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Build Your Tribe | Grow Your Business with Social Media
How To Grow An Instagram Account from ZERO Followers (Step-by-Step) - 852
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This is your complete guide to growing on Instagram, starting from zero followers. And this isn't going to be 100 steps or 17 steps, or even 10 steps. There are only six necessary steps for growing your Instagram from zero to over 10,000 followers. And best of all, the strategies that I'm going to teach you in today's episode are not time wasters. They're not things like removing spam followers or finding the right hashtags. In fact, with these strategies, you can grow on Instagram in less than 15 minutes per day. I'm all about giving you the most efficient strategies, the strategies that have been researched, that are tried and true and tested so that you can get the best results in the least amount of time possible. That is how I've grown my personal following to over 800,000 followers. It's how I grew my dog's Instagram account to over 200,000 followers. And it's the reason that my Instagram school, the Insta Club up, is the number one Instagram Academy in the world. We've helped over 50,000 people grow on Instagram and and our average student grows by 1200 followers in their first 30 days alone. Additionally, over the last five years, I have personally started about a dozen different accounts in different niches, some of them completely private, some of them completely faceless. So people have no idea it's me. And all of them now have over 10,000, if not over 100,000 followers. Let's not waste any more time. Let's get right into it. Step number one for growing on Instagram is actually something that you need to do before even creating your account. So. So if you've already created your account, you actually might need to go back a few steps to make sure that you do things in the right order. Because the way that I'm presenting them to you today is not just some random order. This is in sequential order, laying the foundation first and foremost by picking our niche. Step number one for growing on Instagram is the same step number one for growing on TikTok or YouTube or any social network. And it is that you have to identify two things. Your niche is comprised of the whole and the what. The who is the demographics of your target audience. So the more that you know about them, their age, their geographic region, their struggles, their pain points, their education level, their marital status, how many kids they have, all of those things will help you in the future. So the who is the first part of your niche, and the second part of your niche is the what. Of course, you can't just have an ideal audience. Men in their 20s, you have to figure out what you're going to be talking to that audience about. Now, I know that when you clicked on this episode, you probably already had an idea of what you wanted your new Instagram to be about. If that's the case, that's great. But I want to challenge you to niche down even further. The riches are in the niches, and the more specific that you can get, the better. The great thing about a niche is that you can broaden out over time. As your account grows, you can start to talk about more things. My original niche, when I first started growing this whole social media business online, was actually helping moms keep their teens safe on Snapchat. And then over time, that grew into Snapchat marketing, because I had all of these moms following me and they had little side businesses and I was growing my business on Snapchat. And so they wanted to learn how to grow their businesses on Snapchat. A few years later, there was a mass exodus from Snapchat and everyone went to Instagram. And so I took what I had learned about Snapchat stories and applied it to Instagram stories. And so when I first got started as an Instagram coach, I wasn't helping people with anything and everything related to their Instagram. I was only helping people with their Instagram stories. I was helping people get more views and make more sales through Instagram stories. That's what allowed me to grow and stand out in those early stages. There are tens of thousands of Instagram coaches out there, and a lot of them are really good. I would argue there's probably a lot that know a lot more and are a lot smarter than me. But I was able to grow because in those early days, I hyper focused on Instagram stories. And then a few years later, I started to broaden out my niche and apply a lot of what I had learned about Instagram stories to Instagram reels. And so I started talking a lot about Instagram reels and then my following grew even more. But if you want to make a name for yourself, if you want to stand out in your saturated industry, which don't get me wrong, every industry is a saturated industry nowadays. The way that you do that is by niching down. You don't try to be the vanilla. You don't try to be the account that can solve everyone's needs. You pick a super specific demographic of people and a super specific thing that you're going to help them with, content that you're going to post about or topic that all of your posts are going to relate to. And then you stay in that lane. As you stay in that lane, you will start to grow. You will grow faster and over time you can