Grow on Instagram in 2026: Beginner’s 30-Day Plan

1. Intro: If you are new to Instagram, stuck under 1,000 followers or don't know what to post, this class is for you. This class is for creators, small business owners, artists, students who want steady, real growth without overthinking. First, let me be clear about what this class won't be. This is not a class about growing Instagram account overnight. The growth will be slow but consistent. After watching this course, you will understand how Instagram actually grows accounts. You'll know what to post, why you're posting it, and how to stay consistent. Let's get started. 2. Who Sees Your Content on Instagram?: How Instagram decides who sees your content. Before we talk about growing Instagram accounts, you need to understand one thing very clearly. Instagram does not grow accounts. I grows content. Let's start with an important difference. Followers are the number of people who choose to follow you on Instagram. Reach reach consists the number of people who sees your particular post. In today's time, you can have 10,000 or even 100,000 followers and still get low reach. On the opposite spectrum, you can have just 200 or even zero followers and still get incredible reach. That happens because Instagram always promotes content rather than the entire profile. See what happens is, when you post something, Instagram shows it to a small group of people first. If this small group interacts with your post, like it, save it, share it, or even watch it completely till the very end if I'm taking an example that you posted a real, so they watch it completely, they repost it or whatever. Instagram will now show it to a bigger group of people. It doesn't matter how many followers you have. This is the exact formula Instagram uses for all their post, no matter how many followers you have. The thing you need to know is Instagram pays huge attention to how long people are watching your reels, Reels, post, Carousels. It could be any type of post. How long are people staying on that particular post? Do they share it? Do they save it? Do they repost it? These are the important metrics you need to care about. Ls are fine, but they are not the main signal. And this is phenomenal news for new Instagrammers because Instagram doesn't care anymore about how many followers do you have. They only care about how good your content is in grabbing people's attention. 3. What is a Niche>?: What is a niche? The word niche gets thrown around a lot in Instagram's context. Today, let's talk about what this exactly means. First, we need to understand a big difference. Niche is different than topic. Fitness is a topic. Technology in itself is a topic. Photography is a topic. Niche is something even more specific. Niche consists of three things, who problem and format. Who are you talking to? What problem are you helping them with and what kind of content are you creating? When I say what kind of content, it means real carusals, photos, stories, what kind of content means the content pillar. For example, not photography, but iPhone photography tips for beginners using reels and Carousels. Not fitness, but building muscles for beginners at home, using carusals and reels. Now, let's also talk about extremes. I've seen a lot of accounts were trying to grow as a personal branding thing. But they fail miserably because one day they are posting tips. They go to the gym. They are posting gym related fitness tips. One day, they're posting family trips. One day, they're posting a random me. Mm dad is not even related to fitness, and one day, they're not even posting for a week. This confuses Instagram, and ultimately, your account will be dead even before you know it. Now, our goal is not perfection. Our goal is clarity. Your account should have the clarity. Who is it for and who's going to benefit from following you. Remember, niche is a starting point, not a life sentence. You are allowed to adjust it later. 4. How to Decide Your Niche in 30 Minutes?: How to choose your niche in just 30 minutes. Now, let's choose a niche without overthinking. I have three questions. Grab your notebook and a pen or open a notes app and answer these three questions for me. Question number one, what do you know? This could be experiences that you've lived, things that you are an expert in. You don't need to be the top one person expert. You just need to be slightly better than the average person. Question number two, what do people ask you? Think about the questions your friends ask you. DMs you already get advice people come to you for. If people ask, it means there is something there. There is interest. You have a position of authority over them in that particular field. In my case, it could be technology. People ask me about their phones all the time, how to do this or Dad in their phone. Technology could be one thing. When I was into fitness, a lot, I was into calisthenics and body weight training. That time people were asking me about body weight training so dad could be something. There are a lot of different things that you are an expert expert in and you don't even realize it. Question number three, what can you talk about for six months? Not forever, six months. Let's say three to four posts a week, for six months consistently. Can you talk about any particular topic? The topic that you have picked in question one and two, now's the time to test it. Can you talk about it? In my case, let's take my examples. One more example I want to talk about is photography. I do a lot of photography as well. In my case, it would be photography, fitness and technology. Can I talk about fitness for six months continuously? I don't think so. I don't think so. Fitness is a very tough topic and every content that had to be made in fitness has already been made. Technology, I can talk about it for six months, and photography, I can definitely talk about photography. This way, you can narrow down your niches. Now that you have written