Speaker A
Welcome to my YouTube channel. My name is Mariah Marcia. I am a creator on Instagram who recently in May started being consistent with my platform and grew it from being completely dead to now over 600,000 followers.
Creator Mariah Mpls shares how she grew Instagram from under 100K to 600K+ followers, crediting consistent posting, series content, and automated DM funnels.
Key Takeaways
- Consistent posting (around three times a week) compounds over time, producing many simultaneous small hits that can add up to rapid growth.
- Analyze and replicate the formats that perform well instead of moving on from them.
- Series-based content and clear calls to action to follow-up parts drive repeat viewership.
- Build trust and brand identity; avoid clickbait formats that attract the wrong audience.
- Use automation tools like ManyChat to convert engagement into traffic to owned platforms.
What the video covers
- The creator describes going from a dead Instagram account that lost followers for two years to over 600,000 followers after becoming consistent in May.
- Follower growth is tracked month by month: 654 in May, 2.5K in June, about 22.9K in July, 21K in August, 228K in September, and roughly 200K in October.
- Growth came from many pieces of content gaining traction at once, rather than one single viral video, which the creator says is a 'snowball' effect.
- Early experimentation included unboxings, makeup tutorials, and cleaning vlogs; a scrapbooking tip where she talks to camera was the first format to perform well.
- She emphasizes digging into content that performs well and recreating its format, rather than letting successful posts fade.
- ManyChat automation is used so that commenting on a reel triggers a DM with a link to a podcast, Substack, YouTube video, or resource.
- Series content, with 'follow along for part two' calls to action, produced a noticeable follower jump (about 800 followers from one instance).
- The creator warns against 'trial reels' and clickbait, arguing they attract an audience misaligned with her brand and hurt trust.
- She advises focusing on building brand trust and a broader vision rather than chasing short-term metrics.
- She views a growing platform as a way to command higher prices in brand deals and frames free value-sharing as an investment.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and growth milestone
- 02:10Dead account and the decision to get consistent
- 03:54Early experiments and the scrapbooking breakthrough
- 05:56Month-by-month follower growth numbers
- 08:14Why growth is snowballing across many posts
- 10:14Automation, series content, and engagement tactics
- 15:46Warning against trial reels and clickbait
- 19:40Building brand trust and final advice
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
And I have been very blessed. It has changed my life in a lot of ways that I never expected. And most recently, I gained 100,000 followers in 4 days. The last time something kind of like this happened was about a month ago, and I
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gained 100,000 followers in 10 days. And I thought that was pretty shocking. Uh, and I wanted to get that information out to my followers for free kind of as a thank you for their support. So, I put it all in a substack and I gave away all
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the information for free and I kind of gave a disclaimer and I said, you know what, like this is something that happened to me. I don't know if it'll happen again, but I'm going to tell you how it happened. Uh because I know that
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I'm the type of person who loves hearing other people's experiences about this kind of stuff. It can be so helpful. It can unlock things you maybe haven't been thinking about. And how crazy. I I truly thought that that was a blip and it
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would not happen again. But here I am now and it happened in half the time.
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So, I do think I am on to something and objectively it can be difficult to look at yourself and fully understand the sauce, the secret sauce. Uh, but I'm going to just try to expound and tell you guys about it. I'm not going to edit
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this video. This is not going to be produced. This is just me giving it away. And there is no catch. I just ask that you subscribe to this channel. It'd be awesome to get some subscribers from this. Okay, so I in May had a dead
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Instagram account. I was losing followers every single time I posted and that went on for two years straight. It made Instagram a very discouraging experience for me. Uh but I just kind of hit a point where I was like, screw
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this. I'm going to give this a serious shot. I am getting some of my energy back postpartum after baby number three.
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I want to do this. I would like to find a way to make it feasible. So, I decided to start posting consistently, which for me is roughly like three times a week on average, and just start experimenting. I
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didn't know what I wanted to talk about. That was a big part of it. I kind of had to shift my identity around. A lot of my old content had to do with oil painting and having three kids and being a
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stay-at-home mom. It just was not feasible for me to be oil painting regularly, which really made me confused about what am I supposed to share or talk about.
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So, I just kind of started doing some lifestyle stuff. Like I remember getting a brand new patio set and I did an unboxing of it. It was like what the heck am I doing? This is so random. I
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did like a makeup tutorial. I did like I filmed myself cleaning and resetting the house and doing like a little voice over of just like some thoughts that I had.
