Terry Nakamura I am so excited to have you on the your digital marketing coach podcast welcome I'm honored to be here thank you for inviting me so some of you may know Terry some of you may not know Terry but Terry this is actually the first time we're seeing each other in person and we have known each other I want to say it is Empire Avenue that brought us together and waited for this conversation to say that that is insan saying that's like what 10 or 12 years ago or something I don't think yo
u know maybe seven eight but yeah sever but you were on 2009 I think now for those of you that don't know it's really interesting because we talk about nfts and maybe influencers at Joe pitzi is big on influencers creating their own nfts and I think Empire Avenue was a stock market a virtual stock market with influencers had different prices of their virtual stock based on their social media activity it sort of is like nft is like before the NF you know that's such an interesting correlation I m
ean you're right and it was maybe a little ahead of its time and and it did try to dabble in Bitcoin you know kind of its own Bitcoin currency briefly y but I actually got out of it quite a few years ago oh me too me too and but from that we've been able to continue our conversations Premier wild Neil oh my God so Terry so I thought you were some I mean I'm a social media marketer so I join these things and you know it was the days of clout we were all excited and we wanted to increase our influ
ence and so but you are not the same social media marketing is not your gig so let's start with why on Earth what brought you to Empire Avenue and then we're going to obviously fast forward to your new book you know it it was kind of I have I was really good friends with red Saddler I don't know if you know him or not I do know re he's in Minneapolis right yep yep so re and I kind of jumped in around the same time and and became really good buddies on that you were friends offline with him yeah
yeah totally wow okay because I've never like met him on Twitter since 2008 or something like that or whenever I started on Twitter it was a really long time ago wow okay so he got you into it he yeah we we both kind of found it at the same time and I'm not really sure how that happened but maybe it was Chris Perillo or somebody like that because Chris was really majorly into that yep big time you know so yeah it was super fun I was obsessed I get obsessed about every new thing that comes along
which is maybe why I've never gotten involved with Tik Tok because I I don't I feel like it's such a Time suck and I've got plenty of those already you know so yeah I got 99 problems but Tik Tok ain't won that's for sure so how did you know I don't even know what reg does for a living because if you look at his social media it's just he publishes a lot of content his stock was really high in Empire Avenue I remember but is he I know now that obviously you're a a designer graphic designer I mean
you can go into more detail about that but is that how you met regj we met on Twitter we were just Twitter friends I mean originally we met on Twitter and I was really a late night Twitter junkie so I would be on late at night and so I had a lot of friends all over the world because in America people sane people are asleep at that time of the night but all the vampire people like reg and myself and others you know we kind of had like a late night posy you know so now what is it that you do for a
living then outside of the book which we're GNA talk about so primarily I'm a graphic designer okay and I design websites and print collateral I still do a lot of print collateral like you know people who need actual things you know that they hand out or use to distribute um I haven't done a print annual report for a while but I used to do a lot of annual reports I remember those like those oh yeah yeah I mean those were awesome projects you know because they were you know remunerative so yeah
it's changed a lot and I most of the content I create now is digital and and I'm also doing consulting you know like helping people with their social media but not in the same way that you or you know all the you know hot shot people that really understand this it's more like helping them develop um content strategies or whatever they're doing and then kind of setting it up for them to take over on their own you know so you know it's more of an initial guidance I guess because a lot of people do
n't know anything about any of it I hear yeah so did your presence on social media then attract new customers to your graphic design or was the social media social media I I've always said I mean I I like having the awareness of people people knowing that I'm a graphic designer but it really hasn't for me been a channel to develop business and I've often said I don't know that I would want to get customers off of social media because I'm more word of mouth in terms of the people that I work for
you know they recommend me to other people and I like having that kind of connection and understanding of their you know validity and honesty and stuff like that and social media it's kind of hard to tell really you know who you're dealing with sometimes yeah oh I agree that's sort of one of the reasons why I was on and then I was off Clubhouse I don't know if that's one thing yeah I had a brief love affair with clubhouse as well so yeah and then these people started saying things it's like why
you don't have a LinkedIn profile you say all these things and it sounded like a lot of snake oil which is what we thought about a lot of people in social media and and sometimes do as well right absolutely and I think that's it's part of the the landscape you know when you think about social media it's like the dog behind the computer you know like on the internet nobody knows you're a dog kind of a thing you you really can't tell yeah so fast forward and we've known each other on Instagram and
