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Speaker 2hi friend. Have you ever wondered how to take better photos for Instagram? I cannot wait to share it . My perspectives as a professional photographer and how to achieve this same look with your camera phone. Yeah, y'all . I am a huge proponent and believer in shooting in portrait mode, that little amazing feature on the iPhone in addition to those other things, if you're shooting with an iPhone or not, I get into a lot of tips, but before I get there I just want to say thank you for tuning in to the Jasmine stars show today. I have a really special interview on the boss Bay podcast where we discuss how I started my photography business and then how my business has evolved over time and in this interview I, you know, I flex my photography muscles and I give my top five tips for taking Instagram photos and I can't wait for you to hear it. Let's go to the show.
Speaker 3Welcome Jasmine to the boss Bay podcast . It is such a pleasure to be chatting with you today. I think the pleasure's all mine. Thank you. I love, I am so excited for our listeners to get to know you because I know that you're very much like me. You're an open book, you're happy to share your ups and your downs. And I think that's really important. I think everyone's craving that authenticity and I know that you have that in abundance. So I'm pretty excited about this interview, so I want you to start the conversation off with who is Jasmine star now? Who do you relate to being?
Speaker 2I relate first and foremost to being a wife of an amazing, perfect man. Well, he's not perfect, but don't tell anybody that I personally think he's perfect. I am the daughter of two immigrant parents. I am the sister of amazing siblings, am friends with friends who are just truly amazing, beautiful people. And I am a photographer and founder of social curator.
Speaker 3I love how fondly you spoke your husband that as well. That's so beautiful. I mean,
Speaker 2no jokes. They really married out of my league. I mean, he's pretty fantastic. People meet them and they're like, wow, Jasmine, how'd you score that one? I'm like, I don't know. Well, actually I do know, I do know we met when we were like around 16 years old. He was too young and naive to know what a monster I was. And so, you know, we, we ended up sticking through it and uh, he's still my Mary Best friend.
Speaker 3Oh, I love that. Have you been together since you were 16? Yes. Oh , Oh, that's so romantic.
Speaker 2I casually joke with my friends. I'm just so good at picking partners that when I met him I was like, I'm done. Yeah, this is it. Basically I have 100% score in choosing a partner. So there you go. No ,
Speaker 3I all , that's amazing. So I know like most people will know you being this successful photographer, you know, you're on social media, you have a very successful business. But how did it all start for you? Because from what I read, it was more of a turbulent , it's not necessarily
Speaker 2something that you went into straight away photography. Um , I read that you started in law school. I did. I earned a full ride scholarship to the university of California at Los Angeles. I was very excited as the daughter, like I'd mentioned, I hail from immigrant parents. My father is from Mexico and my mother is from Puerto Rico and they met in East Los Angeles, which is not exactly blue collar. It would be very, very, very low blue collar workings in humble beginnings for my parents. And then we grew up here in the States, in California with government assistance. So if you make less than a certain amount of money, the United States considers you living like a low income poverty level. And so we would get food donated to us. Collections at church would be made on our behalf. But as a kid you don't know any different. You just think, Oh wow, we get food on our porch by our neighbors. You know, you just think it's very normal. And then I earned a college scholarship for academics and I graduated at the top of my class and I say those things not because I was particularly smart, that was homeschooled the majority of my life and my mom doesn't have a college education. She barely graduated high school. My dad didn't learn how to read until he was 25 I just think that that says something about my personality where I'm not exactly intellectual, I'm not the smartest and what the quickest and what the wittiest. I'm not the fastest. I'm not the person in a room where somebody says, Hmm, that girl, she's going to go and do something. But I will say that if I like all of those other things and I have the belief in persistence, I have somehow found a way to consistently rise to the top in certain projects or certain opportunities that I've been given. And I think that's the story that led me to law school and I don't think that I was somebody who was like, Oh, she's going to get into a tier one or tier two law school. And I ended up getting into multiple tier one schools and I ended up choosing to remain in Los Angeles because my mom had an eight year battle with cancer. Her health was so fragile that I didn't want to be too far from seeing her if I needed to. And low and behold, during my first year of law school here in the States, it's three years during my first