# Welcome Message Welcome to the INSTAINFANTRY Docs: A Definitive Guide to Instagram Automation and Growth Hacking in 2024! I am GreyHatNik, the owner of INSTAINFANRY and a long-time running black-hat marketer with over 8 years of experience underneath my belt. I’ve spent the better part of the last decade working with a large variety of businesses and public figures, helping those with limited access to traditional marketing channels find solutions through automated growth hacking strategies. If you’re keen to learn more about my background, check out my [“Origins” blog post](https://greyhatmarketing.com/grey-hat-niks-social-media-origins/) where I dive deep into how I inadvertently became an expert in the field of SMM automation. For those that are only now first discovering INSTAINFANTRY, you may be surprised to learn that InstaInfantry used to be a downloadable software that users had to host and run themselves in a Windows OS environment. It was built specifically for running Mass DM campaigns with limited customization for most other traffic generation strategies. We’ve come a long way since 2021 and now, users are able to not only use INSTAINFANTRY on any OS of their choice but access it through just about any preferred web browser and any computer/mobile device. We’ve also added various new ways of reaching your desired target audience such as automated story reactions and Welcome DMs, giving users a plethora of new ways they can funnel and convert Instagram users. Myself and my co-developer try our best to keep InstaInfantry’s interface and mechanics as user-friendly as possible but Instagram automation is inherently complex at times. For that reason, I’ve created these documentation guides for new users to follow when just starting out. In these documentation guides, I hope to not only give y’all a breakdown of how to properly operate the tool’s various features but also explain the purpose of their existence and how it impacts our ability to execute various methods of traffic generation on Instagram. Ultimately, I want these documentation guides to serve as a quintessential handbook for anyone daring to foray into the world of black hat marketing, regardless of whether you intend to use my tool or not. I’ll be updating this section regularly as we continue to roll out more features but for quick alerts and updates, feel free to subscribe to our Telegram channel for on-demand notifications. If you are a non-technically savvy person and have no interest in managing your own accounts/infrastructure/funnels, you are welcome to utilize our [Done-For-You services](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products) where we handle the entirety of the mechanical aspects on your behalf while leaving the human element side of things in your hands such as target audience selection. For sales-related questions, please check out the[ GHM Shop ](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products)or use the following contact methods below to get in touch: [GHM Shop](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products): greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io IF Telegram Channel: [t.me/instainfantry](http://t.me/instainfantry) Telegram: @GreyHatNik Discord: @GreyHatNik # Preface I’d like to “preface this preface” by noting that this is my first time writing a piece of content this large but it's also the first time I’ve truly covered the science of Instagram automation from top to bottom. Perhaps you want to learn IG automation to grow your own, existing business. Perhaps you’re trying to start a side-hustle of growing other people’s accounts via my methods. Or maybe you just wanna learn how it all works and what the secret sauce is behind massive bot networks. If that’s the case, I’m sure you’ll find that this e-book long guide contains the majority of what you’re looking for. Instagram automation has become increasingly more difficult over the years. Gone are the days when a simple script is capable of operating hundreds of bots to perform thousands of actions without getting banned. Instagram’s algorithm is now far more advanced and is therefore much more adept at detecting accounts running on scripted software. There are several ways to combat this but they all share a common basis point: programming our bots to act as human-like as possible. That means no robotic sequences of action, different digital footprints and a lot of randomized behavioral patterns. The entire process of finding a balance between growth and caution is administered through good ol’ trial and error. We want to maximize the growth each botted account yields while ensuring it remains under the algorithm’s radar. In order to reach an equilibrium between the two, one must test many, many, many sets of parameters. What’s worse is that the Instagram algorithm is an ever-evolving beast. What worked in the past may prove useless if tried now. Thus, the strategies used to run botting operations must evolve alongside it if the rate of growth is to be sustained. Before diving head first into the logistics, I’d like to make clear that everything I’ll be covering in this guide are considered to be black hat tactics. These kinds of tactics are generally frowned upon by many marketing communities along with the social media platforms themselves. A lot of money is actively being invested to prevent these strategies from being fruitful. After all, it’s in Meta’s best interests to do so given the fact that strategies like these eat into their ad revenue stream which is effectively their primary (and truthfully only) source of income. A lot may be accomplished only to be taken away as soon as the algo catches a whiff of the racket. It’s a real “live by the sword, die by the sword” scenario so do prepare for potential consequences. And one last thing: There is this common misconception out there that by using black-hat methodology, one can get away with having poor quality content. I wanna expel that notion right away. Content is and will always be king. If you are providing zero value to the people you manage to bring onto your page, regardless of whether it was through white-hat or black-hat methods, your venture is unlikely to be successful. The reason why I call myself a Grey Hat Marketer as opposed to a pure-blooded, black hat one is because I never compromise on content. The only thing we are automating here is manual interaction. These sets of strategies aim to “bring the horse to water”. Your content serves as the ultimate catalyst of whether it drinks it or not. # Who is GreyHatNik?

