How to Make Money on Instagram in 2020 [Updated]

How to Make Money on Instagram in 2020

Everyone wants to understand the ways to make money on Instagram. In the past few years, Instagram’s endless feed of gorgeous photos has evolved into something between a glossy magazine, your best friend’s taste, and a boutique shop.

With over a billion monthly users, 71% of whom are under 35, Instagram is the platform of aspiration, inspiration—and now, in-app checkout. Instagram has reach and influence; the two things many companies struggle with. Together, these two things offer the chance for Instagram creators to explore multiple streams of potential revenue, whether they want to build an empire or just earn some extra cash and free stuff.

Findthatjob.com.ng brings to you, how to make money on Instagram…

On how make money on Instagram, there are three major ways.

Work as an influencer to post content sponsored by brands
Be an affiliate marketer selling other people’s products
Become an entrepreneur and sell your own products

As an influencer

1: Post sponsored content

Sponsored posts could be the primary thing that involves mind once you hear the phrase ‘Instagram influencer.’ There are over 500,000 active influencers on Instagram as of early 2019. The base requirement here may be a decent-to-impressive follower count and a competitive engagement rate. In other words, this strategy is for you if you’re good at making strangers on the internet like and trust you.

The appeal of this strategy is that it involves marketing without any of the headaches of e-commerce: it doesn’t require you to create a product or fulfill orders. In a perfect world, all this entails is just being yourself and posting about the products, services, or brands that make your life what it is.

Here’s how to get started as an Instagram influencer.

Step 1: Choose a niche

If you really want to get paid on Instagram, you’re going to be living and breathing your personal brand. Make sure you truly love it. And consider how your potential partners see things. Brands will be comparing your audience to their target market.

Step 2: Build trust & grow your audience

81% of Instagram influencers have between 15,000 and 100,000 followers. If you’re not there yet, don’t panic. There are no shortcuts to growing your follower count, but there are tried-and-true strategies. Commit to posting consistently. And commit to posting content that is exactly what your audience wants.

Step 3: Partner with brands

Two main routes to linking up with brand partners are:

Find them by pitching them directly. Contact the brands you admire yourself and tell them what you can offer. Your brand pitch needs to provide plenty of compelling details about your audience and approach.

Help them find you by signing up with an influencer marketing platform.

There are a lot of these market places. AspireIQ, Upfluence, and Famebit are good places to start.

Brands you can work with:

Fohr Card: Connect your Instagram, blog, YouTube channel, and other social platforms to make an influencer “card” that shows your different profiles and total reach for brands shopping around for a partnership. You also get access to an inventory of brands and their wants, so you’ll take the initiative to succeed in out too.

Grapevine: If you’ve got 5000 or more followers, you’ll list yourself within the Grape Vine marketplace for the chance to figure with like-minded brands.

Crowd Tap: Do small content creation tasks to earn rewards. This is great if you’ve got a smaller audience. Available in the U.S only.

indaHash: Brands put up campaigns that you simply can participate in. Post an image with the required hashtags on Instagram and obtain paid. You need 700 engaged followers to be eligible.

Step 4: Post transparently.

As an influencer in America or the UK, you are legally obligated to make it clear when you are posting an ad. The American Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines require your disclosure to be obvious and easy to understand.

Meanwhile, the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK doesn’t care for any coy allusions: say #ad, not #gifted. To stay on the right side of the law, use the #ad hashtag above the fold (i.e., in the first three lines so people don’t have to click around to find it.)

EDITOR’S RECOMMENDATION

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Be an Affiliate Marketer

Unlike sponsored content, this strategy is a smaller amount of spreading awareness and more about making sales. This is because you only make money when your followers actually buy the product. On the plus side, as an affiliate marketer, you don’t need to worry about producing that product or fulfilling orders.

The downside is that this strategy requires a solid strategy if you want to grow without annoying your audience. Also, the term ‘affiliate marketing’ has a bad reputation. It can be associated with scammy promises of seven-figure monthly incomes and… yachts? Approached ethically, affiliate marketing is actually a smart, and well-established angle on marketing.

You recommend your favourite pens, or mascara, or petfood, and supply either a link to shop for the merchandise, alternatively a promo code with alittle discount. Both link and promo code are unique to you, so the merchant can track sales back to your efforts. You earn a fee or percentage for every sale. Meanwhile, as Instagram rolls out product tags and Instagram Checkout, marketers are no longer limited to saying ‘link in bio.’ As customers find it easier to buy on Instagram, affiliate marketers may well see their sales increase.

Step 1: Choose a niche

On how to make money on Instagram, an affiliate marketer’s niche differs from a sponsored influencer’s niche in that they can be more product-focused. For instance, affiliate marketers sometimes start as product reviewers. If you’re just starting out, you have the luxury of choosing an audience with specific material desires, e.g., dog owners who want guidance and deals on the best dog food. (And the best collars, the best dog bowls, the best dog goggles, et cetera.)