year, she had a relapse of brain cancer and I was just struck dumb with grief and depression and it had been such a hard road getting to school and I was so unhappy there. And then with the illness of my mom, I just said, I need to leave, I need to be with her. The doctors had said her time at calm, like she'd been battling about eight and a half years at this time and the doctors that said, we've done everything we can do. It's time to plan her funeral. And it was so hard that I picked up, I loved law school. I moved back home to be with my parents. And so there I was 25 years old and she was 50 years old and I felt like I had a midlife crisis. Like truly, I was so sad. I was such in a font and I thought to myself, if I have 25 years left in my life, I don't want to dial a lawyer . Like I was just it and the one thing I did know was that I wanted my mom to see me marrying my high school sweetheart. She just loved him. He's so wonderful. Our families, you just kind of grew together over the years and we planned a wedding in a little bit less than three months and the doctors said, Oh, she won't be able to fly because we wanted to get married on an Island in Hawaii. And she said she won't be able to fly. She won't be able to talk, she won't be able to walk. And against all those odds, my mom and my dad walked me down the aisle and it was one of the best days of my life and I think that having her there, she was and has and remains my North star because just this morning I had a conversation with my mom, so she beat the odds. She beat every odd that was stacked against her and I think that it really set a precedent for how I want to live my life. When other people say it's not going to happen. She decided to dog lead, determine with miracles from God. No doubt she's just a walking miracle. But it forced me to reconcile what do I want to do with my one wild and crazy life. And we just got home from my honeymoon, I got a letter from UCLA and it said that in order for me to reclaim my scholarships, I had to reapply. And there was about three weeks married and I am sitting at our tiny dining room table with my brand new husband and I'm crying because I say , I don't want to go back. I don't know what to do. And so then my husband says, if you could do one thing for the rest of your life and be happy, what would it be? And I said, I want to be a photographer. And he said, okay, but you don't own a camera. I was like, I know, but if I had a camera like I think I can make it go at it. And that was in 2005 and Christmas 2005 ion wrapped a very simple camera, but 2005 was like one of the hardest years of my life. And I told my husband that I didn't want to open the chemo in 2005 I wanted to open the camera on January 1st, 2006 because I was in new year and it was a new opportunity to do something that I wanted to pursue. And he said, listen, just give it one year. He's like, try to pursue photography for one here and if it doesn't work out, you have one last remaining year to reclaim your scholarship. So law school was like plan B and I was like, okay. So I took a part time job, picked up a camera and then by 2009 I was one of the top photographers in the world.
Speaker 3Amazing. What a story. I had a lump on my phone and you're talking about your mom and I think when you go through something like that, it just puts things in perspective. And we talk a lot on the podcast about fear of actions . Sometimes you know, people want to do things but they don't really know where to start because they're fearful of starting and they feel like they have to be perfect at something before they start. But I truly think that sometimes when you realize how fragile life is, it puts things in perspective and you think, why am I worried about that? What is the worst that can happen? And when you start realizing that the worst that can happen is okay, you might not be very good at it, you might need to pivot and we'll might laugh at you. And she just puts things in perspective. Actually it's not life or death and life is so fragile and we here once. And I just think having you speak about that just, I just think it's a lesson for all of us to remember, isn't it? We have at one champs that this and we deserve to be happy and we deserve to take those leaps that make us happy. So thanks for sharing that story.
Speaker 2Oh, thank you. Just to kind of close the loop on something you had said. You had said, we're so afraid to start because we don't know where. Well darling, nobody does. There's this fallacy that we believe some people have a secret or a code or some divine insight into where to start. The people who actually are in successful positions are we look to aspirationally. They didn't know where to start, but they started. They were the 2% of people who started made mistakes, restarted, pivoted, started and continued every iteration of their business to start. So if you're afraid to start because you don't know where you are, not a special snowflake, we all are trying to figure it out as we go. So take any action because even what you perceived is the wrong action. Well that got you closer to the right. Action. Take action. Any action. Gritty action. Scrappy action. Wrong action. Good action. Amazing action. Any action is better than no action at all.
