Instagram gold rush is back. I posted one video when I had 900 followers and just off this video alone, I got over 870,000 views and 52,000 comments and over 5,000 emails on my list. But not only that, I was able to grow from 900 followers to 10,000 followers within 4 days. And honestly, this feels exactly like back in 2020 when reals first got launched on Instagram. Instagram was pushing all creators who are using reals and I was one of them. I was able to grow my Instagram account to 100,000 followers within just couple of months. It was really quick and I know similar thing is happening right now because I’ve seen this moment before but honestly how much following you have that’s never the point. These four videos alone have brought me over 7,200 email list and that list is actually what makes money. Your email list is directly tied into growing your business. So, in this video, we are going to talk about how you can grow your email list, but not only that, how you can actually make money with Instagram using AI. I’ll share my full stack and workflow with you, and that way you can just copy exactly what I’ve been doing and start right away. I also made a lot of mistakes early on that cost a lot of money. So, make sure you save this video and don’t skip any of the step. In that way, you can follow exact steps. Step number one is what did I do to grow my Instagram? my exact tools, steps, and scripts. Step number two is how was I able to capture people’s email addresses? And that way you can use Instagram as lead generation platform. Step number three is different ways to actually make money with Instagram using this workflow. So without further ado, let’s get into the first step. Step number one, how I grow my Instagram. So in order for you to grow your Instagram, you have to know 8020 rule. 80% of the content you should be making towards the beginning is for the reach content which means you are trying to reach to as many people as possible. And now you may be wondering, Sandy, okay, I get that, but how can I find the right topic and how do I know which one is the broad concept? And not only that, like what about the hook? How should I do that? I’m going to cover that in about a minute. Deals you’re going to make. So the 20% means you’re going to build your personal brand. So, while 80% is trying to grab more people, 20% you’re trying to convert them, whether they’re going to become your fan or followers or even subscribers or even a buyer from your services, whatever that is. Just make sure that 20% is more personalized and you can talk about something about you. Now, let’s go back to the 80%. Because that 80% is very crucial, especially for beginners. All right. One of the reasons why this video got really popular is because I use exact same hook that I use on my YouTube. So this is my YouTube link and for this exactly same topic, I was able to test which one was working, which one was not working. And as soon as I saw this video going up like up in trend because a lot of people were interested in hearing a little bit more, I just made a quick video on Instagram. I was the outlier for this specific video and I got inspired by my own content. Now, if you don’t have a content and you don’t know which one is working, which one’s not working, that’s okay. What you have to do is find other people’s content and you are going to get inspired by other people’s content. I’m not saying you need to just copy other people’s content, copy and paste, be a copycat. No, that’s not what I’m trying to say. You always want to make sure you share your own story, your own thought or whatever research that you did. Something that I will say is getting inspired by other people’s hook. The first one sentence or one to two sentences. That is very important. Even one of the biggest creator, Mr. Beast, he’s doing that too. He’s getting inspired by other people’s thumbnail and other people’s title as well as just the topic in general as well. Now, why do we do that is because it’s proven. So, you know that people like it. And if you pay close attention to all different brands and heck, even like AI, Chad GPT is always trying to compete with Claude and Enthropic OpenAI, same thing. They’re just going back and forth. It’s because they’re keep learning from each other. And that’s what I want you to do. I want you to learn from other creators. Don’t try to be original. This is not where you should be original, but you should be authentic. Being authentic and being original is completely different thing. A lot of people merge it together and they think if you’re original, you’re authentic. No, being authentic, that means you’re being true to yourself and you hold accountable of what you’re talking about and you know what you’re talking about. That’s being authentic. But being original is you’re starting from scratch. You’re not even getting inspired from other other things. You’re just making things up. That is not a bad thing to do. And I want you to do that for the remaining 20%. However, for the main 80%, I want you to get inspired by other topic, other