Alright, my turn now. I initially wrote a complete datasheet on my own that covers pretty much everything Vinny just said but we removed my thoughts on the first three chapters to avoid redundancies. However, I will add my 2 cents about using Instagram to get laid at the end of this datasheet, simply because I think it will offer more value to you guys if you have 2 opinions on how to do it.
PART II
4. How to grow your Instagram page
Four months ago I had 120 followers on my personal Instagram page and even though I was using hashtags like crazy, I was growing at a very slow rate. Days with 2 or 3 new followers were already considered good. Right now – 4 months later - I have almost 13k followers and I am growing at a rate of 100-150 new followers per day, depending on how active I am on Instagram. That’s at least 3000 new followers per month and the best thing is that a lot of them are actually liking my pictures and comment on it. The question that is on your mind and on the minds of millions of people nowadays is the following:
“How can I grow my Instagram page organically and as fast as possible?”
The answer to this question is really easy and yet I haven’t found any guide online that really tells you how to do it. Most guides are very vague and just tell you to post unique content and engage with a lot of people. My approach is a bit more practical and follows basic principles of marketing that are taught at every business school.
Define your target group
First of all, you need to define your target group. Just imagine your Instagram page is a product you want to sell. What do you need in order to sell it? Ask yourself what kinds of people are interested in your product, i.e. your IG page. If you are a bodybuilder, you want to have followers who are interested in bodybuilding. If you sell women’s clothing online, you want women in a particular age group who are interested in fashion to follow you. You get the idea, it’s a no-brainer.
Drive traffic to your page
Next, you need to drive traffic to your page. This is the most important part of this guide and also the part that most people don’t get right. People need to see your Instagram page first before they are following you. They won’t just type your username into the search bar and then follow you. You need to take action first. The majority of the users on Instagram are just posting pictures, hoping that they “go viral” which they of course will never do. Unless you are a model, a hot girl or your page/lifestyle is extremely fucking awesome (see Dan Bilzerian) and unique, you won’t go viral. Trust me on this.
So what can you do to drive traffic to your page?
Again, it is very easy. Just think about the functionality of Instagram and you will notice, that it is actually a pretty simple app that doesn’t let you do many things. You can post pictures and videos with hashtags, you can follow and unfollow other people, you can like other pictures, you can comment on other pictures and you can message other people. That’s pretty much all you can do on Instagram.
Messaging other people is pretty useless when it comes to acquiring new followers. In my approach, the purpose of posting pictures and videos is not to get new followers but to keep your existing followers. What’s left is following people, liking pictures and commenting on pictures.
Following other people
This is the single most effective way of getting new followers if you are starting out with your Instagram page. Here is what you want to do:
First, find existing Instagram pages that have many followers who fit into your target group that you have hopefully already defined and are interested in the niche you are in. This will be your source of new followers. Finding a good source site can be tricky if your niche is very unique. A good idea is to check what other sites your current followers are following or to search for keywords. You want to find a source site with at least 10k followers in the beginning. Even better would be 50k or 100k.
Let’s get back to our bodybuilder example. If I search on Instagram for the word ‘bodybuilding’, plenty of pages with lots of followers show up (e.g. @bodybuilding_motivation, @bodybuildingfamily). Additionally, you can also just use well known bodybuilder as source sites (e.g. @simeonpanda, @mikerashid, etc.).
All these sites are your “source sites” and you will basically use them to “steal” their followers. You do that by simply following the people who are following your source site and hope that they will follow you back. The follow-for-follow idea is as old as Instagram itself and many people are doing it. There is even a hashtag called #follow4follow. However, most people are doing it wrong. They are following random people and hope that those random people will follow them back. My approach is a lot more effective because you are following people who are already interested in the niche your account is in. Thus, your follow-back ratio and engagement rate will be a lot higher.
Next, you need to make us of this follow-back ratio. Even if you have a high follow-back ratio of – let’s say 30% - it would mean a lot of following other people to grow your page fast. Plus, there is the problem that Instagram has a limit of 7500 people when it comes to following other accounts. This means that you have to unfollow some people before you can follow new ones. And once you unfollow people, you will have the problem of not knowing whether you have already followed and unfollowed a certain person when you are following new people again.
