Want a step-by-step process—that you can immediately follow—to profitably run Instagram Shoutous?

Then you’re in luck.

This article will provide you the most helpful content you’ll read, ever.

You will learn absolutely everything you need to know to run Instagram Shoutouts.

Here’s just a few of the things you’ll learn here:

👉 How to Find the Best Instagram Accounts on Your Niche—Plus How to Evaluate Them

👉 How Much You Should Pay an Account for Shoutouts

👉 A Definitive Guide on How You Can Contact and Negotiate with These Accounts

QUICK WARNING: After you read this article you may not want to do Facebook Ads.

It’s a bold claim but I am making it.

Once you finish reading this, there’s no coming back—you can’t unread this stuff.

You’ll know what I mean later.

Let’s start.

The 3 Types Of Instagram Accounts

Before we start with the actionable content, we must discuss this first.

There are  3 basic types of Instagram accounts:

👉 Personal Brands                                            

A personal brand is the most trustworthy—but it is also the most expensive account.

These types of accounts are run by social media influencers.

An example of a personal brand is an Instagram account of a beautiful woman who has loyal, loving and supportive followers.

They can also be called the diehard followers.

One simple post from that woman will drive these followers nuts.

If you can get that woman to take pictures of your product—with themselves in it—your product would sell like crazy.

Though in order for this to happen, you must choose the right personal brand accounts (more on this later).

And one more thing: What you’ll promote must already be a surefire winning product.

Want to learn more about Sales so you can easily convince people to do what you want?

Check this video right HERE.

👉 Theme/Niche Pages

This is where I make most of my money.

Although these type of pages are not quite as good as a personal brand, they’re cheaper.

The owners are usually just in it to make some cash.

Instagram is their business.

This means that they have lower standards for the things they promote (compared to personal brands).

As a new dropshipping store you’ve got a better chance of being accepted and working with these types of pages.

Not with personal brands.

Why?

Because personal brands have something to lose while niche pages do not.

This means that personal brands require high quality partners to save face.

If you’re just starting out, theme/niche pages will be your bread and butter when doing Instagram shoutouts.

If you don’t know what a niche is, finish this article first before you continue reading:

How to Discover the Profitable Dropshipping Niches Gurus Don’t Want You to Know About

👉 Store/Brand Accounts

I’m not talking about the little dropshipping stores here.

I’m talking about real brands.

The really big ones.

But frankly, forget about it.

It’s very rare that these people will do shoutouts for you.

They have their own businesses to grow and they’ll probably cost you a lot as well.

I honestly recommend that you completely ignore this until you are a very big store yourself and sort of a recognized brand in your niche.

So these are the 3 types of Instagram accounts.

Now that you know what they are, it’s time to tell you the things that you need want to know.

How To Find Instagram Pages In Your Niche

A lot of people keep asking this question, but you know what?

It’s actually pretty simple.

You don’t need a special tool or software for this.

Here’s what I do:

I go to Instagram and search one, two or three main keywords in my niche.

I usually find around 5-10 of the most popular pages.

Once I find the good ones, I go deeper.

This is what most people won’t do, so do it.

I will go to each of those pages and click on the blue arrow that shows me the suggested pages.

Make sure you check each of those pages as well.

Why?

Because most of the time, you’ll see other possible—sometimes even better—candidates that you’ll never find simply by using hashtags/keywords.

This has been a very effective way for me to find new pages that are profitable.

It might work for you as well.

So put this in mind and actually do it.

There are hidden gems everywhere, you just need to know how to find them.

How Many Followers Should the Page Have

When you’re just getting started, you’d want to focus on smaller pages.

By doing so, you get to test as many products as you can while burning the least amount of cash possible.

“How small are we talking about?”

When I say small, I don’t mean accounts that have 1k, 5k or 10k followers.

Here’s the guide that I follow:

👉 No page below 50k followers

👉 50-100k followers for a personal brand and;

👉 100k-200k followers for niche pages.

Personal brands are worth more—and are more effective—than niche pages.

It’s a no-brainer why they require fewer followers than niche pages.

When you’re starting out, you’ll need small pages because you’re still testing your products.

If you’re absolutely sure that you have a winning product, then, by all means, try bigger pages.

If you don’t want to waste your time—and hard-earned money—testing products, read this article:

How To Find The Best Products To Dropship

How To Contact Pages—And Actually Make Them Respond To You

You’re probably thinking this out loud:

“Finally! This is the question I’ve been waiting for.”

I hear you.

So buckle up and learn the techniques I use to contact the pages on my niche.

Ready?

Here’s what you’ll do:

After creating a list of potential pages to do Instagram shoutouts on, send that page a DM.

But not just an ordinary DM.

Here’s how you do it:

In the first line of your message, write “Business Inquiry”.

It’s the first line they see and it catches their attention when they look at their inbox.

They will most likely open it because they’ll know you’re not just another follower who wants to say hi . . .

and maybe ask some stupid questions.

