← Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
Give Me 23 Minutes, I Guarantee I Will Blow Up Your Instagram - 892
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But I'll tell you more about them later. Lydia of Relationships well gained over 4,000 followers in four days. The McSeras Claire and Nina gained over 20,000 followers in less than 90 days. Artist Martin Frolic gained over 109,000 followers in less than three weeks. Gage Nelson gained over 2 million followers in less than 18 months. And this is absolutely insane, but spoon debunker gained 2.6 million followers in just 10 posts. If you give me just the next 23 minutes, I guarantee you will blow up on Instagram. The strategy that I'm going to be sharing with you today is actually one that I've mentioned a few previous times on past episodes of Build you'd Tribe. So if you're not already, definitely consider hitting that subscribe button because every single week here on the podcast I'm putting out helpful tips, ideas and strategies to help you blow up your business on Instagram. But the specific idea or strategy that I'm sharing with you today is a format for your reels and it's essentially that you're going to be creating a daily series or challenge on your Instagram. But in today's episode we're going to take a little bit of a deeper dive into the strategy to figure out what really works and why. Some of these challenges go viral and bring millions of followers and 10 posts and some end up taking years. I'm also going to share with you templates to make it easier for you to come up with a series or a challenge for yourself. And I'm going to give you as many examples as possible because seeing what other people are currently doing is a great way to get inspiration for your own challenge. The first template is Day X of Ying every day until Z. One example of this is Bradley Cho who has gained over 400,000 followers on Instagram thanks to his daily series Day X of doordashing for a Diamond Ring, where every day he documents how much money he has made through doordashing in order to save up in order to afford a diamond ring in order to propose to his girlfriend. There's also Everly Pearson whose account is run by her mom and she started a daily challenge which was dark Day X of Finger Surfing every day until my business blows up and her business was selling these little handmade finger surf boards. If you're familiar with finger skating that was popular in like the late 90s, early 2000s. Same idea but custom made surfboards that she has made herself and she's gained over 23,000 followers on Instagram thanks to this daily series. If you follow me on Instagram then you might be familiar with my daily series which is reviewing one of my followers reels and every day until I reach 1 million followers. Personally, since my challenge began I have gained over 40,000 followers and we just crossed the 100 day mark. And then one more example that fits into this format is Sky McIntosh who is doing Day X of seeing if I can get jacked in less than 20 minutes. He's past day 100 now himself. I think he's actually closing in on the one year mark and he just does at home workouts. When it first got started, he had no equipment. He was just doing like push ups, sit ups, and squat jumps and, and he was seeing how his body would transform in less than 20 minutes a day, not allowing himself to exercise past that 20 minute mark. He's a daily repsguy on Instagram and He's gained over 180,000 followers thanks to this challenge. The second way that you can format this daily challenge or series is day X of Ying for every new follower. In the first Tumblr that I gave you, you're doing something every single day, regardless of how many followers you gain. So to use Sky Macintosh as an example, he's doing his 20 minute daily workouts with whether he gained 100 or 100,000 followers yesterday, the daily challenge or the series is simply based off doing something for consecutive days. Or a bonus tip is you can add for each consecutive day. So maybe day one, you're going to run one mile, day two, you're gonna run two miles, and by the end of 100 days, you're running 100 miles. Now that's pretty extreme. I'm not necessarily recommending that you run 100 miles, but you could add to your daily action based off of what day it is. And while challenges that use the first template are cool because they're about the journey and they're about the progression over time, this second template has more viral potential because getting someone to follow you is directly baked into the challenge because when they follow you, it triggers one additional action that you have to take. For example, Steph Vegan fit was doing one strict pushup for every follower that she gained until 50k. And that until 50k is something that you can do if you want to kind of adding an end cap for for your challenge or adding a goal to your challenge, like how in mine I'm reviewing one of my followers reels every single day. But I've set the end cap at until I hit 1 million followers. Now, before I started my current challenge, I had a few other examples that I iterated on. And we're going to come back to this idea of iterating and pivoting your challenge later. But my initial challenge for myself was writing down the names of every single person who followed me until I reached 1 million followers. Just so you know, my idea or my inspiration behind that challenge was reminding myself and reminding everyone that every single follower matters. And so