Building To 1 Million Instagram Followers (2 Secrets) w/Chris Do
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There's a formula or ratio that I use that's called 911. In the United States, if there's an emergency, you call 911. If somebody has a heart attack, there's a person breaking into your house, you call 911. And my whole thing is if your content's dead, if your content is on life support and it doesn't feel like anybody cares or shows up, you gotta call 911. So what you wanna do is you wanna create nine pieces of content that's purely value-driven. No calls to action, no promotion, no selling. You need to deliver value and transformation for folks. And then you create one post, one piece of content that's

And the last one is...

My name's Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast, and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life. What's up, guys? Welcome back to another episode of Living the Red Life. Today, we're going to dive into your favorite platform, Instagram, and how my friend here today, Christo, grew his Instagram to almost a million. He's like a few thousand short.

I'm using two key strategies to newer features that you may not know about and cover a whole bunch more to Chris. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Rudy.

So, so guys, for a bit of context, Chris was one of the experts on, uh, our new Amazon show with 60 day hustle. If you haven't seen it yet, of course, go check it out. Um, and, and, you know, Chris is a well, a very well known creator. I've, uh, known him, you know, before the show came about and, uh, he puts out amazing content and, and I, uh,

You know, always admired the quality of content. I really want to talk today about growing social media the right way and specifically Instagram and some of the newer features that I know you've used to really leverage it. But before that point, for anyone that doesn't know who you are, do you mind just giving a minute back story?

Sure. I'm a traditionally trained graphic designer, but in 19, I'm sorry, in 2014, I started making content on YouTube, left my old service design business behind and started going fully in on content. I love teaching very much. So I've been using social platforms to do that.

Great. And let's talk about Instagram. How did you come about, you know, really growing Instagram and choosing that as a platform? And I know you obviously have worked with a lot of brands and stuff off the back of it. Can you talk a little about that?

Absolutely. Like a lot of people on Instagram, I was just sharing the things about my life and there was a kind of very directionless approach to it, just doing things just because that's what I saw people doing. The big breakthrough came to me

from the introduction of carousels where you can post beyond three images at a time. And now you can post a lot more than 10, but using that ability to tell the story across a sequence of frames really tapped into my background in sequential design, designing main titles for motion pictures.

And I use that as a way to teach people. And it took a little while to figure it out. But since I do a lot of public speaking, I'm sure you do as well. I had hundreds of decks with thousands or tens of thousands of slides. All they needed to do was to figure out how to take that content and translate it for Instagram. And once I figured that out, my account skyrocketed. Yeah. And you said, so, you know, you grew it to pretty much a million at this point in a couple of years. Um,

I know we were talking offline that obviously there's a lot of foundational variables going to any level of success in life, right? Good quality content, knowing your audience, all of those things that people know and we can touch on. But let's cut straight to the chase. I know you said there was two key strategies that most people probably aren't leveraging the most. Can we start and dive in straight into those?

Yes. Anytime Instagram or any social platform offers up a new feature, generally speaking, you're getting a lot of free traffic if you embrace and use those things. So as the techniques that I was using may not be applicable today, you always need to be looking out for what they're pushing, any new features, use them right away because you'll get some free traffic from Instagram.

So back then it was the expansion of three to 10 slide carousels. And now they're pushing beyond that. And once I figured that out, I was able to translate content and teach people. That's my thing. I'm a teacher. So I want to be able to teach people and create a transformation for them. And in doing so, it allowed me to grow track, grow an audience and gain traction on the platform itself.

So when you're creating content, it's helpful to use some of the rules from copywriting. So if you're not a copywriter or studied advertising, there's this formula that copywriters use. It's called AIDA.

A stands for attention, I stands for interest, D stands for desire, and the last A is call to action. So what you have to do is before you get into any of the thing, you have to figure out how to stop the scroll. You have to be able to say something, a promise of the benefit, a true but contradictory thought. You have to be able to twist it a little bit. Otherwise, it'll just keep scrolling past. And what you do across the sequence of carousels is you start to build interest in what it is that you're trying to say.

