July 2020, we finally hit over $1,000 in promo sales on one of our Instagram accounts.
We run @luvhairapp, a theme page where we curate the best beauty content we find on Instagram for women of colour (WOC). We started the account back in 2016 with 0 experience in building a social media account and in fact as the name suggests, it was actually built for an app we were launching to help connect WOC with natural hairdressers (R.I.P Luvhair App, long story for another day).
We are not “influencers” and in fact we were 2 bald black guys with no content of our own to show off that insta lifestyle. What we did have was an eye for beauty content we liked and we were certain that of the 300m+ active users on Instagram, there were others who liked what we liked.
The beauty of starting a theme page is that anyone can do it, and if you already spend a lot of time on Instagram, probably engaging with other theme pages (meme pages, news pages, beauty pages etc.) you may as well be rewarded.
With enough smarts and consistency, you can grow the account, and if you can grow the account enough people will pay for the chance to feature themselves or their businesses on your account. Simple - but not easy.
We made our first $ from @luvhairapp in March 2020, and that’s after 4 years running the account. - 2 years of which the account was dormant, with virtually nothing being posted.
In 5 months we went from a dormant account that we were considering deactivating, to a highly engaged account generating income. Whilst there are no magic bullets to it, the most important principles that really drove this are:
Instagram’s goal is to keep eyeballs on their platform - a nicer way to put it is that they want to give people value through engagement - it therefore makes sense that it prioritises content that promotes engagement and deprioritises content that doesn’t. A good sign of content that is being promoted by Instagram is if it shows up on a user’s explore feed.
Instagram’s Product Lead Julian Gutman explained to reporters how the platform uses Machine Learning Algorithms to curate a user’s explore feed to fit an individual person, there can be no 2 accounts that show the exact same explore feed. How it figures out what to show is based on 3 major ranking signals - interest, recency & timeliness and relationships.
Instagram uses your audience’s past behaviours; likes, comments, follows and saves - to predict what they will also like in the future. Knowing this you must pay close attention to which posts on your account do better and try to figure out why they are liked more and engaged with more than others, these are the posts that IG chose to promote in your audience’s feeds. We are constantly looking at our insights page to look for patterns between the top performing content.
New posts always show up at the top but that alone is not enough, you must also know when your audience is most active - so you can hit them with a recent, interesting post and is just in time for them. To improve this metric we downloaded an app called WhenToPost which does what is says on the tin - we also use Onlypult to schedule posts for specific times that we get from WhenToPost.
Instagram shows your content to people you actually engage with and to those who engage with you, meaningfully. So how do you drive that engagement, one thing we started doing was just telling people to engage with us. Sounds simple right, but that’s exactly what a call to action (CTA) does, we used a bunch of them in our Bio, our stories, and under each and every post we did. When it comes to you engaging, I know lots of accounts hammering away at comments on people’s pages but with 3 fire emojis - stop it, that looks like spam to Instagram. We took 5 minutes a day and went through the people liking our posts, liked their content, and left comments that have 4+ words that weren’t copied and pasted, we sent DMs to people we wanted to build relationships with that weren’t following us before. There are other things that we didn’t take advantage of that we could have like hashtagging and tagging larger and relevant accounts in our posts.
Getting all of the above right is not an event, it’s a process - if you want to change how your account is doing today, you must try new things, measure them in your insights and optimise. Nail the above processes and your account will grow.
If you can grow your Instagram account, you can monetise it. As the account grows, the perceived value of being on your feed grows with it.
Up until March this year, I thought that every user that sent @luvhairapp DMs wanting to feature on our page actually cared deeply about our page and had been following us for a while. They would all send some form of the following message:
Hey! Really love how your page promotes women of colour. Would love it if you would post me too.
Most of these people would have come from the Explore page, and didn’t follow our page, so why contact us? After surveying them we found that every single 1 of them simply wanted to grow their following and we were just one of many pages they would be contacting that day.
It isn’t pretty, but it’s honest, there was nothing particularly special about our page other than a huge opportunity for them to grow their audience. Once we accepted that we could actually invite our audience to join in the opportunity by offering paid promo.
If a user who is highly motivated to grow lands on your page via a post on the explore page, then why make it hard for them to achieve their goal.
To avoid all of this we created a tool for our account we called Featurely. With Featurely we could create a storefront for our promo business.
We would put the link for our storefront in our Instagram bio with a CTA. When a customer wanted promo they would click that link see the price, pick out the promo service they wanted, tell us who they are, pay and send us the content they wanted featured/reposted all in one go whether we were online or not, the customers had the flexibility to safely pay via PayPal or directly using their debit/credit card.
When we get an order, it sends us an instant notification with everything we need to fulfil the order, whilst giving us the ability to track everything in one place.
Conclusion:
Whilst $1,000 is not a tonne of money, it could be an extra $12,000 a year accessible for free to anyone who’s willing to make an effort. In subsequent articles I will do some spotlight articles on some pages that do it to a much higher level than us that are making $5k-10k per month.
If you like Instagram and already spend a lot of time on it, or even if you own a small theme page in some niche you are really passionate about... I hope this article provides some insight on how you can go about generating an income from it.
