Since its inception in October 2010, Instagram has grown to be one of the fastest-growing social media networks in the world with 1 billion monthly users. This creates both opportunities and barriers of competition for any person looking to make money from their Instagram account. Today, let’s forget about the barriers of competition that will always exist in all lucrative endeavours and focus on these opportunities.
The most common ways of earning income from your Instagram account are:
- Collaborating with brands as an influencer – Sponsoring your posts, stories or putting a sponsored link in the bio
- Becoming an affiliate – You can get revenue shares for recruiting people to join various websites or enrol in competitions
- Becoming an entrepreneur – You can launch your store that sells your products or services
Influencer Marketing With Instagram
Having brands sponsor you is one of the most common ways of making money on social media platforms today. This birth of Influencer Marketing has spawned a large growth of Instagram influencers. With the Influencer Marketing spend expected to double according to Business Insider, this legion of influencers will only keep growing at a rapid speed.
There are several reasons why a brand may want to engage in an influencer marketing campaign and collaborate with you:
- Brand Awareness
- Website Traffic
- Lead Generation
- Sale of Products
- Registrations
- Subscriptions
- Downloads
No matter why a brand wants to engage with you, you can follow a similar path to success when picking this strategy for making money from your Instagram account:
- Choose a Niche (most Popular ones are Sports, Luxury, Fashion and Fitness)
- Partner with Brands
- Post promotions in your bio, posts or stories
Once you find a brand that aligns with your identity and audience you can reach out to them using their website or influencer marketing platforms. From there you can collaborate with them and create lasting relationships and establish a reputation within the platform that compounds your growth, providing a good source of extra income from your Instagram account.
The good thing about using an influencer marketing platform such as AdMass is that you can automate your collaborations by creating a profile and setting the price you would like to charge per post, which brands within the community will see and use to approach you directly with offers to collaborate.
Please note that you must pick the right brands to work with which connect with your audience. Brands like to re-engage with influencers who provide a good ROAS, and most influencer marketing platforms will record these metrics. If your audience connects well with the brands and the posts that you produce then your success will grow in parallel with the number of posts you have sponsored.
Another important thing to remember is to be very subtle in your posts and truthful with your followers. Influencer marketing platforms have ways of checking for fake followers and your engagement rates, and if they notice that something is not right with your profile they will not partner with you and may “blacklist” your profile on their platform. Additionally, using subliminal advertising methodology you will be more likely to preserve your audience and brand identity without being too “salesy”, while improving the ROAS for the brands you collaborate with, improving and growing your reputation within the platform.
Becoming an Affiliate
This strategy is a bit less about spreading awareness and more about generating sales. The most common types of affiliate marketing are:
- Subscriptions
- Registrations
- Downloads
- Purchases
The general path to success is the same:
- Choose Your Niche
- Find Merchants & Brands To Affiliate With
- Post about the Product
The different part is how you generate the income. Affiliate marketing is based on a commission rather than an upfront lump sum that you can expect with influencer marketing, so if you partner with the wrong affiliate you may not see much fruit from your labour.
When choosing this strategy it is important to pair up with a merchant or brand which aligns with your brand and audience, and which you believe will have high conversions (Subscriptions, Downloads etc.). Your success in affiliate marketing depends on this!
Becoming an Entrepreneur
With the myriad of new services available that help you launch a website within hours, there are nearly unlimited possibilities for becoming an entrepreneur today. One of the most common ways of doing so on Instagram is through selling products or services that fall within the most dominant sectors on Instagram:
- Sports
- Luxury
- Fashion & Beauty
- Fitness
- Food
There are several ways in which you can approach this endeavour, with a common one being launching an online store that sells products or services. If you don’t have a friend handy who is good with computers, it is easy to do it yourself using any of the resources below:
For Building the Store
- For a quick and cheap approach: WooCommerce
- For a more robust online presence: Shopify
For Domains & Hosting
- For domains: You can search for domain purchase on search engine
- For hosting: There are many options to choose from.
After you finish making your store website and make sure that you have everything ready to go, you can link your new store in your bio and begin selling your products on Instagram!
Now you have many strategies which you can use to earn money from your Instagram account. Of course, you don’t have to stick to just one of these methods the most successful Instagram users tend to utilize all of the above. You can use multiple platforms and join as an influencer so that brands can find you easier, take initiative and contact brands yourself to become an affiliate and launch your store where you sell products or services that you connect with.
Instagram is a rapidly growing community with lots of opportunities and much more are sure to peek over the horizon as this tech giant grows at its exponential rate. To secure your position in the ranks of Instagram’s elite and enjoy the delicious fruit of labour that it has to offer!
Author Bio:
Pravesh Patel is an SEO specialist and WordPress Developer with over 5 years of experience. Started blogging in the year 2019 about Digital Marketing, Finance, Graphics and recently started Cryptocurrencies. Reached Level 6 on Google Local Guide by active participation, reviewing business and places as per experience.