Hey boss.
So since you liked this video so much on the six things that I do every single day to grow
my YouTube channel, I figured I'd make a similar style video, but for Instagram this time and
this time it's only four things.
I do four very simple things, every single day to keep my count growing without actually
posting very often at all.
If you follow me, you know I don't post often, I don't use the follow for follow strategy.
I really don't follow that many people at all.
So these are all things that are super easy to do.
Very organic, very holistic growth strategies for your Instagram account.
I'm super excited to dive into these, if you are to give this video a like make sure you
hit the subscribe button and the bell to be notified every single time I post a new video
and let's get into it.
And before we get into these four very simple things, I did want to give our viewer shout
out of the week.
I love you guys so much.
I love your comments, it means the world.
And this week shout out, goes to Fia Garcia.
She has a great DIY channel.
Make sure you guys check it out and show her some love and go follow her on Instagram as
well.
Show her some sunnysquad love.
Tell her I sent you and to be featured in one of my upcoming videos with the viewer
shout out, make sure that you subscribe to my channel, be sure to leave a comment and
make sure that it's actually thoughtful because I do read them.
And that's how you qualify to get one of those shout outs.
All right, without further ado, let's get into this.
The first thing that I do on my Instagram account every day is focused on community.
So that's really the first category and it's really, really simple.
Let me show you exactly what I do.
You never want to be the cool popular kid at the party who everybody's like waiting
to talk to them because that makes you super unapproachable and kind of intimidating.
You want to be the really friendly person at the party, the hostess with the mostess
you want to be talking to everybody within the niche or the category that you're trying
to build an audience.
And even if you don't know what kind of audience you're trying to build, you want to kind of
find mentors or people who have an audience that's ideal to you and use them for this
community aspect.
So I'm going to show you this example on my phone.
If I just look up, let's say Marie Forleo and her audience is very similar to mine.
So what I would simply do is I'm going to go onto one of her most recent posts, and
I'm going to go into the comment section and I'm going to make sure that I am commenting
and also liking comments from people who are qualified people from my own audience.
So what I do is I will go to their profile.
I love this female entrepreneur.
Perfect.
So I'm going to give that a heart and I'm going to say, You're doing great.
Great.
All put your best is all you can do.
You can do.
And I'll give her a little heart.
So it's not about just liking every single thing and giving a little heart to every comment
it's about actually creating value and making people feel seen that really is the secret
sauce to social media is making people feel seen.
So that is simply what I'll do.
And I'll do that to as many accounts as I can.
And I'll spend a few minutes tackling that on a daily basis, and you'd be amazed at how
it snowballs and creates this momentum for more and more followers to find, discover
your account and become part of your community as well as the person that they were originally
following.
Now, the next step is relationships.
So you're building your community.
You're creating engagement, you're actively doing the outreach.
You're not waiting for people to come to you.
Now it's time to take it a step further.
So let's say that person that I just responded to on Marie Forleo's post and I'm going to
go and actually send her a DM.
So female entrepreneur here to encourage other women to tap into their inherent creative
potential and create a life that brings true joy with [inaudible 00:03:53].
I'm also going to like a few of her most recent posts to really like put myself on her radar.
And if there's one that really resonates with me, I will leave a comment on it as well.
So now I'm going to send her a message and just say hello.
I wanted to say hi and introduce myself.
I caught your comment on Marie's posts.
And I just wanted to send you lots of love because I know this has been a really crazy
time, and I know I might be a stranger to you now, but if there's anything that I can
do to help or any content I could create to help, please let me know and don't be a stranger.
And I do that.
So it really does make a difference.
And you're probably thinking, "Oh my gosh, this must take you so long."
But if you watch this video on the five minute growth rule that I have on Instagram, that's
really all it takes, is five minutes a day.
And you can of course do 10, 20 minutes, whatever you like, the more effort you put in, ultimately
the more growth you're going to get, but these little simple things make a massive difference.
And the other bonus of this is it helps you actually curate your content ideas because
let's be honest.
Sometimes it's hard to think of new content to post on your story or to do a live on or
to even post in your feed.
So by asking people how it can help them, I get the best content ideas.
So the other thing that I do to build relationships is anyone who follows me I try and send them
a voice note that day.
So let's go and pick some people that I'm going to send a new voice note to.
Let's choose you.
Love it.
Oh, she's in Langley.
She's super close to me.
Okay, lets send you a message and I think it was Nikki.
Hey Nikki.
I just wanted to say an official welcome to my little Instagram community here.
Thanks so much for following.
And I also saw that you are super close to me.
I'm just in Vancouver.
So sending you lots of love and light, and please, please let me know.
Is there anything that I can create for you or share with you content wise that'd be really
helpful for you right now?
I know you were making tutorials.
I saw that in your bio.
So any little tips or tricks that you need from me, please let me know.
And again, I do that with about five people a day, five to 10 people a day, and I get
a ton of content ideas.
