14 Ways How to Increase Your Instagram Growth & Engagement

Let’s put it this way. Who do you think is best utilizing their account for Instagram growth, and business in general?

• A person with 100,000 followers that makes one sale
• A person with 1,000 followers that makes 1,000 sales

1. Optimize Your Bio
   ❤️ Structure your bio in a way that speaks directly to your ideal audience. Right down to the emojis, the overall structure, the key words, and the call to action.
2. Engagement/DM Groups
   🔥 Getting inside of engagement groups, also known as Instagram pods or DM groups, is a way to hack the algorithm. Follow a few simple rules, and you can better rank for your local hashtags and in turn, hopefully, get closer and closer to reaching that explore page. When you do, your Instagram growth will take off. Just know that as a personal brand, it’s easier said than done (but not impossible).
   ❤️ In The Course: Learn the best types of engagement groups to join, the key rules to use, how often to post within them, or how to create your own group. #bosslife
3. Posting Content & Type of Content
   🔥 Content is king. So, quality reigns supreme. We are all content creators, so we have to give people a reason to follow us. If your content isn’t high quality and isn’t consistent, your growth will be slow at best, but most likely just dead. Also, as wedding pros, it’s important to be posting often. Personally, I post 2-4 times a day. And while if you only post once a day you can get more “likes” on a post simply because it sits there longer, your reach and impressions will be lower compared to posting multiple times a day. My impressions in my analytics aren’t anything super crazy like those “viral” accounts on Instagram, but it’s between 25,000-35,000 per week on average. That means there are 35,000 eyeballs on my work each week just through Instagram.  Additionally, you should also make sure that you are showcasing YOURSELF on your Instagram account. After all, you are your brand. Show your face.
   ❤️ In The Course: Get content calendars, best times of day to post, what kinds of photos to post of yourself for your particular brand, if you should post long-form or short-form captions, what to include in your captions, and way more.
4. InstaStories
   🔥 Posting to your IG stories is a great way to show the behind-the-scenes of your professional life, and the more personal side to your personal life. Treat your IG stories like your own mini reality TV show.
   ❤️ In The Course: Learn many different ways on how to get to 10,000 followers (without buying any followers) to get that incredible swipe-up feature!
5. Hashtag Strategies
   🔥 Tons of blogs out there will say to use 30 hashtags, others say to use 9, some say to use 12, others say a mix. And you know what, I’ve tested and tracked data across all of these different supposed “best practices.” What I’ve personally found is that they are all just guessing… because I’ve found that simply using all 30 hashtags (the max you can currently use at the time of writing this blog post) works. And when something works, I stick with it.  That said, I believe that you should rotate out your hashtags that you use. That way, you aren’t using the same exact hashtags on every single post you create. Why? Because when you rotate them out, you have more opportunity to be seen on different hashtags, and the Instagram algorithm won’t see you as totally spammy.
6. Influencer Shoutouts
   🔥 One of the fastest ways to grow your audience on Instagram with explosive growth that is also 100% organic. You are just leveraging an audience size that is much larger than your own.
   ❤️ In The Course: Learn how to find those influencers, what to say to them, and how much to pay them. Also, learn how to plan the shoutout to maximize your potential visibility to their audience, and how to capture the attention once their audience comes across the content on their page. It’s all about funneling that attention.
7. Direct Messages
   🔥 Free Tips: Personally, I don’t like those auto-DM’s. Not a fan. But, you should still be utilizing the DM feature in Instagram. After all, it’s a social network. So, be social. Have conversations. Build your know, like and trust factor – always.
   ❤️ In The Course: Learn who to have conversations with and how to drive that conversation OFF Instagram to get closer to a sale of your product/service.
8. Collaborations
   🔥 Free Tips: When you collaborate with other people, you can cross-promote each other. And while most people are simply tagging other accounts that you did the collaboration with… you can instead exchange an Instagram FEATURE post. And on that feature post, that post talks about the person you are featuring. Not yourself. That way, your audience is now directly learning about that other person, and your audience then follows them. And vice versa.  Obviously, the bigger the accounts you collaborate with, the better it will be for you. These are similar to influencer shoutouts, but they’re just not the main influencers in your industry.
   ❤️ In The Course: Learn the structure on what to say, how to pitch the idea to others, and how you can do this without even collaborating on a singular project together while still maintaining your own brand image.
9. Sponsored Ads in The Feed
   🔥 Do some market research about what your ideal client/customer is looking for. Solve their pain points or offer up some incredible promotion to grab their attention. Create urgency & scarcity with your offer in the ad, and run it to a targeted audience.
   ❤️ In The Course: While I do not include coaching on ads (instead, I do this as a done-for-you service), I go into detail about what I recommend you do, what you focus on, and an overview about how to run your ads.
10. InstaStories Ads
