know, I know that I need to change my rates. I know that I need to charge. So my first collab was like a jewellery company. I had, I probably had 8k at the time, and I did it for 50 bucks, literally nothing and didn't even cover my time. No way. And that was kind of the start of it. I just kind of ran with it from there and started to use my my business knowledge In all of the industry knowledge that I had before to be professional online, and that was really the change, it was being professional treating this like a business, knowing that I had to monetize eventually, and pushing through when I didn't know anything, you're gonna learn, you just have to do it.
Unknown Speaker 10:18
Guys, that's so it's just so true. Like, I hope people like hear that. It's like, Just do it. Because you'll figure it out, like you will learn by doing that's so such valuable information. It's also interesting to think about how much it's changed. Even in the two years, like, or two and a half years, everything is sort of shifted, when you think back to when you lost that position at that job. And what Instagram was then to what it is right now. What do you what do you think it's different? Like, how could you explain the difference?
Unknown Speaker 10:51
Oh, my God, I mean, really didn't exist when I started. So that was a whole can of worms, we all know. So every week we were going out me and a friend that had also lost her job and doing content days, quote, unquote, where we would take a huge bag of outfits and like head to some random place in town and shoot picture content. So that we could post are pretty carousels that were all five photos of not very different pictures. Um, I know you can see it in your head, but like slight turn,
Unknown Speaker 11:24
I'm only laughing cuz I've done it. We've done it like, we would like be changing in the bathroom in Times Square at Marriott Marquis, you know, and then going and taking more photos. And yeah, I get it.
Unknown Speaker 11:39
I mean, it was just a very different world. And I'm just the change from just just the change from picture content to video content has been such a game changer with how Instagram feels as a as a content creator.
Unknown Speaker 11:54
Yeah. So how do you feel, you know, as you because now you work with people, you you teach you, you of course, launched very recently, and the branding of this was brilliant, because it has this whole like 90s movie vibe happening. But you launched several courses, many courses to help people figure out analytics and monetization and how to just get go deeper and in the influencer? World online. But what do you notice when it comes to positioning themselves? What do you notice? People have blocks or issues around in order to actually leap into that space?
Unknown Speaker 12:35
Yeah, I mean, I really think it's just doing it because we get such icky feelings about sales are what this what this brand is going to think about you and why does it matter? You know, what does it what does it matter that this one person in the marketing department said no to you? Like, what's the word? What's the worst that can say? Oh, like, I'm not hurt by that say no, like, it's maybe it's the campaign, it's not me, you know. So just jumping in getting your feet wet, really putting enough feelers into the world, so that you are booking these partnerships is really the biggest piece of it. If I'm not pitching, you know, 10 brands, I'm not I'm not going to get any, I'm really, I can really expect one for every 10. And that's like, maximum. So it's a lot of it's a lot of outreach, it's a lot of selling yourself, and it's a lot of pitching and you're doing it in a professional manner, then, like, you will succeed, you will succeed.
Unknown Speaker 13:33
And it's the biggest misconception people have about content creators who are making content full time with brands is that the brands are coming to them. Yeah, and that is the the the biggest thing I would say to anyone who wants to be an influencer is like, you got to go to the brands honey, like you can't, they're not gonna come to you. It's just, they have too much on their plate.
Unknown Speaker 14:00
Right? Right, that, Oh, God, and there's so much competition, that if you can put your best foot forward, if you can show off what you can do, like it's gonna be a no brainer for that company. That's exactly what we want. You have to be pitching them. I have clients that have a million followers, like actually a million I'm not kidding, I'm not exaggerating, and they are making $0.00 from Instagram, because they're not reaching out to brands. So I mean, that just shows you your follower count means nothing if you're not treating it like this business where you're selling your services or outsourcing or this brand is outsourcing a service to you.
