Become Instagram Famous

From the author

I first got introduced to Instagram back in the year 2010, just after several weeks the app first launched I downloaded it from AppStore. The first impression was mixed: there was no one there, your only options were editing your photos and then posting them to some odd “feed’. So I edited and uploaded a couple of photos and only came back about half a year later. Then I realized you could “follow’ other people: at that time, some of my friends downloaded the app so we simply followed each other. I liked the idea of posting photos for your friends to see, the design was minimal and really functional: unlike other social networks (i.e. VK or Facebook) you only had three options and all of them were essential: like, comment, follow, and nothing else needed.

We were addicted to Instagram. In about two months all my friends and friends of their friends were on it and so it began… Questions like “How many followers do you have?” “How come that guy has so many followers…” and so on and so forth… Then I thought: is there a way for me to increase my follower count and therefore likes on my photos? I started searching the Web but at that moment there was nothing, no promotion services nor any programs nor bots.

However, the hashtags were there! The basic premise of a hashtag is simple: you post them in your photo description, people from all over the world search for them and then follow you. Most of those people were total strangers. The idea fascinated me and I started using dozens of hashtags which resulted in getting more than 1000 followers in one week, all of them were real people who were leaving likes and comments under my posts. I had, so to speak, the “coolest’ Instagram account in my neck of the woods. Whenever I met my friends they asked same exact questions: “Where did you get all these followers?!”, “Who did you pay for that?”, “Could you please plug my account?!” etс.

After a couple of months my account reached 3000 followers, providing dozens of comments and hundreds of likes. It was around that time when Instagram started to take over the world. At one point I reckoned that I had less and less new followers through hashtags. Everybody was using them in large amounts like I did so after about a month people stopped coming altogether: I would not have more than a couple followers a week. Stopping at just 3000 people was not enough for me so I started looking into other ways to boost my follower count.

I could not determine any certain ways to grow as there was no information about in on the Internet yet. Though soon I noticed an interesting notion among more popular accounts: they followed enormous amounts of people, and that just seemed shady. In the beginning I figured they are simply friendly and excessively interested in others’ lives so there is nothing more to it than that. However, after I encountered more and more such accounts following from one to two thousand people each I was convinced that the friendliness was not the case.

And so I finally found out about mass following and immediately put it to use: I started following everybody. I was spending hours doing that, following hundreds of people a day. To my surprise, almost immediately people started following back and the conversion rate was tremendous; in my first day of mass following I obtained more than 500 new followers, more than half the amount of people I followed returned that. Such numbers I could get after around 3 to 4 days of hashtag promotion.

With that I pushed further: following from one to two thousand accounts a day for several days. Then I found out the limits of Instagram: you cannot follow more than 3000 people in one day and cannot follow more than 7500 overall. When I reached that limit I was perplexed: I only had 3000 more followers than I had had before.

Logically, I cycled this process and unfollowed everyone and started all over. After 2 or 3 months I obtained 10000 new followers. And then I realized how much time I wasted…

Turned out while I performed all these monotonous operations in my home the automatized Instagram services were in work already. The first one I encountered was Bootup – it was too sophisticated to use and required various Safari plugins. Thanks to Bootup such processes as “following’ and “unfollowing’ were streamlined. There were no filters although there were options to set delays in between the actions and specify profiles you would like to follow.

It was a costly venture and at times I was not able to pay monthly fee to keep my account growing. Further down the road I encountered first desktop tools dedicated to profile promotion and optimization, such as Tooligram, InstaTool and InstaSoft. The first one was unreasonably expensive with almost 1399 rubles ($25) monthly subscription. The other two were popular on forums such as Zismo, especially their free versions, although the usage of them was complicated and the words such as “proxy’ and “multichannel’ were just too big to comprehend.

Browsing through dozens of forums and hundreds of topics led me to a man by the name of German Yakushev: he was the biggest person in our timid SMM community, he was featured on TV, he had immense bot networks and so on. I was interested in his startups and by sheer coincidence we met at one event in Moscow.

At this event I learned about Instagram bots. For me this was a game changer: you could pay 100—300 rubles ($2-$5) and get a couple of thousand bot accounts who would permanently follow you. Yakushev told me about his huge bot database and he could give me a hand with promoting my account to which I agreed. Afterwards I obtained 10000+ new followers and therefore my account had more than 20000 followers overall: half of them were real people and another half were bots.

And that is when I learned the golden rule of promoting your Instagram account: you combine mass following and promotion through buying bots. Firstly, you buy some bots, then you follow about 2000—3000 people and get the best of both worlds: in case somebody wants to see whether your followers are real they will only see the first “real’ ones with bots being at the bottom of the list.

From here on out I became advanced Instagram user. By using bots and mass following I started to get more and more new followers. We stayed in touch with German Yakushev who introduced me to an invite-only Telegram group called “Startup Academy’ with the most common topics being Instagram promotion, operations with bots etc. With my hands-on experience I had got heavily involved in various discussions on different topics. In one week I learned more about Instagram than in a year of self-education.

