Hey guys, it’s Sharon from digital nomad quest. And today we’re gonna go over how to grow on Instagram and really go over my journey on how I was able to gain over 70,000 followers now because they’re new to the channel, welcome. I’m all about teaching on how to build passive income become financially free, and design your best lives. So if you guys are interested in that, make sure to subscribe and hit the bell button to be notified on my latest videos. Now before we begin, I want to thank app sumo for sponsoring today’s video. As an entrepreneur, I’m constantly looking for new tools to manage my business effectively. And that’s why I love app Sumo. It’s this marketplace that allows you to look for new products and tools at a very good discount. And not only can you find those deeply discounted tools, you’ll even see some free tools in this section here, as you can see, and actually picked up a tool recently called in charge on their marketplace and look at their discount, it’s so crazy, and most of their deals are for life. So you’re going to be able to get lifetime access to those tools. So that piece of software that I just picked up, it’s actually a lifetime access deal. So I’m able to access it whenever I want to. And I was thinking it could be very beneficial for me when it came to real estate investing if I needed to reach out to certain partners and certain agents and things like that. And Apsos mission is to help entrepreneurs run their businesses without breaking the bank. And that’s why they partner with big companies and tech to bring you those amazing prices and working with App Sumo. They’re actually bringing us a code that you guys can use. It’s Sharon Tseung 10. And you’ll be able to get 10% off additional on top of the discount you’re already getting on the products that are on the marketplace. It’s offered for the first 500 followers to purchase through the link below. So make sure you use that code, use that link and you’d be able to get an extra 10% off, which is an amazing deal. So I hope you enjoy that discount. And thank you so much app sumo for sponsoring today’s video and helping out our followers. Alright, now let’s get right back into it. So if you guys are interested in this video, you are probably wondering, how can I skyrocket my growth on Instagram and I am with you because back in the day I was stuck at around 3000 or so followers, I couldn’t get it up. And I didn’t know what to do. And it took some experimenting and understanding what successful people were doing to realize what I needed to do in order to grow. And then my growth just exponentially skyrocketed. And you’re probably thinking oh, she probably has a photographer following around giving her these model pics so she can take pictures on the beach or whatever. But if you look over here, I do not have an aesthetically pleasing account like most people do, who are blowing up on Instagram. So I think there are multiple ways to blow up on Instagram without having a team to take photos of you to follow you around to get videos of you things like that. And I’m going to go over different ways that you can do that as well. If you want to blow up on Instagram, my growth on Instagram has really benefited me in a sense of I’m able to connect with my followers a lot better and I’m able to grow my business easier with Instagram as a tool. So I really want to share with you guys my favorite strategies and tips and tricks. And I want you guys to stay till the end because I really go into more detail on those different hacks and things like that in order to grow. So make sure to watch till the end. Alright, so now I’m going to go over basically 11 tips on how you guys can grow on Instagram and I’m going to start more with the basics and then just go into more detail. Like I mentioned, first off, you got to figure out what you’re trying to do with Instagram sounds quite simple. But you know, you have to define your goal. So do you want to make a living as a content creator? Are you trying to teach something? Are you trying to get people to listen to your music you need to define your goals clearly. So for me, for example, I wanted to reach more people to help people learn more about managing their finances and learning about investing and passive income and I have a specific use case for my Instagram. So for example, with my Tik Tok, I feel like it’s more of a discovery thing for me. So like getting more eyeballs on my content, because the way Tik Tok works is it feeds you the stuff that you really are interested in. So it’s going to grab more people to my brand who are interested in finance. Now with Instagram, I’m more about connecting with people and basically responding to DMS putting up stories so they can see more my life. And I put different types of content as well so that people can relate to it in different ways. You know, maybe some people don’t like the short form content as much they might prefer some my infographic content or some of my personal behind the scenes content, stuff like that. So I kind of mix it up there with Instagram and I use that to connect with my audiences. And then I bring them also to YouTube where I can do more in depth content if they want to learn more about specific side hustle or about real estate investing because these are the longer form videos where it can teach for a longer period of time it’s part of my current why to help people build passive income become financially free and design their best lives. So when you’re doing this, you want to know why you’re doing it because a it helps you understand your motivations and goals and that will keep you motivated and then be it’ll help you stay consistent with your content. And that’s gonna be very important to building a valuable brand that people want to follow. Number two, you got to stay in your niche. I feel like we hear this all the time, but it actually is super important because I wouldn’t want to follow someone that’s just all over the place. I have no idea who they are. So why would I even follow them right?
