Here’s a step-by-step guide to how I got Instagram famous, and how you can do it too

Not to shatter any illusions you had about the Almighty Insta Grid but as a certified Insta-famous person, I can confidently reveal that there are only two major keys to social media stardom — and neither of them require professional lighting equipment or a trip to Bali.

Take a look at this picture and tell me the difference between “girl standing awkwardly in a field” and “model stunting in an editorial photoshoot.” Go ahead, I'll wait.

With just posing and editing, you can go from “photo that was clearly taken on an iPhone 3, possibly a Nintendo DS” to “Russell James definitely shot this." With my help, you can grow your following, pretty up your your feed, and weed through tons of angry, thirsty dudes in the DMs — caveat emptor, though.

Step One: Master your poses

It's a universal truth that posing for photos is hard as fuck, even for actual models. Every instinct is screaming, “ABORT mission, you literal fucking tool” at you, and the fear of looking lame forced me to cross my legs, fold my hands daintily in my lap, and cheese like a basic bitch who buys gold foil balloons for her 19th birthday every time someone pulled out a camera. But posing really is crucial to gaining some serious traction on your grid.

To learn how to stop looking like an awkward fucking idiot in photos, I turned to the masters. For months, I diligently studied other Instagram influencers. I actually made an entire iPhone photo album, fittingly entitled “inspo,” that solely contained photos of Kylie Jenner and Alexis Ren. Yes, this is incredibly embarrassing and I fully expect to be roasted, but I don’t even care. I owe 99 percent of my success to these two posing icons.

I would closely examine and imitate the way they closed their eyes and tilted their heads back ever so slightly, with a hand reaching into their hair — a pose that seems careless and relaxed, but also oozes sex appeal. Oh, and it also makes your jawline look snatched. Compare:

But a snatched jawline means nothing if you’re doing cringeworthy things with the rest of your body. So I also studied the way they arch their backs, twist their waists into unnatural-yet-pretty angles, and pop out their booties. After practicing in front of a mirror for a solid week and nearly giving myself a hernia in the process, I finally got the hang of it.

Alexis and Kylie — I wouldn’t be where I am today without you.

Step two: Editing

Even the best booty-popping pose can’t make you famous if you insist on editing your photos with a fucking Valencia filter. Like, look at this:

Good editing is everything. I cannot stress this enough. Good editing can make your crappy iPhone photo look like a professional shot on a DSLR.

Unfortunately, good editing also requires a fuckton of time and a substantial amount of money. Forget VSCO — if you really want to be a pro, you need Adobe Lightroom. That’s right, I pay $9.99 every single goddamn month just so I can have pretty Instagram photos. Whatever, we all have our thing! Sure, I literally had to cancel my Netflix subscription so I could justify this exorbitant purchase to myself and my long-suffering parents, but if that doesn’t prove how dedicated I am to the ‘gram, then I don’t know what will.

With Lightroom, you can design your own presets. A Lightroom preset is basically just a bunch of edits that have been saved and can be applied on numerous photos very quickly. It’s more or less a filter — but since the software is sophisticated, you can do some pretty neat things to adjust the colors, highlights, and shadows in your photos.

After spending way too many hours of my life watching YouTube videos at 3 a.m. to learn what the fuck “split-toning” means, I developed my own presets on Lightroom and named them embarrassingly basic things like “Gili T” and “Santorini Vibes.” Do you even wanderlust, bro?

But it all paid off!! Once I started popping my butt out and editing my photos with legit software, people noticed and rewarded my hard work with likes, spon con, inappropriate DMs, and follows. Bliss!

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@nian_hu