How I grew my Instagram to 10.000 Followers organically and making money from it

[Nazgul]

Hello guys, it's time for me to give back to the community.This is a simple guide on how to grow your Instagram, Instagram is maybe best pipeline for you to build your eCommerce store or a CPA for a dedicated and genuine audience, a lot better than facebook which it's built only for you to buy ads on, because you can start with literally 0$. I started this IG journey 5 months ago around the time I joined HF community and honestly, at first, I felt tired and a bit demotivated but remember that in everything the key to success is persistence, you have to keep pushing on despite how hard it may seem and I know there are few of you who are in the same niche and want to monetize their social media but all you do is wasting money on a bot to follow/unfollow, even though I don't completely disagree with a bot helping you, most bots are either BADLY scripted or it's NOT enough. Here is where I come to help you out a bit with the things I've learned in the past few months that will 100% boost your followers or at least give you some insight.

Equipment
I bought from my local store two phones worth less than 60$ and two sim cards.
On each phone, I created two IG accounts. On one phone I keep my businesses legit 100%, on the other phone 2 accounts are for botting/buying followers etc.
I am all against botting and buying followers because if you do it wrong, you will be taxed and all the work will be in vain. But if you do it right, you can reach the top a lot faster than you would do normally.
I do not use proxies, but 4 accounts on my own IP, two different phones and manually following/unfollowing on my main account.

Tip
Remember this: "90% of your followers will come from YOU following THEM". No one is going to start following you just because you're liking or commenting on their feed unless you are extremely valuable in your content.
When following people, you must accept the fact early on that you will be following complete strangers that never heard of you before.However, there are correct ways to follow and bad ways to follow. My following techniques are one of the reasons why I believe I became successful with my store in such a short period of time.

Overview of following
Who's followers do I follow?
For me, as a women*clothing shop, I always target other shops with less than 50k followers and less than 0.2% engagement rate, maybe less than 0.5% if I find content being super valuable.*
Most other "guru's" recommend you target shops that have 10% engagement and 300k followers, because they have an "engaging audience that likes posts, they'll like yours too", where that's not always true.
They might have 100k followers and 10k likes on a post, because of their high-quality content or other unintentional reasons you can't put in value yourself as a beginner with 100 followers.

How authentic are their followers?
You may want to take your time here because this will make it or break it.*
•Check the growth of Social Blade are they losing -200 followers a day and then pofffff*+1k the next day?If you find these type of patterns they might be buying followers so not a good idea to target them, but not always 100% true because they might be buying shoutouts or getting help from other big accounts, that's why we have the next step:

Now if SocialBlade looks good. Get an idea of the followers that liked and commented on their last 5-6 posts. Manually*check each account that liked. If they have 1k+ likes per post obviously you won't do for each post, that would take ages, but just get an idea, check 100 people.
-If your target audience are WOMEN, then check if the accounts that liked the posts are mostly women.*
-Check how old are the accounts, check their posts captions and people that commented on their posts...Are the accounts fairly new?*Use common sense.
-Make an idea about their feed, they only post images with quotes but no pics of themselves? Probably a fake or just someone bored.
-Do most of these accounts promote something in their bio or caption that's unrelated to their own persona? Probably a fake, someone doing CPA most likely.
Use common sense very important.

-Before following
Be sure to write down how many followers you have in the moment you start following, and how many followings. This will give you an idea of how efficient the followers of your target are.

Botting
The other two accounts are purely for advertisement, I simply buy followers on them and bot on them as much as I can, and I just repost content from my feed with captions and tagging.*
-I do not follow/unfollow more than 200 a day.*
-Constantly changing the settings - crucial step, you don't want Instagram to find out you are botting, therefore don't repeat same steps for 1 week every day.

