It sounds like a dream, working from home, collaborating with your favorite brands, and perhaps even being paid to travel. The life of an Instagram influencer seems particularly appealing when you’re trapped in a 9-to-5 job.
Instagram influencers make money, gather millions of followers through their inner creativity, and have a prominent status on social media. You need to make a serious effort to stand out. You need to offer something different, be relatable, and gain high engagement.
There are a number of Instagram influencers who have quit their jobs and pursued their mini-celebrity status as Instagram influencers.
How to become an Instagram influencer in Easy Steps?
To become a successful Instagram influencer, follow the following steps:
- Choose a niche
- Create a noteworthy Instagram bio.
- Share original and authentic stories.
- Make Your Instafeed Appealing
- Create an appealing Instafeed.
- Post consistently.
- Use relevant hashtags.
- Open a Business Account.
- Leverage Instagram Stories
- Engage your audience.
- Tag relevant brands and contact them.
- Avoid buying followers.
1. Choose a niche
To become an Instagram influencer, the first thing you need to do is, to find a niche that suits your personality, something you’re passionate about. Something in which you have a good knowledge and interest.
To become an Instagram influencer in any field, you will have to post on social media about it regularly and consistently. So, selecting the right niche is very important.
Your niche might be a combination of different things, as long as they’re not random.
2. Create a noteworthy bio
You need to focus on creating an attractive Instagram bio that immediately catches people’s attention. It should be talking about your story in a way that engages people.
It is the first thing that a brand or a potential follower will see on your account. So if you want to become an Instagram influencer and make money, first of all, you need to learn how to create an attention-grabbing bio.
3. Share your stories
You can’t become an Instagram influencer just by sharing photos. The captions along with the photos are as important as the photos themselves.
Use them to tell your stories and connect with your social media followers at an emotional level. Give them a solid reason to trust you, follow you, and get engaged with you.
4. Make your Instafeed appealing
This is one of the crucial prerequisites if you want to learn how to become an Instagram influencer. Not only your photos, but your entire feed should look appealing when viewed as a whole. This means that all your photos in the feed should look good, individually or collectively.
Don’t follow a particular style of editing. You can use tools like VSCO or Lightroom to edit your photos or you can use the built-in filters on Instagram.
Make sure that your photos are taken in high-resolution and with good light to make them look really good.
5. Post content consistently
Posting content consistently is another crucial prerequisite. Studies say that an increase in your content-posting frequency can boost engagement rates. Create a schedule for posting your content.
You can create your content in advance and set the dates and times for posting.
6. Use relevant hashtags
Hashtags are important because they help your content to be found by other Instagram users. Instagram allows you to use a maximum number of 30 hashtags in a single post.
Choose hashtags that have decent search volumes and that can maximize your chances of appearing in the top posts. Because hashtags having high search volumes aren’t necessarily good for your post. Because high search volumes imply high competition too.
Use a combination of hashtags varying in search volumes from 10,000 to 1 million.
7. Get a business account
To become an Instagram influencer, you must have a business account on Instagram.
It is important to understand your audience and research what type of content works best for them.
The other advantage of getting a business account is the ability to run ads. You can promote ads through your posts, to get some additional engagement.
8. Leverage Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories are the biggest thing right now on Instagram. You can tag others on your Stories and give a shout-out to other accounts. This is not only a great way of building relationships but also growing your own following. Because such accounts are likely to return the favor too. And this can help you to get more visibility.
9. Engage Meaningfully
Social media is all about the people and how you engage with them. It’s the most important factor that will help you to become an Instagram influencer. When someone comments on any of your posts, make sure you reply to them.
You can use this to increase the engagement rate on your posts by following some tips given below:
- Include a call to action in your caption.
- Host giveaways and contests.
- Use polls in Instagram Stories.
- Follow similar accounts and engage with their connections.
- Use popular and relevant hashtags.
10. Tag Relevant Brands and Contact Them
Once you have grown your Instagram followers above thousands and have a decent engagement rate, start your brand outreach. The easiest way to outreach your brand is, to tag relevant brands on your posts to put yourself on their radar. Sometimes, even some brands feature such posts on their Instagram account, which gives you greater visibility.
You can also send direct messages to such brands, which suit your niche. Work on a pitch that tells about why you are reaching out to them and what you can offer them.
11. Don’t Buy Followers
Paid followers are no good to you because these followers won’t be engaged enough. And if someone realizes that you have a high number of fake followers, you could lose your credibility in the industry. This could affect all of your future collaborations.
Conclusion: how to become an Instagram influencer
It may seem like becoming an Instagram influencer is quite simple and easy to do. But getting the first hundred or thousand followers may be the hardest part of becoming an influencer. And a lot of people quit here.
What separates you from the rest is how patient you are, and also how consistently you can churn out content, even in the early days when you don’t have a lot of followers. Dedicate a couple of hours of your day every day to publish top-quality content and follow the above-mentioned to get success as an influencer.
