How I Grew an Instagram Niche Page to 12.2K Followers in 6 Months
With only 2 easy minutes of work each day.
What is a Niche Page?
The names explains itself, a niche page is a page where we post feed posts and stories about one subject. For example a page all about travel, golf or mountain biking. My niche page is all about food and cooking. The trick with this type of pages is that you only need to invest a minimal amount of time. Once you’re all set up, it’s only 2–3 minutes of work every day to keep your page growing and booming!
Choosing a Niche
The first thing you will need to do is choosing a niche. There are a lot of niches out there. I suggest choosing a niche that interests you. If the niche is interesting to you, you will not give up as easily. Don’t just choose for the niches that are the easiest monetizable, you need to love what you’re doing. Another key in choosing a good niche is by finding the right balance between too niche and too broad. If your niche is too broad (for example fashion, cars, sports) you will have difficulties to stand out and attract people. But if your niche is too niche (for example blue jeans with holes or Scandinavian flowers), you might have difficulties finding your audience. The chance that there is a big audience for such a small niche isn’t that big. When I chose the food/cooking niche, I niched down to the foodart niche, I will not post a general hamburger with fries, only the finest and most beautiful food.
Creating your Account
There are some important factors that you need to keep in mind when you’re creating your account to stand out from the rest.
Instagram Handle and Name
You will need a clear and preferably simple Instagram handle. How easier it is to remember, how better. Here are some tips:
- Do not use dots or underscores (only if it makes your name more clear. For example golf.masters is acceptable, but go.lfmasters is not good)
- Make your niche clear in your handle, if your page is about brown cats, for example, use brown.cats instead of thebest.cats.
I chose (at)cookingbeauties as my handle, it describes my pages is all about cooking and food. And not only all food, but mostly about beautiful food.
For your name, I suggest choosing other words than that you’ve used in your handle. This will increase your reach if people are searching for something. I suggest choosing two or three main keywords for your page in your name. I chose Foodart, Gastronomy and Chefs. These are three great words because they are different from my handle and belong to my niche.
Bio
Your bio is an important part of your account, I recommend keeping it simple and elegant. Add an emoji that belongs to your niche, then add a separator (| or /) and write a short sentence that describes your page. Do not write to long sentences and do not write more than 4 lines, because otherwise, people will need to click on “show more” if they would want to see your full bio. You can include a call for action, but do it at the end of your bio. The call for action could be: “Follow for more” or “Send in your content by tagging us”. I’ve added the latter, every single day I get around 5–10 pictures where I am tagged in.
Logo
Such as the handle, name and bio, your logo or profile picture needs to be fitting with your niche and not to complicated. You can just make a simple logo on Canva.
Posting
You don’t need to make the posts yourself, that’s the big secret behind these pages. Reposting content is good for everyone, it’s great for you because it’s easy and fast, and it is great for the original creators because they get access to a new free audience.
Finding Content
Go to Instagram and search for a hashtag that has to do with your niche, for example, for my page, I would search for #foodart. Go to the most popular posts and go to the pages that post these. There is a big chance that these pages are niche reposting pages too. When on these pages scroll through the posts and select the best-performing ones. I recommend saving these posts, by clicking the bookmark icon.
Reposting
To repost content you will need an app on your phone or a program for your computer. I use Combin Scheduler for PC. I like this software because it’s totally free and it’s easy to use.
For the description, first, give a little description of the picture or video. Then, and this is very important, you will need to credit the author. You could also tag the author. Then you could add a call to action.
To largen your reach, it’s important to add niche-specific hashtags. To find this hashtags you can use hashtag suggesting sites or just go to similar pages and take inspiration from them.
Getting your First Followers
Getting your first followers is the most difficult part. I struggled with it too. If it’s not working from your first day, do not lose hope. It took me about 7 days to reach my first 100 followers. By just posting posts, you will not reach a big audience. There are two methods that you can use to get your first followers, you can use them both if you want. You will need to
Engaging
This one will take some time to do, you will need some more than 2 minutes a day. This tactic relies on being active in your community, comment on posts of original authors of the content. People will see that you’re active in the community and they will potentially look at your account and start following you.
Follow for Follow
This strategy is controversial, but I used it, and it did work for me. It works as follows:
- Go to a page that is similar to you
- Go to their most recent post
- Follow people who liked that post
But be careful: do not follow or unfollow more than 50 people each day, or you might get action blocked. You will also need to take time to unfollow people, otherwise, you will end up with a ton of people that you follow. I made that mistake, I ended up with around 2,500 accounts I followed. This isn’t attractive, and to the day of today, I am still unfollowing people.
Don’t Give Up
it’s not a lot of work: posting once a day and following and unfollowing some people. But it may be tiring and boring work. You may not see results immediately, but one of the most important things to do is posting consistently.
In October 2020, I fell still. I wasn’t posting anymore for a couple of weeks in a row. And it hurt my account. No new followers came in, my account was almost dead. But in November I tried again, and from then on I haven't stopped.
Organic Growth
Around mid-November, I hit a point where I stopped doing Follow for Follow, because my account was starting to grow fully organic, and it was doing better than ever. From my experience and from the experience of other people I’ve spoken to, the point when you will start to see organic growth is around 1,000–2,500 followers. This needs to be your first goal, from there on, the only way is up!
