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I have built 2 main accounts that I grew at the same time since 2015. My travel blog account @themillennialnomad, my business account @alexthemillennial.

I have managed to grow these accounts up to 10,000 followers within a year by following the Instagram growth tips I will share with you in this blog post.

Note: If you are looking for an easy solution, this is not it. It takes dedication to make it happen and there will be times when you will want to stop. But it is all about pushing through and remind yourself of why you started.

Reaching this milestone is not only about being considered as a micro-influencer in front of brands’ eyes.

Reaching this milestone must have a business purpose. 

• Do you want to work with your favourite brands?

• Do you want to share your story and inspire others?

• Do you want to share your knowledge and educate others sharing the same passion?

• Do you want to promote your business?

Once you will have answered these questions, things should get clearer in your mind and working towards that goal should not be a problem.

So, what will you need to do to reach the 10,000 followers milestone on Instagram?

You will need to start learning the basics of how to use Instagram as a small business owner. Here are a few tips to help you get started.

Find your niche market

By definition “A niche market is a subset of a larger market with its own particular needs or preferences, which may be different from the larger market.”

For instance, my account @themillennialnomad talks about travel and photography. Those are not only two of my passions but also two categories of content people are interested in learning more about.

People are always on the lookout for travel tips and hacks to save money on their next destination or to have a great travel experience off the beaten path.

You need to find a topic that ideally matches with your lifestyle or your business so that you can talk about it with ease and create content about it on a regular basis.

Another example is my business account @alexthemillennial. On this account I share business related content whether educational or inspirational and also share lifestyle tips and inspirational photos.

Once you know your niche, it is then time to plan your content.

Migrate your account to a business account

There are many reasons why you should be using your Instagram account for your business. I won’t share them all in this article, as I already wrote an article about it here. But what I can say is that if you are not using the business feature of Instagram yet, you are missing out on the opportunity to learn more about your audience. Instagram has created business accounts with businesses in mind. What is the number one thing businesses want to know?

They want to know if they are targeting their ideal audience or not?

By migrating your account to a business account, you will be able to know more about your audience and get metrics like:

• Demographic

• Gender

• Location

• Age

• Time your followers are the most active

• What type of content do they engage with the most

All these insights will help you tailor your content for your audience rather than shooting in the dark.

Remember that you want to achieve a goal and the fastest way to reach the 10,000 followers milestone is by knowing what you should post to get the most engagement possible.

Be consistent

Something that will differentiate you from others is being consistent. Only accounts that are posting consistently will grow at a steady pace.

Pick the frequency you feel the most comfortable with. My advice today if you are just getting started, I’d recommend to post content 3 times a day for at least 2 weeks.

Why?

Because that will allow you to collect enough insights to know more about your audience. You will be then able to know:

1. When you should post to get the most engagement on your posts

2. What type of content your audience resonate the most with

Once you know that, you can start slowing down the pace and post once a day.

When I started my travel account @themillennialnomad, I posted at least a photo a day. It was also that time I started taking photography more seriously. I wanted to challenge myself to learn photography and learn how to use my camera. 

And what better way than practicing every day?

It was a personal challenge in the beginning and by doing so, it allowed me to grow my account consistently throughout the year.

Know Your Hashtags

I wrote a complete guide on how to use hashtags to grow your Instagram account that you can read here.

But to sum it up, there are two paths. The free one and the paid one.

The free one is doable but you will have to spend a lot of time searching for the right set of hashtags to get you the most exposure. While the paid one does it automatically for you so that you can focus on doing things that matter the most for your business.

I personally use an online tool called Flick to find the most relevant hashtags for my account and understand how to use them properly so I can spend more time creating content. 

I just have to type one keyword and the tool finds me the most relevant hashtags and sort them out by category (low-medium-high competition) to optimise the visibility of my content.

You can also deep dive into your niche by clicking on the magnifier icon. This will populate a series of more targeted hashtags that are less popular.

If you have your account linked with Flick, as soon as you post, it starts tracking all of your hashtags. When your posts shows up on any of the hashtags, Flick will tell you which hashtag and how high you ranked

Results are shown in an intuitive interface so that you can easily reuse your top performing tags.

And it is a very affordable paid tool that will save you hours of hashtag research!

You can click on this link to get a free 7-day trial and see for yourself.

Be social

The biggest mistake I see many people do on Instagram is post their content and leave Instagram. And they are surprised of not getting any results.

Your best chance to be ranked among the top 9 photos in the discovery page for the hashtags you posted is within the next 10 minutes after your publication.

If you do not engage in the comment section, your post will be lost in the abyss of Instagram digital cemetery!

So, no matter how many followers you got, be active, answer the comments on your posts.

Also, engage with other accounts in your niche. Not only you will be able to nurture relationships with people you share the same passion with but you will also get noticed by their followers who will get interested in what you do too.

Be personal

Yes you can use your Instagram account for your business. But it does not mean that you cannot be personal.

Personal brand accounts are actually more popular among Instagram users than brand accounts. People want to know your story, they want to know about your business and how your products or services can help them.

Why?

Because it helps to build trust and grow your audience. The more value you will provide, the more engaged they will be and ultimately that will help you grow your following.

Another reason to be personal is for collaboration with brands. Brands are looking to collaborate with micro-influencers because they know people will engage more with their content than with macro-influencers.

Not only these collaborations will help you build your authority in your niche, but this will also get you more exposure and attract new followers to your account.

Collaborate with other Instagram accounts in your niche

There is an Instagram feature that allows you to add a collaborator to your posts. Depending on the choice of the collaborator, this can increase your reach quite significantly.

You will see on the screenshot below at the top left, 2 profile pictures, which means that the post is showing on both of our profiles.

This is what I did during my 30 day Instagram reel challenge.

I collaborated with a local page here in Dublin Ireland specialised in featuring content from local creators.

They told me that they enjoy my content and that they usually performed well on their accounts.

Hence, the reason they would like me to add them as a collaborator on all my posts and then up to them to decide which post they wish to accept that fits their feed.

But, as you can see from these recent stats, collaborating with them allows me to boost my reach and engagement quite significantly.

In this case, this post resulted in gaining 4 new followers and reaching an audience of 8 843 non followers.

By posting regularly and better understanding the type of content that resonates with their audience, I can use this strategy to gain new followers by posting on a daily basis.

Provide value

Your content needs to resonate with the audience you are going after. Posting a pretty photo won’t get you anywhere. What you need to do is share content that will encourage them to follow you and engage.

There are 3 types of content that works on social media:

• Inspirational

• Educational

• Entertainment

Pick the one you feel the most comfortable with or mix them together and see what your audience enjoy the most.

With my business account, I share motivational quotes to inspire business owners and solo entrepreneurs to keep working towards their dreams and not give up. I also share some life lessons I believe could help others on their entrepreneurship journey.

Growing a following is not that complicated if you have a strategy in place and I broke down for you the basic strategy I have used when I got started with absolutely no paid advertising.

Make sure to experiment with all the features that Instagram offers, keep the ones that work for you and just be consistent. 

By following these tips you will see your following grow over time and reach the 10,000 followers milestone in no time!

It took me 1 year for my travel blog account to reach this milestone and I did exactly the same with my business account.

If you would like to learn all the techniques I have used on Instagram to not only grow my following but also managed to transform my followers into paying client and monetise my Instagram account, I’d recommend you to enter your details below and get yourself a copy of my ebook 16 Instagram Growth Strategies to Grow Your Instagram Account In 2022.

What about you? What techniques have you used to grow your audience with no paid advertising? Let me know in the comment section below.

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