whenever someone followed me, I would write their name down on this giant piece of paper. And then my vision was that we would get to the end of the challenge and I would have like 150,000 names written down and it would be this really cool banner. But upon creating the challenge, I very quickly realized that most people do not have the problem. And I would even argue I don't have the problem of thinking that every follower matters. Most people already think that every follower matters and they don't need to be reminded of such. Now, I did pivot this challenge after day one because I realized I writing out every single name of every single person who followed me would just take way too long. I think I wrote like 250 names on the first day and that wasn't even everyone who followed me. I had like 800 people follow me that day. I wrote down 250 names. It took like three hours. And I was like, there is no way this is going to be sustainable, especially if I have days where I gain a couple thousand followers. It's just not going to work. There's no way I'm going to be able to spend six to 12 hours a day just writing names. So I was like, okay, I'll pivot. What if I just want to read the names of every single person who followed me? So I did that for a while, but it was like a 30 minute long process so I would have to speed up the video. So you were just watching a clip of me going, reading off a bunch of names and it wasn't very engaging. And again, the whole like, point of the challenge wasn't that interesting. So I was like, oh, what if I also like add a tally mark? I go back to that piece of paper and I start adding tally marks. And that also wasn't super effective. And not to spoil what we're going to talk about a little bit later in today's episode, which is the actual ideas and strategies, the do's and don'ts for these daily series. I think that the reason that those series or that challenge that I set out for myself didn't work were number one. Like I already said, the intention behind it just wasn't really aligned with what my audience was looking for. Also, the intention just wasn't clear. Right. If I'm reading off names or writing down a bunch of names, it's not obvious why I'm doing that. C. There is no interesting element to it. There's nothing that's actually like keeping people engaged. There's no reason for them to come back tomorrow. There's nothing in it for them. So to watch my video. But another example of a daily Action for every new follower was Lydia of relationships. Well, who I mentioned at the very beginning of today's episode, who gained 4,000 followers in like a four or five day period because of her challenge where she was sending a personalized voice note prayer to every single new follower. The first day she gained a couple dozen followers, second day, couple dozen, third day, couple hundred. And by day four, she had gained a couple thousand new followers. And so because of this, she was sending literally hundreds of personalized vlogs, voice note prayers. Now I do want to give a side note here that, that unfortunately got her account in a little bit of trouble because Instagram's like, whoa, is something spammy going on? Like, why are you sending so many voice notes? Also, for her personally, I'm sure that strained her voice and I'm sure that was very just challenging to literally send a prayer to thousands of people. So I love the intention behind it and I think that's why it went viral so quickly. But unfortunately, that's also why she had to shut down the challenge, because it just wasn't sustainable. Instagram literally wouldn't allow her to send that many voice notes every single day. Now there workarounds, there are potential solutions to this, but I do want to just throw that out there. She gained a lot of followers really, really fast. But if you want to do something similar, I wouldn't recommend sending a message or sending a voice note to every single follower because if you do it too much, Instagram can flag that as spammy behavior. But Lydia is a member of our Insta Club Hub, so I want to give a shout out to her for implementing something that we started teaching back in December of 2025, which by the way, if you're not an Insta ClubHub member or you have no idea what the Insta Club Hub is. The Insta ClubHub is my Instagram coaching community where every single month you get a workshop from me, you get a live group coaching call with me, you get an entire course based off of where you are on Instagram at the current time, and you get a personalized 30 day content calendar every single month. So if you want to check out the Insta ClubHub, I will put the link for the $7 two week trial down in the show notes below. But like I said, I was super proud of Lydia for implementing something that we taught a few months ago and seeing immediate results because of it. And then the third way that you can format your challenge is by doing something for every follower and, but not necessarily doing it every single day. And this is something that is more effective for those of you who maybe bite off more than you can chew, or you are setting out to do a daily challenge, but you just know you're probably not going to be able to do it literally every single day. One example of that is Griffey, who is petting his dog for every single new follower he gains. He has gained almost 100,000 followers because of this challenge. And he doesn't do it every single day because he's just a kid, but every few days, he records an updated