I know you have a Japanese last name I don't actually speak Japanese so you you've taught me that learn that you're a graphic designer what have you and then one day I want to say like two years ago maybe it might have been a year and a half you're like Neil what do you think about instagr as a blogging platform now ter have you ever did you ever set up a Blog and you know what I'm going to I'm going to tell you something I've never told anybody because Empire Avenue right A lot of people set u
p social media accounts so they could increase their uh their you know their post frequency stock value yeah get their stock value right I actually started an a Tumblr Channel a Tumblr blog that was completely automated from I use like Yahoo pipes or set up some RSS I actually got banned for life what because they said it was I've never told anyone because they said it was completely automated I'm only telling millions of people well you know good rins I've never gotten on T it's like okay I get
it right I'm bad slap my wrist and so therefore I've never consulted thankfully Tumblr did not become the next Instagram but I'm just curious did you ever so before we get into Instagram for blogging obviously what your book is about did you ever have a Blog you yeah I started blogging in 2005 oh okay I've had three different blogs uh and they're on kind of life support right now because not related Empire Avenue then just like legit block I mean long before Empire Avenue ever existed I was blo
gging so but I and I did started Tumblr blog and I just did like an automatic feed from you know other things but you onto my Tumblr you know so I think Instagram yeah Instagram has an automatic ability to just share over your Instagram to Tumblr and so that's what I've been doing basically gotcha and so you're blogging therefore for more lifestyle all of this is just completely separate I mean the way social media used to be and blogging used to be it's just completely separate from what you do
for a living yeah for me it was just because I really liked writing so I wanted to just have a place to put my writing and it was pretty random and I had a lot of experts say Terry you need to drill down into the segment that you know you should specialize in order to develop an audience but I actually didn't care about that so much I was just really interested in writing and having some people engage with it but you know to be honest it there were times when I would get you know like 40 50 com
ments on a blog post but I had to work at it you know I really had to say you know like send out to my best peeps hey I have a new post up and then they would go check it out and leave comments but I just you know I don't want to do that that is the pivot to why I start blogging on Instagram because before you started blogging was it before or after you mentioned that you also started taking some courses in digital marketing oh yeah I went back to college for two years and got it an AA in digita
l marketing that's awesome because I you know I've been using social media for a decade I had no idea what was going on behind the curtains you know and for me it was just kind of a fun activity and I I really studied it a lot did a lot of reading and everything but I didn't really I didn't know anything about the data behind any of that stuff and that it was important you know uh it was kind of it was definitely eye openening for me to learn all of those things and I had to learn how to do Goog
le ads and Facebook ads and stuff I will never do that like in my for myself or for anybody your DNA but I had to learn about you know all of that all that stuff and it was really great and so now I feel like I'm more informed about the way that that that I try to help other people because it it was pretty superficial before you know when I would try to help people with whatever they were doing on Twitter or Instagram or whatever but now I have a better understanding of it and you know just like
proportions of content what kinds of content to share and how much of it like some people just want to like me you know broadcast about themselves all the time and and I know that that uh formula has changed somewhat over the years but I think some people just feel like social media is there to be an advertising platform and they don't deliver any value and that's why that Joe polii book that I had to read in one of my classes was really enlightening because you know understanding the value and
the education and the other things that you deliver to your audience those are the things that you know kind of draw them to you and so you know and blogging is the same way just that blogging was too much work you know for me to try to cultivate that kind of back and forth right so with this with your experience blogging and social media and now your AA and digital marketing you decide that you're going to write a book now I we hadn't talked about this beforehand but I'm assuming based on the
conversation the book is once again it's almost like an extension of your blog you just want to try to help people there's no I mean if it sells a lot awesome but it's really you just want to persp I just really wanted to write the book because Neil I really felt like I stumbled on a secret when I was you know like just to backpedal a bit I was having problems with my job and it was like at the point where I was kind of going through this personal angst and I started writing a bit more on Instag
ram then I I noticed that people were like interacting with me a whole lot more and then the longer you know longer the post was the more kind of Engagement I was getting and I just went wow this is a strange correlation like I would not have imagined that you know and so once I realized what was happening I just wanted to tell other people about it because it was such a cool way to be able to dip your toe in the blogging water so to speak and then and get gratification from it you know because
