0 to 100,000 followers on Instagram (Here’s what I did.)

What is up, everyone! Welcome back to my channel, the best place for new coaches, content, creators, and entrepreneurs. Now in today’s video, we have something to celebrate because over the last week I noticed that my Instagram account hit a hundred thousand followers.

Now, right now, as I film the video, we are at 101, which is pretty insane to me. And so I wanted to create this video to kind of walk you through my journey of going from zero followers to a hundred thousand followers.

And specifically through each stage, I kind of want to explain what strategies I implemented that I feel contributed to this growth. And so it is going to be in chronological order because you definitely want to stay until the very end of the video because the tips and the strategies and the things that I did are just going to get more and more relevant as the video goes on.

Now, as always, before we begin, something that we do is we shout out our community. So let’s dive right into those shout outs. First massive congratulations to this week’s YouTube channel and Instagram profile of the week.

Thank you for supporting this channel. Now, if you’re interested in being featured too, all you have to do is take a picture of this video and post it to your Instagram stories. Just don’t forget to tag me, or you can leave a comment in today’s video.

Anyways, guys, let’s get right back into the video. All right, welcome back. Now, the very first thing that I did that I felt really moved the needle for my trajectory on Instagram and on social media is really finding a niche that I enjoyed and that I could be consistent in.

And I have a backstory to this. So for those of you who are new to my channel or who don’t know, my story really well is before me doing what I do now, which is teaching people how to use social media, teaching people, how to jumpstart their coaching businesses and all of that.

I took a stab at becoming a beauty influencer because I thought that’s what I wanted at the time I was working at my nine to five, I was miserable. And I thought that my way out was to become a beauty influencer.

And I saw how much money these influencers were making. I saw the lifestyle that they had and all the free product that was sent to them. And I thought to myself, I want that because I was in a place in my corporate job where I just didn’t want to be there.

And I thought that doing the makeup route would be my way out because I thought that’s what I wanted. And the truth is for a lot of people, you don’t really know what you like until you do it.

And so if you actually look at the archived photos and videos within my Instagram profile, you’ll see that I did take a stab at creating tutorials, creating videos, creating content for makeup, but here’s the thing I wasn’t super passionate about it.

And I was doing it for the wrong reasons I was doing it because I wanted to pop off. I wanted to get the vetting metrics and I wanted to be an influencer. But the reality is, is that I wasn’t like a James Charles or a Nicki tutorials where I was so passionate about makeup to the point where I can come up with 20 different looks, always spend the hours after work, creating videos and all that.

And so that in itself impacted my creativity. And every time I did a video, I was just miserable because I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to go on camera and put on more makeup on my face only to take it off for the footage.

And so that impacted my consistency. And today in my pay, the boss Graham Academy, what I teach when it comes to finding a niche that is suitable for you is my PSP formula. And so in my program, I teach this more in depth of how to actually execute the components of the PSP formula.

But for the purpose of this video, I’m going to share with you what that formula is. And so what I believe is that in order for a niche to be aligned with you, it has to cover three of these components.

The first one is personal story, okay. And this was the piece that I was missing when I was doing makeup. I didn’t have a strong enough personal connection to makeup. And so what that means is when you have a niche, make sure that you actually have a story behind it, make sure that you actually have a personal connection behind it.

For instance, when I first started this channel, it was all about helping millennials quit the nine to five. And my personal story was the fact that I went through working two years in corporate, absolutely hating it, and finally taking the leap and realizing that there’s so much more to life than climbing the corporate ladder.

I have a very strong personal story behind it. The next thing, the next component within the PSP formula that I teach in Boscov Academy is searchable. Is this something that is heavily searched on the internet that people are actually looking for and in the makeup case? Yeah, it was super searchable at the time in the year of 2017 makeup was all the rage.

It still is, but it was really, really taking off around 2016 and 2017. And so for the makeup section, yeah, it was searchable. And then lastly, is, is it profitable? Right? So the niche that you’re thinking of doing, can you actually make money? Are there other people making money with it? And for me, it was so clear that in the makeup category, a lot of people were profiting, specifically influencers, Jaclyn Hill was coming out with her palette.

Nicki tutorials was coming out with a pallet Jeffree star, like so many people were coming out with pallets. And so for me, when I did makeup, it was searchable. It was profitable, but my personal story and my personal connection to it just wasn’t strong enough.

And so that’s why that didn’t work out for me. And I wasn’t able to be successful at it. I wasn’t consistent. And I just didn’t have the drive to always pump out content for makeup, whereas what I’m doing now, and also what I did before after makeup, which is more catered towards helping people quit the nine to five.

And also what I do now, which is about helping you guys succeed on social media, monetize that and become your own boss. I have all of those three areas covered personal story check at the time I had just quit my nine to five and I was super passionate about helping other people do the same.

