How to Automate Your Marketing

Note: Due to a request from Instagram, Massplanner was recently discontinued for new users. The only way to register for a membership is through receiving an invite from a member, which you can find in a private forum or this Facebook group. Jarvee has also emerged as an alternative with identical features.

I have a confession to make. In the past, I never seriously considered that social media could provide a worthy ROI based upon the time needed to invest in it. Perhaps you may feel the same now.

Yet time and again I kept hearing of so many online businesses blowing up through platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest that I decided I needed to take a more proactive role growing my social media.

I read all of the beginners “getting started” articles that I could find, but didn’t find them very helpful. The thing that stumped me at first was having to login each day, post consistently, and manage everything manually. In the beginning, it was incredibly tedious and time-consuming.

For example, multiple sources suggested I use the app Crowdfire to manually follow and unfollow people, which over time was supposed to grow my own following. But the application had follow limits, so I could only follow 100 people per hour. And then they “nerfed” the free version even more, so that I could only follow 25 people an hour.

At any rate, I could quickly see that manually clicking follow or unfollow several hundred times per day to slowly grow my audience was probably not the best use of my time. My goal is to leverage technology to give me MORE free time, not become a slave to it! After a few weeks, I gave up.

At that point, I had collected about 600 or 700 followers. But I had far too many more important things to do than blindly clicking a button on my phone, such as writing books, blogs, courses, and consulting with clients.

Around this time I received that golden nugget of “insider info” - similar to what you’re reading in this book - from a fellow blogging friend. In only a couple of short years, she had risen to become one of the top three most influential bloggers on social media in a very competitive niche.

Her secret can summed up in one word: automation. She had found ways to automate all of the tedious, time-consuming aspects of her business, which allowed her to 10x what she could accomplish.

After following her advice and trying this for myself, I realized: automation is the closest thing one can have to super powers.

Within a few days, my Instagram following was up to 1,200 real, targeted followers. Within a week, I’d passed the 2,000 mark. I began to average 1,000 new followers per week, and six months my following had built up to 20,000 real, targeted, engaged followers. One year quickly went by, and I was closing in on 40,000.

There are many stories floating around the web of accounts growing faster than this, sure. But automation makes this process predictable and repeatable - what I have done, you can do, and it’s as easy as breathing.

During this time I set up a productized service business on the side and was able to duplicate similar results for dozens of clients. And let me tell you, when you have an audience of this size, fun things start to happen.

Ever since I begun publishing content through my blog and books, I sought to build an audience of 10,000 e-mail subscribers. But anyone who has tried to build an audience from scratch has realized that it requires a lot of work, expensive giveaways, a large marketing budget, or some brilliant strategy.

For every consultant or coach you may have heard of who has built up a substantial mailing list, there are a hundred others struggling to do the same.

For the average person, it is not easy. And I know quite a few “marketing consultants” who are only able to build big subscriber lists by spending tens of thousands of dollars on advertising.

Building up a following on social media - if you have an afternoon to spare and follow what I’m going to teach you in this chapter - requires neither hard work, a budget to blow on paid advertising, nor direct marketing brilliance.

Rather, it simply requires the simple solution that I believe will power the future of all work over the next century: technology and automation.

For a very affordable price, you can license your own copy of MassPlanner for six months, set it up on a VPS, and replace yourself with your very own hardworking virtual computer. You could do it this weekend and begin to reap the benefits. Unlike an employee or virtual assistant, your automation software never sleeps, eats, rests, or gripes about the work you tell it to do.

I remember the rush of excitement I felt knowing that I had my own virtual computer working for me full-time, around the clock. It was the coolest feeling ever. I had a smile from ear to ear and a boundless energy in my step. The colors of the world seemed more vibrant. Even food tasted better.

I felt like Batman.

For as long as I can remember (going back to high school), I wished that I had a clone that I could pass along difficult work to. Now I had finally achieved that dream - or at least, had come as close as I could.

It felt unbelievable.

Massplanner

There are quite a few automation tools out there, especially for social media. The one I’ve chosen to use in my own business (and deploy for clients) is Massplanner. Although there are other pieces of software which perform similar functions, such as Instagress and Followliker, I’ve found that nothing is as powerful or offers such as extensive set of features as Massplanner does.

Massplanner is a one-stop social media solution that runs across a variety of platforms: Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and even E-mail.

The software boasts an impressive array of built-in features, plus a large and growing number of additional “modules” that you can purchase, for a one-time fee, and they are adding new ones all the time. The team behind MassPlanner has also created an extensive number of blog posts and videos showing how the many different features work.

I’ve been using MassPlanner for about a year and a half now, and while there are still many features of this powerful platform I have yet to explore, I will walk through some of the most important ones, including the basics and some advanced strategies that I’ve been using to great effect.

The cool thing is, you can use the software in such a variety of ways (such as integrating it with the “hack” I discuss in the Product Hunt chapter), that you are really only limited by your imagination! Basically, you become the “brain” behind the marketing campaign and let the software do all of the hard grunt work for you.

It’s a sweet setup, and you may even become addicted to social media marketing once you experience these new superpowers firsthand, as I have :)

FOLLOWING, UNFOLLOWING, LIKING

The first standard feature that Massplanner can assist with are the bread-and-butter actions of following people, unfollowing non-followers, liking posts, sharing and retweeting, and so on. These are the mundane, boring, repetitive daily tasks to grow our accounts, and it’s safe to say most of us would rather stick a fork in our eye than have to perform these manually.