sometimes you publish a blog post and no one looks at it you know but you have your instant audience there on Instagram so chances are if you publish something a blog post you're going to get some feedback some of the comments will just be hearts and stuff like that right but a lot of people really think about it and you know if you form your post the same way you would do a normal blog post where you like ask a question or you know you know kind of invite them to engage they're all over it you
know and so I wanted to write a book about how to do that so you wrote the book did you work with a publisher or self-publish or I worked with a publisher it's a hybrid publisher new degree press and and at the very beginning I mean you were one of the people that I turned to in the beginning because I wanted to do some research about it and you were so nice to talk to me I know in a way it was I felt like you know you were patting me in the head like you know yes Terry sure and you were you cou
ldn't have been nicer oh thank you it was not totally discouraging but you know you were setting the reality for me of the way things really work but but I just decided I I had to push on because I felt inside that it really was effective so you know I just went through with it basically I hope I was encouraging I mean yeah there is a reality but I encourage everybody everybody has a great book they should write and I a great book but it is a book you know a great book and therefore everyone lis
tening please write your book I usually it's funny I usually send people it might have been before I had this video up but I published the age of influence after running a campaign on a platform called publishizer and I wanted to ask you about that so I normally forward people to a video when people ask me about a book if I know you I'm going to give you more answers if I don't know you I'm going to go just watch this video I did with one of the founders of publici um and that gives you all that
what did you want to ask me about publici though because I'm working on my next book now I was just really curious about it because it was if I understand it correctly it is not a traditional publishing platform it's not like going to you know one of the normal you know ERS of books it's is it kind of a hybrid well let me ask you how did you find your publisher I found it because a professor from Georgetown University Eric Coster contacted me on LinkedIn and he said I noticed that you like writ
ing have you ever thought about writing a book and I said yes so so then he had a course um at Creator Institute which is in Washington DC and I signed up for this course and learned the basics of writing a book through this course and then then after I finished it and then I was I you know I worked with a whole bunch of different editors and people that they have on staff and then I went to the next phase which was working with the publisher and all of their you know all their support people so
they I really had a lot of you know people on my team holding my hand all the way through and teaching me things because there's no way I could have done it I mean my book launched like number one in 10 categories on Amazon the first month you know and that was all because of them you know because of the kind of guidance I got from them so they were sponsors of this Creator Academy then and that's how that connection was made no I think Creator Institute is like a is a thing that grew out of Er
ic's course at Georgetown he teaches the same course at Georgetown okay but he recognized that he wanted to reach a lot more people so he started Creator Institute is the way I understand it okay and I don't know he founded New degree press or if it was an outgrowth of it but but together they offer pretty much a full spectrum of services to people the only difference is you don't get a you don't get a payment UPF front like with a traditional publisher I don't remember what that's called when t
hey give you a big chunk of money and then you have to sell books against it it's you own you know 100% of your content so like if I decided I wanted to do an a vid audio book I could just record that on my own and they would get no part of it whatsoever right right so you know I I was wondering if publisher is the same way publishizer same way well and then so you knew Eric just from social media before he reached out to you then actually I didn't know him at all it was it was a cold email he m
ight have been using a LinkedIn automation tool to it was too personalized to seem automated okay and so but once we started talking I just thought it was really strange that he asked me if I been considering writing book because it was really at that moment that I was going through that experience with Instagram and decided God I really should share this with people so they can do it because it's so easy it's easier than doing a Blog I I don't discourage people from blogging I think blogging is
really important for all the other reasons some of which you shared with me you know during our conversation but I felt like but for someone who's just dabbling in it they didn't want to go to the expense of setting up a site and being responsible for all that stuff you know and I realize it's rented space I learned that from you rented versus owned and you know I felt like but it's okay because if you're just starting out you can kind of get a feeling for it and make you know do whatever you w
ant like if you don't like the post or the performance of it you can remove it just like anywhere else but you know it's I think it's a really great place to experiment with people who want to write and have an audience you know and engage with the audience so it's it's so funny how these random connections and I mean just like our meeting today is somewhat of this Randomness that brought us together because you know I've written four books my first two were self-published never dreamed of worki
