How To Grow on Instagram in 2026 | From 0 Followers - 871

(bell ringing) This is your complete guide to growing your Instagram following in 2026, starting from zero followers. Before we even start talking about Instagram, specifically what buttons to press and what posts to post, we need to lay the foundation that our Instagram and our future business will be built on. Whether you plan on selling something someday, building a personal brand, becoming a content creator, growing your following starts with identifying your niche. Now personally, I define niche in two parts. It's the who and the what. The who is the demographics? Who are you going to be posting for? And when I say demographics, I want you to consider every possible thing about this person. I'm not saying that every possible thing about them needs to matter, but it's something you should at least consider. What's their age? What's their marital status? Do they have kids? What are their challenges? What's their level of education? What's their level of employment? All of these different factors are things that you can consider because these differences are going to change how you are posting and what you're posting about. For example, if you are in the weight loss area of fitness, you are going to post very different content if you're posting for men in their 20s, then if you're posting for moms in their 40s, and both of those will be very different than if you're posting for people who are over the age of 65. If you're posting weight loss content for moms in their 40s, it's going to be very different content if they are stay at home moms versus working moms. It's going to be very different if they are new moms versus empty nesters. It's going to be very different if they are moms who are married versus single moms. It's going to be very different if it's at home workouts versus in the gym workouts. So you can already see that all of these different minor details are going to slightly vary what exactly you are going to be posting. Again, the first part of niche is who and the second part of niche is the what? The what is a little bit more self explanatory, the what is the specific thing that you're going to be posting about? Now, if you have absolutely no idea what your niche is, it's okay when your first getting started to just kind of post a little bit about everything until you figure out what you really love to talk about and what you really love to create content around. But some helpful questions that you can ask yourself before you start this random posting and experimentation are number one, what do people already ask me for help with without me even having to prompt them? Think about your DMs, your texts, your conversations with your friends, your coworkers, your family members. What are the things that people are always coming to you for? Number two, what problem can I explain or solve faster or clearer than most other people? If you can simplify something that is confusing, that's niche worthy. Number three, who do I enjoy helping the most and or what topic do I enjoy talking about the most? Like is there something that you just can't shut up about or is there a group of people who you just love working with? You really feel like you have a calling to serve? Answering that might be helpful in identifying your niche. Number four, what have I personally struggled with and figured out? I think that this is a really important distinction that I need to make here because so many of us have imposter syndrome when we're niching down, but I believe that niching down actually can cure imposter syndrome. I was working with a woman recently and we were helping her niche down and we were talking about different interests she has and different industries that she might want to be a part of and she talked about how she's a marathoner. She's done multiple marathon runs. She's a mom of three under three and when I said, oh my gosh, this is perfect, you need to start posting more about running. It's something you love, it's something you don't want to shut up about, it's something you have a lot of experience with. But she felt this imposter syndrome and she told me that, you know, Brock, I'm not a run influencer. Like I see these people who are like running at marathons and they like have all these vlog cameras or they are the owners of run clubs themselves or they do like brand deals and sponsorships with Nike and that's just not me. And I said, great, that shouldn't be you because there are probably lots of other moms in their 40s with young kids just like you who don't want to look up to the chiseled six pack abs of some 23 year old dude who's a run influencer or some 19 year old girl who graduated high school last year and now she's a run influencer and she does marathons. No offense to those people, those people are the perfect run influencers and run creators for some people to follow. But they're not for everyone. And that's really what niche allows, niche allows you to be someone's cup of tea. You don't have to be everyone's cup of tea but you're someone's cup of tea. And by niching down, instead of saying that she's a run influencer who just posts about all things running, she instead was niching down specifically to talk about running and training for your first 10 K race as a mom in her 40s with young kids. Now, if you're a mom in their 40s with young kids and you're training for your first 10 K, you know to follow this client of mine. So again, question number four was, what have you personally struggled with and figured out? And the fifth question is, what's something that I could create 50 posts about without feeling like I have to force it? Because content is kind of like a fart. If you have to force it, it's usually, the final thing I will say about niche is that having a clear niche is essential for growth because the niche is why we follow people. According to a recent report from many chat, the number one reason why we follow people is because quote, they post content I find consistently useful or entertaining. And unfortunately, when you post about a wide variety of things, you post your date night selfie, you post what you had for lunch, you post your workout, you post what your kid did on their first day of school. When you post about all these different topics, people can't find that consistently useful or entertaining unless you're just an amazing entertainer. Like if you're an amazing entertainer, you just create great content, you're an amazing storyteller, you have a big personality and a lot of charisma. Great, you