0 To 10k Instagram Followers From Scratch | Ep. 1

Hey guys, what's going on? Today, I'm going to be starting a brand new Instagram growth challenge. I'm going to be showing you guys step-by-step how to take a branded Instagram account from zero followers to over 10,000 followers from scratch. But before we get into the video, let me just introduce myself real quick. My name is Steve Salazar. I'm an online entrepreneur. That's in all things, business, social media, and e-com. So if you enjoy any of those things, consider dropping a sub below. Now let's get back to the video. So I've been growing pages on Instagram, Facebook, and now TikTok for years now. And I've really learned a lot. The truth is different growth strategies work better than others based on your page's size and age. For example, a brand new Instagram account with zero followers and zero posts likely isn't going to be able to grow organically super well using hashtags or something like that. I mean, I guess it's possible, but it's just, it's going to be a slow process. That's why I wanted to create this video series to show you guys exactly when to use which growth strategies and actually lay out a blueprint that you could use for your Instagram page. So for this video, I'm going to be creating a business motivation type of Instagram page. The American dream and money and wealth. The content's going to be things like quotes, motivational speeches, and other types of content that business minded people would enjoy. And my goal with this page is to build an audience on Instagram that can help boost my views on this actual YouTube channel. I'm definitely a newer YouTuber and I'm always looking for ways to increase my reach on my videos. So I thought it would be fun to make a video series on this process and then also use this new Instagram page to my benefit. It's sort of a win-win. And you know, there's something else that would really help out my channel a lot. And that is if you gave this video a quick thumbs up for the old algorithm. Oh, the games we play for that algorithm. Moving forward though, I've actually already done some thinking and I've already come up with a name for the page, which is going to be ready for it. I wanted the name to have sort of a hustle mindset to it. And I just liked how this name sounded. So we're going to roll with it. Right after I came up with this name, I actually went over to fiverr.com and found someone that would make us a quick logo for this page. It cost me around $7 and here's what we came up with. I think that it actually turned out pretty cool and I think it'll work out perfectly for our purpose. Also, in addition to the logo, I prepared some content for the page in advance. I actually went to fiverr again to outsource this and ended up paying around $126 for 200 branded posts. A hundred of them are just quote images like this. And then the other hundred of them are short vertical videos that can be posted on the pages reels. So now we've spent about $135 on this page so far. Oh, and real quick, I forgot to mention, I did secure the at big bag habits, Instagram handle. So we're good there. We own it, baby. The next step is going to be filling out our bio and making sure it's optimized to encourage people to follow our account. And here are some of the best tips I can give you for writing a great bio. We'll go through these really quick. Number one, feel free to change your name to three words or so that describe what your page will be posting about. In the example of my page, I'm going to be writing business, motivation, and then quotes. You can also definitely just keep this as your actual name, but I like using this part as sort of a header to the rest of the bio. It just looks sort of nice. Number two, bullet points work really well. So use them if possible. I would think of three to four different lines that would help encourage somebody to follow your page. You need to think about what kind of value your page is going to give to somebody that's just passing by on Instagram. Bring them value. So on our page, we're going to write for all the real entrepreneurs. Second line is going to be your habits equal your success. The third line is going to be start doing what you love. And then the fourth line is going to be teaching people how to build an online empire. And then that's it. We have four bullet points done. And then the third and final tip that I want to give you guys for writing your bio is to use some emojis. Too many emojis can definitely look really unprofessional, but using a few tastefully, at least in my experience, can help convert people into followers. So now that we've got our bio written, it's time to post some content on the page. No one wants to follow a brand new Instagram page that has zero followers and zero posts. So we definitely need to add some photos and videos to our feed so that people know what to expect from our page. As I said before, I already have some branded content ready to go. So I'm going to post about nine or 12 of these on the page right now. And I just want to touch on how to format your captions for Instagram so that you have the chance to end up on the explore page and really blow up your account. This is what the big pages do. So even if you're a small page, it's important that you optimize your captions and get in the habit of writing them in a way that will increase your reach. So first off at the top of the caption, I'll write two to three lines about each specific piece of content. It may be something as simple as double tap if you agree with this, or it could be more detailed and related to the actual content within the photo or video in the post. Underneath those lines, a few spaces down, there's going to be a section dedicated to asking people that see our posts to follow our page. And that'll look something like this. Lastly, we're going to go a few spaces down from that and add our hashtags. And I'm going to be getting all my hashtags using the strategy