Gary Vee and the $1.80 strategy

Gary Vaynerchuk (Gary Vee) just released his strategy on how to grow your Instagram account for business and everyone is talking about it. Why is this important? Because it”™s Gary Vee!

Gary is an entrepreneur who builds businesses, a five-times New York Times best-selling author, a ”” highly sought ”” out public speaker and an internet personality who has gained quite the following.

Gary began building businesses at a young age, working at his family”™s wine store and growing it to be a $60 million business in just five years as he also transitioned the company to one of the first e-commerce platforms for alcohol in the country, resulting in massive growth.

With social media exploding and driving business revenues, many small businesses have found their success just by using Instagram, a free way to market your brand and connect with like-minded people and turn them into buying customers.

But how do you get from zero followers to thousands, maybe even millions? For smaller businesses or even startups, this seems impossible at first look.

Gary Vee has spent the last 10 years of his career trying to understand user psychology and reverse-engineer attention into an engaged online community. He explains in a blog post:

“This is not theory, it”™s practical advice that has worked for me and thousands of other individuals, companies, products and brands. I started using these tactics on Twitter but obviously migrated them to Facebook and Instagram. No matter which platform comes next, this will be the behavior I deploy to build awareness, and more importantly, community online.”

And with this thought in mind, the $1.80 strategy was born. Gary explains that the only logical way to gain followers and build a brand is to actually be social. Who would”™ve thought? The aim of the $1.80 strategy is to build a community of like-minded people who care and engage, and want to become part of the conversation. Whether it goes down in the DM or you are actively searching the top posts in every hashtag on Instagram, you need to participate and engage with people who have the same interests as you.

WHAT IS IT?

Okay that all sounds good, but what is the dollar eighty method exactly? Dollar Eighty is an Instagram growth strategy created by Gary himself. He suggests leaving your 2 cents (opinion) on 9 posts for 10 different hashtags.

0.02(cents) x 9(posts) x 10(hashtags) = $1.80

Get it?

HOW DOES IT WORK?

When you leave a positive, meaningful comment on 90 posts each day, you greatly increase your engagement within the Instagram community.

What this does over time is boosts your profile”™s awareness, engagement and community. The strategy allows you to target a specific audience to grow your reach within your chosen niche. Pretty cool, right?

WHO CAN USE IT?

Anyone. Literally. Any brand, small or large who would like to focus on content in a contextualized way, any product launch where you can target your potential customer and build a real relationship, any influencer who is looking to build an authentic community and engage. The $1.80 method can be used by any account, small or large. The point is to be social and engage.

The best part about this Instagram strategy is that not only will you slowly move up in following and build an audience, but you will learn. By consuming 90 pieces of content a day from other businesses and people doing well on Instagram, you will learn more about what kind of content your target audience is looking at. You will engage with people who actually appreciate your content. You will learn something about Instagram, about your niche”™s culture, about human online behavior, about how people interact with each other over commonalities, it”™s all there through this little process. Will you be trying this strategy out? Please let me know at fmuriqi@westfairinc.com.