Looking for notes & links of the course? Click Here → Ascend Viral Course Notes

This is a rough transcript. This is not exact. This is the write-up I wrote before filming, so there are probably a few things different. I’m including this just in case you’re the kind of person who would rather read the course than watch my meathead-head talk about it.

Intro

Every time I watch a video about Instagram marketing on YouTube, they always try to sell me their exclusive Instagram course, promising me they’ll share all their insider secrets

So it feels like, people are giving you half the information in their videos, so they can sell you the other half for $500 in a course. So in this video, I’m going to give you all the information that you would expect in those Instagram courses… for free.

Jojo, would you like to say something? Would you like to sell a course?

Here’s exactly what we’re going to talk about in this course:

• Quick Backstory (Who I am, why I am giving you this course, and my experience with Instagram)
• Instagram Basics (think of this like a general setup guide for Instagram)
• The Algorithm (How does it work? I break down the algorithm in layman’s terms so you know how to use it to your advantage.
• Content Strategies (I discuss the general content strategies and how to use them most effectively).
• Growth Strategies & Maximizing Engagement ( I talk about the various ways to grow on Instagram so you have all the tools you need).
• How 99% Of People Should Grow on Instagram (Pretty self-explanatory, we’re going to talk about how most people should grow on Instagram).
• Making Money Strategies (An overview about how to make money on Instagram).
• Cool Accounts, Neat Examples, Things of Interest & Ethan’s Opinion Corner (This is the finale, this is where I talk about some accounts that I like, wrap things up, and give a few of my opinions. I didn’t know what to name this chapter).

Feel free to skip to any part of the video. There are timestamps below. I’m going to try and do my best to not waste your time while also trying to be thorough. I included this Notion document link in the description that will have the notes for this course, so if you want to follow along, you can. That document also includes all the links and accounts that I mention in this video, along with some other important links and resources that I’ve also included.

If there are errors or confusion, or I need to make updates, I’ll change the Notion sheet. It’s possible I’m wrong and it’s possible Instagram changes things (chronological order 2022)?… and if that’s the case, I’ll make a note in the doc so you’ll always be up to date.

So let’s get started.

Quick Backstory

So my name is Ethan, and I’m the CEO of Ascend Viral, and Ascend Viral is a marketing agency, and right now we specialize in Instagram marketing, but in the future, we’ll also expand to Tik Tok & some other platforms.

I’ve been doing Instagram marketing since 2014, back in 2014, I was a freshman in college, playing two division one sports, American Football & Track and Field. I was broke, because I was a freshman in college, obviously, but I had some experience in internet marketing at the time, not a lot, but I was interested in learning how to make money on Instagram because it seemed like something I could do while I was busy with playing sports & doing homework.

So I spent a lot of time researching Instagram marketing. I was never the kind of guy to be like “look at me, follow ME on Instagram”, so I figured I would try to grow fitness niche accounts on Instagram because that was something I was interested in and passionate about. So for about a year, I had a lot of trial and error trying to learn how to grow these fitness accounts. Eventually, I got a lot better at it, and I was growing multiple Instagram accounts to 5 figures, 6 figure followings.

At the time, I was also learning how to sell things on Instagram, I was a business major in college, so this was inevitable, so I was 19, 20 years old. This was the golden era of Instagram back in 2015 / 2016, and I started getting good at making money with my niche accounts, and there would be days on Instagram where I’d routinely make anywhere from 500 to 2000 a day on Instagram.

It was a good gig, but, and this is a big but, most of what I was doing back then was sprinkled with Black Hat marketing, and if you don’t know what black hat means, essentially it means technically legal things that would be frowned upon by Instagram. So for example, automating your actions on social media isn’t technically illegal, but if Instagram catches you, they’ll ban you. That’s black hat marketing in a nutshell. And back in the day, when I was a bit more naive, I dabbled with that kind of stuff. However, every few months, most of my accounts would get banned and wiped away, and I’d have to start over because I’d occasionally dabble a little too hard.

It should go without saying, that I do not recommend black hat marketing on Instagram, and we’ll talk about why later on in the course.

But I went through different waves, at times I’d do very ethical marketing & growth strategies, and I would build accounts the correct way, or the white hat way or the approved Instagram way. And around this time in 2016, I started my Instagram marketing company I mentioned earlier, Ascend Viral, and I started writing down some of the things I was doing, and I sold my strategies and all these things that I was learning about Instagram in a PDF for like $20, and it was very pretty successful, it was well-received, sold thousands of copies, and it was nice to have consistent revenue that Instagram wasn’t going to randomly just wipe away one day,

So around the time, my eBook was released, I transitioned to basically full-time white hat marketing, focusing on organic growth, and ethical marketing strategies, because I liked that it was much more stable than black hat marketing. Ya know, not having your accounts banned by Instagram and months of work being wiped away in a few seconds – that was pretty nice, So, I started playing by the rules.

But I had some deserved karma happen to me, because about a year after the eBook, I was running an account that had 1.1m followers, completely white hat, and that account got SIMM’d.

And if you don’t know what that means, let me break it down. Instagram had a data leak that they covered up where a bunch of large follower account’s private info was leaked in an excel file, and it was being sold to various people online, so people would be able to see which phone number, email address, full name was attached to these Instagram accounts.

And then someone took that information, saw my name, created a fake ID of me, went to an AT&T store, and said “hey, I lost my phone, here’s my ID, can you put this phone number on this phone” and AT&T did that, and then the scammer did an SMS reset on all my information, and I lost almost everything that was attached to that phone number- including a lot of my Instagram accounts… and there was really nothing I could do to prevent it. It happened to a bunch of people I knew, that account had a rare username attached to it, so I didn’t have the original information needed to recover … yeah, it was a bad day.

The scammer had everything lined up – he was clearly a pro. Within a few minutes, the username was changed, the account was changed to a different username, the email was changed, the phone number was changed, everything was changed.

Ethan Klein from H3H3 made a video about it a few years back if you’re interested. This was a really dangerous scam, and I think most of the mobile carriers have improved since then… but I did switch carriers.

Your Privacy is at Risk

But I took that all as karma, and although I was extremely upset about the situation, I was still gonna wake up the next day and life was going to continue. So that’s when I really decided to put my energy towards Ascend Viral because even when I cleaned up my act, the Universe & Instagram still had it out for me.

So I took my experience, and I put it to good use. I’ve helped lots of people over the years gain followers on Instagram. I’ve been blessed to meet some really cool people, I’ve work with celebrities, influencers, and brands… so it all worked out in the end, and I’ve been focused on my company and some other side projects for the past few years now.

That being said, all the information in this course is up to date. It’s not from 2016, all this information here is very accurate to what we’re seeing now on Instagram, and I’m pretty excited to share it with you. And I’m releasing this course… I guess to promote Ascend Viral. That’s why this course is free.

So, let’s dive in.

But before we get started… I need to thank the sponsor of this video… which is Ascend viral! Yes, I’m technically sponsoring my own video. This is the only ad that should appear in this video, and it’ll be very quick.

Ascend Viral is an Instagram growth service & marketing agency. We have free resources, we have premium resources, and we have free trials. You can check out Instagram growth service which has a free trial, you can also track your Instagram analytics on our website for free, you can download my 200 page Instagram guide that I mentioned earlier for $27 if you want to support the video, a lot of the information in this course might be similar, the eBook may just go a bit more in-depth. On Ascend Viral I regularly post articles & videos, and there’s some other fun free stuff you can check out on Ascend Viral. So if you want to check it out, please do, If you don’t and you just want to watch this course, then feel free, and we’ll get started…. now!

Setting Yourself Up For Success / IG Basics

So, Instagram Basics.

Before I get started, let me just say that there are three things I won’t talk about much in this course

• Facebook / Instagram Ads.
• Anything Black Hat or potentially damaging to your Instagram account.
• Specific ways to make money on Instagram | This isn’t a course teaching you how to make $200 a day by doing X, Y, and Z. So if you’re looking for some kind of spoon-fed method to make money, this isn’t the course for you.

I think Facebook / Instagram Ads are great, but that’s not my expertise. I’m not the Pay-per-click guy or the “ad guy”, I’m much more focused on organic growth. So if that’s what you’re looking for or hoping to learn more about, this ain’t the video for that.

I also don’t want to recommend or talk about any black hat strategies… but I will mention some later. Like I said earlier, I use to run unethical growth methods & monetization methods years ago, but it’s not worth it anymore for various reasons. The biggest reason though: Most black hat strategies don’t work in the long run. If you’re ever doing an unethical growth strategy that involves spam of some kind OR some kind of unethical monetization strategy – it doesn’t last very long before Instagram will kill it. I’ll talk about this a little bit more in-depth later on, but yeah.

Instagram basics and the current state of Instagram

So starting off…

I don’t like Instagram that much. I want it to be better. Instagram has been kind of a letdown for the past couple of years. When you compare 2015 Instagram to what we have now in 2022 is a disappointment. You can tell the culture has shifted away from Instagram quite a bit. I like Tik Tok better, but they serve two different purposes. Tik Tok is the place where content creators go. I would be doing everybody a disservice if I wasn’t upfront about that fact. If your job is to create content, you better be on Tik Tok.

I wrote an article on Ascend Viral called “The Great Shift: Why Instagram Is Losing to Tik Tok & Why They Doesn’t Care” that goes into a bit more detail on what’s happening on Instagram if you want to take a look at it. I’ll try to explain it throughout this video, but that article is there if you’re interested.

The Sad Truth About 99% of Instagram Growth Services – Ascend Viral

Instagram is not a place for elite content creators. It’s no longer a photo-sharing app. Instagram is now essentially, what I firmly believe, your mobile homepage. The world is increasingly becoming mobile, so Instagram’s primary purpose is maintaining the mobile relationship with you and all the followers you have on social media platforms. In the past you might tell someone “go to my website” or “check out my Facebook” – now it’s just “go to my Instagram”.

Instagram is now:

• A place where you onboard followers from other platforms (Tik Tok, YouTube, etc)
  • Specifically, when it comes to Tik Tok, it’s Important to onboard followers from Tik Tok because Tik Tok attention’s span is much lower than Instagram, but you’re bound to get much more organic reach on Tik Tok than compared to Instagram. So if you can bring your audience from Tik Tok to Instagram, You can have time to build better relationships on Instagram.
• Where you maintain relationships (it’s more personal than Tik Tok, has a broader range of content than Snapchat) – it’s the most personal public social network. Snapchat might be personal too, but Instagram definitely designed more for the public.
• Instagram is where you sell things to your followers (it’s easiest to sell on Instagram than any other platform) – you can sell on your stories with the swipe up feature, your link in the bio, reels, story highlights, feed posts, and so on. There’s more ways to sell things on Instagram. I think it’s easier to sell on Instagram currently than on any other platform.
• Showcase Yourself (aka your mobile homepage) – Show your highlights, show your vulnerability, show a different side that you won’t see on Tik Tok or YouTube, etc. It’s where you can be most flexible, and I think it’s the best app to “display yourself” if you know what I mean.

All those things are great, but I should mention this:

Instagram Stars are not being created anymore. I can’t think of any stars who were created in the past two years were on Instagram, where on Tik Tok you have The Damelios, Bella Poarch, Addison Rae, Khaby Lame, but you get the picture. Instagram isn’t the entertainment app, and the content creators who want to entertain people are going to go to where they’ll get the most exposure, and that is Tik Tok. There is not enough content on Tik Tok, and there is way too demand. On Instagram, there’s too much content and not enough demand.

Here’s a chart, basically showing the takeover of Tik Tok.

New Survey Underlines TikTok’s Rise Versus Instagram as the App of Choice Among Teen users

Even if this chart is only Gen Z, let me tell you it won’t be long before your grandma is on Tik Tok (if she isn’t already). I know what you’re thinking… “Ethan… I thought this was an Instagram course… why are you telling us about Tik Tok” because Tik Tok is changing the content game dramatically.

The first rule of Instagram Basics section: Download Tik Tok

So the first rule of the Instagram Basics section, is download Tik Tok, because if you are serious about creating content, you have no excuse for not being on Tik Tok. Whatever your niche is, you’ll create better content on Instagram if you know what kind of content your niche is creating on Tik Tok. Again… I know what you’re thinking… “Ethan, but I’m a photographer, I want to post photos… I can’t post photos on Tik Tok… they only do videos”.

I understand. I understand. Videos are scary. Videos are really scary. For example, I’ve put off creating this course forever. Videos are scary, but everything is shifting towards videos because videos are more entertaining. People would rather watch an epic video of your photos than just see your photos.

And if you want proof of that, check out Jordi Koalitic – the perfect example of a Tik Tok star using their audience on Tik Tok to build their Instagram. Nearly 20m followers on Tik Tok, and moved the vast majority of his audience to Instagram. It’s possible he was on Instagram before Tik Tok, but his Tik Tok is what really blew up his Instagram. He also posts these Tik Tok videos on YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels to get triple the exposure he would’ve otherwise received. He’s easily the best example I can give you. I don’t wanna be like Gary vee and just tell you everything is changing and the future is here, but this type of content is so much more interesting and entertaining than a typical photo. And people are going to demand this from photographers. You don’t need to post all your content in video form, you can still use photos, I’m just saying that this is where the demand is at, and this is your ticket to growth.

I think the people who have gained the most followers this year “organically” on Instagram are Tik Tokkers. It’s something to consider. We’re at a time now where MOST people would rather see your family do a Tik Tok trend than just posting a picture of your family. There’s a lot of ways to promote your Instagram on Tik Tok, but the two most common ways I see & recommend are simply pinning a comment telling people to check out your Instagram, and simply linking your Instagram in your Tik Tok Bio and telling people in your bio to follow your Instagram.

