How I got 20K organic followers on instagram

17 months ago I started social media after learning who @garyvee was. It changed my life. The following is the methods and tactics I used to amass 20K followers over that time

First things first, you need to have an eye catching bio that pops and will attract people to follow you. Same with your profile picture. You should use a picture of your face that has the white of the eyes visible. This is psychological l, people trust people more at a close distance.

Next, you need to get some posts going. Nobody is likely to follow an account w no posts. It's just weird. You should make 9-18 posts before you consider amassing followers.

A note on posting: you need to use 30 relevant hashtags on every single post. I'm serious. Keep them in a notepad, and you should have at least 3 sets of them and rotate which one you use. The algorithm penalizes you if you use the same 30 everytime.

When you post hashtags, do not post them in the caption, it's spammy. Instead post them in the first comment. This means you select your media, write your caption and before you post, you go copy your hashtags and then once it's posted you drop them in the first comment. There's a trick to this, you can post them in a way to overload the comment field and instead of showing your hashtags to users in the feed, they will instead see this [...]

Below is one of my actual blocks of hashtags I use. Pretend these words all have hashtags as steemit won't let me actually put them in the post

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followthehustle reezyresells rezzyresells 2017flipchallenge entrepreneur hustle garyvee contentoncontent documentdontcreate followthehustle reseller sellshit resale amazonfba ebayseller amazonseller fulfilledbyamazon getmoneyonline2017 theysaid hustler selfmade onlinesales makemoneyonline howtosell sellstuff sellbooks bookseller getmoney

How do you know what hashtags to use? It's a bit of an art. You can use a source like tagsforlikes, but it's really just popular ones, not super specific to your niche. A combination of that plus stealing them from other influencers in your niche

The next thing I did was follow everyone in my niche. Thousands of people. Including bigger names. I found them in 2 ways; one by their name, meaning they had words associated w my niche in their name (seller, selling, Reseller, thrift, thrifting, eBay, amazon, fba etc). If you wanted to do this in the crypto niche you would use; crypto, ethereum, Bitcoin, etc... forgive me, I'm a crypto newb so I don't even know what words to use, but if this was your niche, you would know.

The other way I found people to follow was by following the followers and followings of other people in your niche. Stealing them.

If you can use an automated service to help with following people that can make it a bit easier. I use to use instagress but that's gone now. There's others but I haven't kept up with it.

If you're doing your job, some of these people you follow will follow you back.

Most importantly you need to start providing value in your niche. Posting awesome content that people value. When I say post I mean post. A lot. Not one wall post a day, 4-8 posts. And even more importantly use the story. Post 10+ clips a day to the story. And show your face! I can't emphasize the face part enough, people identify w faces and it helps people to trust you. The story adds another element which is your voice and it can't be faked, you have to film story content yourself, usually at arms length,
Holding your phone.

Now you need to get people's attention, especially big name people but anybody in your niche is a good. Start by liking 100 posts a day and commenting on 100 posts. Don't be spammy w your comments, be genuine and try an add value or unique viewpoints.

You want to interact w people that don't follow you already so you can convert them to followers.

Dig into hashtags, locations of conventions in your niche, and thought leaders in your niche.

There's really only a few ways to get people's attention, which is your goal.

-Following them
-Liking their posts
-Liking their comments (on other people's posts)
-commenting on their posts
-replying to their story (huge)
-tagging them (this one is kind of spammy and I wouldn't recommend it unless you were actually providing value that you think that person would appreciate)

The other big one is making yourself available, and engaging. Make posts encouraging your audience to ask you questions, and ask your audience questions.

If people send you DM's answer them
as quick as possible and be thorough and help them, even if it is a dumb question. When you give a random person your attention on demand, you will certainly
Gain a follower for life. They might even extol l your virtues elsewhere and even in a post with a shout out, which will validate you to others and gain you more followers.

What to post? Let your questions be content. Let the audience do the work.

When people ask you questions on your posts or DM's, that's a good idea to create content around that. Chances are, that they aren't the only one that has that question.

Also one major thing: build a social presence around something you're extremely
Knowledgeable about. 5,000 hours experience level or greater. This will make it much easier as you will actually be able to provide solid value and usually have some sort of verifiable proof of your expertise. For me it was sales numbers. If you were a stock trader, you could show your portfolio and or your biggest recent trades etc

There's some more nuances to it, but really that's mostly it.

I hope some of you find value in this

-Reezy