1 Viral Reel. 8,791 New Followers. 5,573 New Email Subscribers.

Ever had a piece of content blow up... and then question if it was actually a good thing? In this episode of The Creative Bodega, I’m pulling back the curtain on the Canva reel that went viral—like, 25K comments, almost 9K new followers, and 5.5K new email subscribers kind of viral. It sounds like a dream, right? But what if I told you I’ve thought about deleting it almost every day since?

We’re talking about the upside and the unexpected downsides of going viral—like misaligned followers, plummeting email open rates, and that icky “this doesn’t feel like me” gut feeling. If you’ve ever wrestled with creating fast, faceless content vs. showing up as your full self, this one’s for you. Real talk, real numbers, and some behind-the-scenes reflection on what really matters when you're building a brand.

Check out the full show notes for this episode.

Things I cover inside the episode:

✨ The behind-the-scenes of my 12 Days of Reels Challenge and how it led to my most viral reel ever
 ✨ Why this Canva hack reel got 25,000+ comments—and why I’m torn about it
 ✨ The ripple effect: How it grew my following and email list fast (and why that’s not always good)
✨ The emotional and strategic conflict of teaching something you wouldn’t actually do yourself
✨ Why I think aligned growth > viral growth—and what I’ll do differently next time

Resources & Links Mentioned in this episode:
🔗 Watch the viral reel in question here
🔗 Join the waitlist for the next 12 Days of Reels Challenge

Connect with me:
🫶🏼 Follow me on Instagram for daily insights
🫶🏼 Join my 321 Create Newsletter for weekly content tips
🫶🏼 Check out The Content Coven Membership

