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How I built a following of 3.8 Million on Instagram. Blueprint

Micahbiz

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Want to give me some of that? :)
I hope he sells you a ''limited time special offer'' for coaching via email.

To me, this guy said a lot and ended up saying nothing. Create accounts, post content, automate it via software and monetize it through influence, shopify, partnerships etc.

As others have pointed out, this smells funny.

A better strategy than doing this instagram thing: I would learn basic programming, and build an instagram bot. I'd then build a nice website with special discounted pricing and offer a 3 day free trial, as long as you give me your debit card info of course.

I'd then write a made up story, one that talks about how I to was a broke, stressed college student who only wanted to succeed. In fact, I wanted to succeed so bad that I worked, hustled sometimes 12 hours a day to get my instagram accounts to grow... ON TOP OF CLASSES. It was brutal... Until one day, something changed my life. I discovered automation (which you can conveniently find here, on a website only a month old in my first thread)

Then, I would go on forums all over the internet, reach out to bloggers and post on youtube about the software that changed my life. Then I would actually get rich from all the people who believe my vague story and buy my automation software.

Ugh, one can only dream. Sadly it looks like someone beat me to it.

Of course, I could be wrong, this could all be legit. I don't buy it though.
 

MJ DeMarco

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In the past I have also used a lot of different bots. IGCompanion is properly not the one with the most functionalities but I feel the most secure with it since it does not use a reversed engineered api to access my accounts. Other than that I will not continue talking about igcompanion anymore because there seem to be people that think this thread is about selling anything. And it definitely is not about that.

Thanks for offering your expertise.

You'll have to excuse the skepticism from some folks on here.

Many of us are mathematical in our analysis and when things don't pass the mathematical smell test, they will say something.

History has proven to this forum that the random gift horses who suddenly show up here offering some kind of click-baity "blueprint" aren't here to share knowledge from the goodness of their heart, they're here to lead generate and sell something, usually a five-figure coaching program or some type of continuity service. In other words, the gift horses invariably are always trojan horses.

That said, your blueprint in TLDR is this:

1) Create good content daily (outsourced to Fiverr)
2) Use bot to simulate engagement.
3) Collect money via your real business which is real commerce?

Is that correct?

I have earned my first million. Special thanks to @MJ DeMarco ! I seriously am in love with you.

Congratulations, glad to have been a tiny piece to your puzzle.
 

Kade

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In the past I have always had a single >official< account for the corresponding brand.
While that is a good idea, such an account does not have as much potential in reaching new customers than having multiple accounts in a more generic niche.

Experience shows that advertising to the same amount of total followers (one time a single brand account, other multiple accounts where the followers have interest in the topic, not the brand necessarily) differs drastically. With the described approach in this thread the conversation rate increases by 60% +

This is interesting, good thinking.
Normally, you can only put one link in your bio but with this you can redirect visitors to your main account.

What content would you post in your generic accounts (before you accepted promotional requests from other brands) ?
 
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Jinn Sola

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Thanks for offering your expertise.

That said, your blueprint in TLDR is this:

1) Create good content daily (outsourced to Fiverr)
2) Use bot to simulate engagement.
3) Collect money via your real business which is real commerce?

Is that correct?

Hi MJ!

If it needs to be broken down to 3 steps, then yes BUT multiple times. The secret is doing all of it in parallel, with consistency and intensively. See insane engagement method.

@MJ DeMarco Have you had your own experiences with Instagram marketing? If yes, how were your results?
 

Jinn Sola

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This is interesting, good thinking.
Normally, you can only put one link in your bio but with this you can redirect visitors to your main account.

What content would you post in your generic accounts (before you accepted promotional requests from other brands) ?

I always ask the question of what kind of content would I want to see for a specific niche?
Then I try to find accounts that already exist in that niche, see what people like about their content and take it to an extreme (brutalism).

To give you a real example:

I started visiting different cities lately and enjoyed visiting various of places. So I created 4 accounts for specific cities in Europe and Australia. On those I post content of places that people should definitely NOT visit because of a given reason.