that I described in one of my previous videos. And I'm not going to be going through that process right now, but if you have five minutes to spare, I really suggest watching that video because it's one of the best growth hacks or hashtag hacks that I've ever used on Instagram. So that's how we're going to build every caption for every post. And at the end of the day, each caption should look something like this, but I've got to get these nine to 12 posts up on the page, so enjoy this little guitar ditty in the meantime. I'll be right back. All right, guys. Well, I'm back. And if you couldn't tell, it's actually a new day. I had some family stuff that came up and I didn't have time to get those posts up yesterday, but I did spend some time this morning getting up, I think five reels posts and then four image quotes. So I'll show you guys those now on the page. So as you can see, here's the nine posts on the page and this page is ready to get some followers now. So to get the ball rolling, we're actually going to be using the follow for follow method just to see how many free followers we can get by like tomorrow morning or so. If you don't know what this method is, here's a quick rundown, but it's been explained probably about a thousand times on YouTube. Basically, I'm going to go to a similar page like this one here that already has an established audience on Instagram. Click into some of their recent posts and then follow users that have liked and engaged with their content recently. So if the follow for follow method works out well, we're definitely going to continue with it. But tomorrow I'm actually going to be buying a shout out from a larger, similar page to boost this audience even quicker. And if you want to build an audience fast starting from zero, I would do the same. I don't want to wait around forever to grow this page. And I think that paying for shout outs is still definitely one of the best ways to gain followers quickly. So I'm going to get to following a bunch of people now, and I'll update you guys tomorrow with where we're at. Peace. So it's actually about a week later now. I sort of had some family stuff come up, so I didn't get a chance to film. So I apologize for that. Also, I did go on like a three, four day vacation. If you couldn't tell by my nice little tropical rooster shirt I'm wearing, you know what, I'm just going to throw a little bit of a montage of it right here. Now you're probably thinking, Steve, did you get anything done on the new Instagram account over the past week or so? And the answer is yes. So let me update you guys with what's going on right now. Okay. So as I mentioned before, I did start with the follow for follow method and it kind of worked at first, but I definitely ran into some issues with Instagram banning me from following more people basically every hour. I really only spent about a couple days with the follow for follow method, and that probably brought the page to about 100 followers. If you have absolutely no money to jumpstart your account, follow for follow is definitely still a method that works, but it does take a lot of time. So after I hit those first hundred followers using follow for follow, I decided to hit up a larger page in my niche and buy a shout out from them. The page I found was called at success achieved, and they had about 127,000 followers at the time. And the owner of this page actually told me he owned a couple more pages in this same niche with over a hundred thousand followers too. I should mention before we move on, I have no affiliation with this page owner whatsoever. Okay. So I hit this guy up and he said it would cost $59 to be posted to all three of his pages for 24 hours. Not a bad deal, but we didn't take it. I offered 40, he said 45. I said 40 again, and we had a deal. So I sent payment and then the content for all the promotions. And then he actually posted the ads the next morning. The posts ended up doing fairly well. And our Instagram page gained about 300 followers from this promotion alone. So definitely not too shabby. In my experience, getting your first 1,000 to 2,000 followers is definitely the hardest part. Lots of people just don't want to follow a page that only has like 200 followers. So you have to work really hard to establish that base audience. Once you have an audience of about 1,000 to 2,000 followers, you'll notice that these kinds of promotions or shout outs will do significantly better. So this was about four to five days ago. And the page was sitting at about 400 followers or so after this promotion. Since then, all I've been doing is posting on the page four or five times a day with targeted hashtags. And actually the page is starting to grow organically. Today we're sitting at about 750 followers, as you can see here. If you can't see it, I'll pop it up on the screen now. And I've actually noticed that some of our reels posts are already hitting the explore page. So that's a really good sign. Here's one right here that already has over 3,000 views and we only have 750 followers. So those are our results so far with this Instagram challenge. Things always move sort of slow at the beginning with a new account. But just like my boy Elon says, patience is a virtue and I'm learning patience. In the meantime, and in between this video and the next video in this series, I'm going to continue posting on the page three to five times a day with targeted hashtags, like I said before. The page now has a good base of followers and it's definitely possible we get a big boost from the explore page. But either way, I promise we'll get this page to 10,000 followers using a variety of different methods. So if you want to see the rest of this journey, be sure to subscribe to my channel below and follow along. Also, if you haven't yet, be sure to drop a thumbs up on this video for the ol' algorithm. I really appreciate you guys stopping by and watching this video. So thank you. Thank you. Till next time guys, peace.