← Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
1 Million followers in 2026 | My *EXACT* Instagram Strategy - 867
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Even just a couple of years ago, someone who was in my position could have used some strategies that wouldn't have made sense to most people, strategies that were only really possible if you already had a large following. Those aren't the ones that I'm going to be talking about today. And in fact, a lot of those just don't work anymore because Instagram and TikTok and YouTube and many of these other platforms have leveled the playing field. Because of the TikTok ification of social media, the number of followers you have matters less than ever before. And I know that's a silly thing to say, as I'm doing an entire episode about reaching 1 million followers. But it's true. Having 1 million followers matters a lot less in 2026 than it did back in 2016. Now, I still think that having followers matters. Yes, it is still true that if someone is a follower, they are more likely to become a customer. They are more likely to become a fan or a super fan. But unlike a decade ago, followers aren't everything. Engagement, views, likes, comments, interactions, community, direct messages, all of these things ultimately do matter. But at the end of the day on social media, the greatest predictor of someone becoming a customer is them, first and foremost, becoming a follower. So in today's episode, I'm going to be sharing with you the five key things that I'm going to be focused on to get over that 1 million follower milestone. And hopefully these things are going to help you get past that 1,000, 100,000 or even 1 million followers yourself. Now, before we get into the five things, I want to quickly say that another one of my goals in 2026 is to reach over 100,000 subscribers on YouTube. And. And we're getting super close already. So please, if you haven't already, consider hitting that subscribe button. Because here on the podcast, every single week, I release a new episode about growing on social media, building a brand, building a business, and making more sales directly through your organic social media channels. We're super close to 100k and I can't wait. I got to come up with some way that we're going to celebrate that. Maybe some sort of giveaway or something, but make sure to hit that subscribe button. And if you have any ideas of how you'd like to see me celebrate, go ahead and leave it in the comments below. But with all of that being said, let me know. Let's get into the five strategies that I'm going to be using to grow my Instagram in 2026 to over 1 million followers. Number one is the kinds of posts that I'm going to be focused on. Let me even backtrack a little bit and say that feed posts are the only way to grow on Instagram. Yes, you could technically make an argument that stories could help you grow, especially recently with the new change that stories can be shared from any public profile to any other profile. But generally speaking, feed posts, photos, reels, and carousels are really going to be the only way to grow on Instagram. So with that being said, there are three categories or three different types of feed posts that I'm going to be paying the most attention to and creating the most of in 2026 to really accelerate my growth. The first one is share worthy content. And if you've been a longtime listener of this podcast, you've definitely heard me talk about this one before. Shareworthy content is king. The content, the kinds of posts that are worthy of being sent from one person to another are ultimately how you grow and not just how you grow or go viral. Not just how you get a higher quantity, but also a higher quality of viewers. Because the kinds of posts that my wife is sending me, I am the ideal target viewer of them. The kinds of posts that you are sending your best friend, those are the kinds of posts that your best friend is the ideal target market for. It's not the algorithm guessing that I would be interested or that your friend would be interested. It is you as one of their loved ones, as someone who cares about them, knowing that they would be interested. So shareworthy content is going to be one of the things that I focus on. And like I said, I've done an entire episode on share worthy content in the past. But to give you a quick acronym that I have recently come up with to help you remember what is shareworthy. Shareworthy posts are simple. They're easy to understand. They're so simple and easy to understand that a drunk grandma simple could understand what your post is about. Far too often I see people needing to explain, or wanting to give a backstory behind what their post is, or needing to explain how their post connects to their niche. If you have to do any explaining that isn't obvious in the post, then you've lost the viewer. Even if you've explained that necessary information in the caption, you've probably lost the viewer and lost their engagement. Because the reality is most people are not going to take the time to do their research and read through your caption to understand the post. If your post doesn't make sense in and of itself. If your reel can't stand alone and be understandable or consumable, then it won't be consumed. The