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Really nothing was landing. Uh so I'm experimenting experimenting experimenting. And then I had one format that did well compared to my other content. And that was me sitting down and sharing a little trick uh about how I scrapbook
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and how I let my kids scrapbook next to me. I basically give my kids their own version of my scrapbook. And that did well. And I thought, oh, there's something about like me sitting down and talking to camera. And you know, we're
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hearing everybody talk about like yapping on camera. Um, so there definitely is something to that. Okay.
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So, something I am good at that I think is serving me well is I definitely get very curious when I see something performing well. I don't just like let it move on and don't pay attention to it. I try to dig into it, try to exploit
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it a little bit like how How can we recreate this? How can we explore what's happening here? So, I started doing that and I had like a viral moment, a little uptick I would say, and I said to myself, you
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know what? I am going to make sure that I like run now. I'm not just going to like let this happen and then let it die out. I actually, let me grab for you guys. Guess I should have grabbed this
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before. Um, I wrote down the numbers of my following increase. Okay. And this is from two nights ago, so it's actually not going to be accurate cuz I've gained like 50,000 in over the last two days, but it's
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going to be close. Okay. In May, I went from no longer losing followers every single time I posted and I finally was net positive for the first time and I gained 654 followers.
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Thrilled. June I gained 2.5K. So 2500. Was really happy about that. Then in July I finally like hit a tailwind with my content.
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22,900. August 21,000. So, kind of keeping pace. September 228,000 new followers. That is a ton. A ton. A ton. A ton. And now in October, 200,000 followers. and then like whatever the 50 is that I did. So I went from an account
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that was under 100K to now over 600K. And what's very interesting about whatever is happening right now for my account in the algorithm is it used to be like all the content was kind of low performing and then I get these random
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outliers and then everything kept being low performing. So I'm like getting in my reps kind of like refining the way I'm doing my content. some of it's like, you know, there's still like this discrepancy kind of happening.
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Now that discrepancy is like getting a little tighter like I have really high performing and then like my baseline is like moderately performing, you know. Um, now what is happening now that I've been consistent from May to we are now in the
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beginning of November is I have all these pieces of content that are all attracting an audience and they are all going down a hill like an avalanche at the same time instead of just one outlier.
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And so typically when I'm experiencing rapid growth like 100,000 followers in 4 days, that would usually be a scenario where there is one piece of content that's going so viral. Like I'm talking like 10 million plus views.
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That is not what is happening whatsoever. My husband is also logged into my Instagram account on his phone.
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So we're he's always like checking it. I'm always checking it. and we are like this is insane what's happening right now because there is literally nothing specific I am going viral about and I know that that sounds crazy but let's
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just say I don't have the exact number let's say I've made a 100 pieces of content within the last like 5 months it's like literally every notification is coming from a different reel so it's everything going at its own pace like I have put
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out so many pieces of content into the ether that they all are snowballing into each other which is really exciting to see and there are some key things I would say that are really serving me right now um it's really serving me well
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that I do on a lot of my content I do do a many chat automation if you guys are not familiar with many chat they are the backbone behind the automated task that happens when you comment on somebody's
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reel and you get an automated DM sent to you. So, I will do these for all sorts of things. I will do it like I did it for this to send you guys to this YouTube video, but I'll also do it to
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send people to my podcast, to my substack to uh something that I like, like a a link, an Amazon link, or like a roundup, a gift guide. It doesn't always have to be like something I'm selling. It can be
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like a really fun creative resource that I'm sharing. And I do that all the time.
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So, that really helps. that absolutely helps with engagement. Um, I also am very mindful of always trying to have a series going on. Series have been gamechanging for me and I had heard about them so much previously and was
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always like, "Yeah, whatever guys, you need to have a series." A series truly is such a game changer. I had never said prior to having a series, I never finished up a video by saying follow along for part two because I never had a
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part two to anything. I never saw I never said that. When I said that for the first time, I instantly gained 800 followers. And I don't want to say I don't want to put that number out for you to like compare it to like your
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experience if you go try this. It was also like it happened to be a great video and that was uh the art of home videos part one if you're curious. I gained 800 followers within like the first I posted it in the morning and by that
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evening I had gained 800 followers and I was like whoa psychologically there is something to be said about literally telling people follow for part two because they're hooked they're interested and so how I have done it to make it feasible with my lifestyle
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because again you guys I am a mom to three young kids uh I can't just like be high production all the time. Um, I can handle one really produced video per week and that's typically my series and that's when I really script everything.
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I put a lot of consideration into what is getting said in that video, the order it's getting said, the opening line, what I'm directing people to at the very end, providing a lot of value.