One of the early mistakes that I made was I would tell people what to do on slide two or three. And if you gave them an answer in slide three, what is the point of them continuing on? And whenever Instagram or any platform introduces features, it's to keep the user the dwell or scroll times so that they stay on the platform longer. Anything you can do to keep people watching or reading your content, whether it be a reel or a carousel, will increase the likelihood that others will see your posts.

Yeah, and I literally, you know, a couple of weeks ago did a podcast on growing someone's YouTube to 2 million. And I've spent a lot of, gone down a YouTube rabbit hole the last couple of years because I really wanted to learn that platform. And I hadn't until now, like really dived deep into it. And I had spent tens of thousands on consultants. And it was funny because one of the big takeaways I got that also was shared on the podcast a couple of weeks ago by this individual was,

retention and how the algorithm go retention heavy and it's the same on every social so just to reinforce it again guys listening to this retention is everything because the longer someone's going through it it's if you're Mark Zuckerberg or whoever's coding these the algorithms right you've got to reverse engineer how do you know if someone's quality content is good well one of the easiest ways to reverse engineer that and build an algorithm around it is

are people consuming it for until the end because if it's click baiting crap they're quitting right away which means it's probably not going to be good for your platform ie instagram or youtube but if they're watching it all the way to the end and then they're commenting and then they're sharing boom you're triggering to the hour of onto youtube instagram this is great amazing content

And then it really like it's not like it does its job right like great content should start the compound and ripple effect so I love that you brought the album up the retention side up because I think it's what we don't pay attention to but I do want to ask one question.

people say, okay, retention is key, really, I get it. How do you increase retention, right? And you kind of lead and tease with it there, like don't give everything away right up front, but like there are some other tactics, right? Like teasing them and all those things, like can you give a couple bits for increasing retention? Yeah, if you study storytelling, storytelling is the art of delaying gratification. It's creating tension in the moment, not so much so that they become frustrated, but creating tension

That kind of tension that keeps them interested in what it is that you're doing. If you take any classic story, boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, and boy does something stupid, so boy loses girl, and the rest of the movie or the story is about boy trying to get the girl again. It is almost always like that. Because if the story begins with boy meets girl, falls in love, and lives happily ever after, no one wants to watch that. You can take that same thing and go into like murder mysteries. We wait to the very end to find out who killed

Who killed the governor? Who killed the maid? Whatever it is. I was about to say thriller movies because they're like that. Because it's like you always wait until the end to see who murdered that person, right? That's right. Here's the thing about thrillers is if you find out who commits the crime

but you review the movie in your mind and they didn't give you enough clues or they gave you total misdirection, you'll feel really cheated. We'll call that clickbait because the setup didn't allow me to figure things out.

So we assume that everybody knows what we know and is interested in things that we're interested in. So what we'll do is we'll write a headline that uses inside baseball, like a jargon that people don't understand. And you got to remember, if you're trying to teach somebody something, they don't know the language in which you're using already. So number one rule here is when you're writing copy, write it at about a fifth grade level for like an American student. So use really non-complicated words that,

that common phrases that people already know, then bring him to where you are. So I talked to Brendan Cain recently. He's a guy who grew to a million followers in 30 days. He said, it's cool that you create niche content for a niche market, but if you want to grow, you have to create context. You have to be able to bring a lot of people in before they can consume that niche piece of content. So I write a lot about

marketing and branding. But a lot of people aren't necessarily interested in that. So what you have to do is you have to find a problem that they're familiar with, that they can relate to. So you bring them towards what it is you want to talk about. And you can do that across frames via carousels. You could do that across a reel. So the first three seconds, you need to give somebody something they care about, use language they understand, and then you draw them in that way.

Yeah, I love that. And I always think like we, we grew up, you know, playing this game, right? We, we watched Disney movies, right? And there's always a big grand finale, pretty much every movie. Like I said, I was going to mention thriller movies, uh, even like Scooby-Doo. I think those kids have watched Scooby-Doo at some point. Like it's always, who's the, you know, what's the mystery at the end being sold. So, uh,

And even like when we watch movies, we'll even stay for crappy movies because we're like, okay, we're like half committed to this now. We just want to see what happens at the end.

So, like, just reverse your content that way. And I think it sounds so simple, but no one does it. Like, everyone I work with and consult with and people in my programs, you know, when you ask them, it's like... And I used to be guilty of this, too. Like, I would just pick a great headline and randomly shoot the content, right? And then it's like, it's not hard to spend another few minutes just really creating a bit of that more of that structure, and it can make all the difference, right?

