08:09Maria Wendt · Interview
How I Got 49,769 Instagram Followers In 90 Days With Zero New Content
Two sisters break down the ad tactic that turns already-proven Reels into a steady drip of new followers, no fresh filming required.
September 28thThe argument in one line.
A million followers came from a hard deadline and relentless posting volume measured by followers-per-view rather than views, with paid shout-outs and ads only accelerating the final 22 percent.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You post on Instagram inconsistently and want a concrete ladder for building up from one post a day to several without burning out.
- You sell digital products or courses and want to see how comment-to-DM automations and a single link in bio turn reels into checkout traffic.
- You're considering paying for growth and want real numbers on what paid shout-outs and follower ads cost per follower at scale.
- You're about to hire your first content person and want to know which parts of content creation can be delegated and which can't.
- You keep chasing viral reels and want a better metric for deciding what to make more of.
SKIP IF…
- You want platform-agnostic strategy; nearly every tactic here is specific to Instagram reels, carousels, stories and ManyChat.
- You have no product to sell yet; the monetization half assumes an existing catalog of courses and a checkout page.
- You need a step-by-step technical setup guide; the automations are shown, not built, and the full walkthrough is sold separately.
The full version, fast.
The account grew from zero to one million followers by treating growth as a single company target with a deadline, then out-posting everyone. The first 500,000 came from one person posting daily, scaling from one to three posts a day only after holding each level for 90 days. A three-person team then pushed volume to six or seven posts a day. Of the final million, 779,157 followers came from organic content, 120,932 from $100,000 in paid shout-outs, and 99,911 from $160,000 in ads run on reels with high followers-per-view. The practical lesson: optimize for followers per view, not views, test any format about 10 times before judging it, and send all profile traffic to one checkout link backed by comment and new-follower DM automations.
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Create a free account →Where the time goes.
00:00 – 01:19
01 · Cold open
The account just crossed one million followers; the promise is a full free course with no gatekeeping, broken into chapters.
01:19 – 07:22
02 · The solo years: zero to 500K
Three stages of growth by team size. The first half-million came from one person, a first awkward reel, a goal of one reel a day for a year, a phone on a bookshelf, and two years of mostly flops.
07:22 – 14:13
03 · Hiring the content team
A first assistant teaches what can be delegated (editing) and what can't (ideas and writing). A gap means waking at 3 a.m. for four months to hold three posts a day, then a content director and a second hire form the team.
14:13 – 27:24
04 · Roundtable: quality, volume and testing
The content team explains posting about seven times a day, testing 50 formats to find five winners, giving each format 10 tries, adding a human element to pitch content, and pushing through the cringe phase.
27:24 – 31:56
05 · Going viral and refilming the hit
A trend reel nears 20 million views and 20,000 followers. The plan is to let it breathe, refilm it, and test reordered versions on trial, while noting average growth is about 80 followers per reel.
31:56 – 35:35
06 · Targets versus goals
A target is black and white with a deadline. The company set one target, one million followers by December 31, 2026, instead of a revenue goal, to buy market relevance and social proof.
35:35 – 42:20
07 · The volume ladder
One post a day for 90 days before adding a second, resets on a missed day, three a day as the solo ceiling, volume negates luck, reps make you faster, and the 3,000-post gap with million-follower accounts.
42:20 – 48:30
08 · Paid shout-outs and follower ads
Two previously unshared tactics: $100,000 in shout-outs for 120,932 followers, and $160,000 in ads on high followers-per-view reels for 99,911 followers, with costs rising as the market saturated.
48:30 – 51:10
09 · Investing before you can afford it
A story of committing to a $1,500 coach with $92 in the bank and selling clothes and a camera to cover it, framed as the willingness to invest toward a target.
51:10 – 55:55
10 · Content and the views-to-follower ratio
Organic content produced 779,157 followers. Side-by-side insights show a 500K-view reel outgaining a 9M-view reel in followers, so content is chosen for follower conversion, not views.
55:55 – 1:04:10
11 · The formats that worked
Nine of ten experiments flop. What stuck: talking heads, B-roll pitch reels, two-slide pitch carousels, personal nurture carousels, quote graphics, and one pitch story every 24 hours.
1:04:10 – 1:10:04
12 · Three ways the account makes money
One link in bio straight to checkout (about $500K a quarter), a new-follower DM automation selling a $147 bundle (about $100K a quarter), and hundreds of comment-to-DM automations on content, then a pitch for the course.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- A goal is nebulous; a target is binary, has a deadline down to the minute, and you either hit it or you don't.
- Every account studied with over a million followers had posted more than 3,000 times, while the gap in looks, intelligence and editing was negligible.
- Volume negates luck: three posts a day is three chances a day to get followers, while three posts a week is a third of a chance.
- Build posting consistency like a muscle: one post a day for 90 days without missing, and any missed day resets the 90-day clock.
- A reel with 500,000 views and 3,671 new followers beat a reel with 9 million views and 2,521 new followers.
- Optimize content for the views-to-follower ratio, not raw views, because viral reach often converts almost no one into a follower.
- Paid shout-outs on large accounts delivered 120,932 followers for $100,000, roughly 83 cents each, because they buy attention rather than fake followers.
- Running ads on reels that already convert viewers to followers organically started near 50 cents per follower and climbed to an average of $1.60 as the market saturated.
- Of one million followers, 779,157 came from plain organic posting; the $260,000 in paid tactics only accelerated the last stretch.
- Give any new content format about 10 honest tries before deciding it's a winner or a flop.
- Expect roughly nine out of ten content experiments to flop; the one that works funds the rest.
- Delegate editing and production, but keep ideation and writing, because new hires don't know the audience and followers can tell when it isn't you.
- If you don't know how to build your content engine yourself, you won't be able to scale it with a team.
- Unedited, candid clips regularly outperformed reels that took ten hours to edit.
- Nurture carousels make no direct sales but are the trust layer that every pitch post depends on.
- One link in bio pointing straight to a checkout page, not a landing page or link list, earned about $500,000 a quarter.
- A single automated DM sent to every new follower, offering a $147 course bundle, generated about $1,000 a day.
- The account averages about 80 followers per reel; viral hits happen three or four times a year and aren't the growth engine.
- Quote graphics of other people's words, made in seconds in Canva, gained followers, which only an experimenting account would ever discover.
Followers come from volume, not viral luck.
WHAT TO LEARN
Set one binary target with a deadline, build posting volume in 90-day stages, judge every post by followers gained per view, and route all the attention to a single checkout.
02The solo years: zero to 500K
- Start alone and stay hands-on long enough to know your audience cold, because you can't scale a content process you never learned to build.
- Set a small, survivable goal like one reel a day for a year, and expect most early posts to flop without taking it personally.
03Hiring the content team
- Delegate editing and production first, but keep ideas and writing, since new hires don't know the audience and followers notice content that isn't you.
- When you lose capacity, protect the posting schedule anyway; treating the schedule as fixed is what separates commitment from preference.
04Roundtable: quality, volume and testing
- Pair quality with volume by testing many formats, keeping the handful that win, and restarting the search when those winners fatigue.
- Give each format or pitch creative about 10 honest attempts before judging it, since a winner usually reveals itself by attempt five or six.
- Unedited, candid moments often beat heavily produced reels, so don't let editing time stand in for relevance.
05Going viral and refilming the hit
- Treat a viral hit as an anomaly to refilm and remix on trial, not as the growth plan, since steady growth averages closer to 80 followers per reel.
06Targets versus goals
- Replace vague goals with one binary target that has an exact deadline, and make it the single priority everyone works toward.
- Choose a target that changes your market position, such as a follower count that buys credibility, not just one that sounds nice.
07The volume ladder
- Build consistency in stages: post once a day for 90 days without missing before adding a second daily post, and reset on any miss.
- More posts mean more chances to win each day, and repetition shrinks a 90-minute carousel down to minutes, so volume compounds speed and skill.
08Paid shout-outs and follower ads
- Paid shout-outs on large accounts buy real attention rather than fake followers, and delivered followers at under a dollar each at a $100,000 scale.
- Ads work best on posts that already convert viewers to followers organically, but cost per follower rises as you saturate your market.
09Investing before you can afford it
- Be willing to invest before you feel ready if the target matters, and find creative ways to fund it rather than waiting for spare cash.
10Content and the views-to-follower ratio
- Measure content by followers gained per view; a modest reel that converts can be worth far more than a viral one that doesn't.
11The formats that worked
- Run cheap experiments relentlessly, because the format that works, like simple quote graphics, is often one you'd never have predicted.
- Balance pitch posts with personal nurture posts; the nurture content earns nothing directly but builds the trust every pitch relies on.
