How do people make money on Instagram? This is a frequent question often asked by new users of the Instagram platform. The Instagram platform has grown tremendously over the years to create diverse means of earning money on it. Thankfully, there is never a wrong time to monetize your Instagram account and if you haven’t, now’s the time for you to do so.
With the platform’s large and diverse global audience, it’s only fair to say that there is a niche market out there for just about anyone. Irrespective of the content you create, you are bound to attract a sizeable amount of audience for yourself.
Although it is a platform designed to share photos and videos, with the right approach, you can monetize Instagram. But before we talk about the different ways you can monetize Instagram, let’s look at what you’ll need to achieve that.
In this article, I will be answering the question: How do people make money on Instagram. We will also show users of the platform how they can leverage the different Instagram monetization techniques to earn cash for themselves.
Instagram Monetization
As a content creator planning to monetize Instagram, you need to first understand the concept of monetization on the platform. The term Instagram monetization is simply the process creators take in making money out of their Instagram account. Content creators often make money by engaging their loyal fan-following to promote brands as well as sell their own products.
Just like every other online business model, there is nothing simple or easy about earning on Instagram. It requires more than fancy Instagram handle, quirky descriptions as well as posting photos to earn money through the platform. It borders more on hard work, dedication, patience, and the ability to convince your followers enough to sway their purchasing decision.
Creators earn through various means which we will highlight later. Keep in mind that the Instagram platform does not pay its users, but in 2020, Instagram announced that they would start sharing revenue with creators on IGTV ads.
Requirements for Instagram Monetization
It’s possible to earn money on Instagram with as few as 1000 followers which is why brands rarely use that as a metric for partnership. Oftentimes, they rely on much more detailed metrics to measure creators worth to their business. These metrics include:
Fan-Base and Influence
For a creator on Instagram to have successful monetization returns, you need to understand why brands will pay you and what exactly they are paying you for. The basis of any partnership on Instagram is for a brand or business to gain exposure and access to your audience. The aim of these is simply to sell their products to your audience.
This means as much as a number of followers isn’t top on the criteria list, it still plays an important role. A business looking to sell its products will have to know that it is getting a sizeable chunk of the target market by partnering with you. Low followers could translate to the inability of the creator to drive sales for a brand’s products. As such, content creators that wish to monetize their Instagram accounts will have to grow their reach. And this should be done organically, to at least a few thousand to be able to have an impact.
Next up is influence. This is simply the amount of control a creator on Instagram has over his or her followers. Since you need the influence to generate sales, creators must be able to design and share compelling content. The contents shared must be powerful enough to sway the decision-making process involved in the purchase. Hence a large portion of your followers should be able to make decisions based on your product recommendations.
It’s important to measure the performance of your Instagram account using a third-party analytics tool. Such tools can help creators improve on their growth process as well as provide information on best practices. Content creators can easily identify top-performing content and use that information to develop future content. In the end, they are able to further increase their followers, reach as well as influence.
Dedicated and Engaged Followers
Creating an appreciable fan base gives content creators an increased chance of appearing in the feeds of more audiences. But that becomes seemingly useless if such an audience doesn’t engage with your content. Therefore asides from an increase in followers, content creators must strive to increase engagement. And the fastest way is to create valuable contents that solve certain needs for the audience.
Thankfully, engagement is easy to measure. A quick glance at the statistics of audience liking, commenting, and sharing posts will be sufficient. Businesses are always on the lookout for creators that engage their audience regularly as this means audiences are active. And an active audience means one that is more likely to purchase or perform a conversion.
When Should I Monetize My Instagram?
Content creators on Instagram can monetize their accounts as soon as they attain the minimum requirement of 1000 followers. The most important factor is to have an impressive engagement rate.
Accounts with at least a thousand followers are often effective in partnering with localized businesses or start-ups. Such account owners are referred to as Nano-influencers and often command lesser fees. As your followers and engagement increase, you become more valuable and attractive to bigger brands that can pay you the big buck you so desire.
How Do People Make Money on Instagram?
Now that we’ve learned all about Instagram monetization, it’s time to see some of the few ways it can be achieved. To answer the question of how do people make money on Instagram, we need to showcase some of the ways to you. Thankfully, the platform provides a wide array of opportunities for content creators to earn from.
Here is a list of some of the best means of monetization on Instagram for both pictures and videos:
- Sponsored Posts or Shout-outs
- Affiliate Marketing
- Product Advertising
- Product Placement Videos
- Integrate Instagram shop to your online store
- Earn with IGTV ads
- Earn tips with Live Badges on Instagram
- Sell on Instagram Live Shopping
- Reviewing products or services in the videos
- Creating how-to videos about products or services
- Running video ads to drive traffic to your website to generate sales
How It Works
We’ve mentioned some of the few ways people make money on Instagram. Irrespective of the method adopted, your aim is to promote products and services so as to increase sales either for others or for yourself.
