Before we get into the nuts and bolts of how you can create Dynamic and engaging Instagram stories right inside the Instagram app. I want to talk a little bit about what kind of content you might want to include in your stories. I think a lot of creators struggle with coming up with ideas on a regular basis to show up on their stories and connect with their audience.

So I want to share a few suggestions. Also just a heads up. I am going to be including a video in the resources on this course page of an entire YouTube video that I made on this topic to give you some ideas of where you can start with Instagram story content, but let's talk about it here too. The first level of Instagram story content that you can start sharing is just behind the scenes or Day in the Life. It can be really great to let your audience in on what you're doing and working on on a day-to-day basis so you can start off using a really basic structure like this checking in in the morning when you first start your work day, maybe even sharing your to-do list or asking your audience what they're up to by using a question box. Then you can maybe check in around noon or sometime midday and share a little bit about what you've been working on maybe some of the challenges that you've been facing or some achievements that you've made during the day and then finally maybe around like 5 o'clock or sometime in the early evening. You can post for a third time kind of closing out the day maybe sharing something that you learn or that you're proud of or kind of an encouraging message for your audience. That's just one very basic structure that you could start with where you build it into your daily routine and you make sure to connect with your audience the main important thing when you're sharing this kind of content is try not to think about it just as a report of what you're doing, but instead try to think how you can connect with your audience share a takeaway message or provide some inspiration instead of giving updates. Think about how you can share your feelings or your struggles or your emotions in some way that's gonna be more interesting to your audience and if you can Incorporate them into the conversation somehow through question boxes or polls or prompting them to reply to your story via a DM that even better another type of story content that you could consider incorporating on occasion is actually sharing tutorials or explainers or walkthroughs. This can be done in a pretty casual way just by filming it inside stories, but you can actually utilize some of the features or effects inside the real Editor to make this even more engaging for example, you can use the green screen effect and you know show a screen recording of you doing something and then talk in front of it while you explain it to your audience or you can incorporate some videos as well as some still images talking people through the step by steps and the great thing about this type of content is that you can very easily share it to your highlights later and then prompt your audience to reference that highlight if they have questions about whatever you explained finally another type of content that you can consider sharing on your stories. It's just a good old Q&A you Start off the day by sharing some kind of prompt asking your audience to send you questions. Of course, make sure you include the question box sticker and then throughout the day you can reference the list of questions that come in and answer them either through talking to the camera or my personal preference is to take a photo either of myself or something that's relevant to the question being asked and then type out my answer.

I think a lot of times we think that we need to just like talk to the camera on stories and while that can be valuable in small doses. I think a lot of people end up tuning out or just too impatient to watch to the end. So they're gonna skip over your video even if it's only 15 seconds long, so consider using a still image and text and then people can always tap and hold and read through everything if they want to now that I've shared some basic prompts that you might want to include in your Instagram story strategy. Remember that the notion content calendar that is included with the course actually has a section for you to add notes about the Instagram story content that you want to share so you can go ahead and Add that to the top of your content calendar each week whether you want to do a Q&A on Wednesday a tutorial on Thursday behind the scenes on Monday, whatever it might look like you can note it down there to remind yourself what type of content you wanted to share on a certain day and then my recommendation is that you refresh that each week. So the idea of that little story section on the content calendar. It's just to be a reminder for you to check in on a daily basis. Oh what Instagram story was I going to share today and then of course you can you know, delete it and start fresh the next week or if you really want to go for it. You can plan out in depth what your Instagram stories are gonna look like on your content calendar ahead of time. There is a template inside the content calendar for scheduling stories. It just depends on your content creation style. If you like to plan that much ahead of time personally. I like to do stories in a more kind of off the cuff spontaneous way but teach their own.

Okay. Now that we've talked about some of the principles behind what kind of content you might share on your Instagram stories. Let's dive in with a bit of a walk through on how to create this content. You can start creating your Instagram story simply by swiping to the right on your main feed and it's going to open up the stories editor for the sake of this example. Why don't we just start off with a classic selfie? This is how I like to start my stories off pretty much every day because I find that especially for personal Brands your face is gonna be the most recognizable part about you. So if you can show your face people are more likely to stop tapping through and actually see what you have to say.