H stands for hook. The hook is everything. The hook is the most important part. I don't care how valuable, educational, funny, relatable, whatever. I don't care how good your post is. If those first few seconds, if those first few frames, if the first few words out of your mouth don't grab people's attention, then it's all for nothing. So ultimately, when it comes to your hooks, I generally recommend keeping it between five and eight words long. I generally recommend keeping it at or below a fifth grade reading level. Which yes, goes back to my point about simplicity. And whenever possible, I suggest using a negative word like don't stop or avoid in your hooks. Now, of course, those three tips mostly pertain to the actual words that you're saying or the text on the screen. But. But besides that, I also want you to pay attention to the visual. What is on the screen? Is there an element? A prop? Is there something on the screen that grabs people's attention and relates to whatever your post is going to be about? If you check off all of those boxes, your hooks will be a lot stronger. The A stands for authentic, and authenticity is one of those buzzwords that you hear every social media expert talking about. My simplistic way of achieving authenticity on Instagram is simply reducing the time between idea and and execution. The quicker you can get from oh hey, there's this thing I want to post about, to actually posting the thing, the more authentic it will be. The R stands for relatability. And my tip for relatability is that relatability comes from specificity. What I mean by that is the more specific that you can get in your storytelling, in your hook, in your text or label on the screen, the more relatable the scenario will be. And I know we have this tendency as humans to kind of water things down, make things more vanilla, make things more easier to palette for everyone. But when you do that, you become no one's favorite. You don't connect that strongly with anyone. For example, if I was to use the famous Michael Jordan crying meme and add some text on it that says me, when my post doesn't do well, it would be generally understood by everyone. It would be simple and anyone could theoretically relate to it. But because it's not specific, no one's going to relate to it that strongly. The post would likely perform a lot better, get a lot more shares and be a lot more relatable if instead I took that exact same Michael Jordan crying meme and instead I said, me. When I spend three hours editing a reel and it only gets seven likes. Now, a much smaller subset of the population can specifically relate to that, but because I use those specifics and those numbers, those details in my caption or in the text on the screen, it allows people to connect with it that much more and see themselves in it. So relatability comes from specificity. And then E stands for Entertaining. I see far too many content creators, and especially I see far too many of you business owners who are focused on educational content. Don't get me wrong, don't get my words twisted. You can educate, you can teach, you can give people advice. I mean, heck, that's what I've been doing for the last 10 minutes. But you have to do it in a way that is entertaining. If you cannot entertain while educating, well, then your education probably won't be consumed. Or it at least won't be consumed as much. So if you want to build a follower base, if you want to build a customer base, if you want to get more engagement and more views, focus on entertainment rather than value and education. And an easy way to do that is not to take dance classes and learn the latest choreography. It's not to become a clown. It's not to start showing a little bit more skin. The easiest way to become more entertaining is just to put yourself in the shoes of a stranger. If a stranger were to see this post, would it make sense to them? Would it be engaging to them? Would it be captivating? Or if you struggle with that empathy and with pretending that you are a stranger, ask one of your friends or family members, someone who maybe doesn't regularly see your posts, but you care about them and you care about and you value their opinion. Show them your content and ask them if this would make sense to a stranger. Or if that's not an option, you can also use AI tools like ChatGPT or the Brockbot as a way to ask it if a stranger would understand this post. The second kind of post that I'm going to be focused on in 2026 is posts with DM Automation. Posts with DM Automation are far and away the best way to make sales on Instagram. I've done entire episodes in the past about DM automation, why it's so effective, and how to set it up. But one thing that I've done to achieve this goal of focusing on DM automation in 2026 is I've come up with a checklist for myself of things that I want to use direct message automation to promote every single week. So basically, I made a checklist of things that I want to, quote, unquote, sell or promote, or things that I want to drive people to on a weekly basis. Because as a business owner, we oftentimes use checklists and to dos and schedules for every other area of our business. But then when it comes to Instagram or social media, we're just kind of flying by the seat of our pants