Nowadays everyone wants to earn money without working hard because smart work is in trend now. For such people, Instagram has come out as the best option to make money. It is no longer such an ordinary chatting app that was introduced in 2010. It has now become a massive platform for traders, social media users, brands, etc.
It caters everyone and along with the entertainment and fun, it also gives people opportunities to make money using their talents and minds. Instagram can be your permanent income source if you use it wisely. Some of the most popular celebrities make trillions of money through a single post on Instagram and some of them make a good living out of it only. But the question is how to do that? How to make money on Instagram?
Well, there are several ways/ methods by which you can make tons of money on Instagram without going to any office for eight hours and just sitting on your comfortable sofa. It sounds so beautiful right? Everybody wants that. In this article we will tell you how to earn a good living through Instagram.
1. Sponsored Posts or Collaborate with Brands
Sponsored posts are one of the most popular ways to make money on Instagram. But you must have a significant number of followers and most importantly a good engagement rate. It’s also called Instagram influencer, a term which gets thrown a lot these days.
An influencer is basically a celebrity with a significant popularity, online reputation and social media presence. Anyone can become an influencer by building a great online reputation by doing or sharing some extraordinary content that interests people. This is how influencers attract their audience and for them, they are trendsetters, tastemakers and someone whose opinions affect them and their mindset. Once you become an influencer, people start to follow your advices, recommendations and this is how you make money by persuading them to make purchases or convince them to consider a particular brand.
It’s never easy for brands to compete with influencers, so they partner with them to achieve success. They partner on sponsored content, paid partnership content like posts, reels, carousels, etc and make a call for action.
But as I mentioned above, social media popularity can never be measured by the count of followers only. It matters but what brands focus most on is your Engagement rate- how much your content engages your audience and how much they trust you. As an influencer, you have the freedom to choose which brand you want to work with. You can always be selective about the brands and once you build an online reputation, you can negotiate the charges as well. 
How to determine the charges as an influencer?
Mostly, when it comes to sponsored posts Influencers are supposed to create a post, reel or story which features the brand or promote it in some way. Sometimes, brands are also permitted to use the content on their website as well. Remember, Instagram is not a shop with a “No Negotiation” badge. You can negotiate your charges per post for different brands. And the charge could be anything like a selective gift, Money, the promise of exposure, etc.
When it comes to charges, remember you are not just selling a post, you are also selling the access to your audience which is your admirer. Access to a target audience means the reach to a large audience, brand awareness and more profit to brand. So, the size, activeness and engagement of your audience determines how much you would charge a brand per post.
If someone has an average fan following of over 100,000 followers charges up to $500 per post. This is not static, the amount is negotiable. This is just to give you an idea of what brands would be willing to pay and how to negotiate. If you are a micro influencer with a follower count between 3000-100000, you can charge $25-$50 or over $100 based on the cards you’re holding.
But before you decide to charge any brand, you should know your audience as well. For example, what is your engagement rate with your audience, how active they are, if they follow your call for action, etc. You should know the answers to these questions before you go on charging a brand per post. You can dig up numbers by going to the Instagram analytics report which will give you a brief view of how your audience behaves.
How to find right Brands to work with
This is one of the first questions that comes to people’s mind after they realise that their profile is good enough to work with brands. It’s something you don’t need to worry about because if you’re big enough, brands will find you themselves and if you’re not, you can boost your online presence in order to attract brands with a similar level of personality and values.
There are several options you can reach out to different brands. You can directly reach out to them or you could list yourself on one of the Influencers marketplaces to increase chances of you getting discovered by any brand. There are some platforms you can use to do so:
Fohr. You can connect your Instagram profile, Facebook, blog, YouTube channel, Twitter, etc to create an influencer card that displays your reach to the audience and profile potential for brands to partner with you. Apart from this, you can also access a list of brands and their needs as per which you can initiate the conversation leading to partnership or sponsorship.
Crowdtap: Here you can do some small content creation tasks. It would be a great option for you if your audience size is small but it’s available in the US only.