It’s a little different with like celebrities because you kind of know who they are and then you want to follow them as a person. It’s a little different when you are just starting out. People don’t care about you as much they want to get Something from what you are teaching or whatever. So for me, for example, I figured that my audience wants to learn more about side hustles. They want to learn about how to invest, they want to learn how to manage their money. So stay in your niche, figure out what you’re trying to do. And then stick with that. Number three, your content has to be valuable. So you got to ask yourself, what differentiates you from the rest or if your account just looks like everyone else’s, your content needs to either educate, entertain or inspire whatever content I make, I make sure that it fits one of those three buckets. And usually, it’s going to be educate, obviously, but sometimes I dabble in the other ones. And I feel like you got to figure out your focus. If you are an entertainer, you got to entertain, right. If you want to inspire people, you’re going to create different types of content that’s going to do that. But it’s okay to mix and match as well with those different types as long as you are bringing value to your audience and you are sticking with your niche as much as possible. All right, number four tip is honestly a super big one. It’s all about reels To be honest, Rails was everything for growth. For me, basically, I was stuck at that 3k mark, like I mentioned earlier, and then once I started using Rails, it just changed my growth. For me, the reason why Rails is amazing. It’s basically like Tik Tok combined with Instagram, you’re just basically bringing new people onto your platform as easily as possible. When you’re posting a piece of content, it doesn’t have as much chance to spread to people virally. But when you’re using reels, you can get millions of hits, like I’ve gotten millions of hits on my videos, and that has brought people over to me, and then made them follow because they liked what they saw. And that’s key too, because what I mentioned earlier is really important in order for people to actually follow you, right? They might see your content from your reels, and then they come to you. And then they’re like, I don’t know, what’s this about, and they bounce off and they don’t follow you. That’s because it has to all stick with a niche, it has to be valuable. You have to know your purpose when you’re doing the content. So
all this matters, okay? But reels is really what created that discoverability. It’s that thing where you are scrolling through reels and you find new people to follow, right. So that’s why it’s really important. Now I want to give you some tips when you are creating those reels. First off, you got to capture their attention right away. That’s because Watch time is everything. So if you’re watching a piece of content, and you scroll away, it’s going to have less discoverability. Because it’s signaling to the algorithm that your video contents not as interesting as other ones. But if you can capture them right away, and they’re like, Okay, let me see what you have to say next. That’s a good sign. And then next, you have to cut out dead pauses. That’s something I started doing later on. When I watched my video, I realized I had some pauses, I decided to cut those. And that helped my watch time dramatically. People don’t want to wait for your arms and your dead pauses, they want you to go straight to the point. So I try to talk a little faster, and I try to cut out those dead spaces, I would also see what’s working well with other influencers in your niche. And that’s actually what I did. When I first started out, I started seeing what types of content people were making in my finance niche. And then I started making those types of content too, because I knew that those get more hits, it’s already been tested and true. So I tried it out as well, I did my own spin on certain topics. And that really did well with people. So you just got to see what other people are doing? Well, you could look at my channel and what’s doing well. For example, if you are trying to be in the finance niche, you might want to look at other music influencers if you’re trying to grow big on music, so try to get inspired by other successful people and then emulate that yourself. But you know, don’t copy but basically create your own version and learn from successful people. Also, if you are talking a lot in your videos, it’s really good to put text captions in the videos. As you can see, in most of my videos, I put text on like each one of them, because it’s helpful for people to digest the information, maybe they don’t have audio on and they just want to read the text. I’ve done that myself. So you want to try that out to make sure you can help increase watch time as much as possible. And lastly, if you can apply new trends to your niche, that’s a good idea. For example, if there’s like a humorous trend going on, I will try to figure out how I can make it funny in the