just go out there and be your loud creative, outgoing, exuberant self. But more than likely, you're like most of us, which is that you're not Ryan Gosling, you don't have this amazing charisma, you're not Dwayne the Rock, Johnson, you're not Kim Kardashian, you're not someone who they can just like boom, your personality is just so worth watching. And so instead, I want you to niche down. I want you to pick one group of people and one specific topic to post about. That way that group of people can find you, follow you, and they can fall in love with you because they find you consistently valuable, educational or useful. And I lied, there's actually one final thing I wanted to say about niche before we move on. The more you niche down, the faster you will grow and the greater your income potential will be. There's this great and now infamous article called 1000 True Fans. And the article essentially makes the argument that all you need is 1000 true fans in order to have a successful business. All you need is 1000 true fans to make six figures every single year. And one of the best strategies for generating true fans or super fans as my friend Pat Flynn calls them is by niching down. When you have a clear niche, people can flock to you. They can fall in love with you. They can keep coming back and binging your content because they know it was specifically made for them. And guess what? If there's someone who doesn't perfectly fit in your niche, but they still enjoy your content, they still find it educational or valuable, they'll still follow and they'll probably still become customers. Let's go back to that example of the mom who is a mom of three under three helping other moms in their 40s trained for their first 10K. If you're a mom of three under three and you're not training for a 10K, but you just want to get into running, you're probably going to follow her. If you're a mom of one kid or four kids or six kids and you just want to get into running or you want to run your first 10K or you want to run your first half marathon and you find her page. Well, then you're probably going to follow and you're probably going to become a customer. But because she has that specific niche, it gives her clarity as to what to post about and it gives her core group of super fans clarity as to why they should follow her. All of that was step number one for growing on Instagram. Step number two is we got to set up our profile, right? If we have a new business, we have a new storefront, we want people to come in, we're going to do a big grand opening and cut the red ribbons. We got to set up the store first. We can't cut the red ribbons. Be like everyone, come on in, grand opening in there's nothing there. We got to make sure things are set up. So let's set up our profile before we even make our first post. I have what I call the ABCs of the optimized Instagram profile. The A stands for an attention grabbing profile picture. If you are building this Instagram account around yourself, I'll a personal brand, then you want your profile picture to be a photo of you. A close up, high quality, well lit, selfie, preferably on a solid color background with no extra props or anything distracting in the image. If you're building an Instagram account around a business, then I would recommend having an icon version of your logo as the profile picture. Far too often I see business owners put their entire logo and like shrink it down with the logo and established in and the tagline in the location in the little profile picture. No, no, no, we need just an icon version of the logo in order to achieve an attention grabbing profile picture. The B stands for the bio beginning. Most people are just skimming or speed reading your bio. They're just kind of glancing at it. And so the first sentence of your bio is the most important. Your first sentence of your bio is where you go back to step one, you take your niche, the who and the what, and you basically plug it into a sentence in the first sentence of your bio. Something along the lines of, I help who with what? I help small business owners grow via Instagram stories. I help beginner rock climbers climb their first, I don't know, I'm not a rock climber. I don't know that niche, but you get the point. Feel free to use chat GPT or any other AI tool to help you come up with a more creative first sentence, but you really want it to articulate the who and the what so that those people are immediately understanding that you are for them. The C stands for a few different things. Is stands for clear and concise because I want your bio. to be not long-winded. I don't want it to be redundant. I don't want it to have multiple versions of the same word. Like, I hope mom's over 40. Get fit, be healthy, get lean, lose weight, build muscle. You just said the same thing like five different ways. Just say it one way in which of those five should you say. You should say the one that is the most clear and the one that your ideal target audience uses the most. So if you're trying to build an audience of mom's over 40 and the actual phrase that comes out of their mouth the most often is I want to get lean, then that is what you should put in that sentence. The final thing that C stands for is no cliches far too often. I see things like live your best life, get healthy, live laugh love or whatever your favorite little cliches is in the bio. It's a waste of time. It's non-specific. It's meaningless and it takes up valuable real estate. So take it out. And while you're at it, take out any of those fun facts that are non-niche-related. Like mom of three fur babies, Virgo, Skier, Wine lover, Hubby XXVLIVLIX. If you wouldn't say it to someone in an elevator, don't put it in your bio. And then the S of the ABCs, I know it's A, B, C, D, but I snuck in the apostrophe S because it just it works with the acronym. So the S of the ABCs is maybe the most important part and it is searchable. Now any text that you put anywhere on your Instagram profile aids in your searchability. Like Google and Instagram and all these other platforms, they can theoretically find you if you put a keyword anywhere in your bio, but there's only two places in your entire bio that are word for word searchable. Meaning that any word, any keyword, any phrase, any letter that you put on these two lines becomes a direct way that people can discover you. The first one is your username. That one makes sense. I am Brock Levin Johnson. That means that no one else can be Brock Levin Johnson. And if you search Brock Levin Johnson, you will