So, in summary, Understand the Instagram game has changed. It’s not about photos anymore. Consider Instagram as your mobile homepage, and Tik Toks, Reels, and YouTube shorts are the ways that you drive traffic to your homepage. Think of your feed as your business card, and Reels & Tik Toks as your way of throwing a thousand business cards into a crowded street. Those videos are what brings exposure more than anything right now.

Moving on, so now in this section, I just want to make some bullet points about Instagram to keep in mind. I should’ve mentioned that this course is not gonna be one of those “This is how you write a good bio” courses or “this is how you upload a Reel” or “This is how you create a professional account”. I’m kind of assuming that you understand the basics of Instagram, and you know how to use Instagram practically…. and… so many things are going to be different from niche to niche.

A good presentation on Instagram

A good bio or a good profile picture in the art niche is going to be significantly different than a good bio or a good profile picture say if you own a restaurant. So, I don’t like anybody that tells you there is a straightforward blueprint because there’s not. Look at Gordan’s Ramsay’s bio and profile picture on Instagram compared to Jordi Koalilitc

Gordan’s bio is cartoonish and short, and Jordi’s bio isn’t flashy, promotes his stuff, and gets to the point. I’m not going to tell you that Gordan’s bio should be different or Jordi’s bio should be different. They both serve different purposes, and they’re both unique to that person. So my advice regarding profile setup, and although this seems like non-advice or lazy advice, it’s the most applicable advice I can give you: Do what your competitors are doing, but make it yours. It’s as simple as that.

I see too many people try and reinvent the wheel or strive waaaaay too hard to have a perfect bio – at the end of the day, it’s not that big of a deal. I don’t think your grid or your bio or your profile are going to be the things that make or break you – I think that’s going to come down to your content, ultimately. Having a nice bio, profile picture, and the grid is nice, but it’s not something to stress about. Find something that works for your niche, make it yours, there you go.

And that leads me to another point, and that point is…

Know who your inspiration/competition is

If you don’t know this, that’s a red flag. Reconsider everything you’re doing right now if you don’t know this. It’s so important to have at least 20-30 accounts that inspire you within your niche, within your industry that you can use to model yourself after.

Look, I don’t know how to make YouTube videos. This isn’t my thing. But I like watching those Business insider videos… and look…. that’s why this video looks this way. Please don’t sue me. If I had to come up with something original, it would’ve looked way worse.

Inspiration is good. Stealing is bad. I’ve made videos on that. Thank you Insider for inspiring me.

Back to Instagram, You should follow inspiration accounts and peer accounts, and I’ll talk about this a bit more later. But follow accounts that inspire you, and follow accounts that are at your same level to see what you can improve on. Research research research. Like I said, find at least 20-30 accounts that inspire you. You should also look for 20-30 peer accounts, too. Accounts that are on the same level as you or in the same ballpark as you.

For inspiration accounts, look for the top accounts in your niche that get good engagement. If they have 100k followers, they should be getting a few thousand likes per photo, a few dozen comments, they use should reels that get good views, they should post stories frequently, and so on. I think the easiest way to find peer & inspiration accounts would be going through hashtags related to your niche, but also, you should know a handful off the top of your head, otherwise, it’s kind of a red flag you’re running an account in a niche you know little about.

For Peer accounts, look for accounts about your size if not slightly bigger that post similar content to you.

So, for example, if you own a wedding photography business, your inspiration accounts would be the top wedding photographers in the world, and your peer accounts would be the top wedding photographers in your area. Like I said, we’ll circle back to Inspiration & Peer accounts later. It’s important. But for instance, if I type #weddingphotography on Instagram, I find a post that has 1.1m followers, a few thousand likes, seems to be a niche account about wedding photography. This might be a good inspiration account, took me 5 seconds to find.

To find a peer account, so I’m living in Nebraska currently, so I type in #nebraskawedding, and boom, a bunch of newlyweds pop up, but also, a bunch of local Nebraska wedding photographers. I find someone like @itsmollysheppard, who happens to be a close friend, and she gets good engagement, so she would be a peer account.

If you say “Ethan, but I’m just on Instagram to make money… I don’t want to have inspiration accounts or peer accounts… how do I make money?” Perfect. Start with a niche. Find inspiration accounts. Grow an account that you’re passionate about. AND NOT A MAKING MONEY NICHE BECAUSE IF YOU DON’T KNOW HOW TO MAKE MONEY ONLINE THEN YOU SHOULDN’T BE MAKING ACCOUNTS ABOUT THAT. That’s always always going to give the best results. That’s a pet peeve of mine. I get questions like that… often… of people asking me what the best niche is for making money… and I’m like bro…

I’m a degenerate gym bro, back when I created accounts, I created fitness accounts because that’s what I knew best, I knew what to engage with, I knew what worked on me as a consumer, so I replicated that as a content creator. I wouldn’t have had the same success I had on Instagram if I had to create content on something I didn’t care about, for example… I don’t drink Tea, if you asked me to create content on Tea I would’ve sucked at it. I wouldn’t know how to sell it. I wouldn’t know what consumers wanted and so on. So… your niche is important. Find accounts that perform better than you. See what they’re doing better than you. That’s going to bring you a long ways.

Now, obviously, not everyone is going to create a niche account, but this applies to whatever account you are going to create. In my mind, there are 3 different types of accounts, there’s probably more, but this is the simple way of explaining it. Personal, Brand, and Niche.

1. Personal

A personal account would be like Bradley Martyn – are you sick of the gym references yet –

This is an account about you. About your interests. You should still obviously niche down. For example, Bradley is a gym bro. He likes lifting. He’s going to post about lifting.

Now what’s complicated is sometimes I get clients who are simply “lifestyle” influencers and they don’t have a niche. They’re just them. And that’s fine, but you should still niche down hard as much as you can. It’ll make things so much easier. And like, if you’re a gorgeous model or something, then your niche is “being hot”, and your posts should consistently be you being hot.

People are going to follow you for a reason, often because some kind of niche, so if your main niche is being attractive or traveling and you decide to stop posting that kind of content, it’s going to be tough to grow. So, unless your niche is you have an incredible personality and everything you do is super awesome and your fans love it, you’ll struggle unless you have a consistent niche. A niche helps you build an audience.

Twitter Is Going Wild After This Influencer With Over 2 Million Followers Couldn’t Sell 36 T-Shirts

I think you have two routes: A specific, ultra-focused niche with a tight fanbase or being the best content creator in a broader niche. It’s tough being a mediocre content creator in a general niche, it’s easier being a mediocre content creator in an ultra-specific niche. So, the more specific, the better – especially if you know your content isn’t great.

Fashion, Travel, A day in your life, Your job, etc. All of those things need to be connected by something in order to be successful. What’s most common is either being Super attractive OR providing an insane level of value… and the people who crush it usually have both. It’s really difficult to make the lifestyle niche popular on Instagram without some kind of audience carryover influence from YouTube, Tik Tok, and so on. You need to be in the 1% of your competition when it comes to providing value or being super ultra attractive in order to make this kind of stuff work. It’s hard.

So if you can, on Instagram, it’s better to be “Sarah the photographer” than “Sarah the influencer”. Or “Greg the chef” is typically better than “Greg with the cool lifestyle” and I’ll circle back to this in the next chapter when we talk about how the algorithm works. Because Instagram wants you to niche down.

2. Brand

Brand accounts are likely to be niched down, already. Again, unless you’re like a “lifestyle brand”… which… please don’t, but the more specific with your brand you can get, the better. So, here’s an Instagram account that caught my eye as a consumer, and I’m mentioning them not necessarily because their Instagram strategy is great, but because I think they have one of the best brand angles out there. They’re a haircare company for guys, and their slogan is “An alternative to shampoo for guys” and I thought that was really, really interesting. So I just wanted to shout them from a marketing perspective, I think that’s the kind of position you should be in. They’re not like a 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner, they’re just straight-up like “we’re not shampoo, we’re something else for your hair” and I love that.

Because when I saw their bio… I was instantly intrigued. I was like… what? What’s a shampoo alternative? I was hooked. Very rarely am I like “damn, I should try this product” and this company made me do that. Show bottle

Unrelated to Modern Mammals, there’s a point I’d like to make when it comes to marketing your brand on Instagram. Do not make content about your brand if nobody has heard about your brand if you want organic growth. You CAN, make content about your brand if nobody has heard about your brand if you just want to spend money on ads and paid traffic. Then that’s fine.

But from an organic growth perspective, this is one of the biggest failures I see with brands that approach us. They try to do things like make memes about their brand or their product… and it almost never works… the owners think it’s funny, but it’s never going to be interesting to someone who just stumbles across the page. We’ll get into this a bit more in the content strategies section, but I wanted to bring that up.

3. Niche

A niche account is just an account that is specific towards….. a specific niche. Here’s a german shepherd’s page. This is a niche account. There’s no brand attached or a person attached to it. I’m sure you understand that…. I’ve DM’d this page multiple times, I don’t know why JoJo isn’t featured yet.

One thing to keep note of, if this is the account type you create on Instagram, give credit if you re-post content. That’s all. Put it in the caption where you got the content from. Tag the creator. I don’t think you necessarily need to ask for permission, but it’s always a nice gesture… I ran million follower accounts that routinely reposted… out of the thousands of content I’ve reposted… maybe I’ve had 1 or 2 people ask for me to take the content down… hundreds of other times the creators would express their gratitude for the exposure. So generally speaking, I think it’s fine as long as you give credit and you aren’t misleading about what you’re posting.

So that’s the three different types of accounts. We’re going to cover all of these accounts in this course. But that leads us to what should your account type be – Personal, Creator, or Business. Personally… do what you want. I’d say if you’re watching this, you probably shouldn’t be doing Personal. The extra insights will likely be valuable to you. It’s a myth that Creator or Business accounts get you less engagement. So pick one that you think will fit your needs. I think business accounts are nice to have when it comes to Facebook Ads but do whatever you wanna do.

So to finish up this chapter… let’s talk about arguably the most important thing in this course.

Engagement and Viral Content

Your engagement is everything, but not all engagement is treated the same on Instagram (and I don’t mean saves are better than likes or DMs are better than comments), I mean that WHO are engaging with your account is more significant than any other signal that Instagram uses. Write that down, we’ll circle back to this later.

Understand Instagram is going to value the 1% of engaging content on their platform, so if you want truly organic growth on Instagram, you need to be in the elite category of content creation. I do have strategies for the 99% later on, (because this video is too much work to make it only for 1% of people) but overall, if you aren’t doing something different, unique, special, industry-shaking – disrupting, it’s going to be hard to grow on your content alone.

So, here’s where I’ll be a meathead and give you a gym example… if you’re 2 years into lifting… and you post your workout routine and everything you know about the gym – are you really going to overshadow someone who’s been lifting for 10 years and they share everything they know about the gym…. probably not (I’m not saying you couldn’t grow and you couldn’t find a market because maybe you’d be more relatable – but it’d be tough),

Generally speaking, the 1% of the content from the 1% of the people are going to get the push… that doesn’t mean growth is impossible for you (And I know there’s a ton of factors in that, but that’s not the point), but that does mean you’ll really need to add some flavor to your content in order to make it stand out IF you want to grow on content alone – again this is truly if you just want to be in the 1%.

For example, maybe all your workout videos are you dressed in some kind of anime character… or maybe you’re the smartest guy when it comes to nutrition, and you figure out how to incorporate nutrition as a major theme into your gym content – something along those lines will be necessary in order to really push you into that 1% category. That’s only if you want to grow on content alone. If you want viral growth, your content needs to be viral.

Now, even if your content isn’t viral, you can still grow, everything is going to be okay, but if you want the ideal option… that’s the ideal option. Posting viral content and going viral is always going to be the ideal option.

How Does The Algorithm Work?

So, if you ever wanna know how the algorithm works, here’s who you shouldn’t listen to:

Instagram.

Shedding More Light on How Instagram Works

On the Value of Diversified Recommendations | Instagram Blog

Designing a Constrained Exploration System | Instagram Blog

There are three articles here, and I think they’re mostly useless. This top article (and the accompanied video that the CEO posted) is most recent, and they suggest if you’re on your homepage, the least important thing that determines the rank of a post is your previous engagement with the poster.

I have friends who post shit content, nobody likes it, they have horrible engagement… but I always like it because I’m a good friend, and that shit is always at the top of my home feed the second they post. So, because Instagram has no issues with lying to us about how the algorithm works, I’d argue your relationship with the poster is the most important factor in dictating home feed post rankings.

This is also where people really try to sell you the $500 course and try to give you a physics class on how the connected recommendations gives you these results, and the unconnected recommendations gives you these results, and… it’s all nonsense. Instagram will put accounts that you tend to spend the most time with on your feed, and 9/10 it’s going to be people you communicate with frequently – like your friends.

But a lot of the people explaining the algorithm try to explain it as complicated as they can in order to make it look like they have a job so they don’t get fired. I don’t think anyone works in the algorithm department at Instagram, and 2021 was proof of that. No one works there, so I don’t know who is making these blog posts at Instagram.