I get all kind of negative feedback but exactly those Instagram accounts that are different sky-rocket. Good luck!
 

sophiee

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I started visiting different cities lately and enjoyed visiting various of places. So I created 4 accounts for specific cities in Europe and Australia. On those I post content of places that people should definitely NOT visit because of a given reason.

I love this idea of brutalism. I guess it is too late now to use this for another city account now ... Do you have any ideas on how i can take this technique of brutalism into the beauty niche?
 
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EricFromCanada

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From my experience, Instagram is catching on to accounts that do follow/unfollow and punishing them through shadowbans. No big accounts that I know on Instagram even do follow/unfollow since it's way too risky and most of the followers you get are spam. Instead most high growth pages I know post highly engaging content and then use DM groups (large Influencers engage on your content) to land on the explore page and grow that way. I have tried both methods and the explore page + DM groups have worked way better in my experience. Are you doing anything with the explore page and DM groups or just the botted automation?
 

ALC

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So let's say my niche is Menswear Clothing.

You would create multiple accounts in this niche and grow them to a point where people would look at them regularly for inspiration, you would run a bunch of them and simply put the link of your shop in the bio and making post of the brand to promote it ?
 
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Hai

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It´s very subtle, but what I get by reading between the lines is making very general content for a niche(which logically can get a huge following fast) and then market the brand through it.

Creating content only with the brand itself is slower, because it doesn´t have that content/mass market potential. This is why personal branding might be slower than the general market approach.

Everything else is just putting in the work.

Congrats on your success @Jinn Sola
 
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ned.ryerson

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You produce some pretty impressive outcomes.

I've developed an AI platform the automates engagement across all the main social media channels using content curated from across the internet coupled with a manual process of brand positioning using virtual assistants, an outsourced technical resources.

Was able to go from your average Joe to an industry influencer in 6 months.

Bringing the Boom!
 
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Jinn Sola

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I love this idea of brutalism. I guess it is too late now to use this for another city account now ... Do you have any ideas on how i can take this technique of brutalism into the beauty niche?

In my opinion you can easily set yourself apart on instagram if you produce content that is different, because these days everyone is publishing the same kind of content on Instagram and people are getting sick of it.

I have literally had success with an account where I had a software engineer develop a program that slices an image into 5 pieces, reorders them and puts them together again. People love accounts that are different. And that is most probably why I have an easy time growing.
 

Jinn Sola

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From my experience, Instagram is catching on to accounts that do follow/unfollow and punishing them through shadowbans. No big accounts that I know on Instagram even do follow/unfollow since it's way too risky and most of the followers you get are spam. Instead most high growth pages I know post highly engaging content and then use DM groups (large Influencers engage on your content) to land on the explore page and grow that way. I have tried both methods and the explore page + DM groups have worked way better in my experience. Are you doing anything with the explore page and DM groups or just the botted automation?

I have actually done an experiment just about a month ago:

First account follow / unfollow manually everyday for 2 weeks
Second account follow / unfollow automatically but simulated natural engagement everyday for 2 weeks
Third account follow / unfollow automatically

Result: only the 3rd account had a shadow ban after 2 1/2 weeks. (Checked each with 2 low ranking hashtags)
To conclude, I still have great success gaining followers every single day

Instagram notices DM groups on certain schemes. I don't suggest using dm groups anymore.
 
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Bert B

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Apologies if I missed links to your Instagram accounts, I couldn't find links. Can you post a few again?
Also, sorry if asking a similar question to before: are you 80 accounts all under the one niche umbrella? So, do you have a connection that migrates your followers to other accounts... like a franchise model?
 

Jinn Sola

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Are you doing anything with the explore page and DM groups or just the botted automation?

After about 5-10k I DM tons of accounts in the same niche doing shoutouts for shoutouts. However, not for all accounts since this process eats time. If you can afford it definitely try to buy shoutouts from accounts with high following (> 1M) and see how it works for you.
 

Xeon

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After reading all these and messaging OP, I'm going to say he could very well be the real deal and not DamienPros v2 (which is what I thought previously).

This guy really seems to know what he is doing. :clap::
It's not so much his botting tactics but his content marketing philosophy.

