With around 1.386 billion users, Instagram is one of the top 4 most popular social media platforms. Moreover, 63% of all customers are people aged 18–34, that is, a solvent audience. All this means that Instagram is a great way to make money.
But how to make money through Instagram? For example, you can become a travel blogger and tell how good it’s to pick up a minivan rental Houston TX and have an unforgettable family trip to Texas. Add some car rental tips to that and you get useful content for your audience. Plus, if you have a lot of subscribers, you can cooperate with car rental companies, promote them, and get paid for this.
However, these are just a few of all the possible options for making money through Instagram. Let’s take a look at how you can profit from the world-famous social media platform today…
Creating a blog and selling ads on it
Instagram’s advertising market is estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars. This is how much money bloggers and celebrities get for advertising goods and services on their blogs. The most active bloggers are those who have 15-50 thousand subscribers. They work better with the target audience, constantly come up with new ways to promote, and don’t have enough ads to alienate users.
You can develop a blog in two formats: personal brand or public account. In order to create a successful blog, you need to:
- Come up with a blog theme and your own specialty. Tell a unique story, develop your special communication style or design.
- Prepare content. Collect all the photos, videos, and stories that you will be using.
- Design a profile header. Write who you are and what you do, as well as who will benefit from reading your content.
- Start uploading content. Publish stories and posts, record videos for IGTV.
- Maintain an active posting to the feed/stories. You need to monitor the engagement of your subscribers and try to increase it. For this, you can use third-party commenting services, such as GetComment. You will receive meaningful comments from real people, thereby pushing your audience to be active under the posts.
- Build an audience. You can customize your target, benefit from mutual PR with other growing blogs, or use a subscriber acquisition service.
Great offers from brands begin to come after you gain more than 10 thousand subscribers – accounts with such an audience can mark advertisers, and also provide advertising links to stories.
Creating an expert brand and selling your services
Unlike a blogger, an expert promotes himself first of all. He shares useful information, builds a positive reputation and trust, and then offers his services. Expert blogs most often sell information products such as consultations, online lessons, video courses and webinars. An expert blog doesn’t have to be a boring informational guide. In order to attract and retain an audience, an expert will need some blogging skills, including:
- clear and interesting spelling
- sharing personal life
- giving an opinion on popular topics
- taking beautiful photos and videos.
Selling any products on Instagram
You don’t have to be a world famous brand to run your own social media account. On the contrary, Instagram helps local establishments to gain popularity. An important feature for an offline business is that you only need to attract local Insta-followers. In order to designate a position, link your account to geo-location:
- write your city in the profile
- use local hashtags
- put geo-tags in publications.
However, if you are a representative of a tourist attraction such as a hotel, museum, or entertainment center, then you don’t need to focus only on local followers. You may be interesting for travelers from all over the world.
Developing and maintaining other people’s accounts
If you don’t want to develop a personal account, don’t do it. Maybe it will be much more profitable for you to start promoting other people’s accounts. Here are the three most in-demand professions in this area:
- SMM specialist. He helps to draw up a content plan and come up with a design, prepares and uploads posts, works with bloggers.
- Targetologist. This person configures and launches paid targeted advertising.
- Administrator. He takes care of communication in the comments, organizing sweepstakes and contests, and working with advertisers.
SMM specialists, targeting experts, and administrators can get a job in the marketing department within the company, a marketing agency, as well as work as a freelancer.
Creating content for posts and stories
If you are good at writing texts, drawing pictures, photographing, shooting, and editing videos, there will also be a place for you on Instagram. Here are some options for what you can do:
- create content plans and write texts
- think over scenarios for selling chains
- shoot videos for brands and bloggers
- edit video for feeds, stories, IGTV
- draw pictures and process photos
- create AR masks
- create photo and video content for targeted advertising
- arrange photo sessions for personal and product blogs
Choose what is closest to you and offer your services. You can search for the first customers among your acquaintances. However, it will be better to promote yourself through popular bloggers.