Zero To 750k On Instagram | How I Did It
I'm about to hit 750 000 followers on my first ever instagram account millionaire dream and later this year we're gonna cross the million follower mark on the account here's how we did it hopefully you can learn something from this video of me explaining how we did it so long story short i started this account back in 2014 when i was almost 15 so towards .
The end of the year um just as a bit of a side project to start off with i didn't really think too much of it until a couple of months in where i messaged a guy called jason who runs the instagram account millennia underscore mentor and asked him if he could repost some of my content to help me grow because i figured that would be a great way to .
Build my audience now bear in mind this is 2014. theme pages were like almost non-existent the term instagram influencer had yet to be coined no one had heard of garyvee as far as marketing goes and tai lopez i don't even think had started blowing up yet his here in my garage thing i'm pretty sure was after that so when jason got .
Back to me and said he'd happily repost my content but he charges 50 to do so i was kind of blown away and at first i was a little bit confused i didn't realize people made money on social media but that sort of sparked some curiosity and me to learn more about it as at the time i was really fascinated by digital business and business in .
General i was a weird 14 year old and i figured that if he could build a large audience and then start making money every single day from just promoting other businesses on his account i could probably learn how to do it too and so from that point onwards i spent a ton of time pretty much learning as much as i could .
Now at the time there were no youtubers no ebooks no blog posts talking about this stuff and teaching you like you've got today so instead i pretty much just had to try things out fail try something else out fail again try something else out fail again until eventually i'd worked out what didn't work and all that was left was what does work that's .
Pretty much how i learn instagram from those early days was just through failing over and over and eventually finding one thing that works here one thing that works there and putting them together on top of that i did network with other people doing similar stuff to me so i would reach out to other accounts we'd talk we'd help each other .
Out and then i could learn from their failures and they could learn from mine so we were sort of collectively speeding up the process of trial and error and that's the first big growth strategy that i think too many people are not doing today that they should be and it's not some fancy like use this hashtag or useless style of content it literally is .
Just trial and error don't wait until everything is perfect don't wait until you've got the perfect branding the perfect logo the perfect bio the perfect username the perfect social proof the perfect website ready to send traffic to don't wait for all of that to be perfect perfect because that's never going to .
Happen simply start putting out content and over time improve over time work out how to be better on video work out how to create better audio work out what's a better profile picture what's the best bio do it through testing not just thinking things up in your head and trying to guess what's going to work but actually putting it out there trying it .
Seeing what works and then improving from there you'll get results so much faster now the second growth strategy that helped a lot is the fact that i was posting a huge amount of content like sometimes up to five or six times per day from the beginning now this almost feeds off the first point because the more content that you put out there the .
More data that you get as to what is working and what is not and the faster you can come to conclusions about what is the most effective things to be doing what is the most effective hashtags what is the most effective times of day to post what's the most effective fonts to have in your content what type of content works best and so on because .
You've just got so much more data points if you're posting three times a week in the space of a month you might have 10 to 12 pieces of content that you can then go and review it's pretty hard to draw conclusions on anything with that amount of data if you're posting five times a day you've got 150 pieces of content after that month more than 10 .
Times as much you can make a lot of conclusions after that and then in that month you're already so far ahead the other person would take a year to post that much content and therefore learn much slower now i just want to say that i don't always recommend posting this often if you're a personal brand then posting five times per day is probably .
Way too much this is only because i was running a theme page that somewhat had an unlimited pool of content i could create from for a lot of theme for a lot of personal brands sorry i often suggest sort of you know from half to one time per day so you're looking at anywhere from three to seven posts a week but the more content you post assuming it's good .
Stuff the faster you develop your skills of producing great content the more feedback you get from your audience to improve your content and the more new people that are actually going to find your account on instagram because the more pieces of content out there working for you bringing people to your account the faster you grow so as it's a win all .
Around and this goes for any platform youtube included the only strategy that i use to go from videos like this to this footage right now that you're watching and that you have been watching the past few months on the channel is just by uploading twice a week and trying to constantly improve get more comfortable on camera .
Get a better lighting understand what lighting to use understand what mike's good i invested in a mic what editing software is good i hire an awesome editor now which definitely helps but if i were doing that myself you'd learn tweaks and learn different things you can add on the way now the third strategy that we use to grow the account .
From the beginning is what's now called the dollar 80 strategy which was coined by garyvee although i was doing this way before garyvee had ever talked about it in fact i was doing this before garyvee was even posting marketing content because when he did start posting marketing content he actually reached out to accounts like mine mine included .
