BIG DOG Instagram Journey

The Mentalist said:

Account 1
Followers: 36,581

Account 2
Followers: 3,797

Account 3
Followers: 19,845

Account 4
Followers: 16,765

Account 5
Followers: 6,079

Total: 82,167 +2,402

Fairly meh week in terms of growth, mainly because I wasn't as active on the main account. I need to decide where I'm going with the accounts pretty soon. The first account I may field offers for soon, and try to sell (not here though). The second account was always intended to become my personal. The third and fourth accounts are just really inactive, and not gaining much. The activity has started to improve some, but they are a long ways off from becoming anything. The fifth has grown faster than I expected actually, and is in an interesting niche.

With @nature recently getting banned from Instagram, and many other large accounts. It's clear in my mind that no account is safe. So having a gem/cornerstone account like I have worries me. Maybe with Instagram, temporary/spam tactics are now the way to go? On the other hand I read an article about a blogger getting paid $5,000 to $15,000 per pic on Instagram by clothing companies...

I have an interesting twist to my landing pages I will maybe try out in the next week. But other than that I'll just leave things to run on autopilot as usual.

Click to expand...

Read that story as well,anywho good luck in the future.

So Account 3 was lost due to copyright violations today. The copyright is on my username. I contacted the person who filed the claim, who was reasonable, but refused to lift it, even if I changed my name and gave him free promotion (account had 21,000+ followers). He declined, so really he wasn't too reasonable.

I don't care too much about losing the account. But I'm extremely alarmed because I believe my main account's username could be taken at any time at this point.

There may be a huge restructuring in my plan soon. Account 2 I may take off FL and use what it was meant to be, my personal account. But at least it has a few extra followers now. Account 4 at this point is not doing so hot. And it really has a limited ceiling IMO.

However two very good handles exist that I may be able to acquire soon, they are in very interesting, unsaturated niches too. What I'd like to maybe do is take account 4 and sell it. And if I find the right buyer sell account 1. A fraction of the money that account 1 gets me should cover the 2 new handles I've found, I'll still have my personal and account 5, which is doing just fine. We'll see whether or not that materializes...

Yikes. How do you get copyright violations off a user name? I have an instagam page where I post videos / pictures, and I posted on brief intro as "no copyright intended" is that fine for me not to get in trouble?

any earnings updates ??? great thread man im also in the ig field

The Mentalist said:

So Account 3 was lost due to copyright violations today. The copyright is on my username. I contacted the person who filed the claim, who was reasonable, but refused to lift it, even if I changed my name and gave him free promotion (account had 21,000+ followers). He declined, so really he wasn't too reasonable.

I don't care too much about losing the account. But I'm extremely alarmed because I believe my main account's username could be taken at any time at this point.

There may be a huge restructuring in my plan soon. Account 2 I may take off FL and use what it was meant to be, my personal account. But at least it has a few extra followers now. Account 4 at this point is not doing so hot. And it really has a limited ceiling IMO.

However two very good handles exist that I may be able to acquire soon, they are in very interesting, unsaturated niches too. What I'd like to maybe do is take account 4 and sell it. And if I find the right buyer sell account 1. A fraction of the money that account 1 gets me should cover the 2 new handles I've found, I'll still have my personal and account 5, which is doing just fine. We'll see whether or not that materializes...

Click to expand...

A few buddies of mine on IG got banned for copyright but got their pages back. They were using somebody else's picture, so I'm not sure if it's the same thing. My friends are also big pages in the millions, so that could also be another factor on how they restored access to their account?

The Mentalist said:

So Account 3 was lost due to copyright violations today. The copyright is on my username. I contacted the person who filed the claim, who was reasonable, but refused to lift it, even if I changed my name and gave him free promotion (account had 21,000+ followers). He declined, so really he wasn't too reasonable.

I don't care too much about losing the account. But I'm extremely alarmed because I believe my main account's username could be taken at any time at this point.

There may be a huge restructuring in my plan soon. Account 2 I may take off FL and use what it was meant to be, my personal account. But at least it has a few extra followers now. Account 4 at this point is not doing so hot. And it really has a limited ceiling IMO.