    🔥 Do some market research about what your ideal client/customer is looking for. Solve their pain points or offer up some incredible promotion to grab their attention. Create urgency & scarcity with your offer in the ad, and run it to a targeted audience.
    ❤️ In The Course: While I do not include coaching on ads (instead, I do this as a done-for-you service), I go into detail about what I recommend you do, what you focus on, and an overview about how to run your ads. Students have been able to reach over 10,000 new, targeted followers a MONTH using this strategy alone with only $10/day in ad spend.
11. $1.80 Strategy
    🔥 This one comes from the man himself, Mr. Gary Vee. It’s an incredibly simple strategy that is based off of treating your social media account as simply that — being social. So, what’s the exact strategy? It’s leaving your “$0.02,” your two cents, on the top 10 hashtags in your relevant industry, and commenting on the top 9 posts that pop up first. So, it’s quite simply $0.02 x 10 x 9 = $1.80. As easily as I can put it, don’t just put something up on your Instagram account and then scroll aimlessly through your feed. If you’re doing that, you are wasting a LOT of time. Instead, go straight to those top 10 hashtags, comment something valuable in the top 9 that pop up (your two cents), and repeat this step every single day like clockwork. Check out his team’s blog post on the strategy here: https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/1-80-instagram-strategy-grow-business-brand/
    ❤️ In The Course: Learn how to find the top hashtags in your industry and what type of comments have given me the best results on other peoples pages without seeming spammy.
12. Contests & Giveaways
    🔥  There are a few main strategies here. You can either run a contest for a product or service that you have for a percentage off, or even for free — but I don’t personally like giving away stuff for free. That’s just me, though. If you do choose to go this route, I would personally combine it with some sort of influencer that is your industry and do what’s called a loop giveaway. (Each person in the loop has the same rules posted in the caption, and each person says you must follow the next person in the loop.. which ultimately creates a circle for the loop.) I would just keep the loop somewhat small, and make sure that the other people within the loop are also in your niche. That way, you aren’t getting lots of followers outside of your niche who will never buy your stuff.
    ❤️ In The Course: Learn how to find the right influencers, what to say to them, how much to pay them, what types of contests to run, when to run them, and how to drive in more traffic to your contests to get more eyes on what your offer is.
13. Follow/Unfollow Strategy
    🔥 Yep, this is a SUPER controversial one.  But it DOES work. You do not have to use this. Using this strategy or not is totally up to you. But further along in this course, you will learn some strategies about exactly how to do it if you do choose to use the strategy. Again, totally up to you. But as an educator, I didn’t want to leave it out. I don’t believe in holding back. And this follow/unfollow strategy in particular is done in the least spammy way possible. The bottom line with this strategy — attention equals currency. That’s right, attention = currency in the social media world. Get seen (they will see you followed them). That peaks their interest in who you are. They go to your account. And with an optimized bio and account, they will then decide for themselves if they will follow you. And there you have it, one new follower. Rinse and repeat. Thousands of times over. NOTE: I do NOT recommend this strategy for people wanting to build “viral/niche” accounts. There are better strategies. Again, feel free to not use this strategy, but it does work.
    ❤️ In The Course: Learn the exact step-by-step ways that I have been able to manage multiple Instagram growth on accounts for other people, and the exact blueprint (with video screenshare walkthroughs) on the exact settings I use to build accounts by 1,000-4,000 real, targeted followers every single month. And the best part, the strategies I teach on here require less than 10 minutes of work inside of Instagram each day.
14. Highlights
    🔥 Using your Instagram highlights is a great way for you to show your audience the strategic things you want them to see all the time. And by this, I mean… have categories (your different highlights) for the main parts about your brand that you feel would resonate with your ideal client, and build your know, like, and trust factor. Example: For me, I would have an Instagram highlight for me (so my ideal client can learn more about me and my life), traveling (my ideal clients love to travel), my workshops (so my professional audience can see I have workshops and want more info), podcast episodes (for anyone looking to listen and learn on a particular topic), etc. Put some serious thought into exactly what you want your ideal client to know about you on an ongoing basis and not just for a quick 24-hour look through an InstaStory.
    ❤️ In The Course: Learn how to create highlights that convert Instagram traffic into paying customers and clients on autopilot.

So, that was a LOT to cover. And of course, I can’t share the FULL growth & monetization strategies behind each and every mini-lesson. Why? Because I am an Instagram growth & monetization coach with an online program. It’s one of the ways I put food on my table for my family. So, I would absolutely love to see you in my full Instagram growth program if you’re interested in learning the exact step-by-step playbook on how to grow & monetize your Instagram account.

Do you want to learn how to do all of this (and way more)?

Looking forward to seeing you inside!

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