Instagram got its start as a photo-sharing app, but has transformed into a business platform. Millions of entrepreneurs are taking advantage of its awesome selling power, from affiliate marketers to service providers to dropshipping eCommerce business owners. Learn how to make money on Instagram. Leverage its giant marketing abilities to your advantage.
Instagram has grown to become a groundbreaking platform for e-commerce. Those that understand it, are the ones who are profiting, whether they offer digital goods through their Instagram shop, or provide physical products. To learn how to make money on Instagram, you must begin by understanding how huge a domain it has become and how the platform captures the interest and attention of its users.
Start With Building An Engaged Following To Make Money On Instagram
While your follower count is not a direct way of monetizing your account, it will help give you a boost and contribute to your profit in the long run. This is because most brands will like to work with active and engaging accounts that have a good reach of followers and can market their products satisfactorily. The number of followers you have has a direct relationship with successful Instagram marketing.
Guidelines To Grow Your Instagram Account:
- Complete your bio using keywords of your niche in the “Name section” if possible.
- Put your website link in bio.
- Post Instagram stories daily.
- Post high quality images in feed at least 3-4 times weekly.
- Use all 30 relevant hashtags per post.
- Most importantly, engage, like and comment with your followers and target audience daily.
How to Make Money on Instagram?
Once you have a decent amount of followers, here are the top 10 ways to make money on Instagram:
1. Promote Affiliate Links
You can sell other people’s products and earn a cut. There are loads of people who make money from Instagram through affiliate marketing programs. Affiliates make money through a trackable link or a personal promo code to make sure that you know exactly which sales came directly from your posts. Create engaging posts so you can promote affiliate products without being pushy.
Since you can only have one link on your Instagram bio, you may want to connect a landing page to your affiliate link. In each post, make sure to tell people they can purchase the product via the link in your bio. You should consider using a URL Shortener to customize your unique link promoting your specific affiliate offer and make it look more customer friendly, because they can be really bulky and lengthy.
There are several affiliate marketing networks that are offered by online merchants which you can sign up for. You can explore various online affiliate marketing networks to find affiliate programs that appeal to you. A few of these communities include: ClickBank, Shareasale, Awin, and Amazon’s Affiliate Program to name a few.
If you have more than 10,000 followers you can also use the swipe-up feature in Instagram stories to promote your affiliate links. Links using the swipe-up feature are clickable. Which makes it ideal for promoting links.
2. Become a Social Media Influencer
Being an influencer means being able to ‘influence’ your audience and affect their opinion on trends and products due to your status and the trust you created with your online presence and user-generated content. Simply put, people seek out peers’ recommendations. So it’s no wonder more and more brands reach out to influencers to get shoutouts and sponsored posts for their brands.
Brands tend to partner with influencers to do sponsored posts that help spread the word about their products and services. To get to this point, you need to grow your Instagram following as well as regularly come up with posts that generate strong engagement from your followers and target audience.
What’s great is, there’s no need to have a huge following to start making money with sponsored posts. When choosing the right influencer, most brands pay close attention to the engagement rate. So even big brands like Gillette, like to work with nano- and micro-influencers.
Since these influencers have in-person interactions with most of their subscribers, they deliver better results. Which means you can get an offer even if you have less than 1,000 followers on Instagram. As an extra tip, be careful not to lose the trust of your audience in the process of making money from sponsored posts. It’s always a good idea to use an Instagram hashtag that tells people it’s a sponsored post (#sponsored or #ad).
3. Sell Your Own Physical And Digital Products
Over the last few years, Instagram has turned into a powerful sales generator for eCommerce brands. Since people actually do use Instagram to search and buy products, they rolled out more business account features. Such as in-app checkout, product tags, the shop button, and shoppable stickers to make the shopping process easier.
As it’s tough to sell products online from Instagram alone, it’s a good idea to also have a website. For a totally free website and even sales funnels, check out Groove Funnels. It’s a one-stop-shop that has everything you need to have a successful Internet Marketing business. Sign up for free.
You can sell products directly on Instagram by setting up an Instagram Shop. Just tag products in your Instagram image posts and you can lead your Instagram followers to your product pages, where they can buy your stuff effortlessly.
4. Sell Dropshipping Products
This is similar to selling your own products. Except you won’t have to store and ship any products. The dropshipping company you partner with will supply, store and ship all products you sell on the platform. You can sell products with Shopify and integrate it with your Instagram account for more sales. SaleHoo and Oberlo are two great dropshipping companies you can partner with.
