Announcer: 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.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of marketing school. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: And today we're going to talk about how to get your first 1,000 Instagram followers. So, here's what you need to do, here's what's worked well for us. I mean our growth everywhere on Instagram right now is about 10,000 people, and we didn't try to buy followers, or anything like that. What's gotten us there is doing a lot of shout for shout, so this is reaching out to people that are maybe around the same kind of ... Well, maybe people that have a following, and people that are similar, and they have an audience that they're aiming for, so in my case entrepreneurs, and you reach out to these people and you can talk to them saying "hey, I'd like to do a paid shout," for example. And then they will post your post on their, and they will mention to follow you.
That works, I think as a startup you need maybe 500 Instagram followers, so that's beyond the first 500, but to get the first 1,000 or so, I'm assuming most of you listening to this you have a good amount of friends on Facebook for example. You can dd your friends on Facebook, and then you can start to follow people that inspire you, and also comment on their stuff. You can also like their stuff, engage with their stuff. Those are the basics, you do need to be doing that, because those are the core features of Instagram
And then also if you want to put some paid media behind it, you can definitely think about that. But I'd recommend just going with the nuts and bolts, looking at people that you're interested in, searching through people that are similar to you, or searching for specific tags, people that are in your area, starting to follow them, starting to DM them, starting to build relationships that way. Then, once you get to 500, 1,000 or so, you can start to do the paid shouts, and that's going to get you to 10,000 and beyond.

Neil Patel: Do something really simple, promote your Instagram profile from the rest of your sites. Your websites, your Facebook profile, like Eric mentioned, your Twitter profile, your YouTube channel. CROss link them all. There's no reason why someone whose following you on LinkedIn shouldn't be following you on Instagram, and vice versa.
That's a quick and easy way to get followers. I get most of my Facebook subscribers, at least at the beginning, from people who are visiting my website. I got most of my Instagram followers from other social profiles I had, and I just told everyone "follow me on Instagram."
It really is that easy. If you're not promoting your own social networks with each other, they're not going to grow as fast. And it's getting harder and harder. See when Instagram first rolled out, it was easy to tweak, and adjust, and play with the algorithm, and sky rocket to the top, and just grow your follower count like crazy.
It doesn't work as much anymore. The reason being that they're already popular, they have an advertising platform, and they want you to spend the money on ads. So they make it harder. Just like with Google and SCO. It's harder to rank on Google organically, because if it wasn't, why would you spend all this money on paid advertising? It's in their benefit to make it harder. So with Instagram you need to use your other profiles to become popular on Instagram. It's a quick and easy way.

Eric Siu: Yeah, and the other thing is, I'm not sure if Neil talked about this, but I mean obviously in addition to linking from your site, cross promoting, things like that, if you have an email list, you might as well just hit your email list. That goes without saying, put it into your auto responder, whatever it is exactly.
Also, at the same time you can do collaborations with other people if you're a little smaller, maybe you're tagging each other on different images, or different Instagram stories as well. That's going to help you get there, and then you can decide what you want to do next.
Neil, you have anything else to add around this?

Neil Patel: Yeah, go look at what's popular within your space, and go and hit hard on those similar types of photos, images, videos, whatever it may be. So it's not just important to engage, and be part of the community, you're not going to become popular on Instagram unless you're there interacting and engaging.
What I mean is like commenting on other people's profiles who are in your space, liking other photos. And not just doing it because you want them to like your photos back, but more so engaging because of this reason.
So in addition to that, what I like doing is I like to see what's hot within my space, because that'll give you ideas of trends. There's no simple tools like BuzzSumo that works well for Instagram. [inaudible 04:19] you have to manually go and see what's popular within other profiles that are in your space, and go create similar types of images. But be unique. Copying them won't do the same. If these other people have more followers than you, and you just copy their images, you're not going to get a ton of likes. You have to be unique.

Eric Siu: That's it for today, but before we go we have a 90 day free trial of Crazy Egg to give away to each and everyone of you. So, to get in, again this is for everyone, go to singlegrain.com/giveaway. You get the 90 day trial, and if you want to learn more about how you can get a one year annual subscription of Crazy Egg, again, go to that link. And we'll see you tomorrow.

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