How To Use ChatGPT to Grow 10k Followers in 8 Weeks with Juan Galán
Have you ever wondered if AI can really make a difference in your business? Juan Galán is an AI coach, content creator, and founder of IG Creator Academy. Juan has amassed over 150k followers on social media, and today, he's sharing how AI tools like ChatGPT can revolutionize the way we create and scale our businesses.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- [00:01:20] Juan's Journey
Juan shares his transition from corporate marketing to becoming a successful online entrepreneur. He discusses the early challenges and successes that shaped his career.
- [00:05:45] The Power of AI in Marketing
We explore how AI, particularly tools like ChatGPT, can be used to automate and enhance marketing efforts, making business operations more efficient and less stressful.
- [00:12:10] Breaking Down AI Misconceptions
Juan addresses common fears and misconceptions about AI, emphasizing that these tools are designed to assist rather than replace human creativity.
- [00:16:30] Building a Brand with AI
We delve into maintaining a consistent brand voice while leveraging AI for content creation. Juan shares tips on training AI to align with your unique brand identity.
- [00:21:15] Practical AI Workflow Tips
Juan outlines his streamlined workflow for using AI in creating blogs, email campaigns, and social media posts, highlighting how these tools save time and energy.
- [00:27:00] Personal Insights and Resilience
A candid discussion about the importance of resilience in entrepreneurship. Juan and I share personal stories and the value of being transparent with your audience.
Links mentioned in this episode…
Juan Galen with AI Creator Academy
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Quote
"You won't be replaced by artificial intelligence, but you could be replaced by someone who knows how to leverage AI as a tool to grow and market their business and brand." — Juan Galan
TRANSCRIPT
S3 Ep24 - How To Use ChatGPT to Grow 10k Followers in 8 Weeks with Juan Galán
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
You won't be replaced by artificial intelligence, but you could be replaced by someone who knows how to leverage AI as a tool to grow and market their business and brand. That's why today I'm super excited to bring you this AI Marketing Masterclass with my incredible coach and mentor, Juan Galan. Get ready because he's going to share with you the secrets to his rapid Instagram growth and how he's built an audience of over 150,000 followers. You'll also discover how to overcome common AI fears and exactly how to leverage ChatGPT to grow your brand and monetize your efforts on social media. I cannot wait to dive into this episode so you can learn from this AI marketing master himself. Let's go.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
Welcome to Strut It, a podcast about creating bold visibility on social media with zero apologies. I'm Elizabeth Marberry, your host and Instagram marketing coach. I help small business owners get seen on Instagram and monetize their offers so they can make more money doing their soul-led work. If you're tired of spinning your wheels on Instagram and you're seeking simple, proven Instagram marketing strategies that actually work, you're in the right place. Let's dive in.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
Hello, everybody. I am so excited that you are joining me because today I am bringing on the most special guest. He is my AI coach, and he is the one who has been teaching me everything that I've been learning and sharing with you in these past four episodes all about AI marketing and how to use ChatGPT to grow your business on Instagram and social media. I'm so excited to bring him here so he can answer all of your questions and really dive deeper into how you can leverage AI to grow your business.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
So, I'm going to officially introduce Juan, and then I just cannot wait to dive right into this. Juan Galan is a content creator, online educator, and founder of IG Creator Academy. His journey started in corporate marketing, where he gained diverse industry experience. Instagram was always his passion, and in 2018, he seized the opportunity to delve into entrepreneurship. This path led him to founding IG Creator Academy in September of 2021, aiming to help content creators grow their personal brands and monetize them effectively through social media. Since then, he's nurtured a community of over—wait for it—150,000 people across different channels, offering coaching, courses, and digital products.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
A significant turning point in Juan's journey was integrating AI-driven marketing in 2023, which is what we are going to dive into today. This innovative approach transformed how he guides creative entrepreneurs in leveraging their marketing efforts to help them build more efficient—and let's scream it from the rooftops—stress-free online businesses.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
Juan, welcome to the show.
