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In this article, I’m going to teach you how to make money from nothing using your Instagram business page. The first stage is to get a thousand active followers in your first month on Instagram. The followers form the core of your Instagram business that you will grow to tens of thousands of followers. The main point of the followers is to make money on Instagram. You will make money in two ways, the first being selling shoutouts to owners of e-commerce stores. The second way is by using your Instagram business page to send traffic to your Shopify store. Shopify has the potential to change your life and is the main reason why you should build an Instagram theme page.
As I discussed in the previous article on Instagram theme pages, shoutouts build capital for your e-commerce business. A page with 10 000 followers and above can sell shoutouts at $40 for a 24-hour post. Selling shoutouts for a few months enables you to try Shopify dropshipping for free. In the future, I discuss Shopify dropshipping in more detail but allow me to pique your interest. You need to know that there is a link between spending months building an Instagram theme page every day, to the potential life-changing income that you will get from Shopify through this Instagram theme page.
You start your journey by building the Instagram theme page to about 10 000 followers. Building the Instagram page takes some months of hard work because Instagram is now very strict in terms of activity that is geared towards the aggressive growth of a page. The main reason why it’s hard to build a page naturally is that Facebook wants people to pay for exposure on its platform. As a result, Facebook makes it as hard as possible to grow an Instagram page for free. On the flip side, if you persevere and build a big Instagram page, you benefit from having less competition in whatever niche you are in. The other benefit of building an Instagram page is that you get thousands of dollars worth of traffic, for free.
After you build the Instagram page using the methods that I describe below. You start selling shoutouts until you make about $1000. I might talk about how to sell shoutouts sustainably in another article.
Connecting Your Instagram Business With Shopify
The $1000 or so is the money that you use to start your e-commerce store on Shopify. Instagram is important in that it provides targetted, free traffic that you use to test products until you find a winning product. Without the Instagram business page, this process costs thousands of dollars without any guarantee of success. I talk about how to grow the Shopify store and its revenue in articles in the future. For now, let us get into the business of the day which is growing the Instagram page to its first 1000 followers.
PS: You can start Shopify dropshipping with as little as $200.
The Instagram Business Growth Strategy
So the strategy I’m talking about in this article is a little controversial. Not everyone agrees that it’s a good way to grow your Instagram page but keep in mind that a lot of big successful Instagram pages are grown in this manner. The strategy works in 2020 although it is much harder to execute it than in 2018 and before.
A lot of people claim that the follow for follow strategy does not work because they do it wrong. People go onto a page in their niche and start following people who follow the page.
A person following a page does not mean that they are a valuable target. Let’s talk about that later in the article. For now, I will talk about preparing the Instagram business page for the potential followers that come to your page.
Add Nine Posts On The Instagram Business Page
I won’t talk about how to set your bio on Instagram and all of that. I am sure you come across this information on every other blog.
Let’s talk about how to select content for the Instagram theme page.
The idea is to curate viral and fresh content for your theme page. There is no time, energy, or resources available to create viral content for yourself. The plan is to use content that belongs to other people, leveraging their creativity and success at the same time.
Think about it, how long would it take you to create viral content, day in and day out. How much in terms of camera equipment, concept ideas, and money to move from place to place would it need? Even if having a big Instagram page is important, there is a limit to the investment that should be made.
Go to the search bar on Instagram and search for keywords related to the niche that you are interested in. Once you find content aligned to your niche scroll down and select the content that has the most engagement and was posted recently.
For example, in the sporting niche, you can choose to create a page on skateboarding. Maybe in the future, you want to sell skateboarding related goods from AliExpress through Shopify.
You find a good page like Stoke Boarding. After that, you find the content that has the most engagement on the page. Choose the content that has amassed thousands of likes in a few hours.
Using Repost For Instagram Business
You use an application like Repost for Instagram to download the content from the selected page. All you have to do is copy the link from the post that you have selected. When you open the Repost application, the content in the post that you select becomes available in the gallery.
All you have to do is post the content on your Instagram business page and benefit from viral content that you did not create. The cool part is that as long as you give credit to the content owner in the caption, your post won’t meet any problems. Only about one percent of content creators will ask you to take their content down from your page after you tag them.
Take a look at the screenshot from Stoke Boarding that I put up there. The caption goes like:
This is siiickkk
Follow @stokeboarding
Follow @stokeboarding
By @out_lander_91
Do you see how the owner of the content, Outlander 91, is given credit for his work by being tagged in the post? Most content creators on Instagram do not have a problem getting extra exposure in this way.