And paid a bunch of us to promote his content which is how we grew so quickly on instagram i literally sit and some of the boring classes i didn't do this in the entertaining ones that i enjoyed but in boring classes at school i'd pull out my ipod under the desk and pretty much just comment on different posts on different hashtags when i wasn't doing .
Anything when i'd finished my work or if something was just not very fun and i would do that to get my account out there in front of more people this was before there was an algorithm or any limits on how you could do this so some days i might do 50 or 100 comments some days i might do 500 or a thousand like crazy numbers just to help build up the .
Audience shout out to my teachers for not ever taking my phone or ipod off me now the fourth strategy that we use to build up the account is quite a big one and that is something that i see less and less nowadays and that is simply collaborations luckily instagram have actually now brought out a feature where you can very .
Very easily collaborate with another creator which is incredible i wish it was around back then but it's making this even easier but what i'd do back then is you'd simply you promote someone else's content they promote some of yours you both grow and then there are sometimes groups where there would be 14 people in .
A group and then on monday everyone shouts out these two people so the other 13 accounts would all make a promotion for these people and then on the tuesday it would be someone else's turn and then when it was your turn you'd get a promotion from 13 other accounts on that day and you'd see a massive .
Spike in growth now after the first couple months of this strategy i was at a couple thousand followers and a couple months later i was at around 20 000 followers and i'd made my first dollar from instagram selling a shout out to a brand for 25 i don't actually remember who it was to i wish i could find them and that leads .
On to the fifth strategy that i use to grow the account which you can still use today as i started making money from the account i pulled that back into growing the account faster and faster now like i said earlier you couldn't really buy courses in there weren't really anyone selling courses back then um on instagram marketing that is .
And facebook didn't own instagram so you couldn't run facebook ads so pretty much the only way you could grow was by just like the only paid strategy to grow anyway was paying larger accounts to promote your account on top of this it also got access to these people so someone with 200 000 followers might not reply to your messages but if you .
Message them and buy a promotion from them they would reply to you and you could ask them questions and if you were consistently buying from them you'd be able to talk to them and learn from them this is actually what happened and how i met a lot of larger creators my first year of doing this i'd had over a hundred thousand followers and within .
Three years was it about three hundred thousand and this was before the algorithm was in place which actually made it harder to grow an audience despite what people think like people are of this misconception that before the algorithm it was easier to grow it definitely wasn't like it was way easier to get engagement from your existing .
Followers but it was so much harder to grow because you couldn't get explore each you couldn't get reals reach you could get a bit of hashtag reach but like content didn't go crazy viral like it does today you didn't see accounts go from zero to a million just by posting content you might have seen that if they were like ridiculously attractive or if .
They were famous offline but nowadays you see accounts go from zero to a million in six months sometimes just from content uh theme pages specifically and you could never do that back then for free you can to that the main way that i grew was simple just hard work and consistently putting an effort by the time i was 17 and a few years into .
This i started also buying up other accounts and i had around a million followers total one of these accounts was income notebook which i bought i built up and then i sold last year there was another account called words of success which i bought again early on built up made some income off and then sold and that's actually close to a .
Million nowadays it was millionaire.existence and there were quite a few others there was another four or five that i owned bought and sold over the years that i just can't find now side note though terrible idea to sell them i wish that i had hung on to them but i guess i just didn't know what i was doing at the time .
Or i didn't know what i know now because had i simply held onto them keep growing them hired someone good to run and monetize them and i just kept reinvesting the profits i'd probably own 10 to 20 million followers worth of instagram accounts and now be making 30 to 100k per month passively from theme pages which i'm .
Definitely not and there's gutting but you know you learned so educational point don't sell cash flowing assets that make passive income and grow month on month anyway by this point i was 17 nearly 18 in the final year of high school uh making around 2 000 a month now just to be clear the end of the year .
Is also the end of the school year in new zealand in new zealand we keep things simple school starts at the start of the year ends at the end of the year we don't start it halfway through for whatever reason weird idea if you ask me to start halfway through the year however the next couple years after that from january 2018 through to january .
2021 the growth of the account slowed massively and and for those three years i went from 300k to 490k so the first three years the hardest typically i'd gone from zero to 300k and then even with all the knowledge from that point i went from my growth halved even with .
More more knowledge more experience more of an audience etc because i outsourced the page and i had someone else run it for me uh and i focused on my agency where we would work with clients to help them grow now outsourcing the page itself was not what caused this drop in growth and drop in reach it was simply the fact that i didn't put the right .