2. Affiliate marketing
Back to the methods to make money on Instagram. Though Sponsored posts are one of the most popular ways to make money on Instagram, it is not the only option. Affiliate marketing is also quite beneficial if you have a large enough audience with a good engagement rate. To become an affiliate, you need to get more into marketing and sales (call for action). In contrast to an influencer, an affiliate is more likely to promote the sales for the partner brand as he gets the commission for every sale.
To make sure that sales happen, you have to put clickable links into your Instagram bio. You must ensure that the clicks turn into sales. You can use unique coupon codes to promote clicks and sales for your partner brands. You can put stories, reels and use fascinating stickers that guide your users to purchase. Never let your caption be just a caption, make it interactive and give a call for action. Things like this can actually help you to make a lot of money on Instagram.
Now you must be thinking about how to get brands to partner with for affiliate marketing. There are numerous online firms which are executing their affiliate programs open to everyone. You can reach out to them or explore some popular marketplaces like Clickbank, LTK, Amazon Associates, etc.
Clickbank: An affiliate platform where everybody is equally welcomed.
LTK: One of the most popular affiliate programs which only invites fashion and lifestyle influencers offering 20% commission per sale.
Amazon Associates: You must have heard about the Amazon Associates affiliate program which offers 10% commission for each sale.
Keep in mind that influencing and affiliate marketing is different. Affiliate marketing is like an art to convince people to take action and if you are good at it, you have better chances to achieve success. If you have a brief plan on expanding it, you can introduce your own website and other marketing channels.
3. Inaugurate your own digital store
If you have built a strong social media presence, you can do anything and use your popularity to make money in Several ways. It’s fine if you don’t want to sell someone access to your audience who could turn into their consumers. Above mentioned methods may be one of the best but not the only option for you to earn. You can also turn your followers into your customers by opening your own ecommerce store.
You need to invest some time in it. If you are a content creator, you can become a successful entrepreneur or business owner as well. As time passes by, it’s getting easier for people to build a large network of followers on Social Media and create a line of consumers for their ecommerce store. If you don’t wanna let go of your audience by selling other brand’s products, you can launch your own. Launch your own brand, sell your own stuff and you don’t even need to worry about posting strategies for other brand’s. Your brands, your strategies.
If you are an influencer and don’t have a new idea of business, you can simply sell your merchandise. Fans will show their love and support by buying from you. You can consider following ways to sell your own merchandise:
- Get some t-shirts or hoodies printed. Create your own logo or design and get it printed. Then, sell your own t-shirts, coffee mugs, wall art, etc with your name or logo on it.
- You can also sell your own services such as Photography, Sketching, therapy, etc for a price. You can use your bio to guide them and let interested people know how to contact you to make purchases.
- You can create your own digital store and sell products like, eBook, online courses, design templates, etc.
4. Create an Instagram shop
Instagram has made it very easier for people to just open their shops online and extend the reach of their brands. The past few years have seen a huge success in the Instagram shopping department where shopping tags are so effective and more than 130 million users click on those tags every month. Apart from this, Instagram has also launched a number of features under the Instagram shopping umbrella. It allows people to search for your brand and take a look into your special collections and make purchases.
Start with creating your storefront and make your bio informative in order to spread awareness about your store. Your bio should be a brief introduction of your store. Instagram provides a great experience for shoppers to browse and pick out the best collections of your store.
If you have seen any Instagram Shops, you will know that it’s pretty simple to open one of your own. Just like in your physical store, you tell the prices, showcase the different sizes and then the customer purchases it. Same thing goes with your Instagram store. Create your product description which includes size, fabric, material, process, etc. You must Include all relevant information about the product. To make a full purchase either you can simply ask people to DM you or you can send them to your website to complete the process of purchase.
But this doesn’t stop here, there are a few more features in Instagram through which people can buy your products.
Tags in Post and Stories: You can use product tags in your Instagram post or Stories to show your products. People can find more detailed information about it after simply tapping it.
Shoppable Ads: To extend the reach of your products, you can use your products tag in ads. It will help your shoppable posts reach more people. Setup is simple inside Ads Manager or you can boost your existing Instagram posts.
Instagram Shop tab: This is the destination where you can meet the people who are looking for various brands. People come to this place to discover brands like yours and you can also reach out to new customers.