But, It’s actually really easy to summarize how the algorithm works:

• If you get authentic engagement, then more people will see your posts (in hashtags, explore, in reels, in-home feed, everywhere). There are some other factors obviously, but that’s as complex as it really needs to be. There’s some level of initial reaction that determines your rank (like how well your content does based on the first few % of people who see it), but that’s not nearly as important as you’d think, because it all goes back to if you get authentic engagement or not.
• If you don’t get authentic engagement, your post won’t be seen very much

That’s it. That’s all that matters. If Instagram thinks you’re gonna enjoy that post, and you’re gonna spend time with that post, it’s going to appear on your feed. And how is that determined? By your history with the person posting it and with your interests, you’ve shown on Instagram, and even if there are many more complicated factors in it, let me tell you this right now, it has no value.

And you may think I’m generalizing to be overly opinionated for no reason, and you are correct, but the vast majority of people are going to struggle with Instagram growth because they don’t post engaging content that their audience will enjoy. If people scroll by your post quickly or decide not to DM it to people, it;’s going to do poorly. If people spend time with it, read your caption, look at your story, visit your profile, comment on meaningful things, It’s going to do much better in every algorithm Instagram has – Reels Algorithm, Hashtags Ranking Algorithm, Explore Ranking Algorithms, Home Feed ranking algorithms… all of it. All of it will be improved if you can post content that gets targeted authentic engagement, and a lot of it.

If you want to read my take on Instagram’s algorithm, my article “The Great Shift” that I mentioned earlier talks about some key points that I’d like to reemphasize here:

• Instagram will punish you for niche switches – Instagram puts a lot of value into what your current followers think of your content. So if you switch niches and your current followers don’t vibe with it, you won’t get any reach with your new content.
• If you remember when we talked about it’s better to be “Sarah the photographer” than “Sarah the influencer” in the previous chapter… this is why it’s important to have a niche, because if Instagram can define you more easily, and place you in the correct algorithms
• The time spent on an Instagram post is the most important engagement factor. Not likes, not saves, not DMs, not comments. It’s time. If Instagram sees people spending a lot of time on your posts, they’ll promote it more and more. Instagram is greedy, they want people on their app as long as possible, so they’ll emphasize posts that take 2-3 minutes to consume over quick posts that take 2 seconds to like.
• Instagram Reels don’t follow the typical Instagram algorithm. In summary, the biggest difference is Instagram doesn’t care if your reels don’t perform well with your current audience, as they might perform well with other audiences. So, this somewhat conflicts with the first bullet point, but only slightly. It’s still generally not a good idea to switch niches on Instagram.

So if you want to “beat the algorithm” and perform really well on Instagram, it has nothing to do with your algorithm knowledge, it has everything to do with your ability to create engaging content, your ability to get a targeted fanbase, and your ability to maximize your engagement on your posts. And fortunately, that’s the focus of the next 2 chapters in this course.

Here’s a quick detour:

Coffeezilla, a fantastic Youtuber, interviewed Mr Beast recently, and Mr Beast said replace “Algorithm” with “Audience”. And I thought that was good advice. Watch that video after this one.

How To Go VIRAL with Mr Beast

So instead of saying “Oh I’m getting screwed over by the algorithm” in theory, you should be saying “I’m getting screwed over by my audience”

And on Instagram, I think that’s 99% true, and the 1% exception being if you’re trying to explore different types of content that is proven to be successful in other niches but your current audience isn’t liking it, then it’s not the audience’s fault, but it’s the algorithm’s fault. Again, that’s a pretty rare example, but it does happen.

So yeah, assuming you have real followers, a real audience, and you’re posting consistent content within your niche, then it’s not the algorithm that isn’t enjoying your posts, it’s your audience… because Instagram will only promote your content on the explore if your audience overwhelmingly likes it, and they’ll only show the post if people spend time with it. If people see it and instantly scroll, that’s not a good sign.

If you think the solution is “Oh well, I’ll just make the caption super long so people read it.”

No, because I’m almost positive Instagram knows when people bail out of the caption early and that becomes a negative signal. So your actual post has to be worthy of a long caption, and then your audience has to enjoy the long caption. Additional metrics like likes, comments, DMs, saves, – they’re all important too, don’t get me wrong, I think they’re natural byproducts of content that encourages you to spend time with it.

If people spend time with your post, click on your account, watch your story… oh man. You’re onto something. Instagram is going to love you. Even if they don’t like, comment, or save your post. If they routinely check your account out, that’s all that matters. It’s a positive signal and Instagram will likely recommend your account more and more to people who DO like and comment on your posts.

That pretty much summarizes how the algorithm works, I’ll kind of continue this into the content section a bit (best time to post, what to post, etc), but this should give you a better overview of how the algorithm works. It’s best not to overcomplicate it. Instagram tries to, but it really boils down to authentic engagement and keeping people’s interests – that’s what is going to drive your account forward and help you grow.

One thing to keep in mind, in 2022, Instagram is going to change their UI up quite a bit. I think they’ll basically get rid of the explore feed as we know it and just integrate that on your home feed. They’re adding a chronological order feature, but that won’t be the default feature on your home tab. I don’t really see this changing the “core” concepts I’m talking about, but if it does, I’ll edit this notion document accordingly.

One more quick thing. Engagement = Reach. I sometimes use these words interchangeably, but that’s really what it boils down to. if you don’t get engagement, you won’t get reach and vice versa.

Types of Content On Instagram

Before we begin, let’s take a quick detour and talk about Content creation in general… this is a big point I want to make, so let’s go on YouTube because there are two creators who took 2021 by storm…

• Dank Pods
• Wendigoon

Wendigoon

Wendigoon creates fun iceberg videos, deep analysis videos, conspiracy theory videos, long explanation videos. It’s just a dude in his room with a microphone, and he talks for hours. He’s incredibly talented, and somehow… he is probably one of the most interesting creators on YouTube for his ability to pull those kind of views for that format of video.

DankPods

The second person is Dank Pods. An Australian who yells at old iPods, plays the drums, has a snake, and crushes old MP3 players with a rock. Hilarious. I love him.

Two creators who kill it doing their own thing, they have a crazy loyal audience, and they are insanely successful in a niche, that by all metrics… shouldn’t work… but it does because they’re crazy talented. In one year, they’ve both gained about a million subscribers on YouTube each. I wanted to shout them out, because they make great content, go support them on Patreon, they post good stuff there too if you’re interested.

None of these creators have an impressive Instagram, because in fairness, their content isn’t super native to Instagram. They also don’t need an Instagram. They do perfectly fine without one. But they can’t just put their unique and creative YouTube content on Instagram and make it as interesting without making massive changes to their format.

And that brings us to:

Content Nativity

Content nativity means you are creating content that is meant for that specific platform. It’s native Instagram content. Your Instagram content goes exclusively on Instagram, your Facebook content goes exclusively on Facebook, your YouTube content goes on Youtube, etc. With the exception of Reels, Tik Toks, and YouTube shorts (since it’s basically the same format), do not repurpose your content.

Dankpods and Wendigoon don’t need an Instagram, nor do either of them try to post their content on Instagram, because they’re very well aware that it’s meant for YouTube. It’s not meant for Instagram.

The biggest issue I see, specifically with brands, is content nativity. They think “Hey, if it’s good enough for our website, it’s good enough for Instagram”.

”NO!” DEAR GOD PLEASE NO.

This is where inspiration accounts come into play. A good inspiration account will have native content, and you should see that they’re building content specifically for Instagram. Lazy brand accounts and people who don’t know how to use Instagram will just slap product photos and stock images on their account and call it a day. Please don’t do this.

Native content is your gateway to engaging content. If your content isn’t native to Instagram, it definitely won’t be engaging. I emphasize this because it’s important. Make sure your content is native on Instagram, first and foremost. The most basic example I can find to illustrate this point:

Go to Fashion Nova men, and go click on any product item.

Fashion Nova Men | Men’s Fashion Clothes

So many brands will just post this image, and be like… yup looks good. Post it to the feed and in the caption be like “We have this style back in stock, check it out” and be done with it. This works if you don’t intend on organically growing and just want to pour all your money into ads. Then it’s probably a slightly better strategy, but overall…. not good. Your engagement and reach will get slaughtered. Nobody wants to see promotions on their feed. If you do routinely and heavily promote, your engagement will suffer.

If you go to the Fashion Nova men homepage, and then scroll down to the “Shop the Gram”, you’ll see content that’s native to Instagram and much more appropriate.

You’re starting to see companies like Fashion Nova do Reels and videos more and more. If you look up some fashion influencers, they’ll often do sponsored videos like “Here’s what I wear in a day” and then they’ll be like “These black jeans I got from this place, and then this shirt I got from Fashion Nova use coupon code SHIRT50 for 50% off” or something like that. People are going to continue to find more native ways to incorporate content natively because it’s the best way to promote and not destroy your reach.

So, now that we got that basic nailed down, now we can get into the specifics for each type of content that you can post on Instagram:

Let’s start with Stories

Don’t overdue it, because you want to retain people through all the stories, if they skip over it, it’s a negative signal to Instagram. So keep it short, less than 10 stories on any given day is my general rule of thumb, on Instagram you wanna do things that drive engagement, so if people are skipping over your stories because you talk about things nobody is interested in, it’s not great.

Some people like using stories to announce their new feed post in order to drive engagement to the feed post. You see… I may be the outlier, but when people do this who I know personally… that’s a strike against them as a human being. It comes off as super needy. Again, you can do this if you want, but I think it’s better to use stories to create ya know… stories about yourself or your brand. I think stories and story highlights are best used when they give context to what you’re about or to give insights on behind the scenes.

Do you know how websites have “About Us” “Our History’ “Contact Us” “What We Do” pages? I think that general direction is usually a smart move for brands when it comes to building their story highlights. I think you want to build highlights that can best summarize you. For personal accounts, I think it can be different aspects of your life. Like I said, I think stories are used to give context and give more insights about who you are.

A lot of people use stories for selling. Whatever the case may be, something along the lines of “DM me for a consultation” “here’s my client results, do you want to be next?” “I scaled this business 20x this month, DM me to find out how”, and so on. I think some niches that’s fine. My issues with this is people abuse this frequently, and I think their value-to-sell ratio (ya know, how much value they give to how much they try to sell to you) is way out of whack. So, again, prioritize giving insights and context to your stories, and then make the selling and promotional aspect last.

Stories are probably one of the best ways to increase the reach with your current followers. If you can create compelling stories, Instagram will place you higher up on the stories feed of your other followers that might not interact with you as often. Anything you can do to drive engagement, like polls, quizzes, questions, DM me prompts, or whatever – that’s all a good signal for Instagram. You don’t just want people to watch all your stories, you want people to interact with your stories.

Carousels

Carousels give you multiple chances for engagement on your feed, if they didn’t interact with your post the first time, they’ll get another chance to see a different slide of the carousel later on. Obviously, you can’t just post the same photo multiple times.

I like having radically different 1st and 2nd slides, so if they don’t commit to the first slide, then maybe the second slide.

A lot of people like creating infographics with carousels, there’s a lot of cool examples out there and they actually can drive good engagement if you’re in a niche that’s heavy on education. The Instagram marketing niche is fulllllll of these, and I’ll show an example of that later.

You can also sneak in a lot of call to actions in carousels if you do the whole infographic angle. You get your chance to tell a mini-story, which is nice, and at the end, you can say “Save this post” “comment your thoughts” or something along those lines. A lot of people really enjoy using that last slide as a call to action. You can also tag yourself in the last slide – just another way to get people to go to your profile. That’s usually always a good thing.

Similar to stories, if people don’t scroll all the way through your carousel – that’s a negative signal. You want people to engage with all the slides of your carousel.

Reels

Like mentioned earlier, Instagram’s algorithm is slightly different with Reels. There is some batching involved, which means that Instagram tests your content a bit with different groups of people in order to determine how much it gets shared. If people are receptive to your content, more and more people will see it. Very similar to Tik Tok.

But, for Reels, use Tik Tok when you do your research. Reels are a good 2 weeks or more behind the Tik Tok trends. Do you know the “Joe Byron Bing bong” meme that’s been dead for like a month on Tik Tok? Yeah, that’s just making its waves on Instagram Reels.

Anyways, I don’t usually recommend using 3rd party sources or websites for inspiration when it comes to Tik Tok trends or figuring out what to do for a video. (but if you prefer this, you can check out someone like this https://www.tiktok.com/@jera.bean ) I typically recommend, watching Tik Tok, and finding how to put your spin on something that’s trending so you can make it work for your specific niche. Whenever I decide to pick up Tik Tok again and post… for a third time, I have like 50 video ideas, that aren’t trend-dependent, for example… I’ll watch a unique video that’s not using a trendy sound or filter, and that unique video will make me think of some kind of silly spin-off that I could do – something like where I like the premise, but the punch line I could adapt it to my niche. So I write that down, and I have a large list for whenever I decide to post.

Please note, that Instagram has specific filters that they push hard because they want more and more people to use them and create Reels. So Instagram is definitely favoring you if you use their shitty filters… they’re not good. But, Instagram will promote your stuff more heavily if you use it.

A general rule of thumb that will make your life easier, is use Tik Tok. For Reels, use hashtags in the caption like you would on Tik Tok… max 5. When it comes to sharing it to your feed or keeping it in your reels tab… I think it depends on your aesthetic and how much of reels are a driving factor for your account’s growth, If Reels are the majority of your content, then throw them in the feed, but if it’s a small percentage or you’re just testing it out, then leave them in the Reels section. General guidelines you’d use on Tik Tok also apply to reels, for example, you don’t want things too zoomed in, you want things distant and you want to keep text in your square frame so they don’t get cut off when you see on your feed (if you don’t see it in the reels tab). Another thing I’d recommend for Reels specifically is consider (you don’t have to) but consider using some kind of closed captions or subtitles. Now, I only recommend this because I don’t know about you, but I usually start off on Instagram looking at feed posts and my volume is off or ya know… I’m just not listening to it. If a Reel shows up on my feed, I’d want to see captions so I know whether or not I should continue watching the Reel or if I should keep scrolling – Tik Tok doesn’t have this issue because everyone on Tik Tok is going to be using sound and they’re going to be seeing the Reels full screen.