12Three ways the account makes money
- Use one link in bio that goes straight to a checkout page, not a landing page or a list of links.
- Automate a welcome DM to every new follower with a low-ticket offer, turning follower growth itself into daily revenue.
- Use comment-keyword automations on pitch content so every engaged commenter receives a direct checkout link without manual work.
Terms worth knowing.
- Views-to-follower ratio
- The share of people who follow an account after seeing a specific post. A reel with fewer views but more new followers is more valuable for growth than a viral reel that converts few viewers.
- Trial reels
- An Instagram feature that shows a reel to non-followers first, letting a creator test a format or variation without it appearing to their existing audience.
- Paid shout-out
- Paying a large account to post about or point to your profile. You buy exposure to their audience, and viewers still decide whether to follow, unlike buying fake followers.
- Pitch carousel
- A short swipeable Instagram post, often two slides, where the first frames a result and the second tells readers to comment a keyword to get the offer.
- Nurture carousel
- A personal, story-driven carousel post that builds trust and familiarity with the audience rather than selling directly.
- ManyChat
- A tool that automates Instagram direct messages, such as sending a link to anyone who comments a keyword or welcoming every new follower with an offer.
- Comment-to-DM automation
- A setup where commenting a specific word on a post triggers an automatic direct message containing a link, usually to a checkout page.
- Link in bio
- The single clickable link Instagram allows on a profile page, the main way to send profile visitors off the platform.
Things they pointed at.
39:19channelAlex Hormozi ("volume negates luck")
43:20productAdley (shout-out coordinator)
46:40linkRose's video on the follower-ad strategy
1:00:00productCarousels course
1:01:30toolCanva
1:06:24toolManyChat
1:07:30product$147 four-course bundle (first 100 sales game plan)
Lines you could clip.
39:19
“Volume negates luck.”
06:56
“If you don't know how to build, you will not be able to scale.”
33:30
“There's a huge difference between a goal and a target. You hit a target or you don't hit a target. But a goal is nebulous.”
53:59
“It got 9 million views and has less followers than a reel that got a half a million views.”
42:58
“Cost me exactly $100,000. It was two wire deposits of $50,000 each. And I bought shout outs.”
51:23
“Cost me pretty much zero. Big fat nothing. But I paid for it in blood, sweat, tears, and labor. It's content.”
24:57
“You have to pay the cringe tax.”
1:01:03
“If a post flops, no one sees it. If it does well, everybody sees it.”
59:08
“Instagram is my diary.”
31:34
“If you put up enough shots, one of them is going to hit.”
Word for word.
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Last week, my Instagram account hit 1 million followers, which was super exciting. It was a huge goal that we had worked towards hitting for a little over a year now. And obviously, when you hit a million followers on Instagram, people want to know how I did it.
They ask you, what did you do to grow your account to over a million followers? And so what I decided to do was something I've never done before. I decided to sit down and film an entire course on how I got to a million followers on Instagram and give it to you here.
for free. No need to opt in, no need to pay anything. I'm going to show you every single thing I did, every tactic I use, every strategy, all the content we did, everything that I did to grow my Instagram account very quickly.
I'm giving it to you all for free. And by the way, there's going to be no gatekeeping. I'm literally going to give you all the little juicy secrets, all the stuff that the big influencers that you see, they never tell you.
These are the real strategies that happen behind the scenes with big influential people that they never talk about. what I'm gonna get into in this video. Now, just as a quick note, we've broken up everything into chapters to make it a little bit easier for you to skip around.
We're going over so much stuff. There's so much that goes from getting an account on Instagram from like zero followers to a million. So this is a really beefy course.
And so feel free to use the chapters to hop around. good stuff in every section so definitely come back to sections that you've skipped but feel free to use the chapters to hop around okay the first thing that i want you to know as we talk about my journey from going to zero followers to a million is i literally want you to understand the timeline because in some parts of this video we're going to talk about my content team and the people that i have hired to bring on to help me grow my instagram account but what's so important for you to understand is the process and the journey and the timeline because yes i have a content team now and they're incredible and they're amazing and they're a big part of why we hit 1 million followers but it's really important for you to understand that i did not always have a team there's three stages to my instagram growth as it relates to my team zero to five hundred thousand was little old me all by myself i made every piece of content i posted several times a day experimenting with filming
Everything was done all by myself from zero followers to a half a million followers. And then from a half a million to about 700 ,000, I had one team member. It was amazing.
It was very helpful. That was the beginning of me hiring out this process. And then right around the like 600 ,000, 700 ,000 is when I brought on the content team that I have now, which we're going to have whole conversations with them a little bit later.
But it's really important for you to understand that. For the first half a million followers, halfway on that journey was literally me by myself creating content as a single mama only working on Tuesdays and Fridays. It's just.
I want to share that because I want to take away the limiting belief you may have that in order for me to get a million followers, I have to spend a ton of money and I have to hire a ton of people. And it's this big, complicated process. It really wasn't.
I think the most important thing as we begin is knowing that we all start with zero. When I started my Instagram account, I literally had zero followers, just like you might, just like anyone else says, we all start with zero followers. And it was...
It was just that, like my Instagram account was up. I really wasn't doing much with it. I wasn't posting.
I was not really doing anything on Instagram for a really long time. And I was, you know, I was worrying about other platforms. I was growing my Facebook group.
I had 300 ,000 people in my Facebook group and that's the platform I was growing on at the time. But eventually in 2023, so that was like three years ago now, I published my first ever reel. I felt awkward.
I didn't know what to do. I will put it up on the screen here, but it was literally a picture of me. I had just had my baby, so I wasn't feeling very confident physically.
I was walking my dog, and it was literally just my sister Rose behind the camera saying, go, start walking, and I just start walking. And I might not look very awkward, but I felt very awkward, and I think I look awkward on camera. And so I relate to so many of you when you talk about how you don't feel like you know what you're doing, and you're also publishing your first reel.
Because not that long ago, I published my first reel too. And now, 3 ,000 pieces of content later, I'm at a million followers.
But I relate. I relate to the people who are just getting started because it was very, I felt very insecure. I felt very overwhelmed.
I felt like a total newbie doing this. So I published my first reel and... Instagram does this thing, a lot of new platforms do this thing where you have a little bit of beginner's luck with your first few pieces of content.
And so I think I got like a thousand views on my first reel, which I was not expecting, right? It wasn't like I had hundreds of thousands of followers. It was my first reel.
I was mentally locked in and ready for it to completely flop. And I was okay with that, which is a good little takeaway for you who are just getting started. It's like, it might flop and that's fine.
So I was encouraged and I just set myself a little goal. I'm going to publish one reel every day for a year. That was it.
That was my only goal was to publish one reel every single day for a year and just see what happens. I didn't set any follower goals at that point. I didn't know what to expect.
I just literally wanted to publish content consistently to see what happened. So I did exactly that. I started publishing reels.
They mostly sucked. They were pretty bad. If you go back and see, you'll see some of my old ones.
We'll put some of the old ones on screen. They weren't that good. It was a lot of me figuring out what doesn't work.
And I would say as you're beginning to grow your Instagram account and take it seriously, you can expect that. You can expect that most of your stuff will not do well. It will flop.
And mind you, when it comes to all the stuff I was doing by myself, I'm also filming all of this by myself. And so I had... For a long time, I didn't even have a tripod.
I was literally standing my old phone on a bookshelf and then I would like step back from the bookshelf and film myself that way. Then eventually I got a super cheap tripod and that was like a game changer for me was having a tripod. And so I'm sharing all of this because I really want you to understand where we started from.
We are at such a professional level now. We have such a great system and such a great team and this massive thing that we've built out in order to be able to pump out six, seven posts a day. But it didn't start that way at all.
It started with me doing all of this by myself, fighting tooth and nail to hit my one post per day and to try all these experiments that really flopped. So I did that for about two years. I think it was from 2023 to 2025, which would have been last year.
And that's how I got the first half a million followers. That was done one post at a time, one reel at a time, one carousel at a time. And I think it was so important that for that first half a million followers, I did not have a team.
I did not delegate. I did not try to bring in agencies. I just sat in the shit of figuring out what works.
And I knew it like the back of my hand. I knew the content that resonated with my audience. I knew what my community wanted.