Speaker 3I love that. It's so right. And I think like you say, just take action. Do something because it might be, but by trying something you get closer to actually what you want to do. I find it interesting though that you were so dead set on photography and that actually you've been very, very successful at doing that. But what made you even think to become a photographer when you didn't even own a camera ? Is that like an intuition? How'd you met a photographer that inspired you,
Speaker 2like actually connected those dots in that capacity? Amazing. So I went to a small private liberal arts college in Los Angeles and the interdisciplinary studies, we were required to take a litany of classes that we wouldn't otherwise outside of our discipline. I ended up earning a degree in business, but they made me take a bunch of science classes and math classes and you know, acting. And one of the classes I had to take was a sociology class and this one class that was offered every other year, once a semester, it was able to lock in a seat. And I felt so thankful because it was a sociology through photography. And I had a borrowed a film camera and I developed my own film while I was in school. And like our school, they called it like a photography department, but it was literally a storage closet that had been converted into a dark room. And so I would buy my own film, I would develop my own film and at the end of this semester the stories we were able to document with our cameras were put up in a small little like art studio there on campus. And I just remember feeling absolutely free and empowered and it was so gratifying to see the work that I had poured my heart into on display. And I think as a first generation American, as a first generation college student, I didn't feel like I had the wherewithal to tell my parents like, Hey, I want to be an artist. Like all your sacrifices to get me here. Like I want to be starving. And in my mind you are only an artist and you're struggling and didn't think of the world in a transactionary sense that like artists could also be business people and later in life that would ultimately guide me to that point and I couldn't be more thankful.
Speaker 3That's so true as well. Sometimes people think and just left brain, right brain. But there is an element where you can be both and if you can't be both then you hire someone who's the opposite to you. Right? You can make it work. I love that. So I want to just touch up a , because I felt like we skimmed past it, but it needs more recognition within a fee as a starting, you actually became an award winning photographer. How did that happen?
Speaker 2You know? Okay. So I am very familiar with the boss paid community and so I want to 100 share my story and I know that within the community there are artisans and crafts women who will hear what I have to say and then there'll be appalled. I can't believe she's saying that and guess what? I'm okay with that. I am okay. Putting a stake in the ground, speaking my truth, understanding that I will only do one of two things. I will either attract you into my orbit or I will repel you. I am okay and feel equally the same about both of those things. I never want to be lukewarm. It's the people who were main lukewarm and want to be accepted and loved by everybody or those who are the quickly forgotten. So I am going to talk and share how I created a business and became an internationally recognized award winning photographer. It was because I created an experience and I built a brand. I was not the best photographer and boil . Boy did I hear it starting in 2009 2010 2011 2012 there was a whole uprising of classically change photographers who would look at my work and just tear it to shreds. It's terrible. The lighting's off. Look at the contrast. Look at the Hughes , her colorings off, does you not understand? And all those years I kept on raising my prices, raising my prices, raising my prices, and people were aghast. How could this untrained girl from the hood who has no business sense and no right to be out there taking photos, running a successful business. And I quickly understood early on that the industry back in 2007 2008 was strongly dominated by an old sense of hierarchy and this is the way that it's done. And then digital media, like social media and digital marketing really hit a stride. Around 2010 I created a blog and photographers were like, what is a blog I have to do with being a photographer? And that quickly marked how I was able to attract, I spent zero money marketing my business. People were paying me 10 to $15,000 to be shooting their weddings in Italy, in Canada, in Costa Rica, we were flying around the world, we were working with editors. We are at the top of the game and people are like, you don't deserve to be there. And I wasn't offended. I looked across them and said, I know, but I am. And along the way I shared everything I knew to every photographer who asked. I put it on my blog. I created videos. I share it . I shared , I shared a shared, and when people talk like how did you get to that point? I created valuable content. I build trust for my clients. They spread my name because they didn't feel like a transactionary event with me. I wasn't just a wedding photographer. I wasn't just working with an art director or an editor. In that moment. I was there to serve them and leave them with such a good taste in their mouth that they're like, I have to share this woman. Like I have to share her work. I have to connect with other people. That is how I built my business with no money and then was able to really build a profitable
Speaker 3business within my first year that all so many lessons and takeaways in there on the site . That was so invaluable. One thing I want to ask you though, because I find quite interesting, so I get what you're saying about people loving you and people disliking you. Actually that being a good thing, but what do you think has allowed you to have that mindset that that's okay because I felt like a lot of people listening just don't like to think that people don't like them and they do try and please everybody. So is that something that you have always embodied or was it something that as you've got older and as you've bought your business, you've learned to become more resistant to, and is that anything that you practice that helps you do that? For example, I've always struggled with being a bit of a people pleaser and now I have mantras around it. So I've built my resilience up, you know, not necessarily being liked by everyone. By having mantras around the, I look at when I am feeling vulnerable or low in confidence. Have you had to do any of that?