And yes, I think retention is so important. Did you mention the second bar? I know carousel in the end is a big one, right? Let's go into that second big one. Yeah, so I'll tell you how I actually discovered the second insight, and I think it's still applicable today.

So a while back, I was like trying to promote a course that one of my creative directors had written and produced. And I was thinking, I wonder if my audience would mind if someone else created content on my channel. So I reached out to my creative director and said, hey, create a 10 slide carousel talking about color theory or design principles based on the things that you teach. Idiom.

So he goes, okay. So he creates this carousel and it's really good. And it doesn't look like anything that I've made before. It's in his voice, in his teaching style. So I put it out there late at night thinking, okay, if my fans get mad at me, I'll just delete it and say, I'm sorry, guys, I have to sell a course. Everything's cool. And to my surprise, it got way more likes than my native posts. I got way more follows. So I was thinking, okay,

oh my gosh this is fascinating they're not upset at me at all they just care that i bring really high value content they don't care about consistency they don't care that it's even my voice or that someone else wrote the post so i go back to my business i keep creating and then people had seen that and they said hey how do i get to be a guest post on your thing because i want followers too

So this is fascinating. Guest posts help you and it also helps the person as long as you tag and identify them so that we both grow. In fact, he got more followers than I did, but that's cool because I got a lot of followers too. So it was really good. So I started to review and curate guest posts and I started not posting my own native content and I started posting them. And then I was growing like 10,000 followers a week at that point.

And I didn't even have to do the work. What I had to do was review and give them notes and say, this isn't working for me. And that started to become a full-time job. There's a downside to this, Rudy, which is all of a sudden people aren't sure what the heck they're getting from your channel anymore. But I did grow a lot by using guest posts.

Okay, I like that. So I would love for you to follow up questions to that. Say someone is a fitness trainer, can you maybe give a couple of examples? Like they could maybe partner with a nutritionist and a physical therapist, right? Like, what are some maybe examples of that for common industries that a lot of people play in?

That's wonderful. So you look for related fields. So if you're a fitness trainer and you want to say introduce dieting or nutrition, you can bring somebody on. And here's the tricky part. You have to figure out your own formula and ask them to follow your formula, but do it in their voice. Otherwise, it'll feel like very random.

So me doing carousels, 10 slides, I said it has to be 10 slides. It can't be three. It can't be 13. It literally has to be 10. I want you to start out with a strong headline and I want you to delay the key piece of information until slide eight or nine.

So once they have the structure, it's actually a lot easier for them to create. Now, luckily on our channel, there was a lot of examples, my own carousels. Now, if somebody is creating most likely reels on Instagram today, if they have a format that they use, for example, if it's one of those walk and talk videos, or it's the guy on the street interviewing folks like, Hey, I love your car. What do you do for a living? Do you mind me asking?

So that would be your format. So you would want your guest posts or nutritionist to use the same format that you're using. So at least there's some cohesion with the channel. Otherwise, it'll feel really odd.

Good. Love it. So a couple of key tip, uh, straight away, you know, first few minutes of today is, um, you know, the carousel style guest pose. And I always teach about bringing in influences and climb some people similar. So I really love that format on how to do it and how to make it a win win. Uh,

And I think one thing that's really important to emphasize is that's the two key things that you use to grow your platform. And a big part of that was because they were newer features at the time, which meant a

Instagram gives more exposure. So just to break that down for everyone listening, generally when a new platform launches anything new, they will massively expand the organic reach you're going to get because they want, you know, as a business owner, they want their new idea to be a success, right? And the way they do that is by

get you know pushing getting lots of use out of it so if you post a carousel when when Mark Zuckerberg first released it or Instagram did and you got a lot of views on that and likes and comments more than your regular content you're going to now go oh I'm going to do more of these which means that their new system kind of gets traction in the marketplace so

That's really an important underlying psychology because what's new now and in six months is always going to be, they're going to keep moving and changing. But if you understand to jump on it when it's new, you kind of get that instant boost. And how are you identifying these newer trends?

