Last updated on February 7th, 2023
Instagram is an attractive and highly useful social media platform to promote brands. Most businesses explore the potential of it to take their products or services to millions of people across the globe. At the same time, Instagram is also a source for people to earn money. They can monetize their Instagram accounts to earn fame and make money. In this webinar transcript, Gent Huruglica shows the right way to monetize Instagram pages. Have a look!
Instagram is amongst the biggest social media platforms today. It boasts of more than 3.5 billion active users that include individuals and brands. Like all the other social media platforms, Instagram has its distinctive personality. It is image-based media that use pictures and videos to drive viewers’ attention.
So, individuals and business owners make use of the power of visuals on Instagram. This platform lets them explore images that include videos in varied ways to reach out to their target audience. After all, visuals catch our attention instantly. You can also take the help of Instagram templates available online for creating eye-catching visuals.
But, Instagram is also a source of making money. Most users have explored this platform to earn decent money regularly as they know how to do it in the right way. Still, many others have no clue about how to monetize their accounts professionally to get the desired results.
Considering that, Designhill, the leading creative marketplace, organized a webinar with Gent Huruglica on 9th October 2020.
About Gent Huruglica
Gent Huruglica is a social media marketing expert and works to educate people on different issues about using Instagram. He is a freelance graphic designer. In the last two years, he has served many clients to help them in content creation and Instagram growth. He started his brand on which he is currently working.
Here Is The Video Of The Webinar With Gent Huruglica
Basics: How to monetize Intagram? How to grow on Instagram?
Learn about 3Cs
We will learn which is the best board and how to do it. How to pick a country to optimize your video, the three C’s to grow on Instagram, researching hashtags, and the famous DM groups, and why we need to avoid them. Still, some people do not understand the best way they have for doing these.
Then, we are going to talk about how you show people that you are on Instagram, and how to grow an online presence. And then we will talk everything about monetization, and all the different strategies that we can learn there.
Two main types of Instagram content
Let’s start with the first type of everything about content. The most famous saying about Instagram is that the content is the king. You will grow only if you have good content. And that is 100% true. Everybody knows that, and it has been proven.
There are two main types of posting content on Instagram. It can be creating your content. Then it can be reposting and curating all the comments.
Reposting Content
Reposting is when you get somebody else’s post and you post it to grow a little bit. Now, if you do that, it’s not wrong. But you always have to give credits and everything because your post might get turned down for copyright purposes. That is not what you want.
Creating Own Content
The other one that I always suggest in doing it is the one I was doing it since I started trading. That is creating content out of your mind with your ideas. You help people with your mindset and your expertise, which people will appreciate more and label it more.
Which is the best content type for Instagram?
So, which one is the best content type to post on Instagram? There is only one thing to remember when growing an Instagram page. That is about expressing value and giving the best worth to the people you know.
The content format does not matter much
Therefore, as long as you can create your content, the format of the content that you’re going to use does not matter. So it doesn’t matter if it’s going to be HGTV or videos or stories or even a single post or carousels. We are seeing the carousel trends that everybody is posting, especially the business pages and freelancers. People are doing this because they think this is the best type of content to post. It does give great results, but it’s not the best.
Instagram algorithm wants people to stay longer on the platform and by posting carousels, this happens. They need a longer time to read it than just a single slide. Then, they will save it because if you post some value in one single slide, people can just take a screenshot and then they keep them on the phone.
Carousel
On the carousel, they are not going to screenshot 10 slides. What they do is they are going to click save and more says that you have, and you are going to rank on the Explore page. This is the biggest reason why people do that. But, that doesn’t mean that just because you’re doing carousels, you’re going to be a great page and something because it all comes down to what you show and how you show that.
Pick your niche
The next thing you should be thinking about is your niche. So, you first understand what the type of content is that you want to post, and you know what to do with it. The next thing is to pick your niche to post on Instagram. This is so important because it shows who you are and who you are going to help. It is not everybody who has an Instagram page that just says everything about pets, cars, graphic design, and everything. You should be specific to help more people and build up our community better.
Tips To Pick Your Niche
How am I going to help people?
