How to Grow on IG as an Online Coach in 2025

Hey, welcome. I'm Steph Frey and I help online coaches scale to $100,000 months. In this video, I'm going to show you how to grow your online coaching business using Instagram in 2025. I'm going to share the exact content structure, keyword strategy, and boosting methods that we teach our clients Inside Success School to bring in new followers and sales without posting three times a day. To make this super simple for you, I've created an Instagram growth checklist for 2025 in the description below. You can download it now for free. This will help you so much. Last quarter, I grew my own Instagram by over 4,000 followers without going viral, posting three times a day. And in fact, I even missed a couple of days of posting as well. I used a specific mix of reels, carousels, and SEO optimized keyword captions that are working for online coaches right now in 2025 to make this happen. One of our clients, shanice, went from 16,000 followers to 36,000 followers and got fully booked using Instagram just from following this exact framework. So why does this even matter? Well, Instagram constantly changing their strategies and their tactics and their algorithms. And so you do need to stay up to date. This doesn't need to be hard work. It actually is incredibly simple. But there's also a lot of new creators coming onto the market, and there's never been more noise on social media than there is right now. If you're just posting random reels and throwing up content with no real strategy behind it, you're probably not getting a lot of likes. Content saves, shares or comments. The good news is you don't need millions of views and you definitely don't need to go viral to make this happen. You, you just need targeted visibility. That means the right people seeing the right content to make this happen. So I'm just gonna run you through the seven very simple rules for growing on Instagram in 2025. The first one is that you need to post daily, but you don't need to post three times a day. So seven posts a week is all it takes in order to grow on Instagram. Right now, you should be doing a minimum of four reels per week. Reels are still being optimized for growth Measurement reels are still the best way to grow your online presence. They get more reach and more shares than anything else. The rest of your content, if you wanted to optimize for growth, should be carousels. Now, again, I'm going to break this down in more detail. As we go on. Point three is that you want to optimize for shares and sends or saves. Meaning can somebody send this to a friend? Is it relatable? Is it something that they think of themselves or someone else when they send it off to a family member or a friend? Or is it something that they can save and come back to because it's really valuable or it makes them feel a certain kind of way? Point four is that you need to reply to all comments or DMs in the first hour. Ultimately, Instagram is a community building platform. They want to know that you're active online, that you're actively there building a community for the right reasons. Number five is that you want to optimize keywords. Now I am going to go into keyword searches after this and exactly how to optimize your captions and reels and text in your reels and hashtags for keywords that you get found by your ideal clients more easily. But you 100% have to optimize because Instagram have been working really hard on their AI and their algorithms to make sure that you're searchable and findable. Number six is to use trending audio on every single post. It doesn't matter if it's a carousel, a video or a photo. Pick a trending audio because because it's going to help it get more reach and help you get more visible. And number seven is that if someone falls on your profile for the first time, you want to make sure they want to stay. So we need to optimize your profile. Your pinned posts at the top of your feed should include a personal story. So your why, why are you here? What's your background? What makes you different? And then three, a value post so they can see the kinds of information that you share on a regular basis. So that's the seven tips to growing on Instagram. I'm going to help you break some of these down now so that you can implement it really quickly and simply. So the first one I'm going to break down for you is Instagram SEO in 20. So like I said, Instagram have been investing massively into their AI and their algorithm. They want to make sure that you are searchable and findable. They want to make sure that the top creators, the biggest ones with the biggest followers, are the only ones that are getting shared and seen. They want to make sure that you're as a new content creator or a small business owner, are also getting the opportunity to be found on Instagram. This is good news. The best way to hack into Instagram's keyword algorithm is to optimize your captions, your username and your searchability on your profile to make sure that they can actually find you. So let me break down exactly what this looks like for you. So your username, your captions, and even the text inside of your reels all play a role in discoverability. So here's exactly what you need to do. 1. Add a searchable keyword in your Instagram name. So for me, I have the word business coach. I hate labels, I hate being called a business coach. I wish I wasn't called a business coach. But that is ultimately what people are searching for when they're searching for somebody like me. So I'm