eventually broaden out. But none of that is possible if you don't start step number one by niching down. And don't worry, there's no such thing as a wrong or a right niche. Sure, you could make the argument that some are slightly better or worse than others. Some might have a clientele that has a little bit more expendable money. Some might have a larger group of people online, and so you, you have a higher ceiling of followers. But I don't want you to get caught up in the right or wrong decision. Ultimately, just pick something like I did with helping moms keep their kids safe on Snapchat, and you can always grow and evolve from there. Speaking of growing and evolving, the very next step, step number two for growing your Instagram from zero followers is to start your account. Obviously, if we want to grow our Instagram, we have to have an Instagram account. But here is my step by step guide for setting up your account correctly so that you can be set up for success. And actually the ground running step number one is of course picking your username. No two people on Instagram can share the same username. Fortunately for you, your username should be your brand name. If you have a personal brand like I do, where my Instagram account reflects me as a person, well, then your username should be your personal name. Whatever you go by or want to be known as. If you are starting this as a business brand, you're starting the Instagram account to represent the company that you have, well then your username should be the company's name. If someone else has already taken your name as their username or they have taken your business name and made that your username. I feel like it's always those random people who created an account in 2014. They posted once and then they haven't posted since, and yet they have your perfect username. Unfortunately, there's no way that you can get that username from them. So the best thing that you can do is add a period, an underscore. Maybe you add the word the in front of your username or official at the end of your username and just get creative with it. Maybe Even use an AI tool like ChatGPT to come up with some slight variations so that your name is still easy to read and that it still represents you or Your business's name. The second step to setting up your profile correctly is what's called the name line. Now, what most people put on this nameline is, you guessed it, their own name. But the Name line is 100% searchable. Anything that you put on that line becomes a way that you can be discovered with within Instagram search and outside of Instagram search, on Google and any other search engine. So of course you don't want to just repeat your name or your business's name. Instead, what I recommend putting on your name line is some searchable keywords, kind of like a title for your Instagram account. So to use myself as an example, my username is Brock11Johnson. Brock Johnson was taken. 11 is my lucky number. So I made my username Brock11Johnson. Like I said, my Instagram is a personal brand and so my username is my personal name, what I'm known as. But my Instagram name line says Instagram Growth Coach. That is because that term is searchable. Now, I would recommend that you get a little bit more specific than just Instagram Growth Coach. As I've grown over the years, I again have gotten a little bit less specific and a little bit more broad with what my title is. The most important key factor to keep in mind with your name line is that this is supposed to be searchable. So you don't want to use any sort of insider lingo or any special nickname that you've given yourself, like the marketing bestie or something like that. You want to come up with a term or title that would be searchable for this. I recommend using Google Trends as a very useful tool to actually see what people are looking up and what they are searching for. And you have to walk this fine line between on one hand being general enough that people would actually look it up, yet still being specific enough that you're not going to get lost in the masses. So if you said fitness expert, that would definitely be broad enough that people are looking for fitness experts online. But unfortunately that might be too broad and you're going to get lost amongst the 50,000 other fitness experts on Instagram. So you want to really find that sweet spot where you are discoverable yet not too specific and not too broad. Next up is the profile picture. If your Instagram is reflective of a personal brand, your profile picture should be that person. I recommend it being a close up, high quality, well lit selfie, not one of these full body shots, not a picture that has a lot of different props or a lot of different people. A close up well lit selfie so that it really stands out from the hundreds of thousands of other profile pictures that people see every single day. If you are creating an Instagram account for your business brand, the most common mistake that I see people making is using their business's generic logo as their profile picture. But unfortunately, most logos were not created to be itty bitty tiny little profile pictures. Instead, most logos were created to go on the top of storefronts, or on billboards, or on the banner of your website. And so what I recommend doing instead is using, or if you don't have one, creating an icon version