I had a very strong interest in social media. Yes. So I did have a personal connection there. Is it searchable? Yes. You obviously found me either through Instagram podcast or YouTube. That’s why you’re watching me here is cause I have topics that you’re looking for.

And is it profitable? Yes. There are a lot of content creators who have been able to coach other people start their own coaching businesses, which is what I have. And then move on to start digital courses that have been super, super profitable in this space.

And so for me now that I can look back at what I was doing, the reason why I was able to at least get it started and be successful, it is because I had a very strong why behind what I was doing. Whereas when I was trying to do makeup, yes, it was something that I thought I wanted to do.

And I saw other people do it, but I didn’t have a strong enough why. And within the PSP formula that I teach in my own program and didn’t check the box of personal story or personal connection.

And so this is a big mistake or a big oversight that I see a lot of people doing with their Instagram accounts is they think that they want something and then they start following other people. They start copy and pasting what other people are doing because they think that’s, what’s going to be successful, which it is, it can be, but they don’t have a strong enough why or a strong enough passion behind it.

And so that’s why you’re not consistent on Instagram. That’s why it’s really hard for you to come up with content because you, yourself, you’re not passionate about what you’re doing.

You don’t have a personal connection to it for me, I can confidently say yes, there are times where I’m like, Oh my gosh, I don’t know what to post today on Instagram. But when I started, I was booming with different caption ideas, booming with different content ideas because I was so, so interested in what I was doing.

It was never a chore for me versus with makeup. It always felt like a chore. All right, now dive into the second shift that I had to make in order for me to grow from zero to 100,000 followers on Instagram is I really want to make sure that you guys know that I’m running some live trainings happening on July 24th, 26th and 28.

These are live. And in these trainings, I’m going to cover the steps that you need to take in order to launch a successful coaching business and get clients. Yes, Instagram, the same way that I have.

We’re also going to cover topics like how to create content. That’s actually going to help you generate leads, niching down. Very similar to what I was talking about earlier on in this video and also how to create some compelling offers.

That’s actually going to make someone want to buy from you. So make sure you click the link in the description box or in the comment section below. So you don’t miss out because these are live trainings happening on July 24th, 26th and 28 of 2020.

So you definitely don’t want to miss out anyways with that out of the way, I want to move on to the second strategy. And that is making sure that I had a value based approach to my content. Now, what I mean by this is basically when I’m creating content, I really try to make sure that it is going to be valuable for other people.

Now, obviously this is subjective because everyone’s perception of value is super different. But if I could give you an example, when I first started creating content on Instagram, it was very, I focused and I’ll give you an example of a caption right here.

You can tell that within this caption, it’s really all about me. And I was treating my Instagram as if it was my own personal diary. And these posts, you know, they did well with my friends and family, but it didn’t necessarily attract new people into my audience pool.

And the reason why is because I’m, wasn’t giving any value away. I wasn’t teaching anyone, anything. I wasn’t inspiring anyone with anything. I was simply just treating it like my own personal blog and not necessarily caring about what other people wanted to see or hear from me.

And then eventually I shifted my approach when it came to caption writing to really think about how I could provide value to other people. And this really started with me actually writing down all the different questions that I believe that my audience is asking.

And obviously I’ve talked about this in various videos before. If you don’t know what other people are asking, you can call them and ask them in your Instagram stories, you can join Facebook groups and see what other people are asking in those Facebook groups and create content around that.

Because a big pitfall that a lot of content creators do is they treat their Instagram or they treat their social media platform like their personal diary. And this is exactly what I did when I first started out.

Whereas when I started posting stuff like this that really spoke to the objections or the questions that I know my audience is asking in this case, you can see that the hook of this caption is already addressing a huge question that I know my audience is always asking is whether or not they should lower their prices.

That’s when I started to really see a pop off in engagement in DMS and people being a lot more interested in what I had to say, because for once I wasn’t shifting the conversation to be all about me, but instead I was having a much more value based approach.

And from then I graduated to kind of what I’m doing now, which is even more value based. And you can see from this carousel, I’m literally giving my audience tips and strategies on how they could improve their social media game or improve their business in one way or the other, everything that I post or most things that I post are ultra value based on my Instagram.

And that allows people to have a reason why to follow you. The next thing that I changed within my Instagram strategy, that I felt helped me in order to get more traffic is really not posting so many photos of me.

And instead shifting my strategy to post things that are a little bit more shareable. Now, I will say that when I post photos of myself, I do get more likes and more comments because when someone sees a photo of me, they don’t really need to read the caption.

Sometimes they’ll just like it. And I find that when I post a photo of myself, I get a lot more engagement from my own family and friends on my Instagram account. However, when I was doing this approach, I was averaging about eight to 10,000 profile visits a week, which is a decent amount obviously.

But the moment that I switched to a format like this, that is a little bit more shareable. Now I see 25,000 profile visits a week, which means a hundred thousand profile visits a month. And the reason why is because when you see a photo of yourself, sure, it’s cute.

