I Quit Instagram - Here’s Why

I quit instagram as of October 1st. As you watch this, it's only been about a week, but I want to share with you why I'm making this choice, why I know it's the best thing for my business and what I'm planning to do instead. In case you're wondering if quitting Instagram should be your next best step as well. Why I'm quitting Instagram. I hate it. And I know I'm not alone, because when I was researching this video, I was finding comments like these that are on your screen right now, consistently on videos about Instagram. And my entrepreneur friends and my clients are saying the same things as well. So I know I'm not the only one feeling this. So hating it is a good reason. I also got sucked in when I opened Instagram. Not only was I getting on Instagram, wasting time just mindlessly scrolling and watching stories, but I also got sucked into this comparison game that constantly made me feel less than. And I hated looking at people thinking, oh, they're doing more than me, I need to do more. Oh, they're doing better than me, I need to do better. And just thinking I was never enough. My content was never enough. And I got that feeling predominantly while I was on Instagram. Go ahead and hit the like button right now if you're resonating with any of these feelings, because I would love for you all to see that it's not just one of us feeling this, it's quite a few people. I actually took the summer off of Instagram as well, pretty much from June to August, and nothing bad happened to my business. In fact, I ended up having the most profitable month in my business and in July when I wasn't even posting to Instagram. So why was I still on it? Instagram was almost like a toxic codependent relationship for me, but kind of just went one way. I felt I was going to miss out on something like a client, like big news or something. I needed to know that was going to make all the difference in my business. But that's not true. And while I do like sharing stories and catching up with people, and I like the creativity of reels and being able to be sarcastic and funny to create enough content over on Instagram for it to actually pay off in my business. To actually see ROI on the content I was creating on Instagram, I needed to be creating way more reels than my creativity handle. And it just ended up really stifling the fun and the creativeness that I was having on reels. Why Did I know I could leave Instagram? I just wrapped up my most successful launch ever of my YouTube coaching experience. You can see all of the new clients back there. And when I looked at the numbers after launching, the numbers do not lie. The traffic that came from my YouTube content converted significantly higher than the traffic that came from my Instagram. And so what that told me is I could get, if I could get more people, more traffic to my YouTube content, I could get more people converting to work with me. So why would I put more time in Instagram when it's a steeper uphill battle? Because Instagram traffic wasn't converting as high. In fact, I think YouTube was converting around three times higher than Instagram. So the numbers do not lie. Why would I waste my time on that platform when I could put more time into YouTube, generate more traffic and have a better result on the back end? There's also a lot of writing on the wall that says YouTube is going to be better for business owners from here on out. First of all, you need to realize if you're a business over on Instagram, you're going to need to pay to play. Your content is not going to get in front of as many people as it used to be unless you are running ads with YouTube when you have the right strategy, the strategy I teach all my clients, you could be getting in front of your ready to buy viewers from your very first video. And the best part about that is it continues to compound. So every video you put out gets more and more and more videos because your new videos sends views to your older videos. And YouTube will know exactly who to put your videos in front of that are going to work with you or buy from you, and YouTube will do the promoting for you for totally free. If you do YouTube right, the opportunities for revenue stream and making money on YouTube continue to grow as well, with way more better opportunities than Instagram. So there are way more brand deals and sponsorship deals for those on YouTube, because brands know YouTube videos are way more valuable than a reel or a story that disappears in 24 hours. Brands know that if they pay you to do a video, that video could literally send them traffic, send them sales for years to come, just like it could for your business. So brand deals, sponsorship deals are way more lucrative. You also have YouTube AdSense, which I tell my clients never to rely on. But it is an added bonus for creating content. You're not getting paid to post reels, but when you put content up on YouTube consistently and you get to the point where you're making AdSense. It can be a nice little chunk of money where you could be paying for a video editor. My goal is to make anywhere between 500 to $1,000 a month on AdSense and that covers my video editor. I am good. The other thing that YouTube has been doing really amazing for me and I'm going to share