So let's go through some of the features that you can add to your story. First of all you can add text. This is the most common thing. You're probably gonna want to do this almost every time this is exactly like I was showing you in reals you can type whatever you want and put it in whatever font is your preference. You can change the size, of course, you can change whether or not there's a background and you can also animate it. If you like then, you know, you can move it around the screen place it wherever another quick tip for you if you want to make your stories look really on brand and consistent is storing a color palette for your brand in your camera roll. So you can import it as a sticker If you want to do that, you can just tap on the sticker tray and we're gonna go back and talk more about all these different stickers in a second. So don't worry, but if you scroll down And tap on this icon here that looks like a little photo of you know mountains and a sun that's gonna bring up your camera roll. So from there if you tap on camera roll it'll allow you to go through and choose an album. So let's just say I go into the creatorly album and I pull up the creatorly color palette. What I can do then is Select my text. And if I tap on that Rainbow Circle there I can get the eyedropper tool and then I can select whatever color I want and I can toggle with the background color is by tapping on the little glitter next to the a there and by doing this you can make sure that your text on your Instagram story is consistent with your brand color palette every time you post just by importing this little sticker when you're ready. Of course, you can just tap and drag this down to the little garbage icon. So you don't actually have to show your color palette in the final story, but it allows you to eye dropper the exact color.

Okay going back to the various stickers that you can use if we open up that sticker tray again. I'm going to tap on cancel to get out of Camera roll option there, you'll see that we've got a ton of different stuff to choose from so let's just talk through some of the benefits of using these various stickers first off. We've got location. This can be great to use especially if you create content based on travel or maybe for your local community that way you can tag your Instagram Story by its location and people might be able to find your story by that if they're searching for that location in Instagram and they tap on the story for that location. Yours might just show up. It's also just nice to be able to show your followers where you are if you're exploring a new place or displaying a destination in your stories next. We've got the mention sticker.

So, of course you can easily tag somebody in your stories. So to tag someone you can either use this mention button, but you can also just type at when you're typing and tag someone that way so either is valid next. We've got this add yours. So this is a new relatively new feature that you can use where you can add a prompt and get your followers to contrib. Cute then we've got the question box. This is something that you might want to use pretty regularly because it's a great way to get your followers engaged. You don't necessarily need to have them ask you a question. You can also ask them for their input like you could put like who is your fave YouTuber or whatever you want to ask and you can like crowd Source opinions that way.

Skipping down a bit, There's the music sticker. This is great. If you film some like b-roll and you want to use that for your story, you can add some music in the background just to make it a bit more interesting next. We've got this reaction sticker where you can actually select whatever Emoji you want and if people tap on it when they're viewing your story, then it will like show that sticker all over the screen. I just can be really simple way to get people to engage. We've also got the slider sticker, which is very similar except for gives you the option to have people like rank their mood or like how their day is going or how much they like something on a sliding scale which is kind of fun.

Next. We've got the pole sticker. This is pretty straightforward. You can ask people their opinion and get them to vote on different options. We've also got the quiz where you can basically make a poll except where you can select a correct answer and then people will get to see what the right answer is after they vote. You can add a hashtag that's very similar to The Mention auction because you can also add a hashtag just by typing it.

And we've got A link sticker. This is great because this is now accessible to everyone whether you have 10,000 followers or not. So you can add a link to your story to direct your followers to whatever offer you might have outside of the platform. Whether it's like a YouTube video or something you're selling or whatever. There's also the time sticker the temperature sticker If you want to share that information in your story and the countdown, if you want to create a countdown to a certain day that maybe you're doing a live stream or some other event that you want to promote and of course, there's all kinds of other like visual stickers that you can throw in there. If you like the vibe and seasonally Instagram will bring in stickers for certain causes or movements or events as well.

So you can see there are a ton of options there to make your story more interactive whether it's through the question box a poll a quiz a slider a reaction sticker I recommend using at least one of these in your story each day doesn't mean every single frame has to have one but throughout your whole story have at least one interactive sticker and it gives your audience an opportunity. To engage, okay, and just to finish going over our various options here. There's also the effects option so you can retroactively add some filters if you want. I believe this only works if you took the photo inside of Instagram, but you can you can add that filter if you want and if you tap on the three dots you can draw on your story so you can you know, Do whatever you want. Whatever you think looks good something that I do find fun. Every so often is drawing something like this and then you can add depth by actually using the Eraser and then just like erasing certain parts of the line so that you know, it looks like it's going behind you or whatever, you know, it's a pretty particular aesthetic. It's not something that you need to do like regularly, but it's a fun trick if you want to try it and finally this last sticker over here, you can add a branded partnership label if the content happens to be a brand deal. And of course finally you can tap on add it to your story when you're ready to post once you've posted some content to your story. If you tap on your profile picture in the top left-hand corner, you can review your story and if you tap on the activity in the three profile pictures in the bottom left hand corner, you can see your stats. You can see how many people viewed you can see who liked your story and if you talk on the graph here, you'll be able to see how many accounts you reach how many we're engaged and all that good stuff. Then you can skip through your stories here and and view your analytics also here under the viewers tab is where you will see any responses to your question boxes and your polls.

I think the biggest thing when it comes to Instagram story content is that you just get out there and experiment remember it's only up there for 24 hours unless you add it to a highlights. This is an opportunity to try new things and really try to engage in communicate one-on-one with your audience members reply to those DM responses and really get a conversation going. That's what stories are all about.