A general rule of thumb for Reels & Tik Toks (this is bound to change) is you want the hook to be within the first 3-4 seconds, you have a minimal amount of time in order to grab someone’s attention.

I’ve seen people say things like “75% of your Reels should be educational or informational, and 25% should be trends” that’s horrible advice. I was mean in the comment section. It’s going to depend on your content style and your ability to create engaging Tik Toks. Many accounts would struggle if they had to create informational content, and many accounts would struggle if they had to follow trends. And some accounts don’t fit into that category at all – like sketch comedy accounts, for example. I think the best way to build a brand or personal account that has the strongest following is if you don’t follow trends. This might be a hot take, but if you can create the same hype without the trend, that’s way more ideal because it’s bound to be way more memorable than if you did the trend ….. because everybody is doing the trend…. what’s making you stand out, ya know?

Creating original content will create a much more passionate fan base. I mean, a very silly example my Tik Tok account has like 40k likes, but my content is also original. I have 1k followers just from those two Tik Toks – I did nothing to promote that content, just created a Tik Tok and uploaded.

There are plenty of people who have 100,000s of likes, but have a few hundred followers because if you’re basically just doing what everyone else is doing, there’s no real incentive to follow you. I think the best creators with the best fans on Tik Tok & IG Reels are doing the original stuff, and even though you have celebrities like Addison Rae, Bella Poarch who are popular for mostly just doing trends, and to be fair if you’re the person to popularize trends and be the “pioneers” of trends and you’re extremely attractive, then you’ll obviously find success. I’m not against doing trends, using sounds, or popular filters, because you can get good results from that, and I think some accounts will do well posting educational content, and some accounts will do well posting silly content.

It completely depends, so this is why inspiration accounts are so important, you should be seeing what’s working within your niche because every niche is going to have a different content style. My biggest pet peeve is whenever I see a marketer suggest that there is a formula you should follow when it comes to content creation regardless of your niche – no. like absolutely not. It’s all very, very subjective.

Following trends is also going to be significantly easier than creating original content, if you find a trend and then use it to encorporate it with your niche, that’s probably going to take less effort and be a more proven winning factor than original content, but… all things being equal, I am partial to original content that fits your style more so than just doing what everyone else is doing with some kind of trend.

But yeah, hook within the first 3-4 seconds, generally speaking, it’s probably a good idea to be less than 30 seconds long, you can obviously go longer if it’s required, but the attention is bound to be pretty short.

Instagram Live

I’m going to be honest with you, I don’t care for Instagram live or livestreams that much. There’s utility in it, and there used to be really good engagement tricks you can do with it. But here’s what I’m saying: As a general rule of thumb, no account rarely, if ever, “needs” to go Live, unless that’s a feature of what you do.

Considering my history with working with brands, influencers, celebrities, my own accounts, I never needed to tell anyone to go live or that it was something they should do. They’d go still go alive, but the idea of going live is the same as any other piece of content – if people spend time with you and engage with you, then Instagram will favor you. If people hop in, hop out, then Instagram won’t. So, if you think you can captivate people’s attention and create an interesting livestream, go for it. If you think you’d struggle on Instagram live, then let me give you some confirmation bias and tell you that you don’t need to go live anyway.

And now here’s some general rule of thumb advice on content

We might’ve gone over this already, but assume nobody cares about your brand. Yes, of course, you want your brand to have a personality, but that doesn’t mean you should tank your engagement by dedicating all your content to why your brand is awesome. Create value with your brand and create engaging content first and foremost.

Always experiment with content, and then focus in on whatever works. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. If you notice certain types of Stories get a ton of views, or certain carousels get a ton of likes, or certain Reels get a ton of views, try and duplicate those results with similar content. Feed the beast. If it produces a high engagement rate and more followers, obviously keep doing it.

I mentioned this already, but if you have a brand on Instagram, that means you have to create content that gets engagement within your niche regardless of your brand… So, if you have a cosmetic brand, create informative posts about cosmetics that provide value to people who might not even have an interest in using your brand, or create posts about a good skincare routine and encourage your product in a list with other well-known brands. Do things that ease people into your brand.

Quick story, one of my favorite artists of all time, a painter – we got in touch and she was curious about growing her Instagram account. She’s not a social media person, but she’s a legitimate, established artist. She asked if I could run her account for her – create her content, do her growth, all of that – I told her no, because I couldn’t create the content remotely for her. She needed someone there to film the process, and I told her that she should go to a local university and see if she can get an art student to intern for her and help her create content for Tik Tok and Instagram. I recommend this to so many people, especially if you are well known, you have money, and you’re not social media savvy. Find someone who is, let them create the content for you. Find an intern. Find a college kid. Find an employee. Find a high schooler. These GEN-z kids know Tik Toks trends… better than 99.9% of people. Instead of mowing lawns and opening lemonaid stands, these kids are going to be Tik Tok consultants, just watch.

Post consistently

Daily content of some sort is ideal. I think this can be done easily with stories. It’s relatively low pressure, but you’ll still want to make sure you’re creating content that adds to the overall goal of the account. Don’t spam posts for daily posts. Consistency is key. Posting 3-4 times a week on the grid is usually a good idea for most people.

Does having a nice grid mean anything?

Not really. Don’t focus on it. Having a nice grid is like having a nice website. Look, Amazon and Google are like the two biggest sites in the world, their design isn’t considered “ultra aesthetic”, but it’s extremely effective at getting you the content that you want. So, it’s much more important about delivering quality various types of content that’s engaging over having an aesthetic feed. If you can do both, great, but if you can only do one, worry about the content, not the aesthetics.

You can make your content aesthetic in a feed and also have it look good individually. Take Justin Kamstra for example, another friend of mine. His feed looks great when you scroll and it looks great when you click on something. You don’t ever want to get into the business of designing your feed to where it looks great when you scroll and not so great when you see the individual pictures because that will ruin your engagement.

Call To Action

It’s important to use call to actions in your posts. Not all the time, because I think that’s lame, but regularly rotate them in if it’s fitting for your niche. I hate this feels like non-advice because I’m basically saying “just do whatever works” but there is a level of testing here that’s necessary. Sometimes personal accounts for example do better without any kind of CTA, but brand accounts thrive on CTA. So there’s different levels. Also, experiment with caption lengths. Like we mentioned earlier, some people can get really good engagement by writing long, drawn-out explanatory captions, forcing users to read, giving a positive signal to Instagram suggesting that this content is interesting… uhh… but some people don’t have much to say, or you can see the weaknesses of their content the longer their caption goes. For example, if you’re just some dude at a coffee shop… you might get better responses by just saying “I’m enjoying this coffee” rather than writing an entire screenplay in your caption.

Also, by the way, if you write long captions, throw your username at the bottom to encourage people to check out your account if they find you on the explore, or you can have some kind of call to action like “view my story for more info” or something along those lines. Anything to encourage more clicks and time spent on your account, if they’re reading your long caption, you might as well get them to commit to more time at that point. Instagram will love that.

Getting coffee isn’t that deep.

Anyways, here are some examples of CTA that you can creatively sprinkle in wherever you see fit:

• Check out the link in my bio.
• DM me.
• Swipe thru the carousel.
• Watch this.
• Like if you… (enter example here).
• Share this post with someone…
• Read This (if caption is long).
• “Save this” … have you ever used that feature by the way… anyways, you can do that.
• Comment if… or just Comment below.

Another good idea is to put the call to actions in your bio to support your story. For example, having something like “watch my stories for behind the scenes footage” or “watch my stories for daily exercise routines” or “check out my stories outfits of the day” You can also include a mention to your stories in your captions for your feed posts, people who see your feed posts might not see your stories, and if you can drive people to both, that’ll definitely improve your reach.

Hashtags

Okay, so we need to briefly talk about Hashtags. I go into the group of people that think hashtags aren’t super useful. They’re like… a 5.5 out of 10 when it comes to usefulness.

Here’s my general thoughts on hashtags

• For feed posts: 5-15, a solid mixture of small, medium, and large hashtags that define your post. Put them in your comment section. If you want to get in-depth in this (I think it’s kind of unnecessary) you can look up Hashtag laddering.
• For Reels, less than 5. Large to medium hashtags. No small hashtags. Put them in your caption. Don’t overcomplicate it. Reels with a lot of hashtags look messy and desperate.

There’s a lot of hashtag generators out there, but generally speaking, I’ve found this one to be the best, and it’s free. So that’s great.

https://bigbangram.com/instagram-promotion/hashtags/hashtag-generator/

It gives you hard, medium, or easy hashtags to rank – so it’s perfect for having a good mix of large and small hashtags.

A general rule of thumb: Look at what your peers and inspiration accounts are using for hashtags, copy them, put them in a huge notepad, and then rotate through them applying them to specific posts. I don’t like hashtag spam, so keep the hashtags you use specific to that post. Don’t use a hashtag that wouldn’t be used to describe that post as I think that probably counts against you to some extent.

I don’t think you need to use hashtags in every post if you don’t want. Again, look at celebrities and people who are in the 1%. If you go on the explore page, how many people do you see using hashtags? Not many, at least on my explore page. So, that’s all stuff to consider.

Hashtags are cool. Like I said, I give them a 5.5/10. They’re not nearly as effective as they used to be, but they still serve some function for extra reach.

Content schedule and how often you should publish

How often should you post? I think daily stories max 7-10, and then as far as your content when it comes to Reels & media posts, I think you should post as often as you can depending on how quickly you can create engaging content. So Reels are typically pretty engaging pieces of content, you might be able to post reels daily – when it comes to feed posts, it depends a lot on your niche and what the standard is. For example, if you’re a hairstylist, you may only want to post feed posts whenever you do a hairstyle that’s really unique, and depending on your workload that might only be every 2-3 days.

It may be a good idea to schedule posts out a few days, too. Not everything needs to be posted the day it happens or the day it’s created. My team uses Notion, there’s a free plan, and you can customize your scheduling as much as you want.

So here’s a pretty hot take: I don’t think “what time you post” matters that much when it comes to algorithm ranking. It does but it doesn’t. The idea that you need a certain amount of engagement immediately after you post in order to get ranked high initially is pretty narrow way of looking at the overall algorithm. Instagram cares more about HOW people respond to your content opposed to WHEN people respond to your content. And if you want proof of this – go to your explore page. Do you see any content posted less than 2 hours ago? Probably not. Most of the content on the explore feed is like 2 days old on average. The time doesn’t matter, it’s about the quality.

However, I do think initial reactions of the content can help when it comes to social proof purposes (and there’s probably some domino affect that might make it seem like the algorithm favors that content), so for example if you get 1000 likes in 10 minutes opposed to 100 likes in 10 minutes, more people might like the post that has 1000 likes JUST because it has so many likes on the content, like people might be more encouraged to engage with the content if others are engaging with it – I think that’s probably valid, but there’s really nothing in the algorithm that suggests you’re going to be punished if you’re not posting at the time when most of your followers are online. So as far as when to post

Types Of Growth

So as we’ve already covered, the best way to grow on Instagram is: Be in the 1% of content creators within your niche. Use reels a ton. Gain followers on Tik Tok and use it to push to an active audience on Instagram. If you wanted to gain 100k followers and you were an excellent content creator, that’s the strategy. Post daily on Tik Tok, and double-dip that content on Reels & Tik Tok & YouTube shorts, and push all that traffic to your Instagram. This is typically the best way to go about this if you can create content effectively.

Side note, you also don’t need to follow trends, or do Tik Tok dances, as long as your content is enjoyable and high quality, you can find an audience and grow.

I have two creators in mind, that I love, that don’t follow trends that use Tik Toks to promote their Instagram (and vice versa):

Petey (@peteyusa) Official TikTok | Watch Petey’s Newest TikTok Videos

TikTok de georgie (@soupytime) | Veja os vídeos mais recentes de georgie no TikTok

1m followers generally equals about on Tik Tok = 100k on Instagram, roughly. It always depends, but that’s a good benchmark to go off of. And to give you a reference on how realistic it can be to grow and get views on Tik Tok – I gained 1k followers off two videos. Those are the only two videos I posted, and they averaged 90k views and 15k likes. If I had the willpower or desire to post daily or more than once every 5 months, I’m sure I could build that following up pretty easily.

However, let’s talk about the ways you can grow specifically on the Instagram app. I hate that I’m referencing Tik Tok so much, but… Tik Tok is doing a lot of things well. Even if it is a Chinese spyware dancing app. It’s a pretty good one. So, Organic content-only growth on Instagram, we practically already covered. That’s hashtag growth, people sharing your content, people finding you on the explore, that kind of stuff.

Now let’s talk about ways to maximize your organic growth besides posting content. I like to break this down into two different types of growth. Interaction Growth, and External Growth. So let’s talk about Interaction growth first.

