so I have one major regret when it comes to making money with social media you see way back in 2015 when I started taking Instagram seriously and trying to grow my internet presence and pursue a career as a photographer I was fortunate enough to have a conversation with

someone much older than me this person was making a lot of money on the internet and they asked me one simple question they said are you doing any type of internet marketing how are you going to get in front of people when you eventually want to make money with this

social media presence and I looked at them like they were crazy I said I have my Instagram following I have this way to connect with people through this app but we all know how Instagram has changed a lot since 2015 and now I've had to implement every single thing that

this person told me to do after the fact and I missed out on a lot of money and a lot of opportunities in the process so today I'm hoping to give you all the information you need to avoid that in 2024 and make some real money with

social media now some background on me is that I'm a photographer I work in the creative field but all the information in today's video applies to literally anyone who has a business that's trying to grow and use social media as a way to make money and the simple strategy I'm

teaching you in today's video is the exact strategy I use to launch my new book momento a few weeks ago so the examples I'm going to be using throughout this video are all based on this book launch because it's what I'm familiar with but like I said you can

apply this to literally anything now today's video is sponsored by Squarespace because throughout the video I'm going to be showing you how I use all these strategies on my website evan.com evan.com was built on Squarespace long before they were a sponsor on this

channel and the reason I love Squarespace so much is because it allows a creative like me to customize my site even though I have no web design experience I can share my work create a blog contact my customers do email marketing and also sell digital and

physical products so throughout the video if you want to try this out you can go to squarespace.com/Evan start a free trial and use code EV to save 10% at checkout now step number one to this strategy is having a plan okay I

know that sounds cliche but you have to figure out what it is that you're going to be offering to people that is valuable people purchase things that give them something so in the next month before 2024 you want to figure out what your value proposition is what can you

do for someone big or small regardless of your audience size now something cool about Squarespace is they offer things like membership sites so maybe you want to directly get in touch with a small group of people and offer memberships that's an option maybe you want to sell

a course that's an option maybe you want to sell a digital product like for me that's presets or if you're a videographer that's a LUT or if you're someone who maybe makes cooking videos on Instagram it could be a recipe ebook

There's a million options out there, but what I recommend, and this is the key, is to think about what is working, what are people taking an interest in? If you're someone like me who's a photographer, let's say you put out certain photos that everyone is asking how you edit this photo, the product you could eventually create that you're going to launch at the end of this video could be a product explaining how you edit your photos or a tutorial breaking down this popular post.

That is where you want to start: what are people interested in? 

Another example, if you have a category of recipes that you're creating on Instagram that always seem to do better, let's say for example it's barbecue recipes, maybe you want your digital product that you're creating to have something to do with barbecue because that is what is working. Look at what people are interested in with what you're doing because that is where the value lies.

Now, step number two is once you define what you plan to offer to people that is valuable in the future, you want to begin promoting this product. So you have your plan in place, you know what you're going to do in the future. Now you want to give people who are interested in that thing the opportunity to get information about it and get updates on when it's available. So in Squarespace, I'm going to show you how to create a mailing list and also create an

email capture. So let's say you're using Instagram or any type of social media. In your social media post, you can create a call to action that says, "Go to my website and sign up for information about The cookbook or the tutorial or the presets that I'm going to release in"

the future and the people who are interested in that can go to this page, they can sign up and all the emails will go to a list that is easy and organized for you. So let me show you how to do that in Squarespace now. The first thing

we have to do in Squarespace is create an email list for everyone who is interested in the product you're eventually going to offer. So what we're going to do is go to marketing, we're going to click email campaigns and we're going to click on mailing list and we're

going to click add up here and we're going to create a new list for everyone interested in your product. So we'll go ahead and call this product announcement, so everyone who wants the announcement of your new product has access to it. So we'll click on Save and

now that list is created, so we'll jump back to website right here. We're going to click on pages and we're going to create a new page to give people some information about the product you're eventually going to release and everyone who's interested can leave their email

and get more information. So if you're using your website, you probably want to add this page in primary navigation, but because this is an example I'm going to do this in not linked, so I'm going to click on this plus sign right here, add in a blank page and we're going to

go ahead and title this page "My New Book." We're going to use my recent book as an example. So from here we're going to go ahead and populate this page. We're going to click on edit for page context and the first thing we're going to do is drop in