To know your niche you need to answer the questions that show how you will do the things. So, answer questions like these. How am I going to help people? How is my content going to affect anyone? How will these influence future generations that come to my page? Answering these questions will help you create a better bio for yourself.
Who am I?
For example, in my case, I am a graphic designer. It is best for me if I start to upload content about graphic design. And if I do branding and Instagram, I might as well mix these two, which I did. If you are a guy who loves cars and posts something about cars, or if you’re someone who loves fashion, you can do that with fashion and everything.
What am I going to do?
Next, ask the question what am I going to do? You need to know what you are going to do. You know who you are and what you are going to post. It is now time to know what action you need to take. For example, I am a graphic designer, but I am going to post about typography or color palettes, or stock photo images. You got to get specific to that too.
Whom am I going to help?
And then the last question is who are the people you want to help. This will help you know about the specific set of people that need your services.
When you answer the above questions, you come to know about your niche. Remember that a niche is a must for your Instagram journey.
By sharing this, they understand your audiences as graphic designers. You are going to help them, talk and engage them as much as you can so that you understand their problems. And then you solve that by your content or even by yourselves. When you answer all these, that’s the first step that you do.
Optimize Your Bio
The second part of your Instagram journey is to optimize your bio. Why is the bio so important nowadays? The bio converts visitors to your followers. This is because people read the bio. If they find it interesting, they want to know more about you. It makes you look like an interesting person. This will turn them into followers. They will click on the ‘Follow’ button when everything in the bio is just like a CV of your account.
Show people who you are
So, you need to show who you are, what you do, and how you do it. In the niche, you answered those questions for yourself. But, in the bio, you answer these questions for the other people.
You should ask some more questions to optimize your bio. These questions are who am I? What do I do? How can I help? And what else?
As I said, you keep those for yourself? Do you need to know to go inside yourself? Well, in this door on these questions you need to give the answer they love people. So when they want to know when they want to see this. So you show people on your first lines of the buyer who are you so graphic designer or Canva teacher, your Instagram branding coach, something like that.
So then what do I do? You can say I help calm I create content for people and teach students and everything
Then, ask how can I help? So it’s you to tell people where you can find them? How can you help me post daily content about this?
And the last one, the what else part, is like a CTA where you show people some extra things about yourself. For example, you want to create the highlights, which are a part of the bio as well. Then you create some stories about yourself about what you do. And then people can just stick to that and they can learn a lot from that. So when you get these, you’re ready to make the bio.
Pay heed to the three Cs to grow on Instagram
Now besides every other strategy to grow on Instagram, the three most important are the three C’s. These are called the content, consistency, and community.
If you can master these three, everything on your road is going to be way easier and a lot more enjoyable.
Content – It must be innovative
The first one is content. We talked about that in the first part. So, we might have heard on Instagram pages, even ourselves or from other people that the algorithm is not working and my page is not going to grow. That’s all the story that we tell ourselves.
But, it’s all because of the content. You posted some great content a long time ago, and you had great results. Later, maybe you changed your content and it’s not getting good results. It is not because of the reach dropped or anything, it’s because your content changed and people noticed that.
So it works the same, they see your content, they don’t find it interesting anymore, and they just scroll down. So, content must be innovating all the time. It must be strategizing and helpful the same way every time to a new follower.
Consistency – Post content regularly
The next one is consistency. Besides the other reasons, one that blew me the best is consistency. Ever since I started, I have made more than 200 days on my Instagram journey. And I have posted every single day. So, Instagram wants you to be consistent. You can even see that when you post something on your profile, they will see that.
When using your Instagram Insight tool, if you have a business, you can begin an experiment. You can see that the insights immediately start to grow up the reach of the impressions, the profile visits, etc. Everything starts to rise because you have posted one day and then more and more. So, the more consistent you are, the more Instagram will reward you with reach and other insights.
Community – Build it with your niche
The last one of the Cs to grow on Instagram is community. If you can build a community on Instagram, you have gathered people who think and like you do. Then, you are like a friend there and everything is just amazing. To build a community, you have to understand by the first part of the niche making that we explained.