Interaction growth is exactly what it sounds like. You are interacting with others on Instagram in order to grow. I think there are three main ways to go about this, and I personally think a mix of all three is ideal for 99% percent of people, and we’ll talk about that in the next chapter. But here are the three strategies. For the sake of naming things, we have:

1. $1.80 Strategy aka an Engagement Strategy
2. Follow/Unfollow Strategy
3. Collab Partnerships & Cross Promotions

$1.80 Strategy aka an Engagement Strategy

So the $1.80 strategy was coined by Gary Vee, and basically, it’s where you drop your 2 cents (or you leave a comment) on 90 posts a day within your niche. 90 * .02 cents equals a $1.80, I just like to call it an engagement strategy. I think the best way to summarize this strategy today since leaving 90 comments may or may not be possible based on Instagram’s action limits, is being as aggressive as possible when it comes to engaging with quality posts from your Peer & Inspiration accounts that we mentioned earlier. Helpful comments, likes, DMing them, being super engaging and friendly is such a good strategy. And let me be clear, on the surface level, when you do this and drop 90 thoughtful comments a day on accounts within your niche, you are helping them grow, again on the surface level, you leaving comments and being friendly is a good signal to the algorithm and it’s a good signal to others that they should engage with that account that you’re commenting on and encouraging. The more social proof an account has, the more likely people will engage with it.

However, if you dig deeper, in a very cliche way, the positive energy you send out in the universe will be returned to you. People will be more likely to follow you, people will see your comment, click on your profile, and possibly decide to follow you, you can get a ton of exposure by leaving comments and engaging with other accounts in your niche, BUT you also will very likely get a good percentage of those comments sent back to you. Your existing followers will see this, they’ll be more likely to engage with you and check you out, new people who just discover your account will see this, and they’ll be more likely to engage with you, this just goes on and on and on and it’s a domino affect that helps you grow.

In summary of the $1.80 strategy (or just an engagement strategy), being super helpful and being encouraging to others, and spreading value can really help you grow. If you are a gardener, and you are dropping knowledge bombs, and you’re replying to a 1m follower inspiration account’s commenters and helping them with their gardening in a massive account’s comment section, it’s a great look for you, because you can establish yourself as an authority in the niche, and you can also build great relationships with inspiration and peer accounts. Assuming of course, you’re not hijacking every post you see with an excessive amount of comments. So we’ll circle back to this in the next chapter, but that’s what I mean when I talk about having some kind of engagement strategy.

Also, one more thing about an engagement strategy. Likes alone are meaningless when it comes to growth. If you think you can like 200 posts a day within your niche and gain followers, your probably won’t gain a single one. You might gain a bot follower or two, but it’s not effective if you “just” like. You need to add value with a comment.

Also, engagement groups or “engagement pods” would technically fit in this category. And this is basically when you have a planned engagement strategy with other accounts. For example, when you post a photo, you tell other people in your group or pod or DM chat that you just posted, and they would go ahead and engage with you. When they post, you’d do the same to their post. In theory, this does work, but there’s better ways to do it. The goal should be that you don’t need to orchestrate your account’s engagement and make sure that the right people are online when you post.

Ideally, if you do this, you’d want the accounts to be in your niche, obviously. Some people think the account doesn’t have to be in your niche for this strategy to “boost your reach” – but the accounts definitely need to be in your niche for them to have a substantial positive effect. I don’t think you need to worry about “joining an engagement group” necessarily – but having friends within your niche is always a good thing. I’ll expand on this more later.

Follow/Unfollow Strategy

So now, let’s talk about the follow/unfollow strategy. Obviously, this is a strategy where you follow people, wait for a follow back, and then you can decide if you want to unfollow them or not – and then repeat the process. Some people think this is a pretty controversial strategy – and then never go into any detail on why… they just say “it’s bad” or “it’s not a good strategy” or “it’s outdated” and then move on.

And I’ll be clear, I might have some bias, my company does this service for people, but I’ve also seen this strategy work wonders. I’ve grown plenty of large accounts using this strategy, and I’ve helped other people grow their account using this strategy. And my company has helped thousands of people grow using this strategy, so… that’s my bias… but I completely understand the criticism.

I think the biggest critiques this strategy gets are:

• I don’t want to follow random people and see them on my feed.
• I don’t want this strategy to ruin my growth and engagement.
• I already have a lot of followers, I don’t want to follow more people that will make my ratio look bad.

So, let me address those one-by-one. First off, the goal of this strategy is not to follow random people. The goal of this strategy is to follow people who are likely to be interested in your account. Most people go wrong with this strategy by following random accounts, or going to hashtags within their niche and just spam following anyone they see. That’s not a good idea, and I also believe that’s technically frowned by Instagram according to their Terms of Service, they don’t want you to build inauthentic relationships.

So, in order to build authentic relationships and not follow random people, the biggest thing that’s required is a good targeting method to find interested accounts and hopefully providing value to that account that you are following.

So, let me give you an example on how to use follow & unfollow effectively and actually build authentic relationships on Instagram. I actually used this example in my Entrepreneur.com article “3 Simple Things Businesses Need For Instagram Growth”

And heads up, it’s another fitness example. I can’t help it.

But, oftentimes I get personal trainers and fitness coaches that want to gain followers, but more importantly, they want to get new clients, and I ask them “Okay, what have you done so far?” and they tell me “Well, I tried following a bunch of accounts, and that didn’t work, I tried buying shout-outs, that didn’t work…” and I ask them, “What kind of accounts did you follow?” And they tell me, they go to other fitness trainers and follow & unfollow the people that comment on that other fitness trainer’s posts. Often times they say they can sometimes get followers, but they rarely get new clients for their business. And by the way, the people I’m talking to are often posting decent content. They’re posting educational content, they’re being helpful, so they just don’t understand why they’re not selling their personal training packages.

What I end up recommending them, and what ends up being a huge driving factor for their business, is I tell them “Okay, instead of following and unfollowing people who already have a fitness coach or personal trainer, go to your local gym’s Instagram, and follow & unfollow the people who engage with your local gym.” So most gyms, like 24-hour fitness, planet fitness, lifetime fitness, etc, all those gyms usually have local Instagram pages for every branch that they have, where they post-holiday hours, gym events, staff highlights, new gym equipment, and so on. So I tell them, if you are based in Miami, find the 10 nearest gyms to you have an Instagram page, and network with all the people who engage with those accounts or follow those accounts. Follow them, DM them, like their stuff, comment, answer the questions you get, you have to think of it like you’re extending a business card (or ya know, your mobile homepage aka your Instagram account) to the people who are checking in to the local gym every day, and you’re basically telling them “Hey, my name is so-and-so, I’m based here in Miami, and I’m a fitness trainer taking new clients and I have a 50% discount right now”. You will get so many more clients that way. You may not get as many followers as some other targets you may use, but you will get so many more clients that way.

So that’s just one example, on how to use follow unfollow in a good way. You’re providing them with a service, they’re happy to receive it, you build a genuine connection with that person, everybody’s happy.

And when it comes to unfollowing, think of it as when you handed out your business card, some people said “no thanks” and kept walking. That happens. I wouldn’t recommend unfollowing people who engage with you, who DM you, or any of that stuff. You want to keep people engaged on your account as much as possible, and theoretically, you should only unfollow the people who deny the business card.

So yes, follow & unfollow works. It’s not going to get you 5k followers per month, but it can get you 500 followers per month, and you can use the feedback you get from the people who follow you to improve your content, create better content, and learn how to connect with people. You should be able to use follow & unfollow to catapult you into more eyeballs organically, you should be able to figure out how to improve your content, you should be getting better engagement with the strategy, and that’s all a domino affect that can help you eventually not have to rely upon using this strategy.

Again, I’m not for spam. I don’t think you should spam follow people and then spam unfollow people. I think you should always strive to build connections on Instagram, but it is a process.

So, hopefully, that explains the first critique of this strategy, and it should also explain the second critique too. If done correctly, you will build relationships and get really targeted followers, so it won’t necessarily damage your account in terms of the algorithm, if that was the case – I mean I know several million follower accounts right now that used follow unfollow to get their first 20k followers on Instagram, so no I don’t think it hurts your ability to rank in the explore if done correctly. I think it helps increase your reach if done correctly.

And, the third critique, I think is fair. I don’t think the best look for large accounts is to be following & unfollowing people – but they do tend to be the most successful at it for various reasons. Obviously, if you’re spending up to 5 hours a day following and unfollowing people if you have 100k followers – something else is wrong. You’d be much better off creating content or using a better interaction strategy. Also, accounts in a really broad niche probably won’t benefit from a follow/unfollow strategy a ton. The more broad of a niche you have, the more your content needs to be spot-on.

For example, if you were an author, and you wanted to write a book called “HOW TO BE HAPPY” and you wanted to market that book to anyone and everyone on Instagram. That’s going to be tough to do with follow & unfollow, because it’s so hard to find who specifically you should be targeting. But if you were an author and you wrote a book called ‘How to throw your german shepherd dog a birthday party that they actually will enjoy” then you’ll probably be able to target people like me pretty easily by targeting active niche pages of german shepherds, for example. (show pic of Jojo in editing frowning)

So yeah, that’s my opinion on follow/unfollow. I think it’s super effective if done correctly. It’s important to know where to source your potential targets, though. Like with the example I used, local gyms often are going to provide better results than following and unfollowing peer accounts. But for other niches, it might be a case where peer accounts are better to use. For example, if you own a craft Brewery, you might be better off using another local brewery. But like if you have a hair salon, maybe you find a lot of success following & unfollowing the people who comment on the boutique fashion store down the block. Some things go hand-in-hand like that, if they already support the store, maybe they’ll support your hair salon. But if they support another hair salon, then they might not support your hair salon.

The best thing to do is test, test, test. Test different accounts to use a target account, and then see which one works overtime.

If you want to know a general guideline to follow when it comes to daily limits and things of that nature, I included a link here on the Notion document that further explains the process because Instagram’s algorithm can be pretty tricky, to say the least.

And I’ll leave this here, I won’t go in-depth with this, but this information is here and it will be updated if it needs to be updated. Again, I should emphasize that do not spam follow and unfollow. You need to be extremely targeted and intentional with every follow. This is for authentic, genuine interactions only. I do not condone doing this for the sake of any kind of inauthentic activity. Do not use automation with this information. Do not break Instagram’s terms of service in any way with this information. Remember, I’m on team Instagram.

So, that hopefully summarizes Follow & unfollow. We will talk about it briefly again in the next chapter because it CAN play a role on how everything should come together for most people.

Pro Tip, by the way. If you find a good source for accounts to follow, turn on post notifications for that target account, so whenever they post, you can go into their likes and comments and find super active and recent users who are online, who will most likely respond quickly, either positively or negatively, to your follow notification. Just a little tip.

Also, one other thing. I heavily popularized a strategy in my eBook back when Instagram was a bit more lenient on action limits, and I called it the 1-2 punch strategy, where you would follow an account, and then like a recent picture of theirs, and then like a random picture of them not so recent. This was supposed to simulate that you were really interested in the account you were following, you were taking time to engage with their account, review their account, and show that you’re a loyal fan. Back in the day, this was a dramatic difference in getting followers compared to just following someone. You would get like 50% better results doing something like this. Now, with Instagram’s current action limits, if you wanted to do this and follow 200 people a day… it would take you 8 hours of manual labor to do this for one day. Instagram has really cracked down because you used to be able to follow 800 accounts a day and like 1600 photos no problem. Unfortunately, Instagram has cracked down so that’s not realistic anymore, but since it’s not super realistic anymore, I’ve noticed that the percentages are pretty similar now without the 1-2 Punch than back in the day with the 1-2 Punch. I think that’s just because Instagram cracked down and make follow strategies more rare and less frequent, so when people do receive a follow notification, it means more today than it did 5 years ago. So, just a bit of interesting history for ya.

AGAIN I’M ON TEAM INSTAGRAM. Don’t break their terms. I’m not suggesting anybody do anything, this is purely educational. I’m serious about that. Don’t blindly follow my advice, please consult with other resources and consult with Instagram’s terms of service before doing anything.

I apologize for this method going so long, but there’s a lot of misinformation about this strategy, and I just wanted to clear the air about it all. The strategy works when done correctly, and I think a lot of people will benefit from it if they know who to target, who to interact with, and if they can provide value for that person that they’re following.

And I think at the end of the day, a lot of marketers talk down on follow/unfollow simply because it makes them look like a better marketer. It’s easier to say “focus on creating better content” than telling people how to properly do an interaction method like this – but the reality is a lot of people benefit from these methods.

Collab Partnerships/Cross Promotion

So Collabs Partnerships & Cross Promotions could technically fit in the content section, but I think it probably fits better here because it’s a more direct way of achieving growth, and it involves interacting with others on Instagram.

And contrasting to follow unfollow, this one doesn’t need a ton of explaining. Basically, this is when you grow your account through collaborations with other accounts. Instagram has a feature that allows you and another account to post the same photo, and then that photo gets shared on your feed and your collaborator’s feed. This is a relatively new feature by Instagram, it came out within the last few months – before this, you would just double post the tag each other in the caption, but this is a much cleaner and more effective solution.

A lot of brands will do this with their ambassadors, if you want an example of this, the company MyProtein did this recently with their ambassador Israel Adesanya, who’s a UFC fighter, they went from averaging 2k likes per post to that post getting 30k likes. They also use this feature pretty heavily to promote their spin-off brands, which I think is also a pretty smart move. Since the feature is still relatively new, it’s a bit challenging to see what the long-term results of these collab posts are in terms of how the algorithm judges your engagement compared to your collaborator’s engagement. I’d say a general rule of thumb here is try to avoid doing this with accounts that get low engagement or aren’t directly in your niche as it could be problematic in the long run.

