1. Adjust your bio - it`s your business card, so describe what you do, what is your expertise, and how can you help others.
2. Find and set the right niche/sub-niche for you - it`s important to know who your audience is to know how to adapt your strategy (students - what students exactly? where from?)
3. Post constantly - reels, stories, posts - choose things that match your bio, post about your work, results, interaction with students/clients, and feedback. Very important, give some free tips, and valuable info for your audience. You will help them, they will like it and come back for more. They will see you as someone who can offer them useful information, as someone with expertise. And that will build and grow their faith in you and they will start working with you and recommend you.
3. Do hashtag research and choose the right ones for your niche. Use them also in reels. Very important with these reels because you are visible not only to your followers but to all IG users and you increase your chances of getting new followers and of raising the engagement.
4. Community engagement - it`s very underrated, but you need to follow, like, comment and DM. Use meaningful comments and always try to help in some way. It`s the only way to grow a stable community, that will recognize your value and recommend you to others.
Have patient, be consistent and you will see awesome results! Leave the bots (they`re too risky anyway), go for the manual growth, and grow organically! Leave me a message if you have questions, I`m happy to help with some advice, free of charge.
Good luck with your journey!