I had my finger in every bit of that pie for the first half a million followers. And I think that that was so important because it really helped me understand. how to scale if you don't know how to build you will not be able to scale and so it was so important for me to really just sit and I see a lot of content creators who are wanting to shortcut the process they want to hire someone to help them they want to delegate because they don't want to do it I didn't want to do it either I didn't feel like I had the time to create content I didn't feel like I had the time to figure it out I felt like I had other fires that I needed to put out we're going to talk more about that later because it's very important to understand why you should prioritize this and so at the first 500 ,000 Instagram follower mark that is when I hired my first assistant now she's no longer with us we did part ways she was incredible but we did part ways and so to respect her privacy we're not going to use her photo we're not going to use her name but I've remained very grateful for the time that we did spend together because it helped me understand how to begin to delegate some of this content creation process and there's a little bit of a lesson in that just in hiring in general
What I've learned is that sometimes you need a first go around to understand what's a good fit for your team, what's a good fit for that period. And so I remain forever grateful for our time that we had together. We learned a lot and I learned what can be delegated and what should not be delegated.
And so things that can be delegated. in my opinion, is the like actual editing and creation of the content. So I would write the carousels and she would make the carousels or I would come up with the real ideas and she would literally like go and edit the real ideas.
And I think that's a really great way to start delegating your content. I see business owners delegate the writing of the content, delegating the ideation of the content. But my issue with that is.
One, the new people don't understand you and your audience, so the content typically tends to flop. B, it doesn't sound like you and your audience is actually really, really good at knowing what pieces of content are created by you and what pieces of content are created by your team. And so that was a beautiful experience and it helped me dip my toes in the water of bringing on a content team.
And by the way, just as a reminder, we're going to be going over all the content I did to grow. Actual tactics that I use to grow. Things I spent money on and whether or not I would actually do it again.
Little things I did to help boost followers. I did all kinds of crazy tactics and we're going to get into that. But it's really important that you understand the timeline of all of this to set the scene so you understand why some tactics will work for you and why some tactics won't.
Or why some things you should do and why some things you shouldn't. And don't forget, when it comes to actually growing on Instagram, there's a couple of big things we're going to go over. The target, right?
So the target that we set. The volume. Got to talk about that.
The tactics, the content, and the monetization. We're going to be going over all of this. It's literally three pages of notes on top of all the other stuff we're going to cover.
We're going to go very deep into the target, the volume, the tactics, the content, and the monetization because that's some of the really sexy stuff. So after and I parted ways, there was a period from like December until I think it was April where I was back on my own and I was struggling because our account had accelerated to the workload of me plus one other full -time person and i was bound and determined to not miss that new content schedule i think at that point we were posting three times a day in order for me to hit this three times a day content schedule i was literally waking up at three in the morning every day from december until april and i would work on this content before my daughter got up that's how committed i am to hitting content schedules we're gonna talk about content later on but when you as a company, as yourself, decide that my upload schedule is my upload schedule, my content schedule is my content schedule, you will be asked internally, how bad do you actually want this?
How committed are you to actually hitting this? And for me, even though I had a justifiable excuse, I used to be two full -time people on this, and now I'm one full -time person on this, it would have been totally reasonable to say, we're going to scale back, but I just am not a quitter. And I'm that committed to my content schedule and my growth.
I was gonna hit a million Instagram followers. I was gonna do what it took. And so what it took for a hot second was me waking up at three in the morning for a while.
Because we knew, now we knew what we were looking for in our next person. So come April, we had an incredible content director come on board. You might know who he is.
His name is Luke. He was an incredible fit right away. A good culture fit, which was very important.
He was also very talented. He had generated billions of views for the accounts that he had been working on in the past. And he was local to us.
That was really important was that he was local to us. And when Luke started, I think he had like a week to warm up, if that. And then pretty much started posting right away from there.
and I pretty much immediately had a I stopped waking up at three in the morning like if I let's say April 1st to April 7th I was still waking up at three in the morning by April 7th I was back to my normal sleeping schedule again meaning Luke had fully taken over everything that I had to have been waking up before so I immediately noticed within one week I was back to sleeping which was really nice but what was so cool to see is that our views kept climbing and climbing and climbing and climbing now one of the first things that Luke wanted to do just kind of as like a little joke with our audience is say that if he didn't hit a million Instagram followers by the end of the year because that was our metric I think when he came on board we had 700 ,000 maybe 600 ,000 I think we had 600 ,000 when Luke came on board and he had from April until December to hit a million instagram followers that was his metric that was the thing and so he's like okay you need to like tell on your instagram that if i don't hit it i'm gonna get fired and so that became like a joke i said that so much like even on stage when i was speaking i would say that follow me i have a content director luke in the back because you might see him but he's our joke is that i'm gonna fire him if we don't hit a million followers by the end of the year so if you want to save luke's job go follow me on instagram thank you and it was just a fun little thing and anytime like we would
our growth would slow because growth slows. We'd be like, Luke, you're chop, chop. You're going to get fired.
It was just fun. Like we had fun together. Like the minute Luke started, it had felt like such a tedious thing.
And then it became really, really fun. And then we pretty instantly realized that we need another person. And so there was someone that we had been working with very part time, but she just kept shining.
She kept going above and beyond. She kept getting it and didn't take much explanation at all to like get up to speed. And so we're like, let's just see if she wants to come and have a bigger role on the content team.
And so that's obviously Bella. You may know Bella. She is incredible.
And she, there are just people that are like the backbone of a company, the backbone of a content team. And that is Bella for us on the content team. She just keeps us organized, keeps us on track, never forgets anything, has great ideas, has great execution.
Perfect. She really completes that little triangle. And what we're going to do now is we're actually going to have, I persuaded Bella and Luke to sit down and have a conversation with.
all of us with you on some of the things they think from their perspective helped us go from that six hundred thousand to a million in six months by the way we did it in six months we did it from april until october which is when we hit it and so we're gonna open up the floor we're gonna i'm gonna sit down with all of them and we're gonna talk about what worked all right you guys thank you so much for being here i'm so excited thank you for having us and i think really what people are the most interested in is what team maria did to get to a million Instagram followers.
And we did it pretty fast. We did about a half a million in eight months. If you really, cause when you came on, it was like a little over 500 ,000, maybe 700.
We came on, we had just hit 700 ,000 when I came on. Yeah. And that was in April, right?
Was when you started? Early April. I'm curious, like what are you, from your guys' perspective, obviously like you have a different perspective than maybe I would.
So from your guys' perspective as someone that was like day in and day out working to grow, what do you guys think actually helped us hit a million? What should we share? Ladies first.
I honestly think it was the quality and volume. I think just making sure that we were hitting all time slots. I think we would post about like seven times a day.
So we did that and then making sure that it was quality. We didn't just post without purpose and hitting every time slot. consistently did that.
And I think it honestly crushed. Volume. That's a phrase I remember Alex from Moses team, I think, talking about.
Yeah. It's not just quality. No.
And it's not just quantity. Right. It's quality.
Yep. It's quality. You have to have both.
How do we do both? I think you have to find winning formats that work. You have to test maybe 50 different formats, pick the top five that work the best and go all in on those.
And then once they fatigue out, go ahead and restart that process again and find out some more formats to do it really is so exactly that it's a bunch of different formats and one eventually sticks and I know that we know because we're pros that like what 48 of the 50 aren't gonna work I feel like I see my students try three or four or five things and maybe all five of those first ones don't work and they get so discouraged they take it so personally Did you guys ever like take it personally if a flop?
Yes. Oh my gosh. I was like, I have like so many like losers here.
She's going to be so upset with me. That would have cracked the web on Bella. I was like, oh my gosh.
Some of the ones I made didn't even reach 10K. But I will say like. once we got to july and then to now we had studied and like tried and the trial and error with certain formats and it got to the point that the editing was easier because we used a specific format and then we just like swapped out either clips or copy and so yeah yeah we ended up doing a lot better do you feel sad if your flops flop i honestly don't i think it's more of a it's more of a test i think social media is and game that never ends it's a never -ending testing game so if something doesn't work it doesn't really discourage me because it's like okay well that was just the test you know let me move on to something else so you never stop testing so that's why i feel like if it flops it's like all right move on to the next test see what happens yeah i think that's so true and you've always been a volume guy i feel like and honestly you're a volume girl like as am i like we just do a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot and then to the
quality point we just try to get better every time yes i shared that in between so there was a gap where i had a team member leave and then when luke started full time i was waking up at three in the morning to hit our content schedule every day i would wake up make the content from like three to five or sometimes four to six like it was a good two or three hours and i wasn't doing to the level that we are now it's just me and then i think luke you came on and then like a week or two later i don't even know if it was like a full week but it was like pretty I went back to like waking up at 7 and that was like a clear distinct like okay now I actually have my content the beginnings of my content team and then very early after I was like we need to call in more we need more and now we've been working I think quite well together for the last what is it agree my crazy yeah a lot of traveling too a lot of traveling a lot of uh a lot of events trials and tribulations yeah yeah a lot of trials and yeah one missing laptop later exactly one of the things luke that you because we talked about this in our um we do our week over week reports right where we evaluate and audit what worked right and belly you're so good at just you know just like pointing out not just like what does well which i think is important but our
failures right like what flop so we report on the top content of the week and then the um bottom content of the week and luke you pointed out something in our week of a week report recently that i wanted to point out for the whole anyone watching because i think it's so important you shared it was something like only got 500 followers from trial rules this week gonna pivot and try a bunch of new strategies can you talk more about that where something doesn't work how do you know when it's time to pivot and try something new i always say like you want to give it a proper test obviously so we have a bunch of different trial reels that we do it's not like they're all sitting down podcast style you know they could be just text on screen they could be b -roll um but basically i when i see that something's not working is when i've given it like a solid 10 good tries that's when i really know i can usually kind of tell after like the five or six try mark whether it's a winner or not but um yeah usually at around the the 10th try you'll really start to know but you also know just in the back of your head from the amount of time i spent with you the amount of the content that does well just off the bat you know like usually you in front of a microphone does well off the bat um so that's kind of the content that i like to push out on trial because
If it does well and it looks nice, looks clean, informative, then those are the ones that will do well in the long run. So, yeah, that's usually how I tell if something's working and kind of what my thought process is, like when I post these trial reels, using proven winners and tweaking them. Yeah.