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and I like to post those either on Mondays or Tuesdays. So, it's really given people something that they can depend on when they know they're coming to my account. Now, what I think is really interesting now is now these
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people are coming into my account with really fresh eyes and there is so much content for them to binge. It's kind of like if you were to log into Netflix for the first time and you've never seen anything or you like are starting a new
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series, you know, and you just want to binge watch it. That is what people are telling me in my DMs is what my content feels like. Are there so many factors of why people feel this way? Yes. Can I
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fully put it into words? No. But I also think you guys are smart enough to maybe just go over to my page and literally just go through like I can I you can listen to me talk all day about this,
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but I do think you kind of just got to go watch it and you're going to like pick up on stuff that I can't even verbalize of why this experience is happening and why this is working for me. I do think it's really important for
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your bio to be super refined and write it for people who are getting eyes on you for the first time who have zero context about you. Like mine used to just be so I'm a creative person and I
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think a lot of creatives struggle with this where you kind of create like this word fluff with what you're doing and it's like too mysterious for regular people. And so getting rid of some of that stuff, just getting more precise about exactly what
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I'm doing. I I used to say artist and mom of three. I took that out because I was like, it dawned on me that that was self-explanatory. Like if you go through enough of my content, you're going to
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figure out I have kids. You're going to figure out I paint. Like didn't need to explicitly say that. But I eventually did add what are people when they come to my page, how am I gonna help them? And so I
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changed my first line to be I believe right now it says helping you archive ordinary life through camcorders, photo albums, and all things nostalgic. Like that pretty much summarizes most of my content. And it also gives me like
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really good content pillars you might hear people refer to them as, which is basically just like key categories of what people know you for. Um, that's so helpful. And I described this I was on a podcast a couple weeks ago and I
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described like as a creative person, if you just like sit down in front of a white blank canvas and you're just told to paint something, it can almost be like stifling. Like you could take so many different directions, but if
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somebody gives you very specific like you need to use this material and it needs to be based off of this reference and in this style like you can like refine and get so creative within that.
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And that for me is what a series is. That's also what a bio is. Like I was really surprised to realize how intertwined the process of refining my bio was with the content that I was actually producing because when my bio
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was not refined, my content also wasn't refined. Like they really like meshed together. So I just really encourage you to sit down and put some time into that.
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And most likely this is how it was for me. I couldn't do it in one sitting.
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Like I tried my best and then I kind of started creating content that kind of like felt like it fit with that bio and then it kind of like things change.
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People are asking for different things and you kind of start going down different different little rabbit holes, you know, and then you got to adjust.
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It's like a very soularching journey. Okay, the next thing I want to talk about that I think is going to ruffle some feathers big time actually.
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I think trial reels are a distraction for most people. Let me tell you, in May, trial reels were kind of like fresh and hot. Um, and I was losing followers up to this point. So, I was like, I'm
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going to do trial reels. Like, I'm going to like make 10 a day, you know, like what you're hearing people give advice about doing. So, I started doing that. I just got to say like I think it's such a
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tit for tat nitty gritty like granular thing. It's a waste of your time. Okay. And again, I know I'm going to ruffle feathers saying that. Um, okay. So, I'm an oil painter [clears throat] and there's like this thing that happens
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when you're doing an oil painting where you have like your whole picture here right?
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and you start like really working on a piece and they call it overwork and so you're like getting really really really like zeroed in really focused on this thing and like you're spending way too much time on it. The brush work is
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getting um it's starting to merc together. The colors are starting to not associate well with the rest of the piece because you're getting distracted.
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You have to physically pull yourself back. This is how you do it as a oil painter. You physically walk to the other side of the room really far away and you look at your painting again. And then you're like, "Oh my gosh, I'm a
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freaking idiot." Like I I was focusing way too hard on this leaf and I didn't realize that it wasn't making any sense. That's what trial reels are for your personal brand. I'm telling you, all that time, all that energy that you
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just spent getting a little clickbaity, that's what trial reels, it's that's the mindset, at least for me, that a trial reel put me in. It's like, oo, let me be clickbait because you are creating content that's not for your audience. And I think
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people when they get really focused on creating content that's not for their audience. Who's that for? Cuz it's not in service to the personal brand that you have built with your people. It is in service to the masses.
