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Hello and happy Wednesday, readers!

I hope you folks have been diving into spooky season festivities recently. Fall has fully fallen in Colorado, and the weather has been absolutely gorgeous. The temp is a crisp and sunny 65 almost daily, the trees are in full-blown color-changing mode, pumpkins are sitting on the porch, and bone-warming meals are the norm. If you couldn’t tell, I f’in love the fall.

In other news, unrelated to my dying love for a season (he’s just a simple guy), I’ll be celebrating turning 28 this Friday, and now I have to deal with an actual existential crisis because 28 is officially old (even though I’ve been showing my old man tendencies for like 8 years now).

I’m not a big birthday guy, but I’m glad to be celebrating with a group of friends this year, and I’m excited to see what 28 has in store for me. No doubt there will be some big changes, but I’m ready to face new roads ahead and try on some different hats as I evolve as a creator, professional, and person.

With that said, if you want to give me a gift this year, you can click on the link below for AI Tool Report, this week’s supporter of the Cmd+Shift+Create newsletter. It’s free, all you have to do is click a button, and it helps me immensely. Thank you to all of you readers who support me when I have these links, you know who you are!

I’ll catch you all next week when my knees give out and my beard turns white, until then, I hope you all have an incredible rest of your week and weekend ahead. ❤️ 

-Luke

I Messed Up / Death to the Algorithm

I’ve been getting some awesome feedback from a handful of you readers about my newer approach to these issues. A lot of you seem to like my personal anecdotes when it comes to providing tips and guidance in content creation.

As I’ve been in the creator space for about five years now, I’ve learned a lot from the incredible individuals I’ve worked with. I’ve been a creator myself in the short form and writing space, I’ve written scripts for some of the top creators in the game, allowing me to amass over 100M views on just short forms I’ve worked on; I’ve collaborated with and picked the brains of some of the biggest thought leaders in our ecosystem; and now I want to give you my hands on learnings as they come up.

And because so many of you enjoyed last week’s read covering all things emulation, I figured I would do another piece from my experience in creating content and dealing with the madness that is the algorithm on our favorite platforms.

Today, I want to talk about consistency and how it plays into getting algorithmic push, how I might have messed up, and what I learned from this test/mistake.

When my girlfriend and I first started our test Instagram to test/learn the waters and see how much we could grow in just a few weeks, we were posting twice a day, every day. We did this for more than three months before burning out and swapping to one post per day after we started to burn out.

Now, when we were posting daily for those three months, Instagram loved us. We were growing by about 100 followers per day, we were getting pushed to new audiences, and our engagement was incredibly high for a small account. During this time, we made it a point to create a community and brand around our content, which is what I believe is saving us after we swapped to just one post per day (more on that later).

So what happened when we started posting once a day when we normally posted twice? In short, our reach took a massive hit, but engagement stayed very consistent. We went from that 100 followers per day number to just a handful of followers per week. We hit over 4k followers in less than three months, but growth generally stagnated after that.

While we understood that swapping to once per day would have implications on growth, we never imagined it would shudder so hard and so quickly. Since swapping over to the once-a-day posting, we’ve amassed just over 500 followers. That’s less than what we would do in an average week when we were on our two-a-days schedule!

Although it’s a pain, it was an incredibly insightful learning about Instagram and its algorithm. My thought is that if you cater to the algorithm and you’re giving it the same things day in and day out, it almost expects you to stick with that consistency.

An algorithm doesn’t have sick days, family emergencies, or days off. The algorithm just knows that you post in a certain cadence, so you must always stick to that cadence.

As we all know, this isn’t feasible for long-term growth, and as creatives, we shouldn’t have to battle a computer for relevancy, but here we are.

So what can we do if we’re battling this omnipresent value judge? Well, for starters, you need to craft community and genuine connections.

When we rely on the algorithm as creators, we’re putting it in the hands of the platform to get us to the people we follow (which is legitimately insane to me…). In order to mitigate the algo’s ownership, we must take that ownership into our own hands with our audience. Organically connecting with your followers allows you to have groups of individuals who look forward to and will search for your content. These folks are the ones who will keep you “afloat” as the algorithm tries its hardest to sink you or, at the very least, not push your content to anyone.

While you’ll still likely see the downtrend in your follower count, at least your view counts can stay pretty consistent if you foster that community. This is luckily what happened in our case, but if we didn’t make the attempt to create this connection with our audience, it’s likely that this page would currently be dead. Seriously.

Now, with all of this said, there’s still more testing to be done. At the beginning of last week, I bent my knee to the algorithm and decided to start posting twice a day again to see how that plays into our reach and growth.

I’m super excited to see how or if the analytics change, and to share my learnings with you readers as I discover them.

If you found this read valuable, consider sharing this issue with a friend who might be starting their content creator journey or perhaps someone who is feeling the pain of algorithmic woes. Or if you’re currently facing this roadblock, reply to this email, and let’s chat. I’m here to help and support you readers wherever I can, so don’t be shy!

PS, if you’re read this far, do me a favor and click the link below, you’d make my day ❤️ 

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Hope you enjoyed this week’s post. See you next week ✌️