Yeah, that's good. I like 10. I like.
the number 10 because if i could get my students to try something 10 times in a row like that they would really learn something from that so that's really good you do a lot of our pitch content so a lot of our pitch carousels a lot of our pitch reels a lot of our pitch stories and then you're tracking like what makes the most money right so we track how much money each piece of instagram is is making us what do you notice about the monetization content that seems to do better than others I think a lot of it has to do with including a human element.
So a lot of the copy and a lot of the photos that we do are written by you and it's your face or written by the team. And I think it's just really important that people get a human element. People are in this world where it's just all AI, everything's fake.
And they want to like... like they're reading a text message or like they're, you know, on FaceTime with you if it's like a reel. So I think that's really important.
And just having a good hook that kind of like explains a little bit, but not like too much. And it's the same thing. I'll try like 10 times.
You can't try it once because then you're not giving it a shot. But you try 10 times, then it's like, OK, maybe we use this photo or similar photo too much or we need to tweak the copy. And then you have a clear winner.
You always have to try at least like 10 times, like Luke said. Just to piggyback off that, I think people overcomplicate social media way too much. Way, way, way too much.
I think that if you constantly try new things, you do different formats of proven winners, and you do high volume, that's 90 % of the battle. The other 10 % can be figured out along the way. You don't have to be a perfect expert.
If you do proven winners, high volume. I would agree. I would agree.
I would say, I would dare I say, like, if you literally just do high volume over time, that gets you your proven winners. And so all you need is like, I'm just like, my aunt did this. She was like, I'm going to post every day for 365 days.
Now, my aunt, first of all, it's a faceless account. We always see people saying like, oh, you can't make money with a faceless account. Not true.
The other thing we hear is like, oh, you can only make money on Instagram if you're a business coach teaching people how to make money. Not true. You want to know what my aunt does?
She does how to, she teaches people, grandparents, how to have better FaceTimes with their long distance grandkids. So. that's so specific a faceless account teaching grandparents how to have better face times with their long like the distance grandkids you would not think necessarily that's an industry that's going to make money but she posted every day on instagram to your point about high volume every day for a year didn't miss one day and made three thousand dollars on the first month of her launch she launched a little twenty seven dollar like product and did three thousand dollars in her first month and i think that like to me as i see it There is so much on the other side of just posting consistently, just posting a lot consistently.
But and I would love for you guys to speak to this. Why do you think or what do you think keeps people from doing it consistently? Because don't we all see like students will like try it or anyone like will try and start like how do you how do you stick with it?
How do you persevere? I think that it comes down to just really wanting it like you got to really want it. Right.
You can't say I'm going to post every day and then. you know you miss a day then you're like uh maybe i can miss another day no like you got to do it um so you just got to really make that mental commitment and even as somebody who strives to post daily myself i know that if i don't post in a day like that's a failure you know like i didn't i failed you know so you just got to think like i'm gonna fail today if i don't post so gotta get it up by any way shape or form yeah 100 just adding to that i think everyone's like their worst like self -critic and so i've noticed a lot of people don't want to post or like friends of mine that are in content they're like i didn't like the way i looked or how i said this and it's we always overanalyze how we speak and how we look and even just like the captions that we write.
And it's like, this wasn't good. So then I'm not going to try again. But it's like, why not?
You know, you have to keep going. And, you know, you're going to get those like hate comments, but it's free engagement. So it's kind of like, just allow it.
Let it happen. Please comment on my stuff. Whether you like it or not, please comment.
And no one is thinking those things about you. They are not. That's so true.
You know, I think so many of our students keep themselves from showing up. Because they are worried about how they look. They are worried about their camera presence.
And I'll tell you, like, if you go to my YouTube channel and you sort by old, you can see how bad it looked at the beginning. Like, we all suck at first. And I think that's part of the process.
Yeah. Definitely. I mean.
if you think your reels are doing bad or they're not doing well, like you have to look at an example like you, like look at your first 200 reels or whatever, like they weren't good. Yeah, exactly. So you just have to put in the reps and just like anything else in life, like you really just have to do it over and over and over again, get better, have to , you know, and over time you will get better, especially if you.
you know, watch YouTube videos, you know, look at other creators that give you advice, really implement the advice. There's no way you don't get better if you just put in the volume. Yeah, I couldn't agree.
I mean, there's no shortcut. We have to put the reps in. There's no shortcut.
Okay, last question. Well, second to last question. I'm curious to know if there was anything that surprised you about our journey, right?
Like we're going from, because it was like. day in and day out for a hot second. This is a goal we pushed for as a team very aggressively to get the account we knew we were going to get to a million by the end of the year if it killed us.
Like that was our attitude. And so I'm curious, was there anything that surprised you about the process? 100%.
I think just like the simpler things, the more in the moment things, the videos that we didn't edit one bit or just like the random little blurb that like you had to say or a team member had to say. always just did so well and so it surprised me in a way but it also didn't at the same time because it was just candid and real does better it does they get to know a little bit more about you and about everyone here and it's not a surprise it is kind of like dang it that reel that i spent like 10 hours editing zero likes but yeah yeah that's really good something that surprised me um was when i first found out the goal of hitting a million followers in six months I was pretty shook.
I was like, well, that's a lot because I grew 400K in a year for my last job. And I'm like, okay, 300K in six months. It's going to be tough.
But we set the goal. And I think it's really interesting. And it surprised me how whenever you give yourself a deadline, you will reach it.
You know, like whatever piece of work that you have to accomplish, it's like you set that deadline and you force yourself to get it done by that deadline. You will get it done. You know, so.
Yeah. Might I add, we did it. so the goal was by the end of the year we did it at the beginning of october so we did it two months ahead of schedule too yeah yeah i didn't know you were shook you were so confident we were freaking out no problem no problem yeah i mean i was definitely like whoa that's that's a big goal um but like i said yeah you set yourself a target and you say by any means you will get it done in that time frame i bet we could have gotten it done in four months if we if we set an earlier target i'm gonna keep that in mind for the youtube team did you hear that guy no but we were freaking out i think like luke and i had a couple conversations where we were like Like, can we do this?
Like, this is a lot. Are we going to be able to do this? But we did it two months early.
Nothing crazy. No, but he's right. Like, anything you set your mind to, you really can.
I love that. You guys played it so cool. I'm like, no, they haven't.
Oh, no, we were shaking our boots. At least I was. That's so funny.
I did not know that. Okay, before we end, I want to share that, Luke, one of your reels just popped off. What was it?
Almost? I think it's approaching 20 million. Our personal record in terms of views.
possibly our personal record in terms of followers, I think too. You said almost 20 ,000 followers. Yeah, it's 19 right now, I think.
Yeah, we're going to put it on the screen. Why do you think it did so well? Well, people actually thought I created the trend.
I did see the trend a few other places and I saw it perform like decently well. And trends have a very high ceiling when they're done perfectly. And I think that in that case, it was done perfectly.
And it's kind of relatable to everyone who's ever worked in a... office environment you know you can see that it was also uh the engagement was everyone thought that we had a lot of turnover which isn't the case but it obviously really helped just failed quickly just scaled really quickly yeah people were like oh they have all these people that have only started working in the last three months i'm like you don't understand i've been hiring like crazy in the last three months that's why everyone started there was a lot of unanswered questions about the reel i think that's what made it do really well um everyone's like is this a modeling agency why does everyone look so pretty i know we have such a good looking tape Yeah, we really do.
The thing about the turnover. So there's a lot of unanswered questions. Plus it was well edited, relatable.