creators, and try to copy their hook. But for the main part, you do your own research and make sure it’s different. That’s my suggestion. If you don’t know which creator to study, then what you should be doing is you should be studying one person, just one person or two that you really like. So, let’s just say I really like this creator. Try to see who this creator is actually following. And if you look at the list of the people they’re following, I want you to follow those people. And if they’re following some people that they personally know, don’t follow them. But just anything that’s going to be helpful for you to create content, I want you to follow those. And then you’re going to go with the next creator, do the same thing, and then next creator do the same thing. If you do anywhere between three to five creators, then you’re solid. Those are the people that you’ll be studying to find those outlier videos so you can get the right hook from them. Okay, let’s talk about one other logistic thing which is editing videos. So, Meta has a creator program and I’m part of their creators program. And when they called me, they said editing video is actually not as important as what a lot of different people think. And I think I know why they said that is because with AI, there are so many different fancy B-roll editing and all that. And I think we as a human, we’re just kind of sick of the same content all the time. So if somebody does not have fancy editing, I feel like we relate to them a little bit more because they just seem more human than AI. Fancy editing is not needed. If that’s what’s holding you back, just cut it. Just do very very basic, you know, just remove and whatever you can do to make it sound good, not look good. That’s the only thing that I would focus on. But I wouldn’t spend more than 20 minutes per video, if that. All right. The next thing that I want to figure out is consistency and batching content. Being consistent on social media platform is hard. My gosh, it’s so hard. Even for me, I’ve been doing this since 2018 and I so struggle to be consistent on social media because here’s the thing. Whenever we’re on social media and we want to study other people’s platform and their videos that often times we are just being stuck into this doom scrolling, right? this algorithm are so addictive that we just doom scroll a lot. So I found the solution to this and I’m going to share that with you in about a minute. But let’s actually go over how can we become more consistent. In order for you to be consistent, you have to know exactly how much time you have. If you overpromise when it comes to the result such as like I’m going to post three times a day as an example, then you if you don’t do that then mentally you’re just attacking yourself. You keep telling yourself, “I’m not good enough because I’m not doing this. I should have done this, but I didn’t do this.” That’s not good for you. No, that’s not good for your brain. So, what I want you to do instead is exactly find out how much time you got and try to allocate that time to this specific task. And once you set the system, it’s going to be so much easier. And that, my friend, it took me a while to figure this out. And I have all this other things that I personally had which is imposter syndrome which I talked about that in one of my videos on Instagram like being a perfectionist. Nobody cares. They don’t like it’s you who cares. And I’m saying this to myself as I’m speaking to you right now. So the most important thing is you just create content. That’s what it is. Let’s talk about step number two which is so important. I’m assuming you are too. Okay. A lot of people who come to me, we’re not famous like celebrity or we’re not wanting to become this famous creator or none of that, but we want to make money. Yeah. We want to grow our business. We’re more of entrepreneur. So, I call that like creator founder instead of creator creator, you know, who just we’re not Kim Kardashian or any of that. That’s what I’m trying to say. From that being said, what’s really important is you want to turn every single video into a lead. Some sort of ROI has to be there. ROI means return on investment. Instagram can kick you out at any time. YouTube can kick us out at any time. It’s up to them. Whatever rule they have, they can just kick us out, which is not fair, by the way. But they’re the owner of the platform, so I guess they get to do whatever they want. What I’m trying to say is you have to build your own lead. Okay? You have to build your own email list. And that’s what we’re going to talk about. turning the social media platform into the lead generation machine. So step number one, what we should be doing is in every single video you should have CTA. CTA means call to action. They got to act on something. That’s pretty much what it is. And one of the best strategy when it comes to CTA for Instagram, now YouTube is different, but Instagram is you’re building up the value of this free document you’re going to give or free resource you’re going to give. You’re trying to make it sound really