I Grew My Instagram Following From 0–100k in One Year

It all started from the first post on July 2, 2019. I reposted a trippy video from an amazing artist named John McLaughlin on my new Instagram page. Trippy Art Official was born.

After curating more pieces of art, I noticed that people really enjoyed the content. I found bigger pages in my niche getting thousands of likes per post and wondered if I could do the same. So I buckled down and put all my effort into growing this Instagram page.

One year later I had a vast community of Trippy Art enthusiasts who loved the content. In just one year, I had amassed a following of nearly 100,000 and was getting millions of impressions a week. I was one of the most popular art curators in the niche.

Suddenly, it all came crashing down… but I’ll get to that later.

How I Did It

When I started posting on this page, I didn’t have any high expectations. I knew I wanted to build a repost page, but I didn’t have any experience. I began by trying to emulate other pages in my niche. I looked at what they posted. When they posted. How often they posted. Which hashtags they used. And I learned.

My posts started receiving traction once I figured out which hashtags were working. I aimed for hashtags that my posts could rank in. If a hashtag has 2 million posts and your posts are only getting 50 likes, your content is going to drown in the abyss. I focused on finding hashtags that were super unique to my niche and had ideally less than 100k posts. This worked very well.

Another tactic I used was following people who liked posts in my niche. It’s a super simple strategy: you go into one of your hashtags, find a post that’s ranking, and follow the people who liked that post. Chances are, if they liked that post, they’ll also like your posts. These are the type of followers you want. They’ll engage in your posts and boost your ranking in the algorithm.

Keep in mind, you only have to do this strategy at the beginning. Once your page grows big enough, you’ll have a steady stream of followers.

Side note: Don’t follow too many people at a time (Instagram doesn’t like that and will flag you for spam). If you get a warning, don’t follow anyone else for the rest of the day.

What content did I post? I curated it from the top artists in my niche. The way to find a winner piece of content is to look at how many likes it received. If it has more likes than any other posts from the past month, then you’ve found yourself a winner.

What about captions? I just kept it simple. I found trippy quotes that connected with the art and added it to my post. I made sure to always give credit to the artist and always posted my optimized hashtags.

Many people ask me how often they should post. Posting 3 times a day at 2-hour intervals worked best for me. I started at 12 PM and posted again at 2 and 4. Every day. You can post more or less — just see what works.

If you take anything away from this article, it should be this: be consistent. The Instagram algorithm reacts well to accounts that post regularly and predictably.

Now, everything was going great with my page. I was about to hit 100k followers, but then this happened…

What Happened

After a year of posting content, I wanted to make use of the platform I’d built. I started a website with Shopify and began selling trippy art products. I sold trippy blankets, trippy phone cases, and everything in between. I attempted to connect my Instagram account to my Shopify store so I could promote my products. Instagram rejected my request. That’s when Instagram, without explanation, attacked my page.

Overnight I went from gaining 300 followers a day to 10 followers a day if I was lucky. My engagement was about the same, but for some unknown reason, Instagram had cut off my juicy supply of new followers. With my follower rate taking a hit, my follower count plateaued. I still posted the same amount as before, but my page wasn’t growing.

I tried everything I could to reverse the algorithm change, but to no avail. I tried not posting for a week. I tried posting only once a day — nothing worked. I grew tired of putting in the daily effort just to keep my page afloat. Eventually, I just stopped posting. I watched as the page I grew to the sky slowly began losing followers.

Sometimes I will return to the page to post here and there, but at the moment, the page remains as a testament to what I could accomplish when I put in the effort. I don’t want to end on a negative note; I really enjoyed building that page and learning so much about the Instagram platform. It has encouraged me to move on and begin new endeavors.

Since then, I started building this finance blog. Started focusing more on my investments in stocks and cryptocurrency. Started developing software more. I go into each new project knowing that I have what it takes to be successful. And that’s all I need.

Thank you for listening.

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