of your logo. It's basically a simplified, recognizable graphic that can be used as your logo instead of using your entire company name. Don't worry. Only two more steps to setting up your profile correctly. But the second to last one is super important. And it's the actual bio that you're writing. What should it actually say? What should go in your bio? An easy template that you can follow is that line number one should be what I like to call your niche statement. That means that line number one should cover the who and the what. It should plainly tell people why they should follow your account or who your account is for. If you want a templatized first line, you can use the sentence I help with blank. So I help who with what? I help people over the age of 40 with learning to rock climb for the first time in their lives, whatever that specific niche is. That's the first line. The second line can add context to the first line. It could be your qualifications, it could be your own past experience, it could be your certifications, it could be your own personal story, or it could provide what you help people do without. For example, I help people over the age of 40 Learn to rock climb without ever going to a rock climbing gym, or without needing special equipment, or without spending more than 30 minutes a day. So it could be kind of like a continuation of that first line. The third line can be a little bit more creative, it's a little bit more flexible. You can share your credibility, you can share your background, you can share some sort of mission statement. Just basically anything that might encourage someone to, to follow you. I do want to encourage you in general in your bio to avoid cliches, to avoid redundancies, to avoid any unnecessary words or lingo that wouldn't make sense to the average person. Really try to keep it simple so that it can deliver impact in the most succinct packaging possible. And then finally, last but not least, the Fourth line is where you put a call to action, telling people what you want them to do next. Maybe you want them to follow along for more daily tips. Maybe you want them to DM you the word guide in order to receive your free ebook. Maybe you want them to click the link in your Bio to get 15% off their first order. Whatever you want people to do next, put that in the fourth line. And yes, I said fourth and last because I recommend having no more than four lines in your bio. If you go on to a fifth, sixth, seventh, whatever line, Instagram will automatically truncate it with a dot, dot, dot more, cutting off the rest of your bio and making it less accessible for the average person, requiring that people tap an extra button to to read your whole bio, which spoiler alert, they're not going to do. And last but not least, I'll call this an optional step, but it is something that I would recommend. Once you have set up your bio completely, I would recommend signing up for Meta Verified. Now, Meta Verified is the program where you can pay a monthly fee in order to get the blue check mark on your Instagram account. In addition to that special blue badge, you also get active impersonation monitoring by Instagram. You get a private chat, one on one with Instagram support. And maybe best of all, a recent addition to Meta Verified is that any verified users will now show up at the top of search results as long as you are searching for terms that are in that person's bio. And so if you're starting a new Instagram account, it might behoove you to verify this new account so that it automatically shows up above your old account. Again, this step isn't necessary, but it is something that I would recommend as it is quite helpful. Okay, so we have our niche, we have our profile all set up. Step number three for growing your Instagram from zero followers is to post 15 times. Now there are some disclaimers that I need to make, so stick with me for just a second. It's important to understand the why or the goal behind these 15 posts. The goal of these 15 posts is not to grow your following just yet. The goal of these 15 posts is not to get views, to go viral, to get engagement, to make sales or anything like that. The goal of these 15 posts is simply to have something to look at so that when people find your page, when people start showing up on your account, there's not just two posts or zero posts, there's actually some content that is ready to be consumed. There are some examples of what people can expect from you. Think about it like a storefront. You wouldn't say, it's our grand opening, come on in and they come into the store and there's nothing there. You wouldn't say, go check out my new website the day that you purchase the domain, before you've even set up the website, because they're just going to go to it and it's going to be a blank page. We don't want your Instagram to look like that. So we're going to have 15 posts posted before you do anything else, before we move on to step four. Because I don't care about the performance of these 15 posts. I don't care if you post them all back to back to back to back on the same day or if you space them out. I don't care if it takes you three months to get these 15 posts posted. You just need 15 things posted. And when I say 15 things posted, I'm not referring to stories, I'm referring to feed posts. So that includes your reels, photos