If you are looking to make money on the internet, then Instagram is a good place to start and many will ask how to monetize Instagram account. The platform has grown to be the world`s second most popular social media site with consistent user growth. With such growth, you can be certain that the platform is here to stay for years to come.
This means brands, businesses as well as individuals can leverage on the platform to make a decent amount of earning. And with over 500 million accounts being active on IG on a daily basis earning becomes a really lucrative reward for doing what you love doing best. That said, the platform offers several monetization methods which are aimed at attracting more users to the platform.
With these monetization possibilities, Instagram has moved away from a platform for entertainment only. It is now more of a powerful marketing service that offers endless possibilities including monetization rewards. Regardless of your identity, you are sure to definitely find an opportunity to earn on Instagram. Thankfully it’s not only via being an influencer and having a big audience before earning.
In this article, I will be examining how to monetize an Instagram account (a step-by-step guide).
When can I Monetize My Instagram Account?
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 high 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.
One best practice is to apply Instagram monetization as soon as engagement rate and follower count fit in with your posts and niche’s quality. This is because brands now focus more on how engaged your audience is and how much influence you have over their purchasing decisions.
Simply prove to them that as an expert in their niche or a related one, you can help create brand awareness and boost conversions.
How to Monetize Instagram Account
When planning on monetizing Instagram, there are a few basic things to get in order. Things like where to start and how to go about your new Instagram business. Here are a few steps to get you off the mark:
Choose a Niche
Like with every other social media business, you will need to have a niche. So essentially, your first step on how to monetize your Instagram account is selecting a niche to work in. Deciding on a niche to play in will have to be one of the toughest earliest decisions you will have to make. This is because the success of failure of your Instagram business will rely greatly on your niche.
A niche is a specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service. Basically, a niche discusses the product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs targeting a small market segment.
On Instagram, a niche is a profitable segment of any topic with a focus on audiences who are looking to consume the information provided on that segment of the topic. This is where Instagram content creators provide useful content with the aim of promoting such segments with a video representation.
Since niches are a segment of a market, a niche can be further segmented. We have categories such as sub-niche, which contains further sub-sub-niches.
When your niche is selected, consider what hashtags you are going to use. Don’t forget to create a unique hashtag for your brand as well as analyze competitors to be as close to your target audience as possible. When picking a niche, consider some of these:
- What do you have passion for?
- How knowledgeable are you about your passion?
- What can you talk about for hours on end even on days when you don’t feel like it?
- Can you further narrow down your passion to a specific category? This is called niching down.
- Is there any demand for the knowledge you have and wish to turn into the content?
- Competition is a factor you can’t afford to joke with. If your niche is oversaturated and highly competitive, then getting acknowledged will be tough and take time.
Add high-quality content
After selecting a niche and creating an account, the next step on how to monetize an Instagram account is to start creating appealing content. It is probably the most time-consuming and responsible stage on your way to success since only interesting, innovative, and unique content can attract new followers.
This is one of the most important decisions you can take as a content creator with monetization on Instagram. As with other social media platforms, you are most likely not the only content creator in your niche. This means competition is high and everyone is jostling for the attention of the same target audience.
One way to edge out this competition is to create quality, useful and unique content. Ensure to always use high-quality images and never repeat product pitches. Originality and authenticity are two attributes that can help your content quality greatly.
Simply offer much more genuine and actual experience-based promotional content. This way audience can relate to your content more and drive up engagements. Most recently, video content in the form of Stories and IGTV can help you stand out. They have also proven useful in attracting an audience and increasing engagement.
To recap, keep these in mind:
- Make your posts unique, versatile, and visually appealing.
- Add them when your audience is the most active.
- Do that on a regular basis.
- Encourage interaction under each post.
- Use only high-quality images and videos.
- Interact with other influencers in this niche.
- Ask your audience about their preferences in content.
Engage Your Audience
When you decide to monetize your account, you should understand that it will become an integral part of your life. Your audience will be your true friends looking for your attention, support, and advice, while a good deal of your life will be public. It means you should be ready to respond to comments as fast as possible and pay much time to your account promotion.
If you intend to make much more money from Instagram, then you have to practice this always. Forming relationships with your audience can help you keep them and attract new ones as well.
By creating a bond with your audience, they can provide you with plenty of free content ideas for your creation. You don’t have to take all the ideas but you sure can get valuable reviews and opinions from them.
Use Other Social Media Platforms to Promote Your Account
This refers to you actively cross-promoting on Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Facebook even WhatsApp. Basically just about anywhere you have a community of fans established.
You can use other social media platforms to help increase your reach by simply encouraging viewers to check out your Instagram page. Another way of utilizing social media is to cross-post your content across all platforms you are present on. You should consider posting teaser snippets on social media. Then ensure to link to your IG account in order to drive your audience there.
Consider giveaways and Contests
Still, on how to monetize your Instagram account, regardless of the technique you choose to monetize with, you will need to reward your followers. One way to do this is to consider doing giveaways or hosting a contest. This is dimply you playing to the human traits of liking freebies and who doesn’t love giveaways? Offer your audience something in return for all of their engagement on your IG page.
Hosting a giveaway or contest will reward your current followers, and help attract new ones. One thing to keep in mind here is that whatever you are giving away must be relevant to your page’s niche. And since people love getting things for free, you are sure that they will inform their friends about it. Especially if the prize is worth it! Talk about free viral promotion.
For a giveaway to be effective, you can request your followers or new potential new ones to perform simple tasks. This can include them following all of your social media profiles to enter into the contest. We strongly suggest using this approach.
Most Important Metric for Instagram Monetization
It’s important to note that when considering how to monetize Instagram, many of your potential partners will rely on some detailed metrics to measure your worth to their business. Two of these metrics clearly stand out and I will recommend you focusing on these two to build your Instagram monetization strategy:
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.
Conclusion
No doubt, you’ve learned a lot on how to monetize your Instagram account. Earning on Instagram is now a reality and many are taking advantage of it to create passive income earnings. The platform provides a very powerful marketing audience to brands and individuals.
This piece has shown you the step-by-step procedures on how to monetize your Instagram account as well as make the most of your monetization feature. Carefully examine the process when you want to monetize your IG account. Above all, keep in mind that the IG platform requires work, time, and dedication before you can start earning.
