0 to 100,000 Instagram Followers in 6 Months (My Story)

0 to 100,000 Instagram Followers in 6 Months (My Story)

This year I grew an Instagram page from 0to 100,000 active followers in just 6 months. Here's how I did it, the mistakes I made alongthe way and how you can replicate the same results without making the same mistakes asI. So in 2020, I went from a student who sidehustled for a little bit of extra money so I could upgrade from a pot noodle... to twopot noodles... To now being someone who's able to make myonline Instagram business my full-time job. I did this by taking just one page all theway to 100,000 active followers.

 Now I'm not going to ramble on too long beforegetting into the content of the tutoral but if you stick around, at some point in thetutoral, I'm going to flash a code and this code will give you my Instagram ebook, theInstagram Bible, for completely free. So if you see that code, go to IGBible dotcom, the link is in the description too and try it out. It will work for the first 3 people, but ifthis tutoral does really well, I'll add more uses to the code so definitely try it outand also leave a like and follow as this will help the algorithm show the tutoral tomore people which means more uses for the code. So let's dive into how I actually grew thepage. Let's start from the start, the first 100followers. 

Which I'd argue is actually the hardest partof growing the account as once you've done that, you really get the ball rolling. I mean just look at how many pages are inmy niche, the finance niche. And I imagine that your niche too will havea lot of competition. So you'll have to do something to stand out. One of the first things that I did in orderto make my page stand out is I'd use these carousel posts and one the first slide, Iwouldn't really give away too much information, it would be like a title page. 

This would force people to stop scrollingthrough the hashtag feed or wherever else they may be finding my content and actuallyclick on it and swipe all the way through and then I'd end these carrousel posts witha call to action to follow me, these did extremely well, so well in fact, that one of these posts,when I first started on instagram has produced more followers than lots of the posts thatI post now with over 150,000 followers. It's a really good strategy and although youcan't keep it forever because the content takes much longer to make and doesn't necessarilygo viral, I'd definitely recommend it to all accounts just to make yourself stand out alittle bit and make yourself a little bit different to the competition. You may look at the big pages in your nicheand see that they're all doing the same thing and it's very tempting to copy it becauseyou know, don't break something that already works right? 

Well, no because they only manage to havethis kind of content because when they post, it goes viral. But your post with 100 followers, less than100 followers, it's not going to go viral so you have to provide massive value to convincepeople to follow your page over a much, much larger page. Alongside this strategy, I also did a hashtagstrategy. And I don't mean using hashtags, I mean goingthrough hashtags and going to the recent tab, scrolling through to find posts that wereactually similar to mine, from people that were really running their accounts, not justbot accounts, so these real people in my niche, similar number of followers, I'd like thepost, I'd comment on the post, I'd follow them, I'd DM them, I'd do everything thatI can so that they know my presence. And then they'd then return that, they'd followme back, they'd comment back, they'd share my posts and really does create long-termrelationships with other accounts. 

And these long term relationships, reallyhelp you build your first few thousand followers and in fact, some of these pages that I networkedwith right at the beginning, I still talk to now and we still engage with each other'sposts now, even though some of them have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousandsof followers. But here comes one of my first big mistakes. My first big mistake was using DM groups,because a lot of these people that you network with, they invite you to them, they soundlike a good idea, so you join. Well, actually they're not such a good idea. The Instagram Terms of Service actually bansthis kind of engagement group and they can tell because when you're using an engagementgroup, they can see, oh "Those likes are coming from that group, he's in that group, so whyis he getting likes from a group he's already in? 

That's suspicious!" Now you won't get banned for using engagementgroups, but it will decrease your Instagram health score. This is a really important concept to understand. The algorithm isn't just good or bad, it'sa scale. And everything you do contributes to the algorithmand if you start using DM groups too often, what will happen is your health score willdecrease more and more and Instagram just won't show your posts to new people. So I really do not recommend using DM groups. Especially not ones on Instagram, you cando one's on Telegram, potentially but you still might get out so just don't let it bea too high percentage of your total engagement. Instead, just comment on people's posts straightfrom the feed or straight from the hashtag feed and if you notice somebody never commentsback, then just unfollow them, find someone new and hopefully they will engage back.

