List of 10 ways to gain subscribers to a VKontakte group

Keywords in the title

Even when creating a group, think carefully about the name: about the pros and cons of different options. For example, I believe that both your brand and keywords should be in the title. For example, Blog of Abdullin Ruslan | how to build muscles.

A brand is useful because over time people will begin to recognize you. And keywords are useful especially at first, when no one knows about you yet. And keywords immediately make it clear what your public page is about.

And that is not all. People often search for groups through keyword searches. If the name of your community contains such words, then people will find you.

It is important that the frequency of requests for different phrases differs. There are topics that are more popular, and there are narrower, more specialized ones. You can roughly estimate the frequency using the Yandex service wordstat.yandex.ru (only it shows the frequency of queries in Yandex search, in the non-social network Vkontakte).

Don't neglect this free traffic source.

How to promote a group on VK yourself

Promoting a VKontakte group has one nice feature:

At first you worry about how to promote the group, you get the first thousand subscribers, two, five, ten, and somewhere after twenty thousand there comes a turning point. Organic growth begins, and the administrator has to respond to user comments, cope with the flow of spam, and even change the vector of development of the community.

But in order to achieve this indicator, and for the group to grow independently after that, it is necessary to do everything right from the very beginning.

How to choose a group name

There is an easy way to regularly attract new subscribers: add a keyword to the group name.

This will save you from having to spend time thinking about the best name; you will not have to check whether a similar trademark has already been registered:

• “Ossetian pies, homemade pastries from St. Petersburg” - what could be more understandable? A user who wants to buy a homemade pie in St. Petersburg will definitely join this group and become a potential buyer.
• “Women's Club │ Weight Loss ● Diet Recipes” - from the name alone it is clear that the group is intended for women who want to lose weight and are interested in dietary recipes.

It is important to understand that by naming groups in this way, administrators are focusing primarily not on users, but on Vkontakte’s search algorithms. The social network displays in search results those groups that have key queries in their names.

What keywords to use in the title and how to find them

[google_other] The best, and also free, service for searching keywords is Yandex.WordStat.

The main window of the Yandex.Wordstat service with an example of selecting a group name for the mid-frequency query “Realtor Moscow”, which has a total frequency of 574 impressions per month

But, before using it, you need to describe your group in a few words, determine what its main key query is. Spam in names is not allowed, because the name is the calling card of the group.

When choosing a keyword, you should give preference to high-frequency queries.

Content

An example of content that is not entirely thematic, but suitable for an online store, diluting the main selling publications of the public, and gaining the trust of users
“Content is king,” say foreign marketers. And this is actually true! Without high-quality and regular publications, using the best services for increasing VKontakte subscribers will not give any results.

There are several points to pay attention to:

1. Thematic content . If your group is about cooking, you should not publish personal information from the life of the administrator, or encourage users to discuss political events. The more thematic content is published, the greater the involvement of each individual user.
2. Posting frequency . VKontakte groups, from the point of view of a proper break between publications, are something between YouTube and Instagram. It’s hardly worth publishing dozens of messages every day, but one piece of news a week is not enough.
3. Compliance of the publication with the age indicators of the audience . If you have a business-themed group, you should not use youth slang and quote performers popular among schoolchildren. On the other hand, publications in a group where students are members are unlikely to be overly encyclopedic.

Decor

An example of the corporate style of one of the VK groups, developed by a design studio.
Look at the most popular VK groups and you will probably like their unique design.

It is better to entrust visual design to freelancers. In general, for five thousand rubles you can get a design of excellent quality.

You should pay attention to the following elements:

• Group cover design;
• Menu item design;
• Regular graphic design of publications.

The first points require one-time involvement of designers. Publishing content requires constant work in Photoshop. No special skills are required, but the process is time-consuming. Administrators of large public sites hire managers to manage the group, which will require monthly expenses of 10-30 thousand rubles.

Performers can be found on popular remote work exchanges, the best of them:

1. fl.ru,
2. freelansim.ru,
3. weblancer.net

Invite friends and tell friends

Here I combined two free methods at once. They are similar and very simple. You are required to do very simple actions, a little even routine if you have a lot of friends.