Consultation Calls w/ Grey Hat Nik Graphic from the GHM Shop

I’m Grey Hat Nik, the founder of Grey Hat Marketing, InstaInfantry and the author of this guide/e-book. I’m a MarTech developer and automation specialist that’s been practicing various forms of black hat marketing since 2015. I’ve been successfully harnessing the power of social media since I was 12 years old, having organically grown an aggregate audience of 400,000 across several accounts. It was in 2015 that I lost it all in a massive IP ban as a result of one bad advert. Tragic, I must say but it ultimately opened the door to less conventional forms of SMM that I utilize to this day. I published the full back story of how I got into black hat marketing in my[ Origins blog post](https://greyhatmarketing.com/grey-hat-niks-social-media-origins/) if you want further details on my descent into the underbelly of marketing. I call myself a Grey Hat Marketer because unlike a Black Hat one, I don’t operate with any malicious intent towards the audience I’m trying to persuade as the term usually paints it. In most instances, my intention is that of any normal marketer which is to persuade my target audience to execute my desired action. The only reason I’m labeled as a grey/black hat is because I don’t operate by the rules of the platforms on which I run my activities. All of the tactics that you’re about to read, all of my methodology is heavily frowned upon by social media platforms as a whole. Sure, they claim it's about protecting user experience but what they’re truly scared of is having their one true source of revenue become compromised. You can execute the exact same strategies manually with the use of human labor and Meta won’t blink an eye. However, as soon as automation is introduced into the equation, their perspective suddenly changes. I transitioned into being a grey hat marketer because I’ve realized that the landscape had changed drastically from when I first accumulated my massive audience. I knew all the tricks, all the gimmicks, everything one would need to know behind amassing a large following. After all, I had already done it once. But because of the ever-increasing reliance on the pay-to-play model, the colossal drops in hashtag reach and the continuous changes construed as “enhancing user experience” (removal of a chronological feed; concealment of likes making it impossible to gauge an account’s true engagement rate, etc.), it was practically impossible for me to reach the same heights again after losing my 400k network. That’s why I don’t view my form of marketing as being “bad”. I view black hat tactics as being the only true leverage we have left. Are they an ideal form of marketing? Definitely not. But they do bring a considerable amount of leverage back to small business as a whole. Black hat social media tactics have been around for ages but we’re only really seeing it explode on a grander scale now due to the practices of the social platforms who’ve already “made it”. They have captured their market share and are now trying to capitalize on it to the fullest extent, leaving no room for other smaller players in the market. That is why I’ve dedicated myself to finding the unorthodox means of growth and not being utterly reliant on social media algorithms to generate leads for my clients. It’s not an easy path but I can now rest easier not having to pray to the engagement gods whenever I post something new. I know I’ll get my exposure one way or another. It’s really just a matter of which method to use. With the introduction finally out of the way, let’s delve into our first section of the documentation: Philosophy and Fundamentals! # Chapter 1: Philosophy and Fundamentals # The GHM and InstaInfantry Philosophy Before we begin covering the mechanical aspects of black hat marketing, I want to first discuss the philosophy of InstaInfantry and the fundamentals of social media growth hacking as a whole. There are a lot of players in this field and a lot of conflicting opinions on the best ways to leverage automation for growth and traffic. One of those aforementioned points of contention are whether or not you should be automating your important/high-value accounts. If you look up “Instagram Bot” on Google, you’ll find no shortage of competitors out there using all sorts of advertorial language designed to make you believe that their tool is safe and has no chance of negative repercussions. I firmly believe that those claims are dishonest. I am from the school of thought that automation, even if done correctly, will always have some element of danger to it. Hell, I’ve seen accounts get flagged for automation that have never once been botted throughout their entire existence. If someone were to come to me and ask me, “Nik, I want to grow my already large 1M account using your tool, can I import my account and start running reactions on it?”, I would say absolutely not. Why risk a 1M account running interactions on it for a chance to gain maybe an additional 2-3k followers a month at best? The ROI simply doesn’t add up in those cases. The concept of InstaInfantry was built on the premise that your main/large accounts should never be automated. I don’t make any promises as to how incredibly safe my bot is or that it’s using some state-of-the-art AI BS to avoid detection from a multi-billion dollar corporation’s algorithm for eons on end. That’s because I know that there is virtually no sure-fire way to guarantee your account’s safety when using third-party automation tools. Can you get away with it for months/years on end? Absolutely! I’ve done it first-hand with thousands of accounts by now. But have I gotten some of my accounts killed as well in the process? Indeed, I have. Tens of thousands of them in fact. That is why InstaInfantry has the word “Infantry” in its name. It represents the idea that you should not be entirely dependent on just one main account to bring traffic to your desired links or pages. Instead, you should have an army of them. A so-called infantry of cloned or generic accounts automatically interacting with your audiences, sending Welcome DMs and doing their best to turn cold traffic into warm traffic. As morbid as this may sound, they’re pretty much like pawns or missionaries being that their purpose is to spread the word of their lord until their inevitable demise. We know that a percentage of these accounts have a chance of perishing sooner or later and we accept that. Our one and only goal is to extract as much value out of them as possible, with a variety of different strategies, before they kick the figurative bucket. How you choose to extract said value out of them through automation is entirely up to you. If you’re a sales rep of sorts, looking to capture more leads in your DMs, the standard “[InstaInfantry Custom Accounts”](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/introduction-and-terminology/customized-infantry-account) method of cloning accounts and treating each of them as a standalone “main” is perhaps your best solution. InstaInfantry has everything you need to manage hundreds of them at once, such as posting/reposting content, reaching out/conversing with your incoming traffic via the Direct Message Manager, and interacting with your target audiences through follows, likes or story reactions. You just treat them as you would treat any other regular account of yours. However, if you are an influencer of sorts, an OnlyFans model, an artist, etc. whose main goal is to grow a centralized audience on just one main account for further nurturing and engagement, perhaps the [“InstaInfantry Pyramid”](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-4-instainfantry-pyramid-king-infantry) strategy is a more effective solution for you. This strategy is where we use non-customized, secondary infantry accounts to bring traffic to your main and funnel them to their final destination only after they pass through the “middleman” account. If the [“InstaInfantry Custom Accounts”](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/introduction-and-terminology/customized-infantry-account) method is scaled horizontally with no account ranking below or above another, you can think of the [“InstaInfantry Pyramid”](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-4-instainfantry-pyramid-king-infantry) strategy as a scaling vertically, with your infantry accounts as being subservient slaves to your so-called “King” account. I’ll be providing more information about this method and its execution under the [“Botting Strategies”](/chapter-3-botting-strategies) chapter. However, the beauty of InstaInfantry is that you have virtually unlimited variants of these strategies to play around with. You are welcome to combine as many aspects as you wish from the different methods I’ll be covering in this guide and create new, customized methods for acquiring and converting your traffic. Or you can disregard the philosophy altogether and simply use InstaInfantry in the same way you’d use any other bot, running the follow/unfollow strategy on it and racking in the gains. At the end of the day, the choice is entirely yours and I will not judge anyone who chooses to go down that route and for keeping it simple. But if you want to experiment with the evolved systems of traffic generation and make use of all that InstaInfantry is capable of, you are welcome to do so. Without further ado, let’s get into the fundamentals:
# Botting Fundamentals Earlier in the preface, I mentioned that to first strike a balance between maximum growth and limited risk, one must test a large variety of parameter settings to extract as much value as possible from each botted account. To reach that aforementioned state of equilibrium, we must start from somewhere. Accounts and proxies are not particularly expensive but when you’re burning through hundreds of accounts on a monthly basis trying to capture all the attention you can get, the expenditure column really starts adding up. One of the most common misconceptions among first-time InstaInfantry buyers is that all they need to start dominating Instagram is a license to use the tool. Many a time I’ve received complaints from clients who failed to read any of my tutorials/case studies prior to purchasing the tool, claiming that the tool wasn’t in a working condition given they didn’t have any of the essentials. If this is your first time exploring Instagram automation please note: InstaInfantry is simply a software. More specifically, it is a software designed to facilitate the automation of accounts to execute various actions that THEN bring traffic to said accounts. Without the bare essentials like accounts and proxies (which we’ll be talking about shortly), the software on its own is useless. So please make sure to have accounts and proxies on standby prior to purchasing a monthly license to avoid any time wastage. If you need to purchase either accounts or proxies, please navigate to the [GHM SellPass Shop ](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products)where you can do so. Now that we’re on the topic of accounts, let’s discuss what makes a “good” or “bad” account and how it impacts your botting operations as well as the various factors such as age of an account you’ll need to pay attention to when running black hat campaigns. And as you’ll soon find out, the age of an account is a factor that warrants a significant allotment size in our hypothesized “likelihood of getting banned” formula, often referred to by practitioners as the so-called “[Trust Score” ](/chapter-1-philosophy-and-fundamentals/botting-fundamentals/trust-scores-explained)of an account.
# Trust Scores Explained To get a better understanding of how Instagram discerns bots from real people, it is easier to envision that segment of the algorithm as a scale. There are two categories of variables: existential and behavioral. Existential variables can be viewed as “innate” factors, components that have little to do with the actions you take on Instagram but the account itself. Whereas behavioral variables focus solely on the observable activity any given account engages in. The existential and behavioral characteristics of every account continuously transmit data to the algorithm. The algorithm then analyzes and interprets that data, which in turn manifests something resemblant of a “trust score”. Said trust score dictates the degree of vigilance the algorithm must observe with any given account. The lower an account’s score is, the faster the algorithm will enact a punishment or block as soon as it detects sketchy activity. Each of the aforementioned variables play a role in guiding the script to assign a specific score. That trust score is then used to place an account somewhere on the hypothetical spectrum of “real-ness”. It’s safe to say that some variables warrant a higher magnitude of influence over the rating than others, forming almost like a hierarchical structure if you will. For example, parameter settings trump all variables in terms of authority if programmed ridiculously. You can have the best existential characteristics across the board but if you try to follow a thousand people in the span of five seconds, Instagram will know. Obviously, a human is incapable of manually following that many people in such a short amount of time. The algorithm will latch on to that and even if the account is not instantly disabled, its rating will be forever tarnished in the eyes of the all-seeing algo. It will be subject to scrupulous surveillance until the end of its days, with each misstep eliciting a progressively harsher penalty until the inevitable ban. That is why it’s imperative to remain under Instagram’s radar at all costs by ensuring each variable is set up to evoke the least amount of attention. Said variables consisting of the following: # Age Upon inception, each account receives a negative trust score in the eyes of the algorithm. The longer an account exists with no identifiably suspicious activity, the higher its rating becomes. When it finally does decide to engage in some questionable activity, Instagram will be more lenient towards it given its age. It doesn’t do that because it values your loyalty but because the degree of vigilance it imposes upon that account has decreased over the period of time the account remained dormant. A brand new profile, on the other hand, does not receive the same level of hospitality. As soon as the algorithm is alerted to suspicious activity, it will not take mercy. It will swoop in and dole out penalties from the get-go. The rationale behind this process is to hinder people from having an unlimited supply of bots ready to go at a moment’s notice. It’s simply an impediment designed to keep automaters at bay which is why age is a very important factor within our theoretical formula of “ban probability”. Take for example two common types of accounts: fresh and aged. In my experience, fresh accounts have a higher probability of being flagged by the algorithm as they have yet to build up their “trust” on the platform. Hence, when utilizing accounts of this caliber, it'll be prudent to set the initial parameters for moderate growth and implement a slow paced linear progression. An aged account, on the other hand, would have accumulated a greater degree of “trust” with Instagram by virtue of just existing on the platform. Aged accounts can be thrusted into more aggressive configurations right away as an action block is much less likely to result in an imminent ban for them in comparison to brand new accounts. This is why accounts sold on the[ GHM SellPass Shop ](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products)for the purposes of running the [InstaInfantry Custom Accounts ](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/introduction-and-terminology/customized-infantry-account)or the [InstaInfantry Pyramid strategies](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-4-instainfantry-pyramid-king-infantry) are at a minimum one month old. It reduces their likelihood of instantly perishing as soon as they hit an action block (which is a highly common occurrence in the beginning stages of warm-ups) and enables users to launch their story reactions almost immediately instead of sitting and waiting for them to age.
# Device
Device is a slightly more complex variable as it is neither a solely existential one nor is it purely behavioral. It’s a mixture of both categories. That’s why we must split it into two different parts.
# Device used to MAKE an account Instagram is well aware of the massive account farming operations being single handedly driven by rooted Android phones. iPhones, on the other hand, command a greater degree of trust because there are practically zero readily available apps capable of spoofing all the info iOS requires. The jailbreaking process is far more cumbersome than Android’s and is generally just a bigger pain in the ass to deal with. If one has a choice between making an account via Android or iPhone, iPhone-manufactured accounts are typically viewed as being superior. With that being said, all the accounts I use for my own operations as well as the accounts sold in the[ GHM Shop](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products) are android-generated. They have no issues performing up to the standard of iOS generated accounts once they reach a certain point in their warm-ups. Will they have lower action limits starting out in comparison to iOS-made accounts? Most likely, yes. But does paying 10x more for iOS-generated accounts justify the couple of days you’ll save in your warm-up routine? Maybe or maybe not. In my opinion, it certainly doesn’t justify the drastic increase in cost and that’s why I’ll continue using android-based generation for all of my botting operations.
# Device used to OPERATE an account Here, the device becomes heavily intertwined with the proxy variable as the amalgamation of your OS, user-agent and cookies all come into play to determine the degree of credence the algorithm views you with. When running a massive operation, you’d want to program your bots to emulate different combinations of said variables to avoid having a link drawn between them. When you’re [Adding Accounts into InstaInfantry,](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/adding-accounts-into-instainfantry) it will automatically assign a completely randomized user agent depending on the sort of device you select: iOS or Android. Keeping them diverse is crucial to maintaining a long-term botting operation without racking up the expenditure column by relentlessly replacing accounts. I personally prefer to stick to android since my accounts already have an association to android as their existential variable but you are welcome to switch. This variable has an almost negligible impact on your account longevity so don’t concern yourself too much with what to choose.
# Email
Email used to verify an account is another variable that you’ll need to pay close attention to. Be careful creating or purchasing accounts that use mailing platforms like “mail.ru” for verification purposes. The reason for that being, those mailing platforms uphold a far less rigorous standard for account generation than say Google or Yahoo. Instagram is aware of those “email mills” and views profiles that were verified via those mailing platforms in a negative light. They typically come pop3 enabled, making the process of verifying botted accounts by email far less cumbersome. Again though, this is just an inference of mine and there’s not enough information out there to prove or disprove this assumption, especially considering how many Eastern European Instagram users use platforms like “mail.ru” as their primary email provider. As a Russian guy myself, I’m aware of its popularity within the region. However, I still stand by my notion that it’s safer to generate accounts using your standard, western-based email platforms that derive a higher level of assurance than off-shore, less established ones. On a side note, do be aware that this is hardly a “make or break'' variable. In the hierarchy of factors influencing bans, I’ve deemed this one to not be as crucial, therefore I suggest you not place too much emphasis on it. Mail.ru accounts are very popular and can last for ages so long as they’re utilized in a thoughtful manner. If given a choice between a fresh, gmail-verified account and an aged, mail.ru-verified account, I’d go with the mail.ru one any day. Same goes for Gmail/DC or Mail.ru/4G proxies which we’ll cover soon. This variable ranks low in the totem pole of importance so don’t stress if you have to use non-western email platforms. I personally use gmx.com to verify my accounts and I’d say it’s only a slight step above mail.ru or rambler in terms of trust.
# Phone Number The phone number used to verify an account harbors practically the exact same implication as what I’ve written above for the email. Numbers based in third-world countries are also presumed to negatively affect the initial rating bestowed upon an account. The same set of principles apply. Lower cost to obtain equals lower barrier to entry. Lower barrier to entry equals easier access to bots. And easier access to bots - bad for Instagram. In addition, it is highly advisable to use phone numbers with area codes that reflect the positioning of your proxies. If you’re using a Thai SIM to verify an account running on a Brazilian proxy, that’s not a good look for your profile. My accounts are generally created using eastern european numbers, same geo as my [GHM Proxies.](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products) I find that eastern europe is an affluent enough region to not elicit as much suspicion from Instagram while avoiding the ridiculous price tags that come with the popular, “safe” geos like the US and western europe. With that said, I know plenty of practitioners that use Indonesian or Indian phone numbers for verification purposes with almost no discernible difference. That’s why this variable is almost identical to the email as it has little to no visible impact on the trust score of an account. When you’re purchasing premade accounts from the [GHM Shop](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products), the numbers I used to verify the accounts get removed prior to being loaded into the shop. This is done to prevent you from getting locked out of the account in the future, which is commonly done with any virtual number you can only use a single time. If you’d like to know where to obtain single-use virtual numbers from just about any geo, I’m willing to introduce you to a few options in my [hour-long consultation service.](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products)
# Proxies
The quality of the proxy on which an account runs is likely amongst the few most important existential variables within the formula. Proxies act as a gateway between you and the internet. They mask your true IP address from the algorithm and maintain your anonymity. It’s a very similar concept as a VPN except without the added benefit of encrypting your traffic. I won’t go too in-depth explaining the intricacies of proxy functionality so if this is a completely foreign concept to you, please do a bit of Google research. The reason we use proxies when automating accounts on Instagram is to ensure the algorithm views each account as being operated by a separate entity. If you are simultaneously running 30 different accounts on a singular IP address, that raises suspicion. The level of surveillance increases. If one account then fumbles and does something to confirm said suspicion, the 29 other accounts associated with that IP address receive the same level of scrutiny, even if they hadn’t done anything out of place. That IP address is now forever remembered as dubious and any accounts affiliated with it, whether in the past or in the future, will be watched far more closely, rendering automation practices more difficult. Bad proxies will absolutely destroy whatever operation you run. That is why most automation experts frown heavily upon the use of datacenter proxy servers. They’re super cheap and are practically always used for doing something super shady. You may get lucky and get some that hadn’t ever been utilised for executing sketchy tasks but the chances of that, statistically speaking, are quite low. The hierarchy in terms of quality roughly goes like this: 1. ***4G IP*** 2. ***Residential IPs*** 3. ***Datacenter IPs*** If you have the budget, always go for the 4G IP. It becomes far more difficult for the algo to detect and outright ban you when your IP is being shared by potentially thousands of other “normal” users in the vicinity. That’s what makes them powerful cloaks while also increasing an account’s trust score for using a mobile-based network like the majority of “normal” IG users do. If purchasing your mobile proxies from the [GreyHatMarketing Shop](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products), they will be 4G proxies as I exclusively only deal with mobile IPs. I do not ever bother using other types of proxies as it has too great of a likelihood of destroying my accounts. Now, the recommended limits on proxies tend to vary quite drastically depending on who you ask but I personally never exceed more than three accounts on a singular proxy at any given time. Having run countless tests, 3 concurrently running accounts is the upper echelon of what is considered safe and effective. Beyond that limit, you’re taking on a greater degree of risk of having all of your accounts banned and tarnishing that particular IP address for the foreseeable future. When purchasing mobile proxies, it is also important to note their User Base to IP pool ratio. Given that I’m currently a co-owner of a farm in Romania, all of my proxies are exclusively RO-based and located within the Bucharest region. The default ISP for 4G proxies purchased from the Grey Hat Marketing shop is Vodafone for the exact aforementioned reason of it having a massive presence within this particular region. Let’s do a quick breakdown of the math. There are roughly 1.8 million people residing in Bucharest. The city has a total known IP pool of roughly 58,000 across its cellular towers. 1.8 million / 58,000 = 31. That is roughly the number of users located on a singular Bucharest-based IP at any given moment. These “normal” users are how we mask our operations. It’s what separates 4g mobile proxies from the data center or residential ones: the degree to which IPs are being shared. Instagram is obviously not going to flag and ban every single user associated with that IP address as that’d be the equivalent of bombing a village to kill a singular criminal. But if you’re simultaneously running 15 accounts on this singular IP address, your operation amounts to almost 50% of that proxy’s ENTIRE user base. That will certainly get picked up by Instagram no matter how randomized your behavioral and existential variables may be. That is why 3 accounts is the limit for any proxies purchased from the [GHM Shop.](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products) I do this to ensure my proxies can continue being sold and used for my own operations for the foreseeable future without the pool getting clogged up with flagged IP addresses. If purchasing proxies elsewhere, I only suggest that you do some preliminary research to get a sense of what their IP pool/user base is. A small IP pool ratio will greatly impact your operations and often not for the better. This is arguably one of, if not the most important variables when it comes to affecting your accounts’ trust scores so definitely do not cheap out when it comes to your IPs. The costs of account replacements and time loss will be far greater in the long-term.
# Software/Scripting
A software or script is what we call an application that is programmed to execute various sequences of actions. It’s how we get the bots to behave and act in accordance with our needs. There are plenty of scripts out there for Instagram automation, both commercial and non-commercial besides just InstaInfantry. One very popular commercial alternative out there was Jarvee prior to them shutting down. The reason this is believed to be an important behavioral variable is because not all bots are built the same. Something like InstaInfantry or Jarvee will generally have significantly more thought-out private API interaction principles than some random, bare-bones script you find on Github. But that’s not to say that certain “lower-level” scripts don’t have their own use cases. Take for example the old version of InstaInfantry back when it was just a Mass DM bot. If you look it up on YouTube, you’d probably be able to find an old advertisement I had made for it about three years back. It had a significantly worse UI than the current web-version of InstaInfantry and it did not offer much in the way of iOS/Android API-emulation in the same manner the current version does. You couldn’t scroll through feed, propagate settings or warm accounts in any meaningful fashion. All it does is just take your accounts and immediately start sending out messages in the spammiest way possible. It was simply not built with account longevity in mind. Having read this, you may assume that that version of InstaInfantry was a shittier option than the “evolved” version of it and you’d be somewhat right. However, in reality, the InstaInfantry Mass DM bot was and still is the best possible tool for running high-risk strategies like Mass DMs on it. I’m no longer promoting it as much anymore but it’s still up for sale in the [GHM Shop](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products) under the [Instagram Mass DM Infrastructure Package.](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products) The reason you wouldn’t want to run a strategy like Mass DMs on the new version of InstaInfantry is because of the following: The old version of InstaInfantry imposes no limits on how many accounts you can run on it at any given time. That’s because the software is self-hosted and doesn't require much in the way of resources to automate a decent amount of accounts at once. In fact, just one running account only eats up about 30MB of RAM, meaning your average 8GB RAM laptop has the capability to run upwards of 150 accounts on the tool simultaneously before capping out (accounting for baseline memory availability). The new version of InstaInfantry, on the other hand, can eat up as much as 260MB worth of RAM per account depending on how many features/actions you enable it to do at once. That means your average laptop will likely only be able to run about 22ish accounts on it (accounting for baseline memory availability) before crashing. This is because the new version of InstaInfantry has far more bloat within its code due to how it interacts with Instagram’s APIs. Those little snippets of code ultimately mean nothing in the grand scheme of traffic generation but mean everything when it comes to emulating a real human user’s behavior. That’s how we’re able to evade bans for extended periods of time while running strategies like[ InstaInfantry Custom Accounts](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-3-instainfantry-customs-story-reactions-large-scale) and the [InstaInfantry Pyramid.](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-4-instainfantry-pyramid-king-infantry) These methods of traffic generation are considered to be “low-risk” and thus warrant using software that compliments them in a similar manner i.e. automating accounts in a “low-risk” fashion. The [Mass DM strategy](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-7-mass-direct-messaging-mass-dms), however, does not fall under the “low-risk” category. You can have the best software and the best accounts in the world but if you’re messaging 40 random users per day whom you have zero prior history with while adding all sorts of media attachments for streamlined funneling, you’re bound to get your accounts banned within a matter of two weeks at the very most. It’s really just as simple as that. That’s why a less bloated software and shittier, mass-generated accounts are actually a more economical option for the execution of such strategies. I’ll be covering more on this topic in the[ DMs, Message Customization, and Managing DMs with Chatters](broken://spaces/dumU31rzLTy6nqeMuVHz) and the [Botting Strategies](/chapter-3-botting-strategies) sections but I just wanted to give you a brief idea of how to discern between various types of softwares depending on your objectives. If you’re ever in need of custom-made software for Instagram or other platforms/websites as part of our[ Custom Development Projects](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products) aka black-hat-devs-for-hire service in the [GHM Shop](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products), this is something you’ll need to account for in the scope of the project. If your objectives are more spam-like, don’t have account longevity in mind and don’t require an immense amount of vigilance with how the tool interacts with the platform, the scope and thus quote of the project will be significantly lower. However, if you’re keen on keeping your accounts alive for extended periods of time and ensuring your automation practices are as hard to detect as possible, anticipate having to invest far more into the development of your script to meet those objectives.
# Parameter Settings This variable is the most complex one of all but also one that we are able to accumulate the most data for and map out accordingly. Parameter settings are what we use to dictate our bots and instruct them as to what actions to take and when to take them. It is a behavioral factor and one that carries the most significance in terms of ban probability. There are innumerable combinations of settings one can implement to reach the point of equilibrium I was talking about earlier. A sweet spot between efficiency of growth and few to no penalties. But to reach this highly sought-after state, one typically spends a lot of time and money gauging what works best commensurate with their set of existential variables. It’s important to keep in mind that although this is likely the most important variable, it is still very much contingent upon the previously covered factors of any given account. That is why there is so much debate within this subset of Instagram automation. What seemingly works for one person would instantly lead to a penalty for another. In September of 2023, I had an account that was capable of liking up to 3,500 stories per day consistently. Many other practitioners said that such aggressive settings have been impossible to execute since early 2023 but my personal experience has proven that to be false. Its fate eventually did meet its demise at the hands of the algorithm but not before I was able to extract as much value out of it in a month than is possible with a batch of 3 conservatively programmed accounts. Again, there is no definitive set of parameters which is sure to prevent penalties. But what is widely agreed upon is that each account should start off slow and increase its automated activity gradually over the span of a few weeks. The progression would typically look like this: | Day | Story Interactions | | ------ | ------------------ | | Day 1 | 80 - 200 | | Day 2 | 100 - 200 | | Day 3 | 100 - 250 | | Day 4 | 150 - 400 | | Day 5 | 250 - 450 | | Day 6 | 300 - 800 | | Day 7 | 650 - 1200 | | Day 8 | 800 - 1200 | | Day 9 | 1000 - 1500 | | Day 10 | 1400 - 1800 | | Day 11 | 1650 - 1800 | | Day 12 | 1700 - 2200 | And so on until you start receiving blocks. Once you begin receiving penalties, you know you’ve maxed out the degree of efficiency that is feasible with your account’s combination of existential variables. When you’re adding your accounts into the InstaInfantry [Reactions module](https://app.gitbook.com/o/lelmeAv0vzNYGgUtwHGh/s/a7Z8ze4cMWZRPXgq5Pfu/~/changes/3/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/reactions-module-and-driving-traffic/the-reactions-module), InstaInfantry will automatically begin doing a warm-up routine on the account. It’ll start off relatively strong and depending on which stage of the warm-up cycle it encounters a limit, it’ll drop down by one and proceed with the rest of the programmed progression from there. Aged accounts purchased from the [GHM Shop](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products) will typically still need about 5ish days to build up to their maximum “safe” daily limit of 2.2k. Even aged, pre-warmed accounts will still need to undergo a brief warm up period after switching device user agents and IPs. Each account is bound to behave at least a little differently during its build-up phase as it’s impossible to control for all of the moving, dynamic variables during this stage. Anticipate some accounts moving along much faster in their warm up routine whilst others lag behind. It’s hard to say what the root cause of this discrepancy is as it can happen with virtually identical accounts, whose existential and behavioral variables match one another to a tee. It’s just one of the many headscratchers you can expect when running any sort of botting operations. There’s also the matter of session limits, randomized interval actions, rest periods, etc. I’ll be covering some of these keywords in the[ Reactions module](https://app.gitbook.com/o/lelmeAv0vzNYGgUtwHGh/s/a7Z8ze4cMWZRPXgq5Pfu/~/changes/3/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/reactions-module-and-driving-traffic/the-reactions-module). The table I’ve posted above is a very generalized idea of what warm-ups look like as they are typically far more nuanced than that. Every advanced practitioner implements something a little different. Once you really get into the nitty gritty of automation, that’s where readily available information becomes scarce as everyone’s scared of having their individual methods uncovered and put to bed. Warm-up methods are one of those. InstaInfantry does a good enough job simplifying this process for most beginners but this is something you may need to pay close attention to when using other tools or working with other platforms. InstaInfantry automatically executes small little actions that don’t have anything to do with story liking or traffic generation for the purpose of warming an account and building up its [trust score](/chapter-1-philosophy-and-fundamentals/botting-fundamentals/trust-scores-explained). If you’re using other tools, try to see if they have features such as feed scrolling, site browsing, post saving, etc. You ultimately just want to have access to actions that don’t always result in increased exposure via notifications. Remember, the goal is to radiate “human vibes”. If your bot isn’t radiating human vibes, then it truly is not long for this world. In today’s social media environment, it will cease to exist nigh instantly.
# Reaching Equilibrium
Now that we’ve covered all the variables, there’s one recurring theme that I’ve continuously referenced throughout this Fundamentals chapter but never fully addressed. That is the so-called equilibrium. The place we all strive to get to when running these operations. The optimal risk and reward ratio or in our case, efficient growth and limited penalties. It is almost a given that you will spend a lot of time getting to it. I don’t have any explicitly useful information for reaching it as it will be extremely different for each person depending on the method or strategy they are utilizing. The one piece of advice that I do have is to continuously test and optimize your combinations of variables. And when you do, never forget one of the integral tenets of the scientific method: only test one variable at a time. Do your utmost best to control for certain variables by generating batches of accounts with similar existential characteristics and experimenting with each one individually before concluding what the optimal state for that variable is. Keep meticulous records of the results and you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches later down the road. Now that we have a decent understanding of the fundamentals of black hat automation, let’s start covering how you can implement this knowledge in your use of InstaInfantry. # Chapter 2: Using InstaInfantry # Adding Accounts into INSTAINFANTRY To add an account into InstaInfantry, please do the following: * In the panel located on the left side of your screen, click on the icon depicting the Instagram logo labeled as “Accounts” * At the top of the screen, next to “Saved Accounts”, click on “New Account”
* Enter your account’s username and password
* Choose a mobile operating system that you want the software to emulate when automating this account, whether it be iOS or Android. I’ve tested both extensively and can say the differences between the two are negligible but I still personally prefer to use Android user-agents since all of my accounts are generated using Android-based devices.
* Select your preferred verification method. If your account is 2FA enabled or in the event of a geographic IP switch, Instagram will ask you to verify your identity by completing a challenge to confirm you’re the owner of the account. You have five main options to choose from: e-mail, mobile phone/WhatsApp, browser extension, backup codes or confirmation from a trusted device.
Email is selected by default and will be the only way you’ll be logging into any of the infantry accounts you purchase from our shop. Phone/confirmation from a trusted device is useful if you’re onboarding accounts you or your clients use regularly on your personal devices. Browser extension is useful if you use a multi-login browser tool for your accounts as you can then import the session they were last in using the Cookie Downloader plug-in. And lastly, backup codes are useful for accounts that have 2FA enabled and went through the process of configuring their backup codes for future use. \- Next, you will need to add a proxy to the account. As I mentioned in the beginning of this section, proxies are one of the most essential things you’ll need when foraying into this form of marketing. They are what mask our true IP addresses and are at the core of any mass botting operation. I highly, highly recommend that you only stick to using mobile proxies when automating accounts you intend on keeping for extended periods of time. If purchasing your mobile proxies from the [GreyHatMarketing Shop](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products), you will be receiving them in HTTPS format. In that scenario, just copy the exact value you receive in the TXT file and insert it into the proxy field. If purchasing proxies elsewhere, make sure that you check the format in which you received them, whether it be SOCKS4, SOCKS5, or HTTPS. If their format is different from “username:password\@ip:port”, reformat them before inserting them into the field. If you’re in need of a refresher for what proxies are and how they differ in quality, please revisit the [Proxies ](/chapter-1-philosophy-and-fundamentals/botting-fundamentals/proxies)section of the Fundamentals chapter. If you have a static proxy that doesn’t ever rotate, ask your provider if they have an API link that you can then insert into the tool for automatic IP rotation. Proxies purchased from the [GHM Shop](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products) are scheduled to rotate IPs automatically every three hours so you can leave this section blank if purchasing them. The remaining optional features on the log-in page are only useful for advanced black hat practitioners. If you are a casual user, simply leave these sections blank unless you are using other tools on your accounts alongside InstaInfantry and need to replicate specific android user-agents or preserve/remove cookies of previous sessions. # Branding Accounts # Manual Editing and Mass Editing Now that you’ve added your first infantry account to the tool, it is time to brand them. If you’re purchasing aged, pre-warmed accounts from the GHM shop, you’ll usually get an account that already has some random posts on it and anywhere between a few to a few dozen followers that were gained through automated follow/unfollow. These accounts have basically already gone through what we refer to as the “warm-up” process and are capable of hitting high action limits without getting action blocked. This so-called warm-up process is an integral part of any Instagram black hat activity as it gives your account what practitioners in the community refer to as a high [“trust score”](/chapter-1-philosophy-and-fundamentals/botting-fundamentals/trust-scores-explained). An account that was created very recently, has a “New” label attached to it, and has little to no prior activity on it would be classified as a “low trust score” account and thus, be more prone to receiving relogins or even falling prey to suspensions when running any automated activities. If you’re working with accounts of such caliber, you will need to be very careful with how you use them in those first few weeks as that will determine whether they become a trustworthy account with high action limits or receive a swift ban hammer from the algorithm.

Accounts Preview

In the “Accounts” section of your dashboard, you’ll be able to view and edit accounts you’ve added into InstaInfantry. On the boxes representing individual accounts, you will find two buttons: EDIT PROFILE and VIEW TIMELINE. By clicking on the EDIT PROFILE button, you will be presented with a range of editing options for you to brand your accounts in a manner you see fit. Here, you can change the profile’s name, edit the profile’s bio, change the profile picture, and add/alter the link in bio among other things. Pre-warmed accounts purchased from the GHM Shop will also oftentimes have existing posts on them, which you could either keep, archive or delete in this section. That being said, you should note that it is recommended to ARCHIVE existing posts RATHER THAN DELETING them all at once, as doing mass deletions of posts could be flagged as suspicious behavior and potentially lower the account’s trust score. If you need to edit accounts at scale and don’t have to manually customize dozens or hundreds of accounts one by one, you can use the Edit module. Here, you will be met with options to Change Profile Picture, Change Usernames, Change Full Name, Change Bio, Change Bio Link, Change Gender, Change Privacy, Change Password, and Change Proxies, respectively.

Mass Edit preview

When selecting one of these options, you will see a textbox labeled as “Connect Accounts'' where you can type in given shortcodes. Typing in one asterisk (“ \* “) will display [accelerators/scrapers](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/introduction-and-terminology/scraper-accelerator-low-tier-account), two asterisks (“ \*\* “) will display main accounts, an asterisk and a letter “s” (“ \*s “) will automatically use all accelerator accounts, and an asterisk and a letter “m” (“ \*m “) will automatically use all main Instagram accounts.

Connect Accounts preview

Connect Accounts Two Stars preview

As you select components of the account you would like to mass edit, you will be presented with text boxes where you can input your desired custom changes. When selecting to edit usernames, for example, you’ll need to write the exact usernames you want the accounts to display in the text box. Each line will be correlated to a new username so make sure that the quantity of usernames/lines you insert into the text box correlates with the quantity of accounts you are attempting to re-brand.

Mass Change Username preview

If you fail to give an adequate amount of usernames or provide usernames that are taken/unavailable, instainfantry will begin to add random characters at the end of the handle until it finds a value that’s available. I won’t be explaining every single editing feature here as most of them should be pretty self-explanatory and are covered by the notes embedded beneath the text boxes. Just play around with them and you should get an intuitive understanding of how to utilize them pretty quickly. As a final note on the subject of branding, please be careful when making certain edits to accounts as it can sometimes deplete their [trust scores.](/chapter-1-philosophy-and-fundamentals/botting-fundamentals/trust-scores-explained) Archiving/deleting a bunch of posts in one go as soon as you login from a new IP is one such example of that as it can be deemed as suspicious behavior and lead to automatic logouts/relogins. Username, password and email changes are the most detrimental changes you can make to an account. The hierarchy goes like this: 1\. Email/phone change 2\. Password/username change 3\. Mass Post Deletion/Archiving 4\. Name change 5\. Bio/link change 6\. IP/Geo switch 7\. Profile pic/post uploads The higher up the hierarchy the respective edit is, the more of an effect it will have on depleting your infantry account’s trust score. Now, I’m not saying that you absolutely shouldn’t change usernames as that would obviously make it very difficult to properly brand accounts and optimize conversions. I’m just saying that you should expect a potential decrease in your action limits over the next couple of days after executing these edits. By simply running normal story actions (which I’ll be covering in the following section), your trust score and action limits will increase as a result of that until you’re back to the account’s previously held action limits.
# The Cloning / Reposting Reposting and Caption Customization The Cloning / Reposting feature is a useful tool that allows you to automatically repost content from other Instagram accounts. This can be a great way to save time, generate new content, and reach a wider audience. To use this feature, simply indicate which pages you want to repost from and specify the settings for your Infantry accounts. You can choose to repost any post, posts with photos only, or posts with videos only. You can also specify how many posts to repost per day and what times of day to repost. To avoid being flagged for spam, it is important to repost only a few times per day. You should also choose pages that repost high-quality content that is relevant to the target audiences of your Infantry accounts.