5. Sell your assets (Photography) online
If you go back to 2010 you will see that when Instagram was introduced it was just a photo sharing chatting app. Though different aspects and features have been developed throughout the years, the core of the platform remains the same- photograph. Just like Twitter is famous for its limited word jokes, Instagram is known as a photo sharing app. Photos are the assets that can be printed, stored, patent, licensed and sold. Photographs are physically sold for billions of money.
If you have got this amusing talent, you shouldn’t keep it to yourself. Upload your assets in the marketplaces like 500px or Twenty20, where brands and publishers might licence those photos. You can also get the orders from Photographs lovers who invest their savings into this kind of stuff. However, you can also sell them physically. Services like Teelaunch and Printful allow you to put your digital photographs on posters, mugs, pillows, phone cases or any other physical element. You will have to take care of sales and marketing strategies. Try your best to provide best quality customer services.
You might speculate the possibility of making money through selling these photographs but the story of Daniel Arnold would make you believe this. According to an interview with Forbes, Daniel Arnold went on from “eating toast three times a day” to making $15,000 in a day by selling his art of photography. He sold the physical prints of his popular but controversial photos.
6. Monetize your content (Stream ads)
Here is another way for a content creator to earn money on Instagram. It’s very simple. If people love the content you create, especially videos, then you have a direct option to make money. Stream ads within your videos which means a part of your video will be for the promotion of a brand where it can advertise. How much money will you get paid for each video ad?
How much money you will make from a video depends upon the number of views or likes your video gets. In the language of Instagram, it’s called “Monetizable Plays”. You will be paid 55% of the ad revenue the brand generates from your video. Your payment will be transferred to your account monthly.
But how to stream Video Ads? It’s pretty basic, you will have to follow three steps and change the settings:
- Go to Account Settings, tap on Creator then click In-Stream Video Ads.
- Click on “Get Started”. Agree and accept the terms and conditions.
- Toggle Allow Monetization on your existing Instagram videos and continue to finish the process.
Remember, in order to make money through Video Ads Stream, your content must be original. Another condition is that your video needs to be two minutes or more longer to monetize. You can not stream ads within images, looping videos, slideshows, etc.
7. Old Stuff Out, Money In
Last but not the least, here is a way to make money for those who are not an influencer. Now the people who are not popular enough on Social Media might worry that it’s not their thing to make money on Instagram. But no, you can also earn a good deal of cash by selling old discarded stuff from your house or your neighbor’s. For example, clothing, Furniture, decorative items, Mason Jar, etc. You can make some side income by selling old stuff which is of no use for you.
This is kind of OLX. You can also rent your personal or homely stuff like sofa, kitchen utensils, grinder, clothing especially, etc. For instance, if you have a Lehenga you haven’t worn for years or don’t want to wear, either you can sell it or rent it. Both will earn you some good amount of cash. There are two benefits of this deal- you can declutter your home as well as save the environment.
Here is a famous example of this. Lavender Loveseat, based in Chicago, is a team which finds older stuff like pieces of furniture, recycled or refinished and then sells it on its Instagram account. The brand also shares some funny and interesting content to keep viewers in tune and attract new ones. The more the followers, the more the customers.
How many followers do you need to make money on Instagram?
Follower count is obviously a major metric that is considered by a brand before determining who they would collaborate with but it’s not the actual factor that helps you make money. Though they want you to have a sufficient count of followers, but most importantly they want to know that their investments get good returns which is only possible when your audience is engaging.
Brands consider the engagement rate of your audience. How much does your audience engage with your content? Because this is what will lead to more sales, product awareness and brand popularity. It doesn’t matter how many followers you have, your engagement rate is a significant factor. Brands check on the quality of influencer’s content and their niche.
For instance, suppose you have a thousand followers but when it comes to interaction, only 20-30 people like or comment on your post. Brands will not consider you the right fit for their investments because they want an engaging audience who could buy their products and make their brand popular. And if someone has only 500 followers and he gets 100 likes on his one post that means he has a good engagement rate and brands would be willing to collaborate with him.