It’s pretty, it’s whatever. And people are liking it and commenting on it, maybe, but it’s not super valuable. It’s not valuable enough for people to want to reshare that to their stories versus a post like this.

People are more than happy to share it to their Instagram stories, which then their audience can see it. And then you’ll get more traffic not to mention. It also allows you to have more variety on your feed as well.

So what I noticed with my previous strategy is when you visit my account, it’s literally not only a personal diary on every single caption, but it’s also basically all photos of me. And it got to a point where even for me, I was uncomfortable looking at my own profile.

I was like, Oh my gosh, I look like a narcissist. Like every single photo is literally a photo of me. And so the moment that I changed my approach to do more shareable content, more graphics focused, not only did I see more profile visits coming into my profile, which contributed to my Instagram growth, but also it gave my feet a little bit more variety.

And so when you’re looking at that account and let’s say, you’re a fresh follower of mine. You don’t know me at all. When you see it account that actually visibly shows value. You’re like, Whoa, I want to follow this account.

It’s very similar to meme pages. When you look at meme pages, if you just saw photos of, you know, the person who owns the account, you’d be like, Hmm, not really interested, but because just from the feet alone in your first impression, you’re like, Aw, there’s content here that I can share.

There’s content here that you know, is going to entertain me or educate me. Then that’s when you can start seeing that growth in followers. And so I’m really feel like this little shift in strategy really contributed to my growth on Instagram.

Another strategy that I implemented that I recently did is incorporating something that I like to call the photo bait method and what the photo bait method is, is when you put a photo of yourself as the first page of the carousel, and then in the back pages of the carousel, you then put your captions or you put the actual value.

And I came up with this because I realized when I was looking at my analytics, I was right that the photos of myself actually perform better in terms of likes and comments, in terms of those vanity metrics that a lot of people care about, but the posts where it’s more sharable, those ones had the most saves and the most shares.

And I value shares a lot because that actually gets me traffic to my page. And therefore people see the link in my bio, click it. And then that turns into a lead into my business, or it actually contributes back to my business, likes and comments don’t really contribute back to my business in a monetary way, whereas traffic does, right.

And so I asked myself, how can I merge the two? How can I also get the initial engagement, get the likes and comments, those banning metrics or whatever, but also get the saves and the shares. And that’s when I started to incorporate the photo bait method.

Now I don’t use this a lot because again, like I said, in the previous strategy, I don’t necessarily like to flood my feed with pictures of me, but occasionally I will do it. And every single time for me, at least it performs really well.

And so what I do now is, like I said, I’ll have the first page as a photo of myself. And when you swipe it’s the caption, or it’s another thing that you can also share on your Instagram story, because when you give people options, N’s in the carousel, they can choose what they want to share.

And so even though the first slide of your carousel is a photo, have you, you can bait them. You can help them stop the scroll and double tap or comment or whatever. But when they swipe, they’ll see that image of bill actually want to share on their stories.

And so you’re giving people options, not only this, something that I like to do and that I have started doing is when I have a super long caption, I’ll always try my best to turn that into a note format like this, to make things a little bit more digestible, because even in my own habits, when I see other people posting captions that are super long, I tend to not read that anymore.

I don’t have time for that, but when it’s in a carousel and it’s formatted nicely with bolded headers or underlined or italicized fonts, you know, that actually catches my attention a lot more and it becomes a little bit more digestible.

And because I’ve consumed that content now I understand I’m actually an engaged user and that’s going to propel me to want to DM someone to want to share their content, to want to like, and to want to comment.

And so now I use the photo bait method and I personally feel like that has actually also helped me accelerate my growth on Instagram as well, because even before then I was growing, but it wasn’t until I started creating the shareable content, using the photo bait method, doing all of that, creating things that are a lot more digestible.

That’s when I really started to see skyrocketed growth, which is why I feel my account went from zero to a hundred thousand a lot faster than most people. The next thing that is obviously a big game changer when it comes to growing on Instagram is being on another platform.

And I definitely should have probably mentioned this earlier on in the video. I don’t know why, but essentially once you feel like you’ve mastered a platform, you have the ins and outs of Instagram, you know, you can consider potentially putting your authority elsewhere.

That’s a lot more searchable. So for me, it was YouTube as I was building up my Instagram, I was also starting up my YouTube channel and my YouTube channel generates a lot of traffic because of the search capabilities on YouTube.

Now for you, if you don’t want to be a YouTuber, that’s totally okay, but you can also consider podcasts or you can consider a Facebook group for me. This is how I started. I started with my Instagram first posted a couple posts, made sure that I could be consistent, had some content planned out for that.

I was consistent on stories. And then I moved onto YouTube and that’s where I started posting once a week. Content on things that I knew was searchable. Cause remember my PSP formula there, you need to have a personal connection.