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Transcript

0:00

This past December, I had a real go viral from that group of 12, and it's still going viral. And I started out thinking, this is awesome. But as this keeps going and the followers that I am seeing, follow me, I'm like. Is this a good thing? Welcome to the Creative Bodega, a podcast about content marketing, Instagram growth, and personal branding for female service-based solopreneurs who wanna grow their business without letting it take over their lives. I'm your host, EM Connors, and each week I'll share actionable tips, expert advice, and unfiltered truths to help you create engaging content, connect authentically with your audience, and turn followers into loyal customers, all without the burnout. If you're ready to simplify your content creation, navigate the ever, ever-changing trends. And build a business that works for you while staying sane in this crazy season of life, then you're in the right place. All right, I'm gonna wing it on this podcast. I have no script and no outline, and I'm gonna see how this goes. It could be complete garbage or it could be epic, but there's something I wanna talk about that has been on my mind, on my heart is bothering me, and I'm curious what you would do. I did a 12 days of reels challenge back in December of 2024. So this is a challenge that I hosted inside my membership and I actually opened it up to the public as well to gain interest in joining the membership and it worked. So I, I really can't stress enough that if you haven't tried some type of. A finite challenge. So, you know, with a certain number of days, um, for free, it really can bump up interest and it was very. Clear and direct what it was 12 Days of Reels. Okay. And mine were 12 days of Canva reels, and this is my third year doing it. So gosh, what my other ones, I think the year before was like 12 days of content. It was something about a content, it was not Canva directly. And the year before that was Canva directly and. I just have a lot of fun with it, but it's kind of hard, I'm not gonna lie, because it's December and I do it from the first to the 12th, and it's just a busy time of year, so I'm always like, maybe I should do that in the summer. Maybe that's like a July thing instead, and so I might actually run it in July this year instead. We'll see. In just this last episode, I was saying that I'm not launching anything this summer, so gosh darn it, I shouldn't do it. I shouldn't do it. But this is the life of an entrepreneur. Like the ideas come and then you're just like, let's do it. Anyw who? Maybe it should just be more fall, like a November thing. I don't know. Anyways, every year I've done it three years in a row. 12 days of reels challenge in December. I've had amazing results. Like I I, and who knows with the landscape or the, the world that is Instagram these days where I'm getting like 12 likes on things these days. So, I don't know, maybe this summer it'd be a good test or this fall, but I've always had really great results. I've always really grown my following with very aligned followers because I'm doing 12 days of something that I wanna be known for, that I'm an expert on, and that I want people to think of me for. So. Duh. Content creation, Canva, stuff like that. And this past December, I had a reel. Go viral from that group of 12 and just one of them, one outta the 12 and it's still going viral. So I posted it. I actually have it up'cause I wanted to look at it. I posted it on December 12th. It's actually my dad's birthday and it is today May 16th. You're not listening to this episode until actually June 16th. So in one month you'll be listening to this and this reel's still going viral. What do I mean? I mean, I'm still getting so many people commenting the word that I told them to comment on this reel every day in my comments section, and I'm like, oh my God, how is this still going? But it's, it's calmed down significantly. But I mean, truly it's gone viral for five months. It's pretty wild. And here's my dilemma with it. Yeah, I know what you're thinking. What is it about What, what is the real about him? And that's what everybody wants to know. Share it with me, and of course, I'll share the link in the show notes, and you can find those show notes on the creative bodega.com/blog/twenty. It is about how to make 100 faceless reels in minutes. Why does this hurt my heart? What I'm teaching is, is valid and, and it works. You, you can do this if you want. I would never do. And, and some of the comments are like, but would you have the same video in every reel? And I'm like, no, but that's how this works. This prompt and, and, and this hack in Canva. And so you can go in and individually change every single video if you want, but it's never something I would do. Number one, faceless like. Uh, I love showing my face and it's something I teach and preach, and here I am telling you to make a hundred faceless reels. It's, it feels like it's going against what I teach, and I also teach, you know, I don't, I'm not here to teach you how to make as much content as fast as possible. The whole thing just feels really click Beatty, right? And, and it doesn't really feel super authentic to me, and so I struggle with it. Let me tell you the other reason that I struggle with it. Let me tell you the stats on this reel, the insights, it's kind of insane. So I'm about to cross 10,000 likes, which I always say I really don't care about likes, so I don't really care about that part. Comments you guys. Right now, as of today, 25,732. Comments, 22,656 saves 4,956 shares and wait for this. This is the part that blows my mind, the follows for this 8,529, so I have gained. 8,529 new followers since December from this one reel. And you're probably like, well, what's the problem? Like what? And you probably think I'm crazy. You probably think that this is the stuff that keeps me up at night. Are all those people aligned? You would hope because it's a Canva reel. It's very aligned. It's not like I went in and made a reel. About like my favorite meal prepping recipe, like something that has nothing to do with what I do. I absolutely wanna be known for Canva. I love Canva. I'm a Canva verified expert. This is so aligned and so good. And I started out thinking, this is awesome, but as this keeps going and the followers that I am seeing follow me, I'm like, is this a good thing? And what I haven't also shared, so. Beyond all those crazy insights, I have gained probably 4,000 email, 4,000 new email subscribers, so it has jumped my email list subscriber rate up dramatically. Dramatically. And actually, let me just tell you, during the month of December when I was doing this, and through to the first week of January, actually let's do through the second week of January, so during my, you know. Again, I did 12 days of reels and I did them I think pretty much in a row. Maybe it went across two weeks. I maybe didn't post on the weekends'cause I try not to. But let's see. I'm just gonna add this up while you're here with me. So during December, I'm just adding up how much my email list exploded. I