Do you know what I also think did really well for the retention on that? And we'll put it up on the screen so people know what we're talking about. But all the comments were talking about Brianna and how beautiful Brianna was.
But Brianna was like the fifth person or the fourth person in the reel. So I think a lot of people are reading the comments like, oh, we're seeing Brianna. And then they're waiting to see.
Because I'll see that sometimes. I'll read a comment and be like, I can't believe what the cat did at the end. I'm like, what did the cat do?
You're like, I'm watching it. Yeah. So I watched the end to see what the cat did at the end.
And so I think that's partially why it did as well, too. Everyone was commenting on how gorgeous Brianna was. And so people were waiting to see who she was.
And she's stunning, so that makes sense. Yeah, that was 20 million views. Are you recreating it?
Tell us what you're doing. Now that you've had a reel go very, very, very, very, very viral, what are you doing next? I'm going to let it breathe for like a week.
That's my goal. It's going to probably keep getting traction for about a week. Then I'm going to...
repurpose it so do the exact same thing but refilm it with all you guys probably post it in like a month just to kind of get it out of the algorithm but then on trial I'm going to take the original video and flip the order of the people around so I'll probably start with you because you're the face but then I'll flip like the fifth and the second person and the third and the sixth person flip the people around keeping the same message obviously just like different order Good way to repurpose it and see how it does.
And then once I test that, we'll see how it does. And I'll either stick with it or move on. And then so you said you're also going to refilm it again, you said, with all of us.
Yes. So basically repurposing exactly the same but slightly different. Yeah, I guess the word shouldn't be repurpose.
It should be refilm. Refilm, okay. And then repurpose for trial.
Okay, got it. Okay, yeah. Dang, that's, I mean, hey, 20 ,000 followers and 20 million views is nothing to sneeze at.
Yeah, that's certainly, I think the one. before that was like eight million views or nine million views so you've more than doubled our top reel so it's crazy and i think the lesson is the lesson is that i always take away before we end this is like we have like that's such an anomaly for us what i love about the way we grow is we actually don't rely on those viral reels to grow to a million it's it's a very it's the opposite it's like our average followers is like i think it's 80 followers per reel so it's like little by little by little by little by little but that's so replicatable if i'm relying on a reel like that that pops off It's like three or four times a year we'll have a really big one like that.
But for the most part, we grow very sustainably, very consistently with all the stuff we're going to talk about in the rest of this video. And I think that's great. I think that makes it very obtainable for the average person.
Yeah, not focusing on vanity metrics. What do you think? Vanity metrics, not focusing on that.
Yeah, that's right. If you put up enough shots, one of them is going to hit. Yeah.
So that's a, that's a word. All right. You too.
Thank you so much. I appreciate everything you've done. This, this Instagram would not be the same without you guys.
Appreciate it. I'm very much looking forward to what's next. 2 million.
Yeah. 2 million in three months. You said, if I give you a deadline, give me the deadline.
All right. 2 million. Thank you guys.
Thank you. A lot of what we've talked about so far is theoretical. It's inspirational.
It's interesting, but you know me. i love my practical tactics and so what i want to do in this section is really dive deep into what we actually did i want to go over it in a structured way so you can break it down i've identified some of the most important things that we did and i'm going to talk about them in detail so you walk away knowing exactly what went into every stage of this instagram growth and i came at it from the lens of What is the average person going to wonder when they're watching a course like this?
What is the average person going to get stuck with when they're watching a course like this? What does the average person wish they had behind the scenes, you know, insight into things I wish I would have known when I started. And so that's what the second section of this entire course is about is the literal, we call it at our company, we call it practical tactical, what we actually did.
The first thing that I think was so important to was actually hitting 1 million Instagram followers is that it was. our target now i have this theory when it comes to companies that and just people i don't think we can do many things at all and i don't think we can do many things well i think we can maybe do one or two things per year well and that's one of the many reasons why new year resolutions never go anywhere is people are like i'm gonna work out more i'm gonna read more i'm gonna hang out more with my friends i'm gonna stop drinking as much and they set all these massive things for themselves but they don't actually hit it When I was learning about business, I was young, you know, early 20s.
And I was talking to this guy and he said, you know, Maria, there's a huge difference between a goal and a target. You hit a target or you don't hit a target. But a goal is nebulous.
I want to read more. That's a goal. I want to read three books every month is a target.
It's much easier to hit targets because it's clear if you hit it or not. It's black or white. Either you read three books this month or you didn't read three books this month.
And so in general, one of the things that you should be doing as a business owner is not setting goals. You should be setting targets. And so for us, 1 million Instagram followers by December 31st, 2026 at 1159 p .m.
PST. was our target and then i think most importantly this was the company target we didn't set a revenue goal at all we didn't set a revenue target we set a follower target and we did that because a few years previously i had looked at where i was and where my brand was in the grand scheme of our online space this online space and i wasn't happy with where i was at i knew i was like a c -lister at best if not a d -lister meaning no one knew me I didn't really have a lot of market relevance and I knew that one of the things to create market relevance could be a million followers.
It would create a lot of credibility. It would create a lot of social proof. It would really enhance the perception of my brand.
And so that was my target. That was my goal. And for you, you might just be getting started.
So you might not be at the point where you're setting entire company targets, but you need to understand the dedication that went in to making that the company target. You need to bring that same level of commitment to your Instagram growth. But you need to set a target for yourself that is clear, that is black and white, that has a deadline, down to the minute that you will either hit or you will not hit.
This whole process, and we're about ready to get into a lot of other tactics, that will be in service of this first step, which is your target. I'm gonna go get some water. All right, now we're getting into the good stuff.
It's about to get good, baby. Second thing, once we established a target, was understanding volume. I do not think...
You understand the way that I grow. There's no magic. There's no secrets.
It's just volume. I went viral so infrequently. Almost none of my posts popped off.
I grew . And I love that. Because if I sat down here and I said, yeah, I got a million followers because my six reels went viral.
is that really helpful to you can that be replicated no but me post by post in and out over and over again that's something you can do too and so i started i this is so super important though i established a consistency muscle and so i started with one post a day every day and didn't miss then after i had done that for at least 90 days Then I added in that second carousel.
And mind you, we're going to go into the content in a little bit and I'll go over my actual content schedule. So you're going to get that. Right now, what I want you to focus on is how I did it slowly.
Sometimes my students will get excited. They'll start posting and they're like, I'm going to do three posts a day because that's what Maria did. And so they'll post three times a day for a week and then they'll burn out and fall off and get off the bandwagon and they'll never post again.
It'll take them six months to get back on the bandwagon. I don't want that for you. I want you to post once a day, every day for 90 days in a row and do not miss.
If you miss, your 90 days resets. So you post every day without missing for 90 days, then you can advance to level two, which is posting twice a day. Then you do that again.
If you miss it, you reset back to the level you were at. Consistency is a muscle that needs to be built. And I say this sometimes, and I'm never proud of this, but I say this to share the reality of my commitment level to the volume.
There was a time where I needed to get a video out and I literally got it done on Christmas Eve. Now, am I proud of that? No.
Do I think that that's something we should be doing? No. I should have had my stuff organized so I wasn't doing anything on Christmas Eve.
But I'm sharing that because you want to know how I got to a million? That's how seriously I took my content schedule. That's how seriously I took the posting every single day and not missing.
I'm much more organized now. That was a while ago. It was back when I was doing it myself in 2023.
However, that's how seriously I take my content schedule. Now, I posted three times a day by myself. That was the most I could do at the peak of my consistency, at the peak of me doing it.
If you remember when that team member took that step back, I was in charge of three posts a day. That was very difficult. That was like content creator max.
That was very hard for me to do all by myself. I'm sitting there, I'm ideating, I'm creating, I'm posting, I'm scheduling, I'm doing all of it by myself. But I did do it.
I did do it and I did it well and the account grew. So for me, Three posts a day done well was my max.
I could not do more than that, but I did do a decent amount. If you didn't have a kid the way I did that woke up at seven o 'clock, you might have time for more. For me, I couldn't do more than three a day.
Then when my team joined, right now we're doing about six or seven a day as a team. I am personally doing about one a day is the thing I am personally doing. About one a day, sometimes two a day, but pretty much right now I'm doing one a day.
to this day and i still am heavily involved in all the ideation i'm actually the one sitting and creating a lot of the content i'm writing all the scripts like i'm still incredibly involved in the whole process but the actual creation is about one a day for me now one of my favorite quotes from alex harmosi is that what he means by that is the more you do things your volume it reduces the need for you to get lucky And I would say the same thing goes for content.
If I post three times a day, I'm giving myself three chances to get more followers. I'm giving myself three chances a day to have my post pop off. If I'm posting once a day, I'm giving myself one chance.