and carousels. Again, I don't care if it's 15 reels, zero photos and zero carousels. I don't care if it's a perfect split between the three. I just need 15 pieces of content, content posted to your feed. Of those 15 posts, all 15 should relate to your niche. No date night selfies, no vacation recaps, no kid on their first day of school, no what you hate for lunch. All of those 15 posts should in some way relate to the niche that you have outlined in your bio. And of those 15, there are three that I need you to specifically create. The first kind of post that I need you to specifically create is an About Me post. This post should be as succinct or short as possible, telling your audience about you or your brand, giving a little bit of background, a little bit of your mission, and a little bit of why you are creating this Instagram account. The second kind of post that should be included in those first 15 posts is an about our business or about our services or our offers. Basically, what is it that you're going to be selling? What's the business going to be? Or if this isn't going to be a business and you're not going to be selling anything. Or maybe you don't know exactly what you're going to be selling just yet. Give some background, some additional context, maybe expand on that About Me post and go a little bit more in depth into your story about why you created this account or what the purpose of this account is or what kind of content people should expect from this account. And then the third kind of post that I specifically recommend making in those first 15 is a quick win. This is something that if you're a brand or a business, is basically giving someone a quick result, not even needing to put in their email address or sign up for something. Just a quick tip. Something that in that moment is kind of like a life hack. Something that by the end of the video they're going to be like, oh my gosh, this was so helpful. Or this was so good. If you don't necessarily have something that is like educational or tutorial based, it could just be something that's super entertaining, something that's super funny, but still of course relates to your niche and exemplifies what people can expect on your page. Basically, you want it to be something that by the end of the post people are really happy. They really feel like your account is worth following. And then once you have all 15 of those posts posted, you're going to take those three specific ones that we just outlined and you're going to pin them to the top of your profile. So the about me is going to be the first pinned post in the upper left. The additional background about our business and services, that's going to be the second post in the upper middle. And then the third post that I recommended, the one that is kind of like a good example of your account or a quick win, that's going to be the third pinned post in the upper right hand corner. Now, by this point we've done a lot of work and we still have zero followers. Guess what? Step number four, we're still going to have probably zero or very little followers. We haven't announced your account yet. We're not even in the growth stages yet. We're still in the setup stages. Step number four is one of the most commonly skipped steps. And yet I would argue it is the most important step in this whole process. And it is that you need to have 14 additional posts made before moving on to step five. Of course you don't know what step five is yet, but if you're following along, so far we have our niche, we've optimized our profile, we've posted our first 15 posts. And now before doing anything else, I'm telling you to create, not post, but create at least 14 additional posts. Now, in just a minute, I'm going to talk to you about what these posts should look like. Quality, quantity, what should the topics of the posts be. But The TLDR is that all of your posts should relate to your niche. So what you're going to do right now is create at least 14 additional reels or photos and or carousels that are ready to go, ready to be posted in the future, but not posted just yet. And the reason for that being step number four and being so crucial before step number five is that step number five is launch. Step number five is to let all of your existing channels, your previous channels, your other channels, your other social networks know about this new account. But here's what most people do. They create a brand new Instagram account, maybe they set up their profile, and then that day they announce it on all their other socials. So they have skipped step three. They have nothing on their channel to look at, nothing on their profile for people to consume. But even if they did do step three, even if they did post, let's say, 15 photos that day before they announced it, what happens is suddenly day two arrives and they have a couple hundred new followers from their old TikTok and YouTube and their old Instagram, but they have no posts ready to go. And so now you're stuck on this hamster wheel day after day of having to create and post and create and post and create and post. So again, before we launch, before we announce this new account, which is step five, step number four is to create at least 14 posts. But the more the merrier. If you can create 28 posts, if you can create 30 posts, if you can create a hundred posts, whatever. The