Cloning / Repost preview

You can also use the Cloning / Reposting feature to automatically add a caption or first comment to each of your reposts. Adding a caption is an effective way to add personality to your posts, and adding a first comment is a useful way to add hashtags or to promote other content. To add an automated caption or first comment, simply enter the text of your comment into the appropriate fields in the Cloning / Reposting settings. You can also utilize spintax to customize your comments and make them more unique.

Repost Time Customization preview

Repost Time Customization Text Box preview

Repost Caption Customization preview

First Comment preview

The Cloning / Reposting feature also includes a variety of filtration and blacklist features. These features allow you to skip posts with certain words or symbols, or from certain users. This is useful for avoiding posts that are not relevant to your brand or that may be offensive or inappropriate. For example, you could blacklist the name of your competitor and any inappropriate names to prevent your Infantry accounts from reposting any posts that mention those words. You could also blacklist specific users who post content that your audience may not like.

Caption Filtration and Blacklist preview

# Reactions Module and Driving Traffic # The Reactions Module The Reactions Module is a powerful tool that takes your lead generation efforts to the next level as it encompasses the entirety of all available user outreach options. It’s basically the core selling point of InstaInfantry as a tool and is vital in the execution of any black hat strategy that we’ll be discussing later on in the guide. This is what you’ll ultimately be using to drive traffic towards your King account(s) or any other link/website/platform of your choosing. Here, you will find a wide array of actions you can automate through InstaInfantry. Actions whose sole intent is to bring eyeballs on your desired infantry accounts. Before we get to the actual automation, let’s first discuss the basics of [targetology](/chapter-4-target-audience-selection). You don’t want your Infantry accounts interacting with just any random user it finds on Instagram. Remember that each account, regardless of its trust score, will have a limited amount of actions (API requests) it can do on a daily basis. Some accounts can do more, others less. But to maximize your action-to-conversion ratio, you need to be selective with who your infantry accounts interact with. This is where the Targeting feature comes in. Targeting essentially allows you to choose where your infantry accounts draw their pools of target users to interact with. You can choose to target the followers of specific pages/people, target users who use certain hashtags, target those who published posts with a specific location geotag (Places), or even just use the exact IDs of users whom you’ve scraped using another tool. This feature basically enables you to hone in on a specific type of user to ensure you’re only spending your limited interactions on people with a higher-than-average likelihood of being receptive to what you’re promoting. If you’re promoting an OnlyFans model for example, perhaps your best choice for targeting is to simply use followers of models who share similar characteristics to yours, whether it be by race, body type, niche/fetish, etc. If you’re a casino or sportsbooking provider, perhaps using followers of your competitors may be the way to go. If you’re a health supplement provider looking to find influencers, perhaps using specific “healthfluencer” hashtags will help you hone in on pages who promote a certain style of living. If you’re a restaurant, a brick-and-mortar store, or just about any localized business, using specific places within your locality/region is oftentimes the preferred choice. The possibilities for how you choose to hone in on your target audience are almost limitless so have a good think about where your ideal customer lies and how you can best find them. I’ll be discussing more about the topic of targeting in the [Targetology ](/chapter-4-target-audience-selection)section later in the guide. To add a new target, first select the type of targeting you’re intent on doing from the multiple choice section. Once you’ve selected your desired category of actions, click on the search box and type in the account/hashtag/place you are looking for.
Click on your desired target once it appears in the search box and that target will be automatically saved to your list below.
To add a different type of target to the list, simply re-specify the variety of targets you want and type in the new target values into the search box.

Targeting preview

As can be seen above, I’ve added a bunch of followforfollow hashtags for my infantry accounts to interact with. By choosing to target accounts who post under the FollowForFollow or LikeForLike hashtags (or any of their variations), your infantry accounts will potentially gain more followers, likes, and interactions by interacting with accounts that guarantee followers or likes back. This method will likely not generate a lot of leads for you but it is a good way to make your accounts look more legitimate through social proofing and gradually increase their trust scores in the process. # Story Reactions The Story Actions feature is arguably the most valuable feature offered by InstaInfantry that really separates it from the rest of the black hat tools being offered on the market. To the best of my knowledge, no other major tool offers as much story-specific functionality as InstaInfantry does. It is personally my #1 choice of feature for generating traffic to my infantry accounts and I’ll explain why shortly. The core functionality of the story reactions feature is that it enables your infantry accounts to interact with regular Stories, Story Polls, Poll Sliders, Quizzes, Countdowns, and Answers. You may be thinking, “But Nik, what is so impressive about simply interacting with users’ stories? Why would this be your favorite action?” The answer to that is quite straightforward. Interactive stories are a relatively new addition to Instagram, very few tools have plotted out the APIs responsible for interacting with them. But the biggest selling point of using it for traffic generation is that Instagram has set very high rate limits for what’s an acceptable quantity of stories you can interact with daily. Currently, the default instainfantry setting for story reactions is set to 2.2k per day with story views oftentimes exceeding well over 10k. And keep in mind that these values are what we consider to be “safe”. Realistically, you can easily do over 4-5k reactions per day without getting blocked assuming your accounts have a high enough trust score. Compare that to the safe values of follows (200) and safe values of regular posts (600) and you’ll understand why I favor story reactions so heavily for generating traffic.

Story Actions preview

Story reactions work particularly great if you’re in a niche that uses naturally engaging content to promote your offerings such as OnlyFans. A user sees that some random, attractive girl interacted with their content and feels the proclivity to go and check out her page. Once on the botted page, he’ll be presented with more content and may even follow the page. Once he follows the page, you can enable a “Welcome DM” to be sent (which we’ll cover in the [Direct Messaging ](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/dms-message-customization-and-managing-dms-with-chatters)section further in the guide), further enticing the user to either go to a specific profile or click on the link in bio. This component of the method is imperative to operate the [InstaInfantry Pyramid Strategy](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-4-instainfantry-pyramid-king-infantry) and can deliver massive amounts of traffic to pages when utilized effectively. But even with these seemingly genuine interactions, you may not want to bombard the same users over and over again, especially if you’re operating in an industry that has a huge market of available targets. In that case, you can choose to limit your story reaction limit with the same users to only once every certain amount of days, with once every 30 days set as the default. However, if you are working in a smaller market industry and don’t have all that many users you can target, decreasing the limit to once every 2-3 days will ensure repeated exposure and will result in higher conversion rates. It’s largely up to you as the user to decide what will be most conducive for your goals. If your primary objective is to reach as many users as possible as quickly as possible, then enabling just “Masslooking” and “Like stories” and setting the algorithm to “Advanced” will speed up the process of outreach quite significantly. The amount of API calls needed to execute the actions will decrease drastically enabling the accounts to only focus on viewing stories and liking them.

Masslooking and Like stories preview

“**Like Highlighted Stories**” is useful if a large percentage of the users you are targeting have no active stories posted on their accounts. This lets you still reach them but just not at the same speed as regular, active stories. That being said, this feature leans a bit more on the dangerous side and increases the likelihood of getting your Infantry accounts banned by around 15%-20%. Useful if you’re working with a very small market niche but will certainly come at a cost.

Like highlighted stories preview

# Mass Actions Now that we’ve covered the basics of story reactions, let’s cover the remaining functions that fall under the Mass Actions tab. This feature is pretty self-explanatory in its title. It includes all of the basic traffic generation actions a user can do to draw attention from their target accounts. That includes liking posts, liking comments on specific posts, follows, unfollows, sending DMs (which we’ll cover in a later section) and more.

Mass Actions preview

\ When enabling each feature, you’ll need to specify the number of users that your Infantry accounts must interact with via the particular action. Let’s take “Follow” for example. The default setting is 50 follows per day, but you can set it to whatever quantity you feel is right for your purposes. Around 200 follows per day is considered to be safe for pre-warmed accounts with some semblance of history such as the ones purchased from the [GHM Sellix Shop.](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products) You can play around with these limits to try to find a sweet spot for your infantry accounts but be careful. Getting “Throttled” i.e. action blocked too frequently can result in a suspension. A couple of times here and there is oftentimes not catastrophic but continuous action blocks will ultimately lead to a ban so be mindful when experimenting with the higher limits. If you wanna go in the archaic direction with your traffic generation and do some basic follow/unfollow, you can enable when your Infantry accounts will automatically start unfollowing users using the “Unfollow” feature. The default value for this setting is 7,500 followed users, but you can raise it up to about 10k if need be.

Follow Unfollow Mass Actions preview

The same logic applies to all of the other actions found beneath the **Mass Actions tab**. As with any action done through Instainfantry, the rate at which you set your Infantry accounts to execute said action is important and will always have tradeoffs depending on your risk tolerance. Being super safe may keep you under the radar for longer periods of time, but it also limits how often you can interact with target users, thus limiting how much traffic you can drive toward your final destinations. On the other hand, assigning highly risky limits to these settings enables you to generate exponentially more traffic but at the expense of your accounts getting flagged, action-blocked, and even banned. Make sure you don’t jump into the high values too quickly, but also don’t be too safe to the point where you generate zero traffic. Find an equilibrium and stick to it. I personally do not recommend using anything other than story reactions to generate traffic these days due to the degree of vigilance and limits beset upon traditional actions such as follows or likes. However, they are still there just in case your desired strategy requires them being employed. # The Use of Accelerators Having covered some of InstaInfantry’s traffic generating features, let’s move onto another aspect of automation that you may find useful when it comes to preserving your accounts - the use of accelerators. I’m gonna keep this section a bit brief as it’s not a drastically important feature for people running traffic generation strategies at scale but it’s important for those who are attempting to automate highly valuable accounts that they cannot afford to lose such as growth service providers or the like. An accelerator is essentially an account that we use to offload an infantry account’s more “mediocre” actions such as scraping and parsing. You can think of them as something akin to a scout whose job it is to go procure information on behalf of our infantry accounts. In a hierarchical structure, they’d be the lowest ranked recruit, making up the very bottom rung of the pyramid. When you connect accelerator accounts to any main account within the platform, the risk of your primary infantry account getting flagged decreases by about 5 - 10%. You may say, “Nik, that’s almost nothing” and in a way, you’d be right but when you’re running clients’ personal accounts and need to employ whatever measures you can to decrease the likelihood of that account falling prey to a ban, you gotta do what you gotta do. Accelerator accounts will unfortunately take up an equal amount of space and resources as any primary infantry account without the benefit of actually generating traffic. They’re only really there to limit the amount of API calls your primary account makes which is why I don’t think they’re very useful for practitioners that are using dozens or hundreds of the same clone accounts to generate traffic. You’re better off simply using that extra slot that would otherwise be dedicated to an accelerator to another main infantry account and generate more traffic. I personally only use accelerators for my[ InstaInfanry Custom Accounts](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products/DoneForYou-InstaInfantry-Custom-Accounts-Traffic-Generation-Service--Account) service that I offer in the[ GHM Shop](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products) for clients running anywhere between 1 - 5 accounts. The sort of clients who purchase that service are generally giving me their own or their clients’ personal Instagram profiles and I add at least several accelerators to them to keep them as safe as possible. Having any of these accounts perish would basically bring the service to an end so the more preventative measures I take, the better my chances are of avoiding angry clients. For 100+ accounts and up, I don’t use any accelerators as 2 - 5% account deaths throughout the duration of the service would not be too impactful on the results and can be easily replaced later on. To add accelerators into IF, enable the function “Connect accelerators”

Accelerators preview

Once enabled, navigate over to the search bar and you should see all of your inactive accounts appear below. If all of your accounts are active in the Reactions module, none of them can be used as accelerators and thus, will not appear in the search bar. You’ll need to deactivate them before you can convert their status from a main/primary account to an accelerator. As you use InstaInfantry to engage with your target audience, you will hopefully begin to generate a lot of leads. These targeted users visiting your account will potentially reach out via DMs to ask about a post or to inquire about your services. Rather than going through and reading dozens of messages one by one, you can use InstaInfrantry’s automated DM module to reply to those DMs and help funnel them over to your desired locations. Here are some of the features that can help you cash in on your prospective leads: Send DMs, Reply to Pending DMs, and Welcome DMs. # DMs, Message Customization, and Managing DMs with Chatters At the very top of the Reactions module, you’ll find a section labeled as Message Templates.

Message Templates preview

This module allows you to bring an additional layer of customization to the automated messages sent by your Infantry accounts. Each DM-related feature in the Reactions module will have a text box beneath it for you to insert the message text but the Message Templates section will enable you to input different messages for your Infantry accounts to use intermittently throughout the day. This arsenal of Message Templates adds a human touch to your automated outreach, making it more engaging and less repetitive. To make the messages feel more genuine, you could even customize them to be more relevant to the niche that your accounts belong to, be it OnlyFans, jewelry, fashion, marketing services or whatever else it is that you are attempting to promote. By incorporating this variety, you are not only making your Infantry accounts appear more human but also keeping them off Instagram's radar. Instagram closely monitors automated activities, and by sending the same message repeatedly, you risk having your accounts flagged or banned quicker in the long run. Using different Message Templates makes it more challenging for Instagram's algorithms to detect automated behavior, increasing the chances of your Infantry accounts maintaining higher trust scores and operating for months or even years without getting killed. I suggest you use this feature over the text boxes for optimal performance.

Message Templates and Spintax Preview

Incorporating spintax into your Message Templates is another valuable function. Spintax allows you to add dynamic elements to your messages, such as mentioning users' names or switching certain words for others. However, it's advisable to use their first names rather than usernames, as the latter can come across as less personal and even robotic, especially if the usernames contain numbers. Personalizing your messages by addressing users by their first names adds a more human touch to your outreach, making recipients feel like they are interacting with a real person, not a bot. # The Reply to pending DM The Reply to pending DM function allows you to get back to your new leads’ DM requests without having to view any of them. Instead of opening every new DM manually as you receive them, you can use the Reply to pending DM function to send an automated response to accounts that message you. This potentially helps you direct your newly generated leads to your main King account or platform, rather than them staying on your infantry account, without having to reply to them individually one by one. To activate the Reply to Pending DM function, all you have to do is open the Reply to Pending DM module, tick the box next to “Reply to pending DM requests”, then enter in the text box whatever message you want your Infantry accounts to send. This function also supports Spintax, emojis, links, and variables which automatically input the receiver’s username or name. 1. Input {{username}} as a placeholder for the receiver’s username 2. Input {{full\_name}} as a placeholder for the receiver’s full name as seen on their profile 3. Input {{first\_name}} as a placeholder for the receiver’s first name as seen on their profile

Reply to pending DMs preview

# The Welcome DM The **Welcome DM** function allows you to reach out to the followers of your infantry accounts automatically. If your primary objective is to funnel traffic to your main account via the [InstaInfantry Pyramid](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-4-instainfantry-pyramid-king-infantry) strategy or directly to a link such as your Shopify or OnlyFans link, this function is perfect for you. To utilize it, you can set up a message under the Welcome DM section to let new incoming followers of your infantry accounts know where they should ideally be going. The best thing about this particular DM feature is that the Welcome DMs will not be easily flagged as spam because you will only be sending messages to people who already follow you and have a history with you on Instagram. The messages will go directly to their general inbox as opposed to requests and there’ll be no easily accessible report button putting your infantry accounts at risk like regular DMs do. That being said, there is still a recommended limit of 30 Welcome DMs per day which is seen in the Speed feature under the Welcome DM tab. You are still able to control how many welcome DMs your Infantry Accounts can send per day, but going beyond 30 per day should only be done at your own risk. Please note that your account’s [trust score ](/chapter-1-philosophy-and-fundamentals/botting-fundamentals/trust-scores-explained)will largely dictate what’s deemed safe for your account and sending 30 Welcome DMs is only safe if your infantry accounts have already been sufficiently warmed up and have built up a cookie history on Instagram. Just like the Reply to pending DM function, Welcome DMs also support Spintax, emojis, links, and variables that automatically input the receiver’s username or name. 1. Input {{username}} as a placeholder for the receiver’s username 2. Input {{full\_name}} as a placeholder for the receiver’s full name as seen on their profile 3. Input {{first\_name}} as a placeholder for the receiver’s first name as seen on their profile

Welcome DM preview

Now that we’ve covered all of the available tools to automate the management of your Infantry accounts’ DMs, the Direct (DM) Manager feature is also available for those looking to manually go through active DMs. Pending DMs from other accounts will also appear in this module.

Direct Manager Pending Request preview

When you receive a pending DM, the Direct Manager module will give you options to Accept, Decline, or Open Chat. You will also be given a preview of who the DM was from, what their display photo looks like, and what the first few lines of their DM request say.

Direct Manager With Request preview

Once you open the chat and reply to the DM, the module will automatically mark it as Accepted. Accepted DM requests will have options beside them that allow you to Mute Chat, Move to General, Open Chat, or Delete.

Direct Manager Accepted Request preview

Selecting Open Chat will open up a chat box where you will see a text box where you can type and send messages to the users.Here you will see the transcript of messages between you and other respective users as well.

Direct Manager with Chat Box preview

You may be wondering, in what instance would you use the Direct Manager if you already have automated messages? Well, apart from you, the main manager of these infantry accounts, your hired chatters could also use this module to manage DMs with your prospective leads more closely. This allows your leads to talk to someone who offers more than just pre-configured, automated messages. This is immensely useful if you’re a professional lead generator working in high-ticket sales or managing a large-scale OnlyFans management operation. DMs that you send to non-followers will also appear here so if in the event you want to run customized Mass DM campaigns that attempt to start an ongoing conversation with your targeted users, you can configure your Send Direct Messages feature to simply say some variation of “Hi” and build rapport with your leads over time. # The Send DM Feature Finally, we come to our last DM-related module that InstaInfantry offers - the Send Direct Messages feature. This feature enables you to have your Infantry accounts send DM requests to targeted users and is the core function behind running [Mass DM](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-7-mass-direct-messaging-mass-dms) campaigns. This tool is particularly useful for getting directly to the point as it allows you to get your offer directly in front of your leads without any action taken on their part, unlike most other methods. However, the direct nature of the strategy does come with a plethora of downsides which can severely impact the longevity of your infantry accounts. One HUGE RISK that comes with this feature is that you will be sending DMs to users who don’t follow your account. This means that your messages will be redirected to the requests folder, giving users an easy-to-see report button at the bottom of the message to report your message and/or account, thus decreasing the account’s [trust score](/chapter-1-philosophy-and-fundamentals/botting-fundamentals/trust-scores-explained) or, even worse, having that account banned entirely.

