How I went from 200 to 2000 Instagram Followers in Less Than a Month

And started to generate real business inquiries…

This week I wanted to share with you how I’ve picked up over 2500+ new Instagram followers in less than 30 days and am now gaining 100+ new followers/day.

Now these are not some fake followers or something like that that I’ve bought from shady site or service. These are real people and for the most part all people interested in what I do as an entrepreneurial coach for fitness professionals.

In fact in just the last couple weeks I’ve seen a significant increase to optins to my email list and direct messages and email responses from people asking questions and ultimately inquiring about coaching services.

Now before I get into this, I need you to understand a couple things:

• I really dislike social media, I’m not someone these days that wants to constantly post and try to cater to the masses.
• If you have a reasonably large following already (like 10,000+) this isn’t likely for you, the tips below are for people who (like me) have resisted Instagram for too long and realize it’s hurting their business by not establishing an audience.

I just watched a video last night from someone talking about how Kylie Jenner will become the worlds youngest self-made billionaire (she’s 20 by the way and did this all in 3 years.)

She did this by building an Instagram following of 111 million followers, and then using that to launch her cosmetics line, what’s more is companies now pay her in excess of $500,000 for a single promotional post!

Now I’m no Kylie Jenner, in fact I’ve been very resistant to this whole evolving social media but the reality is, like it or not, over the next decade or two as stupid as this sounds it’s going to be a significant class differentiator. Meaning the wealthy and the poor will largely be separated by one thing, the size of their audience; or at least that’s my belief.

So I don’t know about you but I definitely don’t want to be on the outside looking in when it comes to this new social economy, whether I’m late to the party or not I intend to make sure I’ve got social capital to leverage in the coming years.

So here’s what I’ve learned recently…

The game has really changed, since none of us are early adopters there’s no easy way through all the distraction and noise to catch people’s attention.

Content alone isn’t going to do it (though good content is key to retaining your following.)

But here’s the real scoop on how you build an initial fanbase on Instagram.

• Make sure you post 1-2 times/day. Instagram is all about the “image tells the story” what will be your identity? I’ll be the first to admit I sometimes struggle with this, I’m not big into selfies day after day, instead I try to use images that mean something to me, that capture what I’m thinking about (keep it simple at first, take a picture of your breakfast, your favourite plate, your favourite brand of something, your favourite park to go for a run in, your favourite clients, one of the camps you taught today, etc, etc.)

Talk about what you’re thinking about in the description, but keep it easy to read, use extra periods to give you line breaks. No one reads paragraphs or blocks of text anymore, think of each line as a Twitter comment and break it up!

• Use Hashtags, you can have up to 30 of them on each post and you should try to use all of them! Make this easy on yourself, download the app Hashtagger. You can enter any one hashtag (Like (yourtown)fitness) and it will give you suggestions, you can tick them off, copy and paste and you’re done! (PRO TIP: Paste your hashtags in the first comment of your post, this makes it look cleaner and if you autopost to other platforms (which you should, you’ll notice the option to connect a Twitter and Facebook as you post) it will keep your posts cleaner.

• Install Ever-Liker. (everliker.com) Ever Liker is am extension for Google Chrome, if your computer is on; you can connect it to your IG account, give it a list of hashtags and it will start liking posts for you. This is “Social Media” afterall so we need to be highly engaged in social things like interacting with other content, but who has time to like 700 different things a day? Work smarter not harder, have Ever Liker do it for you! (P.S. I use the paid version it cost $5/month and let’s you also specify other users who have large followings and may attract followers similar to what you want, it likes the content of their followers, great value for $5/month)

• Followers Pro App. Finally I use a simple app that shows me who recently unfollowed me, no sense continuing to follow people who are not following me (unless of course I really like their content) I just check it a couple times a week and quickly unfollow the users that have unfollowed me.)

Ok if so if you’re an Instagram newbie like me I hope you found this helpful! I’m shooting for 10,000 followers by the end of the year and I encourage you to do the same!