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And you have to kind of play I don't want to call it dirty, but like I'm just calling it that. It's kind of like a dirty game to play. um because you're not creating content that's of like the
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utmost value to the people that you're serving. So at some point I realized that I was like I realized my brain was like kind of going into like a toxic zone in like a clickbaity zone focusing on trial
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reels and I was like screw it. I have a really limited amount of time and attention as a mom of three kids. So, the attention that I do have, I'm going to place it in the [clears throat] place
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with the highest return where I'm going to grow and learn the most. People are like, "Oh, trial reels are guaranteed to push it out to a new audience." Your reels pushed out on your platform, published in a normal format, will also
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get pushed out to a new audience if the content's good. Like it's just so again it's just very granular and if you are limited on your time I would just encourage you to leave that behind. If you have a team, if you have
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like interns working for you, if you are single and don't have kids and have all the time in the world to make 20 drafts of it real, go for it. Go for it. But some of us have really limited finite
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time. And this is just something I would encourage you to do is focus on how do I build my brand? How do I build trust with my audience? How do I create a broader vision? How do I guys Okay,
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it is very easy. I saw a creator talking about this today. Um, how do I explain this?
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She was publishing her real results. She was comparing her trial reels and one had 5,000 views and one had 22,000 views and like going deep dive deep dive onto the reasons why.
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I just want to challenge that type of mindset. I think that's a distraction. You need to post and you need to move on and you need to be mentally resilient and strong and not care when it's 5,000 versus 22,000. Like it's so
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irrelevant and I know that that sounds crazy. You have to stay like connected to the purpose in the mission behind what you're doing and think bigger like an oil painter. Like step back a step away from the painting and actually look at
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it objectively. Like your account's not growing. Let's say your account's not growing. This is what I would say to myself back in May. Hey Mariah, your account's not growing. And it's not because your font is pink and the text
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is this big and you use this keyword in the first five seconds versus using this other keyword in the first 5 seconds.
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That's a load of baloney. Your account's not growing cuz you don't know who you are. You don't know where you're taking your presence. You don't know what you have to provide people. And frankly, everybody else doesn't know what you
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have to provide cuz you're not clear on that. I'm not trying to be me. I'm literally talking to myself and I know that like this is the kind of content I appreciate as a person. So, I'm just trying not to
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like fluff it up too much. This is how I like to receive things and think of things. I hope that challenges your mindset a little bit because I personally a lot of the content that I'm seeing right now of like how to grow
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I it is not true to my experience at all. You guys, I am not caught up in the weeds on this stuff. I am thinking broader. I'm really more focused on building a personal brand. Um, and for me, that's like all comes down to
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building trust with my audience, staying true to myself, staying [snorts] true to my own like aesthetic, and not being somebody else. like this is truly wholeheartedly me not imitating anybody um and staying focused on that. I hope that this is helpful a little bit. I
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actually the other day, let me real quick did a rapid fire. Um and this is just like some more notes of just basic stuff. Uh Repurpose io is super helpful.
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That is a website you can sign up for and you can log into your Instagram and all your other social channels and it will autopublish to like everything. So like Tik Tok, YouTube shorts, Facebook, whatever you don't really want to care
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to focus on. Like I really recommend only focusing on one platform. For me that is Instagram.
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And then I just let it autopublish everywhere else. Um what else? Oh, how I create my content as a mom is I always film everything one day ahead. That's super helpful for me. I can't really manage to like film something in the
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morning and post it within a couple hours. What I do is I all day throughout the day at any time I film my little video. Okay?
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Then that evening when my kids go down, that's when I edit it. Then the next day, I post it around 9 to 10 a.m.
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Central time. And that's worked really well for me. I post three to four days, three to four times per week, Monday through Thursday. Unless I have a brand deal and they ask to go live. Outside of that, that has made it all super
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sustainable for me. I think if I was posting every single day, I would for sure burn out. like of course I don't have a team. I don't have anybody besides I do have a management agency that does all my brand deals and stuff
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and they're amazing. They help me out so much. Um second, the last thing I would say that has served me super well is just like I'm willing to give away what other people are charging for. Um nothing like fires me up more than when
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I see somebody kind of scamming people. Um, and there's so much there's so many ways people get taken advantage of in this space. And I'm like, if I have the information in the lived experience that proves them wrong, I'm like, I'm going
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to freaking get that information out. Um, so yeah, I've been giving away a ton. And I, let me tell you my mindset around this.
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I realized that when I gave away the things that other people weren't willing to give away, it grow. It helped grow my platform.
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That's great because the more that my platform grows, the more I can command price-wise with brand deals. And so it was a big aha moment for me to realize I'm gonna give my audience so much value for free. They can enjoy it. They can
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have fun with it. I'm going to make the brands pay. That's my strategy. And so people can come in, they can enjoy it for free.
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They can also see a brand deal on my page once or twice a week. People are used to it. People are supportive of it.
