Automate/outsource shoutout selling on instagram?

Instagram Marketing
#1

Hey guys!

I have multiple ig pages with a decent amount of followers and I want to monetize them by selling shoutouts. As there are too many pages to manage all the shoutouts myself, I want to outsource this / automate this. To master this process / system is one of my goals for 2018. I also want to share my system with this community once I figured out the best way to make it work.

BUT before I start to solve problems that have already been solved by some of you guys, I want to make this thread so everyone can comment their experiences or ideas on how to automate shoutouts on Instagram.

Here are a couple of my ideas that I might test:

  • get a VA to manage shoutouts and pay them a commission for every shoutout.
  • make a website where customers can easily enter the date/time/caption/etc. for a shoutout so I only need to accept or decline and it will automatically schedule the post with an automation tool.

Would love to hear your ideas and thoughts about this topic! Thank you all!

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#2

How many accounts do you have and what is your average follower amount on each account?
How many shoutout requests do you get on each account per month on average?
How much do you change for shoutout?
How your clients/you contact each other for shoutouts? Via DMs/email?

Thank you for your answers.
I will proceed to answer your topic question with recommendations to your answer to previous questions.

:slight_smile:

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#3

Well all kinds of follower counts ranging from 30k to 300k.

I get about 1-3 requests/day per account per page for the bigger accounts. The smaller ones one every few days.

Depending on the size of the page, the niche, the duration, bio-link, etc… There’s no specific price.

DM & E-Mail

#4

I think the cheapest and simpliest way for you is ecom store like woo or Shopify, just list your pages shoutouts with variations ( time/story/bio link etc) there and that’s all, for more auto way, you will add extensions like forms, customers fill the form attach the photo to the order, date and time. Simple as that!
Sorry for my English btw :smile:

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#5

really cheapest would be woo and you build your own wordpress site. wouldn’t be too hard!

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#6

I truly agree with Rokas.
I have seen some pages where they put the link in the bio for shoutouts and then you get into their website where you choose the type of shoutout (caption, photo, etc.), then you choose the time slot and the day, the duration of shoutout and then checkout

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#7

Wow thanks that sounds good!

So there is a place on shopify / woo where I can list my pages? Sry I have no experience with e-com… is that some kind of plugin?

#8

You can’t truly automate the process of shoutouts (basically you can), because you have to check each shoutout request manually because maybe some of the clients want you to shoutout some shit/spam/nude content…

If I were you, I would employ a VA, because of two reasons:

  1. it is difficult and expensive to create fully automative system to automatically publish the shoutouts into your accounts
  2. you have to manually check each shoutout request (because you might be auto posting some shit/spam/nude content in your account, and I bet you don’t want to do that)
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#9

This is how I do it:

  1. Create gmail account on your phone for every niche (bestdogs@gmail.com, bestcats@gmail.com, bestfitness@gmail.com…)
  2. Put respective email in every niche account BIO (best.dogs@gmail.com, bestdog.s@gmail.com, be.stdogs@gmail.com…) and tell people to contact for business.
  3. Receive all emails from all accounts on your phone as they are sent.
  4. Profit

This way you can receive unlimited number of shoutout requests when they are sent. You will receive all emails for bestdogs in one gmail account, and you will know which IG account is asked for shoutout because of position of a dot. Example: dog1 account has best.dogs@gmail.com in BIO, dog2 accounts has be.stdogs@gmail.com in BIO.

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#10

I actually used a VA and theoretically had everything fully automated but the VA was somewhat unreliable sometimes which takes up my time managing that. In my experience, bringing people in your business tends to make things more complicated. Maybe I just had a bad VA though. Can you recommend any resource to find good VAs?

#11

I just don’t understand the usage of the dot thing. Why does it help for you?
Doesn’t matter if you send the email to best.dogs@gmail.com or bestdog.s@gmail.com, you will get two emails to one gmail account.
What I could offer is to create an email client and put all your gmail addresses there, so you will receive all the emails into one mailbox for easier management.

#12

Thanks for your answer.

That’s actually how I’ve done it for a long time aswell and you’re right, it works fine. Still I want to try and automate it even more to be more efficient without having to back and forth a lot emailing with clients. Do you have any tips to keep the conversation from request to sale as short as possible?

#13

Just add paypal token in your website so they can checkout for the shoutout.

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#14

It helps me with 2 things:

  1. I do not feel comfortable with having exact same email in BIOs of 20 accounts. When I add dots (or +,1,2…) it is a different email address before manual inspection. I never had any problems with this.

  2. It tells me which account was requested for a shoutout. Although all emails come to bestdogs@gmail.com, in address bar exact email address will be specified (for example best.dogs@gmail.com). This is very important because a lot of people send hundreds of shoutout requests so when I answer them, they ask me about my username.

#15

Can you show me examples for this? :smiley:

#16

Plus, you can preset filters that say if email is sent to bestdog.s@gmail.com, mark it as “dog1” - so you never even have to check the “to” address.

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