Some tips for people who want to start out (from what I learned):
1) Post ONLY high-quality contents, if you have no ideas, don't post for that moment and think about what to post later.
2) Do (at least) 2-3 Instagram stories per week, thanking everyone for the follows (every 2-3 weeks) or asking if someone wants FREE shout out
3) Back to point 2, do FREE shout outs to high-quality pages that have posts, don't advertise people with 1-2 posts (and posts may be high-quality contents).
4) Keep the page in the niche you picked; go off topic the few times as you can, never is better.
5) Don't be too much salesy, keep your page just a page where people can enjoy your pics, not where they can buy a product or a service. When you get to 20-30k, start to be salesy, not too much tho.
6) Block the bots. There pages (with 10, 20, 30... nk) that will auto-comment your posts with "amazing!", "nice pic", "wow", "[...]". Sometimes you will see that the comment has nothing to do with the post, in this case you can tell that it is a bot. Block them out, they are basically advertising themselves on your post.
7) Interact, interact, interact. This is important, if you want your post to rank, you have to make people comment it. Every 2-3 posts, post an image that is in your niche (as always) and post a second image (the image that you see when you "slide" the first one, sorry if I can't explain better), with question, something like "what do you think about the previous image..." or something like that. Always be niche-oriented.
8) Use hashtags in the first comment, so the description of your post can be longer and cleaner.
9) Like every comment people make on your posts, even reply to them, not everytime tho.
I'll update this list every week, at least I'll try to. If you have some questions, don't hesitate to contact me