find me. The problem with the username is that it has to be one of a kind. So now that I'm Brock Levin Johnson, no one else can be Brock Levin Johnson. One of our students is at Juicing Recipes, which is amazing. Congratulations to her. She got lucky enough to snag that username while it was still available. So as someone who posts recipes for juicing, great. She has that, but now no one else can have that. If you post juicing recipes yourself, that username is taken. The solution is the second searchable line, which is called your Instagram name. Your Instagram name is unique because it doesn't have to be unique. Your Instagram name could be the same as my Instagram name and the same as hundreds of thousands of other people's Instagram names, which means that all of us are searchable if people type in the keywords on that line. So if you want to be discovered via Google, which you do, if you want to come up in more Instagram searches, which you do, you need to put a searchable title or keywords on this line in order to make your Instagram discoverable. At this stage, I recommend using a tool like answer the public.com or Google trends to research different keywords and figure out what are people actually looking up that relates to me and my niche and what I do. Once you have the ABCs done, I want you to create and post 15 posts onto your Instagram feed. Now a little bit later, we're going to talk more about what makes a good post. What should go in these 15 posts, but part of setting up shop is you want to have merchandise out, right? If I'm launching a donut shop, I can't just say, hey, everyone come in and there's no donuts. There have to be donuts. And so there have to be posts on the feed. There have to be posts that you have already posted before you even make the announcement. Before you even try to grow the account, there needs to be posts that are already up there. And so I know this feels counterintuitive and it's going to feel a little weird posting, but not really caring if anyone sees them posting without the intention of these posts getting views or engagement, but there needs to be 15 posts. Basically, something for people to look at when you do announce and officially cut the ribbon on this Instagram account of those 15 posts, you're going to pin three of them to the top of your profile. And the three pin posts need to be number one about me slash start here slash about our business. This is a post that as the title describes kind of just gives an overview as to what people can expect from you or your account. The second post, it can be background or additional information about you or your business, but ideally the second pinned post is one that provides a quick win. Basically, when people watch this post when they consume it, they get immediate value. They don't have to put in their email. They don't have to engage. They don't have to do anything else. They immediately learn something, have an aha moment or just experience an immediate benefit. And then the third and final pinned post is one that is related to your business. Ideally, this would be a post that has some sort of business related call to action, like comment a keyword to receive something or click the link in my bio or you know, visit some URL visit some website. Basically, a post that generates actual business. It's not just generating followers or engagement. It's actually taking the existing followers or engagement and then converting. Okay, now what? Once you have that done, you're done with step two and ready to move on to step three, which is where the fun starts step number three is to create 14 posts. Now I said create you're going to create these posts, but you're not going to post them yet. I also want to give a disclaimer. At this point, we haven't announced our new Instagram account. We're not even necessarily trying to grow it yet. We're still getting it set up. We're still just pulling the bungee cord back before we let go of this link shot, right? We're still in this preparation phase. So the fourth step in this preparation phase before we actually launch is to create 14 posts. And again, in just a minute, I will talk to you more about making these posts, what they should look like, what makes a good post versus a bad post, all of that. But you're going to create 14 posts, but not post them yet. You're just going to hold on to them and store them step number four is you're going to sign up for two tools. There are two tools that you need. And there are, I guess, some softwares out there now that can do both of these in one software, but basically two different third party tools you need and whether you get these from separate or the same doesn't really matter to me. The first one is a scheduling tool. I recommend using Metricool. It's what I use to schedule all of my posts. And number two is a tool that does DM automation. I recommend many chat because it's the most popular and most widely used. It is the only DM automation tool that is an officially approved partner of meta. And I just really love their advanced tools and capabilities. Plus, I've been using it for like seven years now, which is pretty crazy to say out loud. But you need those two tools. You need a tool that allows you to schedule posts and you need a tool that allows you to do DM automation. DM automation is something that will be really, really important down the line for sales and engagement. It's a little bit less important for growth. So if you want to prioritize one of these tools to start, start with the scheduling tool. And I would recommend the DM automation tool, but that can be second or maybe a few months down the line. If you don't quite have the budget for it right now, you sign up for a scheduling tool. Got it. Okay. Step number five is to schedule those 14 posts. So remember step three is we created 14 posts, but I told you not to post them yet. Step number five is we're going to actually schedule those posts. We're going to schedule them one per day after whatever day you decide to launch. So if you're going to launch your new Instagram account on March 1st, then you're going to schedule one post per day from March 1st through March 14th. What time should I schedule the post for? It doesn't really matter. There is no such thing as a universal best time to post. According to HubSpot, the best time to post is six to nine PM. According to Sprout Social, the best time is 11 AM to 6 PM. According to Hootsuite, it varies depending on the day of the week. According to Buffer, it's 3 PM to 6 PM. And according to Social Pilot, it's 