However two very good handles exist that I may be able to acquire soon, they are in very interesting, unsaturated niches too. What I'd like to maybe do is take account 4 and sell it. And if I find the right buyer sell account 1. A fraction of the money that account 1 gets me should cover the 2 new handles I've found, I'll still have my personal and account 5, which is doing just fine. We'll see whether or not that materializes...

Click to expand...

What was the name of the username?

Artiez said:

Yikes. How do you get copyright violations off a user name? I have an instagam page where I post videos / pictures, and I posted on brief intro as "no copyright intended" is that fine for me not to get in trouble?

Click to expand...

It's technically a trademark violation. The brand has a two word phrase trademarked that my account is based off of. Definitely not an obvious brand name, really doesn't even seem like a super legitimate company to be honest.

Contacted Instagram telling them I just need to change my name and that should clear up any issues, hopefully they respond.

Account 1
Followers: 44,600

Account 2
Followers: Personal

Account 3
Followers: Banned

Account 4
Followers: 17,800

Account 5
Followers: 8,350

So I decided to finally update this. Like I said I lost one account, and I decided to take the other one with a good @ off FL and use it as a true personal account, so its follower count is kind of irrelevant now.

So that leaves me with 3 accounts. Account 4 is pretty much worthless, IMO, account 5 and its niche has some potential though.

The 2 usernames I wanted to target in the niche that I am confident is clutch, well, one of them got banned, I don't know why, it only had a thousand followers and was kind of inactive. The other one I could still probably pick up for under $100 though.

I feel like a really good strategy is to build a large audience across one niche. That way you can sell promotions across 5ish accounts and dominate that niche. Unfortunately my niche that I really like is kind of going to be hard to gain followers in, and now I only have one decent username to target. It's not a niche I can really spam either, the accounts need to be clean to attract brands/companies.

I don't have a good idea as to what I'm going to do next. As of now I will indefinitely continue to grow my main account. I am going to explore a "spam approach" as well.

Any journey thread I seem to start here ends up not making sense to continue, unfortunately. With the unpredictable nature of Instagram it just doesn't make sense in my mind to keep trying to grow large authority accounts. It may make sense to just go all out on a niche, but I'm not sold on it yet. Is there money in authority accounts? Yes. But there's also Instagram ads, something that brands may be more likely to turn to in the future.

I'll keep updating this thread in the future with my Instagram musings and tests, as well as the growth of the 3 remaining accounts. I'm working a temp software job that's consuming a lot of time now, and I'm also putting most of my excess time into an authority social media site. I may turn that into a journey, but only once I have a serious start (unlike this journey).

This isn't really a failed journey, I have a lot of ventures and plans that end up like this. For me it isn't worthwhile to spend large amounts of time into short term projects. Long term, reliable income is what I like to shoot for. While that can be something that's hard to attain when you spend your time working on things like social media and SEO, it's worth chasing. I don't see this being a reliable long term project for me now. When I started this journey, I thought it would, but I've learned a lot about Instagram since I started. But learning is all part of the journey. So stay tuned in the future for a more established, point of no return journey (I'm only starting the thread once the website is finished).

Maybe I'll master starting a legitimate journey in the future! Last time I ended the journey too early, before my site exploded and started bringing in $x,xxx per month. So I'll leave the journey open and keep posting random updates in the future.

Good to see you posting updates. I remember there was a big hype about Instagram a few months ago where some people posted their success making money, which made a lot of people jump into the train, but unfortunately Instagram quickly changed the game and also the saturation showed up quickly. I remember people were making money off 10k accounts a few months back, nowadays it's really hard to make money even with 20k accounts. Well, the game constantly changes, but I'm pretty sure if you can survive through the storm and make a good authority account, there are good amount of money to be made waiting for you.

JustChillin said:

Good to see you posting updates. I remember there was a big hype about Instagram a few months ago where some people posted their success making money, which made a lot of people jump into the train, but unfortunately Instagram quickly changed the game and also the saturation showed up quickly. I remember people were making money off 10k accounts a few months back, nowadays it's really hard to make money even with 20k accounts. Well, the game constantly changes, but I'm pretty sure if you can survive through the storm and make a good authority account, there are good amount of money to be made waiting for you.

Click to expand...

My thoughts exactly.