It needs to be searchable and it needs to be profitable in order to be a niche that could be suitable for you. And also eventually I believe in October of 2018, because I had a master community, both on Instagram and on YouTube, I then created a Facebook group and that Facebook group also attracted more people from Facebook who is searching for topics that my Facebook group would cover.

And then now I eventually launched a podcast. So the podcast I launched not too long ago, I launched like a couple of months ago, but now the podcast also gets me traffic as well. And all of that traffic from these different social media platforms are now going to my Instagram.

And that’s also how, when you look at my social blade, you’re able to see such rapid growth because not only am I incorporating Instagram strategies to help me grow, I also have the fuel of the other platforms that are helping me grow as well.

So something that you want to consider is really pairing yourself with another platform to help grow your Instagram account. It could be tic talk. It could be YouTube. It could be podcast. It could be, yeah, you being super active on Facebook groups and making sure people know how to find you on Instagram in order to contribute to that Instagram growth.

So that is definitely something that you may want to consider to really accelerate the trajectory and the velocity of how much you’re growing on Instagram. Finally, another thing that I did that I feel has really helped contribute to my growth is being a lot smarter with content creation.

And what I mean by this is for me, I got to a point where I’m obviously on multiple platforms, like I said, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube podcast. And I realized that this wasn’t right sustainable.

I cannot be on multiple well platforms all the time, pumping all this content. It’s simply not a CEO level activity. And so that’s when I started to become a lot smarter with content repurposing.

So now what I do is I literally take it my content from YouTube. So for example, I have this video right here and then I’ll turn that into an Instagram carousel and I’ll make that a lot more shareable.

And so now I’ve only created that content once I simply repurposed it to Instagram, and now I’m getting traffic on Instagram and I’m getting traffic on YouTube from that video on both ends.

And that’s how I was able to also accelerate the growth without me necessarily doubling my work. And you don’t have to be on multiple platforms to do this so long as you are someone who is creating a content elsewhere, you can always find areas of how you can convert that into your Instagram captions or your Instagram graphics or whatever.

It may be. Another thing that you can also do is if you have a Facebook group, for example, this is a post that I did in my Facebook group. And then I simply turned that again into something that I could put on Instagram.

And it took me not that long. It didn’t take me sitting there at my desk, thinking of new content. I just looked at my previous content on my other channels and repurposed it. You can also, if you have a podcast, let’s say, and you do audio work, you can turn that into an audio gram.

You can use repurpose house or you can use headliner. And I talk about it in this video right here. You can repurpose that and put it onto Instagram as well. So now you’re doubling your traffic. Another thing that you can consider doing, and this is for those of you who maybe are interested in being on multiple platforms, maybe you’re not there yet.

Maybe you don’t have the capacity for it and that’s okay, what you can do. And this is what I sometimes do. So I’ll look at my old stories that I did on my Instagram account and, uh, literally convert those stories into content for my Instagram.

Because for a lot of you guys, you guys may be on stories doing mini trainings, or you guys might be dropping some key value bombs on your Instagram stories that you’re not repurposing. So what I’ll do is a literally go through my archives, look at past stuff that I’ve said in my Instagram stories and then repurpose it onto my Instagram post.

So at least I’m saving time on the content ideation side of things. And all I need to do is just slap it into a caption or slap it into a graphic and whatnot, and then post it on the Instagram. And so that way, again, you are doubling your work.

Now, at this point in the video, I’ve really shared with you and narrow down the key things that I believe really moved the needle for me, obviously, if go through my YouTube channel, there is a whole section on different methods for Instagram that you can grow with.

But I did condense all of the most important ones that I believe really contributed to my success in this video. Now you might be wondering, okay, so what’s your strategy now? Well, the answer is simple for me.

I know that traffic is the most important thing. At least for me, I already have a niche established. I already know that I’m consistent on content. I already know that, you know, people like my content and my positioning is decently well.

And so now my focus is, is simply on traffic. If you’re watching this video and you’re maybe more at the beginning stages, then your goal at this point may not be traffic. It may be adjusting your positioning, or it may be finding a niche in the first place, or it may be creating an offer so that when you have the traffic, you at least have something that you can sell so that you’re making money online.

And you’re not just being a broke content creator. And again, make sure you click the link in my description box or click the link in my comment section to sign up for my free training happening July 24th, 26, 28, that’s happening live where I cover all of these things, but depending on where you’re at in your business, you might have different goals.

And so for me, my goal is getting more traffic. And so that’s why if you follow me on different platforms, you’ll see that I’m also venturing into Pinterest. And I’m also venturing into LinkedIn in order to accelerate that growth.

Not only this in my stage of business, we’re also running ads, whether that is on Instagram and also on Facebook. And so pending on where you’re at in your business, you might want to consider running Facebook or Instagram ads as well.

The only thing that I recommend is just making sure that you have a validated product and that you have a validated niche and offer otherwise all that money that you’re spending to ads are just going to go to waste.

So again, if you want to learn all about that makes you click the link in my description box. And in my comment section below, because my free training that’s happening live is going to cover a lot of these things.

