Instagram Experiment (Guide/Updates)

Hey Guys,

Long time lurker, first time poster. I've been doing a bit of research on how to make some cash on instagram. I thought to myself, "f*** it, there are plenty of options, I might as well get the ball rolling." So I started up my 2nd instagram account (first is for personal use, which I started a couple months ago) to try to gather a large following and hopefully make some money off of it. So among other things, here are 10 easy steps (that I am currently testing) to gain a massive following on Instagram. (yeah I use parenthesis for asides, wanna fight about it?)

The two main ways I've seen for making money on instagram is by:
A) Shoutouts
B) Surveys
C) Affiliate programs

I'm going to attempt both as soon as this account gets enough followers. Currently I have about 110 followers and I started the account 1 day ago. It's a pretty quick turnaround but I do have a solid name with a solid niche. The niche is in the realm of Fitness and working out.

What I've been doing so far is as follows:
1) post initial content; about 7-10 quality pictures with quality #'s (The #'s take a bit to find. You want popular ones with 1million+) [pictures are scraped as noted in step 3]
2) search for large accounts within the same or a similar niche as myself
3) scrape their pictures from quality accounts
4) start following as many people you can from the accounts with a high amount of followers
5) set a few aside for potential shoutout buys when following is bigger
6) every hour the follow cap resets so you want to be posting quality pictures with quality #'s and following people from quality accounts
8) I skipped 7 because f*** you
9)While you wait for follow cap to reset you should be liking pictures from the high quality #'s that you use in your pictures.
10)rinse and repeat until you have a solid following of 2k-5k.

([optional: you can buy followers from fiverr to gain a solid base. NOT TESTED; but may increase turn around for follow-backs or follows from randos.)]

I'll leave it here until I catch up with my overall plan. I will update this post when I can/get bored. So for now that's all. I'll be back fam. I'd also like to add I am doing this entire project manually. The only bot I am using is 4kstogram to download mass amounts of pictures/videos from higher quality instacounts.

Day 0: while posting quality content I gained 8 followers without following anyone.
Day 1 (8/1/15): 17 posts, 122 followers, 500 following. That's a 24.4% follow-back. That's below where you want it to be. I'll update if I find a fool-proof method to increase this number.
Day 2: 23 posts, 225 followers, 640 followers. That's a 35.1% follow-back. The follow-back percentage has caught up. Makes sense, not everyone is going to follow back immediately. I've been put on a follow restriction. I might give the following a rest until tomorrow. I've been mass following people, but I am going to try to limit the number to strictly 50 per hour. If you have any suggestions let me know. I have 10-20 likes per photo so far.

"I skipped 7 because f*** you"
^ this s*** here just made my day xD

Anyone have any insight on the follow restrictions?

lol following this thread just because you skipped 7!

Thanks for the post Theris.

How important are quality #'s? Can they actually attract in more followers ?

Thanks.

Patriot Vegetable said:

Thanks for the post Theris.

How important are quality #'s? Can they actually attract in more followers ?

Thanks.

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I'd say the hashtags are pretty important. Especially when you start doing giveaways, shoutouts, etc... Hashtags aren't a major asset for gaining followers, though you do gain a couple. The #'s help bring exposure to your posts which is where your monetization methods come in. You want high amounts of likes and overall interaction(comments + likes) with the things you post. I currently am on follow restriction and I'm gaining 1 or two followers every hour just from the hashtags on the content I post. Overall that isn't a major amount, but it's something(this number could also increase when you gain more of a base). But like I said quality #'s are going to be important when you want to start making money.

Update mid-day 3: 30 posts, 325 followers (#is still going up), 1005 following. 32.3% follow back, and that number is expected to go up as the day goes on. That's a decent number. Anything about 30% is good. But what I really wanted to post about is the follow restrictions. I've been posting content pretty regularly, but what I haven't been doing is liking other photos regularly and I have only been mass following people from a few (large) accounts from my niche. Here is what you should be doing:

Instead of following 50 per hour all right in a row, you should be completely random in your follows. What I do is search (here comes those high quality #'s again) some tags from my list and like a bunch of random pictures. Then I do to the account whose picture I just liked and start following their followers. Anywhere from 2-10 people at a time. 2 people for really small accounts (like 100-400) and 10 for really big accounts (like 20k-100k+). This has helped me jump from 640 following to where I am now at 1000+ following in just half a day. I have gotten a few follow restrictions, but they have only lasted a couple minutes, rather 12 hours. I hope this anyone looking to avoid follow restrictions.
Best, Theris

6pm day 4: 39 posts, 958 followers, 2556 following. The randomized follow method has helped immensely. I'm at a 37.4% follow back. I got my first shoutout 4 shoutout request. I got the s**t end of the stick. He has 1k followers but I'm not getting a lot of likes on the photo i had him post. But I'm not really worried. Helped me figure out how these things work and that experience is worth more than the shoutout itself. But anyway I'm ranging from 20-40 likes per photo.

