Yes, you can definitely make money on Instagram. As long as the business can be expressed visually and creatively for marketing purposes, you can tap into Instagram’s millions of users. Now you might be thinking: right, I get that it’s possible, but how exactly can I be making money on Instagram?
To start off, here are a few ways that you can make money on Instagram:
- You could be focusing on sponsored posts for brands that want to reach to your audience, making you the perfect medium to do that.
- You could become an affiliate, and earn money by selling products that belong to other brands.
- You could also be selling your own products, which could be physical or digital products, or even a service. Basically, you can sell services and products, just like in any ecommerce business environment.
- You can sell your photography.
The enthusiasts of this social media platform are always looking out for new ways on how to earn money from Instagram.
Don’t worry, we’ll unravel the mysteries of how people make money on Instagram in detail in this post, along with some success stories from Instagram.
How to Make Money on Instagram?
Instagram is ideal for selling products that photograph well. In other words, if your products are photogenic, most likely you can sell them with Instagram. Also, if you’re photogenic yourself or can take awesome photos, most likely you can have a huge following that can be capitalized to sell.
In general, there are at least 5 business models to make money on Instagram:
1. Become an influencer and make money from sponsored posts.
With your influencer status, you can propose to brands to help to promote them in your posts. An influencer is someone who has built a reputation by doing and sharing things online. They have a good following and they are able to convince their audiences about trends because of the level of trust they have built with their online presence.
Brands tend to partner with influencers to do sponsored posts that help spread the word about their products. Influencers have to manage many things at once such as the size and reach of their Instagram accounts as well as the trust and engagement that they build based on their content.
As an extra tip, be careful not to lose the trust of your existing audience in the process of making money from sponsored posts. That’s why it’s always a good idea to indicate with an Instagram hashtag that it’s a sponsored post (for instance, by adding #sponsored).
2. Become an affiliate and make money selling other people’s products.
You can sell other people’s products and receive a cut. Many brands sell their products through affiliate programs. There are many people that make money from Instagram this way.
The difference between an influencer and an affiliate is that an affiliate is working towards making sales for the partnering brand in exchange for a commission. On the other hand, the influencer is mainly aiming to create awareness.
Affiliates make money on Instagram through a trackable link or a promo code to make sure that any clicks are converted to sales.
Create engaging posts, so you can promote the products without being pushy. The thing is, since you can only have one link on your Instagram bio, you might want to include a landing page to your affiliate link. In each post, include a caption that the product can be purchased via the link on the Instagram bio.
3. Sell poster photos and other virtual products.
Instagram is all about visual content. Photogenic products would sell well on Instagram. You can sell poster photos, paintings, drawings, animations, videos, and other image or video-based virtual products. On each post, refer readers to visit the link in your bio. This is another popular way that people make money from Instagram.
4. Sell your own physical products.
You can sell any physical product that you produce yourself or purchase from suppliers. This conventional ecommerce retailing usually requires stocking some inventory, meaning you’d need to spend some startup capital to stock some products.
And it requires a place where you can keep the products, such a spare room at home or a rented storage place. For instance, if you purchase some inventory from a China-based supplier, you’d need a space to keep them before they’re ordered by and delivered to customers.
5. Sell dropshipped products.
Dropshipping is a business model which you can use to run your store without ever holding any inventory. Once you’ve made a sale your supplier will ship your products from their warehouse, straight to your customer’s doorstep. You’ll never need to worry about storing, packaging, or shipping your products.
Should I Make Money on Instagram?
For those wondering why they should make money on Instagram, we’ve compiled the top Instagram stats for you. The numbers behind Instagram are staggering, and the platform is catching up with Facebook’s growth. While Facebook has 2.07 billion monthly active users, Instagram’s growth has reached 1 billion users over 8 years in 2018 since its launch in 2010. With Instagram gaining nonstop popularity, it’s no surprise that Instagrammers are becoming an unstoppable force. For business purposes, the following figures are worthy of consideration for people who want to make money with Instagram:
1) 1 billion users are active every month. That’s almost three times the US population.
2) 500 million users are active every day. That’s almost double the US population.
3) In 2017, 70.7 percent of US businesses use Instagram. With 30 million businesses (both large and small) in the USA, this number translates to 21 million US businesses using Instagram.
4) 80 percent of Instagram users follow at least one business account. This translates to 640 million users following at least one business account.
5) There are 2 million Instagram advertisers every month.
6) Time spent on Instagram increases by 80 percent every year.
7) In 2016, 48 percent of US brands used Instagram to promote their businesses. In 2017, that number reached 71 percent. In 2018, it’s expected to reach 82 percent.
8) 300 million Instagram accounts use Instagram Stories every day.
9) Instagram users by age:
- 18 to 29 years old: 59 percent
- 30 to 49 years old: 33 percent
- 50 to 64 years old: 18 percent
- 64+ years old: 8 percent
10) Instagram users by gender:
- Female: 38 percent
- Male: 26 percent
- Other: 36 percent