Yakushev always followed trends and tried to adapt to them. This is when he and his partners started his own Instagram promotion script “Insta+”. It was very intuitive: you just need to install it, connect your Instagram profile and then the script would follow your followers back. The price was huge for that time: 3000 rubles ($52) but I still was among the first who bought it and so my work continued.

The script was great: it considered the limits of Instagram, followed and even occasionally liked other users. The only downside was that it only worked when the PC it was running on was working. I had to keep my PC turned on at all times and at one point I even installed remote access app to my phone so that I could keep the script going while I was at work or university.

My hobby slowly turned into career. I analyzed the most active followers, what “donor’ account I may use for more followers and the accounts I had the best conversion with. A month later I attracted 30000 followers with the ratio of 10000 bots to 20000 real people. Then I thought to myself “Why am I so focused on only one account?” and created 5 more additional Instagram accounts, each with different theme, set them up as a VK public groups dedicated to different things and uploaded a few fine pictures. Two were car accounts, one was dedicated to traveling and two more were beauty inspiration profiles.

After a while it appeared to me that the amount of niche or “public’ accounts was growing on Instagram. A lot of people followed such accounts, the conversion in them was incredible: you could promote your other profiles and people would follow them instantly. Thus, my additional accounts were public accounts now and in two months each of them had 10000 active followers, they had an active following with people regularly liking and leaving comments.

And so began the public accounts and advertisement period for Instagram. My feed was packed with ads and I myself started advertising. But I was not promoting any products, I simply advertised my own public pages through my other public pages. All of them had steady conversion and were growing evenly. This resulted in owning more than 10 accounts with 10000 to 15000 followers in each of them; my personal account had 40000 followers at that point.

This is where I decided to start monetizing. I have been using the Yakushev script for about 5 months and still had not made the money I spent on it back. So I have come up with ingenious business plan or so I thought: according to it, I charged 500 rubles ($8) a month for account promotion on Instagram with my own script OR I would sell said script for 1000 rubles ($16) and complete freedom of use for its buyer.

I followed simple steps: created a new account, filled it with content, offered my promotion services and put my mobile number and WhatsApp in the description. By promoting my account with the script others were tempted to use it to promote theirs. This may look redundant but it was extremely successful. At that time, I came up with a name for my project after a 10-minute brainstorm and to this day it stays permanent: the name I came up with was Instalex.

My donor accounts – those I had my followers coming from – were offering Instagram promotion also but that was via mass following or involving bots, while I involved real people into promotion and at the same time could completely adjust the process to the clients’ needs.

My first clients started coming in. On the first week of business I sold a script to my classmate plus received some promoting orders. On my first two weeks of work I made the money I spent on the script and increased the volume by creating 10 additional advertising accounts for my script and promoted via, you guessed it, the script itself. By the third week more than 10 people bought the script and I had 6 more promotion orders. After one month in business my venture generated 10000 rubles ($174): my first ever personal income.

As a freshman, I was ASTOUNDED and to be honest it felt awesome. Of course, it was not all hunky-dory: after my 20th client my PC started to show signs of weakness: constantly working for almost a month without rest it started to lag and actually was dying due to my own script. I decided to switch to another script because my computed would not handle any more orders. In dire straits I was looking for another software or different script to switch to. Two of the most important features for me were standalone performance and cloud-based system.

I was constantly looking for another options while my current orders were carried out with insta+. Tooligram, Instatool and Instasoft were not any good to me since they were pretty much same as insta+ and required my pc to be constantly powered up once again. But soon, something else came up: German Yakushev was about to release his own Instagram promotion service which was cloud-based and suited perfectly for me. If only it was not for one thing…

When German finally released Instaplus it was in work for a couple of months and then was hacked. The hackers had the user base and access to website accelerators on their hands. German released the source code for Instaplus, his insta+ script, user database and all the information related to the service. The script started being used by everyone from your average SMM manager to inexperienced youngling. Soon the company noticed the flaw which script was using and patched it altogether: the script has ceased to work for good.

The launch of Instalex

After what happened I have decided to create my own Instagram promotion service. Back when I befriended German Yakushev and frequented “Startup Academy’ I also met Misha Kitin, a programmer who was working on his own solution for promotion software for Instagram. I reached out to him and we decide to create a joint venture. Our team consisted of just two of us: I was responsible for the service development and client involvement, Misha was improving the system and maintaining it. After 5 months of our collaborative work we have rolled out the first version of our platform under the name Instalex.

From the very start we were in many ways different from our business rivals in terms of interface and how everything was set up: in its core it was a cloud-based dashboard which allowed its users to easily get access to it, promote any amount of Instagram accounts and oversee the process online from any gadget at any time. I realized how important the cloud hosting was in promoting not only for me but for others also.

With the first version of our software released, we started to look for user testers and many people responded. It was not a surprise since the service was free to use for the test period and it was something completely different from others at the time. We spent a month on testing and were ready to officially launch the platform. But, to our great disappointment, after the launch and enabling paid subscriptions all of our testers turned it down, saying they “were not interested’ in using the service for a fee.