What you need to do:

1. Login to your group
2. In the menu on the right, click on the “invite friends” link

3. A window will appear to invite friends. At the bottom, click on “invite friends from the full list”

4. We invite you to our group. As a result, each of your friends will receive a notification asking them to join.

If I'm not mistaken, you are allowed to invite up to 50 friends per day this way. You will have to stretch out the pleasure over several days or weeks.

And there is one more action left. In your community menu, click the “tell your friends” link. And send yourself a message like this on your wall:

You can get creative and come up with a better call to action.

Ways to independently promote a VK group

According to statistics, the vast majority of community owners promote themselves. [google_other] If you do everything at random, every day following the next recommendations of nameless bloggers, you won’t expect a positive result. Promotion must be comprehensive. There are a lot of services that promise to get subscribers on VK for free and quickly, or offer to buy a program for getting subscribers on VK, but they are usually of little use.

When promoting a VKontakte group on your own, until you reach 15-20 subscribers, you can try the following methods:

• Personal invitations to friends . Telling your friends that a new community has appeared online is the first thing to do. But the number of people you know personally is probably limited to a few hundred. VKontakte has special limits; they change every year. As of 2021, you can add 40 people as friends. It is highly undesirable to exceed this limit and receive a message from the social network that “that’s enough for today.”
• Sending personal messages to strangers who meet the criteria with an invitation to the group. This method is quite rightly called spam. But you can use a trick. Before sending a link to your community to a complete stranger, you should establish at least some contact with him - like a photo, a post. In this case, responsiveness will increase significantly.
• Creation of competitions and sweepstakes . This is a “content method” that greatly helps attract subscribers to the VK group. You can give away anything that is of value to potential subscribers. This could be a free membership to the fitness center, a fruit basket delivered to your home, or a family photo shoot. The winner is usually selected live using a random number generation service. Advertising of the competition is achieved by a mandatory condition: only the one who talked about the event on his page can win.
• Ordering advertising in other communities and mutual advertising . Marketers joke that a sausage for two is half a sausage for each, but one subscriber can successfully be a member of two or more communities. Find groups in your niche with similar indicators and offer to exchange mutual advertising. At the same time, buy advertising in more popular public pages.
• Ordering advertising in other communities and mutual advertising . This is the best way to promote a VK group. When purchasing visitors, you can choose their city of residence, gender, age, interests, and even find out the list of groups they are already a member of. You can achieve a significant reduction in costs by pre-configuring an advertising campaign in the Cerebro.Target program.

Automatic promotion services

Automatic reposting services provide the opportunity to repost messages from groups on similar topics to your group.

They save a lot of time and help you schedule posts several days or even weeks in advance.

All of them are paid, some of the best include:

• Buffer
• Hootsuite
• Socialpilot

Screenshot of the main page of the hootsuite.com service
Automatic commenting services are designed for publishing messages with a link to your group in other people's groups. This is an extremely undesirable method of promotion, which leads to nothing but problems. If you take responsibility for possible consequences and are ready to publish a comment that is unique and useful for someone else’s community in each specific case, use Amplifr.

Increase likes, comments, subscribers

Screenshot of the personal account of the Olike service
Getting live subscribers into a VK group is a myth. You can only cheat bots or motivated users who join the community and receive a reward.

Used by administrators who have one (or both) of the following goals:

• Impress advertisers . It’s easier to sell advertising in a community that has 300 thousand subscribers, despite the fact that half of them are fake. Some owners think so. Advertisers, however, not all know that the number of subscribers and likes essentially means nothing. Audience response is important. Nevertheless, due to their simplicity and reliability, cheating services are very popular.
• At the initial stage, when you need to attract the first users . It is easier for a community with 10 thousand users to attract new subscribers than a beginner group with only a hundred. Promotion services really help to cope with this problem.

Top services for getting likes and comments:

• Olike – This website reports a huge user base (almost 3 million) and offers 450 followers or 900 likes for just 1000 rubles.
• Vkstorm is a flexible service with which you can create a task, describe what exactly is required from the contractor and set your own price.
• V-like – you can start an advertising campaign with a budget of only 5 rubles. With V-like it’s easy to make friends, subscribers, and also order maintenance of activity in the group (publication of news and comments).