this more. My plans for the future, but affiliate revenue as well. I don't really focus on affiliate revenue, but there are videos that created a year ago about FG funnels, about tubebuddy, about Vidiq, about my favorite equipment and those videos continue to drive traffic and make me affiliate money. I'm making at least 500 to $700 a month with affiliate money from videos I didn't even have a strategic plan on from videos I posted over a year ago. And I'm really seeing that power in how YouTube can just broaden my revenue streams with content already am creating to grow my business Anyways. Now is it time for you to ditch Instagram? Maybe, maybe not. Let me know what you're thinking down in the comments. But I'm going to break down the few things that I'm doing to really Double down on YouTube with the extra time that I have now not spending it on Instagram. First step in the plan, quit Instagram. Now I'm not going to say I'm never going to show up in Instagram. If I feel like sharing a story or if I see a fun trend on a reel that I'm excited and feel creative over, I will get on reels, I will get on stories. But I'm not committing myself for a specific Instagram strategy or a specific posting schedule on Instagram. That is done. The second thing I'm doing is adjusting my YouTube schedule, which means I will be posting more here on YouTube. The goal for me is to get up to three videos a week. Now one of those is going to be a live stream so it wouldn't be, you know, three actually recorded videos. And I know I'm not going to get to this three videos a week tomorrow or probably not even here in October. But the goal is to start ramping up that posting schedule to just reach more people on YouTube and double down on the traffic that I'm getting from YouTube and just keep sending people to my offers from YouTube. There's also another reason I want to focus more on YouTube because YouTube announced back in September more features that are coming out for the YouTube platform. Specifically more community building features. And this is where I want to build my community I don't want to deal with it over on Facebook. I, I am so excited to just focus on building the community, creating this group of people that are excited to be doing YouTube and seeing YouTube grow their business. So that is another reason why all in with YouTube. The next plan that I have, which kind of ties a little bit in that is to utilize more YouTube features. So I'm going to be posting more on the community tab. I am also going to be posting shorts. Now, I've never really had a feeling towards shorts. I have not done shorts because I've not seen the benefit from shorts. If you saw recently, I, I did post a bunch of testimonials. That's for a launch debrief story another day. But I am going to start playing around with shorts and seeing what actually works on shorts to grow my channel to reach more people, to help me make more sales in my business. The other thing that I plan to spend my time on now that I'm not on Instagram is keeping a better post on my channel. So reading my analytics, studying my analytics more. I do this for my clients all the time. But I am like the cobbler's kid, right? The cobbler's kids never gets new shoes. I never have the time to dive in and study my YouTube videos. I know intuitively what will and won't work and what is working. But I want to dig in, spend more time auditing and analyzing my channel, which means I want to start something new here on my channel, part of the live series that I want to be doing. One of the lives I want to do is diving in and sharing you my monthly YouTube audit. Sharing with you what was working, what's not. So you can follow along as well to audit your YouTube channel. So that is one monthly live stream I'm going to be doing. I'm also going to be doing another live stream where it's like a plan your videos with me. So once a month we'll sit down, you can dedicate that time to join me live on YouTube to plan your next couple of videos. So you're going to want to make sure that you are subscribed because these lives will probably start towards the end of October. Now I will be documenting this entire journey. I actually have a really ambitious goal and I know it's crazy, but I'm throwing it out there. If I can spend the next 90 days on my YouTube channel, I have a goal of hitting 100,000 subscribers and that is double what I have in 90 days. But hey, if I don't throw it out into the world, will it ever happen? And I mentioned, you know, those live streams, I want to hear more about what live streams you would love to see from me or you would show up for because I want to make videos that you're excited to watch. I want to make videos that people just like you are excited to watch. Because now that I don't have my creativity stifled over on Instagram, I am so excited to give my all here on YouTube. Let me know what ideas you're thinking about down in the comments. And if you know, you want to start focusing more of your effort, more of your marketing time, more of your content creation time on YouTube as well, make sure you watch the video that's on your screen right now where I walk you through some of the best tricks and habits that I've created to staying consistent here on YouTube for almost 10 years now.