Send Direct Messages preview

While this feature is a bit on the riskier side, it does come with precautions that you can use, should you decide to activate the **Send DM feature**. Under this feature you will be given the option to set how often your Infantry account interacts with the same users for DMs and also the option to set the speed at which it sends out DMs. To designate the exact message you want your infantry accounts to disseminate, you’ll need to navigate to the **Message Templates** section and save the text you want to be sent out under the specified function “Send DM”. By default, the Send DM feature has the frequency of messages at Once per 30 Days for accounts you’ve already sent messages to, and at 30 DMs per day for the speed at which your Infantry accounts send DMs. If you want to avoid messaging the same users twice, simply make sure to use different targeting sources when relaunching the same campaigns 30 days later. The speed of 30 DMs per day is the maximum safe speed for your accounts assuming the infantry account has a high [trust score](/chapter-1-philosophy-and-fundamentals/botting-fundamentals/trust-scores-explained). However, most infantry accounts that are less than a year old and have a limited cookie history will likely not be able to send 30 DMs per day so you’ll need to build up to that value gradually, even if using the pre-warmed, aged infantry accounts purchased from the [GHM SellPass Shop](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products). There’s no exact methodology for doing so but you’ll likely want to take at least a few weeks to warm up your DM-sending capabilities, upping the daily speed by five DMs incrementally as you go along. Some other safety precautions include using spintax to craft custom messages to each user, the same as what I’ve covered in the Pending and Welcome DMs sections above, and rather than trying to sell them something or directing them to your main account at the very first message, you could send more generic messages to hopefully attract more positive reactions or responses from users before attempting to sell them on your product/offering. This will decrease the likelihood of which you will be reported for spam and get your more “salesy/spammy” messages in the general inbox of your leads. With all this being said it **SHOULD BE NOTED**: Only use the Send DM feature at your own risk. Even when using this feature safely, there is still a risk of being reported by users who receive messages from your accounts. Being reported puts your Infantry accounts at risk of being flagged, action blocked, or banned entirely. Unless you are prepared to lose your accounts at a much higher frequency, you should avoid using this feature in its entirety. The new version of InstaInfantry was designed with account longevity in mind and is not conducive to running high-risk, churn-and-burn strategies like [Mass DM.](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-7-mass-direct-messaging-mass-dms) If your primary objective is to send out millions of spammy DMs at scale and you have no intention of having an ongoing discussion with those users similar to what’s depicted in the image below, then the old version of InstaInfantry that was just a DM bot will be far more useful to you than the web-based IF tool. The software for running this strategy is still available for sale under the “[Mass DM Infrastructure Package](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products/Instagram-Mass-DM-Infrastructure-Package)” in the [GHM SellPass Shop](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products). The package comes with the software license, one 4G proxy, 500 auto-generated Infantry accounts, and an hour-long, live demo via AnyDesk where we set up and execute a campaign of your choice. Just please note that this is a self-hosted software meaning you will need to download and run it on your own Windows PC/Server, unlike the new InstaInfantry software which is hosted by me via the web. If you need recommendations for a Windows virtual server that’s perfect for hosting this tool, please reach out to me directly via Telegram (@GreyHatNik) or email (). # Custom Delays and Activity Time Settings # The Activity Time Settings The Activity Time Settings allows you to choose or randomize the times that your infantry accounts are online and active to make them feel more human. Being online at varying times rather than 24/7 makes them seem less like bots and more like actual people, which leads them to have a potentially higher “trust score” on Instagram. In doing so, your infantry accounts can continue to fly under Instagram’s radar and continue to do work for you automatically for months and even years.

Activity Time Settings Preview

To effectively use the Activity Time Settings, you should Randomize the times at which the accounts are active and make sure that they are not active for more than 14 hours per day. Again, you want your Infantry accounts to feel human, and no normal human is spending 14 hours per day solely on Instagram.

Activity Time Settings Customization preview

NOTE: Activity Time Settings is a useful feature for the longevity of your infantry accounts. As I mentioned in the [Parameter Settings ](/chapter-1-philosophy-and-fundamentals/botting-fundamentals/parameter-settings)section, you do not want your infantry accounts to behave like bots and randomizing your activity time settings helps you avoid that detection. # The Custom Delays The **Custom Delays** feature adds even more to the **Activity Time Settings feature,** both in functionality and risk. This feature is only recommended for those who already have relatively good knowledge in the space of automation and know the API limits for their Infantry accounts. This feature is **NOT RECOMMENDED FOR NEWBIES** in the space of automation. There is no need to get into this feature if you would like to play it safe for your Infantry accounts. The default settings are meant to act as an autopilot for this feature and should already be relatively safe for aged, pre-warmed Infantry accounts. If you think that you know what you are doing and you want to test the limits of your already-established Infantry accounts, then you are welcome to tinker around with the settings but only do so at your own risk.

Custom Delays Preview

\ **NOTE**: Again, the Custom Delays function is **NOT MEANT FOR NEWBIES** and **SHOULD NOT BE TINKERED WITH** unless you have an intermediate amount of knowledge in social media automation. Only change these settings if you are well versed in Instagram APIs and know what you are getting into; setting the ranges for these limits too high will result in humanly impossible action speeds and will lead to inevitable bans. # Target Quality Tracking and Debug Mode # Target Quality Tracking Target Quality Tracking is a powerful feature that helps you optimize your Instagram targeting and generate more leads. It allows you to identify and remove low-quality targets from your campaigns, so you can focus on the ones that are most likely to generate interactions and potential leads. Low-quality targets are typically accounts with a high number of bots or inactive followers. These accounts are less likely to post content that your accounts can interact with or reply to any of your automated attempts to reach out, so it's a waste of time and resources to target them. Target Quality Tracking works by analyzing the activity of your targets' followers. It looks at factors such as how often they upload posts and stories on Instagram. Based on this data, Target Quality Tracking assigns a quality label to each target, indicating how likely their followers are to be real users. This feature allows you to tailor your messaging and targeting strategy which can lead to better results.

Target Quality Tracking preview

# Task Expiration Task Expiration is a convenient feature that helps you manage your Infantry accounts more efficiently. It allows you to set an expiration date for specific Infantry accounts’ tasks, so they will automatically stop running on that date. This is especially useful if you're using Infantry accounts for a limited amount of time, such as for a client campaign. Without Task Expiration, you would have to manually track which accounts need to be deactivated and then turn them off one by one. Task Expiration can also be used to prevent tasks from running for too long. For example, if you have a task that is sending out a large number of direct messages, you can set an expiration date to ensure that it doesn't continue running indefinitely.

Task Expiration preview

# Debug Mode Debug Mode is a useful tool for troubleshooting problems with Instainfantry. When Debug Mode is enabled, Instainfantry will create a more complex log of the activity of your Infantry accounts. This information can be used to identify the source of any bugs or errors. Once Debug Mode is enabled, you will see in the Activity Log tab an extensive and in-depth log of your account’s activity. The Activity Log tab will display a list of all of the recent activity of your Infantry accounts. If you are experiencing a bug with Instainfantry, I recommend enabling Debug Mode and sending me a screenshot of your logs. This will help me to quickly diagnose the problem and provide you with a solution.

Debug Mode preview

Debug Mode in Activity Log preview

# The Activity Log Monitoring Actions and Stats The Activity Log is a useful tool that allows you to see the specifics of the actions that your Infantry accounts are taking. This information can be used to track your progress, identify areas for improvement, and troubleshoot any problems that you may be experiencing, as I mentioned in the period Debug Mode section of this tutorial. In line with the Activity Log, you can also utilize the Stats feature to visualize the performance of your Infantry accounts over time. As the days and weeks go by, you will start to see graphs that show how your accounts are performing over time. You can use the graphs to identify trends and to track your progress towards your goals. For example, if you see that your reach graph is trending upwards, then you know that your content is reaching more and more people. If you see that your engagement rate graph is trending downwards, then you know that you need to make changes to your content to make it more engaging.

Activity Log preview

# Conclusion Now that we’ve covered the purely mechanical sections of using InstaInfantry, let’s move onto the [Botting Strategies](/chapter-3-botting-strategies) sections. Admittedly, I did leave out a couple of modules like Post, Auto-Accept and a few others but they’re honestly all very straightforward and really don’t need much of an explanation to use properly. I’ll be referencing various IF features and modules throughout the remaining chapters of the docs and cover [Troubleshooting ](/chapter-5-technical-issues-troubleshooting)in the last portion so don’t worry if you feel like you still don’t have a full grasp of InstaInfantry. By the end of this guide, you should hopefully have a good baseline understanding of just about every major aspect of IG automation aside from just the basic knowledge of InstaInfantry. Without further adieu, let’s get into the [Botting Strategies](/chapter-3-botting-strategies). # Chapter 3: Botting Strategies # Introduction and Terminology Now that we’ve covered the foundational principles of IG automation and the importance of various InstaInfantry features, let’s delve into the pragmatic side of things and examine the sets of strategies you can use to bolster your growth on Instagram. Before we dive into the actual strategies, I want to repeat something I had mentioned at the very beginning of the docs. Some of the strategies I’ll be mentioning here are extremely versatile and can be modified in ways that make them almost unrecognizable from the original. With InstaInfantry, you have virtually unlimited variants of them to play around with and you are welcome to combine as many aspects as you wish from the different methods to create fully unique ones that are optimal for achieving your objectives. Throughout this chapter, I will be referencing some of the terminology I’ve introduced in the previous chapters but have not explained too well just yet. In case you didn’t derive the meaning of the term from general context, let me break some of them down now to minimize any confusion in the following sections. # King Account A King Account is an account that is high-value and cannot afford to be lost. It is likely your/your client’s main account. It may have built up a large amount of followers or it could just be like a 1-2k account. The size of the account ultimately doesn’t matter, it’s about how severe the repercussions will be if you lose it. Accounts that cannot risk being lost will be referred to as “Kings” or King accounts. # Customized Infantry Account A Customized Infantry Account is an account that holds a moderate degree of utility but is just one amongst many. These are accounts we’ve invested a good bit of time into creating and properly branding alongside building up their trust scores. We want to safeguard these accounts as well as we can but are prepared and willing to lose a small percentage of them per month in the name of traffic. These accounts are used in strategies such as[ InstaInfantry Custom Accounts.](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-3-instainfantry-customs-story-reactions-large-scale) # Generic Infantry Account A Generic Infantry Account is an account that is similar to its customized counterpart with regards to utility but without the time investment of branding them so long as the strategy doesn’t rely on branded accounts. A lot of people buy aged, generic infantry accounts and simply replace them if they die with another batch. You don’t need to invest as much time into them (besides just the usual warm up routine) so you can afford to be more reckless with their limits. These accounts are used in strategies such as InstaInfantry [Pyramid](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-4-instainfantry-pyramid-king-infantry). # Scraper/Accelerator/Low-Tier Account A Scraper/Accelerator/Low-Tier Account is an account whose entire purpose is to do high risk actions such as scraping or filtering users on behalf of your primary infantry account or just general high risk strategies like [Mass DMs](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-7-mass-direct-messaging-mass-dms). These accounts are basically like throwaway pawn pieces and are expected to die within a matter of days. We do not bother branding them or warming them, we just have them do what we need them to do right away and replace them at a moment’s notice. With the terminological hierarchy out of the way, let’s start off the botting strategies section with arguably the most over-used strategy of all time: the follow/unfollow method. # Strategy #1: Automating your King - Follow/Unfollow This here is the oldest strategy in the books, dating all the way back to the early 2010s when Instagram was still in its infancy. To this day, you’ll find many people continuing to utilize this strategy, albeit far less effectively. It is, however, the most cost-effective method and guarantees some semblance of positive results faster than many others. In a nutshell, you simply automate your main account to perform follows with profiles that exhibit an interest in your desired niche. In my anecdotal experience, following your targets delivers far better results than any of the other actions which is why I believe this method has managed to survive as long as it has. It taps into the immense power of reciprocity, one of the principles covered within Robert Cildiani’s book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”. The targets you interact with are most likely to reciprocate or mirror whatever action you took to first initiate that interaction. If you liked one of their posts, they’re more likely to like one of your posts. If you commented on one of their posts, they’ll be more inclined to comment on one of yours. Therefore, someone who is trying to gain followers will likely get the best results out of following others. It really all just boils down to the simple concept of reciprocity. You’ll find that this method has the highest ratio of growth to executed actions because there’s fewer barriers one has to traverse to reach your desired account. It’s so simplistic that its trajectory can be summarized in just three junctures: 1. You perform some sort of interaction with a target user that derives a notification (in this case, a follow) 2. User sees a notification featuring your profile 3. User clicks on your profile out of curiosity, checks out your content and makes a decision as to whether or not to follow you (or check out the link in bio or whatever your ultimate objective for the traffic is) It’s that simple. It’s even easier to think of the trajectory as like a customer journey. Or I suppose in this scenario- the “follower” journey. Each additional step within the trajectory is an additional barrier within the follower journey, similar to how every click leading up to the checkout page is a barrier within the customer journey. The fewer the steps within the trajectory, the greater the growth/action ratio. That is why this methodology is still so prevalent. If set up properly, it tends to get decent output with minimal input. The array of existential and behavioral variables are still very much applicable to this strategy. You’d want your account to be at least a couple of months old, have human activity interspersed throughout scripted actions and utilize at least several [accelerators](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/the-use-of-accelerators) to ensure your King account is only using its limited API calls on actions that bring traffic (which in this case are follows). # Strategy #1's Execution To set this up in InstaInfantry, simply navigate to the [Reactions module,](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/reactions-module-and-driving-traffic) open the[ Mass Actions ](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/reactions-module-and-driving-traffic/mass-actions)tab and enable Follow amongst the available actions. Set your daily follow limit to whatever you deem to be safe for your accounts (I would not recommend that you set it anywhere above 200 per day, even for the strongest of accounts).
Once you’ve configured that, enable the unfollow feature and decide on a “safe” limit that meets your account’s current trust score levels. The default limit for both action types is set to 50 to remain on the safer side for the average account but stronger accounts can handle significantly higher limits after a proper warm-up (still not more than 200). If you’re running this strategy for your clients’ King accounts and want to avoid unfollowing their original contacts, you can enable some of the preventative measures embedded in the action’s functionality.
Because this strategy centers around the automation of King accounts or clients’ personal accounts, it is highly recommended that you attach some accelerators to them. It will decrease your chances of getting the King account banned by about 10-15% as the work associated with finding relevant targets will now be handled by your connected accelerator accounts. Revisit the [Accelerators](broken://pages/gVduC2NvxoQs03iFX4y6)[ ](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/the-use-of-accelerators)section if you need a refresher on how to use them.
Once these two sections are configured and your targeting has been sorted, you’re ready to launch the campaign and test the effectiveness of this strategy for yourself. # Strategy #1's Pros: ✅ **Does not necessitate a large upfront investment** All you need is just your one King account, a software license, a proxy and a couple of throwaway accelerator accounts to take on the bulk of the API calls. ✅ **Highest growth to action ratio** Utilizing this method brings users straight to your profile and gives them a strong incentive to follow the page in the name of reciprocity. Every action results in increased awareness via notifications. In comparison to some of the other strategies I’ll be covering, this one is very straightforward and relatively fool-proof, especially for quick follower gains. You’ll almost always see at least some form of results running this method across a wide variety of niches. # Strategy #1's Cons: ❌ **High likelihood of harming your King** The reason why many advanced automation practitioners have abandoned this method long ago is because this method has become increasingly more dangerous to execute. There is virtually no dissociation here. Every automated action puts your account at risk to the omniscient algorithm. If your account already has some semblance of a following, you’re putting a lot on the line by choosing to run this strategy. The risk/reward ratio is not particularly favorable, at least not anymore. If your account doesn’t get permanently disabled, you’ll likely receive shadow bans or a whole lot of other potential penalties that could handicap your growth in the long-term. Remember, we don’t want to rely on automation for growth till the end of days. We simply use it to jump start the growth of a new page and ensure that the content we’re posting actually gets seen. The goal is to eventually grow organically, once the initial audience has been amassed. By running this strategy, you risk never having the opportunity to reach that stage. Once your King has been flagged, the chances of the algorithm featuring you on the explore page dwindle into nothingness. You’ll always have to depend on automation to garner any new eyeballs. There are many service providers out there who guarantee your account’s safety while executing this strategy. They claim to have the “safest” settings that remove any possibility of your account getting flagged. Perhaps they have, in fact, found the holy grail of settings and proxies that’s enabled them to keep it up for this long but I can say with certainty that so long as you’re running this method, your account will never be 100% safe. Certain service providers still execute this strategy by hand with a literal army of Filipino virtual assistants being paid $1 an hour to follow a bunch of randoms. This is indeed safer than running this strategy via automation but you’re ultimately still just limited to a max reach of 200 users per day and the users that do convert don’t actually have that strong of an interest in your content or offerings in the first place. They’re just following you because you followed them. This issue may cause your engagement to drop pretty drastically due to a lot of “dead” followers which will make it difficult for you to grow the King account organically in the future. This is only really an issue for people whose endmost objective is to acquire an audience and grow their accounts. If you’re running this strategy for the purpose of traffic generation, there are far better alternative methods for doing so that don’t carry as much risk as follow/unfollow does. ❌ **It is not scalable** As I covered in the previous segment, every account has a limit as to how many actions it can perform within a certain span of time, contingent upon its set of existential and behavioral factors. If you’re only utilizing a singular King account to promote your content, your growth is capped at whatever its limit is. Go beyond the limit and you’ll experience some unwanted side effects, courtesy of the algorithm. Hence, there is no scalability to this strategy. You’ll simply have to make do with consistent gains over a prolonged period of time, with consistency being a big “if” given the risks involved. # Strategy #1's Verdict: 🔴 Although it can still be effective and clocks in at a solid 10-25% followback ratio (depending on niche and targeting), the risk of getting your or your client’s main account permanently disabled is simply just too high. Even using this strategy amongst infantry accounts is really not that great due to how low the action limits for follows currently are. The risk to reward ratio used to be good but over the last several years, it has become far too unfavorable for me to recommend utilizing this strategy. I know quite a few practitioners will disagree with me on this but my personal experience has proven time and time again that running follow/unfollow with your King accounts will undoubtedly lead to pissed off clients within just a matter of time. I’ve stayed clear of this strategy since 2018 and recommend others looking for growth strategies do the same. # Strategy #2: Automating your King - Story Reactions (Small Scale InstaInfantry Customs)