Everything from the how system worked to our website design was different comparing to what you can see on Instalex website now. Actually, there was no design or any logos whatsoever. We were using free templates from Bootstrap and lated designed and created the logo ourselves; everything was pretty much handmade. But our main quality was, of course, functionality. From the get-go, we had a unique system of promoting all accounts simultaneously. You only needed to sign up, add your Instagram profile and choose “promo’ – a channel through which your accounts would be promoted. Our catch was the accessibility, since it only required 5 minutes to start using the platform and setting it up would have taken even less time. You only had to set everything up once and forget about it for the next month. Instalex promotes each account using one “promo’ account at a time and does it 24/7 without any malfunctions or delays. When analyzing Instagram promotion software market, I have not seen another service that would allow its users to set everything up only once and never be bothered with checking back for any additional adjustments.

The next groundbreaking thing was the auto-commenting feature. Mass commenting was a big pain for every promotion service, even when there was such function in use, adding dozens and even hundreds of word combinations for comments was tedious for users. And so we were the first in the world to implement Spintax technology to arrange auto-commenting on Instagram. After the registration, each user would receive a preset comments kit. You only needed to add a channel which you want to promote and the system would do the rest for you.

And so it went on: we were rolling out new features while trying to handle the marketing predicaments. The first attempt at marketing failed miserably: our first advertisement was hosted by an Instagram blogger with impressive amount of followers who posted the photo of our service and gave a shout out to our platform. We have received no less than 300 visits from that add and no less than 0 purchases after those visits. We realized that without any budget this was not an option and started to look into other places to promote our product. Month after our website launched I put out advertisements on every forum, social network page or blog related to advertising in social networks. People were coming, but did not buy anything. We started to realize we were doing something wrong.

After analyzing the market and our opponents we have found out why nobody wanted to buy our service: there was no free trial period to test out the platform before purchasing it. A 3-day trial period was added for our clients and the business was slowly recovering. The next day we had a couple of new users and in a week we already had about 50 new users on our website. I have updated all existed ads and placed some new ones on about dozen other websites.

Things were going better and better. We had a steady flow of traffic and new users to our website. From the start the only supported language was English so we had clientele not only from Russia and other CIS countries but also from abroad. A month passed and we already had 600 users on our website! People from all over the world were coming to us because of our unique approach to business and because of our high-quality tech support. Feedback was among the most important aspect of communicating and staying in touch with our clients: we gathered their ideas and recommendations, considered them and added more user-requested features.

In the next six months we have witnessed substantial growth, with our ads being placed on every platform and forum that was possible for me to find. More people started coming from the word-of-mouth, our platform was promoted by our own users who recommended it to their friends and coworkers. After a while we became major players on the promotion market.

People on forums did not like us much, however. We were hugely criticized by big SMM-forums and bot-farm owners who left dozens and hundreds of negative reviews on our product. They claimed our platform was “too expensive’, we lacked the functionality and were “just another small-time promotion-service’. Against all bad-mouthers I believed in our product and kept on improving it. Only after 3 months we determined our target audience which was not the self-proclaimed SMM experts but rather average users who were solely interested in growing their followers on Instagram and nothing else. And so we have finally found our niche: small and medium-sized enterprises and entrepreneurs. Our platform was suitable for any user and it was easy to use for everyone!

Our first year in business ended on this positive note. We have seen considerable growth from 50 users to 100000 in just a 1-year period! We were featured in numerous publications and various mass media outlets and slowly were overtaking the Instagram promotion market. We have worked on every opportunity to reach a wider audience whether it required additional investments or not. We have collaborated with everyone from large brands to small ventures, promoted tens of thousands of Instagram accounts, acquired experience in marketing field, constantly, received advanced training and applied our vast knowledge in practice when working with our website. At the moment our website services an audience of 600000 users, our license provided to companies in over 16 countries, we have given more than 100 franchises to dealers from all over the world, while at the same time developing our platform and reaching more and more users!

From the day one we have seen our fair share of ups and downs, we have seen both immensely successful cases and met various obstacles on our way. We sure do have something to tell you about as we have been through a lot. I started from nothing with no money to invest and only because of the experience I obtained and by learning on my own mistakes me and my business could reach the heights that we have reached! We have managed to develop the product, attract wide audience and become favorites of our users. We still have got a lot to learn and this is not the end as after all we still keep going forward and keep pushing boundaries and make our product better and better! Thanks to our now 9-person team and our prolonged cooperative work we have met the result that we have today!

After more than 6 years of working with Instagram, we have gathered massive amount of knowledge and material to combine it into a single package which is the book you are currently reading! In the next few chapters you will learn about the details and secrets of Instagram promotion, learn a lot about automation services and what is more important is that we will try to give you a simple and comprehensive description of how you can monetize your own Instagram account! On these 200+ pages we have gone through every aspect of Instagram monetization and promotion, unveiled the secrets of traffic arbitrage on Instagram, explained the mystery of celebrity accounts and their growth, talked about the blogger phenomenon and public accounts and last but not least – explained the real cases and reviewed the real success stories of people, who already make the money on their Instagram accounts!