Want to monetize your Instagram? Join MagicLinks!
Among the great mysteries of life (Who shot J.R.? Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?) is one unique to this millenium: How do you grow your Instagram following quickly – WITHOUT bots or buying followers?
1. Add SEO to your Instagram name
No, we don’t mean your IG handle: The name you have in your bio. It’s a great way to add SEO like: “EMILY G. | Plus-size fast fashion vlogger”, “DANIELLE T. | Luxury Clean Beauty Enthusiast”. Searchers will see the words when they’re looking up a topic on Instagram.
2. Focus on your captions
It’s tempting to just put “felt cute, might delete later” or a couple of emojis. The image in your post draws Instagram users in, but it’s your caption that creates engagement, interest, trust, and genuine fandom – all of which helps lead to them clicking your MagicLinks and buying what you recommend!
Start discussions with open-ended questions, give details on what you’re wearing, etc. Think of your IG captions as microblogging, and go from there.
3. Put your hashtags in the caption, not in the first comment
A recent Social Media Today study measured engagement on over 650,000 Instagram posts from 6,874 individual brand accounts. The overall trend? Engagements & reach were better when hashtags were in the caption itself. When an Instagram user is searching for content & reading captions to see if it’s what they’re looking for, the hashtags are a quick way to vet the content as worthwhile or not.
4. Focus on hashtags with smaller results
- #makeup: 246 MILLION posts
#5minutemakeup: 18.2k posts
Your content is much more likely to be discovered by someone searching for #5minutemakeup, because there’s less competition for the search results real estate. You’ll be speaking right to your audience.
5. Don’t use the same hashtags over and over again
Instagram’s algorithm can (and will) flag your content for spam if you repeatedly use the exact.same.hashtags. Keep track of relevant hashtags for your content, and separate them into sets in a note or spreadsheet on your phone. Rotate through the sets & use the tags in your content only when they fit the content itself.
6. Create good content
‘Nuff said.
7. Create and pay for an IG ad that’s a good encapsulation of your personal brand: video is best!
The ad should include your best content with a music soundtrack, good filter, and a watermark so your content can’t be stolen. You can pay Instagram to distribute the ad, or… (see #8)
8. Get your work posted on popular sharing + curation pages
You’ve got 2 options for payment for this: 1)Money, or 2)Leverage – offer to cross promote their posts on yours.
9. Engage with popular accounts in your specific niche
When you engage with other accounts, both on your own page and theirs, Instagram’s algorithm takes that into consideration and bumps your posts up in their feed.
10. Curate content from other pages and repost it with tags.
This encourages follow-for-follow & repost-for-repost. One caveat: YOU SHOULD ALWAYS, ALWAYS CREDIT THE ORIGINAL CREATOR.