If I'm posting three times a week, I'm giving myself 0 .33 % of a chance every day. So volume negates luck. I don't have to go viral because I just post a lot.
Volume negates luck. it's my favorite thing and we're volume girls like on every level where we do hundreds of orders a day volume there we do hundreds of sales calls like thousands of sales calls a month actually volume negates luck so post more the last thing i'll say about volume is that you get faster and you get better the more reps you do.
I had a student come on to my inner circle call and we're talking about our content. And she was like, you know, I'm doing these carousels and it takes me 90 minutes to do one carousel. How long does it take you?
And I'm like, I was literally was like, I'm scared to tell you because I do my entire week's worth of carousels. So I do seven carousels in one four hour chunk. So she was so much slower than I am, but I've just been doing it longer.
I'm just better. It used to take me 90 minutes to do it too. It used to take me two hours to make one stupid reel that did terrible.
I was so bad. But you get faster and you get better the more you do it. And there's no shortcut for that.
Unfortunately, there's no shortcut. You just got to put the reps in and trust that over time you will get faster and you'll get better. It's always the case for everything new we try.
We always get better and faster with time. There's one other thing that I did that I think really helped me understand the volume it was going to take for me to get to a million Instagram followers. I went and I stalked anyone that had over a million followers.
So I looked at their profiles. I wanted to see what they were doing. And do you want to know one of the things I noticed?
I had about 200 posts on Instagram and they all had over 3 ,000 posts on Instagram. And so I noticed a tremendous gap. Not in how smart they were, not in the way they looked, not in what they were saying, not in how fancy and professional their editing was, but I noticed a gap in the amount they were posting versus the amount I had posted.
And so anyone that I looked at that had had over a million followers had posted over 3 ,000 times. So I told myself, all I need to do is post 3 ,000 times and I'll have a million Instagram followers. And ironically, that's exactly, I am just over 3 ,000 posts on Instagram.
I don't think it literally works like that, but that's just what I told myself to identify what they were doing all the way up here with their millions of followers and what I was doing all the way over here with my little no followers. I had posted 200 times. And so I just was like, all right, it's gonna take me a hot freaking second to post 3 ,000 times.
I'm just gonna settle into this volume game and just keep at it because that's one of the things that they're doing differently that I haven't done yet. Now, okay, this one's good.
These two tactics I haven't shared anywhere else. and i'm kind of nervous to share them with you i'm kind of excited to share them with you they're like my sneaky little things and these two tactics got me let's see here 120 000 followers Basically about 220 ,000 followers came from these two tactics and they cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So these are advanced tactics, but I want you to know that I did them because influencers playing at this level, these like big dogs as I call them, they'll never talk about this with you. You'll never, ever, ever hear this, especially on a public facing YouTube video. So I'm kind of excited to talk about this a little bit because they're both really good.
First tactic. Cost me exactly $100 ,000. It was two wire deposits of $50 ,000 each.
And I bought shout outs. So what that is, just so you understand the tactic, and we're going to put examples on the screen so you can see it. But you literally pay big Instagram accounts to shout out your profile.
It gets traffic to your handle, traffic to your profile. And then people can choose if they want to follow you or not. Now, individually, one shout out is not going to get you that many followers, but we did a ton of shout outs.
And so over time, you build up a lot of traffic to your profile and you get followers from that. And so we tracked pretty meticulously the amount of followers we got from that. I paid $100 ,000 for those shout outs and I got 120 ,932 followers from that.
Now, I worked with some of my good friends, Adley, we're gonna put her stuff up on the screen. Adley is the one that coordinated all my shout outs. If you want her to do shout outs for you, I highly recommend it.
She is not paying me to talk about this. I don't even get affiliates, although I should, Adley. Why am I not getting affiliates for this?
I should be getting affiliates. It is just the sheer, I had a great time working with her. She did exactly what she delivered.
And then some, she told me she would probably get me around 100 ,000 Instagram followers. I ended up getting 120 ,932 followers from these shout outs. So a little bit better.
I didn't know if it was going to work. I'd never done anything like this before. I'd never heard of anyone doing anything like this.
So I really didn't know what to expect. But I knew Adley. I was friends with her.
I trusted her. And it was awesome. It worked super well.
Now, this is super different, by the way, than buying followers. And I want to explain the difference. I did not buy followers.
Buying followers is a waste of money. What I did is . I basically bought posts that then pointed people to my profile.
those people still had to make a decision on if they were going to follow me or not. But it was very nice because it's 120 ,000 followers that I did not have to do anything to get. I didn't have to create additional content.
I didn't have to do anything else. I just literally paid the $100 ,000 and then had a bajillion shout outs going on. I'm not even 100 % certain on some of the stuff that like, like we had a little text thread and she would give me updates and stuff.
But some of the tactics, it was just cool. It was awesome to see. And so we put some examples up there.
Shoutouts is basically about $1 per follower. Not a bad tactic. The second tactic cost me $160 ,000.
So I paid $160 ,000. So if you're doing the math, I've now paid $260 ,000. And that was running ads to...
pieces of content that performed very well in terms of followers. Now I'm going to teach you a metric at this stage that we'll come back to in the content section. This metric is called the views to followers ratio.
Basically what it means is some of your reels will have a very high views to follower ratio. Meaning if a hundred people view this reel and 10 people follow me from the 100 that saw me. that's high that's a very high view to follower ratio especially when you compare it to a different reel where i get a hundred views and one person follows me so what we would do is we would identify the pieces of content that organically had a high views to follower ratio and then what we would do is we would create ads and run those ads to those pieces of content again you are not buying followers you are running ads to content that already performs well organically and you get followers from doing that if you want to go further into this tactic which i recommend that you do we actually i sat down with my sister rose who ran these ads and she did a whole video on exactly what the strategy looks like so i recommend you go check that out if that's something you want to dive deeper into but i want to go over the numbers with you so we paid
$160 ,000 and we got 99 ,911 followers. So literally just under 100 ,000 followers from this strategy paying on average $1 .60 per follower. But what's very interesting is that the longer we did this, the more we paid so at first we were spending like 50 cents a follower and then eventually you just literally are like you're topping out your market and so it kept getting more expensive as time went on and eventually once we hit a million instagram followers we turned off those ads because we just we hit our target and we didn't need to spend the money on that anymore but we're including an example of a reel that got us this one reel that we ran ads to got a 16 000 followers from that one ad that we ran so this is a very very very effective strategy and you have to remember we're we had an aggressive target we had a target of 400 000 instagram followers in one year when it had previously taken us all of 2023 all of 2024 and pretty much and all of 2025 and then a little bit of 2026 to get the first 600 000 instagram followers and so we're looking to
double our amount of followers in one year when it took us like three and a half years to get the first half. So we're looking to aggressively shave down the time it was going to take us to hit that goal. We did not want to be going into 2027 without having a million Instagram followers.
And so we were willing, because that was our company target, because that was the one goal we were all focused on, we were willing to invest money, quite a bit of money, into hitting that target. And that's something that I want to talk about because some of you Say you want a goal, you say you want something, you say you want this thing, and you are not willing to invest money in order to do it.
And some people will tell me, but I can't afford to invest. I will tell you the story of the first ever business investment I made in 2020. It was 2013.
I had $92 in my bank account. I was making no money. I was living in a terrible neighborhood.
I literally had $92 in my bank account. I had no business being on the phone with a business coach. And she told me that the investment to work with her was like $1 ,500, which it might as well have been $15 million because I had nothing in my bank account.
But I knew I needed to invest in order to hit my goal, my target. And I said yes to this business coach, yes to this investment with no plan on how I was going to pay it. so i'm on the phone with this business coach i have 92 in my bank account i say yes i put the deposit to work with her on a credit card which i don't necessarily recommend that you do but that is what i did i got off the phone with this business coach my heart is shaking i have no money i just said yes to this incredibly expensive investment as i saw it and i look around and i'm like i'm going to sell everything i own to pay for this fifteen hundred dollars I didn't own anything, but I sold a camera that I didn't really use anymore.
I think I got like 300 bucks for it. It wasn't worth much. I sold all of my clothes on Poshmark, but I don't have brand name clothes.
I buy my clothes at TJ Maxx. So like I'm listing shirts for $3. in enough quantity to hit $1 ,500.
So I literally sold anything that I could possibly sell. And I got the money to pay that coach. I think it was like in two weeks.
And so I had already started working with her. I had said yes. And then like while I'm talking to this business coach, I'm like aggressively selling everything that I own.
And I share this story because people think you wait. until you have the money to invest but sometimes you need to invest and find a way to get the money you need to get creative and i am not the only successful person that has a story where they had no money they knew they needed to invest and they found a way to make it happen and so I'm not saying that in context of this conversation, you need to go spend $260 ,000 to get a million followers on Instagram.