more posts you can create, the more peace of mind you're going to have going into this, and the easier those first few months are going to feel. And the first few months are always the hardest. And so you might as well do everything you can to set yourself up for success before launch by creating as many posts as possible. Like I said, though, step number five is to launch, to announce on all of your other profiles and channels that you have a new Instagram account. I would recommend announcing this on any other Instagram account that you have, your old Instagram account, any other social Media, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, whatever. If you have an email list, which, if you have a business, I hope you have an email list. If you don't have an email list, I would argue you don't have a business. But I digress. Announce it on your email list, announce it on your text list, announce it in person. If you have a physical location business, basically scream your head off for the next one to two weeks on all of those other channels that you have a new Instagram account and that people should go follow it. Now, part of that screaming your head off and part of announcing that you have a new account should be making it crystal clear for people who should follow this new account and who shouldn't. It shouldn't just be follow this new account because you're my best friend and you need to support me. It shouldn't just be follow this new account because I'm desperate. It should be follow this new account because every single day I'm going to be posting helpful tips for women over the age of 40 who want to learn how to rock climb. That way, people can make an informed decision as to whether or not they want to even follow you. They're not just blindly following you, which will hurt your engagement rate in the future. They're not just following you because they want to support you as a person, which will probably hurt your engagement rate in the future. They're following you because they actually want to stay engaged and see the posts that you are making. The final thing that I'll say about this announcement is that you could host a giveaway. Again, this is one of those things that's not required, but it could be helpful. Basically, everyone who follows this new account will be entered in to win the giveaway. And the biggest key with the giveaway is just make sure it's something people actually want to. If you're starting a new account for your social media management agency, I wouldn't recommend giving away a free management package because it's likely that a lot of people aren't going to really trust you yet. Maybe they're not going to believe in your services. It's not something that is that sought after, most likely. So instead, figure out something that people really do want and that relates to your niche. Basically, if we want to incentivize people following us, we want to make sure that that incentive is as appealing as possible. And finally, last but not least, the sixth and final step to actually growing your Instagram from zero followers this year is to post. I'm just kidding, of course. Yes, that is the sixth and final step. But let's break it down. What the heck do I even mean by post? First and foremost, not stories. Stories are definitely a helpful way to build a relationship with your followers. They can be a great way to build trust. And as you're growing on Instagram, I do recommend posting stories. But stories can be more of like your afterthought. They can be more of just like a quick way to document your day, not necessarily something that you're focused on. I never recommend creating or curating or planning stories. Instead stories are just meant to be a documentation. They're just supposed to be quick snippets of your day so that people get to know you a little bit better. So when I say post I am referring to feed posts. I'm referring to photos, carousels and reels. During this early stage I would recommend focusing the majority of your posting on reels because studies show that on average reels reach more non followers. Reels have a greater potential to go viral and reach new people. And so I would focus most of your posting on reels. But I wouldn't do only reels. I would also mix in some carousels. I wouldn't do too many still single image posts because studies show that carousels far outperform single image posts. And the difference for you as a creator between a single image photo versus a two slide carousel or even just a regular short carousel is probably not too big of a difference. So if you want me to put a number on it, I would recommend about 75% of your posts during these early stages as reels and about 25% being carousels. The way that you grow on Instagram is posting a high quantity of high quality posts. To say it another way, posting a lot of really good content. Now early on you're not going to be a great content creator. You're probably not going to have a lot of great high quality content ready to go. And so you have two options to figure out how to create high quality content. Option number one is not what I would recommend, but you could do it. Option number one is to study, watch a bunch of YouTube videos, watch more of my podcast episodes, take a bunch of courses and study content creation, go back to school and learn cinematography and photography and