Once you’ve set up your profile by adding your login information and verifying, hope over to the “Tools” tab within Massplanner. First, we’ll set up the “Follow” actions.

Follow Settings

As of 2019, it’s becoming more difficult to grow accounts by following and unfollowing as platforms such as Instagram have implemented blocks on this type of behavior.

So if I’m going to pursue this strategy using Instagram, I’ll set the tool to follow a conservative number of accounts per day, to follow between 5-45 people per hour, and wait 35 to 90 minutes between operations.

In the past, one could follow 800-1200 accounts per day from a single account but this is no longer possible. I want to make sure my settings are slow, steady, and conservative -- the way a human might perform these actions. It’s also a good idea to check “Enable Advanced Options” in Massplanner/Jarvee and check that the follow/unfollow actions are performed from the embedded browser, to ensure your accounts stay safe.

To improve the chances that we’ll be followed back, we’ll scroll down and check the box “Like user’s latest posts,” and set it to 2-3. Then we’ll also make sure we tick the boxes “User has a profile image” and “Do not follow private users.” We could also tick “Enable automatic follow/unfollow” but I prefer to manually stop following people once I reach

7,000 (Instagram only allows an account to follow a maximum of 7,500 people).

Finally, we also have the option to tick the box “Send a direct message after follow” and input a message to send to new followers. While this can no doubt be very effective, I tend to not use it as much.

In campaigns that I’ve run, I’ve found it more effective to extract targeted prospects by hashtag or geo-locations using the “Contact” tool and messaging those prospects instead, rather than anyone who happens to follow an account. With a good message perfectly targeted to the right niche, you can expect responses.

Back to the Follow tool. Let’s navigate now to “Follow Sources.” To get the most engaged followers, I like to start by selecting the tab “Follow users that interacted with posts on target accounts,” and then add a list of accounts within my niche that have a high follower count and engagement per post.

If you haven’t yet, take some time to browse Instagram and find at least 5-10 model accounts with lookalike audiences to your own. You can also click the downward arrow next tab next to the “Follow” button of an account to have Instagram suggest similar accounts to follow. Input one account per line into the text field in Massplanner, and click “Add.”

Next, we’ll scroll back up to the top and tick “Follow people by keyword search.” For this, we’ll go back to Instagram and use the search box to begin finding hashtags to target.

Do not half-ass this step. This is your targeting, so you want to make sure you are pinpointing the right hashtags, otherwise you’ll attract the wrong people. Do not guess. Take the extra time needed to see what Instagram suggests, look at dozens of different hashtags, check out the top posts, and see what other accounts are including in their photos. The more targeted you are, the better results you’ll have, so browse the photos for every single hashtag you look at to ensure that it fits your customer profile.

Once you’ve created a list of hashtags, you can add these into the keyword search box, separated by commas, and . Do not worry about adding the actual hashtag, you can simply include the keywords.

Example: digitalnomad, laptoplifestyle, lifeofadventure, etc

With these two follow sources checked, we’re set, but let’s go ahead and tick “Follow friends of target accounts” for good measure. Just as before, add some additional Instagram accounts by line and click “Add Account Followers.”

The great thing is that MassPlanner / Jarvee automatically track the followback ratio for each source that you select, and you have the option to automatically remove sources if they fail to reach a certain followback percentage (such as 10%). This way, in time you can narrow down and know what your highest performing follow sources are.

Click “Start Auto Follow” and you’re done! With this one step, we’ve completely automated something that would take countless hours to perform manually. Give yourself a pat on the back, because that’s pretty awesome.

Let’s finish up by navigating to the “Follow Back” tab, and switching that on. Then we’ll go to “Unfollow,” and configure our settings. Mine are: unfollow five days after the application follows someone, wait between five and ten minutes between each operation, and unfollow between five and thirty-five people per operation.

That’s it! In a very short time, we’ve set up the standard follow, unfollow, and like settings. Massplanner will start working for us immediately, and continue working for as long as we license the software.

Automated Commenting

When done correctly, automated commenting is VERY powerful, because it is an easy way to begin conversations with targeted prospects that lead to opportunities. Consult the chapter “Social Media Sales Funnel: How to Automate Lead Generation” for a full breakdown on this strategy.

Contact Users

One of the most exciting features within Massplanner is the “Contact Users” function.

The basic premise is very similar to the “Commenting” function, except that this allows you to direct messages users via the inbox!

For Instagram, this solves one very important shortcoming of the platform: you can build up a huge following, but unlike an e-mail newsletter, you can’t contact them all directly.

With this tool, not only can you direct message your own followers on the platform, you can also direct message followers of other accounts, users who liked or commented on an account, users who tagged content with a certain hashtag, and so much more! You are only limited by your imagination.

The “Contact Users” module also enables you to send custom automated direct messaging on other platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. The only real downside to this function is that you have to limit how many daily messages you send. On a platform like Instagram, you could get locked out of your account if you are sending out too many direct messages too quickly.

Therefore, I tend to set this feature at 20-30 messages per day (and 10-15 for Facebook) and let it run slowly over an extended period of time, rather than simply sending out a broadcast to 40,000 followers at a time.

Another option you have is to also set this feature to only send messages on certain days of the week. This helps if you feel overwhelmed by the number of replies you receive. For me, every Monday is “Marketing Monday,” and I can let the tool do much of my outreach for me.

In actual practice, I tend to let the tool run for a few days, sending about one message every 60-90 minutes. Then I tend to get overwhelmed with messages and will pause it for a few days, take time to reply to every response, and repeat the process.

How you choose to implement this strategy in practice is up to you, you really can have more leads than you can handle!