entrepreneurial sense or the investing sense. So those are basically different tactics I use to blow up my reels, I apply these same things for my tick tock, and some of them do really well. So make sure you’re doing that for your short form reels. Now I’ve talked a lot about reels. But let’s go back into the tips. Number five is an interesting tactic that I try to do sometimes. But basically, when you push out a new post, sometimes it’s beneficial to interact with some of the old comments on previous posts to kind of get them looking back on your profile. So you might want to check on previous posts to see if you’ve commented on all of them. If you haven’t commented on all of them, you might want to respond to some of them. Like I know people actually don’t respond to previous post comments and then do it right after they publish the new post so that they can get eyeballs on the new post. I respond to comments when I can and then like when I push out a new pose, I’ll try to go back and engage but I feel like I kind of do that just to engage with my community as much as I can. If time permits right I get so many comments and DMS that I try my best to get back to everybody but it’s a good tactic. If you are trying to get more exposure on your post comment reply on your previous comments, respond to your DMS and things like that to get more attention on your posts. Number six, I
mix up the types of content that I put on my Instagram. So it’s not just reels. I feel like it’s better to have different types of content For people, so it makes it more interesting for people. If people are sick of reels, they can see some of my infographic posts. I kind of mentioned this before, and also switch it up with some of my personal photos just makes it so that they can bond with me more, I feel like sometimes you will get caught up in just educating and never doing the other things where they’re relating to their audience, for example. So like, some people will just keep teaching about like how to make money, how to do this, and this and this, but they don’t talk about their personal lives. And I think that’s a problem. Because if you want people to relate to you, you got to show a little bit more of yourself and kind of talk with their audience to social platform. So it’s always a good idea to build your community engage with them. Number seven, you can engage with story posts. So what I do sometimes is every week, I try to have like questions or polls, because Instagram Stories allows you to do certain things like that, so that you can engage with your audience. And like I mentioned, I try to keep it more fun and personal sometimes with my stories, or they can see a little bit more of my life. But those story features where you can really ask them questions like, hey, which type of investing? Do you prefer real estate or stocks, or even personal questions about like, hey, ask me anything. Like those are really good to get more engagement on your stories and more eyeballs on your profile. Number eight, you can occasionally promote your infeed posts onto your stories. So what you can do is you can tap Share on your infeed posts, and then share that onto your Instagram story. And then I put like a little tap here button on my story. So let me show you an example. So I can just share this on to my story. And then basically add a sticker, you can put tap here, and then put that on to this story. And that’s kind of what I do, basically. And that allows people to tap on that reel and then see it. So the reason I share posts on to my story is to get more eyeballs onto the post. And that’s really important. I want to say the first hour is actually a good time to try to get as much engagement as possible onto the post because it signals to Instagram that it’s performing. Well, if it gets more clicks, it’s getting more likes gamer comments. So that’s why sometimes I share the post onto the story. I try to make it not super annoying for people though. So I don’t do it all the time. But I think it helps to get more engagement on your profile. Number nine is a tactic I personally do. I don’t think most people do this. But I share some of my responses in my DMs but anonymously to my story. This might not be applicable for all of you guys. But basically, I get a ton of DMS and I don’t know how to tackle everything sometimes. So sometimes I use them all as educational moments, because a lot of people just have investing questions, real estate questions that they want me to answer. And a lot of them have the same question. So because of that, I’ll respond to them. And then I’ll cut off who actually asked me those questions. And I’ll just post it up. So it’s anonymous, and it shows my response to it. And then I put on the top like, here are my thoughts on blank. This basically is like kind of hitting two birds with one stone for me. It helps increase engagement with my community by sharing my responses to my followers and answering their questions, because so many people have the same questions and then allows me to go through my DMs and try