I may update the notion document specifically on this method as it continues to see more usage across Instagram. From what I’ve seen, it usually benefits the smaller account more than it’ll ever benefit the bigger account. The bigger account will usually struggle with reach, and I think it could be seen by many people as an “advertisement” or a “paid promotion”. I think if you own a brand and you work with influencers and celebrities, I would definitely consider using this as often as you can assuming you get good results from it. Again, it’s really new, it’s not super clear how the algorithm reacts to this kind of content.

So, I think it’ll come down to how engaging the content you create is for BOTH of the accounts sharing the post, If one account’s feed performs well and the other one doesn’t, then I think it’ll end up affecting both.

Carousel posts again are going to be your best chance at optimizing your engagement, as you’d likely get double the exposure (or maybe quadruple the exposure) on your home feed if they didn’t engage with it the first time they saw it.

There’s other ways to do collaborations without using the built-in collaboration feature. I mean, mutual feed shout-outs using captions or just using normal tags would technically be included in this section, in addition to story shout-outs and going live with someone. I think in the right time and place, those options make a lot of sense. I think those options might be a bit more organic feeling than the built-in feature, so that may play to your advantage.

There’s another type of collaboration I see sometimes called “Instagram takeovers”…. and that’s when you allow another person to run your Instagram page for a limited time to offer a different perspective to your followers. 9 times out of 10, I hate it when people do this.

I think it works 10% of the time and that’s only when you have a well-known figure running a brand account and it becomes interesting and funny. That’s about it. I don’t like when influencers do it to each other’s accounts. I think it’s usually not worth the time and effort. Unless of course, someone with a much bigger following than you is letting you do it to their account, then do it and you’ll get some followers, but generally speaking, I would never let a smaller account do it to my account, and it just always feels kind of sloppy to me. I don’t think takeovers are usually ideal.

External Growth Strategies/White hat examples

So we just covered interaction growth strategies, now let’s talk about External growth strategies. This is when you have growth methods that aren’t attributed to your account’s participation with other accounts. You don’t need to do anything specifically on your account in order to grow with these methods.

But let me tell you this right now: The only solid external growth strategy is bringing your followers in from Other platforms, whether that be Tik Tok, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…. myspace? That’s going to give you the best results. Period. If you have followers or you are able to easily build followers on other platforms, then promoting your Instagram on those other platforms will hands-down be the best external growth strategy.

Aside from that, I don’t usually recommend external growth methods because it’s almost always not fixing the root issue. Improving your content, improving your engagement, interacting with the right people, improving your reach, improving your “mobile website” aka your profile page – that’s all going to be better off than External growth strategies, and I’ll explain why by going through the various growth strategies.

Ads: I’m not much of an ads guy, I run ads for myself and for a few others, but that’s whole ‘nother can of worms. I don’t consider myself an ad expert, so I’m just gonna refrain from giving advice on that. Generally speaking though, ads aren’t a great way to grow. Most people won’t use ads to promote their overall account, for example, you won’t see the girl you met at the coffee shop using ads to grow her Instagram page so she can be a lifestyle influencer – that’s generally not a good idea unless you have a highly specific funnel in place where you can sell a product or a service. So as a mean of selling a service → it’s a probably a good idea, as a way to get the ball rolling on your Instagram account to gain some followers → ehhhhh you might be wasting your money. But again, I’m not an ads expert, so feel free to disregard this opinion. Ads would be considered an external growth method though.

Shout Outs/Hot Take

95% of the time it’s not going to be worth it. I’ve done shout-outs that were successful and I’ve done shout-outs that were unsuccessful, but when people contact me and tell me about their experience with shout-outs… maybe one out of every 30 people have a positive experience. Shout-outs, in case you don’t know, is when you pay someone to “shout out” your Instagram account on their feed or their story.

A general rule of thumb: Don’t ever use a website that sells shout-outs. Nearly all the accounts on those sites have artificially inflated their reach and their true engagement is pretty dead. If you want to sell shout-outs, sure -feel free to use those sites, but never ever buy from them. Prices are all over the place. People can fake their engagement and their reach and their story views and all that. People will also send you fake followers in order to make it “look” like the shout-out worked. It’s just… generally something you want to stay away from.

The ideal way to buy a shout-out would be to go through an inspiration account and ask them what their rates are, but again, a lot of times it just doesn’t work that well. I’ve heard of people spend thousands of dollars on shoutouts only to get 50 followers. There’s no standard rate when it comes to shout-outs, as everyone is going to price it differently based off what they think their account is worth, so you’ll just have to determine if whatever price they suggest is worth it to you or not.

Giveaway Growth Services

They will slaughter your reach. It’s the worst way to spend money on Instagram, in my opinion. You get real followers that don’t care at all about your account, content, or niche, thus sending signals to Instagram that your account might not be that great. It’s a complete waste of money, and very very very very rarely will there ever be a benefit from using a service like this.

I write about this in the blog article I mentioned in one of the first chapters – The Great Instagram Shift – but basically these services work by placing your account in a list, and then a celebrity instructs their followers to follow all these accounts in order to win a prize. You get real followers in exchange for some one-time fee anywhere from $100 to $10,000. Celebrities like Cardi B, Trippie Redd, Tekashi 69 – they’re generally the kind of celebrities that host these giveaways, but sometimes these services will just say “an influencer” or “a targeted account” is the one hosting these giveaways…. and I can guarantee it’s going to be a random account with 100k followers and then they send fake followers to your account in order to make it look like the giveaway was a great success. It’s super, super common. A lot of fraud in this specific genre of growth services. None of the followers will be targeted, none of the followers will care about your account, and a large number of the followers will unfollow you after the giveaway ends.

Sometimes these are also called “loop” giveaways or influencer giveaways. Anyway, Instagram’s algorithm will destroy you for this kind of stuff. If you just want followers, it might be smarter to just buy fake followers opposed to real followers who don’t care about your account. Fake followers, usually don’t even log in or view content that often – they just follow people. In the most – uh – odd way – that might actually be better because it’s not giving Instagram positive or negative signals. It’s just not active.

But these giveaway followers are real people, who followed you for an incentive, will likely see your content once or twice on their feed, not recognize you, and keep scrolling or they’ll unfollow you. Either way, it’s just not a good. Super harmful. Super expensive. It might be the biggest waste of money in the growth industry right now.

So… instead of buying a spot on a giveaway growth service…. take that money, run your own giveaway, you’d have much much much better results. By running your own giveaway, you’d encourage people to interact with your post who might not. Give away 10 $20 amazon gift cards or something like that, say something like “Like this post, Comment why you follow me, and then tag someone who should also follow me”. I’ll pick 5 winners, and you and the person you tagged will both get a $20 Amazon coupon code” or something like that. Encouraging authentic engagement (like when you tell people to comment specifically why they followed you) is a better signal to the algorithm than just “tag someone” because…. it takes more time. That’s just one example, perhaps customizing the giveaway prize to something within your niche would be a better idea, too (if you’re a hairstylist, give away some nice shampoo or something).

I’m not saying this is like a great strategy, by the way, there are issues with this kind of strategy too, but it’s definitely gonna be better money spent than entering someone else’s giveaway service. That’s for sure.

Blackhat Growth & History

So let’s briefly discuss blackhat growth methods, and why I don’t recommend them. Feel free to skip over this part, because there’s no real method here that I’d recommend, but I do want to mention why they’re not a great idea – and go over a bit of the evolution of some of the black hat methods. Most people who use these methods are almost always trying to make a quick buck, it’s very rare to see legitimate brands and influencers use these methods as a way to grow.

Starting off with the most popular one, we got Fake Followers.

Fake Followers

Again, honestly probably better than giveaway followers because they won’t send activity signals to the algorithm. If you see anyone selling “real followers” and then giving you a specific quantity like “buy 500 real followers” those are fake followers. Some sellers are getting tricky now too and they’re selling “active fake followers” which are by far more damaging than just regular fake followers. These are fake followers that like and leave generic comments on your posts automatically. Yeah, don’t buy those either. For a million different reasons. The engagement isn’t genuine, and Instagram knows that. It’ll hurt your reach because they spend .01 seconds on your post and the on 70 other posts in various different niches, those fake accounts don’t have any real followers because they’re all bots so even if they could influence your account on the explore, it would only be seen by other fake accounts that wouldn’t go on the explore anyway. Again, just a waste of money. People only usually only buy this kind of stuff for social proof – there’s no real utility in them besides it might make your account “look” more active. And even though I tease and say these are better than giveaway followers, fake followers will also likely damage your reach too.

By the way, despite what you might think – most celebrities don’t buy fake followers. They have fake followers, but they don’t buy them. I’ve seen reports where people say things like Kylie Jenner has 150m, fake followers. Trust me: She didn’t buy them. Most fake follower providers almost always routinely follow top celebrities no matter what in order to make the accounts look real. If fake accounts followed random people that weren’t celebrities to make themselves look real, they’d have a higher chance of getting reported because if someone with 100 followers saw a fake account follow them, they might be more likely to report it. Kylie Jenner, Justin Bieber, or any other major celebrity – they’re not going to report those fake accounts. It’s also just easier from a supplier point of view to have a setlist of accounts and randomly follow those top celebrities. And then those fake accounts will later go on to follow people who buy fake followers, or they’ll go out and spam people one way or another. So – keep that in mind. Yes, some celebrities do buy fake followers, but it is more rare than you think, and it’s definitely not to the point where 150m fake followers get purchased by these massive influencers. That’s insane.

Fake likes

Don’t do anything to boost your natural engagement either – those accounts like thousands of posts a day, they spend less than 0.01 seconds looking at your profile, Instagram knows instantly that those likes aren’t real engagement, that these accounts don’t follow you. they’re not liking any specific niche, and like we stated earlier where time spent on posts is a huge deal, Instagram knows these likes won’t influence the explore. I don’t know if there’s a ton of evidence that fake likes hurt your reach or chance of going viral, but I do firmly believe that it doesn’t help you. Back in the day you could buy fake likes and easily rank in hashtags and gain followers that way – that method doesn’t work anymore either.

Automation

Typically people use automation when there’s some kind of follow/unfollow involved, but there’s other uses of black hat automation that we’ll discuss. But this is obviously when you use a tool or a program to automate thousands of follows and unfollows. When a tool automates those actions for you, it’s spam. You’re not trying to build real connections. You’re just following random accounts. Even if you have a targeted strategy, it’s still considered spam because again, it’s not an authentic follow. That being said, Instagram has impressively made this nearly impossible.

I think this happened in either 2017 or 2018 where they just destroyed automation. It’s really hard to do this now. Instagram knows if you’re using a proxy, they know if you’re on some kind of application, they know the footprint of your account and the thousands of other accounts that are using that software… they know. They definitely spent time to figure this out, and it had the entire black hat growth industry in shambles for the longest time because people were getting their accounts wiped out. Any company offering you software, “AI Technology”, or some other kind of bot to gain you followers – its automation and it’s a big no-no if you care about the longevity of your account.

Mother/Child Growth or (Master/Slave)

This is when you hire someone that creates “sub” accounts, or “child” accounts of your “mother” account, or your “main” account. Basically, for example, if you had a clothing brand called “Swag Clothing Elite” or something like that, then this service would go about and create accounts called “Swag Clothing Elite 1”. “Swag Clothing Elite 2”, “Swag Clothing Elite Daily”, “Swag Apparel Elite”, and so on. They would then do some kind of automation on these accounts, try to grow them, and then they would use the collective following to promote your main account, whether that be with DMs, call to actions in the bio, call to actions in the post – they’d be like “Go follow our main account “Swag Elite Clothing” for more. And the theory behind this is it’s supposed to be “white hat” growth for the main account, because the main account isn’t technically doing the spam.

Here’s all I’ll say about this: I think Instagram knows, and I won’t be surprised if they really crackdown and punish accounts that do this at some point. This is becoming more and more common, and I’m just saying it might happen that Instagram will go after these “mother” accounts at some point. Instagram has gotten more and more strict every year when it comes to this stuff… so… that’s just my two cents. I also think it’s just a bad look whenever I see personal accounts or brands do this. And also, those accounts always have horrible engagement and reach, they’re usually trying to avoid improving their content and instead, they’re doing methods like this. It’s a little skeezy. It’s expensive too – upwards of $1000 per month if you get like 10 “child” accounts. So yeah, don’t do this. Don’t recommend this. Put that money into your content. Don’t spam on Instagram. Be careful.

DM Spamming or Mass DMs

Is when you hire someone who has thousands of fake Instagram accounts and they all send people a message you’d want to send specific people, whether that be promoting a service or promoting your account. There’s usually some kind of call to action since it’s spam. You’ve probably had these, if you go in your Message Request inbox, almost every account in there that’s spamming you is using this method. Again, something you’d have to consider specifically for growth, yeah you could get followers if you randomly spam someone from a fake account, but what kind of person is going to fall for that and also be a good follower – like this is another one of those things where people can make money from selling spam services and ya know, the latest NFT collection by spamming millions of people’s DMs, but it’s not a good way to increase your reach or engagement. That’s just my two cents. Again, At the end of the day, I’m not going to be surprised if Instagram starts cracking down on the account’s that are responsible for these spam DMs. Keep in mind that most people use spam on Instagram to make a quick buck selling some shady service or item and they’re not necessarily trying to increase their growth and engagement.

Spam Comments

Are similar. You’ve seen these too. Various uses for this. Never a good idea to self-promote in a comment section, and it’s obviously not a good idea to spam in a comment section. This might be the biggest thing Instagram is going to try and fix in regards to black hat methods because it really does get out of hand.

