LieutenantLame
Junior Member
- Jun 30, 2013
- 129
- 33
End Goal: $884 a month
$844 for rent, $40 for beer. Student gotta do what he's gotta do to keep a roof over his head and a beer in his hand.
I had an old Instagram account from a couple years ago with currently 12.8k followers. Last post was just shy of a year ago, and the account was built using bought followers. So it's safe to say maybe 95% of these users are fake. After posting a couple images, I get on average 800 likes per picture. There are maybe 5 comments on each image. I'm assuming of these engagements, maybe 5% of the users are real people, willing to spend money. Good enough for me, that's roughly 40 users that I can pander to.
The niche? Women's fashion. It's a hard, competitive niche, but I didn't sign up for some walk-in-the-park job.
The general plan is to use Redbubble at the start as a store page. I will eventually make an ecommerce site, but that's way in the future. I will be targetting women in college to late 20's, since that is an audience I know best. I'm using Socialblade to track followers, and Crowdfire to schedule posts (just testing at the moment).
The instagram profile is just reuploads from pictures I found on Google and Reddit. That has to go. I'll be deleting those pictures once I get original content. I want to build a brand, so I need high quality, original content. How to get that? I'm an amateur photographer, so I'm just going to take pictures myself. I've contacted my school's fashion club to see if anyone is willing to model for my instagram page.
I'll probably just take a shit ton pictures, hopefully with different models in different outfits as well for varied content. I want to establish a general theme for my instagram, so people can recognize the brand easier. So while the content may be varied, the theme of each image will more or less be identifiable. Like how you can spot an Andy Warhol or Banksy art piece when you see it.
With high quality images, I will start following women's fashion pages and their followers. Hopefully, this will net me real followers willing to buy stuff. I will also try to keep engagement rates up by responding to comments and whatnot every day.
High quality original content -> High quality followers is my philosophy.
I will be posting every day, twice a day. Once in the morning and once in the evening (once I get pictures). When I have designs, I will follow the 80/20 ratio, rounding down. So for the 14 photos I upload in a week, 2 of them will be promoting my store page.
The promotional posts will likely be posted on Friday and Wednesday, in the beginning. My reasoning for this is that Friday is when people usually get paid, so I'd expect more buyers. Wednesday because people may have gone shopping over the weekend, and are not ready to purchase more stuff online. I figured Wednesday might be a good day to pick. These days are purely speculative, and over the months, I will be changing the day of the promotional posts, and with enough data, I will determine which days nets me more sales.
This leaves the design process. I'm not too brilliant at making art, but I have some vague idea of how to do graphic design. I will eventually outsource this process, but that is for the distant future. The brand will be sort of streetwear/hip/trendy. I'm thinking something like a minimal Supreme or Comme des Garcons. At least where I'm from, the 70s/80s are making a comeback in terms of aesthetics, so my designs will ideally have a subtle nod towards that era.
Here are my strategies for growing the instagram once I have high quality images:
According to socialblade, in one year, my instagram will only have 92k followers.
This is not favorable. I want 100k by 6 months at least. The first couple of months will be growing my instagram, so promoting products is not in view quite yet, however, I will start the designing process. Over this next month, I will slowly transition my instagram page, which is a general women's fashion niche, to a more targetted and brand-focused page.
So, short-term goals?
1. 15k more followers by next month. Total of ~28k.
2. Get high-quality, original images one way or another. I need 70 photos per month, so I will attempt to get 140 to have an extra month of content just in case.
$844 for rent, $40 for beer. Student gotta do what he's gotta do to keep a roof over his head and a beer in his hand.
I had an old Instagram account from a couple years ago with currently 12.8k followers. Last post was just shy of a year ago, and the account was built using bought followers. So it's safe to say maybe 95% of these users are fake. After posting a couple images, I get on average 800 likes per picture. There are maybe 5 comments on each image. I'm assuming of these engagements, maybe 5% of the users are real people, willing to spend money. Good enough for me, that's roughly 40 users that I can pander to.
The niche? Women's fashion. It's a hard, competitive niche, but I didn't sign up for some walk-in-the-park job.