Fortunately, there is a solution to all these problems. The solution comes in the form of so called “Instagram automation tools”. Those tools let you mass-follow users, mass-like and mass-comment photos and many other things that will help you grow your page. There are three tools I know of:
Boostgram,
Instagress and
FollowLiker. The first two are websites you can sign up on, but they are pretty expensive and you have to subscribe to them on a monthly basis. BUT, they have a free trial that you can use as a quick introduction to the whole mass-following strategy. FollowLiker is a software that you download once and then use as long as you want. I recommend it to everyone who is seriously interested in the whole Instagram thing.
Explaining the functionality of FollowLiker in this datasheet would take way too long. I suggest to read this post to get an idea of what FollowLiker can do:
http://imristo.com/the-ultimate-followli...-tutorial/
Once you have followliker, you can mass-follow, mass-unfollow everyone who didn’t follow you back (and blacklist them so that the software won’t follow them another time), mass-like (filtered by hashtags, locations and users) and mass-comment on Instagram. You will need all those functions to grow your page and get laid from Instagram. You should also try to keep your followings as low as possible. They shouldn’t exceed the number of followers you have. This means that you will need to mass-follow and mass-unfollow simultaneously.
Since everything is automated, you don’t need to spend a single minute on growing your IG page. FollowLiker will do it for you. The only effort you have to put in is creating unique high quality content for your page.
Mass liking
This is another good way of making people notice you. It looks even more natural than the mass-following but won’t give you as many followers as mass-following. Mass-liking is a very good way to raise brand-awareness of your business or the products you sell. It is also a good way to collect likes for your pictures, since a lot of people will like back some of your pictures out of respect.
I only mass-like by using hashtags that are relevant for my niche, but depending on what niche you are in, it could also make sense to mass-like pictures that were posted at a certain location, though you can also hit the location angle by using hashtags, e.g. #newyork to reach out to people in New York.
IMPORTANT: be careful not to generate too much activity with your automation tool. Especially if your account is relatively new, you shouldn't do too many follows, unfollows and likes, otherwise Instagram will notice that and ban you temporary from following anyone. Start small with 300 follows per day for example and then increase the total amount of activities every week by 100.
Using automation tools is against Instagram’s TOS. However, it is very unlikely that they will ban you for that if you are careful enough and not overdoing it.
Hashtags
When you are posting a picture on Instagram, you can use hashtags for that picture so that other people who are searching for that hashtag can see the picture. The thing with hashtags is that they are useless if they are either too strong, too weak or the amount of likes you get on your picture is not enough. For example, if you post a picture with the hashtag #newyork, you will be in competition with more than 35 million people who also used that hashtag. In other words, #newyork is way too strong for you, unless you get 20k likes on your picture and rank under the top posts for the hashtag #newyork. Since Instagram sorts the rest of the pictures that are not ranked under the top posts after the time they were posted, your picture will very soon disappear and make place for new pictures that were posted with the hashtag #newyork. The solution to this is to use hashtags that are used by fewer people. A good estimate I found is to use hashtags that are used 10-20 times more often than the amount of your followers. Example: if you have 5k followers, you want to use hashtags with 50,000 to 100,000 posts. This way your picture will not only appear longer on the first page of the ranking but also – if you get enough likes – rank under the top posts of the hashtag. Ranking under the top posts is the ultimate goal you want to achieve with every hashtag you use. Only by doing it this way, your page will grow by using hashtags.
Don’t be shy to use as many tags as you like as well as write tags in different languages you know or are learning especially languages of the group you are targeting. You are allowed to use 30 hashtags in one post. Use all 30 if you can come up with that many. Start first with a description of photo preferably with some humor or a question to get people engaged. With few main hashtags embedded in the text, and then just follow with a bunch of hashtags. First few lines is all that people see unless they actually physically open all comments to see all the tags you’ve entered. The photos where I include many hashtags in different languages has proven to bring more likes. Using 30 hashtags makes it more likely that somebody finds your picture. If you think it looks nerdy or not cool to use that many hashtags, then just edit your post half an hour later and remove the hashtags.
Shoutouts
Last but not least, you can also grow your page by using shoutouts. A shoutout is a post by another Instagram page that is in the same or a similar niche. The idea is that the other page, which usually has a lot more followers than you, links back to your page and thus gives you some of its followers. Shoutouts can be very powerful if done by a site with a lot of followers (50k or more) but they usually cost money.
