First steps in Instagram Marketing

Welcome back, in the last edition I told you about:

• I started the newsletter

• Changed it up a few times

• Grew it to 700+ subscribers

• Abandoned it

• Changed the theme and decided to resurect it.

In today’s newsletter:

• My Subscriber Goal

• Growth Plan

• Executing it

What is my subscriber goal?

You have read about the mistakes I made in the past. Many of them were due to me being a very disorganized, but this time, I’ have a plan, I have set up goals and every effort I make in terms of marketing is going to be with a certain outcome in mind.

My goal is 10 000 subscribers as at this number, I’ll be able to sustain myself off of the newsletter income only, which leaves me with the freedom to grow and improve it.

By rough estimates, the newsletter would be able to generate 0.5$ per subscriber on monthly basis, if the open-rate is 40-50% and the click-through rate is ~ 5%, which results in ~ 5k/month.

How would I reach 10k subs?

In the past I was able to grow the newsletter by a maximum of 10 people a day, by utilizing a tactic, which @ericlamideas talks a lot about on twitter. He gives some large numbers and 100+ subscribers a day, but I was never able to achieve these sorts of numbers, so be sceptical.

If I was to grow to 10 000 subs, by 10 subs/day, it would take me nearly 4 years, which is why I needed a faster method.

While I was researching growth I stummbled upon this forum. In there I discovered black hat marketing, which intrigued me as a concept.

Black Hat social media growth is basically giving you an edge over normal users. These are methods forbidden by platforms, as they often cut in their ad revenue and might be spammy, thus worsening one’s experience on the platform.

With that said, let’s get back to Money Mojo. At that point I had the funnel figured out:

1. Reach people through instagram

2. Get them to join my discord

3. Advertise the newsletter in the discord

I needed 3 things to start executing it:

• Proxies

• Antidetect browser

• Strategy

Proxies

For the ones of you who don’t know what they are:

You can think of a proxy as a middleman between you and the internet. Instead of you directly accessing a website, you go through the proxy first, and then the proxy accesses the website for you. It's like having someone else make a phone call for you so the person you're calling doesn't know your number.

^{There are multiple types like - Datacenter, residential, etc., but I’ll be using 4G Proxies, which are basically a sim card and a modem.}

You can either rent a proxy, as you would with a VPN or make one yourself, which is cheaper, but complex. A limitation with making a proxy is your physical location, as if you want to seem like you’re in the US, then you’ll have to physically set it up there.

This wasn’t an issue for me, as location wasn’t a concern and I couldn’t afford to rent them long-term, so I decided to make them myself.

I have very little knowledge of coding and networking so I needed to figure things out by reading and watching videos. I went pretty indepth and tried many softwares for which I had to write the code with the help of ChatGPT, but none of the publicly available ones satisfied my needs.

While I was researching all of this I stumbled upon a russian forum, where I discovered a software, which enabled me to host my own proxies, while also having a dashboard and everything I needed for one time payment of 100 dollars. Which, seemed like a steal, after 2 months of research and attempting to build my own.

I had to pay with crypto, but I had some prior experience, so that wasn’t an issue.

After I bought it, I got an access code and full instructions on how to set it up on my server. I won’t give the software name and exact setup for security reasons, if you are interested, just reply to the email.

Antidetect Browser

After I had my proxies up and running, I needed a browser, which masked my identity and had automation built-in. These browsers exist and are called “Antidetect browsers”, they enable you to modify your browser identity through cookies and automate them, whithout coding.

One of those browsers was on sale and I was able to get 70% off on an anual subscription.

Strategy

My strategy…Well it wasn’t great:

1. Get 2 accounts on Instagram and 1 Main

2. Post daily

3. Funnel all the engagement to the Main account

4. Advertise my discord community on my accounts

5. When people join the discord, I advertise daily, that the newsletter is free addition to the discord.

In theory, funneling people from discord to the newsletter, would result in higher engagement, in addition to that, instagram, would have a far larger reach than reddit. In reality the funnel was too long and most likely wouldn’t have worked.

It wasn’t even a black hat method, just normal posting from 3 accounts, but I didn’t realize it back then.

The Execution

So I made 2 accounts, one business themed and the other one more of an educational and started warming them up. Little did I know that even creating the accounts on PC(which is what I did) was already a prerequisite for my failure.

While warming up the accounts, I realized that my strategy sucked and I needed to make a change.

At that point I already knew that most of the guys running newsletters have big followings on twitter and had some general idea of how it operated, so I decided to transition my efforts to twitter and automate that, rather than instagram, as the chances for followers converting into subscribers were higher, although the reach was lower.

Another benefit of twitter was that it is a text based social media and newseletters are also text based, which leads to twitter users being far more likely to enjoy newsleters, than short-form content viewers like the ones coming from reels.

The story continues…

This edition is already too long, so I’ll continue the story next Sunday.

Next Sunday you can expect:

• Issues with automation

• The downfall of my plan

There is also another side of the plan, which I haven’t mentioned here, but will be talking about it in the future - Reddit.

Thanks for reading!