So that being said, where I’m at right now is simply continuing to do what I’m doing. Simply continuing to do the things I literally mentioned in this video create more traffic by expanding to more platforms, continue to have a value based approach to my content and also repurposing that content and making it shareable so that I’m not doubling my work, but I am doubling my traffic.

These are things that right now I am super focused on. That’s why make sure you comment below in this video and let me know what you’re going to be focusing on, because I would love to know that being said, while you wait for next week’s video, make sure you also check out these two videos that I have right here as well.

I talk a lot about content creation, social media, entrepreneurship, Instagram, and all the likes of that. So make sure you check out these two videos while you wait for next week’s video as always guys, I appreciate you.

I hope you guys have a great day, a great week and a great life, and hopefully I’ll see you at my live training. All right, bye guys. what is up everyone welcome back to my channel the best place for new coaches content creators and entrepreneurs now in today’s video we have something to celebrate because over the last week I noticed that my Instagram account hit a hundred thousand followers now right now as I filmed the video we are at a hundred and one which is pretty insane to me and so I wanted to create this video to kind of walk you through my journey of going from zero followers to a hundred thousand followers and specifically through each stage I kind of want to explain what strategies I implemented that I feel contributed to this growth and so it’s gonna be in chronological order so you definitely want to stay until the very end of the video because the tips and the strategies and the things that I did are just gonna get more and more relevant as the video goes on now as always before we begin something that we do is we shout out our community so let’s dive right into those shout outs first massive congratulations to this week’s YouTube channel and Instagram profile of the week thank you for supporting this channel now if you’re interested in being featured – all you have to do is take a picture of this video and post it to your instagrams stories just don’t forget to tag me or you can leave a comment in today’s video anyways guys let’s get right back in the video all right welcome back now the very first thing that I did that I felt really moved the needle for my trajectory on Instagram and on social media is really finding a niche that I enjoyed and that I could be consistent in and I have a backstory to this so for those of you who are new to my channel or who don’t know my story really well is before me doing what I do now which is teaching people how to use social media teaching people how to jumpstart their coaching businesses and all of that I took a stab at becoming a beauty influencer because I thought that’s what I wanted at the time I was working at my nine-to-five I was miserable and I thought that my way out was to become a beauty influencer and I saw how much money these influencers were making I saw the lifestyle that they had and all the free product that was sent to them and I thought to myself I want that because I was in a place in my corporate job where I just didn’t want to be there and I thought that doing the makeup route would be my way out because I thought that’s what I wanted and so the truth is for a lot of people you don’t really know what you like until you do it and so if you actually look at the archived photos and videos within my profile you’ll see that I did take a stab at creating tutorials creating videos creating content for makeup but here’s the thing I wasn’t super passionate about it and I was doing it for the wrong reasons I was doing it because I wanted to pop off I wanted to get the vanity metrics and I wanted to be an influencer but the reality is is that I wasn’t like a James Charles or a nikkietutorials where I was so passionate about makeup to the point where I can come up with 20 different looks always spend the hours after work creating videos and all that and so that in itself impacted my creativity and every time I did a video I was just miserable because I didn’t want to do it I didn’t want to go on camera and put on more makeup on my face only to take it off for the footage and so that impacted my consistency and today in my paid program the boss Graham Academy what I teach when it comes to finding a niche that is suitable for you is my PSP formula and so in my program I teach this more in depth of how to actually execute the components of the PSP formula but for the purpose of this video I’m gonna share with you what that formula is and so what I believe is that in order for a niche to be aligned with you it has to cover three of these components the first one is personal story okay and this was the piece that I was missing when I was doing makeup I didn’t have a strong enough personal connection to makeup and so what that means is when you have a niche make sure that you actually have a story behind it make sure that you actually have a personal connection behind it for instance when I first started this channel it was all about helping Millennials quit the nine of five and my personal story was the fact that I went through working two years in corporate absolutely hating it and finally taking the leap and realizing that there’s so much more to life than climbing the corporate ladder I have a very strong personal story behind it the next thing the next component within the PSP formula that I teach in boss Graham Academy is searchable is this something that is heavily searched on the internet that people are actually looking for and in the makeup case yeah it was super searchable at the time in the year of 2017 makeup was all the rage it still is but it was really really taking off around 2016 and 2017 and so for the makeup section yeah it was searchable and then lastly is is it profitable right so Anish that you’re thinking of doing can you actually make money are there other people making money with it and for me it was so clear that in the makeup category a lot of people were profiting specifically influencers Jacqueline Hill was coming up with her palette nikkietutorials was coming out with a palette Jeffrey star like so many people were coming up with palettes and so for me when I did makeup it was searchable it was profitable but my personal story and my personal connection to it just wasn’t strong enough and so that’s why that didn’t work out for me and I wasn’t able to be successful at it I wasn’t consistent and I just didn’t have the drive to always pump out content for makeup whereas what I’m doing now and also what I did before after makeup which is more cater towards helping people quit the night of 5:00 and also what I do now which is