Hello everyone!
I have a big dilemma on whether or not to continue with my Ig automation client management or switch entirely to manual and whitehat techniques. I thought of making a thread about this since I see many others struggle to find an answer on whether they should keep going with automation or even if Instagram marketing is still a profitable career path to take on.
Short history: I’ve been doing automation since late 2018 and it’s been doing great until July 2019 when lot’s of people cancelled their Jv subscription and move on to other things, but not me.
I doubled down on this industry because I thought that what makes the difference between success and failure, the ability to take risks and keep on going when shit hits the wall.
So I ended up investing a lot in building an agency around this service from ground up with everything there is ( website design, marketing materials, hired copywriters for blog posts and invested in equipment and knowledge to build my own proxy Farm). Now more than ever I see people who have done this for far long than I have actually quitting and I’m not sure anymore what’s the best decision.
My question is, should I keep pushing to make my own proxys and eventually a custom bot or take my loses and move to whitehat client management with outsourcing?
I think here’s the question you want to be asking yourself.
You have two options, to sleep well at night knowing that even if your clients get blocked you’re doing it whitehat so it doesn’t violate terms and you won’t wake up to a ban (worst case scenario). Or you can sleep uneasy at night knowing that when you wake up tomorrow you’ll have to deal with the next set of Instagram updates combatting automation and potentially a ban as you’re putting your clients accounts at risk.
I’ve never got a ban from automation, and I don’t think that’s instagrams goal (there’s a Facebook article explaining that it’s not their goal to ban automation users, but just stop their illegitimate actions). That being said, if you’ve invested as much as you say you have, then clearly somewhere in the horizon you picture yourself running an agency with employees once you scale up. Just think about that then, working with a lot of very reputable clients, and having to lie to them to say that you’re not putting their accounts at risk.
I’ve gone whitehat, I know a lot of people who haven’t, it’s all subjective and up to personal belief. I would say to go whitehat, but that’s just me thinking about how big businesses would cringe if sometime in the future I pitched them my services while straight up telling them it violated instagrams terms, and, oh, by the way, your businesses account could get banned, but hey, that’s on you. Hmm…
Except the fact that every single slaves that got banned the last few months were pretty easily recovered … And bans on “main accounts” aren’t that often. I never get any main accounts banned.
And i automated many of them untill now ! So i wouldn’t pick-up the “ban reason” for each one of the methods (i get a few bans on both methods anyway )
I know there are lots of discussion on manual vs Jv but my post isn’t really what’s the best method. It’s more of a specific scenario where I’m not sure if I would lose more by keep investing my time in efforts into this or if I should be happy I only lost the current amount.
I would have to agree with you on that, getting banned is not my primary concern since I never had a client’s account banned. Is more about not being able to deliver a good enough service to my clients and like Laurance mentioned, the constant thought of having to deal with EV, PV and blocks every day.
I’m inclining to manual as well but the thought that if I manage to make my own proxy and custom bot might get me back on track is hard to deal with. Do you offer only fll/unfl or you packaged your offer to include content management, design, scheduling, etc?
Also, I’m guessing you trained a VA or two to do the manual work, right?
Right now I do follow/unfollow manually myself, because I follow a strict pattern, and I think I’m not at the stage where I’m ready to even attempt to make a VA understand that, neither am I at the point where I’m looking to scale properly.
Really depends on the client, some I do everything for, some I just do follow/unfollow. I don’t offer them the services I don’t think they’ll get an ROI from so it varies industry to industry, and business to business. Some I just do content marketing for example. It depends.
I shifted from 100% automated when you aay automated you still need your hand to fix them manually anyway. Now I do manual+automated on androids since last 2 months. And now there is even left jobs for me to do since I got myself proper employees and a office. Even more carefree when I leave them on JV and need to checkup and fix them bu myself on daily basic. What you need with manual service is you need strict rule, how to track the actions and make sure to properly trained the employees.
If you plan to be in the industry for a long times I think you also know your answer.
Sounds like you managed to create a proper business out of it, kudos to you!
May I ask, how you keep track of all actions you make? Do you scrape users for follow using Jarvee? How about the FBR, how do you monitor that?
Daily amount of work is update on our private dashboard, but you can always use igblade to track? And for scraping and FBR they all calculated and done on dashboard at the same place.
Is there a reason your prefer more hassle on the main account then actually support it with slave accounts? There is only a small section of use cases where manual makes sense.
But currently - looking at the market and the situation - employing more slaves seems like the better option. On the other hand, it also depends on your scale of operation and which scale you want to reach.