5 Best Ways To Make Money On Instagram

If you’re looking for ways to leverage your Instagram account and its followers, there are a handful of ways that you can make some revenue with it. Instagram with its focus on rich media enables you to create beautiful user-created advertisements, giving you potential with income through sponsored posts, affiliate marketing, photo sales, and more. And the best thing? You can do this even if you only have a few followers — you don’t need tens of thousands to make money with Instagram. It’s all about how well you advertise with rich media.

If you follow along below, we’ll show you how you can make money using your Instagram account.

Sponsored Posts

Sponsored posts are one of the few methods of making money on Instagram that will require you to have a handful of followers. Sponsored posts are usually given to you by companies that want to get their product in front of as many eyes as possible. That said, companies want a lot of impressions, and will pay pretty well for that. It usually operates on a CPM model, so you’ll get paid per thousand impressions. How much your CPM is all depends on the company, their value, and how many followers you have in your arsenal. But, if you were to get a $10 CPM, you would get $10 per 1,000 impressions, or per 1,000 views. If your ad were to get 10,000 ad views, you would get $100. It works really well, and you have the potential to make a lot of money.

Keep in mind that when approaching companies about a sponsored post, you should have your Instagram’s metrics on hand.

Affiliate Marketing

You can also use Instagram for making money with affiliate marketing. The rich media aspect of Instagram will pull visitors into your post, and they might be more interested in a product this way, thus urging them to buy. Companies will give you a trackable link that you can give potential customers, and when they buy from that link, you get a percentage of the sale.

The downside is that you cannot put clickable links in posts, so you’d actually have to put it in your bio. You can only have one clickable link in a bio, so you would be limited to advertising just a single product at a time. Most people do this by making Instagram posts about products they’re advertising, and then say “link in bio” as the description.

Promote Your Business

You can also use Instagram to promote your online business. Using rich media, you can advertise various aspects of your business, hopefully bringing in more income for it in different ways, whether that be through trying to sell products or services in your business or simply by advertising it and getting the name out.

The 80-20 rule for posting about your business is usually a good method. 80% of your posts should be things other than your product or service. You can still post about your business in that 80%, but only 20% should actually be about trying to sell product. Generally, one would offer different discounts and coupon codes exclusive to Instagram followers only.

Sell Photos

If you’re an Instagram professional, you might even be able to sell your photos for a profit. Granted, this does require some good photography skills, but with a little practice, you shouldn’t have trouble creating some excellent stock photography. The neat thing about Instagram is that, for the most part, you’re taking authentic photos. You’re more likely to sell your authentic photos than a staged, stock photo. You can do this through sites like Foap, where brands will look to crowdsource excellent quality photos. You can earn about $5 per photo, but if the brand likes your photo, they might have you do more, specific photos, for which you get paid a lot more for.

Use It To Promote YouTube

Instagram is an excellent way to boost your YouTube channel income as well. You can use Instagram to send followers to your YouTube videos, primarily because Instagram is all about rich media. That said, you can do things like post short couple-second video clips to your Instagram account to advertise a new YouTube video that was posted on your account. This can increase your viewership, and thus increase your ad impressions. That means more money for you.

Verdict

As you can see, there are a lot of great ways that you can leverage Instagram to make money for you. If you have a good follower base just sitting around, it might be time to consider using that to make a good side income.