and hoping things get done well, I don't want to be that way anymore. And so in 2026, I've made a list of four things that I'm personally going to be promoting, and I use that in air quotes. I'll be talking about these things, I'll be talking about the benefits. Sometimes I'll be hard selling, sometimes I'll be soft selling, but just four things that I generally want to make sure that there is a post about every single week, and maybe this will inspire you. My four things that I'm going to post about every week are, number one, my personal email list, which you might not have any idea that that even exists. I'll put a link down to it in the show notes below. But it is a very small, intimate, personal email list. An email list that I send to personally. I write all the emails myself and I send them on a weekly basis. I rarely, if ever, sell or promote to this email list. But what I do instead is every single week for this email list, I send out what I like to call my report. And report is an acronym, in case you haven't figured it out. I love acronyms, and report stands for Recommending, Exciting, Planning, Obsessing, Reeling, and Treating. So basically, I give a little detail for each of those letters in the acronym and I send it out every single Friday. If you're not already on my email list again, I will put the link down in the show notes below. But that was something that I was really bad about promoting in 2025. I think I maybe made two total posts all year promoting my personal email list. So I'm going to be doing more of that at least once a week in 2026. The second thing I'm going to be promoting every single week is our business email list, usually through some sort of freebie or freemium or digital download. The third thing I'm going to be promoting every single week is our actual trial, which is another thing I did a really bad job of promoting in 2025. We have a $7, 2 week trial and I almost never talk about it on my Instagram. So that's something I'm going to be promoting every single week. And then the fourth thing I'm going to make a point of promoting on my Instagram every single week is this. My podcast slash YouTube channel. I did a good job in the later half of 2025 talking about this, but I want to make sure it's something that gets done every single week. And the really great thing about everything I've been talking about so far is that posts with DM Automation are oftentimes the best performing posts on business Instagram accounts because they're posts that get a lot of comments. And because they get a lot of comments, they will get more views, which leads to more comments, which leads to more views. And these posts can really spiral into some of the best, highest performing content which will help you reach more people and hopefully help me grow more followers in 2026. Something that I'm trying not to do in 2026 is to use the term small business. Because let's be real, there's nothing small about the business that you are building. The number of different hats that you aware is not small. The decisions that you have to make on a daily basis are not small. And the impact that you're making on yourself, your family, your customers, and possibly the entire world is not small either. And for so many business owners, the number of different platforms that you have to learn to use is also not small. But thanks to Shopify, it can be. Because Shopify is the e commerce platform that has all the tools you need in one place. Because Shopify itself used to be a quote unquote small business. Shopify's point of Sale system is a unified command center for your retail business. It brings together in person and online operations with up to 1,000 locations, which makes your customers lives easier by making shopping convenient, endless aisle ship to customer buy online pick up in store, all made simpler so that customers can shop the way they want and staff has tools to close the sale every time. But let's face it, acquiring new customers is expensive. With Shopify pos you can keep customers coming back with personalized experiences and first party data which gives your marketing team a competitive edge. In fact, it's proven and you know I love me Some numbers based on a report from EY businesses on Shopify POS see real results like 22% better total cost of ownership and benefits equivalent to an 8.9% uplift in sales on average relative to the market set surveyed. Get all of the big stuff for your small business, right? With Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling on Shopify. @shopify.com tribe, go to shopify.com tribe again. That's shopify.com tribe. And then the third and final kind of post that I'm going to be focused on in 2026 is carousels. Period carousels, educational carousels, storytelling carousels, casual carousels, all of the above. I think that carousels are going to be a real power play on Instagram in 2026. According to the data from 2025, carousels outperformed reels in many categories, including engagement, engagement rate, and reach to followers. And at the same time, there are way more reels being posted every day than carousels. And so by posting more carousels, I'll be able to reach more people, get more engagement, and grow my following. If you want to reach more people and grow your following