Unknown Speaker 14:42
Yeah, and I think that's the other thing too. You know, I work with a lot of people who are actors, performers, who are artists, who their skill set is this marketable commodity they can, they can write it, you know, but as actors or whatever, like they're waiting to get hired. To make money, so they're doing a lot of side hustles. They want to create multiple revenue streams. Ultimately, like the first thing I was asked them is like, yeah, you build this huge following. But where do you take them? How do you help people find ways to go? Okay, like, you're Yes, you want to build a brand? Like, Oh, you want followers? But what is what are your followers? Get out of it? How do you help people get into the mind space away from numbers and into service?
Unknown Speaker 15:34
Yeah, I got that monetization conversation is one of the first things within any of my conversations with my clients. Because if you don't have if you don't have a monetization plan, what's the point? You know, what are you doing this for? Just literally just to gain followers? That's not helpful to anyone? You know, what, what's the point if you have a huge platform, and you're still working a nine to five that's draining, that just seems like now you have two things on your plate that aren't lucrative to you? You know? So that's one of the first conversations and I really think that there are so many different avenues to monetize that it's so individual to you, it's so individual with what you actually decide to put your energy into. And what really makes you sparkle. Like, even if we're talking about tick tock versus YouTube versus Instagram. That's a different type of personality that's going to like all of those different different platforms, that doesn't mean that you necessarily need to shove yourself in the Tick Tock box, if you if you don't want to.
Unknown Speaker 16:40
Yeah, but I think that like, what I curious about is, what do you tell people? Where do you tell people to start, like, if somebody comes to you and is like, I want to make, you know, $10,000 a month and brand deals, but I only have 5000 followers? You know, do you know? Because to me, I would think well, you know, we got to get you trading time for money a little bit to start, right? Like maybe, maybe, maybe you need to be a speaker, or maybe you need to get people to hire you to teach or you could do one on one coaching or something? Because you aren't everyone's an expert at something, right? Mm hmm. What is your suggestion to people to start at that level?
Unknown Speaker 17:21
With the brand partnership thing, or really, with any of these monetization plans? I think the first thing is really to ensure that you are gearing all of your content towards that end goal. Is your content, showing off that step by step to get to that end monetization plan? Because if it's brand partnerships, are you recommending things? Are you really recommending things? Are you building that know, like and trust? Are you establishing that credibility so that someone wants to buy a specific product from you? There's so many things that we can do on our side, so that when we go to that brand, I mean, at 5k? You could do it right now. But when you go to that brand, do you have a portfolio ready? Can you show off, here's how I market product, here's how my audience knows likes and trusts me, this is how they buy from me. This is when they buy from me. And this is why we should work together and partner up within this mutually beneficial relationship.
Unknown Speaker 18:17
I love that. Okay. All right. So talk to me, let's just be real, this just be real here. Okay, cuz we were we were talking before we started recording. You were saying you, bro, you're in a really big growth pattern right now. But your engagement is low? How? Oh, no, it's not even like an A. I'm not. I'm like, yeah, it's low. It's all it's just never always never been high. And I think part of that is like I have, I have a lot of followers who have been with me for a long time, because I started my account in 2010. And I'm a very different person now. Like I am now not on Broadway, I'm now you know, doing a whole different
Unknown Speaker 18:56
part of your personal account. I did that too.
Unknown Speaker 18:59
And so it's a slower, it just takes a while to get audience to shift and pivot with you. Right? But if let's say somebody like my engagements have a How does somebody find out their engagement? So I think some people don't even really know how to do that. What would you what would you say to somebody who's like, I have a good amount of followers, but I don't know why they're not engaging more.
Unknown Speaker 19:19
Yeah, I mean, part of that is just heading into your analytics and see what they're really engaging with. And I'd say around 10% of your follower count is pretty, it's a pretty solid rate to see for your views. So if you're not passing that you really got a problem and need to start to curate more towards what your followers like and are interested in. But that being said,
Unknown Speaker 19:47
why is that important? You said that you? That's a problem. Why is that a problem? What in regards to what,
Unknown Speaker 19:54
um, if we're talking about the brand partnerships thing, we want your content to be seen? Again, we want this to be a mutually beneficial relationship if your contents not even being seen by your audience again, why? How does it benefit the brand? with it?
