Instagram was my worst channel until I stopped treating posting as a daily decision

I put off Instagram for months. It felt like the wrong platform for what I'm building, and honestly I was just bad at it. Two changes did most of the work.

The first was killing the daily decision. Every previous attempt failed identically: sit down at some point in the day, try to think of something worth posting, feel uninspired, skip it. Then skip tomorrow too, because the streak was already broken. So I moved the decision to one place. Ninety minutes on Sunday, seven posts, one goes out each day. Weekday me doesn't get a vote.

The posts got slightly worse. The account did much better. I found that genuinely irritating, because I'd spent a year assuming the bottleneck was quality when it was just showing up.

The second was building a list of twenty accounts adjacent to my niche and actually reading them. Not the big ones. People roughly my size or a bit ahead, talking to the same audience. A few real comments a day, the kind that respond to the actual argument rather than "love this."

I avoided that for a long time because commenting produces nothing you can point at. But tracing back where followers actually came from, it's comment threads far more often than my own posts. Posting makes you findable to people already looking. Commenting puts you in front of people who aren't.

If you try it, comment before you post rather than after. Posting first turns the next hour into refreshing your own numbers.