in 2026, experiment with carousels. Don't just post reels. All of that was my first key to hitting 1 million followers in 2026. My second key to to hitting 1 million followers in 2026 is posting 5 trial reels per day. Now, just a month ago, I uploaded an episode talking about my strategy for posting five trial reels a day. And I outlined the five different kinds of trial reels that I will be posting every day. And I said something that was wrong. I said, there is no way to schedule trial reels. And I went on this sad sob story about how if you want to post trial reels, you have to post them manually and there's no way to do it. And then a few days later, I found out that Metricool, the tool that I use to schedule all of my content, now allows you to schedule trial reels, which is so flipping cool. Thank you, Metricool. I literally emailed their team and I was like, thank you, thank you, thank you. Apparently, according to Adam Mozeri, Instagram is working on the ability to schedule trial reels in 2026. So hopefully that is announced sooner than later. But as we all know, even when Instagram does announce it, it's probably going to be glitchy. It's probably going to have some hiccups, and it's probably not going to be available for everyone at once. So if you're someone who wants to start scheduling your trial reels right now, today, you can do so using Metricool. I'll put the link down to them in the show notes below. But Essentially, like I said, metrical is what I use to schedule all of my posts. And now I'm going to be able to schedule my trial reels so much easier. Trial reels, for those of you who have been under a rock for the last year, I'm just kidding. I don't mean to offend you. For anyone who doesn't know what a trial reel is, it's a kind of reel that is only shown to non followers, so your existing followers will not see it. The benefit of that, according to Instagram, is that you can experiment, right? You can trial. You can test out posts and see how strangers like it before showing it to your actual audience of followers. But the way us marketers and business owners use trial reels is as a way to reach new people. I have a kind of post that I can now post 5 of per day that will be a guaranteed way to reach new people. Are you kidding me? Why would I not post 5 every single day? And now, thanks to Metricool, I can schedule them, which will make my life so much easier. And I do want to say, the reality of trial reels is that most of them will not perform well. When I talk about trial reels, I will oftentimes get direct messages from y' all on my Instagram saying, brock, I tried your trial reel strategy and it didn't work. And I'll say, how long did you try it for? And you'll say, a week or two weeks. And I say, well, yeah, of course it didn't work. It was only a week or two. The reality is most trial reels will flop. 80, 90% of them will not go viral. They will get a hundred, couple hundred, maybe a couple thousand views if you're lucky, and that's it. But again, that's not the point of trial reels. The point of trial reels isn't maintaining a high average of views. The point of trial reels is that you're kind of like a baseball player who cannot strike out. You can swing at five pitches per day, and no matter how many times or how many days in a row you swing, you will not strike out. So you might as well just keep swinging and eventually you're going to get better. And eventually you will hit the home run. So just keep swinging. Speaking of just keep swinging. That brings me to my third key that I'm focused on. To hit 1 million followers in 2026, and that is posting more. I was absolutely shocked, but I also absolutely should not have been. When I looked back at my 2025 stats I was going through my growth, my total posts, my reflections, my goals, and all of that based off 2025. And I uncovered a really interesting statistic. In the first six months, the first half of 2025, I averaged about 2.5 feed posts per day. That does not include trial reels and that does not include stories. 2.5 per day. And during those first six months, I gained about 20,000 followers in the second six months of 2025. And none of this was intentional, by the way. This was pretty much accidental. In the second half of 2025, I averaged four posts per day. So an additional one and a half posts per day. I averaged four per day in the second half of 2025. Any guesses on what that did to my account? Yeah, I grew 65,000 followers in the second half of 2025. And arguably there was a lot more stacked against me. And arguably there was a lot more in my favor at the beginning of 2025. The beginning of 2025 is when I had the Mozeri interview. The beginning of 2025 is when I did my collab post with Reators, the official Instagram account for creators. And when nstagram for business, which has like 20 million followers, posted about me multiple times. All of that should have equated to more followers, but it didn't. What did equate to more followers? More posting. For you math nerds out there, it was 56% more posts for over 250% more followers. For you math nerds out there, it was 56% more for 220% more followers. That's a pretty good trade off. So in 2026 I have a goal for myself of posting five times per day to my feed. And I know that sounds crazy. I