Buying followers
On a short side note: Yes, you can also buy fake followers. However, those followers will only show up in your follower count. They won’t like your pictures. Hence, your likes-to-followers ratio will decrease. If you are not planning on promoting products of other companies and your current likes-to-followers ratio is higher than 5%, feel free to buy as many followers as you want without your ratio dropping below 3-5%. This way your follower count will still look legit and people won’t suspect that you bought followers.
Optimize your conversion and engagement rate
Now that you know how to drive tons of traffic to your page, you want the people to click that little ‘follow’ button next to your profile picture and become a loyal follower of yours. Unfortunately, there is no shortcut or automation tool that can optimize your conversion rate. In order to get the people who visit your page to follow you, you need to achieve two things:
1. The content of your site must be high quality.
Fisto already wrote all there is to say about that. Use high quality pics, use Snapseed to edit the pictures first, use Instagram filters (but don’t overdo it), tell a story with your pictures. I believe it is better to post fewer pics of good quality than posting one average pic every day.
2. You need to find your niche and stick to it. This ties into what I wrote about defining your target group. You want the people you drive to your page to be interested in the niche you are in. If you post pictures about random things that happen in your life, it is very difficult to get new followers unless your lifestyle is really awesome. It is much better to focus on 1-3 niches. These can be big niches like fitness, travel, fashion, football or even a location specific niche. The idea of the whole niche thing is that people who visit your site immediately know what your story is.
Regarding the engagement rate (number of likes and comments you get), there are a few things you can do:
- Use automation tools to mass-like photos that are tagged with a relevant hashtag
- Use automation tools to mass-comment photos that are tagged with a relevant hashtag. Use a very generic comment like “nice picture!” and see what happens.
- Find out what kind of pictures your followers like the most. Good abs for example always lead to plenty of likes.
- Always reply to comments on your pictures. This will especially be important once your page is so big that people don’t expect you any more to read every comment. People will notice that you react to other comments and thus be encouraged to comment more on your pictures in the future.
- Ask your followers questions when posting pictures. You want as many people as possible join the discussion. Of course the question should refer to the picture.
- Use the “tag someone who…” strategy when posting a meme or funny picture. This is a good strategy to grow your page by word of mouth.
- Comment other people’s photos. If you write a good or funny comment to the photo of a really big site in your niche, you can get many likes and new followers
5. How to make money with Instagram
Instagram has become one of the most used mobile apps in the world. There is a lot of money to be made from Instagram. I am not an expert on that topic yet, but I know of a few ways to monetize Instagram:
- Instagram as a marketing tool. If you run any kind of business, you should use Instagram. It’s a free marketing tool and if you know what you are doing, you can increase sales significantly. With mass-liking and mass-following you can raise brand awareness within your area of business. Imagine you run an offline business in a small town and you are liking and following everyone who posts a picture and geotagged it to that town. The name of your business will soon make the round and people will know you.
- Instagram combined with an online shop. Build a page in a certain niche and grow a big following (let’s say 10k-100k). Then use WeekendCasanova’s guide on dropshipping, promote your own products on your own IG page to your own followers who are already interested in your niche and drive as many of your followers as possible to your shop. Offer other Instagram pages in the same niche to become your affiliate.
- Shoutouts. Build a big following in a certain niche (100k+) and offer smaller sites shoutouts. Some sites make anything from 10$ to 100$ per shoutout.
- Promote products. Once you have enough followers in your niche, companies will notice you and ask to promote their products.
- Sell your account. If you are bored of all the Instagram hustle, you can still sell your site to someone who wants to get into the same business. You would be surprised how much some people are willing to pay for a site with thousands of followers.
6. How to keep your privacy
Even if you have your page set on public, you can still do a few things to keep your privacy:
- Never, under any circumstances, connect your Instagram to your Facebook. If you do that, all your Facebook friends will get a notification that you are on Instagram
- If you want to keep out friends and family but some of them are already following you, you can block them.
- Don’t use your full name on Instagram. No mobile phone number or e-mail either.
- You can delete comments from other users you don’t like by tapping on the comment and holding it for a second.
- If girls comment on your pictures, you can reply them via pm to keep the convo more private.
So that was it, the most comprehensive guide on Instagram I know of so far. I hope it is useful to a lot of you guys. Good luck with your IG game and hustles.
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). BTW thanks to Cr33pin (awesome guy with an amazing beard and impressive gainz) for going to bed early that day and allowing me to escalate in the living room while watching youtube videos on a large screen 
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