Step 2: Find merchants to affiliate with.

You can affiliate with a brand directly, or you can join what’s called an ‘affiliate network,’ or both. Affiliate networks are intermediary platforms between brands who run affiliate programs, and marketers like you. Affiliate networks are designed to give you a huge range of products to choose from. And you aren’t limited to just one network, either. Amazon Associates is the most obvious place to start.

The limitation is that they don’t offer codes; you have to use the affiliate link they provide. While that’s great for Pinterest, blogs, or email newsletters, on Instagram you have to put that link in your bio, or—if you have a business account—your Instagram Story. Clickbank, Rakuten, and CJ Affiliates are also reputable affiliate networks to consider.

Step 3: Post about the product

As with influencers, affiliate marketing also falls under FTC and ASA rules, so be clear about the nature of your relationship with the product. Fortunately, 54% of people say they appreciate transparency when marketers divulge their relationships, and the #ad hashtag doesn’t offend them.

Strategy 3: Sell your own products

The third strategy for creating money on Instagram goes beyond marketing and into the realm of actual e-commerce. Rather than using your personal brand to sell other people’s products, sell your own. This might be a coffee-table book of your most popular photos.

But it could also be your time and advice as a consultant; or your high-end fashion line. And if you already own a business, selling on Instagram is an obvious addition to your marketing strategy. Turning your audience into your customers may well be a natural fit. And with the rise of e-commerce platforms like Shopify and print-on-demand services like Printful, it’s increasingly simple to run an online business that delivers real-world products.

Step 1: Imagine your product

Models sell clothes. ASMR slime accounts sell slime. Marketing experts sell online courses. Your product might be a natural, intuitive extension of what you’re already doing, like @rad.slime’s slime shop.

Step 2: Build your product

If your business plan involves selling your own products (as opposed to, say, drop shipping—but more on that later) you need to build it.

Step 3: Set up your account so it’s shoppable

In the past few years, Instagram has been rolling out all sorts of shopping-focused features: the Explore tab, product tags, shoppable posts, shoppable Stories, and Instagram Checkout. In order to take advantage of them, you need a business account. You also need to create a product catalogue.

Step 4: Build out your e-commerce infrastructure

Set up a website to provide more information to your customers. Consider running a few ads to build awareness. You’ll probably also need to build a landing page to guide people through the final purchasing steps. Keep your audience’s experience at top of mind.

Step 5: Post your products

You can hype your products using regular Instagram posts or Stories. Instagram analytics tools will help you measure your success.

Step 6: Fulfill your orders

Depending on your product, you can handle inventory yourself, outsource to a third-party logistics company, or live the drop shipping lifestyle (which is when the manufacturer sends it to the customer themselves.) The more orders you have, the more time you’ll be spending on this, so be realistic.

Tips for earning money on Instagram

Know your worth

Influencers need to know: what’s the going rate for posting a Story (with swipe up) to, say, 27,000 followers? How much do people charge for running a product giveaway to a niche audience with an impressive 5% engagement rate? When it’s time to negotiate rates with brands, you need solid information on the landscape.

Keep tabs on your competitors

Use social media monitoring (and listening) to stay on top of the conversation in your field, and among your competitors. Set up Instagram-specific search streams in Hootsuite to watch what’s happening on the platform. Then set alerts using Hootsuite Insights to monitor what your competitors are up to everywhere else.

Respond to customer inquiries quickly

Twitter found in one study that 71% of people expect customer service responses in less than an hour on social media. A near-immediate response is imperative to your customer support strategy.

Be professional

Speaking of being professional, this is a business. Your brand partners and customers are treating it as such. As an influencer, missing deadlines and ignoring contracts is the fastest way to burn bridges. (Besides, say, demanding free stuff from other businesses.)

Don’t buy fake followers

Just don’t. It doesn’t work and it’s kind of embarrassing. And it’s called fraud. Use Instagram tools to save time Any entrepreneur will tell you how fast the hours disappear when you’re getting a business up and running. There are dozens of tools out there to help you automate your posts, edit your photos and video, or run reports on your account’s performance.

Promote yourself on other channels

You need to provide more than inspiration if you’re looking to turn views into sales. Creating a blog or YouTube channel will expand your content marketing to provide the information that prospective buyers want as they make their buying decisions. Likewise, using other social media platforms will widen your reach. And email newsletters mean you aren’t at the mercy of the Instagram algorithm when notifying your audience about new content.

Instagram also has a “Paid Partnership with” tag that prominently identifies sponsored posts, which some brands might require you to use to disclose your relationship with them.

Conclusion

What started as a hobby—making people laugh, doing silly photoshoots with your dog or sharing pictures of food—can snowball into the chance to turn Instagram into a source of income fuelled by your engaged following. There’s a world of possibilities out there as a creator with a large online audience made up of people who can’t help but stop when they scroll past your post in their feed. It’s this special appeal that you have that opens the door. You just have to walk through it.

How to Make Money on Instagram in 2020