about helping you guys succeed on social media monetize that and become your own boss I have all of those three areas covered personal story check at the time I had just quit my nine-to-five and I was super passionate about helping other people do the same I had a very strong interest in social media yes so I did have a personal connection there is it searchable yes you obviously found me either through Instagram podcast or YouTube that’s why you’re watching me here is because I have topics that you’re looking for and is it profitable yes there are a lot of content creators who have been able to coach other people start their own coaching businesses which is what I have and then move on to start digital courses that have been super super profitable in this space and so for me now that I can look back at what I was doing the reason why I was able to at least get it started and be successful at it is because I had a very strong why behind what I was doing where as what I was trying to do makeup yes it was something that I thought I wanted to do and I saw other people do it but I didn’t have a strong enough why and within the PSP formula that I teach in my own program and didn’t check the box of personal story or personal connection and so this is a big mistake or a big oversight that I see a lot of people doing with their Instagram accounts is they think that they want something and then they start following other people they start copy and pasting what other people are doing because they think that’s what’s going to be successful which it is it can be but they don’t have a strong enough Y or strong enough path behind it and so that’s why you’re not consistent on Instagram that’s why it’s really hard for you to come up with content because you yourself you’re not passionate about what you’re doing you don’t have a personal connection to it for me I can confidently say yes there are times where I’m like oh my gosh I don’t know what to post today on Instagram but when I started I was booming with different caption ideas booming with different content ideas because I was so so interested in what I was doing it was never a chore for me versus with makeup it always felt like a chore alright now before I dive into the second shift that I have to make in order for me to grow from zero to a hundred thousand followers on Instagram is I really want to make sure that you guys know that I’m running some live trainings happening on July 24th 26th and 28th these are live and in these trainings I’m gonna cover the steps that you need to take in order to launch a successful coaching business and get clients using Instagram the same way that I have we’re also gonna cover topics like how to create content that’s actually gonna help you generate leads niching down very similar to what I was talking about earlier on in this video and also how to create some compelling offers that’s actually gonna make someone want to buy from you so make sure you click the link in the description box or in the comment section below so you don’t miss out because these are live trainings happening on July 24th 26 and 28 of 2020 so you definitely don’t want to miss out anyways with that out of the way I want to move on to the second strategy and that is making sure that I had a value based approach to my content now what I mean by this is basically when I’m creating content I really try to make sure that it is going to be valuable for other people now obviously this is subjective because everyone’s perception of value is super different but if I could give you an example when I first started creating content on Instagram it was very I focused and I’ll give you an example of a caption right here you can tell that within this caption it’s really all about me and I was treating my Instagram as if it was my own personal diary and these posts you know they did well with my friends and family but it didn’t necessarily attract new people into my audience pool and the reason why is because I wasn’t giving any value away I wasn’t teaching anyone anything I wasn’t inspiring anyone with anything I was simply just treating it like my own personal blog and not necessarily caring about what other people wanted to see or hear from me and then eventually I shifted my approach when it came to caption writing to really think about how I could provide value to other people and this really started with me actually writing down all the different questions that I believe that my audience is asking and obviously I’ve talked about this in various videos before if you don’t know what other people are asking you can pull them and ask them in your Instagram stories you could join Facebook groups and see what other people are asking in those Facebook groups and create content around that because a big pitfall that a lot of content creators do is they treat their Instagram or they treat their social media platform like their personal diary and this is exactly what I did when I first started out whereas when I started posting stuff like this that really spoke to the objections or the questions that I know my audience is asking in this case you can see that the hook of this caption is already addressing a huge question that I know my audience is always asking is whether or not they should lower their prices that’s when I started to really see a pop off in engagement in DMS in people being a lot more interested in what I had to say because for once I wasn’t shifting the conversation to be all about me but instead I was having a much more value based approach and from then I graduated to kind of what I’m doing now which is even more value-based and you can see from this carousel I’m literally giving my audience tips and strategies on how they could improve their social media game or improve their business in one way or the other everything that I post or most things that I post are ultra value-based on my Instagram and that allows people to have a reason why to follow you the next thing that I changed within my Instagram strategy that I felt helped me in order to get more traffic is really not posting so many photos of me and instead shifting my strategy to post things that are a little bit more shareable now I will say that when I post photos of myself I do get more likes and more comments because when someone sees a photo of me they don’t really need to read the caption sometimes they’ll just like it and I find out when I post a photo of myself I get a lot more engagement from my own family and friends on my Instagram account however when I was doing this approach I was averaging about eight to ten thousand profile visits a week which is a decent amount obviously but the moment that I switched to a format like this that is a little bit more shareable now I see twenty five thousand profile visits a week which means a hundred thousand profile visits a month and the reason why is because when you see