Shoutouts
Buying shoutouts it's a crucial yet expensive step.I have bought 5 shoutouts each worth 70$+ from 1+ million accounts and 3 of them are complete failures, now the pics and the captions are not the problem, the problem is the accounts are botted with fake likers and commenters (yes, that large it's possible), an example of bad bad nugget:*Fashion Selection*
-The account above has 2 million followers and 2k-20k likes per pic, that's less than 0.01% engagement which is terrible.
Be sure to check everything on socialblade and then*the followers, however, here is harder to determine a GOOD account due to massive numbers, but the engagement percentage can speak for itself.
-Good shoutouts were from smaller accounts that have at most 500k, one has 500k(which is a meme) one has 90k(which is another store), and helped tremendously in my growing.


Strategy
This strategy I am going to tell you it's one of the reasons why I believe I became successful with my IG store in such a short period of time.
Follow + 3 Like + 1 Comment.

Follow
I manually follow only people who recently liked and commented on the posts, that are within my niche's demographics.

Like
I found 3 likes it's best when the following someone, they won't feel like extra attention are given to them nor they feel passed by "just another freeloader who wants a followback"
-Don't like random content, if they have 3 pictures with themselves and 100 with random unimportant stuff, like the pictures with them first, show them you've taken them into consideration and like them.

Comment
I always post a comment on the person I follow, these are like seeds, at some point someone their friends will check these persons accounts and see your comment there and follow you too, that's why it must be a genuine compliment or a personalized question, now, there are many bots out there that people use who comment "Nice" "wow" "nice feed! what you think of my last post?". Now, these cheesy lines will work with some but you need a pipeline to build with your audience because they'll follow you and BUY from you. I like to get personal with the persons I follow sometimes, a genuine compliment on a nice dress or place they've visited might be better than a botted "nice" on a blurred selfie they've taken and not many people liked. That's why I like to do everything manually.

[Juke MC]

Really good thread! Good job!

[godspeedmaster1999]

Thanks for method man!

[Nazgul]

Really good thread! Good job!

Thanks for method man!

no worries, just few more ideas what to buy or how to monetize

Monetizing

eCommerce
This is maybe the best way to monetize your Instagram, there are few others such as: ClickBank, shoutouts, cpa, but on the long term game this is best. This is what I currently do and it's as legit as it goes.
If you have a website with a product or more products you can advertise on Instagram to your followers, that's why it's a must for you to have a very appealing feed with high-quality content because that will transpose your followers into your customers.*
Now you have two options where you can host your website: Shopify or Woocomerce. I personally use Shopify because it's a lot easier to manage your products, but costs 30$/month, if you don't have the budget then go with Woocomerce which requires a tiny little more work but it's free.

[h0lybyte]

amazing guide, going to go ahead and use this to build up a community for my future mmo.

[Heyyouthere]

This is really useful. Can I ask how long it takes you to do it each day? How long you spend doing all of it?

[MoneyMachine]

this guide is good. but as the user above asked, how much time do you dedicate daily for this?

[0xnorrie]

Really interesting bro, thanks for sharing !

[Nazgul]

this guide is good. but as the user above asked, how much time do you dedicate daily for this?

This is really useful. Can I ask how long it takes you to do it each day? How long you spend doing all of it?

this guide is good. but as the user above asked, how much time do you dedicate daily for this?

This is really useful. Can I ask how long it takes you to do it each day? How long you spend doing all of it?

2-3 hours in the morning, 1-2 hours in the evening.

[MoneyMachine]

2-3 hours in the morning, 1-2 hours in the evening.

i also started doing it on my niche and for now i have 700 followers and 450 of them liked at least one of my photos.
are you from Ro?

[Bitdefender69]

Thanks man for the great info.

[nozge]

Thanks man for the sharing! You the man!

[Smirnoffq]

How many followers you need to start monetizing when you want earn by posting sponsored posts and not with selling your products?
@Nazgul

[Nazgul]

How many followers you need to start monetizing when you want earn by posting sponsored posts and not with selling your products?
@Nazgul

5000 , I did it too on Fiverr.

[dHass]

Is not it easier to start by winding up subscribers?