Btw, since DM groups are known to be under IG's radar, would you say Telegram groups are better? I'm currently in a private group where there's all mainly big accounts liking each other every 30 mins. I haven't tried it yet although I'm in the group.

Speaking of making a business out of IG, I got to know this guy previously, who runs an IG repost page on cars and makeup. Showed me the pic of his Mercedes Benz which he brought from the earnings. On his makeup IG page, he directs all the chicks there to his site where he sells dropshipped makeup kits. Neat huh?
 
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Jinn Sola

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So let's say my niche is Menswear Clothing.

You would create multiple accounts in this niche and grow them to a point where people would look at them regularly for inspiration, you would run a bunch of them and simply put the link of your shop in the bio and making post of the brand to promote it ?

Yes, although the description is very simplified. Important parts are to implement the idea of brutalism into the niche accounts to separate yourself from the other accounts. When reaching a certain amount of followers trade shoutouts with similar accounts, keep the quality of your content high and go insane with engagement on potential customers/followers, and while doing all of that direct the funnel to your commerce websites.
 

Jinn Sola

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It´s very subtle, but what I get by reading between the lines is making very general content for a niche(which logically can get a huge following fast) and then market the brand through it.

Creating content only with the brand itself is slower, because it doesn´t have that content/mass market potential. This is why personal branding might be slower than the general market approach.

Everything else is just putting in the work.

Congrats on your success @Jinn Sola
Thank you!

I might not be the best teacher yet, but I am trying to get better.

For me, I feel it's not easy to explain the strategy that I have tried to perfectionize because there are so many factors that have an immense weight on the outcome.
 

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Have you found that your chosen username impacts activity and followers?

What tools and/or programs do you use to edit/upload photos? Lets say for example that I find a picture of a car on google images that I want to share with my followers. Do you just screenshot it, or save it down and edit before uploading to Instagram? Any tools/tricks for photography selection and posting high quality photos?
 
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Jinn Sola

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Apologies if I missed links to your Instagram accounts, I couldn't find links. Can you post a few again?
Also, sorry if asking a similar question to before: are you 80 accounts all under the one niche umbrella? So, do you have a connection that migrates your followers to other accounts... like a franchise model?
I have not posted links because in the blueprint I stated that I use IG automation aka botting.

I am running 3 e-commerce websites in different categories and have designed that each of those is backed up by an equal amount of niche accounts. On those I post valuable content every day to attract and keep followers in between these "value posts" I publish promotional posts that directly link to the commerce systems.

I have tried of using the main brand account as a middleman between niche accounts and websites but that does not work as well. Actually it works a lot worse.

Hope that helps!
 

Jinn Sola

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After reading all these and messaging OP, I'm going to say he could very well be the real deal and not DamienPros v2 (which is what I thought previously).

This guy really seems to know what he is doing. :clap::
It's not so much his botting tactics but his content marketing philosophy.

Btw, since DM groups are known to be under IG's radar, would you say Telegram groups are better? I'm currently in a private group where there's all mainly big accounts liking each other every 30 mins. I haven't tried it yet although I'm in the group.

Thank you, I take this as a compliment!

I have used Telegram groups before, and had some success with it. However, I totally stay away from them now. Even though nothing is proven, Instagram might have the possibility to track the referrer app when you switch from Telegram to like/comment on media. You can risk it on niche accounts but I would definitely stay away from it on your brand account.

Speaking of making a business out of IG, I got to know this guy previously, who runs an IG repost page on cars and makeup. Showed me the pic of his Mercedes Benz which he brought from the earnings. On his makeup IG page, he directs all the chicks there to his site where he sells dropshipped makeup kits. Neat huh?

Stay away from Mercedes and directly go for Lambo, do it like MJ :cool:
 

Xeon

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I have tried of using the main brand account as a middleman between niche accounts and websites but that does not work as well. Actually it works a lot worst

So you're saying to use the niche accounts to direct the visitors directly to your site?
E.g:

Niche account ---> website to get sales

Instead of

Niche account ---> Brand account (website link in bio) ---> website to get sales

?
 
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Jinn Sola

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Have you found that your chosen username impacts activity and followers?