a photo of yourself sure it’s cute it’s pretty it’s whatever and people are liking it and commenting on it maybe but it’s not super valuable it’s not valuable enough for people to want to reshare that to their stories versus a post like this people are more than happy to share it to their Instagram stories which then their audience can see it and then you’ll get more traffic not to mention it also allows you to have more variety on your feed as well so what I notice with my previous strategy is when you visit my account it’s literally not only a personal diary on every single caption but it’s also basically all photos of me and it got to a point where even for me I was uncomfortable looking at my own profile I was like oh my gosh I look like a narcissist like every single photo is literally a photo of me and so the moment that I changed my approach to do more shareable content more graphics focused not only did I see more profile visits coming into my profile which contributed to my Instagram growth but also it gave my feed a little bit more variety and so when you’re looking at that account and let’s say you’re a fresh follower of mine you don’t know me at all when you see an account that actually visibly shows value you’re like whoa I want to follow this account it’s very similar to meme pages when you look at mean pages if you just saw photos of you know the person who owns the account you’d be like I’m not really interested but because just from the feet alone and your first impression you’re like ah there’s content here that I can share there’s content here that you know is going to entertain me or educate me then that’s when you can start seeing that growth in followers and so I really feel like this little shift in strategy really contributed to my growth on Instagram another strategy that I implemented that recently did is incorporating something that I like to call the photo bait method and what the photo bait method is is when you put a photo of yourself as the first page of the carousel and then in the back pages of the carousel you then put your captions or you put the actual value and I came up with this because I realized when I was looking at my analytics it I was right that the photos of myself actually perform better in terms of likes and comments in terms of those vanity metrics that a lot of people care about but the posts where it’s more shareable those ones had the most saves and the most shares and I value shares a lot because that actually gets me traffic to my page and therefore people see the link in my bio click it and then that turns into a lead into my business or it actually contributes back to my business likes and comments don’t really contribute back to my business in a monetary way whereas traffic does right and so I asked myself how can I merge the two how can I also get the engagement get the likes and comments those banning metrics or whatever but also get the saves and the shares and that’s when I started to incorporate the photo bait method now I don’t use this a lot because again like I said in the previous strategy I don’t necessarily like to flood my feed with pictures of me but occasionally I will do it and every single time for me at least it performs really well and so what I do now is like I said I’ll have the first page as a photo of myself and when you swipe it’s the caption or it’s another thing that you can also share on your Instagram stories because when you give people options in the carousel they can choose what they want to share and so even though the first slide of your carousel is a photo of you you can bait them you can help them stop the scroll and DoubleTap or comment or whatever but when they swipe they’ll see that image of they’ll actually want to share on their stories and so you’re giving people options not only this something that I like to do and then I have started doing is when I have a super long caption I’ll always try my best to turn that into a note format like this to make things a little bit more digestible because even in my own habits when I see other people posting captions that are super long I tend to not read that anymore I don’t time for that but when it’s in a carousel and it’s formatted nicely with bolded headers or underlines or italicized fonts you know that actually catches my attention a lot more and it becomes a little bit more digestible and because I’ve consumed that content now I understand I’m actually an engaged user and that’s gonna propel me to want to DM someone to want to share their content to want to like and to want to comment and so now I use the photo bait method and I personally feel like that has actually also helped me accellerate my growth on Instagram as well because even before then I was growing but it wasn’t until I started creating the shareable content using the photo bait method doing all of that creating things that are a lot more digestible that’s when I really started to see skyrocketed growth which is why I feel my account went from zero to a hundred thousand a lot faster than most people the next thing that is obviously a big game changer when it comes to growing on Instagram is being on another platform and I definitely should have probably mentioned this earlier on in the video I don’t know why but essentially once you feel like you’ve mastered a platform you have the ins and outs of Instagram you know you can consider potentially putting your authority elsewhere that’s a lot more searchable so for me it was YouTube as I was building up my Instagram I was also starting up my youtube channel and my youtube channel generates a lot of traffic because of the search capabilities on YouTube now for you if you don’t want to be a youtuber that’s totally okay but you can also consider podcast or you can consider a Facebook group for me this is how I started I started with my Instagram first posted a couple posts made sure that I could be consistent had some content planned out for that I was consistent on stories and then I moved on to YouTube and that’s where I started posting once a week content on things that I knew was searchable because remember my PSP formula there you need to have a personal connection it needs to be searchable and it needs to be profitable in order to be a niche that could be suitable for you and also eventually I believe in October of 2018 because I had amassed a community both on Instagram and on YouTube I then created a Facebook group and that Facebook group also attracted more people from Facebook who was searching for you know topics that my Facebook group would cover and then now I eventually launched a podcast so the caste I launched not too long ago I launched like a couple months ago but now the podcast also gets me traffic as well and all of that traffic from these different social media platforms are now going to my Instagram and that’s also how when you look at my social blade