The general plan is to use Redbubble at the start as a store page. I will eventually make an ecommerce site, but that's way in the future. I will be targetting women in college to late 20's, since that is an audience I know best. I'm using Socialblade to track followers, and Crowdfire to schedule posts (just testing at the moment).
The instagram profile is just reuploads from pictures I found on Google and Reddit. That has to go. I'll be deleting those pictures once I get original content. I want to build a brand, so I need high quality, original content. How to get that? I'm an amateur photographer, so I'm just going to take pictures myself. I've contacted my school's fashion club to see if anyone is willing to model for my instagram page.
I'll probably just take a shit ton pictures, hopefully with different models in different outfits as well for varied content. I want to establish a general theme for my instagram, so people can recognize the brand easier. So while the content may be varied, the theme of each image will more or less be identifiable. Like how you can spot an Andy Warhol or Banksy art piece when you see it.
With high quality images, I will start following women's fashion pages and their followers. Hopefully, this will net me real followers willing to buy stuff. I will also try to keep engagement rates up by responding to comments and whatnot every day.
High quality original content -> High quality followers is my philosophy.
I will be posting every day, twice a day. Once in the morning and once in the evening (once I get pictures). When I have designs, I will follow the 80/20 ratio, rounding down. So for the 14 photos I upload in a week, 2 of them will be promoting my store page.
The promotional posts will likely be posted on Friday and Wednesday, in the beginning. My reasoning for this is that Friday is when people usually get paid, so I'd expect more buyers. Wednesday because people may have gone shopping over the weekend, and are not ready to purchase more stuff online. I figured Wednesday might be a good day to pick. These days are purely speculative, and over the months, I will be changing the day of the promotional posts, and with enough data, I will determine which days nets me more sales.
This leaves the design process. I'm not too brilliant at making art, but I have some vague idea of how to do graphic design. I will eventually outsource this process, but that is for the distant future. The brand will be sort of streetwear/hip/trendy. I'm thinking something like a minimal Supreme or Comme des Garcons. At least where I'm from, the 70s/80s are making a comeback in terms of aesthetics, so my designs will ideally have a subtle nod towards that era.
Here are my strategies for growing the instagram once I have high quality images:
- Get shoutouts from various fashion blogs and instagrams. It is of utmost importance that these shoutouts are of my products. Why? Generally, a random shoutout of a regular image will net very minimal followers. However, when you introduce a call-to-action (in this case, this will be a "buy a shirt!"), this will entice the user to look more into it (hopefully, again this is all speculation).
- To add to this "call-to-action" strategy, in the shoutout, I will include some sort of deal. Like "buy this shirt while it's still 50% off" or something. However, I'm not sure if Redbubble does this yet, so this may have to wait until I have my own ecommerce site.
- Have users share my post. Again, with the call-to-action. I will post one of my products, and ask users to share the post for a chance to win a free shirt or something (if you guys were here for this, the red bikini got viral from this, and many instagrams still employ this tactic). This strategy basically puts the legwork on my users. I won't use this until I have 50k followers, maybe.
- Testing different hashtags. I will try to alternate between various hashtags with low competition. I am still doing research on this. Instagram changed their algorithm to favor posts with minimal and meaningful hashtags, so that's what I'm doing. I'm not sure if crowdfire tracks hashtags and whether a user comes from that hashtag or not. If not, I will likely write my own script that analyzes a post's hashtags, and the users that have liked it. Then analyze the engagment of the hashtag. The script will be rather minimal, because I would rather just use iconosquare, but at $10 a month, I could wait for a bit.
- Using youtube channels. This will happen once I have some good designs out. I will send youtubers some of my products to promote them. The idea is to promote the brand and gain a following. I will analyze this technique on a small scale by just sending a couple shirts to smaller channels. If I see a significant bump, I'll employ this tactic on larger channels.
According to socialblade, in one year, my instagram will only have 92k followers.
This is not favorable. I want 100k by 6 months at least. The first couple of months will be growing my instagram, so promoting products is not in view quite yet, however, I will start the designing process. Over this next month, I will slowly transition my instagram page, which is a general women's fashion niche, to a more targetted and brand-focused page.
So, short-term goals?
1. 15k more followers by next month. Total of ~28k.
2. Get high-quality, original images one way or another. I need 70 photos per month, so I will attempt to get 140 to have an extra month of content just in case.
