How I Grew to 10K Followers on Instagram (What Actually Works)

Hello and welcome back to my channel. I am Abby, a full-time surf and travel influencer. And today I'm going to be sharing with you all about Instagram growth, how I grew my account from around 2,000 followers to now what it is is 39,000 followers. I want to share with you today how I reached 10,000 followers. Cuz only a year ago did I just hit the 10,000 follower mark. And before that, I was posting like crazy. Saw nothing but losing followers. I was going crazy. I was about to give up and I just was not having it. And so I want to share with you what I did. I'm going to be giving away pretty much everything that I know so that you can also implement these strategies as well. Often times gurus and people will be saying do this, do that, do this, but I didn't really pay for anybody or anything to get me to where it is. I did one time speak with one girl who was a travel influencer who I saw who blew up and everything and I spoke with her on the phone one time for an hour and she gave me some insight. But pretty much everything else that I'm going to be teaching you and telling you today, I have just learned through my own experience of trial and error. And I'm going to break it all down for you today. Let's get into it. The first thing I want to discuss here is your mindset. Your mindset matters so much. And I think people really don't think about that because it's like the person you come into making content is not going to be the same person that has 50,000 followers or 100,000 followers or whatever it is. You have to kind of change who you are to become this person. So when you're posting content, you're going to be probably coming up with imposttor syndrome being like, "I'm not good enough for this. Why would anyone want to watch my content? no one's going to care or all these kind of thoughts. So having a very strong mindset is so important and you have to constantly re-evaluate yourself, constantly tell yourself that you can do this because you're going to have constant highs and lows and drops and especially when something does well and then all of a sudden your content does bad. There's like periods where you'll be posting and you'll just be losing followers and all of a sudden you got like a ton of likes and now you're barely getting like 50 likes. It doesn't make any sense. So having a really strong mindset and detaching yourself from social media and knowing that your value is not determined by your views, is not determined by your likes, not determined by your follower count is going to be a big thing. So make sure you get your mind right and make sure you know that this is something that is in for the long-term game. You're probably not going to get a ton of followers really quickly. Sometimes it does happen like that. The reason that that happens is because you've been posting for so long and then finally you get some traction, but it's not like, oh, I just started posting a month ago and now I have 10,000 followers. That does not usually happen in overnight success probably took a couple years of posting and learning. You need to get your mind right. You need to understand and I would say what is your why? Why do you want to post on social media? That is so important. I want you to get out your journal, your notes or whatever it might be and be like why do I want to post on social media? It's because I want validation from other people. Do you want to make money off of social media? What is your why? I want you to write it down. I want you to journal about it and ask why you really want that. And you need to have a strong enough why to why you want to grow on social media. Why do you want to have an online platform? What do you want to do with this platform? So that when you're faced with all of these doubts, you're hitting low views, you're losing followers, your mind is going crazy, that you can go back to this piece of paper that you journaled about and read over your wise and be like, this is why I'm doing this. I'll just share you with mine. I wanted to be able to be my own boss. That is my number one reason why. I wanted to be wherever I want whenever I want. I wanted to create a lifestyle that I didn't have to run away from, that I got to wake up every day, that I was excited. I wanted to get paid to do what I love, which is surfing and traveling, which I am now. I want you to dream and write down your why. Because if I can have it, you can have it. And if all these other people can have it, you can have it, too. And you need to make sure that you have an abundant mindset. And that means that it's like just because everyone is doing it doesn't mean you can't do it. You need to see that as an example that you can do it, too. So, whenever you see people that you might be jealous of or you might be like envious of, remind yourself that you can do that, too. If they can have it, you can have it, too. There is enough room at the table for everyone to have a piece of this. Just because someone has 100,000 followers does not mean you can't have a 100,000 followers. It's not like this round piece of pie, you know, where it's like it gets cut up and then all of a sudden there's not any pie left. No, there is unlimited pie. There's unlimited space for you to be online in this platform. You need to get rid of that mindset. Bring yourself back to your why because it's going to be very important to keep pushing through all of this. Posting about your passions. A lot of people are like, "What do I post about? I don't know what to do." I want you to ask yourself or ask the people you talk with like what do you not shut up about? Like what do you keep going on and on about? What do you talk about that lights you up that energizes you that makes you excited? I don't care what it is. For me it's surfing and traveling. I could talk about surfing all day to everybody. Could watch surfing. I could consume it. You know, anything about travel I love. It lights me up. It inspires me. It gives me energy. You need to look at yourself and be honest with yourself and say is the content that I am posting does that light me up inside? Does that give me passion? Does that give me fire? Is that actually aligning with who I am on the outside? So, before I was posting surf content, which surf content was what totally changed my Instagram account. I was posting