There are three parts to niches. So if you are a graphic designer, you can start from graphic design, which is generally post everything. Then, you can go to typographically, which is more specific. Now, depending on your target, if you want to build a community, or long term business and something great on Instagram, you have to go for the specific niches. But if you’re just interested in Instagram growth and have a huge account with a lot of followers and not so long, you can go for the general niche in that case to build your community.
How to research hashtags?
Researching hashtags is one of my favorite parts and the hardest sports that people face. This was one of my biggest problems ever on my Instagram journey. To do my research on hashtags, I use these two resources:
Ninjalitics
Ninjalitics is an app that shows your profile analyzes. When you search for a profile there, you can see their average likes, average comments, everything. And then you can also see their hashtags on the bottom. So, if you get a successful account, you can find their hashtags. You can use those hashtags for yourself. Then you gather three or four successful accounts. And then you can gather everyone there, which is going to be amazing.
Display Purposes
The other resource that I use to research hashtags is Displaypurposes.com. This website works both on desktop and phone. But I would suggest you work with this from the phone because you get the hashtags and then you will post them and get results from that. You can place a hashtag with the help of this website. For example, let us save the niche graphic design. It will show you the most used hashtags related to graphic design and then it will show you the best performing hashtags for graphic design.
Avoid big hashtags
You should go with the best-related hashtags because you need them. If you go for the big hashtags, you will get ranked on them but you will not last more than five or 10 seconds there. This is because they have millions of posts and people keep posting all the time there. Therefore, your posts are going to be lost in millions of posts over posts and that’s not what you want to do.
Look for specific hashtags
You should get as many more specific hashtags as you can and the Display Purposes helps you best with that. You can do that automatically while using Ninjalitics by basically spying on the most successful guys that are already doing a great job on Instagram. You see the big accounts and the good accounts on the graphic design. Then, you want to know what hashtags are they using.
It is going to be hard if you go on their post to read all the hashtags, or even see them. So, what you do is you go to Ninjalitics, scroll down, and see a place called Hashtags Most Used. You can copy those based on your phone and then use them. I will explain one part here. Lately, people have been saying that copy and pasting hashtags are bad for your Instagram. This is more of a misunderstanding than a statement. The algorithm indeed tracks your hashtags. The problem is that if you use the same set of hashtags that you have used in the post before.
For example, there are the same 30 hashtags or 10 hashtags. Now, if you use them in the same post again, they will consider this a scam. And they will lower the reach purposely on your account, which is not what you want. So, what you can do for copy and pasting is something different and it has been working for me as well. This works well for me especially in carousels, as their people do not think that carousels work well. The hashtags indeed have lower results on carousels, compared to the single.
Mix up hashtags
You can go with an angel at Display Purposes and gather 20, 100, or 300 hashtags. The more hashtags you have, the better it is. So, whenever you start posting something, you want to get 30 hashtags, and then you mix them up together. If you have 300 hashtags, you get five or 10 here from one creator, then 10 or 20 from the other creator, and so on.
Then, you mix them up together and you make up a new set of 30 hashtags to post. Then, the results are way better. So, what we need to know is copy and pasting the same hashtags is not the same now.
About DM Groups
Now, let’s get to the part of the DM groups. This is one of the most important ones and the ones that I like to talk most about. So, that some while ago, these used to be a great source of growth on Instagram, a lot of people pages would be using DM Groups. This is especially if those are motivational pages and business pages.
At that time people would gather in a group basically, whether it be that on an Instagram group or via the Facebook group or even a Telegram group. And they were sent the link of their posts in that group when they would post it. You then hoped that all of the groups where every member there is going to go and engage in that post. Now, this might sound great because you get to have a lot of people engaging in your post within the first time that you have posted it.
Why should you not use DM Groups?
Why is using DM Group bad? The biggest reason is that they carry fake engagement. Instagram tracks this and punishes whoever uses those with reduced reach. All the pages that were grown because of these in the past are all in low and inorganic reach, no matter how they look.
So, these groups sound too good to be true. And most of the time in life when something sounds too good to be true is because it means that is not true. Therefore, Instagram has officially banned those. Instead, you should aim for organic engagement because this will give you trust from your followers.
And I want to share my story here. I lost on account with 12,000 followers, the one that I said I opened back in July, just because I used DM groups to grow. I started using them ever since I started my page. And then every time I would post, I would create some group with similar-sized accounts, and then growing I would get bigger accounts at all.
