Zero to 20k Instagram followers in 8months; $0 spent

Hey Folks, I get asked this questions a lot by friends... How did you grow you Instagram following so quickly? So I thought I would share with the world if this might help someone else

Background

Although I am now running webautomation.io, the company I was promoting is watchnerd #watchnerdofficial , a luxury watch comparison site and blog. It was my first proper fully internet based business. The first thing I quickly identified was most of my target users hung-out on Instagram! So I guess the below tactics only work if your users actually hangout on Instagram. If they don't it might be a waste of time.

#1 Have a schedule

No secret Instagram reward consistency. I posted on Saturday, Tuesday and Thursday between 7am-10am GMT every single week for 6 months straight! I literally never missed a day. My users knew exactly what to expect and when so people would always check my page on a Saturday for new content

#2 Original Content

This was clearly the hardest part, its so much easier to repost that viral meme. I made the effort to take all original pictures and infographics. I noticed that people subscribed to my channel because they knew they could only get the content exclusively from my channel

#3 Quality images

Another no brainer!, brush up on your picture taking skills. You would be amazed the great pictures you can take with your smart phone

#4 Themes

Perception really matters in the Instagram world. From the start I carefully planned a theme for my page. I did two watch shots and then an infographic. Really gave the page character. I also had re-occurring themes for my shots which were almost signature to me

#5 Infographics/Shareable content

This was by far my biggest success . I became the Infographic guy!. Educating people in your niche really builds authority and really separates you as a thought leader. These were also very viral and by far was biggest reason for high growth. My infographics have been shared over 500k times!

#6 Reach out to influencers

In the early days I made a list of top 50 influencers in my niche and I constantly DM them encouraging them to re-post and promote my content for FREE! An account with 2.5m followers once shared one of my infographics and I got 2,500 followers in the next 24hrs!

#7 Engagement

I encouraged users to engage in every post. I used captions effectively to help me with this. I will always end the caption with a question for example "what do you think"?. I also always responded to follower comments and DMs

#8 Hashtags

Using hashtags was another easy way for people and even bots to find me. What i also did was create new hashtags for my content #infographicsaturdays #watchtriviatuesdays

#9 Stories

This was the easiest way to engage people. I didn't have to worry to much about editing and getting the perfect shot! I would always do polls, ask questions and show them preview of what features we were working on

#10 Automation

Firstly DO NOT buy followers or likes!. But in the early days I used automation to like/follow/unfollow basically all the things you would have done as a human just quicker. This has to be done responsibly otherwise Instagram will block your account

#11 Create anticipation

People always looked forward to the Tuesdays and Saturdays as I had #triiviaTuesday and #Inforgaphicssatrurdays. This almost guaranteed people on these days searched my page for new content. I would also hype up the posts before.