From 0 to 25.5k - my IG journey

Dear VIP and higher tier members,

As promised when I wrote my previous post on this topic, I am now writing to provide some insights into my journey. I am not aiming to give you a formula for growing yours, just to share my own experience which will hopefully be helpful to some of you - at least those who want to grow their instagram accounts.

And this is in fact a good starting point: why should you wish to grow your instagram account at all?

Well, if you are a model photographer like me, a healthy instagram account is by itself an important element of success as a photographer, including for making the whole endeavour financially sustainable. as it will drive more traffic to your paid sites and will make you more attractive to prospective models.

Looking back, if I am to identify a single factor that is behind my instagram growth it must be the quality of the content that I was creating. Yes, the collaborations with models helped, but models wouldn't collaborate with photographers whose content they do not rate highly! Content quality drives everything, in fact. It attracts new followers, convinces models to work with you and makes leading brands willing to share your content. The first time that luxury lingerie brand Honey Birdette shared my content, my account grew by at least one thousand new followers.

So I consider content quality as the foundation of a healthy instagram account. It is a necessary condition but clearly by itself is not sufficient. The quality is nothing if it is not noticed by people. So, to build on that foundation you need your account to be seen by as many eyes as possible. Hashtags can help but more importantly, perhaps is your models - they are the first and most obvious way to grow your account. How do you get your models to help you grow? First of all they must like your content - it's not just about the quality but also about the image they want to project about themselves. Key to this is to enable them to be part of your creative process - I have seen a lot of photographers who dictate the entire shoot. At the end of it, the model isn't happy with the results and even f they receive a few pics, they do not want to post them. A happy model is your best ambassador. More often than not, at the end of a shoot, I ask my model to choose their favourites - if you edit some of those, you are in with a good chance that the model will want to share it, tag you and/or collaborate.

Besides happy models, our next potential ambassador are large accounts that can share it. It can be brads themselves or accounts that share selected content. It is important that they are aware of your existence so tagging them in stories - not in posts - can mean that they might see your content.

What I never did was to pay for promotion or even worse followers. I knew a model who had paid to buy followers and subsequently suffered as a result - her engagement wasn't what it should have been given her followers and any new organic growth wouldn't be enough to replace the bots that were dropping off. Frankly, drawing on that knowledge, I would rather have an account with 30k genuine followers than an account with 300k followers, if the majority or even one third of the 300k are fake. I really do not see any benefit whatsoever of buying fake follower or fake likes.

So that's it: I did it my way - the hard way, the way that involves organic growth and despite of my account being shadow banned by Instagram. I am sure there are other ways - but I can only share mine!

ps: the shadow banning is another topic by itself - I can write a separate post on that, if there is demand.

ps2: I am including a few screenshots of my instagram to illustrate some of the points I made above.