Write to people from groups on your topic

Now here's a rather complicated method. It's my opinion ?

You should find other communities related to your topic. Use the search function in the VK community section.

And then you need to somehow bring these people into your community. Here are a few options at a glance:

• Write to people in personal communities and suggest your group (some will complain and you may be blocked)
• Participate in comments, discussions and casually advertise your public page (moderators or admins may block you)

As I wrote above, this method is not easy. You need to show imagination, creativity and find a lot of free time. I don't really like this kind of work. Moreover, the return from such actions is unlikely to be decent.

I know that there are even paid programs that monitor the public pages you specify. As soon as a new person joins the tracked community, you automatically send them a message with your offer. In this case, you need to use specially created accounts, as they block.

Mutual PR

This option is suitable if you have already gained your first subscribers. Now find similar communities with approximately the same number of participants as yours.

Pay attention to whether there is movement in the group: if there are likes, comments. If people are active, that's very good.

Write to the admin and suggest mutual PR. The point is very simple. You share his post in your group, and he shares your post in his. As a result, some members of his group will follow you, and some of yours will follow him.

As a result, everything is positive. It is important to find communities that are close to your level of development.

About content

Before you start frantically inviting everyone you meet into your group, you need to take care of the content. No one will join an empty community. For what? There's nothing to see there!

Don't have your own group? Read the detailed guide and create it quickly.

Publish at least 20-30 posts. There is no time to do something of your own - at least borrow someone else’s. Infographics, for example, humorous jokes, links to useful articles.

A group without posts is like a house without a roof

Then, of course, you won’t go far without your content. If a group constantly publishes the same things as 10 others, then why subscribe to you?

What you can safely publish in the community about copywriting:

• Announcements of your articles . If they are related to the profession, of course.
• Announcements of other people's articles . If you find something interesting, share it with your readers.
• Humor . Laughing is always good. And the humor is quite viral (it is actively reposted, which brings new subscribers).
• Infographics . Pre-cut it into easy-to-read pieces.
• New works in the portfolio and cases . Both colleagues and potential clients love reading case studies.
• Lists . Very viral content. 20 best books, 48 ​​cool posts, 34 infographics, 3.5 articles - feel free to compile and publish.
• Short stories . How you went to the store to buy a new book on copywriting, how you managed to finish an article at the last moment, how you messed up and then fixed everything.
• Congratulations . New Year, Freelancer's Day, March 8, and so on. Don't forget about your blog's birthdays.
• Criticism . Found a text so disgusting that you urgently need to tell someone? Tell me.
• Polls . You can create entertaining ones (how much coffee do you drink while writing 1 text?), you can create useful ones (would you like me to write a guide on how to write guides?).

Try to publish new posts regularly. 1 per week is not enough. 1-2 a day is great.

Guest Posts

What is a guest post? This is when you have prepared unique interesting material and post it on the page of another thematic public. This post contains a link to your blog.

The number of clicks on your public link directly depends on the interest and demand of your post. So try and show your target audience that you can solve their problems.

If you have really cool material, then your guest post will even be published for free. Everything is positive. If you have nothing special to share, then the option of posting a post for money is possible.

Free methods to attract subscribers

First, let's look at methods that do not require any financial investment. The only thing you need is time, desire and a little creativity.

Interesting content

Each published post must be meaningful and provide informational value to users. At the same time, it should not be too long so that it can be easily perceived and clicked on the like or “Share” button. The more people share a post on their page, the higher the likelihood of new interested visitors and subscribers.

The right content should not only be interesting, but also have an “attractive” form. Be sure to structure the text, dilute it with thematic images, emoticons, and add videos. Users of social networks react precisely to a colorful picture - in its absence, even the most effective advertising will not help to promote the group.

Partnership

One of the most effective ways of free promotion is mutual PR. Find groups with similar topics and approximately equal numbers of subscribers. Describe to the administrators your vision of future cooperation. The easiest way is mutual reposting.