So you benefit from the great content, the content creators benefit from the free exposure.
To ensure that potential followers have a decent user experience when they land on your Instagram page, ensure that you have nine posts like this lined up to start with.
After that, you can post at least five times a day using the method that I have outlined above.
Target Low Hanging Fruit With The Follow For Follow Strategy
When executing the Follow for Follow Strategy for your Instagram business, you do the opposite to when you search for the content to post.
In searching for content to post, you look for the content that has the most likes. When you are looking for people to follow you back, target people who have liked posts on small pages that are similar to yours. You should also target people who have liked posts that have a low number of likes. When you target such people, you get a good proportion of them following you back. The reason is that these types of people are not hard to please as they support small pages that usually do not have amazing content.
Your small page, on the other hand, has amazing content that you have selected from other pages. The result is that these people follow your page because it is better than other small Instagram business pages that they usually follow.
Keep following people daily until you reach the upper limit of around 7 500 people that you follow. By that time you are likely to have about 1500 to 2000 followers on your account.
The next stage is to start unfollowing people who do not follow you back. Do not use any third-party software for this as Instagram gives action bans for that. If you continue getting action bans your page is taken down after a while.
Rather, get you to know your audience as you interact with them. From interacting with your followers you know those who to keep following and who to unfollow. This natural approach to unfollowing keeps you under Instagram’s radar until you bust its daily action limits.
2500 Followers Is The Magic Number For Instagram Business
The engagement rate on posts using the Follow for Follow Strategy, ranges between 5 – 10% of the number of followers. This means that after getting to 1000 followers, you are guaranteed between 50 – 100 likes per post. At 2500 followers, the number of potential likes goes up to 250 likes per post. In many niches, this is enough to get your posts featured on the Instagram explore page.
Getting on the Instagram explore page is what it’s all about. Once you get on the explore page you get many more eyes on your profile. At this point, your profile starts growing organically as your popularity increases.
You can stop the Follow for Follow strategy at this point to increase the influence of your page. Stopping the Follow for Follow strategy ensures that you do not get any more Action Bans that compromise the integrity of your account in the long run.
Do this to 10 000 followers and you will be ready to start getting some requests for shoutouts in your inbox. At 10 000 followers, the number of likes on your posts goes up to 1000 per post which is enough to get you on the explore page often.
At this stage, the rate of growth of your page increases substantially.
You still have to unfollow those who do not follow you back. Instagram is very strict about this and it bans accounts who show this type of spammy behavior. The best way to unfollow people is to go on your feed and unfollow those who do not interact with your posts from there. This not only appears natural to Instagram, but it also increases your engagement rate by eliminating people who do not engage with your content. Eliminating passive followers helps you get on the Instagram explore page much faster. The reason is that the engagement ratios for your posts increase the moment you remove people who do not engage with your posts.
Use The Instagram Story Feature To Engage With Your Followers
Do not underestimate the power of the Instagram story feature. Posting a story daily shows that your page is alive and that you are active. It increases the chances that people also engage with the content in your feed. There is less competition on the Instagram story feed as fewer people post stories regularly. The lack of competition presents your page with an opportunity to get more eyes on it.
The beautiful ring that appears on your profile picture when you have a fresh story on it is very attractive to followers. Try it and see that there are a lot of views that come to your profile from the story.
People’s responses to story posts go directly into your inbox. When someone comes into your inbox, it is a golden opportunity to engage with them, increasing loyalty among the fan base. Followers who respond to your stories usually like your posts on your home page as well. More likes on the posts increase the chances of the post going onto the explore page.
Instagram now features viral stories on the explore page. So make sure that you post stories consistently which makes stories go viral as your page grows. That way you have more options for customers who want shoutouts. They can advertise on your feed and your story. The advantage of some customers posting on your story as well is that you can generate more revenue from shout outs in a shorter period without reducing the engagement level of your Instagram page.
Conclusion
That’s it, folks! This is how you grow an Instagram business page that will set you on the path to making life-changing income.
There are other issues to cover as this is not where the game ends. Some of the tactics have to be altered slightly to suit your particular situation. I have noticed with my page that my audience likes certain types of content. Such that sometimes I post content that is not extremely popular but it still does well on my page.
Start your journey with Instagram today. Yes, Facebook is stingy but there is a way to beat the algorithm, my way.
Remember, this is step one on a journey that sees you sending traffic to your Shopify store from the Instagram business page.
If you feel like this is too long a process, I have other ways in which you can have a page with good engagement in a matter of days. I talk about these approaches in later articles.
I hope that you loved the article, I will see you in the next one.