interesting, really engaging to a point. Oh my gosh, I want to know. What is this thing? What is this link? I want to know. You’re trying to like build that up in that 30 seconds. And eventually at the end, you’re asking people literally, if you want this link, comment link and I’ll send it to you. You probably heard that a lot. I said it a lot. That’s what you want to do. CTA, you want people to take action and actually make comment. I have a couple videos on Instagram and some of them don’t have CTA and the result of that it sucks. Like not many people watch it. I haven’t collected any emails from it to a point I don’t even know why I made that video. If you’re thinking of that as a 20%, okay, I think that’s a great excuse. In my opinion, I think every single video should have CTA. So, what happens after you ask people to comment and they will send a DM. Okay, here’s a mistake that I made. Horrible mistake. When this video was first posted, this video I didn’t know it was going to get a lot of views. I had no idea legit. Generally, I’ve been getting like 200 views, you know, or 300 if I get a lot. So, I’m like, okay, maybe I’ll get 10 comments. So, I didn’t have anything set up towards the beginning. No automation platform or not whatsoever. And then when I woke up in the morning after posting, I have 600 comments in just couple of hours pretty much. And I’m like, “Holy cow, how do I respond every single one of them? I promise I’m going to DM every single one of them.” So, you know what I did? I literally went one by one, try to DM everybody. And it was so hard to a point. I was asking Claude, you know, one of the Claude extension to see if they can do it. I’m like, and they made a mistake, too. I’m like, “Oh, this is not good.” So what I did is I quickly connected to one of the social media automation tool and it was not good because it was way too expensive. And there were a couple others but either they were expensive or they didn’t have enough features. So I couldn’t really find anything perfect for my Instagram until Sabrina. Yes, she launched DM feature on Blueot. My gosh, when I heard about this direct message automation feature, I was so excited because I use Claude so much and one of the best part is you can actually connect this using Blueotato MCP to claude code or even codeex whichever agentic workflow you’re using. They can set everything for you. And after showing you the workflow, I’ll also tell you exactly what you should be doing so you can set this up for your Instagram. So basically when somebody is posting this reel over here which is one of the videos on my Instagram and they can put any keyword on the comment and if they do that what happens is I’m going to ask them to follow me. It’s like hey could you follow me real quick so I can send this to you and there is a button that is like I’m following and if they actually haven’t followed me it’s going to send this again. Hey could you please follow me? pretty annoying. And if they actually follow me, then it’s going to skip this, right? And then I’m going to send them the link right away so they have access to the URL, like to the actual resources that I promise I’m going to give to them. That’s exactly what they do. When you actually click this URL, what’s going to happen is then people have to put their first name as well as their email address and click if it’s okay for me to send emails and then get free access. That’s exactly what they’re going to do. And this is how I collect people’s emails. And one of the best part of Bullato is you can customize this as much as you want. Every single business and where they’re at, their thought process is all different. So you don’t have to follow exactly how I’m doing it. In fact, you don’t even have to ask people to follow you. It’s up to you, but you can do whichever way you want. And I’m going to show you right now how you can set this up. So, what we’re going to do is we are going to set everything up in Blueot using MCP. For this specific video, I’m using Cloud Code because I already have Cloud Code connected to Blueato. But if you’re using OpenAI like Codex, then what I want you to do is just check this out. There’s a how can I set up Lotato MCP instead of chatbt and you can use this and there’s instruction in here and Sabrina actually has a couple videos that you can watch on YouTube. So there’s a step-by-step tutorial of how you can show how to use. So that’s what I would do and here I am in cloud code and in this case I already have MCP connected. So I just want to see in the MCP connections for Blueot and I’m going to double check if everything’s all good to go. Yes. And if you’re curious, this is the Blueot MCP. So just copy this and make sure your Blueot is connected to cloud code. And the other thing that I like to do sometimes uh writing deleting tools. Yes, I like that it’s need approval, but also let’s see read only tools. Yeah, some of the tools they you can always allow and some of the tools that you don’t always allow, but I feel like DM is pretty sensitive. So, I’m just going to have need approval for