Anyways, your message must be short and straight to the point.

Talk about how you want to test the page and immediately inquire about their prices for a trial shoutout afterwards.

Btw, include the word “money” in your message so they’ll want to reply to you even more.

This usually implies that what you’re looking for is a long-term partnership—which you actually are—because if that page works . . . you better run more shoutouts.

After that, you’ll talk about what you require them to do (I will explain this later).

The reason why I’m telling you to ask for their prices right away is because some influencers will quote very unreasonable prices.

I’ve heard everything from $200 to $600 on pages that don’t even reach 100k followers.

Those prices are crazy and are just not worth it.

If you will get these said prices, I suggest you move on.

Just appear to know what you’re doing even if it’s your first time reaching out to a page.

Appear professional.

Appear like you’ve been doing this for years.

This will highly favor you when you negotiate with them.

Talking about negotiating . . .

Negotiating With Instagram Pages

Negotiating, a topic that people like to focus on too much.

The way I do it is I don’t negotiate much upfront.

If the influencer quotes a price that’s unreasonable, I just politely decline or tell them to piss off depending on how I’m feeling.

I don’t haggle.

It’s not worth my time—and yours as well—to negotiate a shoutout down $5.

Who you’ll want to negotiate with are pages whose shoutouts are successful.

If their shoutout converts, book multiple shoutouts in advance.

“Why do I need to book shoutouts?”

It saves time and it allows you to get more consistent revenue.

The best part?

You can negotiate a better price because you got leverage.

You give these people consistent cash flow to work on your business.

The big disadvantage of Instagram shoutouts is that you need to keep doing them otherwise you’re not going to make any money.

So book in advance—with as many accounts as you can.

Since you track the sales that you got from the initial shoutout—I’m gonna show you how to do that later—you now know how much you should pay.

However, to negotiate better with these influencers, you need to learn sales first.

With sales, not only will you negotiate better, you can sell your stuff easier as well.

You’ll see the world of ecommerce differently once you learn it.

And once you see that world?

You’ll be ahead of by 80% of the population.

If you want to learn sales to be better in selling your stuff online—and so you can negotiate better—here’s a 46minute video on how to do just that:

How To Sell Stuff Online

This is an EXCLUSIVE content that you can only get inside my course.

Grab it now before I shut it down 👉 I Want To Learn Sales!

How to Evaluate Instagram Influencers

Before you actually start hiring an influencer, you must first evaluate if it’s legit or not.

What you want to do is track the performance of each influencer to see if the quoted price is reasonable enough.

Here’s what you have to do:

You have to make sure that the page has an engagement rate above 1%.

Phlanx.com has a free calculator you can use to do that.

If the engagement rate is under 1% then there’s something fishy going on.

They probably just bought their followers.

Don’t do Shoutouts on pages like this.

It will just waste your time and money.

Now since you’re only going to evaluate pages that have responded to you, you actually have time to watch these pages.

Take a look at what they post.

If they constantly post ads, paid promotions, shoutouts, etc., then your shoutout is going to be less effective.

Terminate your relationship immediately.

Why?

Because they won’t be helpful to you for long.

People get blind to their constant promotions that they’re no longer interested on what that page says.

You geta low click-through rate resulting in low conversions.

How Much You Should Really Pay

Let’s make this quick.

I don’t recommend you spend more than $25 dollars on shoutouts until you know that your products converts in most niches.

If you reach out to twenty to thirty pages—and you follow my advice for picking those pages—then you’ll get a rough idea of whether your niche is expensive, cheap or normal.

In most cases though, for $25 you’ll get niche pages up to 150k followers and personal brands with up to maybe 75k followers.

Now keep in mind that this is just for simple shoutouts.

So you send them the image, the content and the link.

Once that’s done, they’ll post it.

BONUS TIP

Now here’s something that you can do upfront when booking your first shout-out on a page.

Often times pages will quote you a price for a timeline post and a link in bio.

Even though you ask fora link in bio, timeline post and a story post, they’ll only quote you the price for the two.

Now for some reason, page owners don’t seem to value the story with a swipe up feature.

In a lot of case,s you’ll be able to get that thrown in for free—or not for free but for the same price that they originally quoted.

So that’s something you can additionally get if you just ask for it in a lot of cases.

What You Need To Set-Up

You’re gonna want to get a story with the swipe-up feature, a timeline post and a link in bio.

A link in bio is an absolutely mandatory element of any kind of timeline shoutout.

You can also just do a story with swipe up but don’t spend so much on this.

You need to have a link to your website in the shoutout otherwise it is—to all extent and purpose—useless.

You don’t care about brand exposure and you don’t care about followers.

What you care about is getting traffic to your website and get purchases.

You don’t want to send people to your page and then hope that they click the link in your bio.

It just takes too much time and people don’t want to do it.

If the influencer says they can’t do that—they don’t offer the link in bio—I would tell them to piss off.