Unknown Speaker 20:10
Right? The brand's like, why would I pay you for that if no one's gonna see it?
Unknown Speaker 20:14
Right? Right. And that's not to say that I mean, again, we're just kind of normalising this lower engagement, and we all need to kind of understand it. Because if you are putting out more casual content, which you are doing, and this is kind of why I brought this up, too, because the more content you're putting out the lower engagement, you can really expect, because it's more casual, it's more casual content, you're not you're not making a whole production, it's not a whole Broadway musical, have a little 15 Second real, like we didn't spend that much time on it. So why would we expect 12 billion people to like it? Correct. But it does bring in the followers. So is it effective for you? Yes. Is it effective for your brand that wants to reach all of your audience, it doesn't necessarily put your best foot forward. So keeping track of that,
Unknown Speaker 21:03
so So what I hear you say is someone who wants to get a brand deal in partnership, it's really about engaging your audience no matter what sighs Mm hmm. Because the higher engagement like what's a good engagement rate.
Unknown Speaker 21:17
So you can go to if you want to find your engagement rate, there's tonnes of engagement rate calculators online, like flanks is one that I use constantly with my clients, pH, LA, and x, I believe, but you can find any of them online for free. And you'll see some of the metrics of what some celebrities have for their engagement rate. And the bigger you get, the lower your engagement rate is going to be in general. And also, a lot of age components go into this as well. Because if you are older than literally 22, we're not used to liking everything we see. That age is probably older, it's probably like 23. Now 24, something like that. Um, if you are older than that, we're not used to liking everything. That's not that's not something that we've been conditioned to do. We like what we actually like, if you're younger than that you like everything on Instagram, you like everything that you see, that's normal. So what can we expect when you don't have a population of Gen Z in your follower account? Like, you just need to expect a lower engagement rate? So kind of taking it with a grain of salt and thinking about? Okay, how do I compare along this average? I think, under 5k is like 5% engagement rate is solid. And it's really just, you know, paying attention to it, seeing what works, seeing what doesn't
Unknown Speaker 22:43
got, yeah, and I will say like, in regards to probably husbands, so that probably has a higher engagement rate than my personal account. And I don't post on there as much. But I will say it fluctuates, right, it's definitely challenging to keep that engagement up. consistently. So I'll have moments where, you know, maybe once a month where it's really at, like a max engagement, yeah. And then it'll go down. And those are probably not the best times to be pitching to brands.
Unknown Speaker 23:14
Right. And it I mean, it does fluctuate, that's the thing, it does fluctuate. And part of it is such this cyclical thing. I don't know if you've noticed this, too. But once you have your highs, you have your highs and once it drops down into the low, because that's what the algorithm does, like your content can't all be your high content. It can't all be your stellar performers. It just doesn't work like that. But once you drop into that low, it takes a second it just takes a second to teach your audience again, you have something special to say to change it up to try something you know, and to get them interested again.
Unknown Speaker 23:50
Yeah, you know, what's so interesting is with Broadway husbands people love the thing that people love about that account in particular is we try to be very authentic very like you know, it's not glamorous all the time. It's not always like super stylized it's blue try to be very real. But then when we do get a brand deal or brand sponsored post we will post it and we have to hashtag sponsored you know, because I T FTC and all that. I always find that the sponsored posts don't do as well as our regular posts. Do you find that to be true?
Unknown Speaker 24:27
Oh 1,000% All of my sponsored posts are in the bottom of my analytics every single one. What is
Unknown Speaker 24:33
that about? Why does our audience somehow see
Unknown Speaker 24:37
not support us? Well,
Unknown Speaker 24:39
how do you go or even maybe how do you groom an audience to go like okay when you see hashtag sponsored instead of rolling your eyes can you like like and comment please?