a bunch of travel content and I got around 8,000 followers from just posting travel content that I had repurposed from Tik Tok onto Instagram. However, I was like losing followers. I was like I gained a bit of traction. I lost a lot of traction. And I was posting for like every day for like a year straight and nothing was working. And I was about to give up. Last May, a lot of things changed for me. I was in El Salvador and the first time I ever got filmed surfing was in El Salvador. And so I was like, "Oh, I could post this online." Like I never saw myself surf. I was like, "Oh, I actually have a surf video. I could do this." And I also had met a prourfer who was posting content and it kind of was like similar to what I was doing, but of course like surf related. And I was like, "Well, I can do that, too." And then I also met a girl that I had been following on TikTok. Shout out Monica. We had been following each other for over a year and we met up in Mexico. We finally sat down and had a conversation face to face. And she was like, "This whole entire time you have not stopped talking about surfing and yet I've never seen anything about surfing in your content." And I was like, "Hm, you know, that's right." And so I had all of these factors come into play. And I also, while I was in El Salvador and in Nicaragua, I didn't want to leave the beach. All I wanted to do was surf. But as a travel creator, I felt this obligation to go on a hike, to go do this, or to make a video about this. But I didn't want to make a video about it. What's the point of being your own boss if you have to do things you don't want to do? Reason to be your own boss is to do whatever you want to do. I don't want to go hike a volcano. I want to surf. So, I'm just going to post about it. And so, I started to post about it. And I started to post about my struggles as someone who's learned to surf late in their 20s. I started to post, too, because I didn't feel like I was represented online. I felt like I constantly just saw videos of people making perfect waves and everything looked good and beautiful and glamorous and I was like I surf every day and I do not see that often like out there. I was like this is like there's a big disconnect from online to reality when it comes to surfing. And so I was like I'm going to post about it. That's kind of where my whole thing came telling you this story because that's how I discovered like posting for my passion and how surf content for me developed. So I want you to ask the same questions to yourself. What can I not shut up about? What do I want to spend all of my time doing? What consumes my thoughts? Where do I spend all of my money? I spent all of my money on surfing and traveling. Why not post about it and then you know get paid to do that? Just saying. Ask yourself, do I not shut up about what are my passions? And make sure whatever you are posting is truly authentically yourself because people will see through it if you are not authentic. Here's what I did to reach 10,000 followers. I was around like eight nine thousand followers and I really wanted to reach 10K and I was trying so many different things and nothing was seeming to work and it just felt like so far away. So, I'm going to break down what I personally did that actually helped me gain followers. So, with Instagram, of course, like things can get recommended and brought up and do things, but I just felt like the algorithm was against me and I was like, why? My content's good. Like, why are the people that I want to see it not seeing it? Like, what's going on? And I think you have to remember that Instagram is a community platform. cares about building and nurturing a community and everything. So, what I started to do was I was like, "Well, Instagram's not sending my videos to the right people. I want them to see my videos." And I was like, "Okay, I'm going to go to the pages of the profiles of the people that I like that have a larger following." And what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through their pages and I'm going to go on their most recent post. I'm going to go through their comments and their likes and I'm going to go click on their profile and go engage in their videos and all of their photos. For example, I went on to No Shoes No Worries page and I would go on to her most recent post. I would go click the likes, click the comments, and I would go on to the people who had public profiles, probably one of their penned pages, and I would actually generally go through their pages and I would like and comment like things I generally thought about them. They were surfing. I'd be like, you know, you go, girl. I would be like, I love your board. I love your outfit. Being honest and just engaging with like three to five of their posts. I would set a timer and I would sometimes do it for 10 to 30 minutes. And I would do that before I would post and after I would post. So, I spent about an hour doing this. I would set a timer and I would play some music and I was like, "All right, let's just go. We're going to go through and we're just going to engage, engage, engage." And through doing that, if someone comments on your page and goes through and likes a bunch of your photos, you're probably going to click on their page and be like, "Who is this person?" Whether you like my content or not, I got you to come to my Instagram account. And then it's like, cool. So, I'm telling Instagram like, "Hey, I want these people to see my content. I am trying to get your eyes on my content. So, engage, comment, be active with people who you want to follow your account being like, hey, this is for you. And that really helped me train the algorithm to get my content to be pushed out to surfer girls or to people in the surf beach lifestyle. Another thing is too with when you're scrolling on Instagram, it's not quite like Tik Tok. Like sometimes you'll be seeing reals from like forever ago and things like that. Make sure you're commenting and engaging and boosting other people's videos that are like more recently posted. Say you're scrolling through and all of a sudden you see a reel and it has like 10,000 likes and you go click on their page and it was posted four months ago. Go engage with their more recent post. Like that's the one they more care about or the one they're going to pay attention to. So engage, like, comment, and