down your version, I would love to know about it, write in in the comments below. What did you come up with? Also, one thing, if the idea feels heavy, for example, for me, fitness felt heavy. Like, I can't talk about fitness for six months continuously. You can skip it. Just skip it and move on to something else. 5. What are Content Pillars?: What are content pillars? If posting on Instagram feels stressful, it's because usually you don't have a content pillar in mind. You are deciding what to post every single time, and that usually leads to random posting. Random posting is what we talked about earlier, like one day you're posting a trip, and then you're not even posting for a week. That is random posting. Instagram doesn't like that. Content pillars fix this problem. Content pillars are content categories you post again and again. Or you could say they are the type of posts you make again and again. Instead of asking, what should I post today? It's my day of posting. What should I post today? You just need to ask yourself which of the content pillars I should post today. Ideally, you should have three to five content pillars and we will talk about content pillars in depth in the next chapter. 6. Creating Your First Content Pillars: Creating your first content pillars. Et's create your first content pillars. Here are four beginner friendly pillars that work in almost every niche. First is educate. This is where you teach something simple. For example, if you're talking about the fitness niche, here you can talk about how to do a pull up, how to do a push up, or how to basically do anything else, how to or common mistakes to avoid basically educational content. Second would be relate. Make people feel understood. Here you can talk about your struggles, your mistakes, and, you know, overall honesty. This is going to be very helpful for your personal branding. Next would be inspire. Here you can share motivation or inspiration. Here you can share before and after, for example, like six months ago, I looked like this, and now I look a lot better. I feel a lot better. This way, you can inspire people. Or if you're a fitness trainer, you can talk about your client's progression. Fourth content pillar would be show the process. This is where you show behind the scenes like how you work, how you learn, how things are made. This builds authenticity. Among the ones I shared, you can pick any three or four or even all four that you like. Choose the content pillars that feel natural to you. I heavily recommend studying other people within your niche to find out more content pillars. You can also take help from Cha GPT to get more content pillars. Now for a quick exercise, write down three or four pillars under each pillar, list five post ideas. If you can do that easily without too much trouble, you've chosen the right pillars. 7. Optimizing Your Profile for Growth: Creating your first content pillars. Et's create your first content pillars. Here are four beginner friendly pillars that work in almost every niche. First is educate. This is where you teach something simple. For example, if you're talking about the fitness niche, here you can talk about how to do a pull up, how to do a push up, or how to basically do anything else, how to or common mistakes to avoid basically educational content. Second would be relate. Make people feel understood. Here you can talk about your struggles, your mistakes, and, you know, overall honesty. This is going to be very helpful for your personal branding. Next would be inspire. Here you can share motivation or inspiration. Here you can share before and after, for example, like six months ago, I looked like this, and now I look a lot better. I feel a lot better. This way, you can inspire people. Or if you're a fitness trainer, you can talk about your client's progression. Fourth content pillar would be show the process. This is where you show behind the scenes like how you work, how you learn, how things are made. This builds authenticity. Among the ones I shared, you can pick any three or four or even all four that you like. Choose the content pillars that feel natural to you. I heavily recommend studying other people within your niche to find out more content pillars. You can also take help from Cha GPT to get more content pillars. Now for a quick exercise, write down three or four pillars under each pillar. List five post ideas. If you can do that easily without too much trouble, you've chosen the right pillars. Optimizing your profile for growth. Your profile has just one job to turn visitors into followers. Let's break it down. Name field versus user name. Your username is your Instagram handle. Your name field is searchable. Instagram uses the name field like its own mini SEO tool. Instead of just writing your own name here, do you should write what you do plus who it's for. For example, Shubham Jain Instagram Growth Coach, or you can write your name and then handmade jewelry brand, iPhone photography tips. Just keep it simple and readable. Now, let's talk about Instagram bio. I have a very simple formula. You just answer three questions in your bio and you're done. You don't need any complexities. You don't need to rewrite it again and again. Just answer these three questions in your Instagram bio. Who is this account for? What value do I get? What result can I expect? Use this simple structure, and the structure is on your screen, helping with value to achieve result. For example, helping beginners grow on Instagram without burnout. Avoid long paragraphs here and avoid any vague words. Clarity wins. Let's talk about profile pictures while we're at it. Your profile picture should be clear, bright, easy to recognize its small size. Common mistakes I see are they have too much text, group photos as their personal photo or very busy backgrounds. If you're a creator, use a clear face photo. If you're a brand, use a clean logo. And if you're a creator, you can even use AI to create a clean profile picture for your Instagram. 