6 to 8 AM. So no, there is no such thing. All of these different scheduling platforms and all these different social media research agencies, they all come up with different best times to post. The best time to post is the time that works for you. The best time to post is the time that will help you stay consistent. Sure, over time, you might learn, "Hey, my audience is more active in the mornings." "Hey, my audience is more online in the evenings, but they're more engaged in the midday." "Hey, my audience actually responds really well when I post it 2 AM." You might find that over time, but when your first getting started, don't sweat the best time to post. That would be like if you were getting started in the gym and you were like trying to build muscle and that was like your new year's resolution was to lose weight, build muscle and get fit. And you were like, "Hey, personal trainer, what's the best time to work out?" Like, sure, there's theoretically a time of day where like your endorphins might be higher or like your different hormones might be in a better alignment to build strength, but like getting your workout done is better than missing your workout for an entire day because you can't work out at the perfect time. So don't worry about a perfect time to post. Just schedule your posts one a day for the next 14 days. That was step number five. Step number six is to announce your new account on any other socials that you have. If you have an email list, this would be the time to use it. If you have a social media following on any other apps, now would be the time to use it. If you have an old Instagram account, now is the time to say, "Hey, I have this new account." When you are announcing this new account, I want you to be very clear whether you're sending an email broadcast, making a social post on a different social media app, on a different Instagram account, whatever. I want you to be very clear and I want you to say, "Only follow me if you are interested in blind." Because what could happen and what oftentimes does happen is people say, "New Instagram account, go follow me." And it's just like super vague. Now I have to do research to figure out if I want to follow this new account, not going to happen. Or I see you make that announcement, new Instagram account, go follow me. And because I'm a friend of yours, because I'm someone who knows you in real life, because I'm a family member of yours and I want to be a supporter, I go follow that new account. But in reality, I don't really care about that niche. I don't really care about those posts. I don't really care to learn to run my first 10k as a mom of 300. three. And so even though I followed, I'm probably never going to engage with the content. And even worse, Instagram's probably never even going to show me the content because Instagram knows while I am a supporter of you, I don't really care for that type of post. And so I'm not going to see it. I'm not going to engage and I'm just going to hurt your engagement rate. And so you can even be very clear and direct and be like, Hey, if you're a family, a friend of mine, if you're someone who knows me, don't feel obligated to follow me. Only follow this new account if you actually want more content about X, Y and Z. That way, even though you might have fewer followers at the start, you might have fewer people jumping from your old account to your new account, you're going to have a better quality of followers, someone who is actually going to stay engaged. And don't just announce the new account once, announce it over and over again. Of course, you don't want to spam your audience, but if you have, let's say, an old Instagram account that you're not really going to be using anymore, and you're going to be focused on this new Instagram account, well, then you don't really care what happens with the old one. You might as well spam it. You might as well drive using the ground. You might as well post over and over again, telling people to go follow the new one until everyone hears the message loud and clear. Don't think just because you made one post or sent one email or sent one group text about your new Instagram account, that's all you need to do. Keep talking about it over and over and over again until you're satisfied with the number of people who have come over to the new account. Step number seven, which by the way, I should have said this earlier, there's only eight steps. So you're almost done. Step number seven is to create and start posting some sort of daily challenge, some sort of daily series. What I've been talking about for the last few months is essentially the idea of creating some sort of daily post that can build upon itself. A few different ideas are day X of blank every day until blank. My example is day X of reviewing one person's real every single day until I reach one million followers. That's a challenge I'm doing over on my Instagram. Another example template of these daily challenge is some sort of verb for every new follower I gain basically doing something different for every new follower I gain. One of our Insta Club of Students went from 48 to 4800 followers in five days because she started a challenge where she was going to be sending a prayer like a voice note personalized prayer to every single new follower. I'm going to list off a bunch of different examples of daily challenges. Feel free to customize these, tweak them, make them your own use chat GPT or the Brockbot to help you brainstorm your own, but I'll just treat them off now. Running one step for every follower that I gained yesterday day X of trying a new hairstyle every day until I reach 10k followers day X of petting my dog for every follower that I gained yesterday day X of sharing a different insane quote from a text CEO every day of 2026 doing one push up for every follower that I gain doing one pull up doing one burpee doing one whatever for every follow that I gain day X of stuff that rules. He's a guy who's just listing off five things that rule every single day day X of door dashing for a diamond ring. He's a guy who is trying to raise money to purchase an engagement ring for his wife and he's doing it through door dash and he's documenting how much money he's making each day day X of walking for as many minutes as I scrolled yesterday day X of testing unethical business ideas. All right, cool. Hopefully you're feeling inspired but again step number seven is to come up with some sort of daily challenge something that you can do every single day and it would be awesome if you tied