**Juan Galan:**
Thank you, Elizabeth. I'm so happy to be here. It's such an honor.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
Oh my gosh, I'm so excited. So before we dive into how our listeners can absolutely start leveraging AI and ChatGPT in their marketing strategy, you have such a moving story. I would love for you to share a little piece of that today about your Instagram journey. Because I know from following you for a long time that you haven't always been in this niche of AI marketing, and you've had kind of ups and downs. So, I would love to hear just a little bit of your backstory so our listeners can get to know you because you are just so fabulous.
**Juan Galan:**
Oh, thank you. Well, it's been a very long journey. My story with Instagram dates back to 2014. When the app was quite new, I started my first account. My goal was to be a lifestyle blogger and influencer. I am based in Barcelona, so I was sharing a lot of Barcelona content and a lot of self-centered content—not proud, but we all learn from that, right?
**Juan Galan:**
But yeah, it was hard back then to grow. There were no coaches, no courses, no knowledge on how to grow on Instagram. I remember Googling once "how to grow on Instagram," and then I found this bot that basically automated likes, follows, and all that stuff. So I did it, and that's how I grew to over 30,000 followers. But again, it wasn't a targeted audience, and it just resulted in having that account with 30,000 followers. So, I pivoted for the first time and started a second account focused on travel photography. This time, I was determined to do it right, and it took me two years to grow to 10,000 followers. I had a very strong community, and my goal with this account was to get paid to travel because travel is one of my biggest passions. One of the main reasons I started this business on Instagram was to have more freedom to travel. So, my dream was to get paid to travel, but unfortunately, that did not happen.
**Juan Galan:**
Then in 2020, I saw a surge in online educators—mostly content creators and digital marketers—teaching what they knew on Instagram and TikTok. They were growing huge audiences and starting to earn a lot of money. I had been in the marketing industry for about seven years by then and had been doing Instagram for years as well. So I thought, "You know what? I think I have what it takes to share my knowledge and my story with people." So, I started sharing more social media content creation tips on my travel account, which got me my first coaching clients, which was really exciting. But the change in niche was really hurting my reach and engagement on that account. So, I decided to start my third account in 2021, which became the IG Creator Academy, focusing solely on teaching content creation. Back then, I was really targeting content creators and influencers because I came from that background, focusing on how to grow and monetize, mostly through brand partnerships.
**Juan Galan:**
My account exploded, and after two months, I had over 60,000 followers. In nine months, I had grown to 100,000 followers. Wow! I was getting a lot of brand partnerships, and I launched my first course. Well, actually, I launched my first program one month after launching IG Creator Academy. I already had over 30,000 followers, but I had zero people signing up, which was really frustrating and made me want to quit. But I didn't quit. I kept going, and then in February 2022, I launched my first mini-course, and it was a success. And yeah, basically, 2022 was incredible. Lots of sales, brand deals, growth, and opportunities. But then, at the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023, things really slowed down. It started to really affect my self-confidence and mental health. I was really, really struggling. Again, I thought about quitting, but just the thought of going back to a normal job was even more dreadful. So, what I did was I started learning AI. That was when the ChatGPT boom was really starting. I had a small team back then, but I had to let them go because I wasn't making enough to pay them. For two months, I was in the red. I wasn't generating any income because my expenses were higher than my income. So, I let them go and turned to ChatGPT, and the rest is history. That's when I realized that I had been going through a hard time with my business and Instagram, and many other entrepreneurs were probably facing similar challenges. The fact that AI allowed me to stay afloat, build new offers, re-strategize, and pivot completely transformed my business. I knew I had to share that with the world, and that's how the AI Creator Academy was born.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
Wow. I just want to highlight a few things. First of all, thank you so much for your vulnerability because I love when business owners and entrepreneurs can be really transparent about the journey. To be successful as a business owner, you have to have a relentless pursuit of what you desire. You have to relentlessly go after your vision and dream for your life every single day, even when there's no evidence that it's working, even when your engagement's down, you're not making any sales, and you can't pay your team. I've been in all of those places too. So, I just want to say thank you so much for highlighting that for everybody. I see so much resilience in you, and the reason why you've been so successful so many times over and over again, in my opinion, is that you persist. You are unwavering in the life that you're creating. I know not everyone is cut out for entrepreneurship because a lot of people can't hang. It's hard. It's not the glamour that you see in the short-form videos of "10K in 10 days, and it was so easy, and I'll teach you how to do it." It's just like, no. That person who got 10K in 10 days has been doing this for years. So anyways, I just love that about you. What I like to watch and learn from you is how you bring that vulnerability into your content that you post on Instagram. Because I think that can be challenging sometimes to show all those different parts of yourself.