ng with a publisher and it was my third book where I had I had written my first two books about LinkedIn and my second book was more of like a sale B2B sales social media marketing book when an author of sales books reached out to me and said Neil I would love to feature your book as a recommended resource in my book are you okay with that I mean of course I'm going to be okay with that so we had a phone conversation he wanted to get to know more about me and he goes by the way I published with
Wy who do the four dummies books would you like an introduction literally a week later I had a signed deal with Wy and that ended up being W that is so amazing and cool fast forward to using publishizer so publishizer is a Kickstarter so so let's say Terry when you want to write your next book you want to already get pre-orders for it you would start a campaign on Kickstarter on publish eyes excuse me and then you send people the link and they can actually buy your book even if you haven't start
ed writing it yet so you can actually use it to like AB test ideas and so I had this idea for a book an influencer marketing and I'm going to test it right I hadn't started writing it I think I said I was 25% done with it because I had some blog posts but anyway I put it up there and what happens is because it's a Kickstarter for authors there's all sorts of Publishers that are monitoring the campaigns oh interesting there's traditional Publishers there's hyper Publishers there's people that wil
l help you get self-published there's editors there's book designers if that's something you wanted to go into that and so they look at how many pre-orders you get right and you want to get 500 I was able to get 500 so I got a lot of visibility wow that's great and the the funny thing is I was literally negotiating with a Dutch publisher who promised me if I went to Amsterdam this is before covid I could do you know I could do speaking events there and he he said there was this huge like Amazon
for some reason was not active in the Netherlands so he said that they've had Dutch business books that have sold like 50 60 70,000 copies in Dutch right holy mackerel and so I'm that's another thing I wanted to ask you about because I know your books have been translated I'm like whoa how did you go about doing that you know right all right so I'm gonna get to that right this is going roundabout but literally we were already in negotiations and sorry my wife is asking about my son's High School
counselor's appointment I'll get to her later but literally at that time I started to do webinars about the book because I wanted to sell more pre-orders right and one guy who you know I wrote on LinkedIn introducing the webinar he goes Neo that was such an awesome webinar have you considered a publisher for your next book I'm like well you know tell me more about what you think he was actually marketing manager at Harper Collins leadership who ended up becoming my publisher for the age of infl
uence through that introduction so none I never work with an agent It All Happened through these random sort of connections that incredible but publish test I recommend everybody because it gets visibility right it allows you to get pre-orders get visibility test ideas and I'm currently working on my fifth book I I wish I was further along but I will be using publici again and Harper Colin's leadership as most Publishers CU it's traditional they have the right of refusal so if they say Neo we wa
nt to work with you again I'll work with them but it doesn't stop me from getting pre-orders right so is is the value of the publisher the distribution channels like you know getting your book into bookstores and stuff like that the the promotion's the same they're not going to do any promotion for you I mean unless you know John Lee Dumis entrepreneurs on fire big podcaster he signed with Harper Connells leadership and you know I think that if you're someone that has this huge platform like a p
at Flynn or what have you they probably have a limited marketing budget because traditional publishers aren't doing as well as they used to with the internet and Amazon but they do strategically invest in certain authors like the Gary Vayner checks right who's also on Harper Collins so but you know L little old Neil schaer I'm not going to get much help and this is the same most authors I know who work with traditional Publishers they're surprise but you got to do the promotions yourself what th
ey give you though is you're not paying for graphic design you're not paying for editing you're not paying for you have this whole infrastructure you're able to use they were you know originally the book was called The Business of influence and they actually tested out a few different ideas with their book sellers who knew the market really well so I'm getting a little bit of Intel right from them and then obviously the distribution the worldwide distribution which includes the selling of foreig
n language rights which Wy I never got anywhere with maximize your social but with the age of influence Harper Collins leadership has been successful you know Mandarin Chinese Vietnamese Bulgarian and Arabic amazing that you've been able to do that it's yeah it's purely them right and from my perspective it's like I just want as many people to to read this as possible it's not you don't make money off the book you make money off people who read the book who reach out and want to hire you right s
o so yeah that was my whole thing and yes if you know if I would do it again I enjoy Partnerships I enjoy when the other side has skin in the game and I enjoy if I have the opportunity to work with a traditional publisher for my next book I will but if not you know the promotion's the same it doesn't really change the way I operate although I might have to hire like an editor and you know a graphic designer what have you the the route that I took they did have a staff of graphic designers and pr
