Want to make money in an easy way? Well, there is no easy way to earn money but you can make big bucks monetizing your free time. Confused? If you love spending time on Instagram and have a good audience base, then you can actually earn money with it.
With nearly 1 billion monthly active users, Instagram is a giant space to market things. Though it was designed as a photo-sharing platform, a few influencers are making millions of dollars out of the platform. Most businesses are actively using Instagram to boost their brand awareness and sales. You will be surprised to know that over 200 million users visit business profiles at least once daily. The major highlight is that people use Instagram to search for products or services information, and most people get to know about new products through Instagram, and nearly 11% of social media users shop on Instagram according to Adespresso.
So, there is a large audience base on the platform, right? Now, let’s go to the actual topic, how to make money with Instagram. This article walks you through 5 legit ways you could earn money with Instagram. The only secret ingredient to do that is your audience or follower base. You can make chunks of money sharing photos and videos on your profile in 5 ways.
Don’t worry if you don’t have a huge following, this article leaves you with a few quick tips to grow your following at the end, so stick around.
So, here are 5 legitimate ways to earn money with Instagram.
Before you do anything to make money with Instagram, there are two important things you should have:
- Genuine follower base (you will learn how to build that in this article)
You don’t need millions of followers to become an influencer. You can even bag good amounts of money with 5k to 100k followers as a micro-influencer.
2. Followers always ready to listen to you (simply, people who trust you)
So, to win such followers you need to really work hard and share useful and meaningful information, consistently post and have patience. Simply put, the more active you are on the platform, the better.
Promote Sponsored Posts
So, the first way to earn money with Instagram is to collaborate with brands. If you have a notable follower count, you can make money promoting sponsored posts for brands that need you. Brands will have to work with influencers (micro or macro) based on their budget and strategy to boost their brand awareness. As said already, Instagram has a huge user base, so it is a great platform to market their products. Hence, brands keep finding and working with influencers to grow their business. This is how you can make money too.
If you have a good follower base, or you are serving audiences in a particular niche, and your profile is pleasing, then small or sometimes popular brands may reach you. You can also reach out to different brands by cold emailing or publishing your portfolio on platforms that connect influencers with brands like Influenz, Izea, Activate etc. However, the sponsored posts also should be relevant to your audience interests, else you may lose your followers for disappointing them.
Create & Sell your Products
Once you know that you have established a genuine audience base that will buy your products, you can start making money selling your own products. These days creating your products is not any difficult. You can make print tees, mugs on Teespring if you are good at designing. Or you can sell your handmade products and make money.
In fact, you can even start a new business with your audience support. Post beautiful pictures of your products, share making videos and create an interest in the audience before you launch your products or business.
Promote Affiliate Links
Affiliate marketing has been growing for few years and influencers, bloggers are making the most out of it. All you need to do is choose a legit affiliate marketing program, pick the products that benefit your audience and shoot a video promoting them. When users buy the products through your links, you will get a commission. So, this is a great way to make money without doing much. You need to genuinely help your audience with the useful and right products to keep them.
Remember, though you are actually selling the product, do not make it look like you are selling. Make sure you create a feeling of suggesting or helping, if they really love the product, they will surely buy it.
Video Product Placements
Video product placements are similar to sponsored posts, the only difference here is that you need to post a video instead of photos. You will shoot a video with the product in a more casual way. So, your audience can notice the product and make a purchase if they get connected.
Brands will reach you if you are well serving your niche audience or you can reach brands with some creative concepts. Yes, you are completely responsible for creating the concept and shooting.
Read: How to post on Instagram from PC
Sell your Photos to Brands
If you are love capturing memories and beautiful scenes, you can make handsome money selling your photos. So, get paid to take the pictures by selling the photos on Instagram. The best part is you don’t need to be a professional photographer to rake in the money. All you need to have is good stuff. Apart from selling you may also get clients to work for.
Remember to include watermarks on your every picture, because you don’t know who take the credits for your work.
Quick Tips to Grow your Followers
- First things first, your bio needs to be interesting. Before that tell about yourself in an impressive and quirky way in your bio. Also, include the main hashtags, your website link and other important things there.
- People explore social media to have fun and learn new things. Make sure you contribute at least some for it. So, post interesting and useful content always.
- Remember to post consistently. It is even okay to post more than once or twice in a day if you really have something valuable to share.
- Analyze when your posts are doing well. Know when the majority of your followers are active and post during that time.
- Engage with your followers more often in comments, stories and live sessions. But remember if you fake, they will fake too.
- Do not ignore posting quality pictures, captions and relevant hashtags.
Related Article: How to make money from Facebook
Wrapping Up
Hope these 5 legit ways to make money on Instagram helps you start your money-making journey on the platform. If you have at least a notable follower count, you can even make money selling your account. However, if you have time and passion to make money as an influencer, try the above things and have little patience. Soon you will grow to learn and making money. Also, you might come up with your own ideas of monetizing your Instagram account.