you’re able to see such rapid growth because not only am i incorporating Instagram strategies to help me grow I also have the fuel of the other platforms that are helping me grow as well so something that you want to consider is really pairing yourself with another platform to help grow your Instagram account it could be tick tock it could be YouTube it could be podcast it could be you being super active on Facebook groups and making sure people know how to find you on Instagram in order to contribute to that Instagram growth so that is definitely something that you may want to consider to really accelerate the trajectory and the velocity of how much you’re growing on Instagram finally another thing that I did that I feel has really helped contribute to my growth is being a lot smarter with content creation and what I mean by this is for me I got to a point where I’m obviously on multiple platforms like I said Instagram Facebook YouTube podcast and I realized that this wasn’t sustainable I cannot be on multiple platforms all the time pumping all this content is simply not a CEO level activity and so that’s when I started to become a lot smarter with content repurposing so now what I do is I literally take my content from YouTube so for example I have this video right here and then I’ll turn that into an Instagram carousel and I’ll make that a lot more shareable and so now I’ve only created that content once I simply repurposed it to Instagram and now I’m getting traffic on Instagram and I’m getting traffic on YouTube from that video on both ends and that’s how I was able to also accelerate the growth without me necessarily doubling my work and you don’t have to be on multiple platforms to do this so long as you are someone who is creating all content elsewhere you can always find areas of how you can convert that into your Instagram captions or your Instagram graphics or whatever it may be another thing that you can all so do is if you have a Facebook group for example this is a post that I did in my Facebook group and then I simply turned that again into something that I could put on Instagram and it took me not that long it didn’t take me sitting there at my desk thinking of new content I just looked at my previous content on my other channels and repurposed it you can also if you have a podcast let’s say and you do audio work you can turn that into an audiogram you can use repurpose house or you can use headliner and I talked about it in this video right here you can repurpose that and put it on to Instagram as well so now you’re doubling your traffic another thing that you can consider doing and this is for those of you who maybe aren’t interested in being on multiple platforms maybe you’re not there yet maybe you don’t have the capacity for and that’s okay what you can do and this is what I sometimes do so I’ll look at my old stories that I did on my Instagram account and I’ll literally convert those stories into content from my Instagram because for a lot of you guys you guys may be on stories doing mini trainings or you guys might be dropping some key value bombs on your Instagram stories that you’re not repurposing so what I’ll do is I’ll literally go through my archives look at past stuff that I’ve said in my Instagram stories and then repurpose it onto my Instagram post so at least I’m saving time on the content ideation side of things and all I need to do is just slap it into a caption or slap it into a graphic and whatnot and then post it on the Instagram and so that way again and you aren’t doubling your work now at this point in the video I’ve really shared with you and narrow down the key things that I believe really moved the needle for me obviously if you go through my YouTube channel there is a whole section on different methods for Instagram that you can grow it but I did condense all of the most important ones that I believe really contributed to my success in this video now you might be wondering okay so what’s your strategy now well the answer is simple for me I know that traffic is the most important thing at least for me I already have Anish establish I already know that I’m consistent on you know content I already know that you know people like my content and my positioning is decently well and so now my focus is simply on traffic if you’re watching this video and you’re maybe more in the beginning stages then your goal at this point may not be traffic it may be adjusting your positioning or it may be finding a niche in the first place or it may be creating offer so that when you have the traffic you at least have something that you can sell so that you’re making money online and you’re not just being a broke content creator and again make sure you click the link in my description box or click the link in my comment section to sign up for my free training happening July 24th 26 28 that’s happening live where I cover all of these things but depending on where you’re at in your business you might have different goals and so for me my goal is getting more traffic and so that’s why if you follow me on different platforms you’ll see that I’m also venturing into Pinterest and I’m also venturing into LinkedIn in order to accelerate that growth not only this in my stage of business we’re also running ads whether that is on Instagram and also on Facebook and so depending on where you’re at in your business you might want to consider running Facebook or Instagram ads as well the only thing that I recommend is just making sure that you have a validated product and that you have a validated niche and offer otherwise all that money that you’re spending to ads are just going to go to waste so again if you want to learn all about that make sure you click the link in my description box and in my comment section below because my free training that’s happening live is going to cover a lot of these things so that being said where I’m at right now is simply continuing to do what I’m doing simply continuing to do the things I literally mentioned in this video create more traffic by expanding to more platforms continue to have a value-based approach to my content and also repurposing that content making it shareable so that I’m not doubling my work but I am doubling my traffic these are things that right now I am super focused on that’s why I make sure you comment below in this video and let me know what you’re gonna be focusing on because I would love to know that being said while you wait for next week’s video make sure you also check out these two videos that I have right here as well I talked a lot about content creation social media entrepreneurship Instagram and all the likes of that so make sure you check out these two videos while you wait for next week’s video as always guys I appreciate you I hope you guys have a great day a great week and a great life and hopefully I’ll see you at my live training all right bye guys