If you have any questions let me know.
Theris

EDIT 0630: Just hit 1k followers!

Following. Thanks for posting this, OP.

Is there any type of automated service to follow people on Instagram for you automatically?

andrecampbell said:

Is there any type of automated service to follow people on Instagram for you automatically?

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An automated service that does things automatically you say? A little redundant don't you think? But yeah, I personally don't use them (I'm poor right now, until I start monetizing this account) but some people use igerslike and FollowLiker(abbreviated to FL). I, for now, do everything manually.

End of day 5: My follow privileges have been "temporarily disabled" two times now. Once last night, which I reported as a mistake and was lifted when I woke up and again this afternoon which I reported again and was lifted a couple hours ago. Not sure what that means but it's probably not good. But I don't really know their algorithms or what ever. It's probably good that I jumped on the reports (because I do everything manually) right as I got the notice. But as of typing this I have 45 posts, 1972 followers, 5010 following. I've jumped more than 1k followers (more than doubled) in one day. I'm expecting 30-50k followers by the end of the month. That's all for now Fam.
Best,
Theris

We're doing something similar with the follow/unfollow method

When do you start unfollowing?

We followed upto the limit of 7500 and now are unfollowing anyone who didn't follow us back. But it takes awhile to use this method.

Theris said:

End of day 5: My follow privileges have been "temporarily disabled" two times now. Once last night, which I reported as a mistake and was lifted when I woke up and again this afternoon which I reported again and was lifted a couple hours ago. Not sure what that means but it's probably not good. But I don't really know their algorithms or what ever. It's probably good that I jumped on the reports (because I do everything manually) right as I got the notice. But as of typing this I have 45 posts, 1972 followers, 5010 following. I've jumped more than 1k followers (more than doubled) in one day. I'm expecting 30-50k followers by the end of the month. That's all for now Fam.
Best,
Theris

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Happens man, it's usually either a 12-24 hour ban. To avoid it, just go easier on the follow/ unfollow, what you're doing might be a bit aggressive. Furthermore, sometimes if you're doing it manually it's hard to keep track on private accounts that you've followed, and these add to your follow limit and can ban you if a tonne of them accept and knock you over the limit (if you get what I'm saying).

tubetilla said:

We're doing something similar with the follow/unfollow method

When do you start unfollowing?

We followed upto the limit of 7500 and now are unfollowing anyone who didn't follow us back. But it takes awhile to use this method.

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I am pretty much doing this method except I am adding my own little twists. Essentially I'm trying to refine the method.

Dvillain said:

Happens man, it's usually either a 12-24 hour ban. To avoid it, just go easier on the follow/ unfollow, what you're doing might be a bit aggressive. Furthermore, sometimes if you're doing it manually it's hard to keep track on private accounts that you've followed, and these add to your follow limit and can ban you if a tonne of them accept and knock you over the limit (if you get what I'm saying).

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I get what you're saying. Thanks for the clarity on that. I may be a bit aggressive, but the question I'm looking to answer is - Can an account become so big, it is unbannable? Hopefully the answer is yes and with each passing follower I am becoming harder and harder to ban.

Theris said:

I get what you're saying. Thanks for the clarity on that. I may be a bit aggressive, but the question I'm looking to answer is - Can an account become so big, it is unbannable? Hopefully the answer is yes and with each passing follower I am becoming harder and harder to ban.

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Yes/no but you do get higher limits with aged accounts. You're still prone to bans - either triggering their IG spam filters or someone reporting you.