8. Best Content Format for Instagram: Best content formats for Instagram. As an absolute beginner, you don't need to feel pressure of posting every single type of content there is. For example, Instagram threads. Nobody is really using it, right. So don't worry about it too much. Instagram stories, you don't need to worry about it too much when you're starting out your account. There are two types of content posts that you need to grow your account fast. First would be Reels. This is a no brainer. Ever since Reels was introduced in the Instagram ecosystem, they have pushed Reels unbelievably. Short form video content is all over the world right now. Even when it comes to YouTube, even Redit is promoting short form video content with its watch feed. It's unbelievable, but reels, even if you don't like creating reels, figure out, find out a way to create reels because they will offer the best growth. The second best if for some reason you're unable to create reels, or if you're looking for an alternate content pillar, one would be Reels, second Instagram Carousels. These days, if you scroll Instagram, for example, when I'm doom scrolling, the real section, sometimes some carusal posts will show up there as well in the Reels section. Nowadays, what happens is whenever you click on a photo like on the Explore page, it opens in the Reels format. If it's a Carusal, it opens in the real format. Instagram is now treating CarusalPost as Reels. Slightly lower engagement, you will get slightly lower engagement depending on what you post, but the engagement will still be phenomenal compared to if you post just a single photo. My personal advice for Instagram Reels, if you're uncomfortable in front of the camera, I would highly advise you to start your Instagram account with just carusals In the meantime, just create some reels for yourself. You're not going to post it online. Just get comfortable speaking in front of the camera. The camera shouldn't feel like a camera, the camera should feel like it's a person standing there. The conversation happens more naturally. For example, right now, this is, I think, my tenth video in front of the camera. I think I don't remember how many courses I have on Skillshare. This is I think, my tenth or 11th course on Skillshare. And this is my tenth or 11th time in front of the camera. If you compare my first course, which was if you want to compare, it was the Is SEO course. That was my first course in front of the camera, and this is my tenth or 11th video in front of the camera. The difference you notice will be night and day because in that video, I couldn't even speak properly without a script. And this video, for last 40 seconds, I'm not even looking at the screen. There is no script. I'm going unscripted. So what I want you to do is if you're uncomfortable in creating Instagram reels, I just want you to experiment speaking to the camera. Get used to it. After you create ten to 15 videos, just for yourself, you don't need to show them to anyone. If you create ten to 15 videos, I promise you you will improve so much that you will have no problem posting reels. Now, the second type of poster Carusal we covered carusals a bit, but I want to talk about carusals a little more. They can work very well as educational post. For example, like your step by step, step one to step six. These type of posts will work very well in carousel. Also your educational post where you can educate people slide by slide. So as they're scrolling, I mean, not this way, but this way on a carusal they're scrolling, they're getting educated, and they spend a lot of time on that post. Also educational post gets saved a lot more on Instagram. They also get shared decently. So Carousel can also give you a great boost. Now, about Instagram stories, some people stress so much about Instagram stories when there is literally nothing there. Instagram stories are not for growth. They are for building a connection with your follower, your follower or anyone who is visiting your profile. What type of person you are. A lot of times people may just see your Instagram story highlights and judge from that what type of person you are. They may be completely wrong, by the way, but that's how people are. Story is for you to show off your person, person not personality, your personal side a little bit. For example, I've been talking about family trips a lot, family trips. You can post your family trips on your Instagram stories. There you can talk about travel. You can also create videos on Instagram stories. You know many vlogs. They can help build a great personal connection with your followers. 9. What Equipment to Use?: What equipment to use? Okay, so what I personally use, I'm shooting this video and all of my courses have been shot with an iPhone 12. I'm not using the latest and the greatest. I'm using a basic iPhone 12 with a Bluetooth lapel mic. This mic cost me, I think, about $15. Here I'm using a small ring light. This again cost me, I think, 12 to $15. Here, right here, I have a key light. This key light cost me, I think, about $100. This is pretty damn expensive. I have to use the key light because I live in a dark environment. What I want you to do for creating Instagram Reels, just use natural window light as much as you can. Here is the window. Right here is the window. You can just stand like this, place the camera here and you can talk to the camera. You will get phenomenal light on your face with just the natural light. But because I cannot place the camera like this, I have to invest additional money in light and the room is pretty damn dark. But if you can get great natural light, your videos will look incredible. If you cannot invest in these lapel mics for now, if you have an earphones, even their mic will work. Or if you're in a silent environment where there is not a lot of background noise, you can use your iPhones in built mic as well. Even in most