How to grow your {new} audience online through Instagram
Is this is? Is this the year you’re going to take things seriously with your creative work, to start selling it, to turn your social media audience into paying customers?!
Yes yes. Let’s do it together.
I’ve had Petalplum on Instagram for a long (long) time. I know that I’m doing there. I know the people who follow along love what I do, and are inspired by what I do. But now I’m starting a whole new business, a business about the craft of creating your own business.
So, I’m working on a second Instagram account - elliebeck.creative.
This is a different audience. There will be a cross-over. There are people who follow me on Petalplum who also have their own businesses, but not all of them. So, I’m planning as if I’m starting this new account from scratch.
As Petalplum simply evolved by itself, and I’ll admit it was in the easier days of growing an account. There was way way less people, there was more connection, there weren’t really any coaches or those actively selling accounts. There were no ads, reels, videos. There were beautiful photos, engaging captions, conversations, connections.
Not like it is today. So, it does feel a little like I’m learning all the things over. But I’m not really.
I’m going to take you on the journey bit by bit. To see how I go. This is scary - putting it out there, the slow growth of it. The making mistakes, the learning of new ways and things. But I want to do it this way. I know I could just do it all, quietly and then share the fancy 'overnight success’ with you. But we both know there is no overnight success in our creative arts work, in our business, in our building a studio or a practice that is vital for us.
Here’s the steps I’m taking for starting a new Instagram account in 2025.
Deciding my 1-3 main focus ideas.
For me, my main real passion when I work with other creative businesses is to guide them to get their audience onto their own sites. To own their audience. So, newsletters are my big thing.
I will also be selling website templates later on this year (stay tuned in my newsletter here, where I’ll be giving first early bird access). So, this means I need to work this idea of design into my account.
I’m going to stick with these two for now. Later in the year, once I’ve launched my first newsletter online course, things might change. For now, I’m keeping it as simple as possible.
Some of your main focus (niche) ideas might be:
Selling your physical products.
Selling coaching services.
Promoting in person workshops.
Talking about health or wellness ideas.
An influencer - don’t scoff at this, it’s an amazing and completely viable idea.
Having a paid newsletter with recipes, writing tips, how-tos.
Promoting your book.
2. Planning my content for the next 1 -2 months.
I’m not great at this. It’s hard for me. I often fly by the seat of my stitching work on Petalplum. I want Ellie Beck Creative to be more intentional, more focussed and planned. And then for this to flow over into Petalplum Instagram as well.
I’ll be doing this by writing out my main focus ideas and working on sub-topics I can talk about. There will be a combination of carousels, educational reels, stories that (hopefully) sell. I’d love to work in some collaborations as well.
I’ll do this with a proper planning and scheduling app. Currently I use PlannThat for Petalplum. I’ll look into some different ones as well. Free sites are good, for now. Until it’s working well. I think invest in things that are the most important (like learning how to make the most of the audience once you get them off Instagram, and even learning how to connect and grow your Instagram audience).
3. Starting to create the content.
I’m hoping that it might take less time to create reels than it does for Petalplum. As those reels need me to actually make the thing, which in itself takes days and days. And turning those snippets of stitching work into a videos takes me way longer than it should.
Batch creation is the way to go. I’ll spend one day a month working on this. Probably to begin I’ll need to make 6-weeks worth of content and schedule it out.
4. Re-working content into different forms.
Once I have something written up for a blog post or newsletter I can make it into an Instagram post, or vice versa. Rather than making each piece of content stand alone fresh, I will be aiming to minimise the work I do by making sure I can take parts from each thing to share across multiple places.
Let’s see how this goes. I’ll be back in a month sharing the progress, what I’ve done. And perhaps (if I’m not too scared) the growth and results. You can stay connected via my newsletter, where I’ll keep you updated with how it’s all going.
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