Plus I'm nurturing relationships, which is a huge piece to performing super well in the
algorithm because Instagram does pay attention to how much you're talking to people in direct
messages and deepening the relationship and not just focusing on the vanity metrics, because
those aren't really the key strategy or metric that shows Instagram, that you have a valuable
account.
It's how much you're actually talking to people.
Imagine that.
It's called social media for a reason.
And you'd be really surprised how many times this can actually turn into a new client.
If somebody has a YouTube specific question or they're wanting to create an online course,
I'll often tell them, "Oh, you know what that's actually what I do.
And I'd love to tell you more about it."
And then we get to talking and then eventually they become a client.
So it's a really amazing organic way to also build your client roster as well.
And then the next thing to build relationships still under that umbrella is I will use research
via hashtags to find new accounts to interact with and also new accounts where I can find
like-minded audiences and followers that I can do that same thing that I did in the community
step and reach out, send a note and just make myself known to them.
So I keep a list of hashtags in my phone, as you can see here, and they all have different
categories, but I'm going to just type in one of these hashtags right now.
Let's put in online entrepreneur and see what comes up.
And simply what I do when I look up this tag is I'm going to do three things.
I am going to like their content.
I am going to comment on their content and then I'm going to send them a direct message.
So let's find some great little posts here, Sara Wiles she is so cute.
Business mentor perfect.
Okay, great.
So I am going to like this post.
I'm going to like this post and I'm going to like this post and I'm also going to make
sure that I [inaudible 00:07:47] really loved that quote.
I absolutely agree.
Great quote.
There you go.
And then I'm also going to send Sarah a little note.
Hey, Sarah, I love what you're up to and your whole vibe, your aesthetic on Instagram also
looks really amazing.
And I just wanted to introduce myself because I just liked a bunch of your posts and commented.
And you're probably wondering who the heck I am.
So I just wanted to say hello and great to meet you.
So you can do that with a voice note, or you can do that with a video, even by an Instagram
message.
And I prefer to do it that way, because I'm just faster when I do voice notes or when
I do videos versus trying to do, texts to every single person.
And it's in my opinion, a lot more personal.
Now in order to find the right hashtags to reach out to, if you haven't compiled a list
in your phone at this point, which most people haven't, what you can do is you can use a
tool called flick.tech.
And it's super easy.
If you just type in something like entrepreneur, it comes up with a whole bunch of different
variations of that hashtag.
So that can be one hashtag group for you.
And then you can use that to do your outreach and to meet new people and to build new relationships.
So I'll leave the link below to flick.tech.
It's one of my favorite Instagram tools and make sure you check it out.
Now probably one of the most underrated things that you can do on Instagram to grow your
following is to pay attention, to trends.
What is currently working really well in the platform.
And more importantly than that, what's currently working really well within your category with
your particular target audience, et cetera.
So I talk a lot about mindset.
It's a big piece of being an entrepreneur.
It's something that I worked really hard on and oftentimes it's some of my most popular
content that I greet.
So what I do is I'll go to another mindset oriented account.
In this case, I'm going to go to an account called mindset therapy and what you do, it's
really simple.
All you're going to do is you're going to go through and see what their most popular
recent posts are.
So that one actually did pretty well.
It's got 20,000 likes on it, but let's go and see if there's other ones that did really
well.
50,000 likes.
This was posted one day ago.
I really love this quote.
So I'm going to keep this and save it to my Inspo board because my Inspo board is basically
just this magical place where I've curated a bunch of things that really stood out to
me on Instagram.
And it helped me curate content to share on my story, to share also on my feed, of course,
giving credit to that account, but it helps you stay active without having to create your
own content.
So I do this on a daily basis and it's also why I don't follow that many people, everyone
I follow on Instagram.
It's either someone that's very close to me or it's an account that really inspires me
and makes me feel good.
So I'm inundated with content every day where I'm like, that's a really good idea.
I love that.
That stood out to me.
I'm going to save that and I can use it on my story and I can post it on my feed at a
later date.
And it also inspires me to create content on my own along that same theme.
So all you're going to do is look for these accounts that are similar to yours, with a
similar audience to you that you want to attract.
And you're going to see what are the most popular posts recently, and that's going to
help inspire content ideas for you.
So this one has 27,000 likes pretty good, but it's not 50,000.
So let's see.
44,000 for this one again, this one's all about social media.
This is a great post and it's very apt for my community.
So I'm going to save that one as well.
So curating content allows you to take the pressure off of your own brain and you don't
have to think of new things to post every single day.
And it's going to give you some really good themes and ideas and spark some light bulb
moments for you of what you should be posting and what works more importantly for your target
audience and really resonates with them.
So you can increase your engagement, increase the loyalty from your community.
Now the fourth thing is all about attention because let's face it.
That's really the greatest currency.
The more attention that you can drive to your account, the more reach you'll have.
The more impressions you'll have, the more followers you're going to attract.