also make sure that when you're scrolling that you're only engaging in the content that you are producing. Create another Instagram account. You want your whole for you page. You want your reals tab. You want everything to be related to your niche. So don't engage in other content that is not your niche. Another thing that I will share, so like I can talk about Tik Tok growth another day, but I think it's very important to have a Tik Tok account because a lot of trends or ideas that I get all come from Tik Tok and then I repurpose them onto Instagram. If you don't already have a Tik Tok account, I'd highly suggest creating a Tik Tok account. And with Tik Tok, just a little bit about it. Tik Tok used to be owned by Musicly. So, a lot of what Tik Tok has is they boost trending audios and they also pay there's a lot of money that gets funded into Tik Tok to boost Tik Toks based off the audio you were using. That is not the case for Instagram. Trending audios don't matter on Instagram. What really matters on Instagram is that your audio matches your video. I remember I was like posting a video about most people think this is surfing and it's a video of me surfing and it was like the sound to Snoop Dogg. And I remember I searched for like an hour cuz I had this idea and then I was like I just need to find the right audio to match this video to match this idea. And I did and I linked them up together and I like created this magic and that video went viral. So, you really got to make sure the music is right on Instagram and that it matches your video. Does not matter if it's trending. Doesn't matter if it's a really old song, a new song. I don't care. If you look at my page, all of my audios are generally original audios. And what Instagram will do if like you use an audio that you just make your own video and I do this all in Cap Cut and then I upload it. it will sometimes like find your audio and add you. But if not, then sometimes people will use your audio, make videos off of that, which is amazing because then that boosts your video and then people can like click on like, oh, this sound was created by Abby Travelin. And so that also boosts it screen recordings of the audio in Tik Tok or Instagram that I want to use and then I overlay it and then I export it so I never am like adding an actual audio on Instagram. Another thing that really helped me reach 10,000 followers was collaborating. One of the coolest things about Instagram is that you can have the same real or photo being shared on two different platforms. So that way you get to like combine the audiences. Of course, like you can message the people and ask beforehand, but if I was like making travel content specifically, I remember when I was in El Salvador, there was a bunch of other like El Salvador tags I saw these other travel creators using and I just invited them to collaborate without even asking. They accepted it and that got my videos in front of a whole new audience. And so collaborate as much as you can with brands, with businesses, with travel places, whatever it might be. You can see what other creators have collaborated with and save that. You never know. You can just invite someone to collaborate. I did that and they're like, "Cool, new content. We don't care." And then you get to combine your audience and that way your video gets larger reach because it's getting posted on different platforms. So whenever you can collaborate because Instagram loves it, use the features that it presents itself that they don't have on other platforms because Instagram is the only platform that you can collaborate on. Often times in business or anything, you'll hear the word consistency. Consistency is key and anything in life. You want to be good at anything, you need to be consistent. Consistency will always win in the long run. You need to come up with a posting schedule that you can be consistent with, that you can do no matter what. If you can only post once a week, that's fine. just commit to posting once a week and stick with that. For me, I post three times a week because I find that that is manageable. I usually post Monday, Wednesday, Friday around 7:00 p.m. It's just like my promise and my commitment to myself. Just like I have with YouTube, I'm like, I have to record every single week. For Instagram, I'm like, "Okay, I need to post three times a week and stick to that goal. Post no matter how you feel. Get your post ready, get your captions ready, do whatever you can and stick to that because consistency will get rewarded over time. And the more content you put out, the more trial and error you will have. And trust me, I promise you, people are never going to get bored of seeing content. Like, people are never going to think, "Oh my god, this girl is posting so much." If they want, they can unfollow you. Who cares? Unfollow me. I unfollow people all the time. It doesn't really matter. And stop caring about if people are going to unfollow you. You want to find the people that actually want to follow you, that actually support you, that actually engage in your content, that actually are going to help you grow. Let's talk about captions. On other platforms like Tik Tok and YouTube Shorts, your captions aren't generally that long. On Instagram, captions really do matter. Captions are where you can really tell more of a story and you can use your words. I didn't realize how much writing was going to be involved in posting on Instagram. With Tik Tok, it's like post it, upload it, who cares? But with Instagram, you make sure you use your captions wisely. I've had multiple videos that have gotten over millions of views. Like I had one video that I think I got like four or five million views, but I gained like 900 followers. But I've also had videos who've gotten like 1 million views and I got 6,000 followers from it. It can completely range, but it's like, what's the difference between these two videos? Why did this one get more followers and less views versus the other one that got more views but less followers? And the reason is because you have to give people a reason to follow you. Of course, like make sure your bio and the basic things that everyone's going to tell you like people go to click on your page like why are they going to follow you? Make sure that looks good. Of course, in your caption, sharing who you are, sharing your journey, sharing