Personal Story of Promotion and Getting Paid
- Hayley Allred
- Nov 10, 2017
- 3 min read
As a young teen, I always wanted to be independent. I wanted to have my own money so that I could buy my own things and make sure I would not be living in a cardboard box on the side of the road when I grew up. When I was 13, Instagram had just started its long journey of fame in the US. I made a personal Instagram account and realized what the strategy of the game was with an Instagram account; the more followers I got, the more likes I received, the more publicity I got and that was the ultimate goal and never ending achievement of an Instagram account. I had no money, or barley any. I saved what I had from my babysitting and that was about it. I saw all of these “instafamous” accounts posting pictures of random things like dogs, fashion, food, pictures I could easily obtain from sites like WeHeartit or Pinterest. WeHeartit, man how that site dwindled fast, but that’s a whole other topic.
Anyway, I thought to my young self with nothing but time on my hands, I could make an account like these. I could post multiple times a day and gain stupid amounts of followers. All I noticed is the free advertising each account gave one another through shout-outs, and then it hit me. All of these accounts were connected and run by one person. This person had multiple accounts that he or she built up and gave shout-outs to gain popularity. The feed consisted of similar shout-out photos along with its advertisements for different companies and its themed photos. Every account had a theme. If the account was named @puppies, I really wouldn’t expect to find pizza pictures on the account. But yes, all these account had to do was post commonly found internet pictures on its themed account and people would follow and like. Of course, there are multiple accounts with the same theme but I noticed that the themed account with more followers was the one that new followers would follow as well. It is sort of like a band wagon effect.
Also, I wasn’t a dumb kid, I knew this person didn’t just give out free advertising to all of these different companies on the account, they had to be paid. I decided to start my own account with a theme that had not yet been popularized, teen room décor ideas. I accordingly named the account @teenrooms. I quickly learned how to use hashtags and use apps to unfollow and follow users. I learned that if I followed users, there was a 50/50 chance they would follow me back. This was also a time when Instagram didn’t have a cap on how many people an account could follow. So, what did I do? I followed the crap out of girls who followed similar accounts themed with fashion and DIY. I quickly gained followers, but it was still a lot less than the amount I followed. I downloaded the app Unfollow which allowed me to unfollow users that didn’t follow me back. Within a month, I had 10,000 followers and was following 10,000 accounts. After that, I gained followers with ease since I was considered to have a popular Instagram account. Once I had 25,000 followers, I made my second account, @afashiontrend. I gave that account multiple shout-outs and it quickly gained over 10,000 followers in two weeks.
I began to promote businesses and start up Etsy companies in exchange for free products and PayPal money. Now, the main thing I Iearned from managing these accounts is that it is a lot of work and it is very time consuming. As I hit 15, I began my first real job as a lifeguard. I decided to sell my Instagram accounts and make a few hundred dollars from them. I gained a lot of my advertising and social media skills from this experience and I am proud to say I had an Instagram account with over 25,000 followers at the age of 13.
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