Building an Empire - free traffic from Instagram

Hi all, haven't posted here for a while, I've been working on all my other online projects. Things are coming together nicely for my Guuitar niche site Guitar Review Central, my traffic is growing, and interest is building.
One of many methods I am currently using to get free traffic, is to generate interest through Instagram. I thought it might be useful to share how I am building my following there.

** 1000 followers in 7 days

To start with, created a backlog of interesting content. I use a tool called stencil to find guitar images, then overlay a quote from a famous guitarist onto it. I then schedule the post to go from stencil to Instagram user Buffer, which integrates directly with stencil.

Once I had some content, I started working on followers. Because I am currently selling guitar related Amazon products, I want to market to people who are interested in guitars. My thinking was also that I want to focus specifically on people who are interested in low cost guitars.

To build this following, my approach has been twofold:

• Hashtags- I use a hashtag finder (can't recall its name, just google it), to find guitar/guitarist related tags for my post.
• Following relevant accounts- I have been adding 100+ followers each day, by going to a popular, low cost guitar account (for example Epiphone or Squier), and following their followers. Instagram has a fantastic follow back rate, around 25% in my experience.

** So, now to drive the traffic to my site.
Instagram doesn't allow linking out, except in the bio. I always have a link to my site in my bio, but every 4 or 5 posts I add a new review to my site, and make a post related to this review. I then change the bio link to direct to that review.

While I'm still not getting huge traffic, this strategy is slowly building, and will continue to do so.

Hope this has been useful. If so, please comment, resteem, upvotes etc.