oduction people and editors and proof readers and all that stuff but that said it's it I don't think there's ever been anything published that came out without any mistakes in it right sure sure and so you know after my book was printed and I read it I was like oh this pains me so much that I said this in that way Etc so I came out with a A hardbound version after the fact which is kind of ass backward if you think about it right because usually the hard bound comes out first yeah I did a hardbo
und version with an afterward because so many things about Instagram had changed since I published it that I wanted to write an afterward to address some of those things and that I think gave me kind of a this feeling like I was actually a legitimate AU author you know and I don't think I could have done it without having that team of people who were there to support me you know helping me with my book jacket and helping me go in and make all the the edits on the text and and stuff like that and
that's why the hybrid publishing model compared to the the self-publishing where I had to hire anyone and everyone for everything I did that's where the hybrid publisher you do pay up front where you get you know copies of your book but if you're going to do it on your own you got to pay anyway right so why not work with a professional team so I I think that's great and that's definitely a possibility for my next book of working with a hybrid publisher as well who knows so so that's so so reall
y interesting and then you you write this book about Instagram for blogging so when you first contacted me I'm like you know you have like your blog your content marketing you got social media but over time Terry what I've noticed is you know Tik Tok has really emerged with this but Tik Tok you just have one link right but that link can actually drive a business which does for a lot of influencers and you could say the same about Instagram it is like a little website with one link and there's li
ke tools you can use but at the end of the day you're trying to drive awareness and what I've noticed very interesting is I use a tool called Tailwind to manage my Pinterest I don't know I assume you're on Pinterest right sort of I mean I've had an account there since it was in beta but do I use it not really so okay so yeah so Pinterest I use a tool called Tailwind to help manage it and Tailwind has something called Tailwind communities where people share content that they want the other people
to share on their board so it's sort of like this community of people who share a lot of content and I've noticed that some of the people who share pins normally a pin is an image that would go back to a website but I noticed more and more people have pins that go to Instagram posts oh that's interesting where they're basically using Instagram like a Blog and it's maybe a carasel post with 10 different images and they're explaining something and then it it makes sense because you're on Instagra
m uh you hopefully get engagement which helps with the algorithm and then you have a website link that can take them that so it can become your main marketing channel even though it's not a is is it like some kind of subscription or dashboard or what is it what is it so Tailwind is a scheduling tool okay Pinterest but they also do Instagram uh they also do Facebook now they have a Linkin bio tool as well and they are so predominant in the Pinterest marketing community that they have so many user
s that are very active on pinest that they created a new functionality called communities which I believe it might be free I have an invite link which I'll send you but I'll also put in the show notes with which allows people to join what they call communities used to call tribes but they stopped that language and share content and yeah so so yeah and you can find there's literally hundreds of communities if not thousands and you know might have like Mommy bloggers that talk about you know child
like how much time does it take to invest in like laying the groundwork for something like that do you know what I mean like every time you expand into something new there's an investment attached to it so is the worth a squeeze do you think so here's my take first of all I am a marketer so I do this for a living so part of this is R&D right of upy my game like you may try a new digital graphic design tool for this same reason so my situation is a little bit different I will say that if you are
a b Toc company that is targeting a female demographic that Pinterest is a very good social network to be at if you have a visual way of representing what you do or you have a a visual product or service it's even better for that platform so you can't be everywhere you don't need to be everywhere but I was just published a blog post of these like 55 top social media marketing stats and a majority of Americans are on more than one social network right oh yeah I yeah yeah just without saying so y
ou know for me with Pinterest and with Tailwind who are an approved Pinterest partner I can automate this oh that's very cool and I have a staff that I use I don't do all this myself and I have created my own system of hiring around the world very talented people that help an hour here an hour there that allow me to have this infrastructure in place where I can be in a lot of different places so smart I mean I just recommended to one of my clients that she hires a virtual assistant or a couple o
f them to manage different parts of what we're trying to do and Y I just feel like you have to prioritize you know where your time is going to be the most valuable right totally absolutely Amen to that so so that's where it's like huh maybe Terry is making a lot of sense with Instagram for blogging now I know you face you have a different perspective on it but tell me as you decided to write the book and as you started to see you know engagement from your own blogging there what H how did this s
