How to Get 300 Real Targeted Followers Per Day in Instagram | Ep. #205

Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're going to talk about how to get 300 real targeted Instagram followers per day. So Neil, this is something that you're an expert at. Why don't you kick things off?

I'm actually gonna let you kick it off because you use Instagram more than I do.

Okay, I'll kick it off. So one thing I did was when I interviewed Nathan Chan from Founder Magazine, at the time he got his Instagram account— and Founder Magazine is an online publication where they interview a lot of different entrepreneurs like Richard Branson, for example. So he got his Instagram following from 0 to 300,000. And a lot of his business, the brand that he built, is from Instagram. Since then, he's grown it from 300,000 to almost a million. So he's really heavy in that game. And what he did initially was he used a tool called CrowdStrike. And this is against Instagram's terms, by the way. And I don't know if they shut it down or not, but I actually tried it for a little bit. And what you can do is basically, you know, for example, because Growth Everywhere is very similar to Founder Magazine where we interview a lot of different entrepreneurs, Maybe we want to have the same people, right? So we can pick Founder Magazine and then basically we start to select all the people that follow them and then just follow them and then unfollow people. And you'll see people start to follow you over time and you have to just unfollow. And then basically it's a task that you would hand off to a virtual assistant. Every single day they're just unfollowing, following people and repeating the same thing over and over. So that sounds spammy and a little hacky, but it did work in terms of You know, getting a couple thousand followers or so. But what you want to do after that, after you've secured the first thousand— I know we're talking about per day right here— you're really looking to get to that point where you've established a sense of legitimacy. That's when you start to do shout for shouts. So shout for shouts are basically you look at accounts that are similar to you in the space and you can pay them to shout out your account. So you might put up like a nice image quote. For example, for Growth Everywhere, I might put up a quote of like Neil Patel.

Wow.

When I interviewed him, right? And I might put that up there and then they'll put in the message like, you know, go out there and follow Growth Everywhere, for example. And that works out. So, it is manual. It does cost money over time. That's the way that Nathan Chan did it. And since then, he's built an incredible brand. So, Neil, I know you've done, you know, some cool stuff with Instagram. I'll let you take it away.

Sure. One thing that I love doing in Instagram is using hashtags. It's really simple, but that's how people, a lot of them search. If you use hashtags, more of your photos will be found. You're going to generate more followers that way. Another thing that you should be doing is the way the algorithm works. I post a photo and then within an hour, if I like 6 more photos, the photos that I liked are much more likely to get more play. If I like 100 photos, they're less likely to get play, right? Because I'm not liking too many photos. So what you need to do is for powerful influencers, once they post photos, whenever they're done, You can pay them like $20, $30, $50 max to like your image. It's not even that expensive. Most will just do it for free. If you get these people with big profiles to like your photo, it starts spreading because Instagram's looking at us from an authority perspective. Accounts with way more followers are more authoritative. So if they like it, just like you'd get a link from Google, you'll start doing way better on Instagram. So make sure that you're getting likes from powerful users and they'll gladly accept $10 for a like.

All right, and Neil, can you talk about the Instagram campaign that you ran, the What is Neil Patel campaign?

Sure, so I did a Who is Neil Patel campaign in which I paid a ton of people to hold up signs that says, Who is Neil Patel? I've paid everyone from models that are guys and girls to comedians to Viners. And yeah, they've held up signs that say, Who is Neil Patel? Increases my brand awareness and that helps me rank higher in Google. For that reason, I don't have an Instagram account because I keep leveraging it. If I had an Instagram account, everyone would just go to my Instagram profile, which would cause less people to Google, and that wouldn't increase my brand awareness as much. And as I mentioned, for that reason, I don't have an Instagram account.

Interestingly enough, I met with one of our clients in person and he mentioned that campaign and he was like, who's this Neil Patel guy? And there's a model that lives in my apartment complex. She's got about like 500,000 or 600,000 followers. And then, you know, she also mentioned that once too, you know, because she actually saw our podcast. And then she's like, you know, who's this Neil Patel guy? Like, I've seen, you know, models holding up signs. So, you know, in LA, I guess it's because it's in LA too, a lot of people see this stuff because a lot of people in that space kind of follow each other. So it does actually work. You know, when you look at how, you know, we've talked about branding in the past, this is just one of those campaigns that Neil ran. And, you know, it clearly, it worked out. So I don't know. I mean, in terms of things to add around this, I mean, you know, to get the 300 real targeted Instagram followers per day, It is a lot of grunt work, right? We talked about some of the hacky stuff too, but if you're going to try to get there, it's the same thing as content marketing or podcasting, for example. It's just going to take time. You can do it the legit way or you can do it kind of through some of these other ways we're talking about.

So some quick notes. One, follow and unfollow people. Follow a lot of people, wait. Whoever doesn't follow you back a week later, unfollow them.

This will get you a lot more followers.

2, every time you upload photos, use 30 hashtags. This will get you way more play. And the reason you don't want to use more than 30 is It creates issues with Instagram if you have, what is it called, more than 30. So keep it somewhere around there. You can use 28, 29, whatever it may be. Then you also want to post on a consistent basis. Don't post one photo every few days. You need to post at least 1 or 2 photos per day or videos. And then you want to do 5 to 30 Instagram stories per day. And then you want to post one live video each and every single day and roughly at the same time. So that way it's creating habit. And when you're doing this, it'll cause more people to follow you. Those are just some general rules. I've done it. It's worked in the past, although I don't have an Instagram account right now. I've had many in the past and I have a lot of fake ones that I experiment with as well.

And there's, I mean, you can also, there's somebody that reached out to me and he actually does work for a friend and he's actually grown 20,000 legit followers. So there are those people that can help you get there too. And that specialize with it. And the thing is, you know, the other thing I would add too, if you're going to go about doing, you know, tags, and I certainly think tags are important, the first, you know, in your caption, you can just focus on, you know, one or two liner, whatever it is exactly. But then your second, when you add a comment, that's when you throw in all the tags. That way you kind of separate the two. So when people start commenting and things like that, it's not going to look like a huge cluster. So that's a little small tip there. But anyway, a lot of different ways to skin a cat for this one too. We will see you in tomorrow's episode of Marketing School.

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