Fake Engagement on DM Groups
But, the biggest thing is that the engagement is fake. This is because whoever is in that group, they do not know a better way to get engagement besides doing that. So what they did was they joined themselves in many groups. I was importing more than 13 DM groups. Imagine that now. So every group had more than 30 people. Every time someone would be posting three to four times a day was also accountable. You would go and engage with that. And then you would post your post there.
But just because there was a lot of this, the engagement started to be faked. So when everybody was doing copy and paste comments on it, nice post buddies kept posting like this without actually even liking the content. That’s why this broke the whole Instagram thing. And they officially banned those somewhere around October or November 2019.
At that time, I had a page with 11,000 followers almost going to 12,000. And I wanted to sell it because I understood that what I did was all wrong with it. And nobody bought it because the Insights on a 12,000 page were weaker than the Insights I have on this current page with 2000 followers. That’s what we get when you do a fake engagement. So it all seems good. And it all seems okay to do it.
But, then after some time, you can understand that this is the biggest mistake that you can do on Instagram. So, even if you have a new account, you do not understand how to grow and how to get people to get on your content.
How to grow without a DM Group?
This is what you should do right now in case you do not have a DM Group. Think of How To Grow an online presence. The hardest part is to grow from zero to 1000 followers. When you get this, you are going to be happier than reaching 10 thousand followers. Trust me here, because it’s the hardest part. That is because Instagram counts you as a new account. After all, you own one.
They don’t give you extra reach or they do not push your content to be on the Explore page. That’s why it’s so hard to get there.
Identify Your Community
You need to identify the community of your niches. Let’s say you are in the typographic community. You start to see all the typography pages, the big, small, and the medium ones. Then, you engage with them as much as you can, talk to them in the DMS. You engage with them on their comments when someone asks a question in their comments and you will be the first one to answer it. That’s something that worked well for me.
Steal Your Followers In An Organic Way
There is a method I specifically use. I called it the ‘steal your followers’ method. What you do is, when you find the best accounts that are on your dish, you go on them, follow them and turn on their post notifications. Now, anytime they post, you’re going to get a notification that they just brought up a new post. After that, you go on and be the first one to leave a genuine, thoughtful comment, following values that possibly can even get pinned.
A long time ago, the payment option wasn’t available, but now it is, which is a great chance. So if you’re able to do that, it’s going to be amazing. And you just scroll on their comments section as long as you can elaborate as something you ask them. You get some progress in the beginning.
That’s how I grew in a good way to 1000 followers in the beginning. It is all organic and based on using D and blues as it will be worthless if you go there and they do not reply. So that’s what you do to get to 1000 followers with no need for DM Groups and buy followers. Anything Instagram has is a machine that can check all those things. Therefore, do not try to trick a machine because you just can’t do that.
Tips To Monetize Instagram Account
Now, I want to get to all about monetization. So people love this part for most. How do you monetize? First, we need to understand what monetization of Instagram is. Most people think that this is like when you monetize Instagram account or a YouTube channel. Youtube pays you for more views and more likes and subscribes.
But, Instagram is not going to pay you for that unless you’re a celebrity, have a tick comment, tick profile, and things like that. So, monetizing is getting some profit, monetary profit out of Instagram, not necessarily by posting or anything.
There are many ways to earn profit from Instagram. You can sell, offer services, build a partnership with other firms, and everything.
Here Are Some Of The Most Effective And Common Ways To Monetize A Recent Graph
01. Affiliate Marketing
The first way is affiliate marketing. Affiliate Marketing is essentially when a firm or company is going to pay you for referring their products or their services to your audience. They give you a link, you give that link to people so that they know which persons which people went from you to that page. For, example, a stock photo company made you their affiliate by giving you the affiliate link of the subscription for a 20% commission.
Let us say that they have a paid subscription to become a pro user. So they need more exposure and give you this link. So you share this link to the followers. If you have a good community which trusts you, they will get on that by the subscription and then you get a commission from that. The commission percentage will be decided mutually by the firm and you.