ort of evolve into finishing the book well for one thing it's forced me to continue on Instagram right because um life gets really busy and sometimes it gets difficult for me I only post once a week which is kind of like unheard of because most people try to post daily or multip times a day yep if I can just get one post up a week that's enough to sustain my interest and also kind of reinforce what I'm talking about in the book you know if somebody buys the book and they go then it's fairly curr
ent you know whatever they see on my Instagram but I'm sorry could you rephrase that question again so you began this idea of a book where you were sharing your own thoughts and you found people engaging with it right how did how did sort of that thought evolve into a full-blown book it was because I was also a blogger and I knew how hard I had to work to get feedback on my blog posts you know and you put a lot of work into a blog post you know like I just did a guest post for somebody and I spe
nt 12 hours on it you know and I you I was doing research and writing and collecting graphics and and embedding hyperlinks and doing all that work for her right keywords and whatnot um it takes a lot of time where you really can't do a lot of those things on Instagram but you do have the opportunity to post um you know multiple links now which is is helpful it's not the same as a hyperlink but it's pretty good and I'm really uh surprised sometimes at how many people go up to my Linkin bio and ch
eck out different things that are on my multiple links like what they check out and how often and to me that feels at least as maybe more satisfying than it was on my any of my blogs I had three I still have three active blogs that are you know not put to sleep yet and I may resurrect them and reinvent one of them um to support my book pretty much exclusively or Instagram at least but I just felt like it was the analytics aren't deep the way they are on a blog post you can't use Google analytics
on Instagram but you can collect other kinds of of data that will indicate whether or not you're on the right track with something and what kinds of things resonate how many times you get onto the explore page and stuff like that and that's really important I think to kind of build an audience and awareness so you get other benefits and there is a search engine on Instagram not like Google but when you're on Instagram you're not going to go to Google you're gonna be on Instagram and search for
what you're looking for on Instagram so it's kind of like they're two completely different functions you know Google search versus Instagram search because when you're on that platform you're looking for certain things on the platform you don't really care about what's happening on Google you know so so for those that are listening that went to take advantage of Instagram as a blogging platform would you say that your book or your advice is more applicable to maybe entrepreneurs business owners
content creators that don't have a Blog and they can sort of rein invent what they do on Instagram as a blog or do you see it for companies that have blogs they should be once again Reinventing how they use Instagram so that every piece of content they publish there is more like an extension of their blog or something different you think it's both Neil because if if you're a novice I mean it there's nothing easier but if you are someone who maintains a a Blog on a like an owned blog or a company
that has a Blog it's I've seen people excerpt parts of their blogs on Instagram and then in and and say if you want to know more about this there's a link in my bio and usually multiple links you know to on the on that thing and so it's a way of kind of just giving people a taste of whatever it is that you're writing about and some things resonate with people and they're very curious and they'll pursue it and so you know I've seen that happen on my own Instagram you know for various things like
I I was doing some research and I wanted to see I wanted to collect um opinions about certain things so I created one of those Survey Monkey things you know and I was really amazed at how many people went to the link and did the survey and so I really was able to collect a pretty random sample of information that I ended up using for a project so those kinds of things can happen you know it's not and it is random really I mean it's random based on whoever your followers are it's not like worldw
ide Randomness but you know I think most people who do random sampling you don't really I mean how are those people ever really selected true you yeah and I think anyone that's ever done a real that's gotten a few thousand views I have a video that has gotten the explore page it got like you know 10,000 views in 24 hours pH yeah you experience it had nothing to do with what I do for I was in Japan and there's this something called roll ice cream where they roll out this ice cream flatten it so I
I made this like three minute process into a one minute video which you know a lot of Foodies loved U so it did nothing for my business didn't get many followers but it's just reminds you that this is a huge Market it is its own search engine it's not go there's an awareness of people who had never heard of you before that's true and that's like you know tapping into people that would never know who you are right and because of that they do so I mean there's a certain amount of value to that I