The big hype is still going and a lot of people are getting in, but IG is not that easy right now. You can't expect of doing the same as the big accounts and make easy money because that doesn't work anymore.

LleixG said:

The big hype is still going and a lot of people are getting in, but IG is not that easy right now. You can't expect of doing the same as the big accounts and make easy money because that doesn't work anymore.

Click to expand...

JustChillin said:

Good to see you posting updates. I remember there was a big hype about Instagram a few months ago where some people posted their success making money, which made a lot of people jump into the train, but unfortunately Instagram quickly changed the game and also the saturation showed up quickly. I remember people were making money off 10k accounts a few months back, nowadays it's really hard to make money even with 20k accounts. Well, the game constantly changes, but I'm pretty sure if you can survive through the storm and make a good authority account, there are good amount of money to be made waiting for you.

Click to expand...

That was kind of a gut feeling I was starting to get midway through my journey. Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, are all getting better at monetizing their own platform and cutting down on spam. So really it seems like your only option is a "grind to the top" mentality with authority accounts. Granted places like Instagram still show evidence of a lot of spam being there, but it's a different kind of spam. It's not growth hacking an account to 500k followers. It's spam selling clash of clans gems, and stuff like that.

With that being said my next project in the works involves pinterest, but not in a super spammy way. I think that once it is ready to go into a journey thread, I will create one master journey thread for whatever I decide to post.

The Mentalist said:

That was kind of a gut feeling I was starting to get midway through my journey. Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, are all getting better at monetizing their own platform and cutting down on spam. So really it seems like your only option is a "grind to the top" mentality with authority accounts. Granted places like Instagram still show evidence of a lot of spam being there, but it's a different kind of spam. It's not growth hacking an account to 500k followers. It's spam selling clash of clans gems, and stuff like that.

With that being said my next project in the works involves pinterest, but not in a super spammy way. I think that once it is ready to go into a journey thread, I will create one master journey thread for whatever I decide to post.

Click to expand...

I'm getting into Pinterest myself as well, already purchased FL. I've been waiting for my exams to end and reading some stuff about Pinterest meanwhile, will probably start next week. It's a decent platform to make money on, but I will keep going with Instagram as well. As for Twitter, I thought about it as well, but I don't see it as profitable as Pinterest/Instagram, I might get into it later, but for now I have no intentions.

I sold the main account in the 4 figures range, so despite my spending on everything I've turned a profit, which is a relief. Now I basically have 2 inactive accounts with one word usernames at 17k and 8k, I'll maybe try to get rid of them cheap to put a cap on my Instagram experiment.

Work on the next project is starting up now, I'm trying my best to enjoy my summer, but also get some side projects done. Stay tuned for another journey thread in the future, but one that is in full swing before I start, so it doesn't end up like this. I'm officially closing this journey now.

I am a bit late commenting on the culmination of your journey but I have been following closely because IG has driven decent traffic for my work. I have 2 accounts both attached to sites and automated on FL. The growth is not as exponential as yours 1.5k and 2.6k respectively. I did not have VPS, proxies. I do focus on high quality content.

Optimization is a a weekly process as there are different events in the respective industry niches I am in, weekly. Also I do not know FL all that well.

I worry BIG time ALWAYS about losing the accounts with FL. The main account is optimized as aggressively (big risk) as I think I have taken it as closely as I can to the brink, without suspension, and even then, in the later parts of the days, I cannot even "like" on my phone. I have had 2/3 soft bans and regular activity suspension for example "liking". I post once daily manually on this one. I know I am taking a risk on liking and commenting.

The second account is a bit in the trendy niche so has grown faster from scratch regardless of the fact that I post 1 or twice monthly. In the niche 1k is nothing so its quite easy to grow the account but impossible to do anything with the account that I can forsee in the near future as players in the niche have +70k followers! My intentions arent to "monitize" the accounts but rather brand.

Next step, since it worked for you is to get a VPS, private proxies and keep optimizing the accounts. I am tempted with your spamming idea but I have to be careful as the intent is to attract big companies to do business at some point.

All the same thanks for sharing. This journey came at the right time, soon after I purchased FL and was on a learning curve.

All the best in the future efforts as well as your exams!