How do some seemingly bland Instagram posts get so many likes, and why to all 'repost' accounts have so many many followers?
The answer is likely to be many and varied, involving gaming the Instagram algorithms, and upping your search engine optimisation, but the primary tool in Instagrams armoury is promoting posts. Unsurprisingly, they make it very easy for you to promote your own posts, so I thought I'd give it a go.
Infrared Trees
To begin, you need to switch from a personal account to a professional or business account. This will allow you to promote your posts, as well as gather enhanced metrics that will show you how successful your promoted post has been.
Once you've picked a post that will be interesting for people, you can go ahead promote it, there is a new "Promote" button next to your posts on your profile view. Then you just need to decide how much to spend and what your target audience is. Spend is based on how much you want to spend per day, and how many days you the promotion to run. For your target audience, you can define some simple parameters, or just let Instagram choose for you. Lastly, you need to pick what the action of the promotion is, you can link to your Instagram profile, link to your website or online shop, or send a direct message to your Instagram message inbox.
For this experiment, I decided to use a recent Infrared photograph post. Infrared photos are eye-catching, they have a special interest to them, and they are not an effect that the average person can reproduce. After picking the post, I then promoted the post a £1 a day, for 10 days. I had, and still, have no idea if this is a lot to spend on promoting, for me, it's a fairly small amount of money, and worth it in the name of experimenting.
Promotion Results
Over the 10 days the promotion ran, the post reached a fairly impressive 3424 impressions, these are the number of times the post was seen, by 2549 people, and nearly all these people aren't following me already because I don't have many followers.
There were 12 clicks on the promotion, so that's 12 direct clicks through to my profile, of which 3 people, or bots, decided my feed was interesting enough to start following me. I don't expect many of these new followers to stick around though.
Cost per follower: £3.33
The post itself earned 554 likes. This was the most surprising part, I wasn't expecting this many. I have no idea if these are genuine people who like my post, or bots trying to game the Instagram algorithms, but it does look good having a big number there and it will be interesting to see if this number changes.
Cost per like: £0.02
9 bookmarks is a promising outcome, I'm assuming bookmarks are by genuine people, who have seen something they might want to come back to.
Cost per Bookmark: £1.11
Finally, a single person wrote a comment due to the promotion.
All in all, I am quite impressed. I wasn't expecting much, and I now have a good starting point for future comparison. The next phase will be to try this again in a few weeks, or more likely months, and compare the results.
Keeping on top of all the tasks of modern life can be tricky. How many times have you got to the end of another weekend and ever wondered what you achieved in the week? Well, this happened to me all the time, until I started to keep a weekly todo list. The idea is simple:
Get an A4 notepad.
At the start of each week, on a new page, note the week number, and write down all of your tasks you want to get done.
Keep referring to the list during the week, and tick off tasks as you complete them.
So, pretty obvious right? However, I’ve found this method really helps me because of a really simple thing: dedicating a whole, new, A4 notepad page to each week. Now, I generally only have a 5 or 6 tasks jotted down for each week, which means there’s a lot space on the page left over, perfect for making notes throughout the week, and it’s this act of making further notes throughout the week, that keeps you coming back to your task list.
A recent trip to Canada provided an excellent opportunity to photograph the beautiful landscapes around Vancouver Island. With outlying islands, dense old growth rainforests, rocky shorelines, and long sandy beaches; Vancouver Island has a treasure trove of photogenic scenes.
Starting from Vancouver city, just getting to the island is a fantastic experience, either take the 15 minute flight, or the 2 hour ferry, both offer great views.
I’ve been busy building a new section of the site dedicated to Calculators!.
Calculators are interesting things, especially when you can quickly change variables and see the result set update.
Calculators will become an important section for growth going forward. The first calculator to be released is a Compound Interest Calculator, illustrating the amazing effects of compounding interest in savings accounts. The calculator gives you access to all the data as the interest rolls up each year, as well as graphing the accumulation curve.
Making calculators as interactive as possible is one of the goals. In addition, all calculators will have a full API for programmatically accessing the result sets, or for creating direct links with starting parameters for the calculator to pre-populate the calculator. For example, Here’s a link to illustrate how £10,000 can become £34,582.51 over 10 years, and if you want to access the data directly, you can use a command line tool like cURL:
At the beginning of December 2018, I’ve signed up to https://www.prolific.ac, to see if it’s possible to use online surveys as a reliable additional income source.
Prolific specialise in providing a platform for academic research, with typical surveys taking around 10 minutes, and an aim to pay around £8 per hour. Surveys are reserved on a first-come-first-served approach, meaning you need to have the survey's webpage open, or you'll miss out. Most of the time, there won’t be any surveys, with a handful of surveys appearing per day. I wasn’t continuously checking as I have my main job with Salesforce during the day, so I was very much checking Prolific during breaks and evenings. This would have reduced my potential to pick up all available surveys.