InstaInfantry Custom Accounts Service Graphic

This strategy came to fruition as a response to the dwindling effectiveness of the follow/unfollow method. Many people were having their large accounts being permanently disabled and locked as Instagram began enforcing more stringent regulations on the automation of accounts. Instead of giving up their black-hat ways altogether, many other practitioners like myself simply transitioned to a less spammier approach of reaching our targets - viewing and interacting with their stories. This approach enables us to interact with a much greater amount of targets on a daily basis than is possible with any other action such as follows, likes or comments whilst keeping the accounts relatively safe. Watching stories doesn’t elicit as many action blocks as no explicit “action” is being done (excluding the obvious API calls that is) whilst interacting with the stories themselves carries the average action limit of 2.2k per day, exceeding follows by 1,100%. An average account running this strategy will have a “soft” reach of roughly 9,000 - 10,000 users per day via views and a “hard” reach of 1000 - 2000 users per day via story reactions (likes, quizzes, sliders, polls, etc.) The latter action results in notifications and having our account appear at the top of the story view list and thus, has a higher likelihood of resulting in a conversion. The funnel trajectory here is pretty self-explanatory: 1. Watch or watch + interact with the story of a target account 2. User sees your account when looking through their story viewers or seeing the notification of our interaction 3. User clicks on your profile out of curiosity, checks out your content and makes a decision as to whether or not to convert As you can see, the trajectory within this strategy is just as simplistic as the first. The only true differentiator is the medium through which we interact with our targets. This strategy is technically identical to the [InstaInfantry Customs Accounts](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-3-instainfantry-customs-story-reactions-large-scale) method, a strategy I’ll be covering next and one that’s also purchasable from the [GHM Shop](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-3-instainfantry-customs-story-reactions-large-scale). I’ve only divided these two into separate strategies because the execution will slightly differ depending on whether you’re working with an army of infantry accounts for the purpose of traffic generation or if you’re working with just one “King” account for the purpose of growth. However, the [InstaInfantry Custom Accounts Service](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products) has both of these on offer; the difference is materialized by how many accounts you order to be run at once. # Strategy #2's Execution To configure this strategy in InstaInfantry, simply navigate to the [Reactions module](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/reactions-module-and-driving-traffic/the-reactions-module) and open up the Story Actions tab. Then, select the types of story reactions you want your account to execute.
If you’re looking for optimal results at the expense of variation, simply enable Masslooking and Like Stories with the algorithm set to Advanced. IF will be more efficient with the speed at which it interacts with target users as it’ll have less options to sift through when observing various types of stories. It is slightly more risky than Basic but the difference is almost negligible if you’re not running this strat at a massive scale. Next, navigate to the Accelerators tab and connect 1 - 2 accelerators to the account. Because this variation of the strategy centers around the automation of King accounts or clients’ personal accounts, it is highly recommended that you attach some accelerators to them. It will decrease your chances of getting the King account banned by about 10-15% as the work associated with finding relevant targets will now be handled by your connected accelerator accounts. Revisit the[ Accelerators](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/the-use-of-accelerators) section if you need a refresher on how to use them.
Again, you only need to use accelerators if you’re running high-value accounts you cannot risk losing. For people who order the management of 1 - 10 accounts from the [InstaInfantry Custom Accounts Service](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products), those accounts will always be treated as Kings and thus, have more costs associated with running them such as additional account slots and proxies for the accelerators. That’s why in the SellPass product description, I’ve outlined the fact that the discounts for 50 or more accounts are meant for users utilizing the [InstaInfantry Custom Accounts strategy](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-3-instainfantry-customs-story-reactions-large-scale) for the purpose of traffic generation, not client account growth. For people reselling this service as a growth strategy for their clients’ personal King accounts, the discounts will be lower in comparison to people scaling this strategy for the purpose of traffic generation across many identical infantry accounts. It is not recommended that you enable any other functions besides these two if you’re running King accounts. Welcome DMs are often very useful for funnel optimization but it significantly increases the risk of bans and thus, not ideal for King automation. # Strategy #2's Pros: ✅ **Does not necessitate a large upfront investment** Same as the first strategy, you won’t be needing a lot to get started with this method. All you need is just your one King account, a software license, a proxy and a couple of throwaway accelerator accounts to take on the bulk of the API calls. ✅ **Short follower trajectory** Again, once the user checks their story views or sees the reaction notification, they will be brought straight to your account. No intricate or labyrinthine trajectory. ✅ **High daily reach** With a potential “soft” reach of 10,000 targeted users and a “hard” reach of 2,200 targeted users daily, this is perhaps the best strategy in terms of effectiveness at small scale. Miles ahead of follows, likes or comments. ✅ **FAR safer than doing likes, follows or comments** Watching and reacting to stories is considered to be a “safer” traffic-generating action. You must really abuse the hell out of it to elicit some sort of penalty from the algorithm. In comparison to the functions located in the [Mass Actions ](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/reactions-module-and-driving-traffic/mass-actions)tab, your risk of getting banned is exponentially lower with this method, especially if you’re taking preventative measures such as the use of accelerators. # Strategy #2's Cons: ❌ **Still carries the risk of ban** Automating your King is never 100% safe, regardless of how well you do it. If the algorithm catches it (and across a long-enough time frame, it typically does), you effectively risk losing your account. Instagram doesn’t hesitate to punish those who violate their terms and conditions and getting the account back is not always a guarantee. Having said this though, assuming you are following the strategy execution I’ve outlined above, your chances of losing the account permanently are quite low. In my experience, the chances of the King account dying when running this strat is about 0.6%. Without accelerators, that likelihood jumps up to about 1.5%. With Welcome DMs enabled, the likelihood jumps up to roughly 2.8%. As you can see, the likelihood is still very low but for a lot of people/growth service providers, any degree of risk is virtually unacceptable. Because of that, this is an immutable con that comes with the strategy. For some, the risk may be worth the reward whereas for others, the risk far outweighs the reward. Take some time to assess your objectives and individual risk tolerance before deciding to run this strategy or purchasing it as a service from the [GHM Shop.](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products) ❌ **Not scalable (if used for growth)** Despite being 1,100% more efficient than the follow/unfollow strategy, this variant of the story reactions strategy still falls prey to the same con: that you are limited in how many targets you can hit at once. Unlike some of the upcoming strategies which allow you to interact with several targets simultaneously, you can’t watch two stories at once without getting flagged. And watching stories 24-7 also looks extremely suspicious, even for the worst Instagram fiends out there. There must be a realistic balance in place which means your degree of growth will always be capped at the behavioral limits of your parameter settings. However, this is only really a con for the King variant of this strategy as it is under assumption that the people who are utilizing this strategy are doing so for the purpose of growing the King account. If your primary objective is to generate and funnel traffic to your desired locations instead of gaining followers, then this method is easily scalable by just adding more accounts into the mix (which is what the following s[trategy, InstaInfantry Custom Accounts](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-3-instainfantry-customs-story-reactions-large-scale), is based on). ❌ **Doesn’t net as good of a follow per action ratio as F/UF does** Because we are no longer doing the actions we want users to reciprocate or mirror, users are likely to be less inclined to follow the account and instead either exchange story likes or like posts. For people that are accustomed to seeing followback rates of 10-15% per action when doing F/UF, to have that drop down to sub-1% may be a real blow. However, because we are interacting with exponentially more users per day, even though our rate of return drops down significantly, the actual rate of growth in most cases exceeds what’s possible with F/UF. Most growth providers who claim to grow accounts entirely manually by hand with a ton of virtual assistants are likely only sticking to F/UF because of its rate of return per action executed. To have virtual assistants view 10,000 stories per day and like 2,200 of them would be far too time consuming and hurt their bottom line much more than following/unfollowing 200 users per day. But with automation involved, we have no such deterrents and thus, don’t really care about the decreased rate of return due to the massive increase in volume. Keep in mind that we can still take advantage of the reciprocal nature of the story reactions strategy by using our own stories. This is actually a key component of the [InstaInfantry Pyramid strategy](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-4-instainfantry-pyramid-king-infantry) which I’ll be covering later in the chapter. # Strategy #2's Verdict In my eyes, this strategy is very solid for generating moderate gains over extended periods of time and doesn't carry a very significant degree of risk so long as it is executed properly. For what it costs to execute and the results you can generate from it, I think this is a far superior alternative to the likes of F/UF. If your objective is to gain real followers or generate interest/traffic for your offerings, this is a good option for that. I sell this strategy as a Done-For-You Service in the [GHM Shop](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products) under [InstaInfantry Custom Accounts](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products). It is applicable to all packages of 10 accounts and under. Fifty accounts and up is reserved for the InstaInfantry Custom Accounts service for the purpose of traffic generation, not growth. If you’re a growth service provider looking to purchase this service in bulk to be used across dozens/hundreds of your clients’ personal/King accounts, please reach out to me directly for bulk pricing via Telegram/Discord (@GreyHatNik) or email (). With the verdict out of the way, let’s proceed to the following variation of literally the exact same story reactions strategy: [InstaInfantry Custom Accounts ](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-3-instainfantry-customs-story-reactions-large-scale)but for the purposes of growth. # Strategy #3: InstaInfantry Customs - Story Reactions (Large Scale)

InstaInfantry Custom Accounts Service Graphic (50 accounts and up)

As mentioned in the verdict of our previously covered strategy, there is almost no major mechanical difference between this variant of the story reactions strategy and the previous one. The only major differentiator between the two is the endmost objective behind them. The InstaInfantry Custom Accounts strategy is predicated on the fact that most clients purchasing it as a service aren’t purchasing it for the purposes of growth. They’re purchasing it for the purpose of generating and funneling traffic to their desired locations. It comes back to the terminology that I covered in the[ Introduction](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/introduction-and-terminology) to the Botting Strategies chapter. [Strategy #2 ](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-2-automating-your-king-story-reactions-small-scale-instainfantry-customs)revolves around the automation of King accounts/clients’ personal accounts that we cannot afford to lose. This strategy (Strategy #3) revolves purely around the use of infantry accounts. We can afford to lose these accounts because they are simply one amongst many. We obviously don’t want to lose them but losing a small percentage each month is expected and not going to destroy our entire operation or leave us with unhappy clients. It’s just an additional cost of doing business for us. Strategies like this and the [InstaInfantry Pyramid](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-4-instainfantry-pyramid-king-infantry) (which I’ll be covering next) are what InstaInfantry (the software) was primarily built around. The overarching philosophy that you shouldn’t be relying on just one account to do your dirty work and instead, have a whole army of them interacting with your target users and funnelling them to where they need to go. Now don’t get me wrong, InstaInfantry Customs can be used for the purposes of growth as well but it’s most common use case is for the purposes of funneling traffic to places outside of Instagram. That includes clients like OnlyFans Models, E-Com Stores, Course-Sellers, Casinos, Real Estate Agents, Lead Generators, Growth/Marketing Service Providers, and probably hundreds of other niches/businesses. For the purposes of explaining the funnel trajectory of this method, I’ll just use one of my most common client archetypes these days as an example: OnlyFans models. So let’s take an OnlyFans model and say we want to run 100 custom accounts for her. We’d take 100 aged, infantry accounts and rebrand each of them into looking like the real, main account of the model. We want to try to make these accounts appear legitimate so we take our time adding new posts, adding captions to them, placing a high-converting bio and obviously, an OF link (ideally a linktree for safety) right below the bio. Once we’re done with the branding process, we have 100 customized infantry accounts representing the model that are ready to start interacting with the target users. Once we settle on the accounts whose followers we believe are the ideal audience for this model (usually accounts of other OF models with similar characteristics), we proceed to run the exact same strategy as described in [Strategy #2](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-2-automating-your-king-story-reactions-small-scale-instainfantry-customs): Story Reactions. We run only story reactions on these accounts because, again, story functionality enables us to interact with a much greater amount of targets on a daily basis than is possible with any other action such as follows, likes or comments whilst keeping the accounts relatively safe. Watching stories doesn’t elicit as many action blocks as no explicit “action” is being done (excluding the obvious API calls that is) whilst interacting with the stories themselves carries the average action limit of 2.2k per day, exceeding follows by 1,100%. An average account running this strategy will have a “soft” reach of roughly 9,000 - 10,000 users per day via views and a “hard” reach of 1000 - 2000 users per day via story reactions (likes, quizzes, sliders, polls, etc.) The latter action results in notifications and having our account appear at the top of the story view list and thus, has a higher likelihood of resulting in a conversion. In the context of an OF model, this method can be very OP because to most target users, it’ll appear as if some random, attractive girl had viewed and/or liked one of their stories. They’ll be inclined to go check out the infantry account that had interacted with them and this is where the InstaInfantry Custom Accounts strategy starts to deviate from the King - Story Reactions strat: the funnel optimization options. Because we’re no longer as concerned about losing our accounts, we are free to enable certain funnel optimization actions like [Welcome DMs](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/dms-message-customization-and-managing-dms-with-chatters/the-welcome-dm) to users that followed one of our infantry accounts. In the context of an OF model, perhaps we’d say something like “Thanks for following my page, check out the link in bio to receive a free gift”. It’d obviously be a bit more persuasive than that but you get the idea. Now, if you’re having 100 of these accounts, each sending out 30 Welcome DMs per day, that becomes very powerful in terms of redirecting traffic. Welcome DMs often exhibit a far higher open and conversion rate than [Mass DMs](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-7-mass-direct-messaging-mass-dms) (another strategy I’ll be covering later in this chapter) because they go directly to the target’s general inbox instead of the requests folder. Some of my OF agency clients have taken it a step further and use virtual assistants to conduct custom chatting operations with the leads and have on-going discussions with them via the[ Direct Manager](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/dms-message-customization-and-managing-dms-with-chatters/the-welcome-dm) module. All Welcome DMs or regular DMs sent from your infantry accounts will appear in that module and you can use it to have a full-on conversation with your converted targets if the need arises. This is especially useful if you’re in a small market niche that generally has a longer sales cycle like certain course-sellers, real estate agents or high-ticket BDRs. You’re able to send more customized messages and engage in a more organic conversation with your leads, minimizing the losses that come with sending generic, “click link in bio” message templates. Now that we have a full understanding of the method’s trajectory, let’s move onto the actual execution of the strategy via the InstaInfantry software. # Strategy #3' Execution To configure this strategy in InstaInfantry, simply navigate to the [Reactions module](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/reactions-module-and-driving-traffic/the-reactions-module) and open up the [Story Actions tab](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/reactions-module-and-driving-traffic/story-reactions). Then, select the types of story reactions you want your account to execute.
If you’re looking for optimal results at the expense of variation, simply enable Masslooking and Like Stories with the algorithm set to Advanced. IF will be more efficient with the speed at which it interacts with target users as it’ll have less options to sift through when observing various types of stories. It is slightly more risky than Basic but the difference is almost negligible and the results will be significantly better. For this strategy, we DO NOT need to enable Accelerators. Yes, our account death rate will be higher but the costs associated with having to dedicate accounts, account slots and proxies to accelerators is just not worth the decrease in risk when we’re running 100+ infantry accounts.
We’d basically be doubling our costs of running 100 infantry accounts just to save like 10% of them. Not worth it at all if you’re running at scale, might as well just invest those funds into having 200 running infantry accounts instead. Next, navigate to the Welcome DM sections of the Reaction Module and check the Enable function. To create a message template, click the hyperlinked “here” text beneath the speed value or navigate to it at the top of the Reactions module.
Additionally, if you anticipate receiving a lot of DMs from potential leads, you can enable the “Reply to Pending DMs” feature to automate the sending process to those users as well.
Or you are perfectly welcome to simply leave it disabled and use the Direct Manager module to answer any pending DMs with customized responses. Just open the Pending Requests folder and choose which message requests to accept and which to decline.
That’s about it for the execution of this strategy. Again, you are always welcome to experiment and enable/disable certain features that you believe are likely to improve your conversions. Objectives and optimal approaches can differ dramatically from use case to use case so you do not need to follow every strategy execution I write out in these docs to an exact tee. Testing and optimizing means virtually everything in this field so don’t be afraid to deviate when necessary. # Strategy #3's Pros: ✅ **Short Funnel Trajectory** Same as the last strategy, once the user checks their story views or sees the reaction notification, they will be brought straight to your account. No intricate or labyrinthine trajectory. Everything is kept simple and straightforward with the redirects. ✅ **Insanely High Daily Reach and Optimized Funneling** With the amount of targeted users you’re able to reach on a daily basis along with the advanced funneling options through DMs, you can generate potentially tens of thousands of highly-motivated visits to your link, website or main account per day. ✅**Highly Versatile** Running this strategy at scale can net incredible results for just about any niche or use case. It’s great for both small and large market niches with minimal lead wastage. ✅ ***Relatively***** Scalable** You have no bounds to adhere to with this method or any variation of it. So long as you have a steady supply of infantry, the sky's the limit and you could reach millions or even tens of millions of users per day if you wanted to. The only issue with the scaling process of this strategy comes down to the wait times associated with generating and warming new custom accounts. Over time, a certain portion of these accounts will perish and you can’t easily replace them with another if you started with a limited quantity of them in the first place. You’d need to wait a couple of weeks until the next batch of custom accounts has been created and warmed before you can scale or replace. ✅ **Very Good Infantry Longevity** This method does a stellar job of keeping your infantry alive and well for extended periods of time. I’ve had some accounts last for years without inflicting any penalties, excluding the occasional action block or email/phone verification request. It’s obviously not as safe as how we run this strategy with King accounts as described in [Strategy #2,](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-2-automating-your-king-story-reactions-small-scale-instainfantry-customs) but so long as you stay cautious of your InstInfantry’s existential and behavioral limits, you can milk the value out of your initial investment indefinitely. I do not recommend using any of the Mass Actions functions for this strategy due to the higher risks involved. I know I said that we don’t have to worry as much about losing these accounts but we still wanna do our best to prevent losses. These accounts still take time to make and warm and we usually have a limited quantity of them due to the fact that they have to be custom-made. Having to generate and warm-up new custom infantry accounts can take several weeks so it’s best we try to keep our risk factor minimal. In the following [InstaInfantry Pyramid strategy,](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-4-instainfantry-pyramid-king-infantry) that’s no longer a concern so stay tuned for the next method’s chapter. # Strategy #3's Cons: ❌ **Necessitates a sizeable time and money investment** Due to the amount of time it takes to generate and warm the accounts, it becomes a real issue of getting these accounts up and ready. Between the decrease in trust score that comes with rebranding accounts as mentioned in the [Branding Accounts ](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/branding-accounts)chapter and the general warm up routine every infantry account has to undergo, it takes a while to get everything up and moving optimally. That’s mainly why I only really offer the [InstaInfantry Custom Accounts Done-For-You Service](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products) for 100 accounts and up due to the amount of preliminary legwork involved. ❌ **Not very flexible** Again, because of how long it takes to get everything up and running, unlike the [InstaInfantry Pyramid strategy](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-4-instainfantry-pyramid-king-infantry), we can’t really scale the volume up and down at will with this method. Unless you’re making a large surplus of custom infantry accounts to be used as replacements or scaling up, it’s just not feasible. When I run this strategy as a service for clients, the minimum service duration time is about 37 days (excluding account creation) in comparison to the 7 - 10 days it takes to execute [InstaInfantry Pyramid](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-4-instainfantry-pyramid-king-infantry) orders. If you’re planning on executing this strategy on behalf of others as a service provider, getting this operation up and running with minimal costs requires a lot of behind-the-scenes work prior to even starting the process of generating traffic. Which, when you’re onboarding a new client, makes many of them uncomfortable. Nobody likes having to wait up to several weeks to see a semblance of results, especially if they’ve already paid exorbitant fees. But alternatively, if you don’t put in the initial leg-work of properly sourcing for/generating the accounts, re-branding them and going through the many warm-up stages necessary to attain a longer Infantry lifespan, your profit margins will get eaten up super fast as well as the time you invest having to restock and rebrand accounts on a regular basis. That’s partially why this method isn’t very re-seller friendly in comparison to[ InstaInfantry Pyramid](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-4-instainfantry-pyramid-king-infantry). # Strategy #3's Verdict: 🟢 As you probably could’ve predicted by the amount of Pros I’ve listed out, the verdict for this strategy is a very positive one. It has a great action-to-growth ratio, is not very spammy, your Infantry’s lifespan can last for ages, and once you have it down pat, you can generate large amounts of traffic with this strategy. The steep upfront cost is obviously a pretty large deterrent but once you get a solid sense of your Infantry’s limits, you won’t need to restock on Infantry accounts for a while. It ironically even becomes one of the more cost-effective methods in the long run. Overall, I vote yes on this strategy. I still use it extensively to this day and offer it for sale in the [GHM Shop.](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products) Now with this verdict out of the way, let’s move onto the strategy I’ve referenced like a dozen times already and a highly useful counterpart to the InstaInfantry Custom Accounts Strategy - InstaInfantry Pyramid. # Strategy #4: InstaInfantry Pyramid (King/Infantry)