02. Sell Products and Services
You can get profit from Instagram also by selling services and products. This one is my most favorite because it’s what I’ve been doing ever since I started from day one on Instagram as it is easy. You can create ads for your products and services with the help of Instagram ad templates which will help you to sell your products easily to target customers.
You just offer some services as a freelancer to brands or people or other pages. So what you can offer with this is web development or photography. You can offer content creation, which is what I do. That’s my main service and my main monetization techniques. Offer these kinds of accounts, you give yourself a prize, you are known about this, you share content about this, and then people find you, or you can approach and find them.
The other one is selling products. This requires a little more time. But you can also start at the beginning with this one if you are on account that you want to sell. For example, shoes, or t-shirts, or jewelry, or anything else that needs to be shipped are all that you can sell on Instagram. You make a profit from selling shows or whatever products on your Instagram page, I am also doing this. For example, I sell a course, an e-book, which makes it up to both selling services and products as a way to monetize my account.
03. Collaboration
The other one is collaboration, which is great. When this happens, it’s something that gets you emotionally and you feel great when a company can ask you for a collaboration.
A company can come to your Instagram page or your email and want to partner with you. It is almost the same for affiliate marketing only that here you might do a bigger deal. For example, if graphic design is your niche and a marketing agency or a fun selling company calls you and shows you a product to sell. You will sell that and get something in exchange. But you can choose if you want to get affiliate marketing or you want to get something for yourself.
Tips To Find A Genuine Collaboration
A lot of accountants and firms are scams on Instagram. You have no idea how many such firms are there. So, you have to be careful in this type of account approach to yourself.
i. Know The Brand
You should answer these three questions to know if the collaboration that you are doing is great. So you should know if you are somebody, whatever whoever is in your audience, and this color. What happened? How would you benefit from this, you got to know if you would get some good benefits and good price and everything.
ii. Research Their References
The other thing to find out is this brand has a good reference already. See their website, Instagram page, referrals, testimonials, to know if they are legitimate and offer something good.
iii. Think Of Your Followers
Then, find out if your followers are interested in that product or service. These types of companies are really exciting to work with. You should not partner with a company that your followers are not interested in. For example, you might be with a flower company or you can be with photography, but your followers are about cars and fashion. This means it’s not going to be interesting, no matter how good the community or the growth is you will not be able to sell anything.
Designhill: What should be the hashtag strategy?
Gent: The strategy is the same for every niche. So let’s say the niche is art or photography. Following the same method that I use, you can go to an angel to take some type of art and then or painting Gora. You can sculpt and see the Best Types of hashtags that are out there. Then get those and use them on your posts. The biggest struggle on your account might be what to post because hashtags are everywhere.
Post Unique Content
Many people have interesting niches but suffer from content ideas. So, I post art or something like that. You can post, let’s say, on behind the scenes, or something like how do I make this type of painting. How do I make this within one hour, best color palette, etc? People find such posts valuable and they save it. Then, your content is going to blow up on the Explore page. You can also show them your work.
Get tips from the best accounts
For hashtags, it is the same strategy that works everywhere. You can even also get tips from the best accounts on your niche. Ask them what they do if this method does not give you a result, and it works mostly. I have helped some clients in the photography niche doing this.
So experiment with Ninjalitics spying the biggest accounts on your niche. And then also go to the Display Purposes and try to find related hashtags and that can work. If this doesn’t work, tag me on my Instagram and I will one by one teach.
Designhill: How to come up with content ideas, and how should they go about putting content on Instagram? How many times to post?
Post Carousels Once A Day
Gent: As far as the frequency of posting content on Instagram is concerned, that depends on the type of content. If you post carousels as I do, then post one per day. This is because carousels take a lot of time to create. But, find the best time to post.
Post 4-5 Single Images A Day
If you use single images, you can post many more of them. But I would say three times is the most that you should go for single images. You can post in the morning, midday, and then dinner. If you post single images for more than four or five times, then that doesn’t get resolved. This is because when you post something that post needs to have some attention and engagement.
If you leave some time for people to come on that post and engage in it, it’s going to be good for you. If you post an hour or two hours later, that post is going to be forgotten, and everybody’s going to be focused on the next one. This means you will have two weekly posts instead of one strong post, and one strong one is better.