some follower goal to it. Maybe it's a thousand followers. Maybe it's 10k probably shouldn't be anything much higher than that. Maybe 50. I don't think you should go 100k because that's a pretty pretty big lofty goal but starting some sort of daily challenge or series as a few things. Number one, it really incentivizes engagement and incentivizes people to follow you. Number two, it creates brand recognition. You're the person who always post about this. You're the guy who's doing the push ups. You are the guy who's petting his dog. You're the girl who is trying to raise money for that thing. It creates that recognition. And then number three, it just gives you something to post about every single day that you don't have to think so hard about. All right, back in 2016 when I started my first real online business, I remember that my head was filled with so many what ifs. What if no one buys this? What if I'm an imposter? What if there's no market? What if I can't sell? What if what if what if this is all just a big waste of time and I'm just banging my head against the wall? But what I wish someone told me back then is just like you can imagine all the negative what ifs. There are just as many if not more positive what ifs. What if this works out? What if this is my breakthrough? What if this is what sets me financially free? And thanks to one of today's sponsors Shopify. It's easier than ever to turn those positive what ifs into reality. Shopify is the e-commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and it now represents about 10% of the entire e-commerce market in the US from some of the most famous and well-known brands in the world like Jim Shark to solo per newers Shopify has you covered. Shopify helps you get the word out about your e-commerce business as if you had an entire marketing team behind you. It easily helps you create email and social campaigns so that you can attract customers wherever they're scrolling. And if you ever get stuck Shopify has 24/7 around the clock award winning customer support. That way you can tackle the important tasks from inventory to payments to analytics all in one place. No need to bookmark multiple websites and sign up for multiple tools you can do it all in Shopify. It makes your life easier and it makes your business operations run smoother. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling on Shopify today at Shopify.com/tribe. Again that's Shopify.com/tribe. For the last few years I've been using Notion 2 basically organize my entire life. It's so much more than just a to-do list app. It's truly a one-stop shop for organizing any area of your life or business. And it's not just great at organization. It's also great at automations as well. There's so many complex things that you can do and build that can happen automatically and instantly within Notion. And now for the first time they are introducing Notion AI agents. The new Notion custom agents will allow you to automatically perform advanced tasks without you even having to lift a finger. For example I built a Notion custom agent that automatically pulls the link to any reel that I have posted and then it pulls out the text that I say or the text on the screen in the first few seconds of the reel. Basically it pulls out my hook. And then it's able to look at how that post performed and compare it to the hook which allows me to see which hooks are actually working so that I can reuse them and tweak them for future reels. Notion is an AI powered connected workspace for teams. Notion brings all of your notes, docs and projects into one space that just works. It's seamless, flexible, powerful, and with AI built in you spend less time switching between different apps and tools. And more time creating great work. Now with Notion's custom agents busy work that used to take hours or let's be honest, didn't really get done at all, runs itself. The easiest way to think about the difference between a custom agent and normal AI is that normal AI requires you as the human to prompt it but custom agents work for you 24/7 behind the scenes without you having to lift a finger. But don't just take my word for it. Notion is used by more than half of Fortune 500 companies and some of the fastest growing companies in the world. Like open AI, the company behind chat GPT. Try custom agents now at Notion.com/BYT. That's all lowercase NotionNOTIN.com/BYT. To try custom agents today and when you use my link, you're supporting our show. Again, Notion.com/BYT. Imagine this. It's Tuesday around lunchtime but it feels like Friday because you've already had to wear 17 different hats as an entrepreneur already this week. Between shuttling the kids around, writing emails coming up with reels, it's a never-ending job. So you end up resorting to the same old boring snacks that you have every single day or having the exact same meals on repeat. But you know you're craving something better. With HelloFresh, no two meals are the same and you can choose from over 80 global recipes every single month. And as we all know, nothing quite hits like home cooking. Go to HelloFresh.com/BYT10FM to get 10 free meals plus a free NutraBullet Ultra Plus 2-in-1 compact kitchen system. It's a $189.99 value and you get that in your third box. Free meals will be applied as a discount onto your first box. New subscribers only and it varies by plan. And as a disclaimer, you must order your third box by May 31st, 2026. In our final step to growing your Instagram from scratch in 2026 is to post a lot of good posts. Even though this is the last tip, we're not quite done yet. But posting a lot of good posts is ultimately how you grow on social media. It's how you grow on Instagram. If you take nothing else away from this episode, it's that if you want to grow, you have to post a lot of good posts. Is it possible to grow if you don't post a lot? You just post good posts. Sure, but it's going to take longer. Statistically speaking, it has been proven that the more you post, the more you grow. So, conversely, the less you post or the fewer times you post, the less you will grow. Is it possible to grow posting once a week or even just once a month? Sure, but it's a lot less likely. It's a lot less common. It's a lot tougher. On the other hand, is it possible to grow if you don't post good posts, but you just post a lot technically sure, like eventually you'll have something go viral. Eventually you'll gain some followers. But why would you try to post bad posts? I'm not encouraging you to post. I'm not encouraging you to post bad posts. And I