InstaInfantry Pyramid Service Graphic from the GHM SellPass Shop

The InstaInfantry Pyramid strategy follows a similar philosophy as our previous one but with one key difference. If you recall when I first introduced these two strategies in the [Philosophy and Botting Fundamentals ](/chapter-1-philosophy-and-fundamentals/botting-fundamentals)Chapter, I said, *“If the ‘InstaInfantry Custom Accounts’ method is scaled horizontally with no account ranking below or above another, you can think of the ‘InstaInfantry Pyramid’ strategy as a scaling vertically, with your infantry accounts as being subservient slaves to your so-called ‘King’ account.”* The key difference is ultimately in the fact that we do not bother rebranding or customizing infantry accounts for this strategy. Instead, we just use pre-made, generic infantry accounts with already high trust scores and funnel target users to their final destination only after they pass through the “middleman” account a.ka. The King. As you can probably already guess, this strategy is predicated more on growing a main/King account as opposed to general traffic generation like our previous strategy. Now, don’t get me wrong, that’s not to say you can’t use the IICA method to funnel traffic and growth to a King. You most certainly can, and with stellar results I might add. But the pyramid strategy just does it better at smaller scales and is far more flexible in its execution. One other huge upside of this strategy is how reckless we can afford to be with the accounts. Instead of only relying on story reactions to generate traffic for us like we did in the previous two strategies, we can actually now afford to max out our limits across ALL action types, including those found beneath the[ Mass Actions t](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/reactions-module-and-driving-traffic/mass-actions)ab (with the exception of Sending DMs). This gives us an ever greater reach than what’s possible with the custom accounts strategy since we’re no longer bound by fortnight-long account creation processes AND we’re now able to interact with users that are private, granting us access to a significantly larger pool of target leads. The Pyramid strategy also utilizes the infantry accounts’ own stories by tagging the King in them to better facilitate the funneling process. Even though we have more ways of interacting with our targets now, the vast majority of our total daily actions will still largely consist of story reactions simply by virtue of it having the highest limits. Therefore, the “reciprocal action” with most target users would be to view and like the botted account’s story where they get prompted to visit the King account’s page. So to briefly summarize the strategy, I’ll go back to the concept of the “funnel trajectory” I used in some of the previous strategies. The pyramid method’s customer journey has 5 (or 6) distinct junctures to it: 1. Your infantry (i.e. “fan page”) account interacts with one of the target users while consistently tagging the king in its stories 2. Target user follows the infantry account and/or looks at its story 3. Upon being notified of the follow-back, the infantry account proceeds to DM the target, asking them to follow the king 4. The target views the DM and/or story and makes a choice as to whether or not to view the King’s content 5. Upon clicking on the King’s profile and browsing through their content, they make the final decision of whether or not to follow it 6. (optional) Once the target is on the King’s profile, they convert in a way that fulfills the King’s endmost objective, whether it be clicking link in bio, sending a DM, etc. Now you’re likely thinking “But Nik, if we just remove the juncture where the target follows back the infantry, this whole thing becomes a lot easier!” And yes, that assumption is correct and doing so would most certainly streamline the trajectory. In fact, this becomes a completely new strategy altogether which I’ll cover later in this chapter called [“Mass DMs”.](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-7-mass-direct-messaging-mass-dms) However, there is a reason as to why I made it a clause for this particular approach. That reason being that the infantry depletes a whole lot faster when DMing users who do not follow you back. My experience tells me that unsolicited DMs are a hot button action within the algorithm’s eyes as I’ve had prime accounts get permanently disabled after just a couple dozen. Whereas DMing users that follow you back, the count can go up to thousands so long as you’re mindful of the time limits (you still shouldn’t exceed more than 20 - 30 Welcome DMs per day in my experience). # Strategy #4's Pros: ✅ **Highly Scalable *****AND***** Flexible** As a service provider who generates traffic on behalf of others, the Pyramid strategy is actually my most favorite strategy to run purely because of how easy it is to execute, the short amount of prep-time involved (usually taking 3 - 5 days to reach full speed) and its general effectiveness in growing large-market-niche accounts. If some infantry accounts perish or get action blocked, I can instantly replace them and keep the operation moving smoothly without any hiccups. That’s why when I offer Pyramid as a service, I charge clients based on the number of interactions I run for them as opposed to the duration of time that the service will run for like I do with the [InstaInfantry Custom Accounts Service.](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products) Whether it’s 750k or 30M interactions, the timeframe it takes for me to deliver them is basically always the same given that the only differentiator lies in the quantity of generic accounts I’ll be needing to use to reach the desired volume (which I can increase or decrease at a moment’s notice). Overall, if you are a service provider that works with a ton of different niches/King accounts, you’ll be hard pressed to find a strategy that’s as efficient and flexible as this one. ✅ ***Relatively***** Decent Infantry Longevity** Although this strategy is far from being as “safe” as the previous strategies we’ve covered, it’s still not too bad. Obviously, the introduction of actions like follows and story posting raises the risk profile significantly (hence why I didn’t include story tagging in the previous methods) but you can still have some infantry accounts last for months on end. Your profit margin on the execution of this strategy will largely just come down to how cheap you’re getting your aged, high-trust-score accounts for. ✅ **Reach Users That You Cannot Reach via Story Reactions** Because we are maxing out our limits across all actions with this method, we have the capability to interact and convert users that are not reachable with just story reactions. Some of those users may not have stories or may have private pages so the introduction of actions like follows, likes and comments gives us a new medium through which we can interact with them. This opens up a larger pool of potential leads and gives us the ability to be more selective/focused with our targeting. # Strategy #4's Cons: ❌ **Longer Funnel Trajectory** Due to the nature of this strategy, the funnel isn’t as direct as it is with the previous strategies where we use customized King/Infantry accounts. That means that our action to growth ratio won’t be as good when compared to regular story reactions that drive traffic immediately to the King/Pretending-to-be-King Infantry accounts for more optimized funneling. Having said that though, if you are purchasing Pyramid as a service, you will get MUCH better results out of it at smaller scales than you would purchasing IICA at small scales (assuming the use case is appropriate). With the number of running accounts you get for the smaller packages (minimum being 40) along with the increase in daily interactions, the more oblique nature of the funnel is fully mitigated by the sheer volume of traffic. ❌ **Not as Versatile as the** [**InstaInfantry Custom Accounts Method**](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-3-instainfantry-customs-story-reactions-large-scale) This is perhaps the biggest issue with this strategy. Unlike IICA, the use cases for this strategy are quite limited (mainly used for growth) and it is most effective for large market niches whose content is naturally engaging and converts very well on its own. Said niches/use cases include OnlyFans (or really anything remotely sexual), memes, sports pages, luxury pages, fan pages, etc. Basically any niche that has a huge audience on Instagram and is easy to grow in general. Any pages that are overly unique (think art pages) or corporate (think legal services) will simply not perform at the same level as an OnlyFans model’s page would. If you’re a business or storefront with bland content that’s mostly centered around your products/services, you’re far better off following the [InstaInfantry Customs Accounts ](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-3-instainfantry-customs-story-reactions-large-scale)trajectory and simply creating 100 identical accounts of your original page and using those to generate leads and traffic for yourself. A generic female account playing the role of a middleman will simply not perform well for use cases like that. I obviously cannot predict how well each and every use case will work but if you believe your content is naturally engaging and will convert well so long as we get it in front of the right people, then you are certainly welcome to give it a go. I’m just relaying my past experiences of running this strategy for clients in some of the more obscure niches so take that piece of information as you will. # Strategy #4's Verdict: 🟢 I may have sounded overly harsh in my cons but this strategy is absolutely OP for me as a traffic service provider. It’s extremely safe for delivering growth to your King accounts, your Infantry’s lifespan is relatively decent for the amount of traffic you gain out of it, and it has the shortest amount of prep-time out of all of the “scalable” strategies. The only real issue with it is the lack of versatility and underperformance for the more esoteric niches or industries with less engaging content. However, if you are in a large market niche and want great results delivered fast with an unlimited potential for scale, this is certainly the strategy for you. I offer it as a fully managed service in the [GHM Shop ](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products)and it’s a much better alternative to IICA for individuals looking to test the waters of black hat growth without going all out for the custom accounts. # Strategy #5: King/Infantry - Comments The King/Infantry - Comments method is another variant of the previous strategy but with comments being the critical action rather than DMs or story tags. The same ideology behind [Pyramid strategy](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-4-instainfantry-pyramid-king-infantry) still applies here. You do not need custom accounts to execute this strategy and no automated activity is to be performed via the main account, only via infantry. This particular variant is actually just as simplistic as our very first strategy. The trajectory one has to go through to make it to your King is not overwhelmingly long and there are much fewer clauses to be met in comparison to the last one. Here is an outline of how the funnel trajectory unveils with this methodology: 1. Infantry leaves a comment featuring your King on a trending post, found via explore or on a heavily followed target page 2. Users see your comment and make a decision whether or not to click on the tagged profile 3. Upon clicking on the profile and browsing through their content, user makes the final decision of whether to convert or not As you can see, there are only three distinct junctures a target must go through with this strategy, solidifying its spot amongst the simplest of variants within the King/Infantry genus. Again, it is beyond imperative that you utilize spintax extensively when executing this method (revisit the [DMs, Message Customization, and Managing DMs with Chatters](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/dms-message-customization-and-managing-dms-with-chatters) section if you need a refresher on spintax) as your comments will eventually be getting hidden from the public’s eye if you’re commenting the same text over and over. # Strategy #5's Pros: ✅ **Streamlined Funnel Trajectory** There are fewer impediments each user has to overcome in order to make it to the King’s profile, resulting in a higher growth to action ratio. ✅ **A Singular Action Yields a Lot of Exposure** Being that the determinant action within this strategy is leaving a comment on a trending post, that one action can yield quite a few followers if administered skillfully. In comparison to the previous King/Infantry variant which requires a minimum of two automated actions to convert one user on average, this strategy theoretically has no limit as to how many followers a singular action can yield. And even if it doesn’t result in an immediate increase of followers, at the very least, you’ll be harnessing some brand awareness within your niche, making this method remarkably efficient. # Strategy #5's Cons: ❌ **Very Poor Targeting** Having experimented with this strategy quite a few times myself, perhaps my biggest gripe with it is that it does not captivate your targets to the extent that other methods do. It’s difficult to get much traction with this strategy as it doesn’t address users personally. For those of you who have attended a CPR course, do you remember how they taught you to ask passerbys for help? Hint: It wasn’t by yelling “someone call 911”. It was by directly pointing to an individual within the crowd and saying “You! Call 911!”. That’s because when you deliver blanket statements with no real focus upon the person you’re intending to reach, it gets lost amidst all the other noise. I bring this up because amongst my several attempts at making this strategy work, I witnessed a very similar scenario unfold each time. Hundreds of people viewing the comments yet practically no new profile impressions. If you can really hone in on your select group of targets via good source selection and excellent comments, then I suppose it can work but I honestly believe that the vast majority of practitioners will fail to do so effectively. ❌ **Poor Infantry Longevity** Another major issue that plagues this methodology is the pretty low longevity exhibited in the infantry accounts executing this strategy. Your infantry’s combination of existential variables still has a significant effect on the lifespan of your accounts but ultimately, the behavioral variable is what does it in. Leaving unwanted, promotional comments on trending posts to horn in on its popularity is frowned upon by most of the Instagram community. It’s spammy, useless and 90% of the time, is incapable of contributing anything good to the discussion due to a lack of contextual clues. If you’ve done any work in the finance niche, this method is very heavily associated with scammers. Go to any trending post within that niche and you’ll find several accounts promoting some forex guru promising to make you thousands of dollars in minutes. It’s a real bad look for any legitimate business and will surely decrease your trustworthiness within the audience’s eyes. You’ll also find that owners of more niche pages will oftentimes delete your comments, meaning you could potentially be wasting your very limited amount of daily actions commenting on posts that will not even be seen by anyone. # Strategy #5's Verdict: 🔴 Overall, the cost to benefit analysis is just far too unfavorable for me to recommend this strategy to anyone. You’re almost guaranteed to burn through a lot of money having to constantly restock your infantry and the web-version of InstaInfantry is generally just not good for the more “spammy” types of strategies. Wasting your limited amount of slots executing a max of 10 - 20 comments per day per account just doesn’t net a good result considering how resource-expensive it is to automate accounts the “right” way. The old version of InstaInfantry sold in the [Mass DM Infrastructure Package](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products) is better suited for executing this strategy due to zero account limits but if you’re gonna be throwing your infantry into the wind like that, you might as well just run the [Mass DM strategy](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-7-mass-direct-messaging-mass-dms) instead. In summary, I’d stay clear of this one unless you have a solid plan in place with regards to sourcing your target pages and actually enticing their viewers enough to check out your King’s content. Anything less than that is just gonna burn a hole in your wallet and be a massive waste of time. I don’t offer this strategy as a Done-For-You service and don’t have any intentions to in the foreseeable future. # Strategy #6: Mass Mentions This is a strategy whose popularity peaked back in 2021/2022 but still has its place in today’s growth hacking landscape. This method tends to have a relatively streamlined trajectory and actually doesn’t differ much from the previous commenting variant. Its only real differentiator is that it tags target users in the comments of the King’s own posts as opposed to randomized, contextual comments on other people’s posts. Let’s once again visualize the funnel trajectory to see how it works: 1. Infantry is fed a list of target users, collected via scouts/scrapers/accelerators 2. Infantry proceeds to make comments comprising entirely of tagged users on your King’s publications 3. Users receive a notification that they’ve been tagged in a comment and proceed to view the post 4. Upon viewing the post, they may browse through more of your King’s content and make a decision as to whether or not to convert I know that I’ve written there as being 4 distinct junctions within this method’s follower journey but it’s actually three. The first step is simply a mechanical portion of implementing the strategy. It does not concern the target users themselves and does not pose as a barrier/action on their part. This strategy is quite spammy in nature and makes the post appear very strange once the user sees the hundreds of other targets like themselves being randomly tagged in the comments. The only use case I’ve found this strategy to work well with are giveaway or loop campaigns, in which users are supposed to tag x amount of people/friends in their comments in order to participate in the giveaway. With other use cases, the strategy will just appear inorganic and most above-room-temperature-IQ targets will easily recognize the fact that they’ve been involved in some sort of spam campaign. # Strategy #6's Pros: ✅ **Streamlined Trajectory** As explained in the previous methods, having a simplistic funnel trajectory alleviates the many possibilities of abandonment and results in a much better growth to action ratio. With this strategy, the target user is almost guaranteed to see the post/piece of content your infantry accounts have tagged them on. ✅ **Highly Scalable and Efficient** The set-up/prep-time to get this method up and running takes almost no time at all. All you need to do is purchase a bunch of cheap, throwaway accounts and import them into the old InstaInfantry tool. If you want bigger volumes, you simply buy and import more accounts and proxies into the software. This and the [Mass DM](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-7-mass-direct-messaging-mass-dms) strategy are probably the easiest strategies to learn how to execute as they are very straightforward and don’t require any strong technical knowledge of warm up cycles or trust scores in order to run effectively. Makes it very easy to deliver traffic on behalf of others as a service provider. ✅ **One Action Yields a Lot of Targeted Exposure** Similar to the previous method’s pro, you can capture the attention of many potential users with just a singular action. When executing this strategy, I usually set the limit of tagged users to about seven per comment. That means, theoretically, you can convert as many as seven users with just one comment. What’s even better is that this approach eliminates one of the cons mentioned in the “King/Infantry - Commenting” strategy, hence the use of the word “targeted” within this pro. That entire tangent I wrote about CPR? No longer an issue here. You’ll only be reaching targets whom you want to reach and the notification they’ll receive as a result serves as the metaphorical finger-pointing. The personalized outreach begets a stronger inclination for users to see why they were tagged. This, in turn, culminates into a greater amount of eyeballs on your selected post and subsequently, more potential conversions for your King’s content. # Strategy #6's Cons: ❌ **Poor Bot Dissociation/Low Versatility** This one is pretty obvious in this case. Most users who are to be tagged by your infantry will easily figure out they are caught amidst a botting operation. Envision yourself as one of them. You see you’ve been tagged by a profile you’ve never interacted with before. Upon further inspection, you’ll see you’re just one of seven seemingly random users you have no connection to who’ve also been tagged within the same comment. Then you see there are dozens of comments like that on the exact same post. Not a single word written in any of em, just tags of randomly selected users. It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to decipher the glaringly blatant botting campaign taking place here and it also doesn’t take a rocket scientist to trace it all back to your King. Most of them will simply disregard your content and assume that you’re peddling some sort of scam that they don’t want any part of. Like I mentioned previously, this issue is mitigated if you’re using this strategy to promote something like a giveaway or a loop but for other use cases, this lack of plausible deniability will impair your conversion rates. ❌ **Very Poor Infantry Longevity** Similar to the previous strategy’s con, this method has an even worse infantry longevity due to being infinitely more spammy. It’s basically on the same level as the [Mass DMs](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-7-mass-direct-messaging-mass-dms) strategy when it comes to how horrendously short the lifespan is of any infantry accounts that’s running this method. There’s no point in using expensive, aged accounts or warming them because they are ultimately destined to die regardless within a matter of days when running this strat. That’s largely why we use a completely different type of accounts and software to execute it as using the new version of InstaInfantry and aged, pre-warmed infantry accounts will cost you an arm and a leg to run, even at the smallest quantities of mentions. I’ll be covering the execution of this strategy more in-depth in the [Mass DM](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-7-mass-direct-messaging-mass-dms) strategy write-up as they are basically identical when it comes to mechanical implementation. # Strategy #6's Verdict: 🟡 Overall, this strategy isn’t particularly bad or good. The growth-to-action ratio can be fantastic for certain use cases but its lack of versatility and horrendous infantry longevity sort of nullifies its positives. I believe that it can still deliver pretty great results but the hit-or-miss nature of this method becomes more apparent when testing it against several different use cases. I used to offer this strategy as a Done-For-You Service but have gradually moved away from strategies that I believe to be too spam-like and damaging to the target’s user experience of the platform. However, I will not pass judgment on those who want to test its effectiveness for themselves. Infrastructure for running your own Mass Mentions is available under the [Mass DM Infrastructure Package](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products/Instagram-Mass-DM-Infrastructure-Package) in the [GHM Shop.](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products) Just make sure to select it as an add-on when purchasing the package. # Strategy #7: Mass Direct Messaging (Mass DMs)

