Is My Instagram Strategy Easy To Monetize?

Hello Everyone!

I am new to the IG marketing world and have been searching for some marketing methods and such around this website (They're all great, by the way. They work wonderfully.), but I have one account of mine that I am using a different approach on. I would like to get some opinions on if it's easy to monetize and/or whether or not I should change up my strategy.

The account is in an outdoor niche, and I am using Instagram user's photos for my content. I am creating a community of people who like to participate in these certain outdoor niches and give them a chance to be featured on my Instagram if they post a photo of their choosing and hashtag a specific keyword. 3 times daily, I search for this specific hashtag and curate the photos that I see and choose the best ones that would fit the niche/quality I am looking for. If I like them, they get reposted and credit is given to the original user. I started the account a month ago (give or take a few days) and currently have 1.4k followers and engagement of approximately 90-130 likes per photo posted (with hashtags). There are almost 400 photos that have my blog's keyword hashtagged as of now and there were absolutely zero when I started.

At this rate, I feel like things are growing at a decent pace, but could be better. I plan to have a monetization plan by the time I reach 10k followers. The Shout Out method wouldn't really work with the way I am currently generating my content. However, I have refrained from reposting those images that are hashtagged with my keyword by businesses as I see this could be the only viable option for shout out income later on.

Should I start generating content in another way and discontinue the reposting of users images so that I can use the shout out method for income later on? Or is there a more lucrative way to monetize a blog that is run in this way.

I appreciate all of your help!! I hope that I explained my question in a good way.

Thanks.

Bump. I know this is slightly different from the popular methods on here. Willing to take any kind of constructive criticism on this method.

for me i never had problems getting followers or likes, but more so i think the question is how do you turn that into $$. because ive found IG users are like brainless zombies they just press LIKE LIKE LIKE barely even look at the pic, or FOLLOW FOLLOW and thats it, they usually arent ready to check a url, or buy something or visit a blog thats my opinion . ive had better results with pinterest people seem engaged in buying and clicking more so IMO but def keep this updated interested to see if it works out, getting the likes and followers can be done with a bot, but getting the $$ in the end, thats the hard part. best of luck to you interested to see how it works out you should make a journey.

Appreciate the feedback! I like the idea of starting a journey on here. I think I will do that.

I posted a journey thread to have a single place to keep track of all of this and the progress I am making. Sorry for the extra post here. If the mods want to delete it, feel free as I will just be using the journey thread for any further questions/inquiries.