Android phones, the microphone is pretty decent these days. That was all about the equipment. That's all I use, and I think you should use even lower number of equipments. Higher number of equipment doesn't mean better videos. Content is what makes the video equipment don't don't need to invest hundreds of dollars in equipment before you shoot your video. First, work with what you have. Assuming if you're watching this video, you probably have a phone that is better than the iPhone 12. Most people have a phone that is better than the iPhone 12 in terms of video recording. Most people watching might have the latest iPhone. You can just try it even in darker environment, that phone will give incredible videos. The default mic on these phones are amazing. Most of you don't even need to invest like I have. I mean, I had to, but you don't have to invest in these things. Just try to make great videos and that's it and invest only if you have to. 10. First Few Post Ideas: First few post ideas. You don't need viral ideas to start. You just need clear simple ideas. Here are some low pressure post ideas that you can use right away. One tip you wish you knew earlier, a common mistake beginners make before versus after progress, a simple three things I learned real, like no dancing and no following trends. I'm not against following a trend. You can follow the recent trends, but I think that should be T should fall within your niche. That should fall within your content pillar. Also, when you're talking about following trends, that should be one in about ten to 20 posts. Not every post, you're going to dance and not every post is going to follow a trend. Because if you're going to follow trends on every single post, you may have great reach by the end, but you're not going to build a follower base at all. Some more ideas, answer one question people ask you all the time. Share something you're currently learning, show your process, not the result. Talk about a mistake you made. Your initial posts are never going to be perfect. They just need to exist. 11. 30 Days Posting Schedule: Your 30 day posting schedule, you don't need to post every single day on Instagram to grow. You just need a plan that you can actually follow. Here's a simple 30 day beginner schedule. Post three to four times per week. That's it. Now, what you can do is post two reels, one or two carusels. Choose days that fit your life. Consistency matters more than the exact timing. Also when to post. This is not going to make a huge difference as people make it out to be. For example, it won't matter a lot if you post at let's say 10:00 A.M. 11:00 A.M. Or 6:00 P.M. 7:00 P.M. It's not going to matter a huge lot. For most people, pick one time whatever works for you, whatever you are comfortable with, that works very well. Generally, what I have seen with my own Instagrams and the Instagram accounts that I'm managing, if I post at 10:00 A.M. They will get likes throughout the day. It will be slower, slightly slower, but they will get likes throughout the day. If I post something at let's say 6:00 P.M. 7:00 P.M. They will get likes quickly, but the post will die down after four to 5 hours because people will sleep usually around 1011, the engagement will die down and will slow down a bit. However, with that said, different post timings can work for different people, and there is no clear right answer here. So pick any time that you like and stick with it. Whatever time is comfortable for you and fits your schedule. Also here, one thing to note here, do not change your strategy again and again. For example, if you have picked that, I will post on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and I will post on 6:00 P.M. Or 7:00 P.M. Let's say you have a fixed time of posting at 7:00 P.M. Don't change it again and again. Let Instagram learn your pattern. Don't change it for at least 30 days after 30 days, if you still don't get any results, then you can make changes to it. For example, if you're posting at 6:00 P.M. Now, try posting at 10:00 A.M. Or 11:00 A.M. And see what happens. Try that again for 30 days. Instagram takes some time in learning your pattern. 12. 3 Things to Completely Ignore: Three things to completely ignore what to track and what to ignore. Now, as for what to track, we already talked about it in the first chapter, which was your watch time, which was the number of shares you got, the number of repost. Now I want to talk about metrics that you should completely ignore. Follower count day to day. The number of people who just sit on their phone with their Instagram profile open and refreshing consistently just to see how many followers they got and having all of these applications that log into your Instagram account to show who unfollowed you every day and all of that, please don't fall into it. Do not fall into that stuff. Follower count is I wouldn't go as far as to say follower count is useless, but you should focus on reach. Follower count will eventually grow. Lis, self explanatory likes do not matter a lot these days. Other metrics matter more, for example, watch time, save, share, repost, and things like that. Comparing yourself to others, for example, my partner started Instagram account. My partner or you could say someone started an Instagram account and they were able to grow to 10,000 followers in just two months and I'm just sitting here with 100 followers in a month. Growth for everyone is not the same and growth is not linear. Don't compare yourself to others. 13. Outro: Stop chasing growth alone. Start building connection and trust. Focus on creating slightly deeper content, talking more to your audience, improving quality, not quantity, sharing your voice and perspective. Also, one thing if you know about your niche very well, and if you post consistently and you're learning consistently, growth welcome. You don't need to be perfect. You just need to show up regularly. Thanks a lot for taking this class. Keep posting.