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That's my strategy and it's working out really well. So, I really hope that this gives you guys a mental framework of maybe thinking about things a little bit differently from what you're seeing online, what the discussion is along all
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of this. Also, don't outsource your editing to AI. I'm sure if you follow me, you know I'm so big on this. I was an editor for 10 years and the uptick in people selling their like AI claude systems
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um and like selling them as like your get rich quick scheme or like you're going to go viral for this. I am editing all my videos myself. I'm a mom of three kids. I know time is limited. Um but you
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don't need to do that to perform well. I think I'm living proof of that and that is one of the things I am giving away like kind of to stick it to all this discourse about everybody should be
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using claude to edit because I'm like no there are ways to make it faster to make it more efficient to make it enjoyable.
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Uh like for me personally I'm like I can I get it. I get why people want to outsource certain things to AI admin tasks all that. I just do not think editing in particular is the greatest thing to
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outsource. Uh but that's obviously up to everybody's personal opinion and you can have your own take on that. But my experience is I'm not using AI to growth hack any of this. This is all me all by myself. Onewoman show. It is possible
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and you can still have fun doing it. And I hope that that provides a optimistic perspective in a world where people are constantly trying to tell you like the reason you're not growing is because you're not doing this AI tool automation blah blah
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blah blah blah. Uh you can do it your own way and there are no rules. And I would like to argue doing it your own way might be better than even doing it my way. I'm doing it in a way that feels
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I hate the word authentic. It's so cheesy and overused, but I'm doing it in a way that is authentic to me and that's working out for me. And I think you need to figure out the version of that for
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yourself. It's not going to be replicating what I'm doing because it's not going to be fully embodied by you.
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Okay? You got to figure out the thing. You got to drop into like the zone as a creator of what is going to be true to you. And so much of this is being willing to put in the reps, being
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willing to experiment, being willing to look stupid. Guys, I felt stupid for like some I still feel stupid, but I felt really dumb like getting back into the swing of it for like six weeks. Like I'm just like out here. You got to look,
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you got to accept that you're going to look like you're trying. And I hate I hate the term try hard.
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Cool. I'm a try hard, I guess, cuz I'm trying hard. Like, okay. Uh, okay. Now, I'm kind of ranting and I think I should wrap this up. If you have any questions, um, feel free to drop them in the
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comments section. The last thing I want to say is don't be afraid to do the unscalable thing for a brief moment in time in order to push push through. And what I mean by that is if you have a viral little viral moment
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and by viral it could mean like your account normally gets 300 plays and suddenly on one of your videos you get 3,000 plays. Like I just mean like there's an outlier.
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You have to be willing to double down. And I am so grateful because in those moments my husband's so on the same page with me. Like he gets it. He gets why I want to double down on things, why I
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want to invest time in continuing to keep like the content engine burning. Uh and he's so on board with it. And so like we've had like Saturdays where he's taking the kids out to go to Costco in the park and like he's just like on the
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go and I'm cranking stuff out, but I don't have to do that anymore because he was able to quit his day job which is such a blessing. And so we have been able to now like make this all
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sustainable and easy to fit in with our life. But I wouldn't have had that had we not been willing to do the unsustainable thing for a season. So, that's just one thing I want to leave you with is like there is going to be a
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a squeeze. Like you're going to go through a moment of pressure where you're trying to put in the time. You don't have the resources and it's hard.
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It just is straight up hard. It's like you either have to sacrifice like some sleep or some money, uh, some sanity.
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Like there is sacrifice in that season, but the idea is is if you do it well and you do it hard, you can get through it.
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And it's not easy. It is so incredible how much of it is a mindset. And even myself, like I'm kind of through on the other side of this now where I'm like now have some money to like pay for
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extra child care when we need it and you know like get into more of a stable routine with it. But I'm now working with these brands and I've had several weeks that have happened where it seems like they all want the deliverables at
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the exact same time all of a sudden and I'm like cranking out content every single day like my own organic content, branded content, editing it, filming it, turning it around on the same day for like seven days straight. Like that's
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hard. It's very hard. and a mindset that's been so helpful for me in those moments. I need a little David Gogggins.
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I don't know if you're familiar with David Gogggins and he has this principle where he basically talks about like think about like the moment where you feel like max effort like you're like I've never worked so hard in my life
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which I felt that way like two weeks ago managing all this and I was sick at the same time. And the idea is is when you hit that point, tell yourself, I'm only at 40% max. Like, I have I think I'm at
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my max, but I still have all this bandwidth to tap into. Like, I think this is hard. It can It can get this hard. That very helpful. Very helpful for me. Might not be helpful for you.
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I am gonna wrap this video up because I thought it was going to be five minutes and it's 33 minutes. [laughter] I hope that was helpful for you guys and thanks for watching.
Topics:Instagram growthsocial media strategycontent creationreelsManyChatfollower growthseries contentcreator economyconsistencypersonal branding
