I’ve been very doom and gloom as of late, but I think it’s very important to recognize all of the great things going on.
Within the past year, my automotive Instagram has gotten 3 sponsors, a small clothing line, and followed by some major automotive celebrities. All while continuing to do what I have been doing for years, with a little more consistency.
That is really neat, right? Well I wanted to write this post as a collection of my thoughts on the matter, how I did it, and how I plan on moving forward.
I’m a sucker for history, and somehow, I was a part of social media history. I mean, in a grand sense, any active user on social media in the last decade is a part of history, but let me explain.
Back when I was a junior in high-school in 2012 (Kony 2012 is how I remember so vividly), my friends and I started using the new hit social media app called Instagram. Now, what made us different was that we weren’t self obsessed with broadcasting to the world all of our mundane social lives. I am not a sexy man, my dudeness is not getting me anywhere haha.
So my friend and I decided to just start automotive pages. I always saved automotive pictures on my phone while browsing the net, and Instagram acted as a great way to present an open catalogue of my tastes to the world.
Well, my friend David had a runaway success with his account, DailyCarPictures. When he finally stopped posting, he had about 23k followers, and received a bunch of free swag from shouting out smaller accounts. My friend got a free t-shirt and hat from a growing Mob-Steel, a custom fabrication shop in Detroit, that later went on to have a television show.
Hindsight is always 20/20, and someone recently said I’ve been learning a lot of hard lessons lately. Well Instagram was another one.
Our automotive accounts were some of the first on Instagram, and so we knew all of the large accounts. We all grew rapidly together…or so I should have, if I actually kept up with it.
I couldn’t tell you what high-school me was doing at around 2013, but my consistency of posts on Instagram knee-cappped my growth. By the time I came back to using it consistently, everyone was in the tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of followers. I personally know a gentleman around my age, who had his account reach 1 million followers, and he later sold it. We still keep in touch on Facebook, and he does automotive photography.
So by 2014, I was playing catch-up on followers, and have been ever since.
My second mistake was less of a mistake, and more of my own unwillingness to bend to mainstream appeal.
A lot of of the huge automotive Instagram pages would focus on very mainstream vehicles. My friends would all post muscle cars that are very common in the community. It was all Mustangs, Chargers, Camaros, and Chevelles.
I guess it was my own personal tastes or my own dare to be different, but I rejected the mainstream classic cars. I’m not here to give a history lesson on automobiles, and write a thesis on the appeal of mainstream classic cars vs marketability, but I’ll keep it brief. I posted mainly 70s and 80s classic cars, most of which were not well respected or mainstream. They weren’t particularly fast, and folks were constantly ragging on their designs. Thus, they weren’t as marketable.
My own tastes limited my growth tremendously.
However, this is a mild success story I’m telling, so I’d like to share the positives that emerged from me being stubborn.
My niche in classic cars helped me find a growing group of some of the nicest people I’ve ever met. They are open minded and creative folks, who appreciate automotive history as much as I do. A small group of us have single handedly brought Malaise era classic cars to the mainstream. I’ve influenced people’s car purchases for god’s sake, and that’s kind of weird to me. People love the history and perspective I give about classic cars forgotten by mainstream audiences. I think I may even have influenced a few SEMA builds by General Motors, but I can’t back that up just yet.
I have grown to over 11.7k people by just posting every day, or every other day consistently. I do a little research on some vehicle I like, write up a post, and find some pictures to compliment it. The quantity of my followers is mild, but the quality of them is unmatched.
The secret to my mild success has just been consistency, being polite, and delivering something interesting, while staying true to myself. As cheesy as that sounds. Instagram has been one of the few things going well in my life, and it’s ironic, because I didn’t really plan on making anything serious of it.
My first sponsor was Pedantic Publishing. It’s a small company that specializes in informative automotive literature. I discovered some awesome work they were doing on suspension design, and asked for a book in exchange for a year of promotion. I’ve been with them for almost 6 months now. They’re really nice folks.
Amazon actually reached out me, and offered the Amazon Influencer’s program, which I decided to go ahead with. All I had to do was make a curated list of products my followers would like, and link it in my bio.
Lastly I applied for a sponsorship with Vvash Car Care Products. It’s a smaller home grown company that sells car care products like soaps, waxes, shammies, etc. I ended up getting a discount code and a free product from them.
My content really hasn’t changed. I still post my same style of information on weird Malaise era cars, while casually including my sponsors.
My clothing line is simply a handful of designs hosted through a third party printer and distributor. It’s extremely simple and a passive way of promoting making a few bucks.
Richard Rawlings from Gas Monkey Garage follows me, and regularly likes my content, which is very radical.
My future with Instagram still isn’t serious. I don’t want to be internet famous, but I’d love to keep informing people on cool classic cars. I’d like to branch out into a podcast series just to have a better platform to spew out a lot of information at once. I know podcasts are a tired idea by now, but a lot of this is mostly for me. I collect this information like a currency, and store it on my page. I can dig back years, and find out everything I’ve ever liked or researched.
I don’t go out of my way to get any monetary gain from this, and I’ll never exploit it. If it leads me to getting some cool job offers, I’d be very happy. If it just leads me to continue talking about weird classic cars, I’d still be content.
I think that just wraps everything up. I just wanted to keep things positive, and cars are always my gateway drug to positivity. I will always appreciate the history, design, and engineering surrounding these old rolling hunks of metal and steel-belted rubber. Now if I could just afford some cars to wrench on haha.
Visit my Instagram here: @v8_or_die