So, how much did I make? Over 1 month, I was successfully paid for completing 28 surveys, 2 surveys are pending payment, and 2 surveys failed to complete. Below are the successfully completed surveys that have paid out:
Reward
Bonus
Time
£1.00
£0.00
00:10:59
£0.42
£0.00
00:07:09
£0.95
£0.00
00:14:13
£0.20
£0.00
00:02:37
£0.42
£0.80
00:04:11
£0.60
£0.00
00:02:06
£0.13
£0.00
00:01:43
£0.52
£0.00
00:05:46
£1.20
£0.00
00:15:36
£2.00
£0.00
00:06:45
£0.40
£0.00
00:01:43
£0.20
£0.00
00:02:40
£2.10
£0.00
00:26:53
£1.50
£0.00
00:14:59
£1.30
£0.00
00:14:50
£0.70
£0.00
00:13:47
£1.25
£0.00
00:11:05
£1.09
£0.00
00:13:45
£1.00
£0.00
00:06:19
£0.37
£0.00
00:07:53
£1.20
£0.00
00:04:03
£1.10
£0.00
00:12:19
£1.00
£0.00
00:05:44
£0.75
£0.08
00:11:43
£0.50
£0.00
00:05:52
£0.61
£0.00
00:03:20
£0.20
£0.00
00:03:52
£2.10
£0.00
00:15:08
Together, over a month, this is a total of 4 hours and 7 minutes of work and paid a total income of £25.69, which works out to just over £6 per hour … not great. However, one thing that surprised me about this experiment was how engaging some of the surveys were. Although there were some pretty boring questions, there were some genuinely interesting questions, likely due to the academic nature of the surveys, but this was a small positive that I was not expecting.
Could I recommend this is a main income source? No, unfortunately from my brief time, I just cannot see how this would make a decent income. From what I can tell, surveys are a numbers game, the only way to make more money is to complete more surveys, which at £6 per hour is too little for the effort. Assuming you could complete surveys all day, a 10 hour day would only pay £60, with costs still to factor in.
Could I recommend this as an additional income source? Although it's only a small amount, Yes. However, you might need to consider any tax implications. Technically you should be paying tax on these earnings, which could decimate your potential for making any income, although the UK government have recently announced that you do not need to declare the first £1000 of non-employment income. Which means you’re unlikely to need to worry about this unless you have multiple non-employment income streams.
As a future experiment, I Might try running multiple survey sites in tandem, to see if better payouts are available.
This simple equation can be used to demonstrate the importance of understanding the value of your own time. As you can see, Active Income is directly affected by either how long you work, or by how much you're paid; increasing each of these will increase your total Active Income.
The first way to increase your Active Income is to increase the number of hours worked. This is probably the easiest to achieve, as your job might allow you to work additional hours, work overtime, or have a second job. However, there is only so many additional hours you can work, firstly, everyone needs time away from work to relax and enjoy, and secondly, it's impossible to work more than 24 hours in a day. because of these 2 constraints, increasing hours worked will only ever yield small improvements in your Active Income.
The second, and better approach is to increase your hourly wage. Unfortunately, many people greatly underestimate the value of their time. The sky is the limit when increasing your hourly wage. However, achieving a higher hourly wage is obviously harder to achieve, as this will require you to learn new skills and be willing to progress your career, or even change your career entirely. A quick method of increasing your hourly wage is to simply change companies. This can be hard, as you may have loyalty to companies, but in this game, you have to look after yourself, and if you feel there are better opportunities at another company you can often negotiate a higher salary and expectations of promotion.
Active Income will always be constrained by these 2 factors. If you're really interested in boosting your total income, you'll need to start making your money work for you. And this is called Passive Income.
Landscape photography is all about taking your time to explore the terrain. Unfortunately, it is only all too easy to spot a subject, raise your camera, line up and take the shot, whilst comply ignoring any distractions that creep into your composition.
This photo is an excellent example of missing the distractions because I was too focused on getting the shot.
A little background, this photo is from a recent holiday to the island of Madeira. The island is famous for its lavada waterways which provide excellent walking paths across the island. So it was on one such walk that snapped this photo of a gnarly tree.
So, what's wrong with the shot? Well, several things; Firstly, the foreground distracts from the subject. Recomposing the shot further to the right would help to remove the foreground tree from blocking the subject tree. As this is a wide angle lens, getting closer to the subject would really help to exaggerate the branches. Secondly, the sky is blown out. A simple ND gradient filter, or using exposure bracketing would help here. Unfortunately, as this was a handheld shot, bracketing would be out of the question, and as this was a shot of opportunity, I didn't have any filters available.