There’s a few other older ones that were pretty popular for a while and they really don’t work at all anymore, mentions, & story viewing, Mentions is when you have thousands of accounts comment on a post you made, and each of those accounts would tag like 3-5 people, so… on one post you’d have 3-5 thousand people getting a notification that you posted. Lowkey, this method went crazy back in the day when it worked. Because it was stupid cheap for traffic you would get. So, people used this for growth, but a lot of people just used this to sell things – and you could get a million people tagged in your posts… for like $500. All of them would get the notification. You make it really targeted. This is what I ended up getting karma for, because I am guilty of this circa… 2015 or so – but remember Instagram already punished me for this, I bought mentions and then Instagram leaked my private data, so… who’s really at fault here. But that’s mentions, it’s just spam comments with a twist.

Story viewing was the dumbest one, and it’s also probably the most recent out of all of these, but it really only lasted a few months, but there was some weird exploit in Instagram that allowed you to view like a million stories a day using certain types of software – and you’d gain followers whenever someone checks who viewed their story, and they’d see your name and then decide to follow you. I know a lot of verified accounts that did this because I think there was something specifically about their checkmark that allowed them to view more stories than others – and I think it worked because people were like “oh my gosh, Ray J just viewed my story??” and then they’d go follow Ray J. But I always thought it was a dumb way to grow because.

• 99.9% of people don’t watch over a thousand stories a day, so to be watching hundreds of thousands just felt like a recipe for disaster.
• I very rarely watch stories personally – and whenever I’d post stories, I almost never go through to see who watched my story and who didn’t watch my story – so the method wouldn’t ever work on me, so I just felt like it was a bad method. But people did gain followers with this, again, it doesn’t work anymore, but that was a way to gain followers at a point in time.

Power Likes/Power Comments (this was forever the best one)

So, powerlikes and power comments were legitimately like the best way to grow in 2015-2017, but this probably falls into the category or “grey hat marketing” because if anything, it was just exploiting how bad the Instagram’s algorithm was. Instagram’s explore page worked a bit differently back then, where a good percentage of what you saw on the explore page was based purely off what the people you were following were engaging with. So if you followed ESPN, and then ESPN liked a random clip from an account you didn’t follow, there’d be a good chance you’d see that clip on your explore page. That concept is still somewhat true of the algorithm, but it’s a lot harder to manipulate now and the explore page is much more focused on specific recommendations on what you’re interested in. Back in 2016, it was more of a free for all. But, essentially, this is when large accounts specifically liked and engaged with your content in order to go viral more easily.

Here’s a fun little backstory: Back in those days, there was a group on Telegram that I was apart of called SYNC, where people with over 800,000 followers were all in a big group chat. And on specific times throughout the day, like 8am, noon, 3pm, 6pm, and 8pm you could drop your username in the chat, and everyone would post exactly at those times. Then, a few dozen massive Instagram accounts would like and engage with your content within seconds of you posting it, and you would like and engage with their content within seconds of posting it. That just ruined the explore page for everybody, but people were growing like crazy. Everybody was going viral. You’d still need viral content to go viral, but it was rare to see posts flop. I’d have it down to a science where if I didn’t have 3k views within the first 3 minutes of posting (I posted mostly videos, by the way), it wasn’t likely to do over 150k views total. If it had at least 5k views in the first 3 minutes, then it would likely have over 500k views. My biggest post ever on Sync did like 15k views in the first 3 minutes of posting, and that post ended up doing like 4.5m views & 300k likes…. and then I got simmed a few months later. And then I thought… maybe… maybe… maybe I shouldn’t do these black hat methods.

But, uh – Instagram wised up, and they can recognize when large accounts are just randomly engaging with people from various different niches. Accounts do have general engagement juice, really big and active accounts are going to have some authority in determining the explore and how feed posts get ranked, but also YOU the user decides what accounts get that power. So if you don’t care about ESPN, you won’t see those clips. But generally speaking, If large accounts are really picky with who they like, then Instagram will place more value in that than accounts that just go around liking everything. We’ve already pretty much covered this though at this point. Your personal interests matter a lot, so… RIP Power Likes.

Also, let me be clear about why I’m mentioning some of this black hat stuff – because if I didn’t, some of you would be like “Hmm… I know there’s other ways to gain followers. Let me do my own research and see what I can find” and then you’d look up one of the black hat companies, and these companies would have no issues lying to you, and then that’s how people get trapped into doing things that they shouldn’t be doing. So, that’s why I went through these methods to show you why they’re usually not a good idea.

Focus on Your Engagement

So, let’s bring things together now and focus on how to maximize your engagement when considering the types of content and the types of growth. The biggest and most helpful thing we’ve already discussed, and that’s having good call to actions. Encouraging people to spend time with your posts and doing everything you can to retain their attention is going to maximize your engagement in long run. If you can generate interest, you can generate engagement.

Like we’ve mentioned, getting people to spend the most time on your posts and your account is the best way to grow. You want to be the perfect account, the account that people are addicted to. So when I say get people to spend time on your posts, that doesn’t mean write a long, boring caption every time when the post doesn’t need a long caption, that doesn’t mean post a thousand stories every day hoping people will sit through them – no no no. You want people to think “I wonder that person posted today”. Maybe it’s just a funny meme in the story. Maybe it’s just a collection of pictures from a recent trip in a carousel – whatever the case may be, keep them interested, and that usually means not posting the same thing over and over again.

It’s common knowledge and advice to try a bunch of things out when it comes to content, find the thing that works and gets good engagement, and then just find new ways to re-vise that same concept over and over again. That’s very common advice, and that’s generally a good idea; however, you should still continue the experiments even when you found out what works. Not all the time, but definitely sprinkle it in when things get stale. Make sure it’s still within your niche, but have fun.

So there’s a theory that suggests the reason that Kanye West has one of the most hardcore, most supportive fanbases is because it’s fun to be a fan of someone who gets a little crazy. The theory is something along the lines of when you ride the emotional roller coaster of seeing someone at their best and then seeing someone at their worst, and that repeats over and over again – it becomes addicting. We’ve all had toxic Ex’s. I’m not saying be like Kanye West, but there’s some evidence that suggests being a little crazy can be a good thing every now and then. Riding that roller coaster can be fun.

So, if you’re selling farm tractors on Instagram and you have a very professional page, maybe one day, you should do the latest hip-hop dancing trend with the elderly people that work at your company. It might be funny. It might go viral. You might be surprised how well it would do. Like don’t do anything that shatters your reputation, but ya never know what might just be the reason people decide to follow you. Like, if you decide to post some silly content, say “we’ll shave our CEOs head if this gets 100 likes”. At the end of the day, things aren’t that serious. It’s okay to be a bit goofy on Instagram, and sometimes being goofy, switching things up, can be a huge boost to your overall reach. If your reach is struggling, by the way, you definitely should be switching things up.

But yeah, I’m a fan of “engagement tricks” or “engagement lures” or “creative call to actions” if they’re done tastefully. This course is going to be long enough, but some quick ones to consider would be:

• Having some kind of series with your content.

  An example, on my personal Instagram, I did book reviews on my stories where I would read & review one book a week for a year and post it to my story – which in hindsight was kind of pretentious, but that got the best engagement I’ve ever had. For reference, those book reviews would outperform pictures of my dog when she was a puppy. And my dog was a beautiful. So, like, if you run a car bodyshop page on Instagram, maybe you can post a series on the craziest car wrecks that you have come in or something like that. Get creative with it, and find a way to keep it interesting.

• Be intentional on when you like comments from your posts.

  So, a general rule of thumb is respond to most comments on your posts and let them know that their feedback is appreciated, it’s a good idea to respond as soon as you can after you post, but a common strategy is whenever you a post a new post, go back to your last post prior, and then go through and like all those comments. Instagram will then notify all those people who interacted with you before hand, and then they would get a notification, potentially check out your account, see you posted again, and perhaps comment again. It’s a good little trick to consider.

There’s obviously a lot of things you can do to generate interest on your account, get people to engage with you, and so on. This is just a couple of examples to get the ball rolling.

How 99% Of People Should Grow on Instagram

So this section is basically going to be a summary of everything I’ve talked about so far, and hopefully, this makes sense on how everything comes together.

Let’s talk about Phases Of Growth (100 new followers is more significant at 500 followers than at 50k followers. Therefore it makes sense to work harder for 100 followers if you only have 500 followers.

So, I’ve seen people make really, really technical videos about this where they’re like from 0 followers to 1k you should be focusing on this, and from 1k to 4k you should be focusing on this…. I don’t like that. I used to be like that, but… there’s a better way to explain your phases of growth.

So here’s a pretty simple illustration I made that I hope more clearly explains a lot of the concepts I’ve talked about so far.

So, on top of here we have the quality of content. On the left, we have 100% quality content, pure viral content, this is Bella Poarch, Mr. Beast, Jordan Kloatic. Those people are at 100% viral content. And if you look down, that means they are at 0% for The Number of Interactions they need for growth. They don’t need to be dropping comments, liking specific posts, engaging with others, etc. Their content is completely shareable, completely viral, they post, it works, and it gets seen by millions.

Now on the other end, we have the inverse of that. If your quality of content is at 0%, that means the only way you gain followers is by intentional interactions – you need to be following people, interacting with people, commenting, liking posts, etc.

Now, obviously, if your quality of content is at 0%, you can do all that stuff, but you still might not get followers. That’s just life. If your content is at 0%, you’re posting unironic despicable me minion memes, you’re posting non-native promotional content, you’re posting accidental screenshots. You’re just making it crazy hard on yourself.

Now, most people lie within this red bar here. 99% of people are here, it’s basically a bell curve. You have a small amount of people making really viral content, but you also have a relatively small number of people who post the worst content imaginable.

Now, the more your content increases in quality, the less interactions you’ll need to maintain growth, and if you increase your quality of content and keep the same number of interactions, you’ll find your growth increases.

So assuming you’re somewhere on the red line, here’s a good metric for what to do next, and this is typically what I recommend people when they ask me on a guideline for their interactions.

• Follow 15-30 inspiration accounts, set their post notifications on, comment whenever possible, add value in the comments and these accounts should be significantly larger than yours. We talked about this earlier if you remember on what makes an inspiration account. The goal here is to learn, hopefully, network, and provide value.
• Follow 40-80 peer accounts. Whenever they show up on your timeline, add value. Comment, like, engage, shoot them DMs. These accounts should be similar-sized if not slightly bigger than your account. Find a few really targeted accounts (it doesn’t necessarily need to be all of them) and then set their post notifications on. This is important by the way, even if those peer accounts you’re engaging with aren’t super popular, if you can build a genuine relationship with another peer account – you likely have a supporter for life. They’ll comment on your stuff, they’ll help you boost your engagement, it’s really beneficial to build friends within your niche. The algorithm loves seeing that.

I’d say spend 80% of your time with the peer accounts, and 20% of your time with the inspiration accounts. It’s important to build your engagement up as much as you can from like-minded people who have a similar following to you.

Follow/Unfollow As Needed

Follow unfollow accounts that show up in the feeds of the peer accounts OR if you have specific target accounts or locations in mind, follow/unfollow those accounts. You can also do follow/unfollow on likers and commenters of inspiration accounts, but that definitely depends on how targeted those engagers are.

Like I mentioned earlier, it’s probably best with the personal trainer reference, follow/unfollow where you might find clients at like a local gym or something along those lines.

You gotta think about using as follow/unfollow extending people your business card. I’d recommend following a guideline or a limit that you think is appropriate based off the limits I gave earlier. You don’t need to do the max, just whatever you’re comfortable with.

Then routinely go through and remove some of your follows (not followers). If you really connect with some accounts or you make a sale or they’re a good supporter of you, keep following them and supporting them. Ideally, you’d only want to unfollow accounts that didn’t follow you back or don’t seem to have any interest in your account but followed you anyway.

Every 2 or 3 weeks, research and see if you can find more peer accounts, perhaps slightly larger than the ones you had before. If certain peer accounts weren’t receptive of you, you can unfollow them at this point too. Peer accounts that don’t post frequently enough, feel free to unfollow them too.

Every 2 or 3 weeks is a good time to rotate and adjust the accounts that you run follow/unfollow on, too. You might be surprised at which accounts give poor results and which accounts give really good results when it comes to follow & unfollow. Also if you have 200, 300 peer accounts and inspiration accounts – great. That’s fine, the numbers I give here are really just the bare minimum.

This strategy takes time, but this strategy has worked consistently on Instagram for years now. Over time, you’ll force yourself out of your comfort zone, you’ll meet a lot of peer accounts that post great content, you can use that content as inspiration to improve your posts. You’ll find people who write better captions, you can use that as inspiration.

You’ll find people who use really good stories in conjunction with their posts. This process is supposed to guide you into creating quality content and help you get consistent feedback over time.

The goal here is to overtime to ween yourself more and more to the left of this chart so you can rely more and more on content, and less on interactions. That’s obviously the goal, but some people get such steady results doing follow unfollow campaigns that they keep doing it even if they hit the explore consistently.

You don’t want to just frantically look for posts and comment and interact with as many people as you can – you want to keep your posts that you interact with to be targeted, and it’s usually a good idea to be following that person. That’s why it’s important to have a good amount of peer and inspiration accounts to engage with.

You should be mindful of action limits. Instagram won’t let you comment 200 times a day and follow 400 people. You’ll likely get blocked. Getting action blocked by Instagram isn’t really going to limit your reach though, but it will obviously limit the number of people who you can interact with and THAT might limit your reach.

So, if you’re serious about doing this method, which I think most people should be, consult the guide I posted earlier in the Follow/Unfollow section for action limits. It includes limits that you should be aware of so you can do this without getting action blocked.