**Juan Galan:**
Yeah, absolutely.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
I love how Instagram has been evolving to a place where people can be more vulnerable, and people's audiences are craving that authenticity and vulnerability instead of just the milestones, wins, and successes.
**Juan Galan:**
Absolutely, absolutely.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
Okay, so let's get into AI and how it's totally transforming marketing and growing your business. As a person who has coached a ton of different business owners and brands who are wanting to leverage AI or who are considering leveraging it, what are some misconceptions that people have about ChatGPT—or we'll just say AI in general—or some fears? What is the resistance that comes up in people when they consider using these tools?
**Juan Galan:**
One of the first misconceptions is that people relate AI to technology and to something that is complex. Yes, it used to be complex. As a matter of fact, one of my jobs in 2019—freelance jobs—was to write for a digital transformation agency. I was writing about machine learning and AI, and it was so different than what it is today. Nowadays, the AI tools that we have available are so user-friendly and easy to use. I think that's one of the first fears that people have: "It's just too complex, too hard for me. I'm not tech-savvy." You don't need to be tech-savvy to use AI tools.
The second misconception I would say is that, especially with language learning models like ChatGPT, which basically emulate human conversations, but we all know that these conversations are not very human-like, if you know what I mean. So I think the fear people have is that if they use ChatGPT or any other AI, like Gemini or Claude, they're going to lose their brand voice and brand authenticity. People think others won't trust them because they're using AI. Yes, that can happen if you don't know how to use it properly. That's one of the things I love teaching because, once you learn how to leverage AI properly, it's so different. I barely do any edits to what ChatGPT creates for me anymore because I've trained it so well to sound like me, speak like me, and basically think like me, and it's just perfect. It does take time, and you need to invest time in training these models, but once you do it, it changes the whole game.
The third misconception I would say is that people relate AI to advanced technology and think it's expensive. But it's actually quite affordable. There are a lot of free tools. Most of the AI tools have a free version, and you can do a lot of great things with the free version. But even if you pay for premium ones, ChatGPT Plus is only $20. Seriously, it's a huge investment because $20 is, for most people, nothing. At the end of the day, you're getting a huge ROI.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
You know, she was starting to play with it and said, "Well, I don't understand how this is going to save me time. It's already taking so much time going back and forth." In this four-part mini-series on AI, I've been trying to express to everybody that, just like anything else, there's a little bit of a learning curve. You have to invest time and energy upfront. When you first learn how to create reels and edit videos, it might take you three hours to make your first one because you don't know where all the buttons are, where the text is, how to swipe up, and all the things. But as you do it, now you and I can create reels in five minutes that do really well, right? To me, AI is just like that. It's another tool that takes a little bit of time and energy upfront, but once you've experimented with it and trained it, it's such a massive time, energy, and money saver.
**Juan Galan:**
Yep. Exactly.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
Cool. I'm personally so curious because I know what you teach, but how are you using AI in your business right now? Just to give you guys a framework for what Juan does: he is on Instagram multiple times a day on multiple accounts. He has a YouTube channel, an awesome blog, and his email marketing is on fire. This man is everywhere. So, give us your secrets. Give us one or two tools that you're using, or what have you found to be the biggest game changer for you in how you're using AI?