So, the number of posts depends on the day, Gary Vee says post 100 pieces of content a day, but that’s another strategy. It all depends on yourself and your page. You have to be consistent with content. I prefer to go with fewer posts a day, and only post one time a day right now. I tried to post two to three times but it wasn’t that effective as with one post. When you post one time, you give more effect to that post.
Tips To Get Content Ideas
I said that in some niches, getting content ideas is easy. For example, in graphic design, it is quite easy. You can just find the best color palettes or how to choose one, how to create a logo and tell it to people. But in some niches like photography or filmmaking, it can be sometimes harder if you want to post infographics or carousels.
i. Use Carousels
I struggled when I first started with carousels because you do not understand how to structurize it and how to get the ideas. Once you get this, you can make a carousel out of anything.
ii. Show Behind The Scenes
Show your audience what happens behind the scenes. Can you tell them what to do? Besides posting on Instagram, you can show them how to create a great color palette, for example, as a designer, step by step. You can show them how you choose the color and how you create one. So, you write it down somewhere and then you get an idea of that.
iii. Write Down Your Ideas
Anytime you can get an idea, you’ve got to write it down. So it can be on your phone or it can be on your text anytime. So you just need to write this and keep ideas saved. I keep them on my phone, I sometimes can see a movie and find an idea out of it. Sometimes even an image can inspire me to make a post. So, I type it on my phone and keep it safe to post it later. That’s how you get ideas.
iv. Explore Guest Posts
But it is hard to get ideas for everything. I mean, even if you’re going for carousels, you want to do it every day. It’s hard to post every day and get ideas. Sometimes I have days when I have no more ideas. So I would get people to do guest posts or when someone does a post for you. And then you posted that. So you have the posting, he has more exposure, and both when both the parties win. So that’s how we do it. Otherwise, getting content ideas, it’s always a struggle, if you find a way, it’s always better. So try to show people what you’re doing.
Designhill: How do we get our target audience to follow us?
Gent: You need to find these people by yourself. Then, you need to create a way to make them come to your page. You can drive them based on your knowledge, comments, or your content on your Instagram.
Identify The Biggest Pages
So, identify the biggest pages of your audience. Let us say you are in graphic design. Get the biggest pages of your audience graphic design and go and see the other accounts that are following them already. You can see them in the comments because these guys are better. And you can go to the Followings list or Followers, but not all of them are the ones that you need. So the ones in the comments are the best ones that you need.
Engage With The Followers
You should engage with them at the place to comment where you find those followers. When you are engaged with them, they discover you. Then they talk with each other and share the posts. The word of mouth works on Instagram as well. So do not just talk but you should also do texting. It works the same in every niche. That’s how you find your target audience, when you know who you want is the biggest step. Most people don’t even know who they want to target when you know that you’re way ahead of most people.
And then after a while, the target audience is going to come back all by themselves. This is because the content is going to be pushed on the Explore page and hashtags. And that’s all. Also, hashtags play a big role in that.
Designhill: I post frequently, but I can’t grow. What is your advice on it?
Post at the right time and engage
Gent: The problem might be in your content, you might want to focus more on improving it by design or by other timing. Also, the timing can be wrong. You may be posting at a time when most of your audience might be inactive. You should do some experiments to find when the best time is. A good way to find the right time is to let people know that post is going to come two hours or three hours later so that they turn on the notifications for that one. And then a lot more people are going to know that you just posted so it’s like turning your post notifications from just that one. If you do then that helps.
The other reason can be a lack of engagement. Try to target more people and engage, even more, design it better, or try to find a different time to post.
Designhill: What is the strategy to follow accounts made by other people in the same niche and liking the content as well as sending a DM good for getting more followers?
Gent: This is similar to the ‘follow and unfollow’ methods. I don’t recommend this because Instagram does not want you to do this. According to this method, you go follow accounts that are in your niche and then follow them with time and hope that they return the following. Well, that is not how it works.
Connect and Engage Followers
So the way to approach them is by direct messaging. The best strategy is to connect to as many people so when someone gives you a follow you drop a voice message or a normal message to them saying thank you that you followed me. And this creates a little bit of friendship between the account and the follower, which then helps build a community better and easier. I did this at the beginning, which was helpful.
