One of the most requested posts so far is how to reach that coveted 10,000 followers mark on Instagram and eventually make money off your blog / social media handle. Sigh. You have to give your soul to the devil – there’s no other way around it haha. In this post ill try and help you with small subtle things that really worked for me and the @aa.living brand on instagram. In 2 years we reached 30,000 followers, which is a good number to have I suppose. Get your foundation right to begin with! Income generation will follow soon after! Read on – 1) Customer / follower engagement is everything. If you don’t have people engaging with your posts – liking, commenting and eventually enquiring about you / your product…you’re not doing something right even if your ‘follower count’ is increasing 2) Post regularly. 3-5 posts typically in a day. But that said, posting back-to-back posts would make you lose followers instead of gaining them. 3) Space out your posts in an interval of 3-5 hours 4) Do weekends work better to get more customer engagement? Or perhaps early mornings / evenings when people are commuting back from work. Figure out your target audience and cash in on the timings that are working for you. 5) Fill out your bio with all the right information: This includes your contact information, what you post about and where you’re from. Add in enough so you’re easily findable by the right kind of followers. 6) You may have heard that your Instagram feed needs to have a certain theme to it: food, fashion, home, travel, etc. That doesn’t sound very fun though, does it? Exactly. Settle on a common aesthetic that weaves through all of your photos and that’s enough. 7) Edit your photos similarly. To help you curate Instagram and have your feed flow naturally, you should have a consistent approach to editing your photos. This doesn’t mean you have to choose one filter and one filter only, but limiting yourself to a few will help you stick to your chosen aesthetic. 8) Focus on Your Feed. Take a step back and look at your Instagram feed as a whole: how do all of your photos fit together? Sometimes a good-looking first impression can be the difference between someone following you or not in those couple of seconds. 9) Use high-resolution images only. For the love of god! 10) Sporadically promote yourself / limit your sponsored posts per day – too many too soon and you’ll immediately annoy your followers. Do you have any suggestions or perhaps even apps you use to track customer engagement? Do share!