don't think that's what you're trying to do. I don't think that was a thought that even crossed your mind. I think most people are actually too far down the spectrum trying to overanalyze their posts. And when I say post a good post, I purely mean good. I don't mean great. I don't mean exceptional. I don't mean A+ touchdown slam dunk home run. I simply mean good. I think most of us are way too much of perfectionists when it comes to the content that we are posting. We overanalyze. We over edit. We over critique every single post that we make. And it's this analysis paralysis that leads to burnout, not over posting. It's the over analyzing, the overthinking, it's this like, oh, it's this good enough. That is what ultimately leads to burnout. And that's what leads people to stop posting altogether. And so I want you to post a lot of good posts. Let's talk about both of those things. Let's talk about, first of all, what even is a good post? What makes a post good by my definition? And then we'll talk about how do you make a lot of them? How can you work smarter and not harder? How can you scale your output without having to change your input? That's what we're going to be talking about for the remainder of today's episode. But let's get into what makes a good post good. Number one is something called the two second rule. The two second rule is a rule that specifically applies to video content. So if you're posting any reels on your Instagram, this is going to apply to those. And the two second rule is that there should be something happening, something changing, some sort of cut transition, sound effects, something on the screen or in the audio every two seconds. And I know that sounds absolutely crazy, but the next time you're watching Netflix or the next time you're watching a movie or any TV show, try to count out loud how long it takes before there's a change. And I bet you'll struggle to get to three seconds because every two seconds there's going to be something happening on the screen. I know it sounds crazy, but fact check me, try it for yourself. This is done because the really high-paid people who produce movies and TV shows know that our attention spans are horrible. And if they don't have something happening every two seconds, we're going to get bored, we're going to look away and we're going to pull out our phone and keep scrolling. I mean, I bet while you're listening today, you have probably been doing at least one other thing. So good posts, number one, have the two second rule. Number two, they follow what's called the drunk grandma rule. The drunk grandma rule relates to how simple your posts should be. Oftentimes we try to make our posts too complex, too smart, too big wig. We try to use fancy acronyms in terms that most people don't understand. When instead, we need to simplify our posts so that they are so digestible, so understandable, they could be understood by a drunk grandma. And this is not because you want drunk grandma's to literally follow you. This is not because your followers are dumb or you're trying to attract a dumb audience. This is because, again, most people are distracted. Most people are not giving you their full attention and most people are seeing thousands of posts every single day. And so, by simplifying your posts, you make it easier for people to actually pay attention to. The third thing that makes good posts good is a strong hook. The hook is the most important part of your post. If you do not have a strong hook, the rest of your post is pointless because no one's gonna watch it. If you can't grab their attention and get them to sit down and actually stop their scroll, the rest of your post is wasted breath. So the tip within the tip within the tip is four different things that you can do to improve your hooks. Number one, keep them generally between five and eight words long. So if you go a little bit longer, so if you go a little bit shorter, but five to eight words is a good rule of thumb to stick to. Number two, fifth grade reading level. Similarly to the idea of the drunk grandma, you want to simplify your hooks so that they can grab attention and be understood without any thought. Number three is negative words in your hooks outperform positive words. So instead of saying the team won the game, ESPN will say the team snapped a three game losing streak. Either way, they're saying the team won last night, but the second one uses more negative words, snapped losing, right? Or they'll focus on the other team, the team that lost. Using words like don't stop, avoid, loss, pain, these sorts of things, our human brain is psychologically more likely to pay attention when we see the negative. Speaking of see the fourth and final tip for your hooks is that the visual matters more than what you're actually saying. Oftentimes I will see business owners and content creators use visuals, things that are on the screen that have absolutely nothing to do with what they're talking about. For example, if you are making a post about fitness, you should not be sitting in an office. You should not be driving a car. You should not be sitting at a desk. You should be in the gym. You should be doing the exercise. You should be actively exercising if your post is about exercise. Again, all of that was tip number three for what makes a good post, which is strong hooks. The fourth and final thing that makes a good post is what I like to call the mini skirt rule. Now, you have likely wondered how long should my posts be? How many seconds should my real be? There is no one size fits all for how long your content should be. Instead, I want you to stick to the mini skirt rule. And the mini skirt rule is as follows. Your content should be like a mini skirt. There is no such thing as a one size fits all mini skirt. Instead, your mini skirt needs to be long enough to cover what you need to cover, but it still needs to be short enough to hold attention. To say it another way, your reels, your captions, the number of slides in your carousel, they need to be long enough to get the point across to tell the story, to deliver the message, but no longer. They still need to be as concise as possible in order to hold people's attention, in order to retain the viewer. So rather than forcing yourself to be super short and cutting yourself off and having to like bury all your information in the caption, or conversely forcing yourself to be super long-winded and fill unnecessary time, I want you to focus on delivering the value as concisely as possible, as long as you need to to get the point