 So these 2 relatively simple strategies havehelped me to get my first 100 followers and I've continued to use these strategies toget my first few thousand followers but before I had the chance to reach 1k followers, disasterstruck. Somewhere between 100 and 1000 followers,I'd spent so much time on the account, so many hours grinding out these strategies thatInstagram banned my account. They thought I was a bot and I thought therewas nothing I can do, I'm a little tiny account, Instagram's not going to notice me tryingto get my account back. But I tried anyway, I spammed every singlecontact form, I went on my personal profile and I spammed the report a problem thing overand over again and eventually they emailed to say it was a mistake and they unbannedme. So there's an important message behind this,in fact there's 

2. The first one is if you do get banned, don'tgive up, don't think "That's it! My accounts gone forever", Instagram are hardto contact but it is possible. I've seen loads of people have accounts thathave 100,000+ followers, they get banned and they try for maybe 2 days to get the accountback and then give up, do not give up and secondly if you really can't get the accountback, you've put all that work in, don't let it go to waste. Just try again, come back, this time scalethe engagement down just a little bit for the first few months and try again and honestlyeventually you will succeed. Sometimes it seems like Instagram is againstyou but in the long run it will work out. When I got the account back, I grinded thesame methods, just a little bit more slowly this time. And I started to make some money from thesefree stock affiliate links and this kind of inspired me to start investing some moneyto grow the account. And this is where a really cycle of mistakesbegan. So, now this is the story of how I went from1000 followers, all the way to 10,000 followers and exactly what I did wrong.

 I was approached by someone, offering somethingcalled a target shoutout, and it was just $30 for a 1000 real followers, related tomy niche. I know you're thinking "Oh, these must befake" but no, target shoutouts are actually a really good way to grow your account. But back then, I was a little bit naive anddidn't really understand if I was paying $30 I was going to be getting the worst demographicsof followers. These followers, they engaged, they liked,they commented, they DM'd me, they shared my posts, so it sounds like I might have gota really good deal. And I thought I did. That's until I started to reach 10,000 followersand people started to ask to buy shoutouts from me. I was thinking "This is great!" and they'dalways ask "Can I see your audience insights?" and I'd show them and it was over 80% Indiaat the time and this is absolutely nothing against India but advertisers do not wantIndian followers, they want American audiences and European audiences. Cuz on average they spend more money. 

So even though I was very thankful to havethese followers, I could not monetize my page with such a high Indian demographic. And that was why the target shoutouts hadbeen so cheap. Because they knew that and they were sellingit so they could only sell these Indian followers for a lower price. You know isn't even something that might crossyour mind like me you might just get hooked on getting followers and as long as you'regetting followers, you're happy. You really need to stop and think "Who doI want my audience to be? Where do they come from, what are they interestedin?" 

Think about all these things, think aboutwhat advertisers might want from your niche too and then build your whole page aroundthat and then any paid promotion you do, make it target what you want your audience to be. So after I hit 10k followers, I switched fromtarget shoutouts to Facebook ads, in the hopes that this would solve my issues. Now, Facebook ads allowed me to grow all theway to 60,000 followers and for a long time I was at university, I wasn't on my page much,I was just enjoying university life, until things got crazy in March, but before thenI was spending like $5 a day on Facebook ads and growing 100's of followers, every singleday. It was cheap, my page was growing, it tookbarely any effort, I was really happy and if you guys leave 50 likes on this tutoral,I'll make a whole new tutoral about my FB ads strategy, because it was a good strategy andit worked for a long time, and you can definitely change it to make it fit your audience butit will take a whole tutoral to explain it. But there was one big problem, again withwhat I was doing. 

When I did reach 60k, I looked at my audiencedemographics again and realized that although it had improved, it was still quite an issue. Because Facebook ads had improved my demographicsbut not enough to convince advertisers to promote on my page. I was probably being rejected by about halfof the people that wanted to promote on my page. I had a choice: offer really low prices formy shoutouts or find a way to change my audience. And you know that I needed that Instagrammoney to buy sick whips. Anyway, this is when I started using targetshoutouts again. Except this time, I was working with the personwho's now my business partner, and we were able to work together to create our own targetshoutout service, so this time I could target the countries that I wanted, by contactingpages and finding out their audience insights and make lists of ones that fit the Americanand European demographic. Ones that were like a bit of American, a bitof Asian followers. And ones that were purely Asian followersto create these 3 tiers. 

And then I exclusively promoted my page onthe American and European tier. This drastically improved my demographicsto the point where now most advertisers are very happy with my audience insights and veryhappy to advertise on my page and I can now earn a lot more money from my page. But what exactly are target shoutouts? And can you just do your shoutouts yourself? Well the thing about target shoutouts is wehave a lot of clients at any one time. Meaning that we can promote 5 pages on just1 shoutout. This drastically decreases the price to getthe followers. 