**Juan Galan:**
Being able to use AI—and I mostly use ChatGPT Plus because it has so many features you can use, like the GPTs, where you can add logins, upload documents, and create your own bots—has been a game-changer. I can create my own workflow where I drop an idea, it creates a blog post for me, and then I can easily repurpose that blog post into email content, a YouTube script, and social media content. I have this entire workflow built, which is why I can put so much content out on my different channels. That's the biggest way I use it, but I've been using it a lot lately to create my offers. My last mini-course and the one I'm about to launch next week were built entirely with ChatGPT. From product ideation to the whole offer, marketing material, sales page copy, email sequences, and social media content, it’s all been done through this workflow. It allows me to do just copy-paste. For this new mini-course, it took me so little time to create everything because it's basically inputting my ideas into this workflow, and it's spitting out all the content for me. So, I love building offers now because, in the past, you know how hard it is to build something new. You think about the marketing messaging, the launch strategy, and the content emails. I remember with my first courses, it took me like three days to build the email sequences, and I was using templates from a course I had purchased. But even with templates, it took me so long to build these sequences. Yesterday, I built the sequences for this offer—the email sequences—in 10 minutes, even less than 10 minutes.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
Oh my gosh. I love that. That is so cool. I absolutely love that. That is exactly why we want to learn how to use these tools so we can work smarter and not harder, right?
**Juan Galan:**
Yeah.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
I love that. Especially if you're a solopreneur or you have a smaller team, it's like, why wouldn't you take advantage of having your own personal assistant?
**Juan Galan:**
Exactly. That's how I look at it. This is my own little personal assistant, and I'm going to be in a relationship with it every day. The more I'm in a relationship with it, the deeper our relationship will go, right?
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
Exactly. That's what I tell my students and my audience all the time: think of ChatGPT as an assistant, like a real human being. When you hire someone, you need to train them. They're not going to be perfect after the first month or two. You need to see how they work, give them your feedback, and they need to improve their work based on your feedback. It's a constant loop until they become really good at what they do. It's the same with ChatGPT. You need to train it. The first few projects or tasks it produces won't be great, so you need to tell it, "Okay, this isn't great because of this; that would be better like this." You give it instructions and all the feedback you can so it can improve. I recently discovered a new hack that I haven't shared with you guys. I'm sharing it with you here as an exclusive insight. When you're using ChatGPT and it produces a blog post, social media caption, or whatever, there's a symbol at the bottom that stands for regenerate. If you regenerate it once and then regenerate it a second time, the third answer is like 200% better. It's incredible.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
So yes, I’ve been doing this a lot lately, and it's just crazy how much better it gets once you regenerate it twice. So like, you know what they say, the third strike is a charm. Yeah, third time's a charm. Third time's a charm. So same with ChatGPT. Oh my gosh, that is so cool. I cannot wait to try that. That’s awesome.
I have a clarifying question for you. So you mentioned the word “workflow.” What does that actually mean in terms of ChatGPT? Do you mean that you have a specific chat open for each of your launches? Can you give me an idea of what that actually means when you say, “Oh, I have my workflow down with ChatGPT”?
**Juan Galan:**
So each chat would be either a specific offer or a specific client if you work with multiple clients. When you build a workflow, you are giving ChatGPT step-by-step instructions so that in the future, you don’t have to do it all over again from the beginning. It gets trained.
Let me just give you an example. My workflow for creating a new offer would be first honing in on the audience, the specific customer avatars that this offer is for. So we would work on creating these avatars, going deep into all their desires, their problems, their goals. Based on that, we would create the marketing messaging for the offer. Then, based on that, I would create the marketing material for launching the offer. And then, based on that, I will create social media content. It gets to a point where it already knows everything it needs to know. So if I want to keep promoting this offer on social media, I can easily say, “Okay, let’s create an Instagram carousel about this to promote this offer.” Right? So you don’t need to give it more instructions anymore because it’s been trained so well.
From that point onwards, you can always come back and say, “Oh, I need to write an email to promote this offer. Let’s include these points in the email and this is the call to action.” It writes it so well because it’s been trained on all the previous steps.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
Awesome. Got it. And just to clarify too, so you said that example of an offer would be one chat with ChatGPT, exactly?