Bringing this baby back from the dead. So last summer I tried this and quickly lost interest. Managing an instgram account was a lot of time and effort doing everything manually. However, I have repurposed this insta account (I gutted all the pictures, the name, and the description), added new pictures, with a completely different niche/theme. My plan for this account is now as follows: use an automated system to gain likes/followers/unfollow those followers. The automated system I am using is via a thread I saw earlier this month which sparked my interest. The tutorial for setting up this bot via python is here:

vodkacola said:

Introduction
So you want to bot Instagram, but wouldn't like to throw hundreds of $$$ into the overpriced GUI tools that everyone on BHW seems to prefer? Worry no more! Vodkacola will help you spam the shit out of this social network, for FREE!
In this thread I will share the tool(s) I personally ended up using, and how to set them up, step by step.

What we will set up is an Amazon micro instance which runs these python scripts created by our lovely friend LevPasha: https://github.com/LevPasha/instabot.py



What features does this bot have?

-Follow by hashtags
-Unfollow
-Like by hashtags
-Comment by hashtags
-Custom follow and like limits
-Unlimited account support
-Proxy support​

What using this bot requires?

-a PC
-Ability to read​

What using this bot does NOT require?

-Coding skills
-Paying monthly fees for a motherfucking computer program
-Paying for anything at all
-Clicking referral links from some bullshit BHW tutorial thread​

Setting up AWS Micro instance (optional):
In this part we will set up a server where the scripts can run when your computer or internet is turned off.

1: Register to Amazon Web Services as a free tier user: https://aws.amazon.com/free/
2: Set up billing alerts as instructed here: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/free-tier-alarms.html
3: Launch the virtual machine where you will run the bots, as instructed here: http://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/tutorials/launch-windows-vm/​

Installing Python
Next you need to install Python either into your PC or the Amazon virtual machine you just set up. I'm not going to explain this myself, the internet is full of tutorials for this stuff!

Using instabot.py

1: Download instabot.py files: https://github.com/LevPasha/instabot.py/archive/master.zip
2: Extract the .zip to your desktop / porn folder / wherever
3: Locate the file called "example.py"
4: Right click
5: Open with notepad
6: Edit in your account info, tags, follow and like limits
7: Save as "opensourcebotsfuckyeah.py"
8: Run the file you just saved. If everything went right you should see a terminal like this:

9: Go outside and spend the money you just saved at a liquor store​

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One thing missing from the guide is you need the "Request" library for python. You can easily google "Request lib download" and there will be a handy guide video that will come up. I used that. One problem with this bot is that it only unfollows followers that the bot itself followed during the session. Also once you close the bot it will not unfollow those people. So you will have to manually get your acc to 0. Plus side is it's free!

I also kept all my followers from my fitness niche. Old acc name was "liftinggoals" so if anyone wants to take that insta name feel free. I suspect that I will get a lot of unfollows as people will start seeing PC gaming (as this is my new niche) pictures in their feed. But that's okay. I left off with around 2500 followers. Good start for a new account. My plan as of right now is to build this gaming instagram to springboard my twitch.tv account. Around 10k followers I will start advertising my own twitch account and/or youtube account for monitization. I love video games and play them in my off time so I might as well try to make some money off of it. I know it's not as easy to enter into the youtube/twitch scene as it once was but this instagram will be my ticket in (hopefully) so wish me luck ya'll. I will try to update this thread as my success grows or you will not hear from me in another year. Depends on how long my attention span is in the pre-success time frame. I've never actually followed through with much because I get bored and other things in life take over. So we'll see how long I last at this. But any useful information I obtain I'll be sure to post. As for now, only time will tell. Sorry for the wall of text.

tl;dr I'm back with a new niche on the existing account to try to gain a following by gamers to boost my youtube/twitch accounts for monetization. Maybe I'll succeed maybe i'll give up. Enjoy the thread.

Why give up on fitness niche? Monetizing gaming vids is very tough

justgotkoned said:

Why give up on fitness niche? Monetizing gaming vids is very tough

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It just wasn't rewarding. In real life I am fit and enjoy lifting etc.. but it just wasn't something I could keep doing without it feeling like a drag. It did start to feel like a drag so I just ended up stopping and other things replaced the instagram in my life. So I thought I would give it another go with something I am more passionate about. I realize youtube/twitch is infinitely harder to break into now than it once was, but what's life without a challenge. Am I right?

can u give some tips on ur fitness account? What hashtags worked best and what helped u grow the fastest? Im stuck on 5k followers for a few months now