video. Hey, since the last one, I gained 23,000 followers. And so today, I'm gonna pet my golden retriever 23,000 times. The next example is Gage Nelson, who is a friend of the channel, who has gained over 2 million followers on Instagram alone by challenging himself to run one mile for every new follower. He's also gained nearly a million followers on TikTok and a couple hundred thousand followers on YouTube and on Facebook. So if you add up all of the miles, he should theoretically be running 3 million miles. Now, that's not possible. That's probably impossible for any human being to run 3 million miles in their lifetime. And he's said this like, hey, there's no way I'm gonna be able to run that many. So instead, he is running almost daily, and he is documenting his progress. He's lost over £100 on this journey, and he has truly transformed his life because of this challenge. And so, again, he's not running literally tens of thousands of miles every single day, but he's doing his best. He's documenting his journey, and he's running as much as he can. Another example of doing something for every follower but not making it daily is the McSeras, who I mentioned again in the intro. They're another Insta ClubHub All Star member themselves. They've gained over 20,000 followers since joining the club earlier this year. And what they're doing is they're adding sticky notes, colored sticky notes, to a giant wall mural that's eventually going to be a giant pride flag. They are a lesbian couple, and the goal of their page is to create an inclusive environment for LGBTQ people. And. And so every single time someone follows them, they write their names down on a sticky note and they add it to the giant mural. Now, they don't necessarily do this every single day or document every single time a new person follows them, but every few days, they update their followers on the mural and how it's coming along. And they've started to sell merch and other products that are related to the mural and it's just been awesome to see them gain again over 20,000 followers in just the last few months. Now I know I have a lot of social media managers who listen to the show every single week and so I'm so excited to tell you about our latest sponsors Sponsor Rella Rela is an all in one social media management tool which is going to make working with your clients so much easier. Everything from planning, getting approvals and posting your content all in one place is so much more than just a scheduling tool. Is truly an all in one management suite for your social media management business. RELA even now has an AI tool embedded called Ella which knows your content better than you do, allowing you to plan entire content calendars and create on brand content. So much easier year go to getrella.com and use code BYT to get 10% off the first three months of your annual plan. 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Again, that's shopify. Com tribe. And then the final example of doing something for every follower is the artist who I mentioned in the intro, Martin Frolick. I'm not sure if I'm saying his last name right, but he is adding an eyeball to this giant mural like illustration for every single new follower he has gained. Now, he has gained over 100,000 followers since starting this challenge and he has done so in just the first three weeks since starting the challenge. And he, similar to Gage, has said like, hey, it's going to be impossible for me to draw 100,000 eyeballs on this mural in like 24 hours. So he's just kind of spacing it out. And every single day he's adding more. He's adding a couple hundred or a couple thousand eyeballs to this mural with the eventual goal of catching up with the number of followers that he has gained. But again, all of this incentivizes the follow because you want to see his artwork and you want your follow to equal one more eyeball added to this artwork. Basically, you are doing an action, preferably every single day. And that action can be based off of what day of the challenge you are currently on or the number of followers that you gained yesterday. And if you want to, you can set a cap or a goal for the challenge. Now I do want to note you can also base this off of different kinds of engagement. So you can say that you're going to do a push up for every single person who shares this post or you're going to do a different action for every single person who likes this post or who comments on this post. I, as part of my daily challenge, am yes, only reviewing the reels of people who follow me. But the way that you can enter in to have your reel reviewed the next day changes Almost every single day I have a different action that I want people to take. Sometimes it's sharing the post with a friend, sometimes it's liking the post, sometimes it's multiple actions liking the post and commenting me, commenting me and sending the post back to myself. I like to change up the call to action just to keep people on their toes and make it so that you actually have to watch the reel to hear what the call to action is. Thus getting me more of a watch time and making sure that people are actually engaging in the way that I want them to. Now that you've heard a bunch of examples, I think that there's two different ways that you can approach this daily challenge. One way that you can approach it is for consistency. If you're someone who just struggles to stay consistent on Instagram, coming up with some sort of daily challenge or series for yourself