The past week I reached 100,000 followers on Instagram, which is insane. The succes of my Instagram is also the reason i started my blog. Thanks to this page I have been able to meet amazing people, and work with great companies. here is my story + tips on how to increase your follower count, and how to earn money with instagram.
My story
Back in 2013 I started a instagrampage; @searching_for_adventure, a friend of mine also made an extra account and we both posted pictures we liked on our accounts together. When i started my instagram it was just for fun, i loved searching for pictures, trying to reach more followers, meet new accounts. In the beginning gaining followers went so slow, i remember looking up to accounts with 25K and thinking i would never be able to reach that, and now here I am. I could’ve never expected this.
Why social media?
When you have a large following on social media, that can definitely increase the views on your blog! also it’s a great way to connect and discover other bloggers, and a other way to earn money. I earned a lot of products and also money by my instagram page, i’ll tell you about that further in this post.
Gaining Followers
in the beginning to get followers i used hashtags, oh lord, yes i said hashtags. Now you don’t have to worry, I won’t suggest this, you might gain likes and followers, but most of your followers will be ‘ghost followers’ and you’ll end up having less likes. what i can suggest? well I’ll tell you that gaining followers in the beginning ain’t really easy, I think the best option you got is to search for other accounts with the same theme, whether this are fellow bloggers, or fellow inspiration accounts, you’ll make friends and gain followers and likes. When you start to have a larger amount of followers (from 100 or something) you can also do sfs (shoutout for shoutout) with those fellow accounts with a same amount of followers, this is a way to both discover other accounts and gain new followers. Once you have got more followers, it will be easier to gain and maintain those followers.
Creating a feed
Creating a feed can be another difficult thing, when you can choose out of entire weheartit and tumblr, all you have to do is look for pictures who look nice next to each other, but when you have to take pictures yourself… it can be be hard to post everyday day or to actually find pictures that match. what I’ll suggest is to find a app (I like VSCO.cam) and search for a filter you like, this way your photo’s will always look sort of a like.
Business via instagram
I think almost everybody nowadays knows you can earn money through instagram, but when I started that didn’t quite exist yet, and therefore I never thaught I would be able to earn money with my instagram page. At 26K something I got my first buisness proposal. Ever since then I collaborated with different brands and they send me their products for me to promote them, I got jewelry, clothing, make-up, skin care products, bags, bikini’s, everything. When I started to gain more and more followers I also started to earn money. I try not to do collabs like these to often since I know my followers often don’t like them. lf you have non-inspiration account with this amount of followers you’ll get paid about $400 for one post with a cup of sponsored tea, and big Celebrities like Kylie Jenner can get up to $100,000 for a sponsored post, quite insane right?
that was all for todays post, i hope you enjoyed it! and if you’d like to follow me on instagram, my links are:
http://instagram.com/searching_for_adventure and http://instagram.com/citiesandcouture
XOXO
Sophia
Cities & Couture 