graphic design and copywriting. Or the other option, option number two that I would recommend is practice. Practice makes progress and fortunately for you, quantity breeds quality. And so while on Instagram you need a combination of both quality and quantity. The really cool thing is that quantity breeds quality, quantity leads to quality. Additionally, something that I'm somewhat known for saying, and also sometimes that people really get mad at me for saying, is that the more you post, the more you grow. There have been numerous studies done on Instagram that have shown that there is a direct correlation between the frequency in your posting so how many times per day or per week you post and your growth rate. And every one of those studies shows the exact same thing. There is no upper limit the more you post, the more you grow. To say it another way and put it into real numbers, posting twice a day is better than posting once a day. Posting once a week will lead to more growth than posting every other week. The most recent of these studies was done by Buffer, where they analyzed hundreds of thousands of Instagram accounts. And their findings were in alignment with every other study that I've ever read on this topic, which is the more you post, the more you grow. Now, I'm really glad that you didn't stop after that last sentence, because it's the next sentence that is absolutely key. Yes, the more you post, the more you grow. But your focus should be on what you can sustain, because if you cannot sustain that frequency, if you burn out, if you're inconsistent, if you miss days or weeks at a time, you will not grow. You have to have a sustained and consistent frequency in order to reap the benefits of the more you post, the more you grow. For you and for every single person listening today, we're all going to have different levels that we can sustain, and it's going to be based off a million different variables. Our season of life, our season of business, our resources, our team, our capabilities, our content, our all of that is going to impact how much we're truly able to post. I want you to figure out ways to post more without working more. I am not a fan of hustle culture. I am not a fan of working more hours to create more content, to spend more time on your phone, to work more on your business, and lose your life to this whole damn Instagram thing. Instead, I want you to be more efficient. I want you to be able to grow while working smarter, while working less. And so, with that being said, I have four tips for you to to increase your quantity, and then I have four tips for you to increase your quality. Because remember, as we are posting and growing on Instagram, it is ultimately a combination of a high quantity of posts that are high quality that will lead to ultimate growth. So let's get into it. My top four tips for quantity on Instagram. And this is coming from someone who averages 250 posts per month while working less than 15 minutes per day on Instagram. Tip number one, stop trying to make every damn post you make perfect. They don't have to be perfect. They don't have to be touchdown, slam dunk home runs. Plus, let me ask you this. How many times in the past have you made a post that you thought was going to be great, you thought it was going to be Hilarious. Viral. This was going to be the post that made you famous and then you posted it and it flopped. It did not perform well. It performed below average. Heck, maybe it even was the worst post that you made that week or that month. Yeah, absolutely. And so if you already have evidence of that happening in the past, why are you consistently trying to recreate that in the future? Stop overanalyzing your posts. Stop nitpicking every single little detail. Stop worrying about the edits and the filters and the Photoshop. Unless your goal is to be that person. Unless your goal is to be known for having a plus Steven Spielberg cinematic, high production, professional level content. Don't even try. And yes, I truly mean don't even try. I recently did an episode about the way the algorithms have changed and the way us as consumers expect content to be presented. And the argument that I made in that episode was that most people end up in a middle ground where they have horribly performing content, but they've spent some amount of time editing it. And so in that episode, I make kind of an argument towards the raw, the imperfect, the real, the authentic content. So if you want more information on that, I'll link it up and you can check that out. But my point is this. Stop overanalyzing everything you post and just press post. Tip number two for achieving high quantity is to schedule posts. In the past, remember, step number four was to create 14 posts. That was so that when you announce your Instagram, you have 14 posts ready to go. And according to this current tip, you could schedule those for the future. So if you have 14 posts and the sustainable level that you think you can achieve is one per day, great. Well, then you can schedule those out one per day for the next two weeks. And on the day that you announce the account, you don't have to make a post. On the next day, you don't have to make a post. You could spend the next two weeks after the announcement day, after launch day, creating additional content to help you stay ahead. Scheduling posts will not hurt your views. It will not hurt your engagement. 