will help you become more consistent. Because then every single day you don't have to come up with a new post idea, plan a new script, and reinvent the wheel. You can simply do the next day in the series. Now, for me, as I'm planning out my content, if I have two posts scheduled for a day, I know I'm going to have three posts on that day. Because every single day I'm guaranteed to have my daily challenge. Every single day, I'm guaranteed to review another person's reel. So even if I come to a day on my content planner where life got busy or things got messed up or whatever, and I have zero posts scheduled that day, I know I'm still gonna have at least one post go live that day because I'm gonna do my daily challenger series. So be honest with yourself, be real with yourself, and know that if you're someone who really just struggles to stay consistent on Instagram, you're just kind of new to the whole Instagram sphere and growing your small business on Instagram. Maybe you start with a series that doesn't necessarily have the goal of virality, it just has the goal of helping you get consistent. The other way that you can approach this is probably why you clicked on this episode, which is virality wanting to do a challenge for the sake of gaining a lot of followers in a short amount of time, reaching 10k, 100k or a million followers, whatever your goal is that is possible with one of these challenges. But of course it's more difficult. If it was easy, every single person would do it. Now, before we talk about how to design your challenge for virality, if your goal is simply consistency, then I would suggest doing your daily challenge or your daily series around something like tips or fun facts or myths. Day X of giving a different myth about rock climbing. Day X of giving a quick tip for baking these Daily series are less likely to go viral because they're not really challenges, they're not that creative or unique or interesting. It might be challenging for you to post every single day, but for your audience it's like, okay, I'm gonna get a daily tip, I'm gonna get a daily idea and that's cool, that's helpful, but that's not really all that novel, it's not all that unique, it's not all that worth following. So again, that'll help you with consistency, but it probably won't allow you to go viral. If your goal is to go viral, here's three things that I think you need to focus on. Number one, your challenge absolutely needs to be niche related. Let's take that example of the kid who's petting his dog. If you were to do that same challenge on your page, you would be generating a lot of followers who are interested in dogs, who like seeing little kids who pet dogs. And if your niche, if your business has nothing to do with dogs, then that would be a really dumb challenge to do because sure, you might go viral, but you're going to go viral in the wrong way. You're going to end up with a bunch of followers who don't actually care about your business. That's why the challenge that the mixeras are doing is so awesome, because it's so aligned with their niche. You are only going to follow them if you actually want them to be, build and continue with their pride flag mural. If that's not something you're into, if that is something you disagree with or if that's something that's offensive for you, you're not going to follow them. But they don't want you following them anyways. They only want people following them who actually want to be a part of the community. So it must be niche related in some way or it can be a little bit niche adjacent, but you want it to at least in some way connect or attract the ideal follower that one day will become a customer. Customer. The second thing to focus on is what I'm going to call commitment. And commitment means a few things. Number one, the challenge needs to be challenging. I was having a conversation with one of our Insta clubhub members about this idea a few months ago and I gave her an idea and she goes, oh man, that's, that's really tough. That's going to be really challenging. And I was like, well, yeah, that's the point. The more challenging it is, the more likely people are to follow. If it's taking a step for every new follower that I gain. You're probably not going to gain very many followers. But if you're over £400 like Gage was, and you challenge yourself to run a mile for every follower, well, yeah, that's a whole heck of a challenge. And people are a lot more likely to want to get involved and want to participate. So commit to something challenging. And the more challenging that you make it, the more likely you are to go viral faster. Now again, I'm not encouraging you to be extreme. I'm not encouraging you to put yourself in harm's way. But let's be real. The more challenging your challenge is, the less of a challenge it will be to go viral. But also, commitment doesn't just mean committing to something hard, it also means committing to doing it consistently. In doing research for this episode, I came across a lot of people who gave up on their challenge after a few days. And I understand why. Because here's what is likely going to happen. And here's something that you need to keep in mind when you first start your challenge. Day one will be exciting. Day one will be this hot, fresh new thing. Hey, I'm challenging myself. And all of your followers are likely going to be excited. Oh woo hoo. Brock's doing a new daily series where he's reviewing reels. Let's get involved. Let's get hyped. Let's get excited. But