track my week over week list growth. So I'm actually just adding up each of these weeks across about. Six weeks into January and 18.4%. So during this 12 days of reels and during this challenge, I absolutely was prompting people to download something for almost every reel or comment something for almost every reel. And my list grew by 18.4%, which is massive, like a normal week for me. Email growth wise is like 2%, something around there. This was. Drastic. So again, going back to, I love this concept of this 12 Days of reels challenge and it's really simple and ugh, the more I'm talking about this, the more I'm like, I should just do this, this summer for everybody to like get people like making reels. Like my membership loved it. My community loved it.'cause again, I, I gave it to both for free. So I do challenges inside the coven. Every other month, and I decided for this one, I would make it public and in an effort to try to grow my membership and bring people in. And again, it did work, but it also worked to grow my email list dramatically, and in the end it worked to grow my following quite dramatically. So again, why is this a problem? I just find that when my growth explodes like this, like when my email list explodes. My open rate suffers. Like when I get this massive influx of 4,500 people in a month, they're not all super aligned. They may be just one of that one thing and they're getting out. I just find the quality of the subscriber or the quality of the follower starts to go down when I have. A one-off viral reel like this, things start to get a little outta control or they feel out of control for me, and that's what I don't love. And so therefore I lay awake at night thinking, should I take the reel down? Should I take that reel down? I don't know. It's, this is kind of bothering me. It doesn't feel crazy aligned, but um, it's bringing people in and I've actually had people DM me and be like, um. I found you through this reel and I love your content. Or MI found this reel and I can't tell you how much time it saved me as a small business owner. And it's the dms like that that make me keep it up.'cause,'cause then I'm like, all right, even if one out of every 25 to 30 is someone who's gonna become like a wonderful, possible paying client of mine, is that worth it? I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. I'm actually coming to you guys. I'm, I'm wondering if you're thinking I'm crazy or if you're kind of picking up what I'm putting down and you're like, I could see how that could be a little unnerving. Right? So it's still up as of this very moment. It is pinned to the top of my reels tab. You can find it. I'll put it in the show notes. It's still there. But every time I see somebody comment prompt. I'm like, Hmm, should I take this down? So let's talk about why I think this real is successful. So in the beginning of the reel, I'm walking, I'm actually walking into my office and sitting down. So there's some good movement there, and I have the headline or what it is about immediately. On the screen so you're not waiting to figure it out. It says 100 faceless reels in Canva in two minutes. So boom, they saw that they got hooked in. I have got captions like, you know, automated captions going along the bottom. Why is this so saveable for people? Because. It's a lot of steps. It's like a a, it's a good amount of steps and it's a little confusing. So if you don't save it, you're for sure gonna forget what the heck I said. So people have to save it. Why is it shareable? Because it's really kind of crazy that you can make a hundred reels in two minutes, like. You know, what's the quality of the reels, eh, I mean, like, I'm teaching you to like share a, a quote, you know what I mean? Or something like that. It's gotta be something really simple for this prompt that you're using. So it's not groundbreaking, but can it fill in a gap for a really busy business owner who just really wants to like, get something out every week? It can because I, I know it can, because they've reached out to me and said, thank you, thank you, thank you. So why else does it work? I show my face, and I think that anytime somebody shows their face, it gets people's attention. And I have it very clear comment prompt. I have that in the caption as the second line, and I have it towards the end. I say if this is confusing or overwhelming, just comment prompt and I will email you the prompt you need and my top aesthetic video search terms for Canva. So it's actually like quite valuable if you comment and you know, get added to my email list and, and get this so. I just have noticed since I've had this massive influx of new followers and massive influx of new email subscribers that my open rate has gone down and my engagement has dropped. You know, it's like, what do they call? I feel there's like a term, I'm trying to think of, it's not like the lesser of two evils, but it's like something like that. It's great. And also maybe not. So take from this what you will, this is a shorter episode. I'm trying to do like a, you know, little shorter episodes in the summer. Why Kids Home Summer? You're busy. I'm busy and I'm curious what you think, but if you take anything away from this. I would think about doing a 12 days of something. So again, mine was the 12 days of Canva Hacks, and it was a countdown from the 1st of December to December 12th, and it certainly helped bump things up for me beyond this one reel that went viral. I actually had decent numbers on most all of the reels, so. Think about challenging yourself to doing something like that. I think it can be very beneficial for growth if you're looking to grow. I can't do beyond 12 days. Don't even ask me to do a 30 day real thing, like I'll keel over. That just won't be fun for me. 12 days for me is just enough to get in and get out. Just will never commit to anything beyond that. So that's what I got for you today. Let me know what you think. Let me know what you think about the real. Let me know if you would use this type of prompt. I personally wouldn't, but clearly there's a lot of people out there who are looking to save time. Who would. Enjoy your day, and I will see you next week on the Creative Bodega Podcast. If you have not already, please drop me a review or drop me five stars for this podcast. It means the world to me and just, you know, gives me a little virtual pat on the back that I, I'm doing all right over here. All right, I'll talk to you guys next week. Thanks so much for hanging out with me on the Creative Bodega Podcast. If you love this episode, please be sure to share it with a fellow solopreneur who could use a little content creation inspiration. And hey, don't forget to check out the show notes for any resources I mentioned on the episode. To help you create content that feels easy and actually gets you results. If you want even more Canva and content tips, head over to my website, the creative bodega.com, or find me on Instagram under the same name. Until next time, keep creating, keep showing up, and most importantly, try and have a little fun with your content. I'll see you on the next episode.