Sending invitations manually

The tools of the social network VKontakte allow you to manually invite your friends to the group. If you have a large friends list, don't miss the opportunity to take advantage of it. Also ask your friends who have already joined your new group to send out invitations too. The more people you reach, the more users will join your group.

Conducting competitions

This method is not entirely free, since you still have to spend money on the prize. But it doesn't have to be expensive. Possible gift options include:

• tickets to a movie, concert or theater;
• souvenirs and accessories;
• sample of our own products;
• discount certificates, etc.

The condition for participation in the competition may be joining the group, liking, reposting, or all together. These user actions will help significantly increase not only the audience, but also activity indicators.

Advertising in groups

As a continuation of the paid methods, you can buy advertising in thematic groups. Advertising for your public page can be placed in different places:

• on the wall,
• in the message pinned above on the wall,
• In the link block,
• and other places.

I have never used this type of advertising, so I don’t know all the nuances and placements.

When I just started actively recruiting subscribers to my public page, one advertiser immediately wrote to me and offered his services. I refused:

• Firstly, the public was off topic,
• secondly, the prices were high,
• thirdly, I didn’t plan this at all.

But keep in mind, you will also be offered advertising services. But it’s better to find groups of your competitors that are suitable for advertising.

Competitions and giveaways

I am sure you have encountered this phenomenon in contact. When you subscribe, like, or share, you participate in a drawing and have a chance to win a valuable prize. Sometimes it's money, sometimes it's free services, sometimes it's a real valuable prize that you can touch with your hands.

And you can launch a similar competition.

My advice. To give people real motivation to participate, prepare a good, valuable prize. If you have a fitness or rocking group, you can raffle off some useful equipment, or if it’s about self-development, then a best-selling book. And also such thematic prizes will cut off unnecessary people who are not interested.

In general, think about how you would interest your target audience.

Define the purpose of the group

Here you need to understand that it is pointless to create a group just like that. If you don't set goals, you won't achieve them.

Setting your goal will determine what promotion methods you will use, what content you will publish, how often, how to activate subscribers, and what kind of subscribers you will attract.

Defining the group's goals is the foundation for further progress.

If you are creating a group to promote your business, then you do not need subscribers. You need sales! And attracting subscribers is a step towards sales.

If you are creating a group to sell advertising, then you need many, many active live subscribers so that advertisers want to advertise with you.

What to remember

There are only two goals:

• Selling your goods and services;
• Selling advertising.

Choose yours and let's move on.

Targeted advertising

There is a “Community Advertising” link in your group menu. After clicking on it, you will be taken to the mode of creating an advertising post, under which there will be a button to join the community.

Write why your group is valuable, make a call to action to get people to join. Add a picture or video. Change the button text if necessary.

This is a paid service. There must be money in your advertising account balance. If you don’t know, your advertising account is located at vk.com/ads

This option is suitable for those who already have a sales funnel set up. In this case, the money will be returned, or at least part of it. If you don’t sell anything, then it’s better not to even try, you’ll just waste your money.

Where to begin?

Creating a group on a social network is never limited to preparing an avatar (or cover) design and filling it with content. In order for a page to become popular and popular with visitors, it is important to find and attract an interested audience. You can do this using:

• text content;
• advertising;
• promotions and special offers;
• various media content (photos, videos).

You should start with the right page title. This will make it easier for people to find it in searches. Don't underestimate the power of keywords and phrases. Such an excellent tool as Yandex Wordstat will help you find them.

Before filling a group with content, research the needs and interests of your target audience. After this, you can start recruiting a subscription base. Anyone can independently attract the first subscribers to the VK community. This can be done for a fee or for free.

External sources

If you have your own website, YouTube channel, Instagram, telegram channel or other platforms on the Internet, then use them.

My blog has detailed instructions on how to create a website from scratch. Use it if you don't have a website. If you don’t know how to create your own channel on YouTube, then I also recommend filling this gap.

Ask your subscribers and readers from these sites to join the VK group. If you have established contact, many will join.

And also simply place a link to your VK group in the description of these sites. And from VK, put back links to the sites.