85% of my content is scheduled. Adam Mozzeri, the head of Instagram, in my interview with him earlier this year, said that pretty much all of his posts are scheduled. So schedule your posts. Stop being silly. Tip number three for achieving a high quantity is to work smarter and not harder. And I think the easiest way that you can apply this is to use AI, use tools like ChatGPT, use tools like Munch, use tools like the Brockbot to help you create content. Faster, more efficiently to extrapolate on ideas, to take scripts for reels and turn them into carousels, to take transcripts for your reels and turn them into captions, to take captions and repurpose them into text posts. And there's so many different ways that you could use AI to create more content that's still authentic, that's still from you, that's still in your voice. It's just expanded or multiplied without having to do a bunch of work. I mentioned the Brockbot. The Brockbot is kind of like if chatgpt and my brain had a baby. And don't get me wrong, I think ChatGPT is great. I think ChatGPT is good at a lot of different things. But I don't think that ChatGPT is necessarily an expert when it comes to Instagram, especially when you consider that the top two most commonly cited sources by ChatGPT are Reddit and Wikipedia. Not exactly the most academic of places to learn about Instagram strategy. And so the Brockbot is a generative Chatbot, just like chatgpt is, but its knowledge base is based off of my trainings, my expertise and my strategies. If you want the link to that, I'll put that down in the show notes below. It's less than half the price of ChatGPT, which I think is pretty affordable and pretty cool. So if you want an AI tool to help you work smarter that is actually taught by an Instagram expert and uses real Instagram strategies, consider checking out the Brockbot and then last but not least, last but most. My all time favorite strategy for increasing your quantity so that you can achieve a high quantity of content without having to work your butt off all the time is to upcycle. Upcycling is a term that I use to refer to taking a post from the past and uploading it a second time, posting it a second time. When I say upcycle, you could either take something from the past that has worked well, it's gotten good engagement, good views, and slightly recreate it, maybe change the words a little bit, rewrite the caption, maybe you're going to re edit it, re film it, maybe you're going to change up the words of the hook, something like that. But essentially taking an idea from the past and recreating it for the future, basically taking a post from the past and recreating it for the present, that's one form of upcycling. But the other form of upcycling that's even easier is taking a post from the past and simply posting it again. If this Instagram that you're starting from zero is an Instagram that you're actually starting over because you had a previous account, maybe you had a previous TikTok, maybe you had other social medias. Take your best performing content from those other social medias or from your old Instagram and as long as it relates to your niche, post it again on your new Instagram. It's your content. You own the rights to it. It's not duplicate content, it's not low quality, it's not stolen content because it's yours. You own the rights to it directly from Meta staff. I've spoken with them about this topic numerous times. You are free and clear to repost your own content whenever you want. In fact, a lot of people are surprised to learn this statistic. But over 2/3 of my posts that you see on my Instagram account are upcycled. That means that more than two out of three of the posts that you're seeing on my Instagram every single day are ideas, topics, posts that I've made in the past that I'm either slightly tweaking and reposting today, or that I am literally directly, word for word, re uploading a second time. The reality is most people are not going to remember. The average person sees 10,000 posts a day. So please don't flatter yourselves by assuming that they remember your post from two months ago. They probably don't, and they probably didn't even see it in the first place. So please upcycle your content and give it more life. It deserves to be shown to the world. So don't post it only once and then forget about it. Post it multiple times. Those were my top four tips for achieving a high quantity of content. Now let's talk about my top four tips for achieving a high quality content. Number one is to focus on your hooks. Hooks are everything. If you can get people to just watch past the first three seconds, you're going to be far above the rest. Your content is going to far outperform the average. Most people aren't watching videos for more than about two and a half seconds. And so if you can have a strong hook, you will get people to watch for longer, get people to engage, and get people to actually follow and even become customers of your account. I would recommend spending 80% of your time, energy and effort on just those first three seconds. Just that opening frame, that opening scene, and that opening sentence. If you can improve that, your overall reels will improve as well. And I think this episode is already long enough. So if you want an in depth episode on creating