some text this is going to give people an understanding of what is to come so I'm going to go ahead and highlight this and make sure it's all the right heading settings and as you can see it's a breakdown of how I released my book so

now that we have that the next step is to click the plus sign once again and now we're going to drop in an image so from here we're going to click on the plus sign to add in our image and we're going to go ahead and add an image

that I already created that's an asset for my book so once I found the image I like we'll go ahead and click on upload let that load in real quick there we go that looks pretty good that is now at the bottom of our page but one more

thing we have to do is click on the plus sign and do the most important step which is actually drop in our email capture so we're going to click on newsletter right here and I'm going to go ahead and drag this block up and next to our text I think this is going to

create a more aesthetically pleasing looking page I think that looks good now we'll click on this we'll click the pencil tool now from here we can go ahead and customize this so maybe rather than say subscribe we can say gain Early Access now that we have that populated

you do have the option of adding in a name field if you'd like that's really up to you you can also customize the post submit so when someone says sign up you can change this message we can change it to thank you there we go so

after submit we're giving them a little bit more information and that looks good so we'll go ahead and click on back now we have to go to storage this is a very important step we want to make sure that we turn on confirmation email this basically ensures that once someone puts

their email in they get an email from you they actually subscribe to your mailing list so your email will be delivered to them now we can add our mailing list option here so we're going to go down to product announcement from there everything looks good and let's

double check all this think everything's fine so let's go ahead and click save on our page right here so just like that we have now created a system that takes control out of the social media algorithm's hands and puts it into your hands you now have

a way to directly contact the group of people who are interested in the value you plan on providing in the future and remember that value can be anything for the sake of today's example we are talking about my book for the month leading up to my book launch I got

people to go to that landing page and sign up for early access to my book and then when it came time for me to launch the product I was able to contact them directly rather than relying on social media now step number three in this process is to actually create the

product so you need to invest the time necessary into making the thing you're making it can be your digital product your cookbook your membership site your course in my case it was this book this book took a very long time to produce but once you produce the product you

have to add it to your site so for this example I'm going to show you how I add a physical product to my Squarespace site so now to add our product to our website we're going to jump back to our pages and we're going to click on

selling and we're going to go to products and now we're going to click on ADD product now for this example this is going to be a physical product because I'm selling my book but for you it could be any of these it could be a download

like a file maybe a preset or an L pack it could be a service could be scheduling if you want to schedule Consulting it could be a membership site it's really up to you and it's going to be specific to your product but for this

example we're going to do a physical product click on that and I'm going to go ahead and add this to a page that's not live we'll go ahead and click continue and now we're just going to populate everything that we need for this product I'm going to go ahead and

copy and paste what I've already done from my site just to speed this up a little bit first thing we'll add is the title so Momento Photography book by Evan Ram next we'll go ahead and drop in our description and it's good to be as

specific as possible in your description for my book I have all the information about the book laid out I also have a note that I wrote about my inspiration for the book as well as a thank you and then a notice to any International customers once we do that we can go

ahead and drop in all of our images now once all of our images are in there we can take whichever image we want to be the thumbnail and slide it up to the front I think this image looks fine so we'll go ahead and leave that there now

we'll jump down to our inventory and our price you want to go ahead and set your price to whatever you think is fit for my book 400 or excuse me $44.99 is the price that I set and you can set your stock as well whatever your stock is you

can say how many are available and then you can change your SKU the reason it's important to change your SKU is when you're using shipping software and you're processing orders if you have multiple SKUs or multiple items you want to be able to distinguish what is what

and you also want to be able to map your shipping software to this particular SKU so when someone orders my book it automatically has the size the dimensions and the type of mailing service already mapped to that SKU now the last thing that you want to do here

is you want to make sure that you customize your page so you're going to go down to marketing and you're going to go ahead and click on editing now from here what you can do is change your SEO your description I just did Evan Rant photo book because I feel like people

are going to Google that so I want this to come up and I also changed the URL slug to be the title of my book so all someone has to do is type in Evan r-store slmo and they can find my book so from there we're pretty much done you can go

Go ahead and customize your checkout button. You can add a form in if you want subscriptions. You can also add in maybe a video or something if you'd like under the additional information tab. The way you do that is once you're in additional information, you can click the plus sign

and you can add in any of these blocks like you would anything else. So you can do more IM, you can do a form, you can do a video like I said, it's really up to you. But for now, we're going to go ahead and leave that blank and we'll click on

save. All right, now it is almost time to launch our product. It's out, it's available. You've captured everyone's emails, you've been doing calls to action on your social media saying, 'Hey, to get more information on the product I'm launching, sign up for this mailing list.'

