Learning tips & tricks on how to grow my Instagram audience is something I’m really focused on right now. There is the super quick, but stupid method of buying followers. It never works, it actually works against you. So that’s definitely not the route I want to pursue. What I want, is to grow my Instagram audience organically.

Growing your Instagram audience takes time, patience & effort. I have compiled a list of my 6 top tips that I am trying to implement to grow my audience.

Growing my Instagram audience

1. Have an Instagram strategy

What is my WHY. Why do I want to grow my Instagram audience? I want to direct more traffic to my website. I also want to reach more people with my real life honest stories & photos.

2. Define the target market / ideal reader

This is my WHO. Who are they? How old are they? What do they do? Their needs & challenges? What do they do in their spare time? Where do they live? These are all points I can answer and build my ‘ideal target person’. When defining your ideal reader get as specific as you can, this will help narrow down the range.

3. Create a look & feel

I’ve chosen presets that appeal to me and I use them on all my images on my Instagram grid photos. I use Lightroom to edit and apply the presets before posting to my grid. Your Instagram audience must know an image belongs to you before they see your handle.

4. Use relevant hashtags

Hashtags are one of the keys to building your Instagram following. It’s something that I need to constantly update. Doing regular research into the latest hashtags being used my mom bloggers will keep my lists up to date with the latest trends. It’s important to not just use hashtags that have been used millions of times. Personally I prefer to have hashtags that have been used anywhere between 1000 & 50 000 times. This increases the chances of my posts being seen by others searching those tags.

5. Engage engage engage

The more you engage with your audience & on other people’s posts the more people will see your handle and click onto your profile. Then, if they like what you’re about they will click that ‘follow’ button and, voila, growing your Instagram following!

6. Consistency

Personally I aim to post once a day. Some days I don’t manage that but some days I post twice. For me, I feel the key is not go for days without posting or at least popping into my stories.

My niche, as per my bio, is wife-life, mom-life & life-life. My audience can expect to see a variety of images on my grid relating to this. If I suddenly post an image of wresting or kickboxing my audience is going to wonder if I’ve been hacked because this is not what I consistently post about.

If you need a few more tricks head on over to the lovely Tarryn’s grid, she did a great post about Instagram tips & hacks.

My bullet journal is going to be my goto for planning & scheduling all these tips for growing my Instagram audience.

I’d love to hear if you’ve implemented any of these or if you have any tips that have worked well for you.

Much love xxx