Here’s some examples of how you would go this strategy:

If you run a coffee shop in Dallas, an inspiration account would be some of the top baristas in the world. A peer account would be a different coffee shop in Dallas or Maybe Austin OR perhaps one of your neighboring businesses, and then based on how specific you get, you can choose to run follow/unfollow on different coffee shops in Dallas or those neighboring businesses.

If you run a photography business, an inspiration account would be like Jordan Koalitic. A peer account would be photographers in your same niche, or perhaps photographers in your local area, and then you can run follow/unfollow on the engagers of other photographers in the same niche or something along those lines.

I think two examples are enough. Hopefully, you get the picture. You gotta exhaust your daily comments as much as you can on these peer and inspiration accounts – be helpful, be thankful, be supportive, don’t self promote, and make sure your comments aren’t copy-and-pasted. They all need to be unique. Copy and pasted comments will lead to quicker action blocks.

And I guess as far as a content strategy, I mean, content is important, the underlying assumption here is that you are posting consistently, you are self-analyzing your content and attempting to recreate your most engaging type of content, you are actively trying to improve the time people spend on your posts, the Reels you create, the engagement you get, the story views you receive, and so on.

The assumption here is that you have the content figured out, you’re trying to improve it as much as possible, and you’re working on moving your content closer and closer to 100% on the chart. That should be the most important takeaway, here. A lot of the interaction strategies are not as important as creating the best content possible in your niche. That should be priority number 1.

So I’m going to give you a lot of examples of accounts in the last chapter of the 1% of accounts, but in this chapter, I’m going to give you 1 example, and that example will let you see thousands of examples.

There are obviously other niches that use this strategy, but this is just the clearest example that I could give you. Go to this account, go to his comments, click on an account, go to their comments, click on an account, and repeat 40 times. You will see thousands of accounts doing this strategy. It’s actually pretty funny.

Lucas makes good content, he’s super helpful, and he’s very consistent, and clearly, all these Instagram marketers, digital marketers, brand marketers, graphic designers, are all doing this strategy because they know it works. They create a lot of content, sure it looks like a cult, but they are hardworking people.

All these accounts like each other, comment on each other, shout each other, do promotions, do all of that stuff. They do giveaways, hashtag laddering, you name it. Everything I mentioned, they all do. Some of the accounts don’t do follow unfollow – some do. It depends. Some will preach against it, and like I’ve said earlier, those accounts are generally wrong about that.

My only issue with all of this, is they’re all saying the same thing and they’re convincing each other that they’re not, and a lot of the content they make is meant for each other. It’s practically an echo chamber. So basically, you end up having Instagram marketers making content for other Instagram marketers, brand strategists, makes content for brand strategies, logo designers making content for logo designers. But it works, and these accounts grow. I think it’s all a bit goofy just to see how obvious it is. The comments crack me up because the most basic boring post will get hyped out of this world with like really long responses. It’s so funny. Crack open a beer and go scrolling through these comments. It’s a good time.

By the way, your niche won’t have this obvious of a footprint unless you’re in the Instagram marketing niche. So just keep that in mind.

I should be clear though – the 1% of growth here is happening from the accounts that create the best content. There are a lot of accounts in these comment sections that are on the right path, but they aren’t growing as much as Lucas is.

There are plenty of accounts in those comment sections that have less than 200 followers and are stuck there. Content matters. Value matters. If you look at some of these accounts with 200 followers, there is a clear difference in the quality of those accounts compared to Lucas.

Making Money on Instagram

Instagram’s main utility now is your mobile homepage, as we discussed earlier. That being said, you should treat it as a representation of your personal brand or your company’s professional mobile landing page. From what I’ve seen, the accounts that do Instagram the best treat it like this.

I don’t like the idea of creating accounts for the sole purpose of making money, I’m not a fan of the idea

Don’t listen to people who say micro-influencers are making $10k a month on their account with 5k followers. That’s usually manipulative for whatever reason or they’re massively destroying their account potential by doing shill ads all the time. (selling their soul) or they’re just saying that to sell you a course. Just always be on guard whenever some guru is flexing and telling you that you’re not making enough money.

Also, in regards to Instagram’s monetization 1 billion dollar investment – do not make that your primary focus. That needs to be an afterthought. Having a stricter idea on your Instagram is

There are companies like Aspire and #Paid (or any other influencer network that you can join) that help you get connected with brands… there are a lot… again… not something I typically recommend, but I think that’s something you can look into if you’re just completely lost and you’re looking for ideas.

Don’t recommend selling feed posts shoutouts… I’m more okay with Story post shoutouts as it’s likely to have less of an impact on your reach.

You can link now in your stories, you don’t need 10k followers to link in your stories, so that’s another route to sell things.

Your collaborations and your opportunities to make money and your ability to make money is going to be varied wildly. A coder who makes carousels about coding languages and informative topics might get a DM offer randomly for a $10k a month consulting contract. Where as a lifestyle influencer woman with 10k followers might get an offer to shill sunglasses for $50. Things are going to vary greatly on your skill, and that’s why I mentioned in the beginning to have a thorough plan – I don’t like the idea of telling yourself, I’m just going to post about my life, try to use these tips and get to 100k followers and then see if I can make money… don’t do that. Do you have interests? Can you monetize your interests? Do that. Learn about how to monetize your interests.

I’ve made offers to work with people based off their ability like this is a real thing that people do. I needed a graphic designer for some Instagram posts, I found one, offered him some money, and we got to work. Shout out to my boy.

https://www.instagram.com/digitalhafizz/

Again, I’m not trying to give you non-advice by saying “figure it out, try a bunch of things”, I’m telling you that you should know your worth, you should know how to negotiate with people, you should know how to sell things, you should know how to conduct a business – those are things that no Instagram course are going to teach you, because all of those things are a 5-10 hour course on their own.

That’s why I’m kind of against the idea of dropshipping random viral products or these dropshipping courses that tell you how to make money – it’s not focused on any specific talent or trait that you obtained, there’s rarely any business skills being taught and there is often this expectation that you already know a bunch of things, like setting up a Shopify store, buying hosting, buying a domain, whatever it may be. and I think that’s where real money comes in. I don’t think real money comes from a video like this because if I told you here’s what you need to do to make $500 a day, then it becomes a get-rich-quick scheme where there is no talent or trait or skill involved.

If you are a company, I’d maybe do like a 90%/10 strategy when it comes to promoting your products, so every 10 posts, you can include one straight up ad. Ideally, you’d want to include your products naturally in your posts, while still maintaining some level of information and entertainment that could benefit people who may be on the fence with your products. I show some examples of this in the next section.

Cool Accounts, Neat Examples & Things of Interest & Ethan’s Opinion Corner (The Finale)

So, I didn’t know what to name this section, and it’s basically just a frantic “final thoughts” and more examples that I wanted to share for various reasons. A lot of this course was scripted if you couldn’t tell, I just didn’t want to forget things and I’ve taken too many hits to the head in football to attempt this without some kind of script. The full transcript will be available on the notion document too.

So, let’s just take a look at some accounts that I like, and I’ll give some positive feedback, and then I’ll give my closing thoughts. I apologize for the

• Varun.aditya: Is a good account if you’re wondering how to showcase your photography in a Reels format. I know we talked about Jordi previously, but this guy has a pretty similar style and it works really well for him, he’s a photographer and in one of his videos he presents a photo by having a countdown, which I like because it’s going to force people to watch his video, giving a positive signal to the algorithm that you were interested in the content.
• Made.by.james: A really good graphic design account, he pretty actively shows his process through carousels, it’s got a really cool aesthetic, so big shout-out to James, he does some really cool work and he gets good engagement. 2k likes, 100s of comments. Good stuff.
• Becca Means: Super good engagement, good consistent content, keeps it aligned, got all her followers from Tik Tok, I believe. I think she has 1m+ on Tik Tok and she managed to grow to about 250k on Instagram. A good example of someone who brought Tik Tok energy to Instagram and still kept her content really native to the platform. Also, please respond to my DMs. I’m kidding.
• Max Taylor Lift: Another huge tik tokker who is translating his audience to instagram, has his links in his bio, gets insane engagement, and also keeps his reels off his feed grid, I like that, it’s a nice touch. I think it’s clean, it looks nice. Also, please respond to my DMs. I’m kidding.
• SetActive: is a cool brand – take a lot – maybe too much – influence from the Yeezy brand, but they’re a good example on how to create content for a clothing company that’s native – it doesn’t look like they regurarly post pictures that you’d find on their store on their instagram, which I think that’s a good sign, but they still have a level of similarity between their Instagram and their store, and they have a nice consistent theme.
• Raddad: one of the best monetization strategies I’ve seen on a meme account. I like how they throw their merch on the memes in the carousels.
• Zach King: obviously you’re probably familiar with him, one of the most consistent viral mobile creators ever. Dude kills it.
• Black – One of the most aesthetic feeds, very good with using all forms of media that Instagram offers, I like that they just have black story highlight covers. Lots of cool stuff here.
• Gorilla_Mind

Summary & Myths & Takeaways

So, here is some of my closing thoughts & final summary to conclude this course. In no particular order.

• Treat Instagram like your homepage. Instagram isn’t dead, it’s just going to serve a different purpose moving forward.
• Use Tik Tok. Create Reels. Post your reels to Tik Tok and YouTube shorts to get the most out of your effort. Even if you refuse to create Reels, use Tik Tok to get better inspiration for your content at the bare minimum and so you can stay up-to-date with the most relevant creators in your niche.
• Don’t overcomplicate the algorithm. It’s basically just going to put the most engaging content in front of people who they think want to see it. There’s no “tricks” or “secrets” to make your content more “fit” for the algorithm, it’s completely and purely related to how your audience reacts to it.
• Whenever you get mad at the “algorithm”, replace that word with “audience”.
• Follow inspiration and peer accounts in your niche. Study what they do right. Study their engaging content and learn from it. Leverage the peer accounts to increase your engagement as much as you possibly can by helping them increase their engagement.
• Add value in the comment section, but never hijack or spam someone else’s comment section. Answer questions from other people that go unanswered. Be supportive to people. Be friendly. Be knowledgeable. The energy you put out in the universe will return to you.
• Avoid Black Hat methods. It’s not worth it. Learning how to do things the correct way is way more beneficial because it’s going to be more sustainable.
• Instagram wants you on their content as long as possible, so the most important factor in determining “engagement” is the time they spend on your content and your account. Maximize the time people will commit to you. Don’t bore them. Don’t make long captions for no reason. You need to be the perfect balance of “keeping things interesting” and “keeping their attention”. Find ways to make your account addicting. I know that sounds like non-advice, but you want your account to be memorable and something that people like to check in on.
• Organic growth without reels is practically dead on Instagram. The chances of you “blowing up” and “going viral” without creating Reels is low. It’s possible. It’s definitely still possible, but it’s very, very, very difficult. You’ll have an easier time using Reels.
• Instagram will go through some UI changes this year. I don’t think it’ll affect much of what I said in this course. If Instagram brings back chronological, it won’t be the primary, default option.
• There’s no follower “threshold” you need to monetize your account. You can sell and promote stuff whenever either directly or indirectly, but don’t be surprised if you don’t sell many shirts at 40 followers.
• Engagement is everything. Find that mixture of quality and quantity that allows you to post content that’s still engaging. Post. Post. Post – at least once a day in the form of a Story, a Reel, or a feed post.
• A lot of the “old methods” don’t matter much anymore. Finding the “best time to post” doesn’t matter that much. Finding “the perfect hashtags” don’t matter that much. Optimizing your bio and profile picture doesn’t matter nearly as much as it seems – it’s all going to come down to your ability to create engagaging content. If you can create engaging content, then you’ll get organic reach on the explore, on the suggested, and you’ll get followers.
• A powerful engagement strategy or interaction strategy is necessary for 99% of people. The worse your content is, the more you’ll need to interact with others to grow (and vice versa).
• Understand the fundamentals of business before selling things through your Instagram. Don’t expect an Instagram course or a Tik Tok course or a Shopify course to teach you how to become better at business. Read books. Take selling courses. Be wary of gurus who tell you otherwise.
• Don’t switch niches on Instagram. If you do, start a new account. If you HAVE to post different type of content on Instagram, make sure your audience will be on board. If your audience won’t be on board, then at least post them to Reels so they still have a chance on getting reach.
• Follow unfollow can be effective if you have your targeting method spot-on. Buying giveaway or celebrity loop followers are pointless.
• If you don’t accept the new meta of Reels, you’re going to get left behind. I’m seeing this already with some really powerful influencers who blew up in 2015-2018… before the rise of Tik Tok… and they’ve made little to no reels… and their engagement has fallen off hard. Especially if you’re a personal account – you need to embrace it, otherwise, they’ll be new influencers in your niche that are going to embrace it and replace you. Trust me on that.
• Avoid Echo Chambers – super super super common in the Instagram Marketing niche I’ve noticed. 200 followers and then 80 comments from the same people on all their posts. Don’t always interact and engage with the same people. Make new friends. Find a way to stick out.
• Instagram gives unfair advantages to people who try their new features.
• If you don’t accept the new meta of Reels, you’re going to get left behind. I’m seeing this already with some really powerful influencers who blew up in 2015-2018… before the rise of Tik Tok… and they’ve made little to no reels… and their engagement has fallen off hard. Especially if you’re a personal account – you need to embrace it, otherwise, they’ll be new influencers in your niche that are going to embrace it and replace you. Trust me on that.