Introduction
The rise of Instagram in our culture has laid a foundation where a generation of professional Instagrammers can make a living out of Instagram. As much as the title of this article seems enticing, it is not that easy! It’s possible but not easy!
$100k is just a number given for an example, you can make a lot more (and a lot less too) depending on your content. A couple of years ago, a concept was introduced called “Thousand True Fans”. It basically means if you have a lot of followers and among them if thousands of them are your true followers and if they each spend like around $100 in a whole year, you’re likely to earn $100k year. Doesn’t matter how they spend their money, whether they’re buying your t-shirts or music albums (if you’re an artist!). If there’s a thousand people who follow you who is willing to spend $100 on you in a span of a year, that’s a lot of money!
This amount of earnings is more than enough for some people to sustain their business and live their lifestyle. The concept of the thousand true fans is very much applicable in today’s social media world, especially on Instagram. Now let’s take a look into more techniques on how to make money on Instagram and also how to monetize your Instagram account.
You can monetize your Instagram account either by working as a business account or working as an influencer. There are 4 basic ways you can monetize your account and earn money. Each of the ways has different strategies. Some of the ways will take a short period of time while some of them will require your patience.
Selling Ad Space
In order to promote something, the first thing that pops up in everyone’s mind is an advertisement. Advertisement causes exposure and lets people know that your product exists in the market. In the olden days, most people used to rely on TV commercials or billboards. The times have changed now and people these days rely mostly on social media. Essentially what happens is that, you own an Instagram account and a business/company wants to expose their product or services to your audiences and beyond. So, it’s sort of an exchange, they pay you to promote their product to your audiences.
Once you have an account with sizable following and people reaching out to you, business will start contacting you for their promotion purpose. Thus, selling advertisement space on your account.
Affiliate Marketing
This is where you promote someone else’s product and you have a tracking link. So every time you make a sale or some kind of conversion like clicking on the link or downloading, you get some commission. If you don’t have your own product and if you’re not an influencer, this is a good way to start monetizing. Basically, if you’re not really a content creator, you can just sell ad space or other people’s products through your account. Therefore, based on what you sale you get a kickback or commission.
Brand Partnerships
It is basically using the brand’s product or services to make your videos or putting in the videos. It is a very lucrative way to make money and brands pay a huge amount of money for this. Brands usually ask the instagammers to give exposure to their products (usually newly launched products). The instagrammers make videos that usually highlights the products and they integrate hashtags in the videos which help further into giving exposure. This is how companies usually approach instagrammers, they launch a product and give like 20/30 instagrammers to shed light on their products. When you’re new, the companies won’t pay you much but as you increase your reach, the companies will start to pay you more.
Businesses are using influencer marketing like crazy! In 2014, there were over 14 million sponsored posts, that is over a billion dollars a business is spending money behind Instagram. That number is supposed to get doubled in the upcoming years. The way businesses are spending money is drastically changing and they are putting a lot of their advertising money on Instagram.
Selling Own Physical Products
One of the best ways to make money off Instagram is by selling your own products! A lot of new brands have become large and popular by selling their own products through Instagram. You can sell both physical/digital products depending on your type of business.
It has been seen that among many brands, fashion brands that have started their journey through have been more successful than the others. Not to demean other brands, but fashion brands have had more success on Instagram mostly due to the interface and their type of business. If you’re a traveler who has traveled a lot of countries, you can surely make a good business out of selling merchandise or clothing in general. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a pre-existing business or an influencer who is about to open their own start-up, you can utilize Instagram however you want.
The best thing about selling your own product is that you can cross-promote your products with other influencers and reach out your products to their audiences as well. You can even get sponsors if you have a good amount of reach. You can get as creative as possible with your own products. At the end of the day, it is important to have something of your own.
You can sell ads or affiliate products but when you sell your own products, you kind of care more about it and it’s a matter of creation of your own.
There are multiple million dollar companies who have started off through Instagram, therefore never underestimate the power of taking your business and relying on social media platforms such as Instagram to promote it and grow it.
To sum it up you have 4 important ways you can monetize your Instagram account:
– Affiliate Marketing
– Brand Partnerships
– Selling Own Physical Products
Authors Suggestion: You can take help from some marketing tools to make the process easier and consistent because in social media marketing specially in Instagram marketing the consistency is very important factor to grow.