across, but still short enough to hold attention. That's the mini skirt rule, and that's the fourth key to making a good post. Oh yeah, and then the fifth and final thing that makes a good post good is that it is share worthy. At least in terms of growing your Instagram, the best kind of posts are share worthy posts. Share worthy posts as the name implies are posts that are worthy of being shared, or to say it another way without using its own word in the definition, posts that are good enough to be sent from one person to another. Now, what kinds of posts get shared? There's a little acronym that I came up with to help you remember. I have done an entire episode of Build Your Tribe in the past, so if you want an in-depth tutorial for creating share worthy content, go check that out, but essentially share worthy content is S simple. We've already talked about that. H hook, we've already talked about the hooks, A, authentic, which is one of these buzzwords that everyone throws around these days. How do you make a post more authentic? You reduce the time between idea and execution. The less time that you can spend between, oh yeah, there's that thing I want to post about. There's that tip I want to share. There's that idea that I wanted to make a real about and actually posting it, the better and the more authentic it will be. R is relatable. Relatability is another one of these buzzwords and relatability is the second biggest reason that people follow people on Instagram and relatability comes from specificity. What I mean by that is the more specific you can get in your struggles, your pain points, the more specific you can get in your storytelling in your circumstances, in the labels that you put on your memes, the more relatable that content will be. And then finally, E might be the most important of all and E is entertaining. Far too often, especially business owners, but business owners, content creators, people with a personal brand, they focus on a different E and the different E is education. They focus far too much on making their content educational because they've been hearing for years, your posts need to be valuable and they do, but value doesn't necessarily mean educational. Educational content is oftentimes very boring. Another tip, another free piece of advice, another quick lesson. If we feel like we can get it from chat GPT, we're not going to keep coming back for more. And the reality is most people feel like they can get any answer to any question on YouTube or from a podcast or from Google or from chat GPT. And so the age and era of the information economy is largely over. So stop focusing on making educational content and start focusing on how entertaining is this. Would a stranger care to watch this? Was this exciting? Was this engaging or inspiring or motivating or captivating to watch in the first place? Or was it just sharing a quick tip? But like I said, we can't just post good posts. We have to post a lot of them, which that's kind of like a bonus tip in and of itself is that the way you make high quality content is you make a high quantity of content. Practice makes progress. The more you post, the better your posts get. How do you make a really, really good post on Instagram? You post 300, not so good posts on Instagram. But let's talk about how do you post a lot? Because as I said earlier, the more you post, the more you grow. So how can you achieve more posts and thus more growth without burning yourself out? Because you still have a life to live, you still have a business to run, and you still have plenty of other responsibilities. Oh, and you're trying to be a normal human being and have hobbies and passions, and you're trying to have a love life and you're trying to do all these other things in addition to growing on Instagram. So let's talk about it. Five tips for scaling your output without changing your input, posting more and working less. Number one, focus on sustainability. As a goal, like if you really need a number, I will set that number at one post per day. That can be your goal. But in reality, if you cannot sustain one post per day because of your life, your circumstances, your availability, your resources, your tools, whatever, then you're gonna kill yourself if you try to sustain one a day. Instead, I want every single person listening right now to decide for themselves what can you sustain? Maybe it's one a day, maybe it's three a week, maybe it's two a day. Find what you can sustain, but then don't just stick with what you can sustain. Challenge yourself to do just a little bit more. And when I say do just a little bit more, I don't mean work harder, I don't mean burn the candle at both ends, I don't mean sacrifice your priorities. I quite literally mean use the following systems that I'm about to share with you, in order to create more content or post more and push yourself a little bit more than what you were sustaining before. Because growth in life and on Instagram comes when we push ourselves past what we can easily sustain. Tip number two for posting more and working less is to fact, perfection. If you're picking up what I'm putting down, stop trying to make perfect posts. I went on a little rant about this earlier, but stop trying to make perfect posts where you're over-analysing, over-editing, over-pollishing, over-refining. Let me ask you this. Have you ever, and this is for those of you who have already been posting on social media, maybe even already posting on Instagram, have you ever worked really hard on a post? You thought it was great. You thought it was amazing. You thought it might be the best post you've ever made, and then you posted it and it was crickets, silence. Your lowest post of the week or the month, just horrible engagement. Yeah, right. What about the flip side of that coin? If you ever had a post that you just kinda like whipped up, you didn't think much of, you posted it and it ended up doing way better than the rest. Maybe it even went viral? Yeah. So that is proof to all of us that we are all horrible judges of our own content. And not to get too lost in the sauce here, but the reason that we're horrible judges of our own content is because our ego gets to involved. We're too close to our own content. We can't see the forest for the trees. And so stop over-analysing, over-editing, and trying to make perfect posts and embrace the imperfect. Trying to make a perfect post is rejecting your own humanity. You can't make a perfect post. And an imperfect post that is posted will always beat a perfect post that's still