Speaker 2I strongly spent probably somewhere like 30 years of my life trying to please people, trying to fit in. Unbeknownst to me, what happens as a child and the way that I was framed is like I was always on the periphery. I wore somebody else's clothes like we can afford to buy our own clothes. We had our food donated to us. I always worried that I was the odd man out there . People can look at me and be like, she's different. And I think that my whole life I aspired to go unnoticed. Growing up, I didn't want to be noticed as the girl who looked different than everybody else. I would also grew up obese, so it was very big and as a result of being very big as a child, you're always selected and noticed in a room. And so I wanted to please everybody. I wanted to be forgettable. I didn't want to stand out. And then I had a really great conversation with my father and he sent me down and he told me, if you don't want to be anybody, do nothing. Say nothing, be nothing. People will have an opinion about you regardless of how hard you try for them not to have an opinion of you. If you think you're doing everything perfectly, there's going to be somebody who looks across and be like, I don't like the way she does it. I don't like the way he does it. I don't think she talks. I don't like the way she looks. I don't like the way that he teaches. So in my mind it was like a light bulb went off and I was like, Oh my God, regardless of my behavior, somebody's still gonna have an opinion. So why not stick a flag in the ground and say, this is who I am. This is who I serve. I understand you might not like me. I bless and release all of that because I could sit back in the shadows of my fears and my doubts hiding inside of my house. Afraid to put anything out online for fear of what people will think. Guess what? People are thinking something about you anyway, at the grocery store, at the post office, as you pick your kids up from school, people have opinions about you. If you want to be nothing, say nothing, do nothing. Make no waves. And even when you do that, they will still have an opinion. So if you know that people will have an opinion of you, you do you, you're serving your highest self and you're living to your maximum capacity.
Speaker 3It's so true and I think that society now we are surrounded by social media. I think this is showing up for a lot of people right now, that whole feeling that they are constantly being judged and there's no way to get away from it. You know when we were at school we didn't have mobile phones and what do you want home, you are on your own and you are how'd you run privacy on your house and you wouldn't in that moment you could think you weren't being judged even if you were, but I think now social media has accentuated that and I think that actually for us to grow up or survive now in the culture that we're in, we have to become resistant and we have to look within ourselves like you were just saying like an owner and just be like, well do you know what? Someone's always going to have an opinion whether I do something or not, so I might as well do it and try and make myself happy. They're not doing anything at all. So very , very powerful. So again, I felt like I wanted to ask you around the awards, and we have touched on it a little bit, but one thing I was interested in is how that actually impacted your business. Because we talk a lot within the society which has our membership about building credibility and that was so many ways to build credibility. But I do believe that having a wards is one of those ways. And also there's a lot of stigma around whether you nominate yourself award or whether you get some people to nominate for your award or whether actually you just wait to get spotted and get that award. And so I wonder what the situation was with you and actually how you felt that impacted your business. Did you see it improved from those awards?