It is time to utilize that mailing list. So I'm going to show you in Squarespace how easy it is to use their email marketing tools to create an email to send to the group of people that you have now captured in a mailing list. So

now that our product is live, we're going to click back on marketing and we're going to create an email campaign for this new product that we're launching now. From here, what you want to do is go ahead and click on Create and you're going to click on Blast. Now this is

going to allow you to send an email to all the people on the list that you select. Now Squarespace has a number of templates that are available for you to use. These templates are just as easy to customize as any of their website templates, but for today's example, I'm

going to show you a template I already customized for the announcement of my book so for this email all I had to do was add in pieces if I wanted just like I would on any other Squarespace Page by selecting the plus sign I can add an

image, spacers, I can add buttons in. I did this to customize this template and as you can see I have one set of images, two images and three images. I have details about the book that I typed in and I also have buttons here that allow people

to click, click and go directly to my store. So to customize a button like this, let's add a new one in, let's click the plus sign up here, let's click on a button and let's change this button label to "Secure." That's just an example

right here and we're going to go ahead and change the color of this button to something that contrasts the page. I think that looks good. We can also customize the text if we want. That looks solid but we're going to go ahead and delete it just because that was an

example. Now the button that I've made right here as you can see it links to my store so when someone clicks this they go to my store on my site. So once you've built out your email all you have to do is go over to this email tab right here.

You're going to click on the recipients you want. We don't have anyone in our made-up product announcement list but if you did you would go ahead and click that box right there. Once you do that you are now going to send this email blast to all those people you just have

to drop in a subject once you have that you can schedule this you can say immediate or you can set it for a specific date in this example we'll just keep immediate on and now we would send a test email first because you want to see if the email looks good you want to

check for spelling errors but once it's done off the screen right here you can't see it you would click on send to recipients and everyone on your mailing list who signed up for this announcement will now get the announcement of your new product and there we go just like

that you have now gotten contact with a group of people who are interested in the value that you can provide without relying on any social media algorithms you've done the work beforehand getting people to this landing page and now everyone who's interested has the opportunity to buy your product now the

next step in this process is to redefine your email capture now the product that you've been promoting is out so what you can do to redefine your email capture is to offer up a free product now I have a separate video on this channel where I

talk about this strategy I use it all the time with my Instagram I'll go ahead and link it in the description down below but a simple strategy you can use is offer some type of free value to your audience and get them to go to your mailing list from your social media

with this free value on my Instagram I offer up a free preset right now it's not there because I launched the book but in the past I offer up a free preset so when someone finds me on Instagram they can go download that preset and then when I do updates or launch new

presets or new digital products. I now have an email list of people who are interested in that offering from me. So I told you it was simple; that is everything you have to know about how to start making money with social media in 2024, the easy way. Now, obviously, this

example is fairly simple because this is a short YouTube video. There are a lot of ways that you can refine this process and make it better. One way you can do that is create email automations. I talk about that in the other video I mentioned earlier. Remember, it's linked

in the description down below. With email automations, you now have an opportunity to create more of a rapport with your audience. You can do something like a newsletter or send out multiple emails before that offer email goes live. There's a million things you can do, but

at the end of the day, the biggest question you have to answer, and really the only question you have to answer, is what can you provide to people that they find valuable? If you answer that, now all you have to do is execute the easy steps in this video, and you're on your way to

making money with social media. Now, remember, if you want to sign up for a free trial, you can go to squarespace.com/ramp. Implement everything in this video, try it out for yourself, and when you're ready to sign up, you can use code EvanR

to save 10% at checkout. And also remember, you kind of have to build out your website on your own. I didn't go over that in this video, but I have multiple videos on this channel where I break down how I built my website. Evan

r.com, so I'll go ahead and link those in the description as well to help y'all out in every way I can. I'll look out for questions on this video, drop them in the comments down below and I'll see y'all next time.

How To Make Money With Social Media as a Photographer In 2024 | Step By Step Practical Guide

How To Make Money With Social Media as a Photographer In 2024 | Step By Step Practical Guide