Yes, it’s possible.
Getting 100k+ followers in 6 months is possible.
I know what you’re thinking, and trust me… I feel you.
When I started out with this whole Instagram thing, I was like: “let’s make some followers and cash out”.
But as time goes by, the more I realise that Instagram is a marathon, not a sprint.
It’s not about getting followers and flipping pages (well, it pays off sometimes – yet it could pay way more in the long run).
It’s not about finding out the latest bot and make it engage with your followers.
Instagram is about human interactions.
And yes, this is entirely out of this article’s context – I got those 100k+ followers sharing viral content.
If you’re working on your personal brand, you can hardly apply any of the methods that you read here to your profile.
You do can achieve those numbers, but you need a top-notch strategy, a reasonable budget to invest in influencers, and a kickass videographer.
That being said, let’s cut to the chase and talk about going viral.
As you already know, going viral is the fastest way to grow on Instagram.
Not the easiest though.
As you as you hit the explore page, if you’re content is good you experience what I call an “explorgasm” – you start getting tons of comments, likes, views and followers.
It’s a unique experience.
“Hey, stop talking BS – how can I experience this?”
If you want to go viral and make the most out of your “free” exposure, you have to master the next four pillars (by the way if you want to know the four pillars of personal branding, I wrote an article about them too).
This is not some common stuff you’ll find on big magazines.
I’m not going to tell you – “share engaging content” or “engage with your followers”.
This is practical knowledge, and you’ll find out what Instagram marketers do to get high exposure and drive traffic to their websites.
Are you ready to get your mind blown?
1. Content
When it comes to Social Media, content is always king.
We’re talking about viral pages, right?
As such, we’re not meant to create our own content (well, we could but it would require a crazy investment at the very first stage).
So we repost other people’s content.
You may think it’s unethical, you may think it’s too easy… what’s sure is that this is the way it works and it’s not easy whatsoever to pick out the right content.
I’m going to tell you the exact process that I go through, step by step.
First of all, how shall we repost the content?
Basically, you download the piece of content you need and schedule it on your feed.
The best website to download any piece of content is Instasave – you submit the link of the pic/video, and you’ll find it in your download folder.
Then my favourite app to schedule on Instagram only (if you have to combine posts on different platforms, probably there are better apps) is Onlypult.
Now that we know how to get content, we need to find out how to pick out the right content to schedule.
What I do is pretty simple and works like crazy – let’s assume you’re into Fitness.
If I were you, what I would do is following the best pages on Instagram that share fitness content – and look at their average number of views, likes, and comments.
Write it down, and look for those pieces of content that have gotten at least as triple as that number.
Save those pieces of content, and Instagram itself will collect them for you.
We have the right content, we know how to download it and how to schedule it.
What else do we need to make it go viral?
2. Exposure
The highest-quality content in the World will never go viral without an exposure boost (unless you already have Millions of followers).
If we want it to go viral, we need to hack the algorithm.
As humans, we’re not meant to know how the algorithm works.
However, we marketers have found how to hack it by testing everything for years and years.
Let’s start out with these four principles:
a – The more engagement you get, the better.
b – The bigger the pages that engage with your content, the better.
c – The soonest you get your engagement, the better.
d – The longer the comments, the better.
You’re right – it looks like a hell of a job to hack the algorithm… We need some tools!
Actually, we do have many tools ahah
Just to mention a few: engagement groups, DM likes, powerlikes, etc.
Each of these tools deserves their own article/video; I’ll give you a couple of quick tips.
It’s not easy to get into active engagement groups if you have less than 100k followers. That being said, there are two alternatives.
You can either pay someone to give you their slot into the group (they provide likes and comments from their account, and you’ll receive the ones from the other group members), or create a brand-new group.
It requires a little bit of effort, but it’s totally worth it.
You reach out 100k+ pages via DM, and write these words:
“Hey bud, I’m setting up a 100k+ (your niche) group. Do you wanna take part in it?”
Once you collect ten pages, they won’t mind if you don’t have many followers.
Same applies to DM likes, but you have to pay for them. Reach out big pages and tell them that you’re willing to pay 1$ for three likes and comments per day.
Many of them will be interested.
Regarding Powerlikes… You’ve got to pay! There are private providers (drop me a message if interested) and public ones. Fuelgram is definitely legit and I would recommend it.
So now we know how to pick out the right content and how to give it visibility. What else do we need?
3. Hashtags
In my last article, I spoke about hashtags and can’t find better words to talk about it. Let me paste that part 🙂
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When you look for a hashtag in your search bar, the platform will show you the 9-best-performing posts (in the section called Top Posts).
Every day, hundreds of thousands of people search for a specific hashtag – a few months ago, they made it possible to follow a single hashtag as it was a real profile.
So, we want to make it among the top posts as much as we want to make it on the explore page.
Any time we post a picture or a video, we are allowed to put up to thirty hashtags in the caption. Are we forced to put all of them? We’re not, but if we use less than thirty, we’re not optimising our chances to achieve our goal.
We’ve been given with thirty bullets, shall we use all of them?
Most likely, we want to – so now we need to pick out the most effective hashtags of our niche.
As a rule of thumb, we should pick out hashtags that our account size reflects 10-20% of their usage (practically if your account has 1’000 followers, you should use hashtags with 10’000-20’000 posts).
Several apps and websites will help you to do so, the ones I personally prefer are:
We’ve found a way to get thousands of hashtags in a matter of a click, but we do need only 30 of them (I use even fewer) – which ones should we focus on?
We should focus on three “hashtag categories“, such as niche related hashtags (e.g. #fitness), sub-niche hashtags (e.g. #shredded) and emotion hashtags (e.g. #beastmode).
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4. Call-To-Action
Finally, you made it to the explore page.
You’re getting traffic, more likes, more comments… But nobody follows you.
You’ve put in a lot of time, money, and hard work to get there – but your followers are always the same.
Don’t worry; I’m about to tell you the secret formula to write your captions for users to follow you.
Buckle your seatbelt; this is going to change your “Instagram life”.
Here’s the magic formula:
- 1st row: a short description
- 2nd row: two emojis
- 3rd row: follow @yourpage
- 4th row: –
- 5th row: 📽 @owner
- 6th row: –
- From 7th row on: Hashtags
Dude, it’s not even funny.
It’s not logical at all, but converts.
Just test it out, and let me know how it goes.
That’s it man; you’re ready to go.
After reading this article, potentially you could set up a new business out of this knowledge.
Flipping pages is very profitable, so you might be wondering: why do you share your knowledge?
Because as always, it’s not about knowing how to do something.
It’s about doing something.
The execution is a different game, and just a few of you will execute on this.
If you’re among them, congrats on that – and speak soon!
Alessio Cordeddu
P.S. I got on board a crazy challenge – 365 days daily YouTube video. It’s going to be lit, follow me on Instagram not to miss out on my next videos!