It's pretty straightforward because there are folks who report on new Instagram features and they have access to newer features that sometimes aren't available to the public. So if you don't have access to those features, at least you can start preparing mentally like, how do I need to grade for that? But just keep an eye out on them. Their main job in existence on Instagram is to tell you what's new. So follow a couple of those folks.

Of course, you can follow the CEO of Instagram. He'll tell you what's new and what's coming down the line. But I like to see the angle from creators talking about it because they give you examples.

Yeah, I was going to say, like, and I just follow a couple of, like, top creators that all they do is Instagram when millions of followers. It's like you see them doing it right away. And then, like, if you're good at reverse engineering stuff like I am, it's really easy to look at it and go, oh, wow, this thing must have come out. This is all how they're doing that. How could I apply that? So, yeah, I love following some channels of that sort.

accounts that just talk about it, but also maybe a couple of top influencers to see it in action. I think it's a great way to do that.

Yeah. And I want to say something because if people are listening to this, hey, yeah, Chris, carousels haven't been happening for a long time. When in fact they are. And I know this because of a couple of different things. So the newest version of this is the longer carousel, the inclusion of music because you can add music now. So that's a new feature. And you can also do video carousels where each of the slides can be video. So it's quite interesting. It used to be that, you know, you can only create one video at a time. Cool. I get that.

right but now you can sequence a bunch of videos together and that's increasing watch time or retention on your specific account so if you do all those things i'm pretty sure it's going to work out really well how many applied i've not seen many people do like the free plot video series you know right there's marketers for decades many years right but

On Instagram, I've not kind of seen much of that. Yeah, it's worth trying, but that's interesting. I mean, I'm going to test that too. So next question for you, and I'll go after you. So I would love to hear from you, and then I'll go. Three other key strategies or fundamental principles for growing Instagram or social media in general, like beyond these two, like what are three kind of quote-unquote laws or things you would teach that you feel most people miss?

Okay, I'll answer your question in one way. There's a formula or ratio that I use. It's called 911. In the United States, if there's an emergency, you call 911. If somebody has a heart attack, there's a person breaking into your house, you call 911. And my whole thing is if your content is dead, if your content is on life support and it doesn't feel like anybody cares or shows up,

you got to call 911. So what you want to do is you want to create nine pieces of content that's purely value-driven. No calls to action, no promotion, no selling. You need to deliver value and transformation for folks. And then you create one post, one piece of content that's purely reflective of you.

Because a lot of accounts teach, but then you're like, who is the person behind this? Is it a team? Is it a robot? I want to have a personal connection with the person behind this. So now you have permission by me to create something that's just about you. So it could be a slice of life behind the scenes. You're traveling, you're doing something, something much more intimate where you peel back the layers and you show yourself your voice or something like that.

And the last one is one piece of content that you're allowed to sell unabashedly so that now you don't have to tiptoe around it. What I find that most people do is they get this totally swapped. Every piece of content is a marketing piece of content. And you know what? I don't show up on social media to look at advertising. Yeah, I love that. I love that. So I want to follow up on a couple of those things.

So, yeah, I often teach that with socials, like, I mean, if you're looking at socials to sell, you've got it all backwards, right? Like all the top creators and influencers, socials is to grow your tribe community name and add value. That's it, right? And then if you can sell and make money on the back end, that's the bonus, right? And the last couple of years, we really focused on growing our Insta and monetizing it.

And at my peak, we were making about 150 grand a month from Instagram. But we never sold. We weren't doing direct sales at images all the time. We were just growing the channel on the platform and using back-end strategy and retargeting ads, engaging with the top followers and all those sort of things to really monetize it. So...

Yeah, you're never going to grow and go viral and grow a big platform if your content is selling. I kind of use this 80-20 rule, like the simple terms of 80% should just be focused on viral content, content that's shareable and adds value. And then 20% of the time can be other stuff, such as new product launches, promos, serve about, picture of your dogs, all of those sort of things. And then...

To back up the second point, so we actually have this SOP in my own company which is called Weekly Authentic Posts. So once a week I try and thoroughly after most of my team create my content, I just approve the ideas. But once a week I actually sit down and create what's called an authentic post where it's something about me. Brian, it always, it's funny, it always destroyed his embryo of a post, right?