**Juan Galan:**
Exactly. The great thing now is that we have the memory feature. In the past, if you wanted to start a new chat and bring some information from other chats, you would basically need to start again from the beginning. Now in the chat, you can tell it to remember this whenever I say, “I don’t know, IG, remember this offer.” And then in the new chat, you can tell it, “Remember IG,” and it’s going to say, “Yes, it’s about this, this, and that. Based on this, let’s continue the conversation on something else, but I want you to keep that in mind for this new chat.” I don’t know if that makes sense or not.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
Yes, and that’s exactly what I do. I took your course and have worked with you, which we’ll talk about how our listeners can do that too, because you teach it so clearly and effectively. But that’s exactly what I do as well. I’ve trained ChatGPT on my target audience, what they’re struggling with, what they’re desiring, and specifically how I’m unique, how I can help them, and my offer suite. Then I’ll say, “Remember Elizabeth Marberry brand,” and then I can always say, “Okay, for Elizabeth Marberry brand, I want to do X, Y, and Z.” And so then it already has all that information.
Now, I couldn’t remember this when I was recording last week’s episode, but I also pay for ChatGPT 4.0. If people are on the free version, is there memory on the free version? Do you know?
**Juan Galan:**
So there should be memory on the free version. The only difference now between free and paid is that the paid version has more tokens, which means that you can use the advanced models more, like 4.0 or now 4.0 Mini. With the free version, it’s going to run out of tokens at some point, and it’s going to downgrade into 3.5, and you have to wait 24 hours for it to kind of reset. With the paid version, you have more tokens, which means you can use the advanced models more than with the free one. But I do know that some students of mine who are paying for the premium version don’t have access to the memory feature. And I don’t know if it’s because of their location. We haven’t been able to figure it out yet. So to answer your question, it should, but not everyone has it available yet.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
Okay, cool. That’s good to know. Thanks for clarifying that.
So I want to get into Instagram. Our audience definitely is showing up on Instagram for their business, hoping to draw more students into their studio or drive ideal clients to their coaching offers. We also have a lot of people in the wedding industry, like florists, photographers, venues. So lots of different people, real estate agents, and they’re all wanting to use Instagram to essentially make more sales, right? It’s about brand visibility and wanting to monetize and make more sales.
So if someone is listening and they’ve never really understood the connection between, let’s just focus on ChatGPT, ChatGPT and Instagram, and how they could start to use ChatGPT for Instagram, what are some beginner steps that they can take to get started today?
**Juan Galan:**
That’s a great question. I’m going to use as an example my new account, which I know we’ll be talking about in a bit. What you can do with ChatGPT is really turn it into an Instagram strategist and help you come up with your own Instagram strategy. Everything from profile optimization to boosting visibility, right? Because that’s something really important. I’m sure you see this in a lot of your clients—that one of the reasons why they don’t get enough reach or enough traffic to their page is that their account is not properly optimized with the right keywords, with the right bio, right?
So ChatGPT can take any role. You can ask it to behave as a business strategist, Instagram marketer, or coach, and it will take on that role. So you can tell it to behave as an Instagram strategist so that the outputs it gives you are more tailored to Instagram. You can use it to optimize your profile. You can use it to build an Instagram content strategy that’s going to help you attract, nurture, and convert.
And then from there, you can create specific content. Sorry, I skipped the part where you should always use it to hone in on your target audience and create customer avatars. The deeper you go into this, the more ChatGPT will know about your audience and will be able to suggest content ideas or create content that is specifically, I like to call it, hyper-targeted content for your audience. This is something that in the past would have taken us weeks to do market research and really create our customer avatar profiles. I remember when I first started my business, my ex-partner, who’s a marketer as well, gave me this huge sheet to create five customer avatar profiles, and it took, honestly, like 10 days. I was really going deep into each profile, and it was fun, but 10 days—who has 10 days for that anymore?