That is not the point of this. The point is that this is a target that I wanted and I was willing to invest in order to make it. And so for you, perhaps on a smaller scale.
At some point in your entrepreneurial journey, you will be required to make an investment to get the things that you want. And I want to work on that belief with you right now that you will find a way to make it happen. You will invest and you will not wait until you have the money to do it.
The third tactic got us 779 ,157 followers. Cost me pretty much zero. Big fat nothing.
But I paid for it. I wrote here, in blood, sweat, tears, and labor. just like written there at the bottom of the page.
It's content. That was the tactic. Most of my followers were just got the good old fashioned one reel at a time, one carousel at a time, nothing sexy, nothing viral, just piece of content after piece of content after piece of content.
I would say the 220 ,000 followers we got is what helped us get pushed over the finish line to hit that target of a million. But I would also argue. That we hit that goal of a million Instagram followers in October.
So we still had all of October, all of November, all of December. We had three more months. So wait, we hit.
You hit it in like five months? So April. May, June, July, August, September, October.
We hit it in six months. So we hit. You hit like 80 ,000 followers a month.
Yeah, we got, wow. I haven't done that math yet. So there you are.
You saw me do that a lot. That's crazy business. Arguably then, all that to say, we could have gotten, we could have done away with the other tactics and still hit our target of a million.
The good old fashioned, content that is the bulk of these followers are from the content and i want to spend a ton of time talking about exactly the kind of content that we posted and why it works so well we're gonna get through five other videos i i i'm feeling good that makes 0 .5 of us that was so funny i wasn't reading that hey having a good day oh i need a stretch after this You're just sitting behind the camera like a bump on a log.
You're not doing nothing. Okay, now what I'm going to do, we talked a little bit about the views to follower ratio, but I want to give you actual examples of a reel that has a great views to follower ratio and then a reel that has a bad views to follower ratio, just so you can see what I'm talking about here. So this is a reel that I did.
It did really well. I'm going to go to the insides of this. So I want to pull up the insights on this one.
You can see here it got half a million views. So not bad, but like not millions of views. And then you can see here it had 13 ,000 shares and 24 ,000 likes.
Now here's what I want you to see.
It got 3 ,671 followers for a half a million views. Now, this is important to pay attention to because the next reel I'm going to show you will have gotten an insane amount of views, but very little followers relative to the views it got. Making sense?
All right, so let's pull up the next one. Okay, so this reel got 9 million views. So like 18 times more views than the reel before.
It got 511 ,000 likes. It has 54 ,000 shares.
Unbelievably different in terms of quantity. Unbelievably bigger. But do you want to know how many followers it got?
2 ,521. That's a terrible views to follower ratio. It got 9 million views and has less followers than a reel that got a half a million views.
way more followers, especially when you consider the views to follower ratio. And so what would most people do? They would see a reel that got 9 million views, 500 ,000 likes, a half a million likes, and they would say, we need to create more content like this.
This popped off. This is doing better. And you guys are doing this even at much smaller levels, right?
Let's say you get a reel that got 5 ,000 views and a reel that got, you know, 100. or like a thousand views you should not be optimizing for views you should be optimizing for followers and you should be paying attention to your views to followers metric so you might see me make content that gets less views but that could be sometimes my stuff just flops but sometimes it's because i'm intentionally creating content that i know will get less views but it's on a topic that will get me more followers.
And so as we were gonna talk all about my content, I'm gonna pull up examples of the different kinds that we did, the experiments, we're gonna really get into the content. It is so important for you to understand that in service of our target of 1 million followers in this time period, we really paid attention to our views to follower ratio and we created content with that in mind.
Now we're going to talk about content. I got my notes here. I got examples here.
We're about to get into it, but here's what I want to say about the content. We, the most important thing that we did was we experimented and nine out of 10 things we tried completely flopped. You need to be okay with things not taking off.
You need to be okay with a lot of stuff doing terrible. You need to be okay with wasting your time. That is just part of the content game.
And it is what allowed us to land on some plot, but like some pieces. of content some types some concepts that worked really really well and so the first kind of content that we did that works really well is what we call talking heads classic classic form of content creation it'll look something like this so i'm just talking and what i really want you to see here is like most of my reels like you can see here this one it's about to hit 100 000 views i have a million instagram followers most of my content like i've said already It does not go viral.
It's not like incredibly viral pieces of content. Most of my content just trucks along. I'm happy with 100 ,000 views per reel, to be honest.
Like I would say 50 ,000 or even 30 ,000 is closer to my average. I have no ego in this. I just know that I can control the outcome by my input.
The second piece of content that I do that. makes a lot of money which we're going to talk about monetization in a second but it's like not overly like sexy or good i honestly can't believe it works as well as it does it's something like this so this has consistently been a good performer for me but it's not because it looks sexy it's called b -roll by the way and it's a little bit of like a hook and then you pitch and then i see you can see here i got like 2 000 comments now we're going to talk more about this comment stuff in the monetization section but this content It's literally B -roll footage of me doing something, text on the screen with a call to action, and then thousands of comments to go to a checkout page, which we will talk about in the monetization.
I can't believe how easy this is and how much money we make from this, to be honest. It should be harder, in my opinion. I don't know why it's this easy, but it is.
And so that's a big one we do. Again, this is not the most sexy looking piece of content in the world, but it works and makes us money, so I'm not gonna sneeze at it. All right, so now I wanna talk about carousels.
Those are the reels that we do. talking heads b -roll super easy now i want to talk about carousels i do two types of carousels first type are pitch carousels second type are nurture carousels i want to show you what i do with pitch carousels first because it's so easy but i make again a ton of money from these it's literally two swipes this is the first swipe what we're looking at here and then this is the second swipe so basically what it is is the first swipe how to get it is the second swipe you can see here we've got 4 000 comments almost 5 000 comments it works really well and again what are these comments going to check out pages and again in the monetization section we're going to talk more about all of this but this is how i make a ton of money from instagram is by getting people to comment and then those comments take them to the checkout page okay so now we have the nurture carousels nurture carousels are something that i still do every single part of by myself it's a way for me to i always say like it's a way for me to like write in my diary and so here's an example
of one that i did that did really well being homeschooled made me a millionaire by 30 and it's just like literally talking about my life they're always like me with my parents or like me with my daughter or just like it's just like me so these are very real um they're very vulnerable but so many of you get to know me through my nurture carousels are a very very important part of the um content ecosystem because if you don't know me if you don't trust me um then you don't stick around.
And so I have found in a weird way, even though I don't make money from these nurture carousels, . that all the pitch posts can stand on. And so these nurture carousels are very, very important for me to have.
It's one of the main reasons why I've never taken my hands off those. I've never delegated those. They're just also hard to delegate.
Like it's my diary. Anyone can easily recreate a pitch reel. But for me to reach into the depths of my soul and share what's really going on is pretty much, I'm the only person that could do that.
And so... It's a super important thing. I think a lot of people miss it.
I think a lot of people don't know how to do these well. I did create a course on carousels. I'm not here to pitch you, but if that's something that you are interested in, I will put a link to that in the description because I go into great depth on how I do my pitch carousels and my nurture carousels.
And I think they are the most important type of Instagram content that I do, specifically the Instagram nurture carousel. So really understanding how do you get vulnerable on Instagram and how do you share it in such a way where it's received well and doesn't look like you're complaining or airing your dirty laundry out or whatever.
And so they're a very, very important piece of content. But I will also say this, give yourself permission to experiment with it, to try it and not have it do well right away, to make mistakes with it. I'll say the same thing one of my friends said on my stage the other day.
They said, You know, if a post flops, no one sees it. If it does well, everybody sees it.
So you don't have to worry about your flops anyways, because no one's paying attention. No one sees the flops. The third kind of carousel post that we do is a new one that we've been doing.
And I cannot believe we are getting followers from this. I genuinely don't understand why this experiment is doing as well as it is. Key thing here is that you've got to experiment.
But this thing is literally... getting me views and followers and it's so silly it's literally other people's quotes the quote credit of who came up with it and then it gets views it gets some followers some get more followers than others this one got 57 followers though from one quote post that took seven seconds to make in canva again this was about four thousand four hundred thousand views from a quote post that we made in canva And 77 followers, 553 profile visits.
Who the heck is looking at a quote like this and then going to my profile and saying, yeah, I want to follow Maria because of this quote post that she posted. I don't know why this experiment is working. It bothers the hell out of me because these things are successfully working when my stupid stuff does not successfully work every time.
I get like nine out of 10, nine out of 10 of my stuff flops. But other people's quotes pulled off of Instagram threads. The point is this.