How to bring subscribers to a group for 3 kopecks

With this knowledge and tools, you will easily outperform your competitors!

The first service is allsocial.ru. With its help you can understand what is happening in this market. The first screen contains groups that are currently experiencing a lot of activity. Look at the growth of subscribers opposite each group.

Groups on VK that are purchased with advertising

You can understand what is relevant now and look for interesting ideas for developing your community.

In the category, select the desired topic and list all your competitors in a separate file on your computer. Look at the most active ones, which are showing good growth.

This will most likely mean that your competitor is purchasing advertising somewhere, so now we will find out where he advertises and how much 1 subscriber costs him. Let's do some reconnaissance!

Spying on a competitor's group

For this we need this service. Complete a simple registration. The service is paid from 600 rubles per month, but it has a free trial version with which you will conduct your reconnaissance and appreciate it.

In the end, for 600 rubles you will save tens, or even hundreds of thousands of rubles when promoting your group.

Now paste the competitor's group link into the search bar and click on the magnifying glass. Then go to the “promotion” tab and activate the trial period.

Now in the “promotion” tab you will see all the information on the competitor. The budget spent on promotion, the number of sites where advertising was purchased, the number of attracted subscribers and the average price per 1 subscriber.

Spying on a competitor

From this information we see that 140,000 subscribers were attracted for only 0.68 rubles! Do you understand what to do now? That's right, take it and repeat the same thing!

Click on the “CPA” tab and filter the cost per subscriber in ascending order. You can see that from one particular group, subscribers go for three kopecks! In the “subscribers” tab you can see the number of subscribers.

We find the cheapest price for 1 subscriber

Copy the best creative and repeat the same thing

Let's move our gaze to the left and see which advertisement brings such cheap subscribers. Click on “Preview”.

We find the best creative and copy it to ourselves

Congratulations! Now you have an example of advertising that will bring you cheap subscribers. We need to take this picture, make an advertisement out of it and post it in all the groups that you will find in the “Places” tab.

The competitor has already done all the hard work for you and found the best creatives and groups that have cheap traffic. Now can you imagine how much time and money you can really save?

Your task is to drive all your competitors through this service. Find out what posts they use and what groups they advertise in. Also look at what budget was spent on promotion and soberly assess whether you can compete with them or not. Then take it and just repeat the same thing.

Pay attention to the “Age and Gender” tab. In my example, the subscriber is so cheap because of his age. The gray diagram means that the audience is under 18 years old. Blue is already 18+.

I said earlier that the older the audience, the more expensive it will be. But you can still bring subscribers for 1 - 2 rubles in large quantities. Here's another example.

Adult audience for only 1 – 1.3 rubles per subscriber

The screenshot shows that an adult male audience costs 1.3 rubles. Don’t be lazy, search, and you will be happy!

Services for boosting subscribers

The topic of recruiting subscribers is in great demand, so even special services have been created for this purpose.

On my blog I already told you how to get subscribers to a VK group using the BossLike service. You can get subscribers both paid and free.

• For free. First, complete the tasks yourself: join other people’s communities, like them - earn the internal currency of the service. Then spend it on buying subscribers.
• Paid. Immediately top up your balance with your money and create a task to subscribe to your group.

Of course, in this case the subscribers are either completely dead or uninterested. But for initial promotion, this is sometimes useful.

You need to understand that people earn money from these services by completing tasks. That's why they join the group and like it just for the sake of money. They will either leave your public in a few days or weeks or will simply be inactive ordinary people.

Also, non-living subscribers will be brought to you, who will eventually turn into “dogs”. These dogs need to be deleted, since the VK Administration does not like groups with unrealistic participants. As a result, your public may be blocked, and you will have to start all over again.

Therefore, treat cheating with caution; don’t cheat too much – it will backfire.

Buying a group

This is the last method I decided to consider.

You can buy a ready-made group with your subscribers. Unfortunately, I will not provide you with step-by-step instructions, since I have never bought groups on exchanges.

If you are interested, just enter the request “buy VK group” in Yandex or Google and study the offers and conditions.