better hooks, I'll link that in the show notes as well. Tip number two for achieving a high quality of content is that success leaves clues. What I mean by that is you aren't the first person who's tried to make good posts for social media. There are so many great content creators out there, there are so many great pages out there and so I am not encouraging you to steal their content, but what I am encouraging you to do is stop just mindlessly consuming with your brain turned off where you're just doom scrolling for hours and start consciously consuming. Start being aware of why did this hook grab my attention? Why did this reel bore me? Why was this video so funny? Why was this so relatable? Why did I send this to a friend? Why did this video make me mad? What inspired me to leave a three sentence comment on this post? Start to ask yourself those questions and you'll start to pick up on these little clues and elements that you can then incorporate into your own reels. My additional tip on top of this is don't just get trapped in your own niche's bubble. So if you're helping people become rock climbers, don't just follow hundreds of other rock climbing accounts and get all your inspiration from other rock climbers. Because then you're going to just end up parroting them. You're going to just end up as a cheap knockoff, a copy if you will, of everyone else in your industry. Instead, get inspired from books, from newspapers, from people outside of your industry. Get Inspired from a YouTube video and apply it to your Instagram. Get inspired from a TikTok and apply it to your Instagram. Get inspired from a comic strip in a newspaper and apply it to your Instagram. Get your inspiration from a diverse pool of people and creators and mediums and it will help you create better, more diverse content that is at the same time more authentic to you. Tip number three for creating high quality content is K I S S Keep it simple sweetheart. The simpler you can make your content, the better. And that's because most people are mindlessly consuming. Most people are scrolling and seeing 10,000 posts a day. So as soon as you start trying to make your content really smart and sophisticated and using fancy words, you lose people. As soon as you start using that insider lingo and that fancy term to flex your knowledge and boost your own ego of how cool am I? How smart am I? You lose people's attention. Basically dumb it down and speed it up if you can make your content more concise, more succinct and simpler to understand, that's better. And then finally, last but not least, the best kind of content for growing on Instagram is is share worthy content. Share worthy content, as the name explains, is content that is worthy of being shared. Posts that are worthy of being sent from one person to another. Shares are disproportionately the best kind of engagement on Instagram. Compared to likes and comments and saves shares get you way more views per interaction. And so if you can create the kind of content that actually gets sent from one person to another, or to another group chat, or from one person to their Instagram stories, that's really how you're going to grow. That's how you're going to go viral. That's how you're going to reach targeted accounts fast. And so that you can actually grow your Instagram and see results. Shareworthy content is another one of those big topics that we could spend a long time talking about. And I know that I'm already known for yapping a little bit. Trust me, I see your comments about how I'm long winded and I talk too much. I'm just trying to simplify things. I'm trying to make sure that no one gets left behind. So I'm sorry if sometimes I'm a little bit redundant saying the same thing multiple different ways. I do apologize. I'm working on it. But nonetheless, I've done an entire episode on shareworthy content in the past. So if you want an in depth guide or tutorial as to how to create shareworthy content, I will link up a video that I've done in the past on that topic and I'll even link up a free guide that I created that is kind of like a typed up version of that episode as well. But that's it. Those are the six steps to growing your Instagram account from zero followers this year. I guess step number seven would be to just keep going consistently keep doing step number six, keep posting, keep showing up. And it's going to take some time. I mean, realistically, it takes the average account 9 to 12 months of consistent effort to reach about a thousand followers. Like I said earlier, our average Insta ClubHub student does grow by 1200 followers in their first 30 days. But that's not realistic for everyone. Realistically, it's going to take you some time to grow. It's going to take you months, if not years to hit 10k or to hit 100k followers. I hope it doesn't take you that long, but I want you to embrace the suck. I want you to enter the pain cave. I want you to understand that it's probably not going to be overnight success. If you want to learn more about the Insta ClubHub, my Instagram school, I'll link that up in the show notes below. But I want to say thank you so much for listening today. I hope you found this valuable. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button before you scroll away. And as always, happy networking. Foreign.
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