How I Grew My Instagram Following to 20k in Under a Year (+ Monetized It)

For years, I struggled to grow my audience on Instagram. After 6 years of trying hard to build my fitness-focused account, I only had 2,300 followers to show for it.

While I do believe follower count is a vanity metric, I couldn’t help feeling frustrated and like a failure. Realizing I needed a change, I revamped my strategy based on my experience to grow a new Instagram account Not Bored in DC to over 20,000 followers in just 9 months while also getting paid to create content.

The secret? I have a crystal clear picture of my target audience, speaking clearly and speaking only to them, treating every piece of content as an experiment, and spending my energy doing things that prioritize long-term income.

In this article, I will walk you through exactly what helped me grow and how you can do the same.

Defining a target audience & monetization strategy

Success on social media requires planning beyond a posting schedule. Focusing on creating content for a well-defined audience is essential. Creating generalized content that may appeal to everyone ultimately appeals to no one.

Deciding which audience you want to target will impact your future monetization. For that reason, I think everyone should have a monetization strategy from the beginning.

When brands are looking for influencers and content creators to work with, they are looking for someone who knows how to speak effectively to a defined audience.

Identify content themes

When deciding to become an influencer, consider the kind of content you want to create, such as fashion, technology, or travel. As I was thinking through the content themes I wanted to discuss, I realized it would mean shifting into new content my existing fitness audience did not care about. I thought it best to start from scratch.

I brainstormed various topics I’d be interested in creating content, organized all of them into broad themes, such as “DC fitness,” “DC lifestyle,” “event highlights,” and “affordable adventures,” and saw that most of them were centered around Washington, DC. I used this to create my user personas.

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Create user personas

In my day job as a product manager at MetaCTO, I create user personas to better understand users’ needs and build apps that solve their problems.

A user persona is a fictionalized person who represents a segment of users of a product, like a website, app, or service. It is general enough to represent many people but detailed enough to feel real and elicit empathy.

Based on my content themes, I created user personas for who I thought would be most interested in my content, segmenting them out by broad groups:

The early 20s student who is looking for affordable and unique things to do in DC. The person who has lived in DC for many years and feels like they’ve seen it all. The suburban parent who dislikes crowds. The tourist from out of state. And the recent transplant to DC who’s looking to get to know their new city.

For each of these, I imagined what they would be like and created a representative person. My primary persona is Alex:

This exercise helped me identify the most valuable content for each audience segment. I selected my primary target user persona and secondary personas and excluded those that did not fit.

Recognizing which audiences to ignore is crucial. For example, I decided against making content for tourists because their needs are too different from my primary audience. This doesn’t mean that tourists won’t find my content useful. It just means that I’m not trying to solve their unique problems.

Focus on a niche

To be successful, you need to narrow down the types of content you’ll be making and determine your niche. A niche is a highly targeted and specific audience or topic.

I went through an exercise to clearly state who I am helping and how using the following statement:

I help [type of person] to [outcome] by [method].

For me, I help people living in Washington, DC, to have a more fulfilling life by connecting them to new experiences and information. This means I share things to do, eat, and know in and about Washington, DC.

Understand monetization options

Creating content is time-consuming and requires many skills. To ensure I get compensated for my time and expertise, I planned possible monetization options from the start, even though I didn’t plan to monetize immediately. I didn’t want to struggle to