With over 300 million users sharing more than 70 million photos and videos each and every day as of January 2015, it’s not all that surprising to realize that several big Instagram users are raking in big bucks from the millions of people who follow them and engage with their posts.
What’s even more inspiring is that most of them are just normal people who stayed persistent with posting and interacting on their accounts to build up their followers over time.
If you love interacting on Instagram and have a sizeable number of engaged followers, or if you’re at least willing to put in the time and effort to start building it up, then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to start making hundreds or even thousands of dollars from this one social platform alone.
There are lots of different routes you can take to start earning, and while they may seem “easy” on the surface, keep in mind that any kind of online income generation strategy takes time and work before you start seeing real results.
- Sell your Instagram photos to brands that want to use them.
If you just love taking photos with your mobile device and consider them to be of pretty high quality before posting them to Instagram, then it’s very possible that you could start licensing your photos to companies that are willing to pay to use them for their own brand building purposes.
Here are five popular options you have to start making money on Instagram relatively quickly if you have great posts and/or a big following.
- Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is basically when you promote a product and get paid per sale. You’ll often see bloggers doing this with sidebar banners promoting their partners (affiliates), or even through specific product inspired posts. Well, it’s not much different with Instagram.
With Instagram, you post attractive images highlighting their products and drive sales through your affiliate URL (this should be provided by your affiliate).
- Create Sponsored Posts (Find Sponsors!)
Instagram users with engaged followings can earn extra money by creating original sponsored content for brands.
In a nutshell, a piece of sponsored content on Instagram is a photo or video that highlights a product or a brand.
These posts are accompanied by captions that may include branded hashtags, @mentions, or links.
Brands don’t typically require a formal brand ambassadorship for creators of sponsored content, but it’s common to for them to tap certain influencers for content time and time again.
However, it’s important that any brands or products you promote are a good fit for your own personal image on Instagram.
The idea is to show off brands that you can personally get behind, and to show your followers how that brand fits into your lifestyle.
- Promote Your Business, Products Or Services
If you run your own business, then Instagram needs to hold an integral place in your marketing matrix.
If you sell products, use it to post beautiful shots that can’t be found on your website. Here are some creative ways to promote your products or services:
Behind the scenes. “Behind the scenes” type images tend to be hugely popular – picture gorgeous handmade soaps being gift wrapped, jewellery being pieced together or delicious cakes straight out of the oven. It’s appealing and adds a certain realness to what you’re doing… and people love that.
Your customers’ photos: Linked to this is the use of User Generated Content on your account. Get customers to share their images of your products and re-gram (download “Repost for Instagram” app to repost your customers’ photos). This is a proven successful method of selling and would make a great addition to your account. It also calls for you to start up your own unique hashtag which you can then promote to all your customers: it’s a seriously slick way to make yourself stand out from the crowd. For example, White Castle asks their customers to use #MyCrave to their photos. Now when they see them using that hashtag, they can repost (or regram) their photos to their Instagram account.
- Sell Your Instagram Account
Had enough of Instagram? Ready to move on?
Well, you’ll be happy to know that all your hard work hasn’t gone to waste. You can actually sell your Instagram account if (for whatever reason) you can no longer manage it.