I would say as long as the username fits the niche it's alright.

For example: If you are posting luxury homes a username like "luxuryhomes.87" is inappropriate

while when posting memes you can definitely go with "funnymemes.87"

To conclude, fit your username to what your audience expects: serious? humorous? ,...
 

Jinn Sola

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What tools and/or programs do you use to edit/upload photos? Lets say for example that I find a picture of a car on google images that I want to share with my followers. Do you just screenshot it, or save it down and edit before uploading to Instagram? Any tools/tricks for photography selection and posting high quality photos?

For photo editing my VAs and I use photo fox (iPhone app) because it's simple, fast and you can get great results (see examples on their instagram account).

Please don't use images you don't have the rights to use for. If you want to take images instead of creation your own content, then link back to the author in the caption.

Stick to a well defined theme within your niche and then go with the brutalism method. If you decide to repost, there are tons of images you can search for by # or let a VA do it.
 

Jinn Sola

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So you're saying to use the niche accounts to direct the visitors directly to your site?
E.g:

Niche account ---> website to get sales

Instead of

Niche account ---> Brand account (website link in bio) ---> website to get sales

?
Yes exactly! People are lazy. The less clicks needed to get gratification, the more users will gratify themselves with your products.
 
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Nelow

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Well, let's give him the benefit of the doubt as a person who knows Instagram, But I HIGHLY suggest people stay away from that bot website. It was finally archived as an actual website (11-17-18) Check for yourself IGCompanion History . The lifetime sale is now over, but you can only pay one way, your credit card. But if on the off chance you actually shop online and happen to trust PayPal to do your transactions for some reason they only have one option available to you because they don't "official support PayPal" and that's for a mandatory 1-year subscription with no Free 3-day trial. If you know anything about e-commerce taking payments with PayPal is one of the easiest ever to set up. Takes more work to set up legit credit card processing also cost more.

Learn all you can from our new forum member, but I wouldn't suggest having that bot site anywhere near your financials.
 

Xeon

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Let's say for example that I find a picture of a car on google images that I want to share with my followers. Do you just screenshot it, or save it down and edit before uploading to Instagram?

That's too slow. Download Regrann app and install on your phone. When it's in, each time you see a pic or video you like, click the 3-dots in the IG post and tap Copy Link. The app takes over the rest lol.

EDIT : sorry, the above was for reposting within IG. Read wrongly lol
 

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I love this idea of brutalism. I guess it is too late now to use this for another city account now ... Do you have any ideas on how i can take this technique of brutalism into the beauty niche?

By taking fan favorite brands/products and posting why people SHOULDN'T use them.

In America some of the most popular brands (on Instagram) would be Anastasia Beverly Hills, Huda Beauty, Too Faced, Kylie Cosmetics, KKW Beauty, Charlotte Tilbury, etc. etc. etc.

These brands have a culture and community of people who swear by the products just because they love the brand. Watch the bad reviews on Youtube to see what popular beauty influencers have to say about the products.

(Usually poor color pay off, fading pigmentation, too chalky/dry, etc. etc. etc).

I do hope this helps you Spohiee!
 
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sophiee

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By taking fan favorite brands/products and posting why people SHOULDN'T use them.

In America some of the most popular brands (on Instagram) would be Anastasia Beverly Hills, Huda Beauty, Too Faced, Kylie Cosmetics, KKW Beauty, Charlotte Tilbury, etc. etc. etc.

These brands have a culture and community of people who swear by the products just because they love the brand. Watch the bad reviews on Youtube to see what popular beauty influencers have to say about the products.

(Usually poor color pay off, fading pigmentation, too chalky/dry, etc. etc. etc).

I do hope this helps you Spohiee!

Somehow I feel like the beauty niche is over-saturated already. Lately I notice the growth of my follower base stagnating on Instagram and i dont know what to do about it anymore.

Is it the content, or what can I be doing wrong?
 

MJ DeMarco

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@Jinn Sola - thanks for following up with questions. I'm happy to see (as well as others) that after 4 pages we haven't been linked to a $997 IG Blueprint Coaching Class with $100 in free bonuses. ;)
 

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