But it doesn’t mean that just because you do it, you will get more followers. This measure will keep your followers to stay there longer, they will have a better respect for you. You can talk to them, offer free consultation calls, and then people know what they start to share the help that you get. And then other people are going to approach you in that way, that’s the best method of giving help on MySpace.
Designhill: How many hashtags we should use for one post?
Gent: That’s all depending on your strategy. You can go with five or 10 or 20 hashtags, it doesn’t matter. But I prefer going with 30 because every hashtag is the chance of exposure so why not use them all. That’s why I choose to go with 30.
But, there is a strategy called 369. There are three big ones, six medium ones, and nine small ones, which doesn’t make 30 but it doesn’t matter. But I think the more the better because as I said, Every hashtag is a chance of exposure.
Designhill: Can we have one page for food design art, or should we keep it separate?
Gent: You can keep two or three pages at the same time, I am managing four pages at the same time. So, here is my one that I’m not going to be coun. Then, I have right now, the branding and Instagram, and the other one is about marketing. They are different. And they all request time in specific. So you can have more pages. It’s not a problem. If you can find the time to do it, keep two or three accounts at the same time.
Have a different strategy for each account
But make sure that these are different accounts, and you’re not mixing it up on one page. Every account has different strategies. It is just that what worked on the first account may not work on a second wall. So you got to be aware of that. You need to have different strategies, different hashtags, different people different targeting different content, and also different time zones. Even if you put both at the same time and both have the same audience, you still need two different types of regionals.
Designhill: What strategy do you use when it comes to finding clients from getting online and how do you go about finding time on Instagram?
Gent: At this time, clients approached me but before this, I had to approach them in my way. When I first started at that pace that I mentioned working as a content creator, I opened a different business and it was a content creation agency. And I wanted to create content for similar pages. So what I would do is, I would direct message these kinds of pages the whole time, the whole day. And I would mostly get rejected because they are considered a scam. They don’t even look at you sometimes.
Use Email For A Professional Approach
So, a good way that helped me is by email. Emails are more professional. Most of the accounts have their emails linked to their bio. You can find their emails there and try to become more professional and have a way to engage with them to get into relation with them, not just trying to sell them. Make efforts to get to know them and reach them in a better way.
Offer Your Services For Free
And then the first one that you can do is you can offer services for free. They will give you content and when I work web development, whatever you do for free, if you’re willing to do it, and then if they like it, they will hire you later. I worked for months with that page for free before starting asking for money on that.
Grow Your Account to Have Clients
And the other way is that the more you grow, the more clients are going to reach you by themselves. This is because the content that you post is like your product and your marketing. If I am a content creator, I post things about that. And I try to make my content as better as possible. If I am a content creator and I design that out. But no one is going to hire me because they are just going to say what is this type of content you create.
Therefore, I make extra efforts in my content. That is how they see you and then they ask themselves if they come and approach you.
Designhill: Can you also talk about pricing?
Pricing depends on individuals’ needs
Gent: I have a pricing method that I do the pricing based on myself? What is good for me that’s how I keep it. It is not that I am going to spot competitors or other people if everyone is charging $50 for carousels. But to me it might not be a good price, I might go for even more expensive or even cheaper. It might be good enough for me to just have it for $30.
So then if I get 30 carousels for a month, it can be good for some people, but it can be bad for some. To make a price, give a price to what I think the value is, and what is good for me and I stick to that. I do not lower the prices, because that’s not good. Too much lowering of the price is like devaluing yourself and your services.
And when you lower your price, the client is going to be thinking all the time to lower the prices even more. And that’s not good. So, give a price as you like, based on yourself, based on what is good for you, or what the competitors are doing, it all depends on your choices.
And after you do that, you will market your services but do not do it all the time. Because a lot of accounts I see after they cross 10,000 they have the swipe up feature now, they just promote all the time, and then they lose credibility and that is not good. So, you should be giving free value and good content the whole time and be offering services at the same time.
Designhill: How do you know whether Instagram has shadow banned you and how do you recover from that?