using the word that makes the most sense for my audience to find me. I'm going to use three to five keywords in every search. Single caption. Okay. Not just in hashtags, but I will talk about hashtags at the end. But these are actually in your captions. So you know, if you're writing a caption about a downloadable that you have, it might be like, this is the best downloadable for online coaches in 2025. If that's the people that you're trying to attract. Okay? So an example of this is instead of I help my client grow, say this content system helped my online coaching client get more leads and sales. It has so many keywords content systems. If anyone's looking up content or what's helped with their content, they're going to bind you. Online coaching clients have someone searching up like online coaching support or online coaching coaching growth leads and sales. I want to get more leads from Instagram. This is going to help you to become more searchable. You can use hashtags, just make them relevant. And no more than 6. An extra hack here is not just to use this in your captions, so you can use this in the text on your reels as well. So Instagram reads the text on your reels, not so much with carousels, but definitely the reels, especially when you create them in app. So if you're creating Instagram content in app, which we'd highly recommend, especially putting text on reels, now you can maybe make the video in capcut, but then bring the video into Instagram, put some text on it in the Instagram app and that is be going to to make the content that's in the reel searchable as well. The algorithm is now favoring searchable, niche specific content. So please use that to your advantage. Another strategy that has massively helped us to grow in the last 12 months on Instagram has been boosting reels. Another thing that's helped me to grow on Instagram in 2025 has been boosting my posts. This is such a cheat code and absolutely something that you need to be doing. Let me show you through how it works. So step one for boosting your content is to let your content run for 48 hours. Okay? So let it, when you post it up, let it go organically for 48 hours, let it do its own organic thing, and then boost our posts for three days. Now I'm going to go into when we turn off and how we know whether to turn off shortly. Step two is that we boost to cold audiences. So we're not boosting to our followers. We're trying to get this to reach new audiences, to bring new eyeballs in. So when you're boosting, you want to choose detailed interests that match your niche. So things like online coaches, fitness, business owners, business coaching, whatever it is for your niche. Okay? Step three is to optimize for profile visits or messages, not likes. This is all about lead generation. It's not about vanity metrics. Step four is to make sure that you're boosting on computer, not iPhone. So especially if you're Apple, if you're Android, this is not a problem for you. But if I boost on my Apple iPhone, Apple charges me a 30% increase for boosting on there. So it's going to cost me 30% more just to boost on my phone when I could go up here to my browser, go to Instagram and boost through there really simply. So just boost it using the Instagram app, but on your computer, not on your iPhone. There's just some proof that this massively works. One of our clients, Jess, boosted a reel for $10. She. She messaged 10 of the new followers that she got and managed to sign four into her upcoming masterclass, which was amazing. Another client, Steph, boosted, and two days later, she signed a $1,650 client from that with a sell by chat conversation in dm. So this massively works for not only getting new eyeballs into your world, but also converting those eyeballs into paying clients. Bonus tip here. Your profile must be optimized. They have to land on your profile and know exactly what you do. And they have to think like this person's for me, I like them. I'm gonna stay. So if you want tips on profile optimization, go and check out my own profile at Steph Gordon underscore underscore, check it out, take a look, see what we've done, how we've structured it, and try and structure yours the same. Obviously, don't copy that would be not helpful for you, but see the way that we've structured it and see how you might be able to replicate that for your own Instagram profile. Ultimately, there's no point paying for boosts if they don't end up following you because your profile isn't optimized. So if you implement this and you're still posting content that's not getting reach, it's not getting views, and it's definitely not bringing you in paid clients, then it's probably not the algorithm, it's probably a content system. If you want help building a content system that grows your audience and your revenue, then I would love to see if I could help you DM me the word grow on Instagram at Steph Gordon. Underscore, underscore and I can show you how it might look to work together. And don't forget, if you want my exact growth worksheet for online coaches to grow on Instagram In 2025, I have graded it into a very simple checklist for you so that you can just download it and get to work straight away. So click the link below in the description and get the free worksheet that goes along with this video to make it so super simple for you to grow online in 2025. If you liked this video, which I hope you did, please click like and subscribe. It means the world to me to know that I'm helping you and I'll see you in the next video.