We've also tried many, many forms of ad copyand over time have created viral ads that gain a lot of followers. So, I think if you were to do it yourselfwith your own shoutouts, it would cost 10-15x the amount. In which case, I'd recommend doing Facebookads. But if you can find a reliable target shoutoutservice, it's a really, really good strategy. It allowed me to grow all the way to 100kand I could finally have an audience to start making me money. And you know that was the time when I decidedto become a hype beast and buy some AirPods. You know I could've probably bought a bettercar for the price of those AirPods. Self-deprecating jokes aside, I used thisstrategy for 6 months to get to 100,000 followers, alongside my organic growth strategies thatI previously mentioned. But after 100,000, I started to switch thingsup so definitely keep realing. And see what else I did. 

So now you know how I got to 100,000 followersbut at the time of recording, I'm at 160,000 followers so what am I doing now and whatcan you do if you have no money to invest into your page? Well if you smash the like button for therealearn algorithm, I'll tell you how. Just kidding, you already know I'm gonna tellyou anyway. So, nowadays, I still use these same shoutoutsbecause I want to get to a million followers in the next 2 years which is a huge, massivegoal but if you're thinking you want to invest a bit of money into your page, but then starttaking a lot of the profit, very soon. Then you can do this to 100,000/50,000 orif you've got really, really good content just 10,000 followers because my page nowgenerates hundreds of followers every single day organically so at this point, the businesswould have almost no expenses if I just wanted to leave it growing organically, take theprofit and it really, really, be quite easy to do now. 

So it's very, very tempting for me to juststop investing in my page now and take the profit but I know if I keep investing andget to 1 million followers, the page will easily generate $1,000 a day so I'm keepingup the shoutout train all the way to the big... one... million. So on top of that I do shoutout for shoutoutswith other big pages my size. And I also work on creating viral contentnow, rather than those carousel posts from before. As some of this viral content goes to theexplore page and gets me hundreds of thousands of views. In fact, at the time of recording, every singleone of my posts reaches the explore page. But you might be wondering what to do if youhave no money to invest into your page. 

Well, there is still ways to grow, withoutspending any money on your page. So, besides only eating one pot noodle tosave money, you can also save money on investing into your page by using the strategies I mentionedearlier, at the start of the tutoral and when you do start to grow, you get to a few thousandfollowers, you start doing shoutout for shoutouts with pages your size, do maybe 1 a day. No more than that. But aim for 1a day and your page will startto gain traction. Just from these free promotion methods. There's also a really good method that I think,Gary Vee might've mentioned at some point. But you turn on post notifications for bigpages in your niche and now when you see that notification come up, you click on it straightaway, you leave a valuable comment, it must be like 2-3 sentence, not just like "Oh comeand follow me please", really respond to the post, provide value to the followers of thatpage and then they'll come over to your page and follow you. So there's some other really good strategiesto use that are completely free and I'd keep doing those things until you reach 10,000followers. 

Now, when you do reach 10,000 followers, you'llbe able to start taking money from the page through shoutouts and other methods that I'vementioned. So at this point, you really should startinvesting in your page. You only have to invest the revenue from thepage, you don't have to put any money upfront yourself. And this will really help you scale your accountquickly. Now, if you don't know how to make money fromyour page, I made a aritcle about this a few days ago, so that'll be on the card somewherenow, it'll appear. And also if you follow, then I'll be releasingnew aritcles about Instagram monetization in future. Because really I could make 100s of tutorals,just on that topic. There's so many ways, and there's so manylike ways within the ways. Nerd moment aside. Let's keep going. So yeah, like I said. Once you've started making money from thepage, go back to the other methods that cost money and try them out and you'll be ableto make that sweet, sweet Instagram dollar. So, that was the story of how I went from0 to 100,000 Instagram followers in just 6 months. 

I hope you liked it, and if you did, pleasedo follow. I'm a new website, so I really, really appreciate,every single subscription and I notice every time I get that notification. So please do follow and I'll be bringingout more tutorals about Instagram. But also things about investing, personalfinance, self-development or just anything that helps you and helps you make money. The feedback on the first tutoral was overwhelminglypositive and that's inspired me to keep making more content to help out you guys. So thank you and goodbye!