Unknown Speaker 24:48
You know what I feel like that's the biggest crux of like influencer world and influencer culture right now because people think it's fake. They they think that anything you're recommending Sponsored ys is you being a sellout you don't necessarily like it. So I've had this issue with my story is where I'll recommend something I absolutely love. It's in no means tagged. It's by no means like literally anything, I will just link the product. And I've had people that I know or people in my courses that have had like long conversations with me, like not people that I've never talked to in my life, say, Wait, but do you really like this? Or I'll have my like, best friends comment on my story and say, Do you really like this as it's like, actually something that you like? And I'm like, What do you mean? What?
Unknown Speaker 25:33
Why would I? Yeah, why would I talk about it? If I didn't?
Unknown Speaker 25:36
It's not tagged, it's literally just our recommendation.
Unknown Speaker 25:42
I don't know how to like, it's usually gets very, you know, very present. And I've made the story posts for you know, I've been like, Hey, listen, you know, if you really love us, and you love our content, it helps us to do this. Like it helps us. If you just go in there and like it. I know, you probably think like, oh, well, they're getting paid or whatever. It's like no, actually, like, we can't continue to get paid. If this posted form. Well, like you gotta help. So it's interesting, but then I feel like I'm begging I feel like I'm like,
Unknown Speaker 26:11
right, then it's icky to me, I think, I think part of it is just going to be that we really can't recommend products that don't align explicitly with our life phase or content as well, anymore. We're really just so we're in such a time of like, you need this clear niche, to grow, whatever that is. So whatever that is, what tools do the people that are need your niche also need? Because that's going to be the easiest pitch for the brand. It's going to be the easiest pitch for your audience. It's the lifestyle contents just hard.
Unknown Speaker 26:55
Yeah, it is. Okay, so you're starting an agency? Yes. And what do you what do you think like, Okay, I know, for me, I've done some times in my life where I've actually manage other people's accounts. And it's so much harder to motivate myself to help other people's accounts than it is for myself. Do you know what I mean? It's like, it just feels like more labour, right, coming up with cash
Unknown Speaker 27:21
I feel about social media management, I would never do that.
Unknown Speaker 27:26
But what excites you about being an agent for influencers?
Unknown Speaker 27:32
Yeah. So the reason that I really wanted to step into this like talent agency spaces management space, is because influencers main main thing that makes them sparkle is a lot of the time, the creativity, the ones that are successful, they have this creative spark, this, that's their zone of genius, the business side, the negotiation, the like, how to position yourself to actually book these partnerships, the words to use all of that lingo and copy like, that's not what comes naturally. So for me with my business operations background, I'm like, you know, what, the contracting and stuff, I get that, like, I love that I think the negotiations really easy. So bringing on people to help them, take that, take that logistics off their plate, so that they can focus on actually making an impact with their audience and doing what, like makes them sparkle. I'm all about it, like go. You do you? Oh, I'll figure it out for you.
Unknown Speaker 28:32
I love that because I know pitching is the hard part for me. Because it is time consuming, you know, to set to send the pitches, the follow ups, set up the meetings, negotiate.
Unknown Speaker 28:48
That is really looking at maybe 150 pitches per person, per month, sometimes. It's a lot. It's not a little.
Unknown Speaker 28:56
Yeah. So that's great that you're willing to take that on for some people who maybe it's not their strong point, but they have an audience is waiting that like their audience is waiting for them. You know,
Unknown Speaker 29:07
I mean, again, I have people slide into my DMs every day that have hundreds of 1000s of followers that are in this creator economy. They're in this age of going viral where tick tock can blow you up in a matter of days like Instagram, if you do it right. If you hit it big, I had a girl that slid into my DMs the other day that had a video hit 54 million people like those. Yeah, jaw drop. That's not even a real number. I can't count that. Hi. Wow. 54 million people she brought in 50k within the weekend. I don't even know honestly, I can't even tell you why this video went viral. I literally looked at it. I was like, I don't I I don't get it. But she didn't know what to do. That's the kind of person that I'm like, Come Come here. Let's figure this out for you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