Gent: When you have discovered what your engagement and what your reach is on average. Then by posting this drop drastically out of nowhere means that you might have used the banned hashtags or something like that. So, Instagram might have shadow banned you. When you post, your posts are not going to rank on hashtags, when you see that.
Then, when you want to test this out, you go on the hashtags and see if your posts have been ranked. And if it’s not, that means you have been shadowbanned. This usually happens from banned hashtags, you might use a hashtag that you did not know that was banned. That is the reason why it got there.
Get Clean Hashtags
So, a good way not to get banned hashtags is by using the Display Purposes that there is a way to not offer banned hashtags. That’s guaranteed because I tried it. And when you get clean hashtags, that’s good. You recover from that.
New Accounts Shadow Ban Risks
But how do you recover from Instagram shadowban is that some Instagrams can be shadowbanned early. This is because there are a lot of accounts that just open up in a day. And then some services offered are scams and things like that. So new accounts are always in big danger of getting shadowbanned.
And this happened to me too, I was shadow banned and blocked for more than 15 days when I started this account that I have right now. Those 15 days were long enough to destroy my consistency. If I would go on for 15 days, I would be maybe a lot further now. To recover that you need another 15 days, which means I was one month late.
Post Without Hashtags and Engage
When trying to recover from the shadow banning, post a couple of days without using hashtags. Do not use hashtags at all, just keep your post simple. Increase the engagement rate by talking to more people and bringing more organic reach. In that way, the Instagram shadowban will be removed within days.
Do Not Use Bad Hashtags
But if you keep using the banned hashtags, the ban is going to stay there. So, forget the hashtags for a couple of days and stick to their organic reach as much as you can. Post without hashtags. And then after some days, you can start and try again by getting new hashtags.
Designhill: How do you know which hashtags are banned?
Gent: I always have a problem understanding myself. But there are some websites which can show you what hashtags not to use and which hashtags to use. So it can be like fake or IQ hashtags, which show you another method that you can see is when you click on it, it’s going to give you a sign from Instagram.
I’m not exactly sure what it says but you’ve got to know and when you see that you cannot visit this hashtag or something like that. That’s how we know it is banned. And a lot of people use it without actually knowing that it is dangerous and that then breaks their page.
Designhill: Is it better if I put the hashtag on the comments in the post?
Gent: If you don’t want them to be seen on your captions, you can put them in your comments, write a few posts, but they give the same results. It’s not something that might be better from comments. If you want to do them both, it’s not a problem, I see a lot of accounts will do both.
But I only go with the ones in captions, it’s all because of the locks. If you don’t want them to be seen there, you go to the comments and content. So keep on to the capsules, which looked a lot cleaner and better. So that’s a long answer, but you have to rush with it if you post them and put them in the comments. 20 minutes after you cannot bank on any of them. So you have to be as fast as possible.
Designhill: If you have a very popular post, is it worth spending money on it, or is it good to promote it?
Gent: If you want to push it even more that it depends on you. But I don’t always recommend giving ads to promote your posts, I would do that for a product or something like that, not just to promote posts, I see pages that do motivational things and promote their photos by paying, which is not good. This is because when you pay Instagram, Facebook is not always going to give you some organic reach to that.
So, then you might get some good results. But, after the next post that you post is going to be weaker than the ones before that. And that is not something that you want to do. I never run any ads. But if you have a post going viral already, you can try to do it and go even more. But I didn’t do this. So I don’t know, it depends on you, I don’t suggest it much. So it all comes down to choice.
These are the crucial tips from Gent Huruglica to resolve your issues when you need to monetize your Instagram account. Pay heed to the expert advice and revisit your monetization strategy.
However, make sure that your brand is equipped with impressive visuals such as its logo, brochure, business cards, website, etc. These visuals will help you project a professional image of your business. When people come from your Instagram page to your website, they must get a memorable experience.
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Wrapping Up
Instagram is a big social media platform that brands use to enhance their market reach. But as an individual, you can turn this platform into a source of money provided you monetize and grow it well. Gent Huruglica advises that you first know your audience and then target them with a strategy. A proper instagram growth strategy of your Instagram page with the right use of hashtags, DMs, connecting, and engaging followers, using carousels, etc., will help.