know a lot of what I've been saying right now sounds good on paper. And you might be like, yeah, Brock, mathematically that makes sense. Or yeah Brock, that's fine for you. You have a team. Like your full time job can be content creation, but not for me. And I hear you. I am never a fan of burning the candle at each end. I am never a fan of overworking or preaching hustle culture. I am the self proclaimed president of the anti hustle hustler club. Like yes, working hard is important and we might have seasons where we're able to work harder or not work as hard, but ultimately I'm a way bigger fan of working smarter. I'm a way bigger fan of building systems. And so that's one of the four things that I'm going to be doing in order to achieve my five feed posts per day in 2026. Number one, building systems. Building systems within Dropbox and Google Drive. And if that's something that you want to hear more about in the future, let me know and I can do an entire episode talking about my systems. The second strategy that I'm going to be using to achieve my 5 posts per day goal in order to reach 1 million followers is also my all time favorite Instagram strategy. And it's what I like to call upcycling. Upcycling is the idea of taking a post from 90 days ago or more and re uploading it, basically posting it a second time. You don't need to change the original, you don't need to edit the caption, you don't need to add a special hashtag, you don't need to say this is a re upload. You can just post anything that you have previously posted a second time. And I used to always say that you should only re upload your best performing content a second time. But now what I'm saying is that you should re upload everything that you post. As long as it's still evergreen, as long as it's still timely and relevant and makes sense and it's accurate, post it not just a second time, but a third time. I believe that you need to post every post at least three times before you can judge whether or not it was a successful post. Because there are just so many factors at play. There could be something that was totally outside of your control that you had no idea about that made your post perform poorly the first or maybe even the first and second time. And so every single post should be posted at least thrice. The third strategy that I'm going to be using to achieve my 5 posts per day goal is good old batching and scheduling. If you are listening to this episode right now and you do not have at least seven posts that are pre made ready to go, you already have the captions written, everything is ready to go and everything is already scheduled, then I need you to take at least a week or two off of posting and spend that week or two creating as much as possible. If the way that you're approaching Instagram is that every single day you wake up with a clean slate with nothing ready to go. And you have to create, come up with the idea, plan it, execute it, write the caption, edit and post it in that same day. Or else you will not be consistent or else you will not post that day, then you're on this never ending hamster wheel and of course you're going to burn out. So instead, like I mentioned a moment ago, take the next week or two Are you ready to take your business marketing to the next level? 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Get started for free today or use code TRIBE50 to get 50% off the starter and standard plans for the first three months of an annual subscription. Just head to www.brevo.com tribe and take your marketing further with Brevo and Aura for the last few years I've been using Notion to basically organize my entire life. It's so much more than just a to do list app. It's truly a one stop shop for organizing any area of your life or business business. And it's not just great at organization, it's also great at automations as well. There's so many complex things that you can do and build that can happen automatically and instantly within Notion. And now for the first time they are introducing Notion AI Agents. The new Notion Custom Agents will allow you to automatically perform advanced tasks without you even having to lift a finger. For example, I built a Notion custom agent that automatically pulls the link to any reel that I have posted and then it pulls out the text that I say or the text on the screen in the first few seconds of the reel. Basically it pulls out my hook and then it's able to look at how that post performed and compare it to the hook which allows me to see which hooks are actually working so that I can reuse them and tweak them for future reels. Notion is an AI powered connected workspace for teams. Notion brings all of your notes, docs and projects into one space that just works. It's Seamless, flexible, powerful, and with AI built in, you spend less time switching between different apps and tools and more time creating great work. Now with Notion's custom agents, busy work that used to take hours or, let's be honest, didn't really get done at all runs itself. The easiest way to think about the difference between a custom agent and normal AI is that normal AI requires you as the human to prompt it. But custom agents work for you 247 behind the scenes without you having to lift a finger. But don't just take my word for it. Notion is used by more than half of Fortune 500 companies and and some of the fastest growing companies in the world, like OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Try custom agents now@notion.com byt that's all lowercase notion n o t I o-n.com byt to try custom agents today and when you use my link, you're supporting our show again. Notion.com byt as someone who cooks about 95% of their meals at home, and no, that's not an exaggeration. Usually the only meal that Tae and I eat out each week is our Sushi Saturday. What we eat, what we prepare, it matters a lot to us. And that's why I'm so excited to introduce you to our newest sponsor, HelloFresh. 