With ChatGPT, you can create it in 10 minutes. Based on those insights, you can create really good content that addresses your target audience directly. You can create a content strategy based on that and create content for your Instagram as well. That’s how I’ve been able to create viral content for my new account because it’s really addressing the emotions. At the end of the day, content that goes viral usually does so because it evokes emotion in people. They want to share it, save it, and see themselves in the content. That’s how I’ve been able to create viral content with ChatGPT by following this whole process.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
Okay. So you brought up your new account and I totally forgot to bring that up with our listeners, but. Can you tell everybody about how you decided, okay, I'm going to do this experiment and I'm going to start this account from scratch. And this was what, like four months ago?
**Juan Galan:**
Yes.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
Okay. Yeah. Tell us about this because this is bananas. Like this is, as I said, I've been following Juan for a while, been in his community. And I remember I'm in your broadcast channel and you were saying like, okay, I'm starting this new account from scratch. I'm starting from zero, just like all of you. Let's see if I can do this using AI. And what are you at today? Like over 20,000 followers?
**Juan Galan:**
Yes, like almost 25,000 followers.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
Which is like, holy cow. Okay. So yeah, tell us about A, why you decided to start this new account and B, how you grew it so quickly.
**Juan Galan:**
I decided to start it because two main reasons. The first reason was that my main account, IG Creator Academy, was getting very, very low reach, low traction, low engagement compared to what it used to. And at the end of the day, we're all human and whether we want to admit it or not, it does affect us. Cause you know, like we're just programmed to compare ourselves not only with other people, but with our past experiences and going from growing 10,000, 20,000 followers a month and have, and reaching 100,000 people per post to like not growing or losing followers every month and reaching one-tenth of the people you used to. Well, it was bothering me. So I was like, you know what? I think I want to start a new account. But at that time I had already pivoted to AI and I was sharing a lot of AI Instagram, like the, and on IG Creator Academy, it's always AI for Instagram. But I had been learning so much about AI, ChatGPT, other tools that I felt that I wasn't able to share everything that I wanted to in IG Creator Academy, because it would mean like complete, that 180 pivot again. And instead I was like, you know what, I'm just going to create a new account, focus only on AI and ChatGPT tips and share everything that I've been learning because there's a lot. And the third reason why I created that account, not two, three, is because I wanted to funnel in more people into my offers. So I was already getting people into my programs from my main account. At the end of the day, the offer is the same, even though the niches are a little bit different, but the offer is the same. So I was like, okay, I'm going to do an experiment and I want to funnel more people into my paid programs to increase my sales. So I started it at the end of February, 28th of February, actually, my goal, my initial goal was 100 followers in 90 days, but It didn't happen, but it's fine. I'm not sad about it because it's been performing really well. Not only growth, but it's getting me thousands of new leads every month and I'm getting a lot of customers from that account as well. As a matter of fact, my two last students that joined the AI Creator Academy, which is my high-ticket program, came from that account. So it's a great reminder for everyone that you don't need to have a huge account to make high-ticket sales. You just need good content basically.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
Oh my gosh. Of course that was your goal. You're just like, well, I've done it before. Why can't I do it again? I appreciate your vulnerability because I definitely experienced that with my account. You know, people see people who have massive followings and they just assume that everything's always great for them and they're always growing and their engagement's always popping off. And I totally, I've gone through a big pivot myself in the last year and I'm still, I've even explored being brave and starting over again or doing another account, honestly, because of you, because of what I've seen you do. I'm scared. So just really quickly, what, how did you grow that account so quickly?
