How To Grow Your Instagram

How I grew my Instagram from 10k to 112k in 9 months by doing one thing

There’s a lot of reasons why you might want to learn how to grow your instagram. Maybe you want to look more legitimate to potential brands for sponsored posts. Maybe you want have an ideal number in your mind that means “you’ve made it”. Or maybe you just have a goal for growth this year. Whatever your reasons are, I can tell you how I grew my instagram from 10k to 112k in only 9 short months doing only ONE thing.

Don’t worry, this isn’t anything spammy or some crazy “hack”. Its a legitimate way to grow your instagram following by finding the people that connect with the stuff you’re putting out there. Best part? It only takes a few minutes a day.

The best tip I got on how to grow your instagram

Early in 2018, I had started actively working on my dessert blog and decided to attend my first blogging conference. The Everything Food Conference in Utah. While I was there I learned a ton about blogging, networking, social media and of course, how to grow your instagram.

I attended this workshop from Stef Pollock of The Cupcake Project. I believe at the time she had 750,000 followers. That was May 2018. Today, Jan 2019, she’s up to 878,000 followers. She definitely knew what she was talking about and I couldn’t wait to hear what her strategy was.

Her strategy was simple. Share other people’s posts.

Say what? Like, you can do that on instagram? I had no clue! It was so simple but made so much sense. I mean, that’s what we do all day on facebook and other social media platforms. If we see something we find interesting, entertaining or useful, we share it. Why don’t we do that on instagram?

So that’s what I started to do.

How do you know what to share to instagram if it isn’t your own?

But what would I share? I didn’t want my feed to completely lose it’s identity, even if it sucked. So I had to ask myself a question, what do my followers need from me? What do they come to my feed for? Is it just to see my cakes or is it for something else?

Sure, they came for the cool cakes but the fundamental desire of my followers is in my name, they are GEEKS! They love interesting information! They love to see cool techniques, outrageous designs and stuff that get’s them inspired. So that’s what I was going to share. Anything that would seem interesting to my followers and give them value.

Where do you find valuable content?

So now that I was starting to share content, I realized it’s not so easy to find interesting stuff when you need it. I had to be strategic about not only finding good content that would serve my followers interests but consistently post.

Sometimes I would find interesting content on my feed but I didn’t need to share it right away so I would save the post to a folder labeled “share”. That way I could find it later when I needed it.

I would also check out the explore tab on instagram. If you don’t know about this tab, you are missing out! It’s like the best content on instagram from everyone, on it’s own special feed. A great way to not only see what’s trending and find great content but to follow new and awesome people!

The explore tab is the little magnifying glass icon. You can also search the explore section by categories like “cake” or “pastry”. Save anything interesting to your “share” folder so you can find it later.

Ready to start growing your instagram like crazy? Download my Freebie to learn all about my instagram workflow. The apps I use, how I find good content to share and how I schedule it all out to save myself time!

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