So one of the things that I do, which is really simple and has allowed me to grow my audience
without actually having to post on my feed very often at all, is on my stories.
Stories are so easy to create.
I did make this whole video on how I create my Instagram stories.
You might want to check that out next, but one of the things that I do, that's kind of
like a little secret trick is I make sure to include popular hashtags in every single
story post, as well as my location.
Because again, that's going to help you show up geographically when people are searching
for certain locations in areas and help you show up in front of new people.
And when people are searching for certain hashtags, it's going to help you show up in
front of those people as well.
And I use them to make sure that they're super targeted to who I want following me.
So let's show you an example.
Happy Monday, just working on some new YouTube content for you.
And I'm so excited to share this with you.
If you haven't subscribed yet to my channel and make sure that you do so, and I'll see
you in the next video.
So then from there, I'm just going to mute it.
So it doesn't play over and over again.
But from there, what I would do is I would go into the little tag at the top there and
I would click on hashtag and I would put entrepreneur because that's a big one.
And then I would add in at least three more.
So I put online entrepreneur and then I'd put youtuber and then I would put YouTube
channel, for example.
And again, you're going to get great ideas when you use the flick tool to find the right
hashtags.
This is where I found the majority of these.
So I'm going to just go like that.
And when it comes to choosing hashtags for your stories, it's not really the same as
using hashtags on your feed.
On your stories, you can go a little bit bigger and more aggressive with the hashtags.
So I'm going to use those.
I'm going to put them down here.
And then I'm also going to make sure to add my locations.
My location is Vancouver, British Columbia.
And then I'm going to put working on new YouTube content and I'm going to make this big.
And I'm just going to make these even smaller to go right underneath, hide them.
I don't really want it to look messy and no one really needs to see them.
So that covers it up, but it still serves the same purpose because when I share this,
it's going to be discoverable by new people because of those hashtags and because of my
geolocation.
So it's kind of a little trick that I've been using and it's been working really, really
well.
And I've actually noticed a big uptick in my followers in the last couple of weeks since
starting to do this.
So little ninja secret that you can try for yourself on your own account and let me know
how it goes for you.
And the next little attention hack or secret is it's really easy for people to just tap,
tap, tap through your story and not pay attention.
So making them interactive is really important.
This is something I've talked about before, but what it also does is it allows you to
kind of warm up your audience and tease upcoming posts and content.
So let's say I had a post idea plan about how to get more views on YouTube and I was
going to post it onto my Instagram account.
Well, the day before I would go ahead and I would post a poll or a question on my story,
talking about things like, what do you need to know?
Or do you want to know about how to get more views?
And then from there, so let's say I do this.
Are you looking to get more views on YouTube or are you feeling frustrated and stuck on
the platform?
Let me know, because I'm planning on coming out with a new video about this soon, but
I need to know if you guys actually want to see it.
So I'm going to do that.
And then I'm going to add the poll in here and you can add a poll or a question and anyone
who answers the poll yes, or answers the question.
You're going to send the link to the video, to that person by a direct message.
And that kills two birds with one stone, one you're promoting your content and sorry, did
I say video?
I meant Instagram post.
You're going to send the link to the Instagram post.
You could also do this with YouTube videos, which I've done in the past and podcast episodes.
You can use it for any kind of content promotion, but it also allows you to build deeper relationships,
which brings me back to what I was talking about earlier with these people, by actually
connecting with them in a one on one way.
And you might think this will take forever, but it's a small act.
That's going to create so much community for you on your Instagram account, that you're
going to see your engagement on your posts skyrocket because you've already teased the
content.
You already know.
There's demand from the people who voted and they're going to be super excited to see that
new content.
So that would be the pole version of it.
So you can do it this way, or I can go ahead and I can do a question.
So what I would do is I would go to the question, want to know how to get more YouTube views?
And then again, anyone who answers yes or anyone who answers the question, send them
the link the next day, send them the link to the Instagram post, the podcast episode,
or the YouTube video.
It's giving them extra value.
It's showing that you actually care and you're listening and it's warming your audience up
to know that, that post or that content is coming.
So they're going to be extra excited to see it, which is going to give you a surge of
engagement when you do put that content out, those are truly the four things I do every
single day.
It doesn't take me long at all.
And again, the more effort you put in the more reward you're going to see from it.
But even if you can spare, five, 10, 20 minutes to do this, it is going to add up and make
a huge difference for your account.
So please let me know how it goes.
Tag me in your stories.
Let me know what you thought of this, share this video out and again be sure to tag me.
So if you share it out, I'll be sure to share it on my story as well.
Thank you so much for watching.
Make sure you check out these videos next on how I post to Instagram to get max reach,
when I do decide to post and my five minute growth role for Instagram, be sure to subscribe,
hit the bell, to be notified every single time I post a new video and be sure to hit
that like button, so more people can see this inside the algorithm.
Thank you so much for watching.
I'll see you in the next one.