Instagram Mass DM Infrastructure Package Graphic from the GHM Shop

This is a strategy that gained a lot of popularity/notoriety within the last few years. Practically everyone that uses Instagram actively has likely received a DM request from a fake-looking profile, promoting some other page. Or maybe they were the target of bots who create group chats with a bunch of other random users and send their links into the chat. This is a method I am very familiar with and have used extensively during its prime years, even going as far as to releasing a tool (i.e. the old version of InstaInfantry) made specifically for that purpose in mind. It’s a highly effective strategy for lead generation and it requires almost no prep-time to set up and execute. Very churn-and-burn in nature, making it very effective to offer as a service provider. The execution of this strategy revolves around the use of low-bloat, API-based software with little to no limits on it and extremely cheap, mass-generated accounts that’ll serve as our infantry. Mass DMs is such a high-risk strategy that using infantry accounts that we’d use for the likes of[ IICA](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-3-instainfantry-customs-story-reactions-large-scale) or [Pyramid](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-4-instainfantry-pyramid-king-infantry) would break the bank to a ridiculous degree. Instead, the accounts we use for this strategy are basically throwaways whose lifespan hardly ever exceeds 72 hours. These accounts are destined to die regardless and we only really need them to last long enough to send out messages. We do not care about their longevity, we do not care about their trust scores and we do not care about their warmups. We simply import them into the tool and attempt to get as many DMs out of them as possible (approximately 40 DMs per account) before they kick the figurative bucket. The reason we don’t care about account longevity is because sending out unsolicited DMs is a very-high risk action and thus, makes it illogical to spend any amount of time or resources on buying/warming accounts with decent existential variables. The accounts we use for Mass DMing have horrible existential variables but that actually makes them perfect for a strategy like Mass DMs or [Mass Mentions](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-6-mass-mentions) because of how cheap we can acquire them for (the cheapest costing us only $0.02 a piece). I used to generate these cheap accounts myself at an even lower rate but upon discontinuing the offering of my more “spammy” strategies as Done-For-You services, it became easier to just buy whenever I needed to run a demo as part of my [Mass DM Infrastructure Package.](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products/Instagram-Mass-DM-Infrastructure-Package) I really don’t think it’s necessary to explain the follower trajectory behind this method as it’s pretty self-explanatory. You program thousands of accounts to send out messages to your group of targets over a specified period of time, typically within hours. In the message, you attempt to entice them with a description of the King/service/product along with either a media attachment of a profile or post. If done effectively, it is capable of bringing massive amounts of leads within just minutes of mobilizing. # Strategy #7's Pros: ✅ **Highly Scalable and Efficient** This along with [Mass Mentions](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-6-mass-mentions) are literally the easiest strategies to pick up as a newbie automation practitioner. It’ll take you less than an hour on average to mobilize, including the time you spend scraping the target audience. If you want bigger or smaller volumes, you simply just add or decrease the number of accounts you buy to later import into the tool. In terms of ease of use, this strategy probably ranks higher than everything else due to the concerns regarding the “safety” of our infantry accounts basically being thrown out the window. The accounts will die and they will die fast and nothing you do will prevent that. It’s actually kind of freeing in a way since your margins will always just come down to how cheap you are able to acquire accounts for as opposed to how well you can optimize your warm-ups, delay or activity settings to further extend the lifeline of your infantry. It’s really the cornerstone of stability, barring any major IG updates. ✅ ***Relatively***** Streamlined and Highly Versatile** Due to the medium through which we are interacting with our targets via this strategy, we are able to structure our funnel trajectory to be as optimized as possible. That means we can employ the use of Call-to-Action statements directly within our first interaction with the target user, making it possible for us to funnel only the most motivated of users over to the King. The fact that we can text or message the user whatever we want also makes this strategy a lot more versatile, capable of delivering productive results for a wide variety of use cases and niches. It’s not really the greatest method of growing accounts in my experience ([Pyramid](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-4-instainfantry-pyramid-king-infantry) and/ or [IICA ](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-3-instainfantry-customs-story-reactions-large-scale)are far better suited for that purpose) but it can still perform relatively well for certain niches. However, if you’re looking to simply generate leads for just about any business/industry in the fastest possible way, this strategy is probably most effective for that. Whether you’re an OnlyFans model, a real estate agent, a SaaS, an Instagram marketer, etc., you can literally find and reach out to any audience promoting just about any product or service you can think of. There really aren't any limiting factors with the degree of versatility this method grants you. The only real downside is that unlike the current version of InstaInfantry, the old InstaInfantry bot does not support ongoing conversations. You cannot see replies, like responses or send “feeler” messages to gauge your target user’s interest levels. Instead, you sort of just have to lay it all out in one generic DM and hope that the message is persuasive enough to get them to convert. If you’re a lead generator, you’ll need to funnel the users to another account by saying “DM @xyz to get a free trial” or something along those lines with the @xyz profile added as an attachment below the message.That’s sort of the downside of using low-bloat software to automate accounts at scale and something you’ll need to make terms with when running a churn-and-burn strat like Mass DMs. # Strategy #7's Cons: ❌ **Very Poor Infantry Longevity** In a similar vein as Mass Mentions, the Mass DM strategy has horrible account longevity by design. Accounts die VERY fast when used to spam messages to people they had no previous interaction with, regardless of how strong they may be. It also doesn’t help that unlike [InstaInfantry Pyramid](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-4-instainfantry-pyramid-king-infantry) or [IICA](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-3-instainfantry-customs-story-reactions-large-scale), the messages we send to targets via this strategy go into their requests folder as opposed to their general inbox. That means unless your target is actively checking their requests folder, they may not ever see your message. That’s sort of why the funnel isn’t as streamlined as some other strategies as the notifications derived from other interactions are generally more likely to get noticed in comparison to DM requests. To combat the insane death rate, this strategy utilizes accounts of a much lower quality. These accounts are typically fresh, made via an API script and cost as little as $0.02 a piece. Their lifespan hardly ever exceeds 72 hours, even if they remain dormant with no activity. It’s still quite cheap to execute but the fact that one must burn through thousands of these every day to complete a singular, decently-sized operation makes it one of the more expensive methods in this guide with few options available for cost optimization. ❌ **Poor Bot Dissociation** Unlike other strategies that generate traffic in a more “organic” fashion like [IICA](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-3-instainfantry-customs-story-reactions-large-scale) or [Pyramid](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-4-instainfantry-pyramid-king-infantry), Mass DMs are similar to Mass Mentions in the sense that the average Instagram user will easily be able to discern them as bots. The infantry accounts doing the messaging will only have a profile pic on them and 0 other posts, sending what are likely to be long ass messages with salesy-sounding CTAs trying to funnel you to another account or link. You’d have to be pretty dumb to really question if this is a real user or not. That’s why you really need to optimize your message text as best you can so your average-IQ targets are compelled to convert in spite of the apparent spamminess of your marketing methods. # Strategy #7's Verdict: 🟢 I may have sounded a little harsh in my cons but this strategy gets the greenlight in my book despite being pretty saturated. It can generate a ton of traffic and leads in as little as under an hour by a practitioner with little to no prior knowledge of Instagram automation. I firmly believe it to be amongst the easiest of strategies to learn off the bat. That’s largely why when I sell the Mass DM Infrastructure Packages, it only takes me an hour to demo the tool and run a campaign together with my client’s chosen text and targeting. This is in stark contrast to strategies utilizing the current version of InstaInfantry like IICA or Pyramid where small issues will pop up throughout the month that need your constant attention and monitoring. Like I mentioned in the Mass Mentions verdict, I do not offer Mass DMs as a service anymore but if you’re interested in acquiring the old version of InstaInfantry Mass DM bot and running your own Mass DM campaigns, you are welcome to do so by purchasing the infrastructure package from the [GHM Shop](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products). It comes with all of the essentials you need to start DMing tens of thousands of users per day. And if you need to scale up fast, introduction to my account vendors is included in the package for those looking to send millions of DMs per day immediately. # Strategy #8: Interactive Quiz/Maze This strategy is actually one that I’ve never really covered anywhere before or even used since like 2019/2020. It was a completely random idea at the time, back when I was still managing/growing theme pages and I’ve never really seen or heard any other practitioners discuss it. I drew inspiration for this strat when scrolling through the comment section of a trending meme. There was an account, likely scripted to comment as soon as a new publication was posted on one of the big meme pages, prominently displaying a comment stating “don’t click on my profile”. The name of the profile was a phrase similar to that. So, obviously, I clicked and ended up in a wild goose chase of what is meant to be a maze. The crazy part is that the end of the maze led to a personal account, likely of the guy who created the maze. Not even a commercial or themed page. He had about 8k followers and insanely good engagement so I monitored his account for growth and was pleasantly surprised with how effective his creative strategy was. So I decided to test it out for myself but instead of making it a reverse psychology type maze, I made it into an interactive theme-based quiz. I was doing some work in the hip-hop niche at the time and I thought, why not create something similar but targeted towards hip-hop heads? Here’s an example of one of the junctions within my maze quiz:
I reckon this is pretty self-explanatory from here on out. As you can see, it’s a very simple, straight-forward maze with a fun overtone behind it. User finds the correct publication and proceeds to the next sequence however many times. I had an aggregate of 5 sequences like this one, with the final junction leading straight to my King which was a hip-hop based theme page. Here is an outline of the follower journey with my approach: 1. Infantry leaves a comment on a trending meme post enticing users to test their knowledge in a specific niche 2. Users see the comment and click on the profile to take said quiz 3. Users click on the account in the bio which leads them to the first sequence of the quiz 4. User completes first sequence and moved onto the second 5. Third sequence 6. Fourth sequence 7. Fifth sequence 8. User arrives to the target account, browses through their content and decides whether or not to follow it You could probably tell that this is the most convoluted trajectory we’ve seen yet out of all our covered strategies. There are numerous barriers each user must overcome in order to reach the final destination. Typically, I’d say a strategy with a follower journey like this one is doomed to fail. But the shocker, with this particular method, is that the convolution actually serves as a strength rather than a weakness. It makes the journey more engaging. That’s because the longer the trajectory is, the more prominent the sunk-cost fallacy becomes. Users will develop an increasingly stronger proclivity to finish it and be far more likely to see what lies at the end of it. When it finally does reach your King, they’ll likely spend more time analyzing the King’s content than they otherwise would have had it only taken them several seconds to complete the maze. This is seriously the only time you’ll find me advocating for a longer trajectory. To really ensure my comments garnered as much exposure as possible, I purchased comment likes from an SMM panel. A couple hundred or so likes back then typically landed you in the top 10 comments of @memezar’s posts which was enough to get a very solid amount of traffic. I only really tried this method out within the music niche but I reckon you can use this method with any large-market niche such as money/finance, fitness, travel, etc. So long as there’s a sizable amount of accounts with a large audience in your given niche, there’ll be a good amount of users who’d be down to test their knowledge within said niche. I suppose you could theoretically use other actions to harness exposure besides commenting but I’m not sure how well it’ll work given the absence of a clear call-to-action that you can implement when using the comment method. I feel like with other interaction types, a lot of users will simply get confused not knowing that the account that followed them or liked their story is the beginning stage of a quiz/maze and likely nope out without completing anything. But again, I could be completely wrong and y’all should test that assumption for yourselves before writing off the use case completely. # Strategy #8's Pros: ✅ **Great Growth-to-Action Ratio** As I’ve already mentioned, you’ll find that this method can have a fantastic growth to action ratio if implemented properly. There are a lot of factors that can influence it such as the actual quality of your quiz and whether you put in the time to make it engaging but if done semi-well, you’re guaranteed to see some semblance of growth regardless. ✅ **Pretty Versatile (I think)** Like I said, I’ve only really tested this method out within the music niche but I really don’t see why you couldn’t create a similar type of maze/quiz for just about any large market niche. For the more obscure niches, I can see this being a potential issue when utilizing the commenting method as the initial interaction but who knows. If you end up trying this method out for your niche/use case, feel free to send me a message on Telegram or Discord (@GreyHatNik) and let me know your results. I’ll come back and edit this strategy’s write-up further once we have more data to work with. # Strategy #8's Cons: ❌ **Very Poor Infantry Longevity and Time-Consuming** Because the dominant action within this method is commenting on trending posts, similar to what I covered in the [King/Infantry - Commenting Strategy](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-5-king-infantry-comments), you’ll find your Infantry getting blocked and dying rather quickly after a certain amount of actions. It’s a hot button action for the algorithm to latch on to and thus, accounts don’t last very long. You can prolong your Infantry’s lifespan by employing spintax extensively but sooner or later, they will inevitably fall. The biggest issue is that you can’t really cut on costs with this strategy like we can for [Mass DMs](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-7-mass-direct-messaging-mass-dms) or [Mass Mentions](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-6-mass-mentions). The accounts need to be relatively strong in order to safely weather the trust score decrease that comes with the rebranding process described in the [Mass Editing section ](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/branding-accounts/manual-editing-and-mass-editing)of the docs. That means you’ll have to be sacrificing prime, expensive, customized Infantry accounts on a pretty regular occurrence in order to run this strategy long-term. That ultimately does make this method quite expensive to run but also time consuming as not only will you need to be replacing expensive accounts consistently, you’ll also need to spend a good bit of time customizing each batch of them to fit the starting sequence of your maze. ❌ **Poor Targeting if Niche is Too Obscure** As I’ve mentioned previously, the commenting interaction will likely only perform well if you’re targeting a common interest like music, fitness, memes, cars, etc. If you were to run this strategy for say, a chiropractic business themed page, you will likely struggle immensely drumming up interest for it in the comments. You’ll probably need to use your 1st sequence infantry account to follow or like stories of your sourced targets instead but unfortunately, I just don’t foresee it to derive the same degree of success as the original variant. I reckon most targets acquired in such a fashion won’t make it to the King because: 1. Unlike the users sourced through comments, they have little high-intent to spend the next 10 minutes completing a random quiz and 2. Are likely to just get confused as to what to even do and won’t bother looking further into it. # Strategy #8's Verdict: 🟡 I’m giving this strategy a “yellow-light” verdict on the basis of a few points. The first is that I just haven’t really tested it or worked with it enough across different niches/use cases to know it converts well for a wide variety of clients. It may literally only just work for growing music-related theme pages so I can’t really endorse it any further beyond just that one singular niche. Two is just how expensive and time-consuming it is to run. Unlike with [Pyramid](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-4-instainfantry-pyramid-king-infantry), the infantry accounts we use have to be customized in a very specific way in order to run this method. Between the creation of the initial maze/quiz itself and then subsequent generation of batches of customized infantry accounts that’ll serve as the “entrance” into the funnel, setting it up and managing it would be a massive pain in the ass. I have no intention of offering this strategy as a Done-For-You service in the[ GHM Shop](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products) largely because of the aforementioned reason but if you are a growth service provider looking to execute this method on behalf of your clients, be cognizant of the conflict of interest that may occur when utilizing the comment variant on trending posts. You could potentially be pinning your own clients against one another if they’re in the same niche and there might be serious issues if it comes to light that one client’s comments are ranking above another’s on the same exact posts. However, if you’re using this strategy to just grow a singular account, I think you can certainly give it a go and expect to see at least some semblance of positive results. I honestly don’t even think you need to use automation to run this strategy as you can easily generate great results just by virtue of manual commenting and using an SMM panel to boost your comment to the top of the chain. In any case, if you do end up testing this strategy, do let me know as I’d be curious what other people’s results of it were like for different niches. # Strategy #9: Artificial Engagement This may be the safest strategy of all because it’s the only strategy where you’re not actively disturbing the serenity of your unsuspecting targets with botted actions. Instead, you’re only using automation to spruce up your engagement rate and make Instagram think the post is more engaging than it truly is. Or at least, that’s the theory behind this method. Here’s the general trajectory: 1. You program your Infantry to follow your King 2. You program your infantry to like, comment, save and share your posts once encountered in their personalized feed, ideally within the first 20 minutes of you posting it 3. Infantry executes and you now have a much stronger probability of reaching the explore page That’s it. Notice that there is no funnel trajectory to this method given that you’re not sourcing for targets directly. There are no people involved, only a set of scripts interacting with one another. In a way, this is almost like a white-hat method really. Just a slight manipulation of the algorithm for the possibility of reaping its many benefits. For once, we are not actively fighting it but rather playing along with it. This time around, we actually want it to notice us receiving all this natural-looking engagement and bless us with a trip to the explore page. Now, you’ll definitely need to follow the process as I’ve outlined it above. Certainly do not go and purchase fake likes to any given post. That doesn’t do shit and never did. If anything it’ll raise unnecessary suspicion and likely guarantee that the post DOESN’T make it to the explore page. It is crucial that your bots: 1. Follow you 2. Get to your post via their feed, not via the URL 3. Do not simultaneously all like and comment on the post the literal second you publish it So long as the above conditions are met, you’ll *theoretically* increase your chances of organic reach by a pretty significant margin. # Strategy #9's Pros: ✅ **Safest Strategy Yet** There is little to be afraid of with this approach. You’re not interfering with people’s user experience, you’re not shamelessly self-promoting your content, you’re just interacting with your own posts. If you wanna be extra safe, make sure that the Infantry you employ have had limited prior automation. There’s always the chance they’ve been flagged executing past dirty work and there’s little benefit in dragging that along to this “clean” method (can’t say I’ve always done that though). ✅ **Possibility of Strong Organic Exposure** A few safe, automated actions can potentially result in hundreds of thousands of impressions. There’s very little risk and the potential upside has no bounds. Suffice to say that this method flaunts the best risk to reward ratio any black-hat strategy can have. # Strategy #9's Cons: ❌ **Not Reliable Whatsoever** Unlike the other methods, there’s no guarantee of any upside whatsoever, however small it may be. There’s no targeted outreach happening here which means you’re entirely dependent upon the algorithm for any and all exposure just like any other white-hat, Instagram user. Unlike with all of the previous strategies I’ve covered, you’re not brute-forcing your way into traffic by virtue of interacting with your targets anymore. Instead, you’re basically doing a ton more work for the increased chance that your prayers to the algorithm get answered with increased organic reach. It sort of goes against the [Philosophy ](/chapter-1-philosophy-and-fundamentals/the-ghm-and-instainfantry-philosophy)I covered in the introduction since we’re basically back in the same spot of being subservient to a piece of code for bringing us our leads and traffic. With that said though, I’ve personally seen this strategy work a few times but you’ll definitely not be seeing results every time you implement it. If that were the case, I’d have abandoned all the other strategies we’ve covered in a heartbeat and only ever utilize this. I can’t even really give you any concrete figures of the likelihood because there are far too many variables involved but I reckon it’s sub-1%. What I can say though is that it appears to work much better for accounts that have already seen some level of growth. Preferably ones sporting a following between the 5k and 30k range. If you just have five followers and they all interact with your post, nothing will really happen. The algorithm won’t deem it as an orgasmic piece of content that everyone must see and won’t push it to people with an interest in your niche. You’ll certainly need more people hyping it up for that to be viable. ❌ **Necessitates a Sizeable Investment** If you were to maximize the probability of this strategy performing well, you’ll need quite a few accounts to make that viable. Accounts that are 10k and up with a minimum 7% engagement rate tend to receive the most love from the algorithm in my experience. If your King is exhibiting a 2% natural engagement rate, you’ll need to make up the 5% difference with artificial exposure. Depending on how big the account is, that may be a hell of a lot of Infantry for something that’s not a sure thing. Now, it’s not necessarily a complete waste as we’ll typically utilize the infantry to run other strategies anyways but it’s still quite a big prerequisite for anyone just starting out. You’ll also be spending a massive amount on the proxies themselves but again, if you’re using them for other purposes, you can think of this method as more of a side-mission for them considering the accounts will only need to run for a couple of minutes max before completing all of their needed actions for this strategy (liking, commenting, and story viewing the King’s content). # Strategy #9's Verdict: 🟡 I am as neutral as can be on this strategy. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it but I also wouldn’t advise to steer clear of it. It’s just kinda one of those strategies that you revisit every once in a while to see if it has improved. It’s just not reliable at all and has far too many factors influencing it than we can account for. Even when you finally reap the benefits of it, you’re left wondering whether it was the strategy that had worked or whether it was just the natural course of things and would've happened regardless. Either way, I say feel free to experiment with this one however much you want but do prepare to eventually move on to something else. I do offer this strategy as a Done-For-You service in the [GHM Shop](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products) under [Artificial Engagement](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-9-artificial-engagement) but mainly just for shits and giggles. This is only really meant to be purchased by those who are staunchly against any form of black hat marketing that we’ve covered in the previous strategies and just want increased chances of potentially making it on the explore page or perhaps purely for cosmetic reasons. If you are serious about generating traffic or leads to your pages, do not purchase this service as there’s no guarantee that it will actually bring you any real traffic. I don’t really offer guarantees for any of my services but it goes doubly-so for this method. The only thing I guarantee with this strategy is that 4,000 of my generic, female infantry accounts will follow your page, 80% of them will like your posts and view your stories, and 1-3% of them will share, comment on and save your content everyday for a month. There is a very strong possibility that once I stop running the bots, the account will return back to its original state as if nothing happened, so again, only purchase this service at your own risk. Choose any other strategy if you want at least some semblance of positive results guaranteed by the end of it as this is definitely not one of them. # Conclusion to Strategies And that just about wraps up the strategies portion of the docs. I hope that was sufficiently informative for anyone new to automation. There are obviously far more variants to these strategies one can think of as just a singular tweak to a method’s funnel trajectory can effectively transform it into a new one. By releasing these docs (which are basically more of an ebook by this point lol), I’m obviously anticipating many of these methods to become far more saturated in the foreseeable future. But I suppose that’s a price I’m willing to pay for the sake of building InstaInfantry into a leader within the underground industry that is social media automation. At the end of the day, all of these methods become saturated sooner or later and I’m simply just slightly expediting that process. As I’ve mentioned in the beginning of this ebook, innovation is truly the name of the game when it comes to Instagram botting. By implementing your own spins to these strategies, you’ll likely end up discovering a whole new approach very few practitioners have ever thought of. Keep testing and optimizing until you’ve found a variant that derives the best results for your particular niche, business or clients. Once you do that, keep it on the DL and you’ll be set for the foreseeable future. Now let’s move onto the Targeting Audience Selection chapter of the Docs. # Chapter 4: Target Audience Selection # Introduction Navigating your target audience can sometimes prove to be more difficult than one typically anticipates. If you have an intimate, in-depth understanding of your niche, then the struggle obviously diminishes. But when handling a large variety of clients across various niches, you’ll certainly have your work cut out for you as you can never become fully immersed in a singular niche. Having worked with a large number of clients in various niches/industries, I’ve come to find that a significant percentage of newcomers take a very lackadaisical approach when it comes to their audience selection. With some niches that are more obscure, it’s a bit understandable but when people in large-market niches come to me with the most generic targeting sources, I cringe a little knowing how scattered that audience will be. The truth of the matter is that targeting is by far the most important factor of any black hat marketing campaign. You can have the best software and the best infantry accounts in the world doing millions of interactions per day but if all of those interactions are being spent on users that have virtually zero interest in your niche/offering, you’re screwed. No strategy and no method will save you from that. Targeting is and will always be at the forefront of any successful strategy execution. And that’s what we’ll be focusing on in this chapter: how to truly hone in on your ideal audience sources. For the purposes of this chapter, I’m only really going to be focusing on two niches that I am most familiar with: Music and OnlyFans. I’ve obviously worked with significantly more niches than that but if I got into the nitty gritty of every single niche’s/industry’s ideal targeting approach, this would end up being a whole nother ebook. If your primary niche is outside of these two, just try to take what you can out of this chapter and apply those parallels to your own targeting procedures. At its very core, targeting is the same across all niches. It’s simply the process of finding locations (a.k.a. sources) on Instagram where your ideal audience is most likely to be. Now let’s get into it! # Source Assessment A source is quite literally a source from which we obtain our target users. It can be any Instagram specific URL, the scraping of which results in a list of users who have interacted with the contents of said URL. That can take form in practically anything. A page, a post, a hashtag, a location. Any place that you believe harbors your ideal audience. Some sources will derive far better growth to action ratios than others. I personally always recommend starting with as many sources as possible so that you can gauge the success rate of each individually. That enables you to hone in on the ones emanating the best results and save your Infantry’s limited actions for targets with a greater likelihood of interacting with your King. The most common sources are typically the followers of your competitor pages. Those tend to derive the best results for the vast majority of use cases. Too many times have I had clients provide sources that were just outright terrible. A 5 minute, in-depth look at some of those profiles illuminated just how dead they were. And of course, I end up being the bad guy for delivering poor results. When assessing any new source, go look through their most recent posts’ likes and comments. If you find that many of the profiles who’ve interacted with their content or follow them: 1. Are comprised of a demographic that hardly fits the niche (think profiles of middle-aged, arabic men) 2. Have too many strange, generic usernames (john\_doe\_483925, mark\_smith\_482948, etc.) Then you should not be using them as a source. This is why I strongly recommend meticulously analyzing each of your sources before targeting their users. Simply looking at their profile’s engagement rate through an analytics tool does not suffice as no formula is capable of detecting fishy-looking profiles. One must manually vet them prior to utilizing them as a source. Some of my OF agency clients actually utilize a method of source analysis that I think can be useful for people in all other niches. They reach out to models using their own established models’ accounts via DMs and request the pricing of a shoutout/collab. Once they get a response/figure, they request a screenshot of their page insights (assuming they’re a business page). Those insights are usually the only way you’ll ever be able to see the exact statistics of a given page’s demographics such as the percentages of countries their audience belongs to and their age/gender metrics. It’s a little misleading of a tactic but ultimately doesn’t really hurt anyone so if you opt to use it, I won’t hold it against you. It’s likely the best possible way of assessing a source but don’t become completely reliant on it as not every large page owner will be sending those over to you (or even replying for the matter). # Source Discovery - Music As I briefly mentioned in the [Maze/Quiz Strategy](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-8-interactive-quiz-maze) write-up, I had done a lot of work in the music niche between the years of 2018 and 2020. I had some large hip-hop themed pages I was growing/managing and I was working with a decent amount of artists back then before the crypto craze came along. I initially chose to specialize in the music niche because I had (and still have) an active interest in it, I was well aware of the trends happening within it and I was well-versed in its various sub-genres and styles. My onboarding process would then comprise of: 1. Listening to the client’s music 2. Analyzing their style and choosing a few respective sub-genres most suited for it 3. Consulting with the client as to who their major influences were along with their respective list of competitors 4. Crafting a mind map consisting of said influences and their respective sources 5. Filtering through each source until you have a list of targets belonging to each sub-category of their target audience So let’s say for example, an artist comes to me trying to promote their new single. Upon listening to it, I deem it as being a mixture of two genres: horrorcore and ambient. I consult with the artist and we settle on a few major influences that we think would have the largest overlap in fan bases. That means big name artists and a list of their albums exhibiting as close a style to the single as possible. Here’s a simple diagram of what that would look like:
The reason we hone in on specific albums and singles is because I’ve found it to drastically increase conversion rates and narrow down our target audience. Most hip-hop artists these days alternate heavily between various sub-genres of rap with versatility being at an all-time high. I’m all for experimentation but some projects simply deviate too far from one another and wouldn’t appeal to the same subset of fans. With that said, the first level of targeting would be to obviously scrape the followers and likers of the target artists themselves whom we believe to be most similar to ours. If the artist is large enough, you’ll also tend to get higher conversion rates scraping for users from their fan pages. That’s where you’ll find their most loyal fanbase with the highest likelihood of converting. The next level of targeting would be to generate a list of keywords associated with our diagram. That means the album titles as listed above, names of the singles in that album, names of the artists, artist taglines (i.e. 92 to infinity; most dope; etc.) and common nicknames. Once you’ve generated a list of all of the positive keywords you could think of for that niche/sub-genre, you can methodically search them up in the Instagram search bar. Chances are, you will find a lot of music-related theme pages that had made a post on said artist or their album and all of the users who had liked or commented on the post are all potential targets. I’ve found that the best converting users came from theme pages focusing on cultivating discussion in the comments, along the lines of @rapdebates\_ or @jahtalksmusic. With this method, you are guaranteed to find an absolute ton of publications to scrape likes from, easily garnering millions of potential targets from pages that have covered said artist in the past. # Source Discovery - OnlyFans Now with OnlyFans, targeting tends to be a little less straightforward than how it is with music. A lot of people would think, “just find profiles belonging to other hot OF models and you’re good” but there’s actually a lot more dynamic variables at play in this niche besides just general attractiveness. Matter of fact, I’ve seen some clients in the OF niche use sources that were completely out of pocket in my mind but actually derived remarkably good results such as beer brands, sex toy shops or DnD/Magic the Gathering groups/shops. You can afford to be really creative with your audience selection when working in this niche. However, when I deliver traffic to OF models/agencies as a service in the [GHM Shop](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products), I generally do recommend most of them to just stick to other OF models as their target audience sources. Sticking to conventional methods will always bring moderately good results but finding those untapped, unorthodox sources is where the risk to reward ratio becomes significantly higher and can make a campaign either outlandishly successful or an utter failure. When it comes to finding other OF models to use as your target sources, there are several “criteria” within that niche that you need to keep in mind and each one of them will have a slightly different conversion rate associated with them. In the context of OF, a sub-niche is essentially a specific selling point or feature that a model chooses to focus on. The most common criterions consist of race, physical attributes and sub-niche/fetish. For example, if you are a latina model and you find that the vast majority of your existing audience are mainly there for the fact that you are a latina, then it would make sense to target other latina creators as your target audience sources. The same applies to asian creators, black creators, white creators, etc. As weird and slightly racist as it may sound, my experience working in the OF niche has proven that race tends to be a relatively strong deciding factor in the conversion rate of any given model’s audience. Not endorsing it in any way, just stating what I saw. As the saying goes, “don’t shoot the messenger”. Next is physical attributes. This feature can take shape (pun intended) in a lot of different forms. If you are a petite model and believe that that’s your primary selling point, then perhaps finding other petite models is your best bet. The same is applicable to creators that are more busty in appearance or in a different twist, are on the older side (i.e. MILFs). One could also argue tattoos/piercings for this section, however, I believe that those particular attributes are more suitable for the following “selling point” we’ll be covering which is: Sub-Niches/Fetishes. This one is a little difficult to pin down as there are many potential “selling points” that can arguably be categorized as a sub-niche or fetish. The most prominent examples of an OF sub-niche are goth girls, dominatrixes, cosplayers, e-girls or anime/weaboo-focused creators. That’s partially why I chose to classify certain physical attributes such as tattoos/piercings into this category as it’s more an expression of a model’s personality/interests as opposed to a physical attribute of sorts. All of these aforementioned selling points tend to work great as targeting options. However, using a specific sub-niche as your primary targeting criterion has a propensity to deliver the highest conversion rates in my experience. I speculate it’s because target users scraped from specific sub-niche sources tend to feel a greater connection with those models. Whether it be some sort of anime fandom proclivity or a goth-like subculture, I reckon it helps foster a stronger feeling of interrelatedness than you’d get with just any generic hot girl and thus, makes it easier to establish a parasocial relationship. Again, not every OF model will fall under a well-defined niche so don’t wreck your brain trying to find something that isn’t there. Targeting by race and physical attributes still works well for most OF creators so if you can somehow find models that share your characteristics across both race and physical attributes, the results can be just as good as targeting by sub-niche. Now that we’ve established what sort of models to look for, let’s talk about where to actually find them. Obviously Instagram is our first choice but finding the right ones can sometimes be a little difficult. Hashtags are usually the best option for finding relevant content. Just come up with a variety of keywords that other models within your sub-niche/criterion are likely to use in their posts/reels and you should be able to find quite a few that way. I’ve discovered that once you secure the first few models you believe to fit your needs, if you go through their followings, you’ll likely be able to spot other models that fit a similar archetype. A lot of the more prominent/established ones do frequent collabs with one another so they or their managers/agencies already did the groundwork of establishing whose audiences will be most receptive to them. Use that to your advantage to expedite the source discovery process. For some of the more sub-niche related ones, I’ve had decent results finding models to target by using Reddit. There’s probably a dozen or so NSFW subs dedicated to literally every sub-niche, fetish or OF subculture you can think of. Just find the largest one and start scrolling through submissions until you find what you like. Click on the Reddit profile and see if they have their IG linked in their bio. If not, do some further research using tools like FansMetrics or OnlySearch and see if you can find it. There’s likely to be hundreds if not thousands of unique models in each of those niche-specific subreddits so you definitely won’t be hard pressed to find at least a couple that you like. # Sourcing for Active Users When choosing your sources, there are a plethora of factors that may affect your growth-to-action ratio that aren’t necessarily related to an account’s health. So far, we’ve only covered sourcing for targets from a look-a-like’s list of followers. The issue with using that as a source stems from the fact that a sizable portion of their users may be inactive and hardly ever interact with their content. To a certain degree, those types of followers are simply dead weight that drag down the page’s engagement and will likely do the same to yours. To decrease the extent to which you waste your Infantry’s actions on these types of users, instead of scraping for targets via a look-a-like’s following, you scrape them via the likes of their most recent posts. That ensures that you’re not: A) Unknowingly targeting users who haven’t opened Instagram in ages B) Targeting users who will simply follow and never interact with the content in your niche Thus, you’ll find yourself boasting a much stronger GTAR and maximize the usefulness of the followers you attract to your King. This approach of course varies quite drastically niche to niche as some are far more obscure than others (read: localized businesses) but for a niche as broad as music or OF, you won’t have much issue sourcing for large amounts of targets with this method. However, if you have to choose between targeting the followers of an amazing, well-fitting source or targeting the likers of a so-so, mediocre source, you’re infinitely better off sticking with the followers of the amazing source. Do not feel like you need to dilute your pool of strongly-aligned targets with more “meh” ones simply on the basis that they are more active. So long as you are conducting a thorough assessment of your sources, losing 10-15% of your actions on dead or inactive users is preferable to interacting with 50% of active users that have a very limited interest in whatever it is you are peddling. When clients order Done-For-You services from me in the [GHM Shop](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products), such as [InstaInfantry Customs](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-3-instainfantry-customs-story-reactions-large-scale) or [InstaInfantry Pyramid](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-4-instainfantry-pyramid-king-infantry), I scrape a healthy mix of both, followers and likers from their provided sources. So again, do not insert just any mediocre source simply because they have the highest engagement. Instead, analyze the content and see it from the target user’s perspective as to whether or not it's a good fit for your use case. # Common Pitfalls When Target Scraping/Filtering When scraping for your ideal audience, the accounts you believe to possess the greatest likelihood of converting into followers/customers, the goal is to typically narrow down your audience to a molecular level. Most advanced tools like InstaInfantry will generally have filters you can enable to help you eliminate some of the more “undesirable targets” such as by language or gender. However, I am personally not a big fan of using filters for a few key reasons. The first and largest one being that your infantry/accelerator accounts will die at a much, MUCH faster pace with filtration enabled.The amount of API calls that now need to be made in order to check each user increases EXPONENTIALLY. We’re talking literally 100x more for every hundred users scraped. Instead of simply collecting 100 target user IDs it finds on the source, the account must now individually visit each account to check whether it meets the filtration criteria or not. This absolutely demolishes accounts in the long-term so the cost of running just about any strategy increases by a ridiculous margin. That should be enough to dissuade a lot of users from utilizing filtration but the 2nd reason is that it oftentimes can actually decimate your pool of already decent targets. I find that many users try to find the most obscure, niche-ified sources and then proceed to also add ten different filters across a pool of like 50,000 potential accounts. As a marketer, I understand the inclination to do so. To get as granular with my audience as possible. We’ve all heard of the phrase “if you’re marketing to everyone, you’re relating to no one”. But there is obviously a limit as to how granular you can truly get. Using one too many sets of criteria ends up becoming counter-productive to your marketing efforts. The script doing the parsing cannot read the context of someone’s page like we can. Sometimes, spending more of your time finding the good sources ends up being far more effective than agonizing over each positive feature you want the profiles in question to have. For example: Back when I was focusing solely on the hip-hop niche, I’d have times where I’d go for weeks on end without any clients. In an attempt to get a bit more work, I’d resort to using my own marketing methods to find clientele. I’ve spent countless hours trying to find the perfect filters, endlessly reviewing the profiles of aspiring rappers and artists to find as many commonalities between them as I could. I had a list of hundreds of positive keywords. “Artist, rapper, EP, LP, single”. I had even begun implementing long-tail keywords such as “...out on all major platforms”. I had so many spreadsheets of the filters I had used for each campaign and their respective conversion rates that it was hard to stay organized. At one point, I spent almost $60 on testing just to determine the ideal size of an artist’s audience/follower count (with regards to their likelihood of becoming my client). That was until I had some bot comment on one of my music theme pages, saying “contact @xxx for promotion”. The tagged profile was some massive rap themed page whose entire content strategy was posting small clips of aspiring artists for promotional purposes. I’ve seen those pages before and I harbored quite a bit of disdain towards the people that ran them as the degree to which they artificially inflated their follower count, views and engagement was ridiculous. They were essentially preying on artists by charging ridiculously expensive promo fees to post their music on a completely dead page. It was blatantly obvious when scrolling through the comment section of each post. Same exact phrases, a shit ton of emojis and almost no negative feedback whatsoever (which, in this niche, is practically unheard of. Mfs love to hate on others in the music field). So I decided on my next campaign to simply scrape the usernames of all the artists that were tagged or mentioned on those posts. No filters or anything else. The conversion rate ended up being so high that I had to tell several of them to wait until the foreseeable future because I didn’t have the infrastructure nor the time to support that many clients at once. In hindsight, it was so simple. These fake promo pages have done practically all of the legwork for me. They’ve reached out to thousands of potential clients, manually vetted each applicant’s ability to pay and only then proceeded to post their music on their page. Not only was I getting targets who perfectly fit the criteria but I was also getting targets who possessed a variable that I couldn’t possibly filter for: a proclivity towards paying for promotion. And as many of us psych students know - “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.” What made it even better was that their clients received practically zero value from their previous promo and many were a lot more eager to try my black hat ways after being scammed one too many times by pages like these. It was perfect. I suppose the moral of this whole tangent is to again, put more time and thought into finding sources that would logically exhibit a higher ratio of good to bad targets than spending hours trying to map out all the ways you’ll be filtering out the irrelevant ones. Filters are useful in some contexts but when utilized to a ridiculous extent, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a sizable group of eligible targets not to mention killing a ton of [accelerators/scrapers ](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/introduction-and-terminology/scraper-accelerator-low-tier-account)in the process from all the API calls you’ll be making. If you absolutely need a filtered audience, I would actually recommend using tools outside of InstaInfantry whose entire purpose is to just scrape and filter targets. Those tools will oftentimes not ask you to have your own accounts and proxies and just charge you for the amount of threads you have running at any given time. But again, this is all completely optional and not really a necessity in my mind. So long as you just focus on content and proper source assessment, you will have virtually zero need for filtering to get stellar results out of your campaigns. # Conclusion Hopefully by now, you have a solid understanding of how we discover good sources, how we assess their quality and how we can ensure we’re reaching the targets we want to reach. Like I mentioned in the introduction, I don’t have the time to write out source discovery strategies for every possible niche out there but I hope you were able to take away some key pointers from my OF and Music use cases and apply it to your own. Again, targeting is by far the most important variable in any black hat marketing campaign and should not be taken lightly. Many a times I’ve been asked by new clients in the OF niche if they can simply use the sources of my other OF clients that had performed well in the past. The answer to that is obviously no. First of all, I don’t want to compromise my other clients’ sources (whom they probably worked hard to find) and end up oversaturating them. But mainly, even if I were open to doing that, there’s a good chance that the sources that converted so well for them will convert atrociously for the new model. That’s because their audiences were likely custom chosen for them. They may end up being a terrible fit for you so there’s really no point in trying to re-use them. Ultimately, source selection and targeting is always going to be an ongoing process, not a one-and-done kind of deal. You should obviously put a good bit of thought into it upfront so you don’t waste your infantry’s limited actions on complete shite but even then, not all of your chosen sources will end up performing amazingly. That’s why continuous optimization is where you’ll begin to really get the most out of your campaigns. Keep an eye out on the [Targeting](/chapter-4-target-audience-selection) section of the [Reactions Module](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/reactions-module-and-driving-traffic/the-reactions-module) and also the Stats section to see how well each of your given sources is performing. If you are purchasing traffic generation as a service from me in the [GHM Shop](https://greyhatmarketing.sellpass.io/products), I will notify you at the end of each [InstaInfantry Pyramid](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-4-instainfantry-pyramid-king-infantry) campaign how well each source performed and on a weekly basis for any [InstaInfantry Custom Account](/chapter-3-botting-strategies/strategy-3-instainfantry-customs-story-reactions-large-scale) campaigns. You can then substitute the poor performing sources with new ones and continue to refine your targeting until it's reached its optimal state. # Chapter 5: Technical Issues/Troubleshooting # Introduction We are coming up to the end of the InstaInfantry docs and I’m well aware that I’ve yet to cover much of the technical trouble side of things. Now, I anticipate a lot of people reading/using this guide who may not have any intention to use the InstaInfantry software and are using/plan to use another tool. Hence, I will try to make this chapter more inclusive of those people and cover not just the technical issues associated only with InstaInfantry but also cover all of the various blocks, bans and checkpoints any account running on any sort of software is likely to encounter. I do this because Instagram’s imposed limitations are universal, regardless of what software or script you use. If you’re running a large enough botting operation, you are bound to face dozens of checkpoints, action blocks and relogins on a near daily basis. I suppose that’s one of the misconceptions about social media automation - there’s hardly anything “automated” about it. You’ll need to be vigilant and check the state of your operation daily if you are to succeed within this venture. Dealing with verification requests, replacing accounts, resting accounts. All of those things require a manual vetting process until you can establish proper automation systems without destroying the accounts in the process. You can certainly get an intern or a virtual assistant to do these things for you but it requires human intervention nonetheless. So as a parting note, let’s cover all of the potential blocks and penalties you’ll come across when automating IG accounts and the correct way of traversing through each of them. # Dealing with Relogins
Relogins are probably the most frequent technical error that clients will encounter when using InstaInfantry. It’s hardly ever a cause for concern and simply an unavoidable annoyance that comes with running automation. In the vast majority of cases, all it really means is that the session of the account was terminated and requires a new session by re-logging into the account. You’ll need to simply delete that account from InstaInfantry and import it again by following the same process as depicted in the [“Adding Accounts into InstaInfantry”](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/adding-accounts-into-instainfantry) section. However, if upon doing so, you are greeted with another error stating some variation of “SendChallengeCode”, that means the account must resolve some sort of checkpoint or challenge before it can proceed with its regular activities. InstaInfantry is not capable of resolving these sorts of challenges and you’ll need to use either a real device or an emulator to log into the account in order to resolve it. Unless you have a ton of real devices just lying around at home, I would recommend using another tool to handle this issue. If you’ve been running purely on android devices, then you are welcome to simply download the Android APK on your computer and emulate a real android mobile environment on your pc to traverse to checkpoint. The same applies to iOS. However, if you want a pre-packaged SaaS that allows you to easily choose between both environments and allows you to duplicate environments across different device IDs, I recommend using AdsPower.com. They have a forever free plan for two devices so you could theoretically just keep cycling through the two devices, deleting and resetting them to handle all of your account relogins without ever needing to upgrade. There’s tons of other similar tools out there besides AdsPower that offer the exact same functionality so feel free to experiment. I’ve had quite a few InstaInfantry clients so far ask me, “Nik, why can’t you just add the same functionality to InstaInfantry so we don’t need to use other tools?”. The answer to that isn’t because its too hard or difficult to implement but because of how resource-intensive hosting functionality like this is. You must remember that InstaInfantry is a web-hosted software whereas AdsPower is a self-hosted software that you must download onto your own PC. To add something like that to IF would basically quadruple my hosting costs on clusters so unfortunately, there’s no foreseeable future where this will be a feature without me skyrocketing the prices for each plan. Upon manually logging into the account using a device/emulator, you’ll see the sort of checkpoint you’re dealing with and how bad the situation for the account potentially is. However, if you search up the affected account’s username and have no problem locating it/visiting the profile, you are likely facing a lower severity checkpoint that is easily resolvable. The following subsections will cover each of the potential “challenges” you’ll need to face and what their expected level of severity is. A one out of ten on the severity scale basically equates to just a minor annoyance with almost no detrimental impact having been made on the accounts besides maybe a temporary decrease in [trust score](/chapter-1-philosophy-and-fundamentals/botting-fundamentals/trust-scores-explained). Whereas a ten out of ten on the severity scale basically means you may as well just forget about the account and move on as it is basically unsalvageable. Generally, I avoid dealing with any checkpoints that are above a 9 in severity unless we are dealing with King accounts. A score of 7 and above in severity is where I throw in the towel on most customized infantry accounts and a score of 5 or greater is when I give up on most generic infantry accounts. Now, let’s start this off with one of the most common and easiest to resolve challenges: # “We Suspect Automated Behavior” Challenge
This challenge may seem menacing at first but it’s not something many should get overly concerned about. It’s basically guaranteed to happen with most infantry accounts and all that really happens as a result of it is a slight decrease in trust score. I’ve seen accounts get a dozen of these before actually getting hit with something more serious. When they send you a challenge of this nature, it’s more of a scare tactic than anything else. There’s not much data there to prove automated behavior is actually happening besides just the repetition of certain actions which any regular user is capable of doing as well. The fact that this checkpoint can be resolved by simply hitting the blue “Dismiss” button in your device or emulator is a testament to that. InstaInfantry will automatically dial back the limits on accounts that get this so you don’t even really need to rest your accounts. Just proceed with business as usual and the slight impairment to the trust score will ameliorate itself in a matter of days. Once you start receiving captcha checkpoints is when you know the “suspicion” has evolved into certainty. But until then, don’t fret too much if you encounter this. **Severity Level: 1.5/10** # “Your Post Goes Against Our Community Guidelines” Challenge
This one is of a similar vein as the automated behavior checkpoint. Again, it’s very easily resolvable and doesn’t really impact the account in too significant of a way. This challenge can occur pretty regularly when you are using the[ Repost module](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/branding-accounts/the-cloning-reposting) discussed in the [Branding Accounts](/chapter-2-using-instainfantry/branding-accounts) section of the docs. Generally, Instagram is able to spot content that’s being reposted by tracking its hash. This tends to occur most often if you are consistently reposting content from a singular source since it sees the same hashes appear over and over again. To prevent this challenge from appearing in the future, try to not repost more than one piece of content from a singular source per day if you can help it. This challenge can also occur as a result of people reporting the content but that occurrence is even more rare in most instances. Resolving this checkpoint has the same degree of ease as the previous one. Just click on the blue “OK” button in your device or emulator and everything will go back to normal. However, this challenge does have a slightly higher severity score and you generally only get about three of these before it escalates into a suspension. **Severity Level: 2.5/10** # Phone Verification
This is where we get into more serious territory but still hardly anything we’d throw a solid infantry account away over. Phone verifications are indeed a cause for concern and present a bigger pain in the ass to resolve in comparison to the other checkpoints we’ve covered so far but are not insurmountable. To resolve this checkpoint, you simply need to go through the SMS-verification process. If you don’t have access to physical SIM cards like some advanced practitioners, you can use virtual service providers like SMS-PVA or the like. Simply top-up your balance, purchase a number with an area code of your choosing, enter the number into Instagram’s request field, and receive the code. It’s all a very intuitive process and eliminates the need to keep hundreds of physical SIM cards on stand-by. There are plenty of providers similar to SMS-PVA that are cheaper so do a bit of digging. Once verified, you’ll need to dial back the pace you were going at prior to receiving the PV request. If you have yet to reach your Infantry limits, try to rest the account for a day or two before continuing the warm-up process. And most importantly, if using virtual SIMs, never forget to immediately remove the phone number from the profile while you’re still logged into the device or emulator. Chances are, you’ll never get this number again and you won’t have the chance to change it after getting another PV request. If you are logged out without access to the phone number you used previously, you’ll be locked out of the account forever so make sure to remove it before you go back to reactivate the account in InstaInfantry. **Severity Level: 4.5/10** --- [Next Page](/llms-full.txt/1)