August 28th, 2018 | Updated on December 1st, 2020
1. Pick Your Niche
As obvious as this may sound picking the niche for your Instagram account is probably the most important step of becoming successful on this platform.
As you are going to be posting at least a daily basis you need to be able to keep focused on your chosen subject when perhaps you aren’t as motivated as you were when you first started.
Don’t pick an area to focus on that you are likely to leave when the going gets tough.
You might be sitting there wondering why you need to pick a niche when you just want to document your life through pictures.
Well every successful influencer has a niche they focus on, Instagram accounts that are very broad in nature tend aren’t anywhere near as successful because they fail to create a captive audience, leading to low engagement and lower amounts of followers.
2. Make an Awesome Profile
After picking your niche, make sure to create the most engaging profile you possibly can. Make sure to fill it out completely with information so that anyone who stumbles upon it knows who you are and what you are about.
Pick a high quality photo for your profile picture, these perform better when they are facial portraits rather than a logo as people like to put a name to a face.
If you have a website make sure to include the link at the bottom, when you start gaining traction this will be crucial in driving traffic to your website.
It is wise to change this link up to keep things fresh. For example, you might have the link send people to a new blog post everytime you upload one to your website.
3. Target Your Followers
Gone are the days where a few #follow4follow hashtags would start bringing in some serious follower numbers. Also, you can include hashtags via a tool to track hashtags, that are relevant to your business as this is another asset that contributes to your account’s discovery on Instagram.
Instagram’s new algorithm is focused on engagement, so there is no longer any point in having 10,000 followers if no of them are interested in your content.
Go into your niche’s community and interact. Look at your competitors by location and industry and interact with their followers by liking and commenting on their photos.
Do not use bots for this purpose. Real followers will spot you a mile off and probably report your account for spamming. No, this takes real work, real comments, real likes, and real follows.
4. Post Consistently
You will have to be posting a least daily if you want to grab people’s attention. What is more, you need to be using the story function to keep yourself at the top of people’s Instagram timelines.
Content is no longer displayed in users’ feeds in chronological order, so you have to keep pumping out content to reach your followers.
It is a well-known fact that it is becoming harder and harder to reach even your own followers. So you are going to have to outwork your competition to stay in their personal feed.
5. Manage Your Time By Scheduling Posts
Bearing the above point in mind you need to be posting everyday but you obviously still want to be able to live a life away from Instagram.
This is where scheduling tools come in handy, you can upload 5 – 10 posts ahead of time and organise them to drip out over the course of the next week.
The result is that it only takes one hour to do one week’s worth of content. I recommend PublBox’s social media scheduler it’s very competitively priced and will save you literally hours of work.
So there you have, 5 steps to getting your first 1,000 followers. No one ever said it would be easy, but it will be worth it, because after your first 1,0000 the numbers start to snowball and that 10,000 followers figure won’t seem all that far off!
