Instagram has been hype among the young these days. Instagram (also known as IG or insta) is a photo and video-sharing social networking service owned by Facebook, Inc. Most of the people are using Instagram for sharing their photos while a few are there who uses this platform to make some money. You may be surprised hearing this but yes many people earn money from Instagram and the amount is not in hundreds but in thousands of dollars. So if you are among the people with highest followers then congratulations you can also earn pretty decent money from Instagram. So without delay let me start how to make money from Instagram.
You may think that for making money from Instagram you need followers in 6 – 7 digit numbers. But according to me, that’s not the fact. I have seen some people who are making 100s of dollar per month and their follower are only in 4 digits. If you have followers more than 5k then you are ready to start making money from Instagram.
Mainly there are different methods for earning money from Instagram which are:
- Doing sponsored posts for brands that want to get in front of your audience.
- Becoming an affiliate and making a commission selling other brands’ products.
- Creating and selling a physical or digital product, or offering a paid service.
- Selling licenses for your photography or videos.
These are some of the methods used for making money from Instagram. You find other tutorials on the internet to make money from Instagram so I won’t bother mentioning and explaining the methods. The thing that I will mention here is how to make an Instagram account that can make you money.
Step 1: Growing from 0 to 100 Instagram followers
Okay, so you now have a brand new account and need to build that initial momentum and get followers on Instagram.
If you already have a business or a brand with a somewhat established community, then getting that initial following shouldn’t be that big of a challenge. Send out a newsletter to your existing customers, inviting them to follow you on Instagram.
Remember that when you want people to do something, you need to give them an incentive. In this case, a discount for your products to the first 100 followers could work just fine. If you have a large enough email list, you can split the offer so that first the 100 followers get 30% off, next 100 get 20% off, and so on, to not discourage those who might have opened the email later, from following you. Before you send out the email though, make sure you already have a few engaging posts up to give an idea of your brand.
If you don’t have an existing customer/follower community, you can turn to your friends, family or colleagues, and ask them to follow you. This is one of my personal favourites, because you can get the initial follower base quite easily even without posting any content (however, I’d still suggest having at least one post there to begin with), and if you’re one of those people with a large family and friend group, you might just hit that 100 followers quite quickly. Also, if you have a brand website, you can capture any site visitors by adding an Instagram follow button, to be sure your audience knows where you find you on social!
After you’ve completed this initial step, it’s time to choose a strategy to get followers on Instagram and growing this base to at least 100 followers.
Techniques that Hackers use to earn money
Strategy 1: “Something’s coming…”
This will be best if you have some kind of an announcement coming soon — a new website, a product, a giveaway, etc.
Create an attractive profile picture, and an engaging and witty bio – don’t be afraid to throw some emojis in there if that’s something that would resonate with your audience. If you have a link to your homepage, email subscription page, or literally any other brand link that could potentially extend the relationship with your followers, definitely add that as well for perfect create Instagram content.
Strategy 2: “A rising star”
If, on the other hand, you don’t really have anything big coming up or if you’re interested in developing a personal brand (models, photographers, speakers etc), then go for this one.
Everything we discussed in Strategy 1 is still useful. You should work on your bio description, explain who you are and what your account is about, reach out to other accounts in your niche and engage with their followers.
The major difference here is that you need to build your feed up BEFORE you do the outreach. Remember, you won’t be driving people to your upcoming offer to get followers on Instagram — you will be driving them to your posts.
Step 2: Growing to 1,000 Instagram followers
Once you have that initial traction, the following strategy will really give an extra boost to get followers on Instagram. Here’s what you do:
- Identify some of the bigger accounts(50k+ followers) that are similar to yours or are in the same industry with the same target audience you’re trying to reach.
- Check if their followers are real (some great tools for that: Fameaudit, SocialAuditPro)
- If the majority of their followers are real, open up their follower list and start following these accounts (I personally suggest to follow accounts that have a real human in the profile picture, instead of a logo)
- Start checking who’s not following you back and unfollow these accounts. There’s plenty of apps for both Android and iOS for this exact purpose — just give it a search.
Ideally, at least 20% of the people that you started following, should follow you back. The more followers you have, the ‘healthier’ your follower to following ratio is, the more attractive your feed looks, and the higher the follow-back percentage is going to be.
People are more inclined to follow back Instagram accounts that:
- Look real
- Have more followers than the account is following
- Have a nicely designed feed of posts
In addition to the follow/unfollow strategy, you should start interacting with these bigger accounts (as long as they’re not direct competitors).
Firstly, turn on post notifications for these accounts. Every time they post something, be the first to like and leave a comment. There’s already too many “This is so true”, “That’s a dope man”, “Awesome post” type of comments out there because of engagement bots.
To reach 1000 followers, I would suggest combining the follow/unfollow strategy together with the strategies covered in the previous step!
Secondly, when you start reaching the 1000 follower mark, its a good idea to start thinking about scheduling your Instagram posts. This will give you more time to create content, engage with your audience, and continue to get followers on Instagram.
Scheduling and managing your Instagram content with Hopper HQ means you can post straight from your desktop, visually plan your Instagram feed, and save loads of time! Photos, videos, carousel posts, captions, first comments can all be scheduled in advance so you never need to rush for last minute posts again.
Step 3: Growing to 5,000 Instagram followers
Now that you have a good foundation for growth, it’s time to accelerate even faster. I’m not saying you should stop doing what you have been doing previously. I think those methods are great even if you have passed the 20,000 follower mark. However, adding other methods from this point forward might give the same if not better results with less effort.
- Firstly, you should start using engagement groups. If you haven’t heard about them, then you should read the following article, to understand what engagement groups are and how they work. Increase your Organic Reach on Instagram with Engagement Groups.
- Secondly, consider investing in ads. If you’re building a brand (and not just posting pictures of your cat), Instagram ads will come in quite handy at this point.
- Thirdly, definitely start scheduling your Instagram posts. Once you’ve reached this stage, every minute you invest in your Instagram counts.
Now that you have 5k+ followers you can now monetize your Instagram profile 🙂
This ends our today’s post hope you have enjoyed this 🙂 If you have any queries feel free to comment down below.