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Free meals applied at discount on your first box for new subscribers only and varies by plan off of posting and spend the next week or two batching as much as possible. This is something that I personally really started ramping up at the end of 2025 and it's one of these systems that I've been putting in place. Whereas I used to batch and schedule my content a week or maybe two in advance, and I'm now scheduling content months in advance and I'm even taking content that is tied to a specific time of year, like content that's tied to Christmas, or content that's tied to the new year, or content that's tied to Spring. And I am scheduling it a year in advance. So at the time of recording this in January 2026, I could click on any random week in this year and I bet I would at least have a couple of posts already scheduled right now. And that doesn't even include all of the posts that I'm going to batch and schedule for that week, but before that week even comes. And that just allows me to when that week happens, I could take the week totally off of posting and focus on actually running the business. Or if I feel inspired, if there's an idea, if there's a trend, if there's breaking news, if there's something that I want to post about that week, I can make that post. But I'm not forced to. I don't have to. It's all been batched and scheduled ahead of time Are you ready to take your business marketing to the next level? Meet Brevo, the all in one marketing and CRM platform built to help you connect with customers, brand boost engagement and grow your business smarter. With Brevo, you can manage all of your customer interactions in one place, nurture leads with their built in CRM, reach your audience through email and SMS and keep them coming back with powerful automations. But here's where it gets really exciting. Meet Aura, Brevo's AI Assistant. Aura helps you craft smarter campaigns by suggesting personalized content, optimizing send times, and even analyzing performance data to help you improve your strategy in real time. It's like having a marketing expert on your team 24, 7. And of course, Brevo offers advanced analytics, seamless integrations and AI driven personalization. Everything you need to create multi channel campaigns that hit the mark every single time. Get started for free today or use code TRIBE50 to save 50% on starter and standard plans for the first three months of the annual subscription. Just head to www.brevo.com tribe and take your marketing further with Brevo and Aura. And then the fourth strategy that I'm going to be using to achieve my 5 posts per day goal is I'm going to use repeatable formats. This is something that I have done in the past, but in all honesty, it's something that I haven't really been very intentional about. But repeatable formats is a really, really great way to create more Instagram posts without having to work so hard or reinvent the wheel every single time. Really the only repeatable format that I've been using over the last few years intentionally was my talking head reels, because many of them follow a similar format and a similar script style, but those are a lot of work and those are a lot of effort. So instead I have come up with a list of 11 repeatable reels or repeatable kinds of posts that I'm going to be posting throughout 2026 that will just allow me to pump out more content that is still high quality, but not feel like I'm going back to the drawing board and starting from scratch every single time. I'm going to list off those 11 different kinds of reels. Right now. My 11 repeatable formats are number one, the award reel. Number two, the every generation reel. Number three, Brock with a sign similar to dude with a sign. Number four, clips of people interviewing me. I've been on so many podcasts and I've used almost zero of that content on my own Instagram. Number five, of course, good old memes. Number six, celebrity quotes. And of course I mean celebrity quotes that are about Instagram or social media. Number seven, lists of ideas like X reels for July17, carousel ideas for May. Number eight, hook swap videos where I use a hook swap. And then I break down why it's so effective and how people can get their own. Number nine, calling Insta Club Hub members, which is something that I did around Black Friday in 2025, and it was super fun and engaging and just a great rewarding way for me to get to interact with my customers. Number 10, coffee spinning with a quote. And number 11, my daily challenge, which in and of itself is a huge strategy. I could have made an