sitting in the drafts. So just press post. And that will help you feel more free and less stressed to be able to post more and worry less. Strategy number three for posting more and working less is to batch posts in advance and schedule posts in advance. Now, we already talked about this like 20 minutes ago when we were talking about create 14 posts. And then I had you sign up for a scheduling tool and I had you schedule those 14 posts. That's what I'm talking about. I need to be doing that all the time. That's not just like a right now before we get started thing. That's a constant thing. I think that you should post daily, but I do not think that you should create daily. Instead, I think that you should create maybe a couple times a week, maybe two or three times a week. Actually sit down, script out some posts, film some content, edit some reels, create some carousels, and then schedule it for the other days. That way, on those other days, if you're feeling inspired, motivated, you're looking good, feeling good, whatever, then you can film and create new content. But you don't have to force yourself to, if you're not. If you're having a bad day, if you're busy, if life is life, then you don't have to force yourself to create a post that day. Because remember what I said earlier about posts that are forced. But if you followed the steps that I've outlined for you in today's episode, then you are already achieving this. You are batching and scheduling posts in the future. And it gets you off the hamster wheel of having to create daily. Tip number four for posting more is to come up with repeatable formats. Repeatable formats are basically kinds of posts or styles of posts or topics of posts that you can repeat over and over and over again. I have a few that I commonly do on my Instagram. One is what I call my award reel. It's a reel where I'm like holding up an emoji of a trophy. And it's one video that I took in the summer of 2024. And I just continually reuse the same video, but change the text on the screen to present the award to a new group of people based off what's trending or what's going on in pop culture or what everyone's thinking about right now. Another one of my repeatable formats is my every generation reel. So I basically make a parody of how every generation posts on Christmas, how every generation posts on Instagram stories, how every generation posts on Halloween. And I can recycle this and continue reusing this format and just changing up where the generation is posting or what they're posting in honor of. You could steal both of these for yourself. You could create a repeatable format where you take a video of yourself holding up a trophy or holding up an emoji of a trophy, save that video and then just reuse that, changing up who the award is for. You could reuse the generations idea by coming up with how different generations do something in your niche. How different generations train for a marathon. How different generations meal prep. How different generations file their taxes. And you can just create these again, as long as it relates to your niche for each different generation. And then our final tip might be my favorite tip, which is upcycling. That is the fifth and final way that you can post more in work class. And upcycling is essentially the idea of recreating or literally just re-uploading an exact copy of something that you have previously posted. Now, I used to say take your best posts and recreate them or repost them. But now what I say is take every post. As long as it's still relevant, as long as it still makes sense, as long as it's evergreen, right? I'm not gonna tell you to take your happy New Year's post and repost that in April, but as long as it's evergreen and it's still relevant, post every post thrice. Three times. Because maybe the first time it just didn't perform well. There's so many factors and variables that can go into a post performance that you might not be able to judge it based off of one or even two bad performances. Additionally, most people didn't see it the first time or the second time. They didn't. Even for me, someone who's got 800,000 followers, I recognize even if a post goes viral, most people didn't see it the first time or the second time. And the few who did probably don't remember because they're seeing thousands of posts every single day. I hardly remember what I posted today. So no, your followers probably don't remember what you posted a few months ago. Speaking of a few months ago, I do recommend waiting at least 90 days before using this strategy. I don't recommend re-uploading the exact same posts every single week or every single month. It is usually good if you're gonna do an exact carbon copy of, hey, I made this real and I posted a few months ago. Wait, at least 90 days before posting it again, that way, it kind of has time to leave people's minds. It's not right at the top of their mind. It's something that they've forgotten about or something they haven't seen in a while. Or hopefully you've gained a bunch of new followers between each post. And so in those 90 days, you have new followers who never even saw the first one because they weren't following you yet. But this upcycling strategy is something that I use for about 75% of the posts in my feed. If you scroll through my Instagram at any given time, you won't find the exact copies 'cause they're way down there and buried. But at any given time, about three out of four of my posts are either re-uploads or recreations. To say it another way, only one out of four of my posts, only 25% of my content is a new fresh idea or a new script or a new post that I've never posted about before. If you follow these eight steps, I guarantee that you will grow on Instagram in 2026. And the final thing that I will leave you with is to stick with it. It takes time. Your first six months will be slow, slow growth. You're gonna feel like you're banging your head against the wall, but stick with it. Somewhere between month six and month 12, if you stick with it, is where you'll start to see some things click. Some things will start to make sense and you'll start to have your first successes on Instagram. But it's probably going to take that long, if not even longer, it might take even more than a year before you have your first real successes, your first real viral post, your first, wow, hey, I'm actually growing my followers here. But you never know when you're one post away. So stick with it, keep showing up, ultimately just press post. And as always, happy networking. (upbeat music)