**Juan Galan:**
I basically was posting three times per day. That was like my goal was I'm going to post three times per day. I'm going to post a specific type of reel that generates a lot of growth, which is a, what I teach inside one of my mini courses, the IGA Accelerator, which is basically, I call them low effort, but highly effective reels, which are short reels, five to seven second reels with B-roll video that is somehow aesthetic and pleasing to watch. I have a lot of travel content on my phone, so I always use my travel videos with a very powerful hook, again, that will, you know, grab that attention from the audience, from the viewers, send them into the caption. But I don't say like read caption as more people would say, I do it in different ways so that people are enticed to go into the caption. Let me give you one example. One of my best performing is saying how ChatGPT helped me with a specific task in my business. So I use ChatGPT to create launch strategy that generated me, I don't know, 5K, right? Here's a prompt I used. And in the caption, I shared the prompt. So it grabs attention. It sends people into the caption. In the caption, there's value so people save it. And I'm always promoting my lead magnet. So people are always commenting on those posts. So that boosts engagement, which pushes the reel to more people. So I've been able to maintain three reels per day because they're so easy to create. I repurpose most of them. So if you scroll down my feed, you'll see that the post that I did yesterday, I posted it three weeks ago, I posted it three weeks before, so I'm always like recycling that content so that I don't have to create new from scratch. And the great part, the great thing is that the people who already saw it might not even remember it if they remember it, they won't care it. But since it's always been pushed to new people, those reels, those like concepts or themes or topics are always seen by new people. So I was able to grow it by posting more and just, you know, finding this really easy reels formula that gets tons of reach, tons of engagement, and it brings lots of followers. Recently, I did go back down to posts per day and I've started incorporating more carousels, singles, direct to camera videos. So now I'll do maybe one of these simple reels per day and then the other one will be like a little bit more elaborate like a carousel or a direct to camera. But I'm always recycling. Like I posted a direct to camera reel yesterday that I posted the month before. So yeah, just making my life easier because my main account is still IG Creator Academy. But we'll see, maybe the other one will become the main one very soon.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
Oh my gosh, totally, totally. Okay, this is a content creator question. Where do you store all of your videos that you, like so you edit your video and then you save it to your camera roll before you post it, I assume. And then where do you store all of your content? Do you put it in like an album on your phone or like where do you put it?
**Juan Galan:**
Okay, so I am the most disorganized person in this way. So when it comes to like the b-roll videos that I use, I don't even have an album or a gallery or anything. I have so much video content on my phone. Like I'm always recording videos when I'm like at the beach, I'm like filming a seven second video. And so my train of thought is, okay, I need to create a reel. I just open my gallery, scroll down, and as soon as it stops, I just choose the first video that I find. I am super disorganized. I do the same. Like, you're making me feel so much better because I'm like, I bet other creators are so much more organized than me. But I think people like you and I, it's like, because we create content every single day, we always have videos on our phones. To me, that's easier than like, I would have to go back and like organize and put all these things in folders. I'm like, that would take me days.
**Juan Galan:**
Yeah, that's exactly what I think. I don't have time to organize it. The day that I have someone doing this video is for me, then I will have to have like a folder, but for now it's only me and I enjoy it like that. It works for me. I know it doesn't work for everyone, especially people that are not content creators, like you know, other business owners and entrepreneurs that wanna market their business with content, well, obviously they need to have a better system, but for us it works. Don't follow our advice though.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
Don't follow our advice, go devise your own system. To close out, what is one final thought you want to share with our listeners as they wrap up this episode?
**Juan Galan:**
One key takeaway I want to leave with everyone, especially those who are just starting out, is to not fear failure. I’ve encountered many setbacks—multiple accounts, failed launches—but each failure has strengthened me and become a part of my journey. Sharing these stories helps you connect with others and can even boost your sales because stories resonate. So, if you're just starting, embrace failure as a blessing in disguise. It’s an integral part of your growth and success.
**Elizabeth Marberry:**
Fail forward, everyone. Fail forward.Thank you so much for joining us today, Juan. And to our listeners, thank you for tuning in. I hope you found immense value in this episode. If you did, please make sure to subscribe to the show and follow us for more. If you enjoyed today’s episode, leave us a review—it really helps us reach more ambitious business owners like you. And don’t forget to share this with a friend or colleague who could benefit from this conversation. Thanks for being here, and I can’t wait to connect with you next week. Thank you for listening to *Strut It*. If you're ready to leverage Instagram to grow your business, grab my free *Monetize Your IG Guide*, where you'll discover seven simple, proven methods to start making money on Instagram. Download your guide at elizabethmarberry.com/freebies.
If you gained valuable insights from today’s episode, please leave a review and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. I look forward to having you join us again next week!