why people should follow you is very important because that's what's going to happen. That's what's going to make you stand out between everybody else is just sharing your story. A real that I've posted now twice. I've literally repurposed it. So, I highly recommend literally repurposing your content that does well. There's no problem with doing that, tweaking it, changing. People consume so much, they're going to have no idea if they've seen your video or not. And usually, it gets pushed out to new audiences. Anyways, in this video, I have this video where it's like, "Bye, mom. I'm going to Australia for 9 months and I'm going to come back and I'm going to get a real job." And then fast forward, I'm surfing in the Philippines. And that video got over 20 million views and I think I gained like 14,000 followers from it. So, when I went to Sri Lanka, I was like, I'm going to redo this video. I redid the video, the same beginning, but then I'm like surfing in Sri Lanka. And that video has gotten like almost 30 million views and 16,000 followers. Same video, same concept. I changed the text a little bit, but in the text I share my journey of how I didn't feel like I related to having a corporate job. The only thing I ever wanted was to travel and so I just saved all my money and travel and I was happier bartending on the beach than I was in any corporate job. And that was all things that was like deep from my heart that I've truly impersonally gone through. That's why people are following me. And I also share my surf journey. I share my personal things. I don't even think I'm that good of a writer. We have such amazing things with AI these days. Like what I do is I get out my little notes on my on my Mac computer and I type out my feelings. I type whatever I want to express for this video be like why did I make this video and I type it out and then I just tell chat GPT I'm like make it better. And then me and chat GPT go back and forth. It's my editor and I'm like okay this is good. And then I post that. And so that's kind of how I come up with these captions. But it's like just share personal things about yourself. Be open. Be vulnerable. You don't have to share everything online. share parts of you that make you unique and make your journey unique because uniqueness and being an individual is what makes us all special. Once you start posting a lot of content, I want you to also go back over your videos and look at them and look at the analytics of like what did well? Why is this video doing well? What can I do better? And give yourself a selfanalysis and take what is working and keep doing that. That's kind of what happened with me with surf content. Like I just started posting all of my videos of me falling and failing because that's really the only content I had of me surfing. And so I just kept posting it and it kept working and I just kept going off of that idea and that whole momentum. Whenever you're posting, just look back being like, why did this video get 5,000 views and then this other one got 20,000 views. Why is this working? Ask yourself that. Keep redoing the same thing. And also too, it's really important, make sure the content is like you want to make it obviously sharable. You want people to be able to save it. You want people to engage. So whenever you're like posting something, make sure you're never when I do this, make sure you always make it like when you do this, make sure it's like you. So when the person is reading it, have it relate to them because people want to want to relate. And that's the whole reason we're on social media is for connection, to relate to laugh for some reason. So make sure your content is getting transformed into a way that that person can relate. This is a new Instagram feature that not everyone has access to, but if you do have access to trial reels, I highly suggest you posting them. I will use trial reels for videos that I'm kind of like a little too embarrassed to post. Like for example, I posted this video of my booty getting scraped by the reef and it's almost at like half a million views. I even posted one of me like rubbing like white zinc all over my face and that went super viral cuz I was like a little embarrassed to post it. If you think the content's good and it's getting traction, I will post all these videos on TikTok cuz I really just don't care as much. And if they start to do well, I'm like, "Okay, well, I'm just going to repost them." It never hurts to post. If you are a little bit nervous and shy about posting, just start posting on trial reels. Just post as much as you can because the more you post, the more you're going to get like some feedback and continue on. And that is all that I really have for you today. I really hope that this video helps, that it was informative, that can help you learn something so that you can also reach 10,000 followers or whatever it might be. And if you have any questions, any comments, please let me know. I would be happy to help and to assist you. So, one thing that I have been doing which has been able to fund pretty much everything my travels besides making money through brand deals is I'm also a social media coach. So, if you are really struggling with getting to a place where you're like, I've been trying everything. I just can't seem to do it on your own and you need support. I'm here to help. I'm pretty much when I do my coaching, I'm not just here to tell you things. I'm here to help you as well. I do one-on-one. You get to talk to me. You get personal feedback. I'm your coach. I get to help you through mental blocks. Whatever it might be, you feel called to create content. You're like, "That's me. I want to do that. I'm struggling. I'm figuring out I have some blocks. I want to get there. I don't know how. I've tried everything." Please reach out. I actually will leave a form that you can apply down below to work with me cuz I don't take on tons of clients. But if I feel like we feel aligned, we can hop on a call and everything like that. So, you can fill out the application below if you would like to work with me and I can help you grow your social media and also I can help you learn how to make money so that you can get your money back from working with me. Again, thank you so much for watching this video. I know that your time is very valuable. 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