think but I think what you're talking about is also in in a different way a different approach to what I talk about which is really make every piece of content that you publish count care about the other person you know Anne Hanley uh probably another author that you read in school but you know make actually yeah make every email a love letter right uh when I went to Facebook headquarters they said the same thing to businesses that are complaining they don't get any reaching the algorithm did ev
ery post you make sound like a love letter to your fans right so you can imagine that if you treat social media if you treat Instagram in that way as you are putting the attention in creating a blog post and every post you you publish there it can be really impactful because it really is a personal uh platform and you can personally connect with people and engage with people in that way so I can see how blogging on Instagram might even be more impactful because of that than just blogging digital
ly and hoping people find you on Google I I totally agree because the people that you are regularly interacting with on Instagram they become friends I mean they become like real friends and uh an example is somebody in Russia who suddenly disappeared and then he came back probably got a VPN or something you know I don't know but but to reconnect and to kind of know what they're going through and he really was clueless about what the world was seeing of Russia until I said please take a look at
this and he was like holy mackerel you know I had no idea I mean he really did not have any idea how the world was viewing what was going on so it's like you have these friendship people you know through it starts through commenting right and it kind of develops into a much deeper level and I never really had that happen on my blog like I would get comments you know from strangers but they never really gravitated to any other place like you know like a personal conversation of any sort so yeah a
nd my big thing with Instagram is I'm a big fan of a Japanese musician named yomi and through Instagram I've been able to connect with some of her biggest fans people that actually met at her concert and got married and therefore you know I got to the point where I was getting invited to her concerts and Not only would I get like you know really good seats even though I'm based in the United States I don't live in Japan but they had these amazing After parties where you know these are people tha
t have met the artist they've been following her for you know 20 years they go all so anyway so I know how impactful Instagram can be in terms of relationship it's really incredible it's like that kind of stuff doesn't happen on Twitter I mean I've met hundreds of people from Twitter like at conferences and stuff like that but uh it's a very different thing many of these people on Instagram you will probably never meet because of you know because of proximity but people do come to Seattle and li
ke take time to meet them for coffee and stuff like that so you know that's awesome so for those that are listening that say you know what all right Terry I'm sold I want to leverage Instagram more more of as a blogging platform what are just you know without giving away all the secrets of your book but what are you know one or two things you might be able to you know teach them or advise them to do if they really want to get the most out of Instagram I think that when you're writing a post you
need to make sure that you're setting it up and inviting people in and I would call it starting with a hook you know when you're writing something so it gets their attention of course you have to have a good visual you know to or some kind of visual thing that will initially get their attention but starting with a hook and then kind of un telling you know explaining whatever it is and then ending with an invitation for them to engage like asking their opinion asking them a question asking for th
eir advice anything you know so so they feel kind of compelled to jump in and share their experiences with you so and it's important to then interact with the comments that people make because I think one of the sad mistakes is that a lot of people collect comments and they just just kind of put a little heart by it and think they're done you know but that isn't really a great way to to build a relationship with you know with your audience the best way is to acknowledge that they took the time t
o read it and say something and and I feel like if you just you know those are kind of like the very basic parts of it but if you were just to do those things alone I think it would make a difference awesome Terry Nakamura thank you so much tell us the name of your book again and where can people go to buy it as well as connect with you okay so the book is called blogging on Instagram engagement writing on one of the world's best social media platforms and and you can find it on Amazon but if yo
u were to search blogging on Instagram book just in general it's going to come up you know and it'll offer a lot of different places where you can purchase it it's a an ebook um a paperback and a hardbound book so awesome and then where can people find out more about you well I'm basically all over the place aren't we all I know it's it's like crazy but but I would I would say that LinkedIn probably has has a good amount of information about me so you know LinkedIn would be a good place to start
I don't spend a lot of time there though I I mean you and a lot of people I know do but I I just haven't haven't done that so linkedin.com Nakamura right and then I assume people can reach out to you on Instagram as well right Terry Nakamura Terry Nakamura on Twitter Instagram you know all all over the place I've been able to keep the same name is t r i and it'll be in the show notes as well but Terry thank you so much for your time and sharing your story it's very inspiring and I hope that uh
people get a lot out of this interview okay thank you so much for having
Comments
Interesting info to apply to my own writing. Thank you, Terri and Neal. 👍