entire one of my five keys for hitting 1 million followers. My daily challenge. I talked about this in my predictions for 2026 video, which if you haven't already, definitely go check that out. But I believe that there are going to be tens of thousands of people who blow up on Instagram in 2026 because they are doing some sort of daily challenge. My daily challenge for myself was originally going to be writing the name of every single person who followed me, but I quickly realized that that would just take way too long. So instead What I'm doing is I'm reading the name of every person who followed me, and I'm adding a tally to this big, giant piece of paper. The more names I read, the more tallies that I add to this piece of paper, the bigger this challenge is going to become, and the more impressive it's going to be, the more people are going to want to follow along and help me get to that 1 million follower mark. My fourth strategy for reaching 1 million followers in 2026 is more collab posts. Collab posts are one of the best ways to grow on Instagram, and they're also a great way to bring two communities together to work with someone else in your field. And it's something that I have definitely done a lot of in the past, but I've never been super intentional about it. And so one of my personal goals for my Instagram in 2026 is to do one collab post per week. And like I said, collab posts are not just a super effective way to grow, but they're also a super fun way to grow because you get to work with another creator, you get to brainstorm with them, you get to come up with ideas together, you get to see how they work, they get to see how you work, your minds get to meld, and you get to come together. My favorite person to do collabs with is marketing Harry. And I'll tell you why I love doing collabs with him. Because when he says, hey, Brock, do you want to do a collab? He pitches me the idea. Him and his team create the entire graphic. They might ask for my input on, like, what I want on each slide or, like, what lessons I want to teach. But ultimately, he does most of the work, and he makes it so, so easy for me. And so if you're someone who, like me, wants to do more collabs in 2026, take most of the work onto yourself. When you are reaching out to the person you're going to collaborate with, offer to them that you will do most of the work. You'll do the heavy lifting. It's kind of like saying, hey, do you want to do this group project with me? I'll do most of the work, but we'll share the Credit. Also, in 2026, I plan on doing more collab posts because I also plan on doing more interviews here on this podcast. And so oftentimes, when I post about the podcast interview, I will collaborate with the person I interviewed. Speaking of, I would love to hear from you in the comments below. Who do you want to see me interview? Is there any expert, any business pro, any marketing person, anyone who's great social media or anyone who just is a great creator, someone who makes really awesome content, who you want to see me interview, Pick their brain and learn their social media strategy. Anyone at all, Let me know down in the comments below and I will take that into extremely serious consideration for the guests that I bring on in 2026. And then my fifth and final strategy that I'm going to use to reach 1 million followers in 2026 is what I wrote in my notes as symbiotic relationships. And I wrote these notes a few weeks ago and then I came back to them before recording today and I was like, what did I mean by symbiotic? Symbiotic? Like, was I thinking about something else? Was I writing a note for myself about some other thing, about some nature documentary I was watching and it just happened to be on my podcast? Notes? No, by symbiotic relationship, I mean you, my podcast listeners, becoming my Instagram followers. One of the reasons that I saw a big spike in followers in the second half of 2026 is not just that I increased my posting, but also that this channel began to really grow and it began to really take off. And there can be a symbiotic relationship where YouTube subscribers become Instagram followers and Instagram followers become YouTube subscribers. And so if you're listening and you haven't already followed me on Instagram, I encourage you to do so. It's kind of like a bite sized, fun, interactive version of what you get on YouTube. It's not just like pictures of my wife and I out on a date or pictures of what I had for lunch. I practice what I preach. And so every single day on my Instagram, I'm sharing helpful tips and strategies and ideas. And so a little shameless plug. If you want to help me reach 1 million followers, or if you just want some free advice, strategies and ideas, consider following me on Instagram. But with all that being said, I want to thank you so much for listening today. I am so fired up for 2026. I haven't felt this fired up about my own personal channels, my business, my YouTube, my Instagram in a long time, and it feels really good. So I want to thank you for making 2025 so awesome. I want to thank you in advance for all of the really cool things that, that we're going to do together in 2026. I can't wait to hit 1 million followers. I hope you help me get there. And until next time, happy networking.