There are a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs who have learned how to monetize Instagram and are making a decent living with dropshipping. It’s a true product of today’s environment of connected technology.
5. Sell Your Photos
The major focus of Instagram is visual content. Therefore, original high quality photos will attract a lot of buyers. These include simple art illustrations, paintings, videos and animations, pictures, selfies and any other form of visual content. From the business profile of a Property Restoration Company to the business profile of a Travel Agent looking to sell their services, everyone needs good-looking photos to be successful.
If photography is your niche, there are various channels to sell your pictures and stock photos. Marketplaces like Foap,Twenty20, or 500px are all avenues where it is possible to market your stock images and pictures on Instagram. These pictures will then be licensed for sale and use on the platform .
So, if you love photography, post your pictures with attention grabbing captions, hashtags, and product tags. Add customized watermarks to your pictures, and list the details of the photo to lure potential buyers.
6. Be A Brand Ambassador
Sponsored posts work well on Instagram, but most companies aim to establish long-term relationships with influencers. So they seek out brand ambassadors who can promote a company in a positive light on a more regular basis.
Since Instagram is the most preferred channel for influencer marketing, it’s a perfect place for users to find brand ambassador and collaborate with companies to promote their products and services. Large brands also frequently send free products to influencers to review and promote them.
Most brand ambassadors usually sign contracts with brands to promote their products. And to get better results, brands need to find an influencer who has a following that represents their target audience. For ambassadors, this means a great opportunity to make money as the standard salary for a brand ambassador is somewhere in the $40,000-$50,000 range.
Micro-influencers in a specific niche are often more valuable to brands than major celebritie influencers as they have a more engaged audience.
7. Social Media Marketing Services
It’s no secret that Instagram has powerful sales potential. So more and more brands want to use this platform to promote their products, reach out to the target audience, and increase sales. According to Business Instagram, over 25 million businesses and 2 million advertisers are currently on the platform.
The competition is growing, so brands need professional assistance if they want to cut through the barriers. In other words, social media marketing services are in high demand. Brands crave different social media marketing services. From training and guidance to regular monthly support. This means social media experts have many opportunities to find freelance work and make the most out of their knowledge of Instagram.
8. Drive Traffic From Instagram To Your Website Or Blog
If you own a business and you have a website or blog, Instagram can be a very potent tool to promote that business. Create awareness about your business, post brilliant pictures that can give your business a unique identity. Then use that to attract as many as hundreds of thousands of visitors to your website.
If captivated by your social accounts’ content, your target audience will like to know more about your business, link your website or blog on your bio, and this will get your visitors to visit your website. Creating more awareness for your product or service and ultimately increasing your sales conversions over time.
9. Become a Virtual Assistant
Many influencers need help with managing ads, filtering sponsorship requests, identifying fake followers, and more. You can offer to be their Virtual Assistant and charge by the hour for your services.
As an Instagram influencer VA, you’ll be accountable for lots of things, such as scheduling posts, managing DMs, and replying to comments. Also, an influencer may ask you to share content ideas for growing their personal brand.
10. Write And Sell Captions
While most big brands have a great in-house content creation staff, small business owners often seek out freelance talent to reduce social media marketing costs. Therefore, they often want to find creative specialists who write captions for their businesses at a low cost.
To get a full-time job offer, you need to show your social media marketing writing portfolio. Plus, you need to run your Instagram page creatively so that interested employers can see examples of captions you create. The more creative and engaging your captions are, the more potential clients you will hook.
How To Get Sponsored On Instagram
Getting sponsored on Instagram requires constant work and a consistent approach to growing your follower count. Most of the time, you’ll have to pitch for paid sponsorships rather than brands approaching you. Here are some tips to get sponsored:
- Define your brand and get to know your target audience.
- Post often, with hashtags and geotags.
- Tag brands when posting, that are in your niche.
- Include links in your bio.
- Reach out to pitch paid sponsorships.
Conclusion
Learn from successful Instagrammers. Combine what you’ve learned from them with your own strengths. Instagram is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms with the highest engagement. So learning how to make money on Instagram can be a life changing decision. It’s easy to make money on the platform if you do it the right way. From sponsored posts to shoutouts and, social media marketing services, there are many creative ways for anyone to make money on Instagram.