Speaker 2Oh my gosh. Okay. So again, the, the tiny voice in my mind is like, Oh, I wonder what she's going to think about your answer. Because I'm not quite sure if it aligns quite closely to the hypothesis. I do agree to a certain extent that awards are transformative in a business where they transformative in my business, the answer is zero. No, they did elevate me in the esteem of fellow photographers, but they weren't the people that were hiring me for events or photo shoots. So in that regard it was fine. I loved it. I was honored. But working in serving the clientele I was working, it didn't matter to them specifically because photography and you could substitute the word photography for any other creative element that requires a person's thumb print on the end product or service is that I was selling a highly sophisticated product to a highly uneducated audience. Now my audience isn't dumb. They're all bright, successful, amazing doctors, lawyers like CPAs . Okay. But the fact of the matter is people look at a photo and they appreciate it for what it is. But as a photographer, there's so many nuances to it that the awards that were given were for it , like nuances and quality and experience. All of these things that people might end user. My customer, my client didn't understand. So while it looked nice on my website, that was not the defining factor of if they were choosing between me and another high end photographer. They're not like, you know what, this award right here. No, it was how did I show up for them? How was the conversation, how did I egrets and you know, at the end of the day it does look great as a veneer, but it didn't have any bearing whatsoever on how many clients I was booking as a result.
Speaker 3I love that and I think thank you for sharing that as well. Because again, when we come back to this confidence piece, sometimes people feel that they need to have these things to be successful or X, Y and Zed makes them successful. One thing we talk about a lot is how many followers you have on social media does not determine your, and I'm going to put it in quotation marks, success because we can also chat about what's the class meetings, right? But I do think they have all these vanity metrics in all fields and actually, you know, what is it that matters well, what matters is satisfying your customers and pleasing your customers and giving value to your customers. So I agree with your takeaway. I think in some businesses that can really, really transform it and others that you say it doesn't have an impact to that end user. So it's just, I mean this and that very politely a volunteer metric, right? It's nice to get a Pat on the back and there's nothing wrong with those vanity metrics, but it is interesting how they actually do impact the bottom line if you bet .
Speaker 2Yeah , absolutely. There is one of my favorite quotes by Dale Carnegie and it's something very similar to this. It's like your business will go farther having two people genuinely interested in what you do then trying to get 200 people interested in what you do. And I think that that parlays very well years later with social media is that so often, so many of us are looking at our followers as if they are the people who define us. But I have come now to really say that your Instagram account will go farther with a thousand people who are genuinely interested and engaged with what you're putting out. Then trying to get 10,000 followers for some vanity metric. I have seen people, very small Instagram accounts do six figures a year and then we see these mega Instagrammers who are not even closing 30 there's a difference of being popular and profitable. If you are looking to learn how to be popular in Instagram, I am not the coach teacher guide for you. If you're looking at to run a profitable business, leveraging a group of wildly inspiring followers who want to know and learn from you and hear from you and buy your products within, Hey, we can have a conversation. But to me I never lead with followers because Instagram can be gone tomorrow. Facebook can be gone tomorrow and then what are you left with? If you don't have a business behind it, you don't have anything.