all of it. And what I’m going to do now is literally connecting Blueotes and to my Instagram if I haven’t done that and double check that, too. You can also do that on Blue Bull’s website, but I personally like to do it everything inside of Cloud Code. So, it’s a little bit easier for me to go back and forth instead of trying to figure out where things are. So, I’m just going to say, is my MCP for potato connected? I’m going to ask cloud code all these questions and it says yes MCP is connected. It just came max uh active subs. We have active subscription and okay um check if Instagram is linked and I bet your Instagram is not linked and this is where you can link your Instagram. Now, if you don’t know how to do it, the other way is ask cloud code how you can actually do that. Like, yeah, Instagram is linked at this point. Let’s just pretend that I have one video that I want to publish on Instagram and it hasn’t been published just yet. You can use blot to publish this video. I usually make three trial reel. So, the exactly the same video but different title hook. Sometimes you can do different CTA, but I usually just do different title hook and one video for faster. So times 1.5 those three videos I use cloud code to make the videos and also using blot to upload it. But before it’s uploaded I want to make sure it’s linked to the right resources. And if you actually go to one of my links I have multiple different resources per video. I have a skill that I put together for this specific skill. What AI is doing is AI is creating those links for my specific video. So when people are watching this, they can put their first and last name, email address and get access right away. So that’s what cloud code is going to do before uploading to our social media platform using Blotato. And after this is taken care of, then it’s going to upload to different social media platform. This case Instagram using Blotato. But what’s cool is after they upload it, automatic DM feature is taken care of. And I want to show you this is what I have for every single link. It’s just a little bit easier for me to see. So using cloud code I had cloud code go over here and edit this specific document IG blot and I am using feature called playwriter.dev This is what I want you to use instead of there’s another thing. There’s a playwriter uh playwright or playwriter two different things. This sounds so similar. So it drives me nuts. But playwright is from Microsoft. It sucks. It’s not as good. Sorry Microsoft. It’s just not good. But play writer is better because you don’t have to log in and log out or like don’t have access. So from that being said, I just use this. It pretty much add everything inside of this document. Now, if you look at this document, I have a real link. So, I can listen to the real right away. Topic and comment. What comment should people write to get this resource? And once they get the resource, which is the late page, what do you exactly say? And also, I want to check if this is all active and blue. Yes. All good to go. And another thing is is for some of it I want people to follow me before they get the link but some of it they don’t need to follow me you know just go straight to YouTube. So that’s why I have a check box over here. This for me is easier to see. That’s why I have everything in here. But you can also go to potato automation. Everything is in here as well. So if you just click this then you can see more visually. This is a lot a little bit more prettier. But I personally just like everything in one place. That’s why I have one extra thing. That is it. Pretty simple, right? You’re pretty much asking Claude using Blotato what they should be doing when it comes to uploading the video and also sending the DM direct message automation tool. And I’ll put the link in the description below so you can try Blotato. They have a free trial so you can try this. And thank you Blotato and Sabrina for sponsoring this video today. Even if I didn’t get the sponsorship, I would have still recommend using Blotato to anyone that I know. So I hope that was helpful. And by the way, this whole thing, this whole setup, you’re like, I’m a little confused. I got you. I have a skill that I can share with you. If you’re part of my community member, just go to classroom and go to resources and you will see everything in under skills. If you’re not part of the community member, I’ll put something together in notion doc so you can create a skill for yourself. Now, shall we talk about how to actually make money using Instagram? There are multiple different ways how you can do this but I’m going to talk about one of the most famous way. It seems like a lot of creators are doing this way. So I’m going to talk about the one of the most proven famous method and I’m going to break this down into three different ways. The very first one is sponsorship. Gosh there are so many sponsorship opportunity. There’s a lot of people who has reached out to me via email asking about Instagram sponsorship. I haven’t taken any just yet because I just want to grow my Instagram