How to become an Instagram Influencer?
Tags: Instagram, Influencers, Instagram Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Influencer Marketing Tips

Nowadays lots of brands and businesses want to work with Instagram influencers and bloggers to create content for their products, services, or Instagram accounts. So if you can showcase the best work on your Instagram account, it can become an awesome portfolio for your skills and can open up opportunities to work with great brands, collaborate on social media projects, and get paid for your Instagram content!

To become and Influencer you definitely have to have a strategy to do that and here are the main tips for you to succeed:

Tip #1: Identify your Niche

Picture this: you’re scrolling through Instagram’s Explore page and you come across a beautiful travel image. Since you love to travel and are always looking for more inspiration to jet set, you visit the profile.

The likelihood of you following a page that is filled with equally stunning travel imagery is much higher than if the page was filled with random images of a dog, a family, selfies, beauty products, and flowers.

When people come to your page, they want to know what they can expect by following you and feel confident that they will consistently receive that type of content. Because of this, niching down is absolutely vital because it will help you grow your audience faster.

identifying one specific topic to post about can oftentimes be really difficult, though. We are all multi-faceted with many interests, so it can be strange to post only about travel, fashion, or wellness, for example.

Here are some questions to ask yourself that will lead you to your niche:

What am I most passionate about?

What am I most knowledgeable about?

What could I happily create consistent content about for a year without making a dime?

Once you have your overall niche established, you’ll need to nail down 3–4 content pillars to get more clear on the type of content you’ll post on your Instagram. These content pillars are smaller, more specific topics that fall under your broader niche.

Here are examples of other influencers’ content pillars:

Beauty, street style, and luxury fashion:

Tip #2: Stay Consistent

A few years ago, it was possible to post sporadically and grow consistently. But in 2020, it’s a different story.

If you want to see growth on Instagram and stay top of mind with your followers, it is vital to be consistent.

As far as feed posts go, pick a schedule. Whether it’s posting every day of the week or just Monday through Friday, set a posting schedule and commit to it. Your audience will want to know when they can expect to see new content from you.

Regardless of what schedule you commit to for feed posts, I recommend showing up on Instagram Stories every single day.

Instagram Stories are becoming increasingly more important and it’s become the norm to spend more time watching stories rather than scrolling the Instagram feed!

One of the hardest parts about staying consistent and showing up every day is that you may not have enough content or may not take the time to plan ahead.

Solution? Batching.

Dedicate 1–2 days of the week to head out with a friend, photographer, or tripod and shoot the next week of content!

Prior to shoot day, I recommend making a list of all the shots you want to get and any outfits or props you’ll need to bring for them. Remember to take photos for all of your content pillars.

Tip #3: Write Meaningful Captions

The data from Fohr and Later’s recent study shows that average caption length has more than doubled since 2016.

And it’s no wonder: Users are wanting more out of the influencers they follow than a pretty photo and a cute 4-word caption.

Captions are a great opportunity to spark conversation and start forming meaningful connections with your community. They’re also a perfect place to provide value and inspiration to your audience.

Becoming a successful Instagram influencer isn’t easy, and it’s no secret that Instagram is a very different platform in 2020 than it was just a few years ago.

Long gone are the days when getting featured on a larger profile would grant you hundreds of thousands of new followers.

Posting a 3-word caption and seeing consistent growth? It doesn’t fly anymore. The old follow-unfollow “hack”? We don’t know her. 👋

Tip #4: Focus on Building Community

While follower growth and engagement rate are important metrics to be mindful of, influencers should be focusing equally — if not more — on the quality of the community they are cultivating with their audience.

In other words, strike a balance between focusing on depth and breadth.

When you’re hyper-focused on breadth, you might have a very large audience, but one that doesn’t necessarily trust your advice because you haven’t spent the time building it.

When you’re hyper-focused on depth, you’ll have an audience that trusts your recommendations, buys the products you recommend, and follows you to other platforms.

No matter what stage you’re at in your Instagram influencer career, building relationships within your community is the single most important thing you can do.

Get Conversational:

After posting on your feed, stick around on the app for at least 30 minutes after you’ve posted responding to comments and go back later in the day to respond to the rest.

When you receive DMs, always be sure to respond and strike up a genuine conversation. Sending voice notes adds a personal touch too (and saves your fingers!).

Get Your Audience Talking To Each Other

One way to do this is by asking your audience to engage with one another in the comments of a post.

Tip #5: Learn About Your Audience

Do you know more about your audience than basic demographic information? Do you know the kinds of brands your followers love, the jobs they have, their struggles & goals?

To succeed as an Instagram influencer, you truly need to know everything about the people following you because it will help you create content that they resonate with and that therefore performs well.

It will help you ensure that you take on the right kind of collaborations with brands that resonate with your audience and that your followers might buy from.

If you want to create a product of your own one day (an online course, a clothing line, a digital product), knowing what your audience’s interests, desires, and struggles are will be incredibly helpful in ensuring you won’t launch to crickets.

Spark conversation in comments:

Use your captions as an opportunity to ask your followers to tell you about themselves in the comments!

Post Polls on Instagram Stories:

The poll feature is one of my favorites because it’s quick and simple for someone to vote and participate.

Some questions you might ask (that, of course, should be tweaked to your profile and niche specifically):

Do you live in the U.S.?

Are you older or younger than 25?

Do you have a 9 to 5 job?

Do you travel more or less than 3x a year?

Do you like it when I post scenery or hotels more?

Become an Instagram Influencer Tip #6: Set Yourself up for Brands to Approach You

One of the most common complaints I hear from new Instagram influencers is that brands aren’t coming to them and, most of the time, it’s because their page isn’t set up in a way that will attract them!

Here are some things you can do to make sure that potential brand partners know that you’re open for business:

Make sure you have a business profile:

This is vital not only for brands to see you as a potential partner but also because it will open up vital features like Instagram Analytics.

Analytics help you see what is and isn’t working to improve future content and share stats with brands.

You can switch your profile by going to Settings -> Account -> Switch to Business Account.

Tip #7: Use Aiboost App

To reduce your efforts and make the way of becoming an Influencer shorter try the Aiboost app. It will save you a lot of time building engagement, and you could simply cross out tips #2 and #4, as Aiboost will help you to stay consistent as you no longer have to think about an engagement after posting a post to make it visible, and there will be simply no need to engage with your audience to build community as Aiboost will do it for you. Try it Now for Free!