You have just launched your first website, newsletter or social media account. Getting your first hundred visitors or subscribers can be quite an exhausting experience. Nobody likes being the first to follow an account. 

So how do you get that initial traction going? In this article, I am going to give you very specific tips that can help any business go from zero visitors or followers to the first hundreds, or even thousand.

Buckle up and read on. 

Tag For Visibility

When you are at zero followers, you have no history or connections. That makes it difficult to get people to subscribe to you. 

So the first thing that you must work on is content quality. Can you produce a series of amazing content that nobody has ever worked on before? If you can, that is where you start off with.

If possible, pick a content angle that is unique to you. For instance, when Jason Chan of Foundr launched his digital subscription magazine, he hopped on to Instagram and created a unique theme – in his case, it was a series of inspirational founder quotes against a beautiful background. 

Not long after, he acquired over 10,000 followers which, today, is over 2.5 million.

So how do you replicate this success at zero followers?

This is what you do: 

Find a unique content angle – for best results, pick an angle that is inspired by larger players in the industry. For example, if you were starting a marketing-related account, you could pick an angle where you could either share quotes, or create a visual demonstration of advice offered by leading marketers. 

Once you produce a bunch of such content, tag the person you were inspired by to make that content. So if you were quoting Neil Patel, you could tag him on your Instagram or Facebook post. 

This way, you capture his attention and motivate him to retweet or share your content. This brings in a stream of new traffic to your account – a lot of whom may now follow you, or subscribe to you.

Ask for advice

Looking for advice to grow your subscribers? You have come to the right place. But this is not what I am referring to.

There is a very popular refrain in the startups world – you get funding if you ask for advice, and get advice if you ask for funding. 

The implication here is that when you go looking for advice, you seem more legitimate and potential investors are interested in funding your business. 

The same is true with marketing. If you go spamming your link on various websites, you are going to get banned sooner or later. Also, people are not going to be interested in following what you are up to if you spam them. 

However, when you go asking for advice, people are naturally interested to know more about what you do in order to help you.

Advice could be regarding anything. You could ask web designers a question on how you can improve your website look. You can ask content marketers how to produce a truly good piece of content. Anything that makes you look legitimate is good to get noticed and subscribers.

Here is the thing – when people ask you to share your website in order for them to give honest feedback, share one that prominently showcases your lead magnet and email subscription form. There are plenty of great email marketing services that you could choose from for this purpose.

Start advertising

You look at all these advertising blogs and see people spending thousands of dollars a month – it can be quite intimidating to compete with them for real estate space.

But you do not actually have to spend so much to succeed. An ad spend as little as $5 a day can help you gain traction on platforms like Instagram or Pinterest. 

This is how you do it – learn to make a good copy to nudge users to subscribe to your content. You could create a sales page even to nudge people to follow you on Instagram or Facebook. And $5 goes a long way when you advertise. That’s literally thousands of impressions.

Keep experimenting with different copies and landing pages to find the right fit for your content. Before long, you will have hundreds of followers and subscribers who you can leverage to gain more followers.

Sign up for professional services

You are not the only one struggling with growing your Instagram account from zero to hundred. This is something that all business owners struggle with.

Not surprisingly then, there are professional services that can help you with a legitimate strategy to grow your account. Signing up for a service like Kicksta that can help you kickstart your social media growth process. 

They make use of a completely tried and tested strategy of engaging with your target audience by liking or sharing their content. This brings them to your account and they reciprocate by following you. Kicksta follows over 10,000 photos a month – and if you have a good social media content angle (that we discussed earlier), expect to exponentially increase your followers within just a month or two. 

Experiment, Experiment & Experiment

The tips I have provided you here are simply a collection of what has worked for me. However, that’s hardly an exhaustive list. There are new avenues opening up everyday and it is important to test them all thoroughly. Keep experimenting till you find newer strategies that work for your account.