Speaker 3So what are your tips for building a business? Obviously you grew your business and scout it very quickly. What do you attribute that? I
Speaker 2attribute it to creating content and creating content on platforms that were my own, so I started off as a blogger. EG was blogging five or six days a week and during the peak. Now I understand that was like a Renaissance. That was something new. It was different. I was getting anywhere between 20 and 25,000 unique views a day on my blog and I did that by creating content, content for my end client, the people who are booking me as the photographer, and then content. Also in regards to my personal life because I was building our personal brand and this was yes where I was going on vacation when I got a new puppy. All of those things that people thought were and consequential to my business actually became foundations to them and then thirdly, creating content for people in my field. Free content. I was just putting out because for years and years and years, I didn't know that I was doing this. Then I look back and I said, Oh, this is how it played out in my business. I was just creating free content to establish myself as an authority and a trustworthy figure in a very saturated industry. I have still kept that pattern up today, but then made iterations as Twitter was introduced and YouTube was introduced and Snapchat and Facebook and Instagram and Pinterest. I am still creating content in this same capacity but then slightly changing the content so that it's suitable for each of those platforms. My biggest thing is like when I see somebody who has like, Oh 500,000 followers on Instagram and then they have like 5,000 followers on Facebook or they don't really have a big newsletter list to meet. That is not a balanced business. You never want to put too much of an Easter egg in your basket. You want to have like six small eggs instead of one big one because that's called diversifying your marketing efforts and it makes you longterm sustainable and a viable option. As an entrepreneur, should your business ever in the future get acquired by me ? True. I like that. Like spreading the business is really important. I agree. Like I say, having those different platforms. So how has your business evolved over the time that you've had it? Oh, I love this question. This is this interview girlfriend. I mean I'm just going to give you a slow collab right now. Um, okay. So started creating content for photographers around 2010 at the time it was brand new, like this is like God. I think as sometimes like when I'm 80 or 90 I'm going to tell my great grandchildren that I lived through the equivalent of like the gold rush or the roaring forties because this is truly the wild West. Like we're making up the rules as we go along. It's just such a powerful place to be as human beings that we with no money, truly no education, truly no resources. I never even knew a single person in my life who had ever started a business. And then there I was within the first year and a half of my business and I had created a six figure revenue stream. What the heck? This is amazing, right? So it's like all of a sudden everybody's trying all these new things. And so it was around in 2010 that an organization called creative live, they started sending , we're streaming online education, would you like to come and teach? And I was like, sure, I'll come teach photography. What we did in the summer of 2010 is we trended on Twitter, we Ustream and we had over 20,000 people watching live as I did a photography shoot, not because I was unique or not because I was special or cute or fun. It was, this was brand new. It had never been done. And I think that that was like the big first iteration to really position me as an authority in the photography world. And from then I started creating online resources for photographers, like just PDFs that people can download and videos on my own. I was just trying to like figure out how can I scale my business and then business owners outside of photography. So around 2014 2013 2014 business owners who were in the creative fields said , we see what you're doing with photographers. Do you think that it would work for us? And of course the imposter syndrome comes up like, who am I to teach this? There are other people like I'm not enough. And then I was like, well, let me just start seeing if I can do consulting on the side and see if my strategies would work for business owners. And they did. They were not just even that with like similar success but like jaw-dropping, astounding, amazing success. And then what I realized was the thing I loved about creating content online was that it was scalable. And I was meeting a lot of people's, like helping them in their journey. And when it came to consulting, which I did for a couple of years, I just felt like I was only working with one person and guiding them to their success. And it was wonderful, but it wasn't scalable. And he realized this is not where I'm the most happy. And where I'm the most happy is connecting with a lot of people, pushing people, keeping them accountable and saying, this is how you do it guys. And so then in 2017 we launched, I say we, my husband is my business partner. We launched social curator and this was the marrying of everything I loved in my life. I am a writer. I started off as a blogger, so regardless if people consider me a writer, I'll just name it and claim it. So every month, part of our monthly social media membership is we create lifestyle photos for business