first for YouTube. Yes, I really am grateful for the sponsors who’s sponsoring me for YouTube because it’s helping my channel to grow. It’s helping me to dedicate my time more and just this business in general. But for Instagram, I was trying to do multiple different things. So, I couldn’t really do a sponsorship on top of that. But that is one of the most common things a lot of people do. There’s a lot of sponsorship opportunity. But I got to say as a beginner there’s no sponsorships. You have to grow your channel first. For those beginners are like yeah I have like I don’t know 100 followers Andy like and those are all my friends. Then sponsorship is probably not best route for you. So let’s talk about method number two what we can do. I didn’t know this but my mom told me actually pretty interesting. She said Instagram is paying people and I’m like, “Mom, that’s a scam.” But I found out it’s actually true. So, this is where you can find it. Click this hamburger menu right there. And once you click this hamburger menu, you’ll see settings and activity. Scroll down a little bit. Clicks professional dashboard and you can see like all the views you have and go monetization. So, if you go to monetization, there’s a badge, creator subscription, and bonuses. And if you click bonuses, this is where you can see, okay, you can be eligible for carousel post. And it talks about you have to be at least 18 years old. You have to live in the states, but I’m pretty sure they’re going to extend it pretty soon to another country. But basically, if you qualify for this, you will qualify for bonuses. And you have to have a lot of views, like 5 million views per month in the past 3 months. So that’s how you can actually make money using Instagram. And I’ve seen a lot of people talking about it. But the problem is you have to go viral each time because it’s purely correlated to the amount of views you get. Obviously the bonuses from live. Yeah, that’s a little bit different because that’s your true fan. But if you’re just starting out, you don’t have a true fan. So that’ll be a little bit hard. Subscription, same thing. Like why would people subscribe to you if you don’t have any following just yet? But I’m talking about those carousel and post what I just barely shared with you. But you have to have like millions of views, like a ton of views in order for you to get paid by Instagram. Now, I’ve seen people doing it. Yep, I did. I’ve seen people actually doing it and then make money and sell course of that method. I don’t know if I like that method cuz I don’t think it’s really sustainable. First of all, try to go viral on each video. Like, what would you do if Instagram goes out of business? I mean, what would you do if Instagram decide not to do this anymore? Like, not pay you? What is the outcome of that? just because sponsors will not sponsor those type of content like Panda like scratching their head, whatever. It’s I guess it’s funny and people watch it. I don’t know why it gets a lot of views, but it doesn’t really show your brand, personal brand, none of that. I personally don’t like it, but I’ve seen other people doing it. So, if you’re one of those people you’re like, I don’t care about my business. I just want to make money and I think I want to find a way to go viral, then this is the way for you. It’s not as easy as you think but it is one of the way. Now I want to talk about my favorite way. So my favorite way is number three is you promote your own services. I recommend this the most. This is the most sustainable business you can get. And if you look at my Instagram I talk about I’ll help you to make simple content. I’m the mom of three kiddos and also I have a AI content system at school like that. So, this is what I offer to people right now. As of this moment, I don’t have any other offer. The reason why I did this is because a lot of people have asked me if there’s a community where they can learn. I’m like, I’m sorry, I can’t do one-on-one, but I guess I can put something together. So, this is what I put together a couple months ago. My gosh, it’s been a while. So, from that being said, if you have an offer, you’ll just put it there and you will talk to your ICP, ideal customer person, directly. That’s what you would do. And guess what? You just learned how to collect people’s email addresses using Instagram. So, you can send emails to people, too. Don’t spam people, but send emails. Talk about your business. You never know who’s going to benefit from your business. And the only way to find that out is actually sending emails. So, I hope this was helpful. Again, Instagram is insanely pushing for new creators, small creators. So, I would say timing is just perfect. You’re watching this in the right time and I want you to start as soon as possible and definitely leverage and utilize Lotato so you don’t get burned out. Now, if you’re curious about how I was able to create my content system, I have a video right here that’s talking about that. So, make sure to watch this and if you have any questions at all, just put in the comments below.