Our guy's dying behind the camera. Here's the point. If we hadn't experimented with this, we would have no idea that it worked.
This new type of content has successfully done well and gotten us literally thousands. We had one, I think, that got us 10 ,000 followers.
If you don't experiment with content, you will not know what works. And when you are lucky enough to find a content method that consistently works, what I need to do, I'm speaking to myself more than anyone else, is put the ego aside and just roll with it. Who knows why it works as well as it does?
I don't know, but it works really well. And so keep at it. Now, the last type of content I always get asked about is Instagram stories.
My tactics that I do for Instagram stories are very interesting. I only post one story every 24 hours and their pitch, which is a really nice tee up into the monetization content that I'm about ready to get into. But they're just a very simple pitch.
It's a little hook, a little headline, a little call to action, a little headline, a little like paragraph, and then a little call to action. And you can see here on average, my stories get around 70 ,000 views per story. some of them obviously will do more than that some of them will always do less than that but a right around like 75 to 80 000 is about um we're about 70 000 is where i consistently land um and all of this is stuff we make money from which teased me up very nicely into the monetization section now we get to talk about monetization which is my favorite part because i do not post off on instagram as a hobby i have other hobbies i paint i read i go to the beach with my daughter i want instagram to make money and to make a lot of it and so we are now stepping into my favorite section of this entire video which is the monetization and by the way fun fact in case you want to know what character i am in the universe of the world of characters in any show and anything if you want to know me if you know mr krabs from spongebob that is me he just goes around looking for money that's me i'm going around looking for money anywhere i go i find a penny on the ground there i am mr krabs reporting for duty here to talk about monetization with instagram
so we make literally millions of dollars from my instagram account i do not play with the monetization i make bank from instagram i'm gonna break down the three different ways we monetize instagram and i'm gonna go over examples for all of them the first way that we monetize instagram is with my link in bio we make about a half a million dollars every quarter just from my link in bio which is obviously like a crazy amount of money that's insane um but we there's one thing that we do that i think is very strategic with our link and bio is that we only have one link in our bio and it goes directly to the checkout page so we're not having multiple links that pop up we're not linking to a long landing page we're not linking to multiple things we're linking to one direct link.
Most of the time I see people who will have a couple of different things in their bio. It's confusing. It's unclear.
One link in bio. So all your profile traffic is going directly to that checkout page. That is what we recommend you do.
And that I think is why we make so much money from our link in bio. No funny business directly to the money, directly to the cash. You saw in some of the real analytics that I showed, you saw like each reel might get us around 500 profile visits.
That's traffic that's generated. That's traffic to my profile. I want to make money from that traffic.
And so that's why I have that direct link in bio. You will be surprised at how much money you'll make from your link in bio if you do it the right way. Second thing is an automation that I think every single person who has an Instagram account should build.
It makes us about $100 ,000 every quarter, which is about $33 ,000 a month just from this one automation. And mind you, I have literally hundreds of automations, which I'm going to talk about in the next bit. But this one is what we call the new follower automation.
You can set it up here. You can see we have... about 400 000 people have run through this which means we set it up a few months ago because we've gotten quite a bit of followers but in the last few months we've had 400 000 people run through it this is what it looks like and i'll do a little preview so you can see it so it says hey now that you're thanks for following me so this is anytime someone follows me they immediately get this message now that you're part of the family i'd love to share something special as a thank you want to check it out so pretty simple right and then they say yes send it over it's going so they just like click yes send it over and then i put together a little game plan game plan to help you hit your first 100 sales and then that goes to a website and i want to show you what this looks like so usually this bundle if you buy all four of these courses together each of my courses are like 300 bucks and so it's about um like all together be a little over a thousand dollars for all of these combined but i bundle them and they can get a discount for 147.
And it includes, you can kind of see here, it includes this one, this one, this one, and this one. And then it has a little game plan. It's basically how to get your first 100 sales.
This is just a great little low ticket product. It does really well. And this makes us, like I said, about, if you do the math on this, it makes us $100 ,000 every quarter, which is about $33 ,000 per month, which is about $1 ,000 a day.
So think about this. This one automation makes us $1 ,000 every single day. freaking nuts and if you go in here which i'm going to talk about in the next section i have if we go to my automations i have bazillions of automations a ton of automations um that are all working around the clock to make me money now If those first two strategies that we use make us hundreds of thousands of dollars, we make millions from this third monetization strategy.
And that is with our Instagram content. Now you kind of saw little bits and pieces of it where I have these carousels that get thousands of comments and those go to the checkout pages. And what I've done is build, I've built hundreds of automations that work around the clock to send people to my checkout page.
So I am making millions of dollars from these automations that I have built. And it's... it's not complicated it's really not that hard to do but you want you're going to want to follow some tutorials to set this up and so what i did is i created these step -by -step tutorials showing you how to monetize your instagram content like this how to get hundreds if not thousands of comments on your stuff and i put it all together in this little course with these tutorials and i call it leverage income with instagram now leverage income with instagram is typically sold for 300 that is the price i've sold that course at for like three years but We recently decided to drop the price down.
to $57 and it's something that we're testing. That is an experiment that we are currently running right now. So when you're watching this video, the price should be $57 for this course.
But again, we sold this for $300 for years. So I'm not sure if this experiment will still be going. If you see this video, it's very likely that it's currently $57.
And if it is, I highly recommend that you snag it because we don't know how this experiment is gonna go. It could go well and we keep it at 57 forever or it could go terrible and we raise the price back up to what it's been for three years. I genuinely don't know.
but this is a real experiment that we're testing with some of our core products and leverage income with Instagram is one of our core products. So if you want me to teach you exactly what I do to monetize all my content, to create content that attracts buyers, not just viewers, to how to get people to actually comment so you have tons of comments going, I show you everything that I've done.
You do not need a big audience. It's a fabulous core course that is usually $300, but right now it's 57. I'm gonna link it in the description.
Thank you so much for joining it. I will see you there.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The video promises a full, free course with no opt-in and no gatekeeping, and it mostly delivers: exact follower counts per tactic, exact spend, and the realization that more than three quarters of a million followers came from nothing more exotic than posting every day.
Named ideas worth stealing.
09:16list
The five pillars of Instagram growth
- Target
- Volume
- Tactics
- Content
- Monetization
The structure of the whole course: set one binary target, build posting volume, layer in growth tactics, find formats that convert, and monetize the traffic.
Steal forstructuring any growth plan or course curriculum
33:30concept
Goal vs target
- Goal: nebulous, e.g. read more
- Target: binary with a deadline, e.g. read three books this month
Targets are easier to hit because it's clear whether you hit them. The company ran on one target per year rather than many goals.
Steal forannual planning and team OKRs
36:40model
The 90-day volume ladder
- Post once a day for 90 days without missing
- A missed day resets the 90 days
- Then advance to twice a day and repeat
- Solo ceiling around three a day; a team reaches six or seven
Consistency treated as a muscle built in stages, preventing the burnout that comes from jumping straight to a high posting cadence.
Steal forany habit or publishing cadence
42:58list
Follower sources breakdown
- Paid shout-outs: $100,000 for 120,932 followers
- Ads on high-conversion reels: $160,000 for 99,911 followers
- Organic content: 779,157 followers
An unusually transparent accounting of exactly where one million followers came from and what each source cost.
Steal forbudgeting paid versus organic growth
45:44concept
Views-to-follower ratio
Judge content by how many viewers become followers. Identify reels with high organic conversion, make more of them, and put ad spend behind them.
Steal forcontent reviews and ad creative selection
56:06list
The content mix
- Talking-head reels
- B-roll pitch reels with text and a comment CTA
- Two-slide pitch carousels
- Nurture carousels (personal diary posts)
- Quote-graphic carousels
- One pitch story every 24 hours
Pitch formats drive comments into checkout automations; nurture carousels build the trust that makes the pitches work.
Steal forplanning a weekly Instagram content calendar
1:04:50list
Three monetization paths
- One link in bio straight to a checkout page
- New-follower DM automation with a low-ticket bundle
- Comment-to-DM automations on pitch content
All profile and comment traffic is routed directly to checkout, with no landing pages or link lists in between.
Steal forany creator selling digital products
19:21concept
The 10-try rule
Give a new format or pitch creative about 10 proper tries before calling it; a winner usually shows by try five or six.
Steal forcreative testing on any platform
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
1:08:30product
“I put it all together in this little course with these tutorials and I call it Leverage Income With Instagram... right now it's 57. I'm gonna link it in the description.”
Soft-pitched as a natural extension of the monetization section, with a price-drop scarcity frame ($300 down to $57 as a live experiment that may end). The same course link leads the video description.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
Visual structure at a glance.