I would not do a shoutout with a page that won’t do link in bio except if it’s a story shoutout with a swipe up feature.

Your goal here is to get traffic.

If you can’t put a link in the bio—and you can’t do a story shoutout with a swipe up—then you’re barely gonna get it.

It will not be worth it to you.

Focus on getting traffic to your site and convert those people to customers.

That’s your job.

If there’s no link in bio or swipe up story, then I would not bother doing a shoutout.

How to Track Sales from Shoutouts

This is something that a lot of people just don’t do.

They try to guess how many sales they made just based on the time of the shoutout and then the sales they made immediately after that.

That is not a good way to do it because it’s not accurate and it’s a lot of work (especially when you have a lot of pages).

What you want to do is use a traffic link.

Assuming you’ve already set up Google Analytics, you’ve enabled ecommerce tracking.

Just a quick note:

This is usually going to be too long for the Instagram bio so sometimes it gets cut off and you won’t have the tracking benefits.

To prevent that from happening, you may want to put it to a URL shortener before sending it off to the influencer.

With a tracking link, you can tell exactly how much revenue came from each of the shoutouts.

Do you now see why tracking is so powerful?

You’ll get all these useful data and it basically takes no work!

You’ll just add the tracking link to the end of your URL, change the name and put it through a shortener.

After that?

You simply send it off to the influencer.

And that’s it.

Can You Scale With Instagram Shoutouts?

People say that this is a giant misconception . . .

“You can’t scale with Instagram shoutouts”

They got it all wrong.

You absolutely can and this is how you do it.

After you find a profitable product—or products—and you use the system I showed you:

👉 How to evaluate small pages

👉 Who to choose to do shoutouts on

👉 What to use (a tracking link)

👉 How to set up a shoutout

You start scaling by finding larger pages and testing them also to see whether they convert.

Literally just how you do it with smaller pages.

Look for some pages with five hundred thousand followers and that’s how you scale Instagram influencer shoutouts.

Now the important note.

If you’re profitable on the smaller pages, keep running shoutouts on them just once or maybe twice a week . . .

Even if you scale to five hundred thousand follower pages.

Moving to Facebook Ads

I know I said you may not want Facebook Ads.

Here’s why:

Instagram shoutouts are the cheapest and easiest way to test your products.

What’s more . . . It’s easier to learn and less complex that Facebook Ads.

The things with Facebook Ads is this:

You need to learn how to do it first and that usually takes around 2 weeks—assuming you’re learning all day long, everyday.

You see, there are a lot of things you have to keep in mind with Facebook Ads.

It’s not as easy as people make it sound to be.

It takes a lot of mental energy to analyze and optimize.

Don’t get me wrong though.

Facebook Ads is important and it’s definitely essential if you want to scale your business faster.

I even recommend you use it . . . but only AFTER you’ve built an audience.

If you’re just starting out, even if you’re an expert with Facebook Ads, you’d still choose Instagram Shoutouts over it.

Why?

Because you need data.

And one way to get that is by doing Instagram shoutouts.

An Important Keynote

So eventually you’re gonna want to move over to Facebook ads but that doesn’t mean you’ll stop doing Instagram shoutouts.

Absolutely not.

You keep doing them as long as you’re profitable and as long as it’s worth your time.

The only time you stop running IG shoutouts is if you’re making so much money with Facebook ads.

It’s simply no longer worth your time to set this up.

So, the way you move over is once you’ve got at least 100 sales for one product.

You can go to Shopify and export your customer data and your abandoned cart data.

Create a list of these people.

You then take that in an excel sheet or CSV and import it into Facebook audiences.

If you want to know more about Facebook Ads, sign up to my email list HERE.

I will be telling you guys what I learned from spending thousands of dollars in Facebook Ads.

I’ll be sending that soon, so join now before it’s too late.

Click Here To Join.

Closing Thoughts

Instagram shoutouts is a great way to make money.

It’s how I first became profitable with dropshipping.

It’s how I recommend all of you get started.

But here’s the thing . . .

I know it’s not the sexiest option.

It’s a constant hassle.

You’ll always have to find new pages and etc.

A lot of it is manual labor (but don’t think you’re above this work).

If you’re not making money yet, then don’t pass up on this opportunity.

It is basically free money if you figured this out and you’ve got one or two products in pages that convert for you.

Yes.

I can’t deny.

Facebook ads are cooler.

They’re sexier.

But it does not necessarily mean they are better.

You won’t necessarily make more money on Facebook.

Like I’ve said, the main problem with Instagram influencer shoutouts is NOT the inability to scale.

It’s just the inconsistency of the income that’s going to become a huge drag for you.

If you want to do Facebook Ads to automate your advertising and have a consistent income, then, by all means, do so.

But not until you meet the requirements and you have the fundamental knowledge to run them.

Enjoyed this article about Instagram shoutouts? Click HERE and receive daily emails about how to make money with dropshipping from James Holt, the founder of Start Selling Stuff.