owners to show up everyday online we create 30 lifestyle photos so that every single day you don't have an excuse as a business owner to show up and talk about your business. Now, I didn't say sell your business. We're branding, we're creating experiences, we're building personal relationships to get your followers engaged and then we include a monthly marketing plan and so it's like everything that I love to do with my life, I'd love to write, I love to empower, I love to shoot, I love to strategize and all of a sudden they became this community that has really revolutionized the thing that I love doing. I'm living in my purpose, I'm standing in my passion and I'm empowering other people to show up on social media. It's like, Oh wow, this is it. Like, this is where I'm supposed to be right now. So from what I'm picking up from your story as you all very good at spotting trends, you are an early adopter of blogging, you are probably a very early adopter in social media. What do you think is going to be the next trend? What are you looking out for in your business to grow? Okay, so thank you for noticing. I was just thinking about that today in yoga this morning. I was like, I need to really own the fact that I am a pattern, a big believer in where everybody else is going run the opposite direction. I like to play in the smaller margins because there's bigger returns there and like months ago, okay , so IGT TV came out as an estimate early year of 2018 and people were like, this doesn't work. And then I saw people doing polls like, do you use ITV ? No one's ever on it. And then I have it on film, I put it on YouTube and I put it on Facebook because I couldn't put it on Instagram. But I was like, y'all, I GTV is going to be the thing. And I started taking polls with my audience. Like do you want to see the videos in horizontal or in vertical formats? Hands down. Everybody wanted to see it in vertical. So starting from the summer of 2018 I started making content specifically for IGT V even though nobody was really there. And I kept on saying, you guys double down here like Instagram, it has not invested millions of dollars to simply say, Oh, you know what, it's not working. No, they're fighters. Like they know that video is the future. And so they're going to amend their platform to ensure that people are seeing it because they knew that IGT V was like an app within an app and people weren't going to the sub app. And so they outright said, we're not going to put long form video on the platform because it's gonna ruin the experience. Well, a couple months ago, February, 2019 G TV can now be linked from your profile to your channel and you can only watch 60 seconds on your feed. And then you have to click to go over to IGT V. so I was putting out videos on IgE TV and I was getting anywhere between like eight and 9,000 views, which is fine, but considering how many followers I had, it didn't really measure up. And then the minute that the integrated the capacity for people to watch it in the feed, the views went up to around 30 to 35,000 per video. I noticed the pattern and I hate thing I like [inaudible] . It makes me feel icky, but I know that I have to start saying what's true. Oh nuts. I know, I know. [inaudible] so I mean I do feel like with the platforms , going back to the question is why you feel so strongly about where the platforms are right now is there isn't a strong contender right now that's shaking things up and this is coming from somebody who downloaded Marco polo it. We started off with ask whale who got into all the other new social apps and I'm like, okay, it's not really heading . I believe we have a good 48 months left in Facebook and Instagram, like really, really, really like, I definitely seen a massive job on my Facebook page. I know that that was coming. I know now you have to pay to play, but guess what? Instagram's going to be there . Instagram is going to be paid to play in like 12 to 14 months without a shadow of a doubt. The writing's already on the wall. They're going to shrink organic reach because they can . They have over a billion users. And then if you want to get your, and you're going to have to start promoting them, that's gonna be the name of the game. This is the trend of every social platform and this is something that we have to understand going into it. However, whatever you can do now, create so much content to maximize your average four to 6% organic reach and if you have something hot, you can get up to 10 to 12% that's where you need to be right now, and I am deploying a LinkedIn strategy in 2019 getting really serious about that.
Speaker 3Again, we're exactly the same. Nothing has a complete I physician media, I'm more the operations kind of had, but she's created this incredible Instagram course as well just because it is how to allow people to tap into it. But also you're so right with looking at other strategies as well, like LinkedIn and looking at different places and I think you have to ride the waves, but you also have to look ahead of the wave and go, okay, what's my plan after this? And I think that is super, super powerful. So I have another question for you. I was like, well, I'm thinking I'm a photographer and award winning photographer on here. I want to ask her some questions about taking Instagram photos because we have spoken about it a lot. And I do know that a lot of people are like, Oh, what do I post ? Or like what is good light or what angles do I do? So what are your top five tips for taking Instagram photos? Jasmine?