Systems and people in place to scale without me which i now have again you live you learn you make mistakes and then you learn from that and then you can apply that moving forward and whilst outsourcing the management of the page really hurt the growth that was actually great for my business as at the time i decided to have a year where i didn't go .
To university after i'd finished high school figured i'd give business a shot see what i could do with this and by outsourcing that and focusing on the agency i was able to grow it from 2000 a month to 10 000 a month in that year during that year we helped one of our bigger clients russell brunson go from 40 000 followers to half a million which .
Was way faster than any of my pages grew and we were getting awesome results so it was pretty cool to work with him he even posted some of our content and so on showed it on screen at funnel hacking live in the us which was pretty cool as an 18 year old from small town new zealand getting back on track to how we then built this account from 400 and .
Something thousand followers up to three quarters of a million and on its way to a million followers takes us to the start of 2021 which is last year about 12 months ago at this point i wanted to turn things around and start getting results i wanted to build up the account you know just for networking for .
Generating an income and just for growing the account in general so i hired someone good to run the page i put some good strategies and systems in place and we went to work getting results now we're never aiming to bring back an account that's had extremely low reach for a long period of time it's always going to be hard the first few .
Months especially will not be amazing you're not going to see great reach your follower growth may even go down even further like you could be losing 20 followers a day and you could be doing that for a year and then you start trying to revive an account and all of a sudden you're losing a hundred a day but then it .
Hockey sticks up and just takes off so the first few months we saw no results for the first three months of 2020 in fact we didn't really see anything in january 2021 we had 490 000 followers we put in a ton of work over those three months and got to 497 000 by march so 7 000 growth across three months with half a million followers in total not .
Particularly great three months later at the start of june we'd have 558 000 followers so we went from seven thousand and three months to sixty thousand in three months which was a nice bump and then three months later in early september we'd gained another hundred thousand putting us at 658 000 .
And now starting the new year we're about to hit 750 000 followers since we already had an audience the main thing was just bringing it back to life and starting to grow it again and we did this by focusing entirely on content and this is what you should be doing too if you're .
Trying to build an account so we focused on the right reels the right images and the right carousels to build the audience both build the relationship with existing followers and generate new followers nothing fancy lots of content finding what patterns work doubling down on them experimenting .
Finding what works doubling down on them experimenting finding what works and just continually refining the process which if you get anything out of this video hopefully you get that take action now start putting out content and then double down on what's working rather than trying to spend forever coming up with the perfect piece of content which .
Will probably flop and then getting annoyed post content put it out there put it out there put it out there see what's working double down on that keep experimenting double down on that and then later this year the plan is to head over a million followers pretty much through just doing what we're doing and .
Just continuing to rinse and repeat that same process and that sort of sums up the journey of this account from zero to 750 000 followers later this year we plan to hit a million just through like i said doing the same thing and so i really appreciate any of you who follow the account who share the content who enjoy it you're awesome now if you want .
Some more technical advice on the nuts and bolts of how to build your audience and grow your instagram account to start generating an income you can check out the other videos on my channel as i've got a lot more how-to tutorials i've also created some skillshare classes which are more step-by-step some of them also include youtube videos from here .
But it's been formatted into a more laid out plan rather than all over the show so you can access those classes for free with a month-long trial i'll leave those links below and if you want one-on-one help to grow your instagram and start generating customers for your business then flip me a dm on .
Instagram at josh ryan and we'll have a chat and see if we can help you that's it for me i hope this video helped you inspired you taught you something and i'll see you in the next one
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In todays video I break down how I grew my Instagram from zero to over 750,000 followers on Instagram using organic growth strategies after the past few days. Free Instagram ebook & training series: http://ignewsletter.com Free trial of Flick (#1 hashtag & analytics tool): https://www.flick.tech/?fpr=josh-ryan57 Follow me on Instagram for daily tips, tricks & insights: https://instagram.com/joshryan Apply for one on one coaching: https://forms.gle/pGPw75dDbTNQ7dDR9 Free Courses On Skillshare: (free month long trial) Instagram Masterclass: https://skl.sh/382rYVf Instagram Hashtags Training: https://skl.sh/3n1p1x1 Tools that I use & recommend: Instagram Hashtag tool: https://www.flick.tech/?fpr=josh-ryan57 Youtube SEO tool: https://www.tubebuddy.com/joshryannz Business Inquiries: josh@cleverpreneur.com