The platform provides several avenues to perform these promotions. Content creators can use posts, Stories, Reels, or IGTV videos for promotional purposes.
If you decide to promote brands and businesses other than yourself, the terms of the agreement have to be agreed upon mutually. Most content creators prefer to be rewarded in outright agreement fees while others favor commission-based payments.
After an agreement is reached, creators produce contents that are promotional for the said brands. These contents are geared towards driving sales by recommending such brands or their products to followers. Let’s explain how a few of them works:
Become an Affiliate Marketer
Affiliate marketing is one answer to how do people make money on Instagram. It simply entails users selling other people’s products for a commission. It’s quite a popular monetization technique and many users of Instagram leverage it to make money. Affiliates earn through a track-able link or a promo code to track sales. This ensures that payment is credited to the right affiliate after each sale.
Affiliate marketing does differ from influencer marketing. This is because an affiliate’s main goal is to drive direct sales for the partnering brand in exchange for a commission. On the other hand, an influencer is mainly aiming to create awareness. Thankfully, affiliate marketing has a lot of potentials if you plan on developing your reach. Affiliates can expand their presence by utilizing websites, other social media channels, and marketing tools.
Using affiliate marketing to earn involves creating engaging posts to promote products. And create a fun Instagram caption to make it sound not overly promotional. Also, you can only have one link on your Instagram bio; therefore, connecting to a landing page with your affiliate link is advisable. Simply ensure to state clearly on each post, that audiences can buy the product via the link in your bio.
Sell Physical Products
From our above list on how do people make money on Instagram is to sell products on the platform. Usually, this is of two forms:
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Sell Your Products
Simply sell any physical product that you make or buy from suppliers. This entails using Instagram as a conventional eCommerce retailing platform and will require you to stock an inventory. This essentially means incurring extra costs as start-up capital to buy your products.
Asides from inventory, you will likely need a space to keep and store purchased products such as a spare room or a rented storage space. This becomes necessary if you intend to buy products in bulk to reduce cost. Users can leverage the Instagram store feature to sell products directly on Instagram. Simply tag products in your Instagram images and you can lead your Instagram followers to your product pages, where they can buy your products.
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Sell Other’s Products via Dropshipping
If the conventional eCommerce method sounds expensive to operate, another mode of selling is Dropshipping. Dropshipping is a business model that eliminates the need for a store to run a sales business. It also takes care of packaging as well as shipping of products to buyers.
Once you’ve made a sale, your supplier will ship your products from their warehouse, straight to your customer’s doorstep. Dropshipping makes it easy for users to try their hands on different niches before settling for one. Thankfully, starting a dropshipping store is easy and can be done in minutes. Platforms like Shopify and Oberlo’s free Explorer plan provide eCommerce stores.
Leverage Influencer Marketing
One method on how do people make money on Instagram is through Influencer Marketing. This is most likely the most popular means of earning money. An influencer is someone who has built a reputation and loyal following by sharing regularly on their social accounts. They have a good following and they’re able to convince their audiences to jump onto trends as well as purchase certain products. This influence is derived from the time spent building trust and relationships with their audience.
This is one of the most popular Instagram monetization techniques available on the platform. Users that attain the status of influencers can leverage their profile to promote just about any product from any brand. So as an influencer, asides from having a decent follower number, you must also come up with posts that generate strong engagement from your followers.
Businesses and Brands are always on the lookout to partner influencers. Most often to help create sponsored posts that can help boost awareness for such businesses and increase their reach. In return, top influencers make thousands of dollars per sponsored post. Earning money via influencing on Instagram is viable but potential influencers have to manage expectations.
To leverage influencing, it’s important to know your audience well enough. Learn who they are, and understand their interests, values, needs, and wants. This will help you know which brands best fit them. A quick tip is that Instagram business account users can learn more about their audience stats through the Instagram Insights feature.
Take care not to lose the trust of your existing audience in the process of earning money from sponsored posts. It’s often best to practice to make your audience aware that a post is sponsored by using hashtags such as #sponsored or #ad.
Conclusion
When it comes to answering how do people make money on Instagram, the answers are numerous. Thankfully, just about anyone can benefit from it as well. As easy as that sounds, the process involved is not for the faint at heart. It takes time, dedication, and hard work to build a decent following as well as appreciable engagements.
But if you have an eye for creating quality and unique content, as well as being creative with words, then you can be sure of earning on the platform. The platform provides many opportunities for its creators to earn from.