then by day five, a lot of that excitement has worn off. By day 28, a whole heck of a lot of that excitement is worn off. But if you can stick with it for long enough, eventually you will either have a post that is an outlier and or even goes viral and then it reignites and brings in a bunch of new followers who are excited. Or you will reach a stage where you've been doing the challenge for so long. And that just the fact that you've been doing it for so long is impressive. And people are more likely to follow you or engage with the posts because of that. For example, every single time I hit a new milestone, like I hit day 50 of my daily challenge or I just recently hit day 100 of my daily real reviews. Every single time I hit one of those, people get re excited and they're like oh my gosh, you're still doing it. That's so awesome. I admire the consistency. And that in and of itself itself becomes a reason for people to engage outside of what the actual challenge is. Just the fact that you've been doing it for a long time is Impressive. And so, besides committing to something hard, commit to doing it for the long haul, commit to doing it for at least 90 days, commit to doing it for at least 100 days, commit to doing it for an entire year before you decide to give up or change or pivot. Now, this does bring up two things that I want to mention, which is, number one, I do not suggest putting, putting a cap or a goal that is time bound. So I know earlier we talked about, you know, I'm reviewing a reel every day until 1 million followers, or Everly Pearson was posting about her small business every day until her business blew up. That sort of a cap or that sort of a goal is great, but I'm not a big fan of setting a cap where it's like, I'm giving a tip every day for 30 days or I'm gonna be doing a burpee for every new follower every day for a month or every day for 100 days. Because I think in the psychology of the viewer, when you put that time bound cap on it, they know, well, 100 days from now, am I going to want to unfollow you. Like, I'm following you for this challenge. And so if I follow you on day 33 and you're doing it for 50 days, that means I'm only going to be able to follow you for 17 days before the challenge ends. And it just deincentivizes the randomness or the unexpected expectedness of the challenge. It's like, you know when it's going to end, you know how it's going to end, and so people are less likely to follow. So I wouldn't put a time bound cap on it. But the second idea that this brings up is just the idea of pivoting. And I told you earlier that my initial challenge had to be pivoted after day one. And then after 21 days of reading and adding a tally mark for every new follower, I pivoted again. And so I want to give you encouragement to pivot. And I know that's kind of conflicting with what I just said, but. But if your challenge truly needs a pivot, it's okay to pivot, but I think there's a difference. And you'll be able to tell whether or not it's just the challenge is dumb. Maybe the idea wasn't great to begin with. Maybe it was just not exactly aligned. And then you need to pivot versus you need to pivot because you're not getting results as fast as you wanted or you're not going Viral as much as you wanted or it's getting tough. Yeah, it's supposed to be tough, but be real with yourself and know when it's time to. Yeah. Pivot. This challenge is dumb. It was a bad idea. I'm going to do a different challenge versus I'm just going to give up altogether. I'm going to quit this challenge. And then the third thing to focus on is to add some level of curiosity or unexpectedness or some sort of journey. The more unique you can make your challenge, the more likely people are to follow. There are lots of people who are running a certain distance for every follower. But the reason that I would argue Gage is the most successful out of all of them is that he started at over £400 and and he gained so many followers that he has put himself in a really tough situation where he's got to run a lot of miles. And because he has committed and he has run thousands of miles now and he's lost hundreds of pounds now, it makes it that much more impressive, that much more unique, and it builds that curiosity. Only you will be able to determine where your sweet spot is. Where is the exact point for you where the challenge is challenging enough that you're going to do it every single day and you're going to commit to it. And yet it's still challenging enough that it is novel and unique and challenging. Something worth following. So now, because you've made it this far, I want to challenge you to start a challenge for yourself. And if you already have an idea or a rough outline or a brainstorm, go ahead and put it in the comments. Because I often find the more ideas that we see and hear, the more it can spark inspiration for our own challenge or series. And so while I tried to give you a bunch in today's episode, if you read the comments on this YouTube video, there might already be a couple of other people who have put their daily challenge or series in the comments. And again, maybe that could help you have your own light bulb moment. But I want to challenge you to do this for yourself. I also want to challenge you to hit the thumbs up button if you made it this far in the episode because clearly that means you liked what you were hearing. If you hit that subscribe button, then I'll see you in the next one. And as always, happy networking. It.