Speaker 2Oh, I love this. Okay. So if listeners are visual learners, I get asked this question all the time on IgE TV on YouTube. I have created visual tutorials on explaining. This is an audio format, so I'm gonna do my best to describe what I am saying when it comes to describing good light and that is my number one tip. If you are a novice photographer or you're just rocking your iPhone and no dis on the iPhone, I shoot a lot of my Instagram photos on a phone so good on us. Good light would be described as something being illuminated by the sun. Now you don't have to stand in the sun. In fact, I encourage you not to. The best light will come when the sun is out, but you're standing in shade stand in the shade of a building, standing the shade of a tree or standing in doors with the light source coming from an open door or a window, that light is going to be the most complimentary. Like people often ask, like I do an Instagram live every single week and I literally put my phone up on my kitchen window. I do a Facebook live every week and I've opened up my laptop right in front of an open door. I don't pay for fact . People always ask, what lighting rig do you use? And I'm like [inaudible]
Speaker 3that's fun . [inaudible] yeah,
Speaker 2really expensive one. So that is truly finding good light. The second tip would be to focus on something that is called the rule of thirds. And this means that your subject, a flower, your dog yourself is placed in one third of the frame. Oftentimes most people will take a picture and make sure that the object, the person, the thing is smack center. But if you were to actually look at your Instagram feed and everything would be smack center visually, it's not as appealing as if you make your eye work for what to focus on. So if you were to divide a photo into three equal parts and then you were to divide the photo horizontally on three equal parts you would be looking at is a nine square grid. That is also, if you notice what Instagram shows us, why it's visually stunning from an artistic perspective and innate how we are programmed as humans to look at things and find beauty. So you want to make sure that your object is in one of the thirds . Now you can absolutely have things that are centered. In fact you should, but the variance is really important. Upper third, lower third, right, third left third. These are all things just to kind of take into consideration. Also, when you think about colors, when you are, let's say like in the morning, if you want to take a photo of your coffee, you want to make sure that you don't have like a purple polka dot napkin next to a silver spoon and like a black cup visually that doesn't go well. I commonly referred to a color wheel. You can actually just Google color wheel and you'll see colors that are next to each other on the color wheel or across from each other are complimentary. There's a reason why things that are green match really well with whatever the opposite side of the color wheel is. And then also when it comes to another photography tip, we would really be thinking about lifestyle. What is going to show who you are and how you spend your time. People have noticed that photos on Instagram perform 67% better with people in them than if people are not in them . And we have seen as I coach our business owners all the time that a mediocre selfie is better than a perfectly quaffed , perfectly styled photo. Why? Because people want to see who you are. And I think that the minute we lead with who we are, it helps us stick out. And we know this, we implicitly know that when we get to see people on Instagram, we're intrigued a little bit more. And the minute you intrigue somebody on Instagram, there's a higher likelihood of them liking and engaging. We create that authenticity, don't we? Absolutely.
Speaker 3I love those tips and I didn't know about [inaudible] so that's interesting. And they're actually very smart dog [inaudible] I know.
Speaker 2And you know like a couple years ago, I'm such a nerd, I'll get you out about Instagram all day. I'll give you [inaudible] social. I just feel it is the truest and utmost revealing of human nature that is existed digitally. I mean it's fascinating to me that like social media exposes who we are. Like we've always been this way and now we have an opportunity to really showcase these behaviors and I'm fascinated. My husband's as I should have been either a sociologist or a psychiatrist, like I just love human behavior. A couple of years ago they had tested a 12 square grid. They beta tested it . They never did a full rollout because people were like in arms about it. They're like, no, this doesn't work. And so again, it goes back to what we find is beautiful, how do we understand the world? And then making sure that Instagram is playing to those roles has been pretty wild and fun to see. Well, well
Speaker 3thank you so much for finishing with those tips Tasman. Honestly, this interview has been incredible. I've thoroughly enjoyed it and thank you for opening up and being so authentic and sharing
Speaker 2your stories has been amazing and I'm taking notes myself so thank you for that. I am so honored. You have no idea. I was so excited when we got introduced and you're like, would you like to be on the podcast? I was like, what? I thank you. Thank you so much. Friends. I hope this gave you a bit of insight into what it was like when I started my business from absolutely nothing to turning it into a world renowned photographer. I loved this interview and I truly hope you did too. In this episode we discussed my top five tips for taking Instagram photos and I know that as a busy entrepreneur, sometimes taking your own lifestyle photos is easier said than done with your busy schedule. You know the importance of posting on Instagram, but booboo who has the time, right? This is why I would like to invite you to download five free lifestyle stock photos@jasminestar.com forward slash free stock photos. These photos can be used for any business anywhere in your Instagram stories or an Instagram in newsletters, as blog headers and so much more and there is no photo credit required. This is a gift from me to you, so save time in your business today by downloading your five photos for free@jasminestar.com forward slash free stock photos. I hope you enjoyed this episode and until next week, shine out . I'm a friend. Shine on
Speaker 1[inaudible] .