And it's not like it doesn't take me long like yesterday I literally erased a triathlon posted a selfie photo of me which I wouldn't only do unedited wrote it out like two lines and you know hundreds of comments and now the week before I got interviewed on a podcast and someone was asking me like how's your life changed since you moved to America and it was a good question and it really got me thinking about it and where my life was that's what I thought um

um and so i actually wrote uh an email to my email list just talking about it um and then i decided on just going to post this on insta too again hundreds of comments top performing post of the month so don't i think it's important especially you know when no one knows you yeah posting your dog photo every day it's not going to help you but when you've got like a tribe in a community it's kind of flip-flops on its head where now they want

content of you right and i think everyone also gets that backwards that when they start they feel it's all about them it's like no one knows or cares who you are but then as you add a ton of value bro big tribe and community now all they want to do is like what does rudy you know what what does rudy do in his nighttime routine like what book is he reading right where what's his dog's name they it's funny how they crave that so much so yeah really great points on on those three i love those

Yeah. I want to echo that 100%. You're right. Most people get the formula backwards for some reason. They start with a lot of personal content, what you're eating, where you're going to vacation. No one cares. You know, the weird thing is you start teaching and creating transformation. Now they care a lot. So it's like the tabloids care about people who are famous, not, not famous people. And so what you have to do is get famous first. And for them it's acting or doing something great in their life or becoming rich.

And then now we care about them. So what we can do, the average human, what you can do is create your own kind of fame by helping people. It's really an amazing time in which we live in because you can be rewarded handsomely. You can live like independent, like financial life and live wherever you want. If you just help enough people. Exactly. So, all right, just to wrap the show, I'll give my quick free. I won't go into them too long because we're right down time. Uh,

And so I, you know, echo everything you said. You know, I'm a marketer first. I always teach a lot of people like the content has to have a clear, unique selling point book or lead in. It's got to be purposeful and have some like big outcome or deliverable. I mean, most people post too much like wishy washy random content. It's always trying to bring in a big book to hook them in. I think it's number one.

Next one is consistency, right? It's like the most boring thing that I used to teach in fitness and nutrition when I thought that 10 years ago. And it's sadly the same in all aspects of life. If you want to be great, it's consistency. Like what, you know, you've got to create a great plan, follow everything we taught today, but then doing it twice a month, it's not going to get you the results unless you're maybe Mr. Beast. And if everyone else, we've got to be consistent every day.

And then I would say number three is like, I always try and say, and I learned this from working with so many celebrities, I think it helps you stand out, is create some sort of a gimmick for yourself, like something you're known by, something people reflect on. Like for me, I have the whole red thing. For you, you have the whole introvert thing too, right? Which we didn't talk about, but I know it's big. And so I think for you, like try and create some sort of a gimmick

Um, and WWE wrestling is probably the number one of doing this for their, their, you know, influencers or celebs or, or whatever. Uh, look at the rock and all those things and Paul Kogan and these people, like they've done such a good job of building those brands. So try and create some sort of a gimmick. And when I say gimmick, it doesn't have to mean a bad thing. Something representable for your brand. That's something you stand for. So, yeah.

So Chris, last question. If people want to follow you, let's give them the Instagram handle so they can see this in action. And then just where if they want to learn more about you, where they can find your website would be great. Wonderful. You can find me on Instagram at thechrisdoe, and doe spelled D-O, thechrisdoe. And you can find out more about the programs and things I do by going to thefuture.com, the future, F-U-T-U-R, there's no E at the end, thefuture.com.

And they can check you out in the new Amazon show, 60 Day Hustle. Remind me what episode you were in? Episode three for about 33 minutes. That's how long I made it. You were there for like a whole day. I was there for a long time, yeah. Well, the TV, you know, the magic of TV and editing. Old people, you know, each episode is like four days in a studio for 12 hours a day. Yeah.

edited down to 45 minutes but yeah i i appreciate you being part of the show and coming on today and thank you for your time and guys go start growing your social social wherever these days your audience is right there and if you really invest in it like we have you can build amazing tribes communities and as i mentioned briefly you know monetize and make great money from it too

which is secondary but obviously at the end of the day you got to pay your bills too so um it's it's a great all-around platform so chris thank you so much for coming on guys until next time keep living the red light see you guys soon