As a photographer, I always find myself lost on Instagram, scrolling through hundreds of beautiful pictures and whenever I see perfectly matching feeds, I wonder: "how do they do it?"

I have dreamed of having the perfect Instagram feed, not for others, but for myself. I love inspirational things and I pride myself in creating content that I love looking at.
So I started researching and I have finally found, how they do it!

#1 Create another Instagram Profile

One of the cool things about recent Instagram updates is that you can manage more than one account from the same device without logging in and out.
It is easier to plan your images and know what they will look like next to each other if you have an account where you can post images without anyone seeing them.
Make sure to have that account on "private", so you will be the only one that can see what you are posting.

#2 Use: Later.com

Later.com is one of those useful apps that makes your life easier, perfect for planners like me that always forget to actually post photos on time.. or just forget to post them!
Later is a free service, that lets you plan in advance, photos, captions, hashtags, by day and time.
Do you want to schedule a photo to go up at 3pm on Sunday but you know you will forget? No problem, you can schedule it on Later, and the app on your phone will remind you to post the photo at 3pm. You will only need to open Later on your phone and the photo with caption and hashtags will be copied and posted on Instagram.
It will not be done automatically by the app. You will need to manually post the photo, but it does help A LOT!

#3 Use external apps to edit your photos

When I was in Bali, I didn't have my pc with me but I still managed to post stunning photos of our trip, thanks to the wireless transfer of my camera and the app VSCO.
I find that app to be amazing, it has all the tools you need to create all sorts of styles from soft to moody or clean and bright images.
VSCO is a free app available for IOS and Android I believe. I feel like it was made for me 😀

#4 Plan our style

Generally speaking, people tent to like feeds that have the same theme, more than feeds that showcase a lot of different things.
Do you want your feed to be about food, interior, nature, lifestyle, pets or books?
If you have a look at the big accounts, they all showcase not more than 3 things.
For example: Lifestyle, food and interior or Food and books or Nature and adventure and so on.
I love many things and I find it really hard to choose what to post and what not to post.
No one says you have to do this to get a lot of followers but again, generally speaking, people tent to like simpler feeds.

• @Book.lover14 for example, has a very attractive feed, all about books. I have lost my reading skills lately, but every time I look at her photos, I feel like grabbing a book and start reading again!
• @Da.vi.de has a soft look going, where the brown and soft white color prevails. I love how simple his photos are and how they seem so effortless. He has 83K followers and I am one of them!
• @Goeatyourbeets is a food photographer and with her very unique name and food styling, she always makes me feel hungry. Her photos are more on the dark side, with heavy shadows and bright highlights.

One of the things I would like to point out is the engagement on this profiles.
For some reason, @Goeatyourbeets, has 102K followers and get the same amount of likes that I get with 5K. How is that possible?
@Da.vi.de gets about 4k-5k likes on each photos with 83K followers and @Book.Lover14 gets on average 1200 likes with just 12K followers.

There is a huge difference in engagement and I wanted to point this out to show how people with thousands of followers get very little engagement if content is not posted constantly and it is not heartfelt.
Your followers want to see new content every day, want to be inspired and that is why they follow you. If you do not appear in the newsfeed everyday, you go right at the bottom of the scrolling process, and we all know how it goes, you click on one profile, and end up on another.

Engage with your followers, provide good content and you will be fine!