to get to as many people as possible, a lot of people have actually been surprised that I actually answer my DMs, I like responding to people because I like to talk to the people in my community. And it’s part of my why and I really like helping people out. So that’s why I try to respond to as many people as I can. And then number 10 engage with your community with a $1 ad strategy. There’s $1 ad strategies basically created by Gary Vaynerchuk. And he’s basically saying put your two cents on nine trending Instagram posts or 10 different hashtags that are relevant to your niche and your brand. I’ve seen so many people actually do this and do it really well. There are multiple accounts I can think of that don’t want to do reels, but they do a really good job with engaging with their community, engaging with the different posts on their feed, and then also engaging with the top trending posts under the different hashtags they are targeting. And because of that they ended up getting a ton of followers, they get a ton of engagement on their posts, and it’s really cool to see them do that. So what does $1.80 strategy, I basically want to say that real is not the only way to blow up your brand. If you don’t want to do reels, you can totally implement this strategy and do really well with it. But I feel like it takes a lot of work because you have to do this every single day, you have to basically comment on 90 posts a day, but that consistency will definitely pay off. I would say that not only just commenting on the 90 different posts based off of hashtag also comment on posts of big influencers in your niche because I’ve seen people do that for my posts, actually. And they comment on every single post that I put out, but it works because it also develops a connection with me like I started responding to them. I know who they are, and they get noticed by other people. So it’s a grind but it totally works. I’ve seen at least three accounts blow up in this way. Number 11 I would say start Instagram lives after you start growing more. It’s probably not a good idea when you’re just starting out to do lies because you won’t really have that many people come in if you are a brave soul though. Totally do that and be consistent with it. If you Want to because it’s actually really good because it brings your story up to the front because you’re doing a live. So I think Instagram really cares about lives and pushes that out. So if you can do that, it’s a great thing. Now I’m more introverted, so it’s not really natural for me to do it. But then when I started growing an audience, it’s actually been really fun like me and Shawn will jump on to lives and talk with my community. And we essentially do q&a is with our audience, they will ask us a bunch of questions, and we’ll just answer it for like an hour or so. So I think it’s a good practice to do because connecting with their audience is just so crucial. It’s so much better to have 1000 true fans than have millions of fans that actually don’t really care about you. And I really cherish the deeper connections that I create with my followers. So I know I said 11 tips, but I got to end it with this last one that everyone always says, but you got to stay consistent. staying consistent is super important. For any different platform that
you choose. I’ve been consistent with my instagram with my tick tock, and with my YouTube some days, I might not want to do it. And that’s fine, because I used to post daily and I started doing less and less, but it still works. Even if I’m doing like two to three a week. That’s pretty freakin good. So if you can do that, that’s amazing. So try to post consistently if you can, if once a week is your max, go for that. And that’s better than dropping off after posting a bunch of times, okay, it’s better to space it out and actually be consistent with it for a long period of time. And not only do I post the minimum of two to three a week, I still post on my Instagram story almost daily, I think pretty much daily because I like to try to keep my audience connected with me. And I think it’s a valuable thing too, that you should try to stay top of mind for your followers try to post stories if you can, and bring that personal touch. So I hope this is informational for you. I honestly feel like these are some of the biggest things that I do for my brand. It’s not like some crazy secret or hack, right with a lot of these tips. Ultimately, it’s just the grind it’s just the hustle and also thinking smart you have to plan it out in the beginning that’s kind of why I brought over the basic ones of kind of sticking with their niche being aligned with your purpose making your content valuable. Those are the foundational pillars and then you got to be consistent with it and also implement the strategies I mentioned as well if you guys liked this episode, let me know in the comments below. If anything was surprising to you or not subscribe hit the bell button to be notified on my latest videos and I’ll see you guys in the next one.Transcribed by https://otter.ai