Did you know that a micro-influencer on Instagram with only 10k followers can make $88 per post? Also, Instagram is estimated to have 1.16 billion users by 2022?
Whether you know all these statistics or not, you should know what this means to you. As an influencer or brand, you have an immense opportunity to grow, build a massive community and make money on Instagram.
Top influencers on Instagram make millions of dollars per month. That means even if you’re not a famous celebrity or sports star, you can make a significant amount of money.
But the question that grips most people is, how to make money on Instagram? How to grow your following, reach people and monetize your account so that you can earn those dollars?
To help you understand all this, we’ve with us the founder of Women CEO Mindset, Paula, who went from 0 to 700k Instagram followers in 24 months and now making a serious amount of money from her Instagram page.
Today, we’ll let you know about the complete step-by-step process on how to make money on Instagram by growing your following organically.
How to Make Money on Instagram
Ok, so let’s cut to the chase and begin with learning how to get started with Instagram, grow and monetize it, and more importantly, how to make money on Instagram in 4 easy yet effective steps.
1. Build a Community And Create Value
The first thing you need to figure out is what niche or industry you’re in? If you’re already an entrepreneur or business owner, going into that specifically and creating value to build a community is the first step.
If you’re not an entrepreneur, or you just wanna start an Instagram account so that you can monetize it later, then decide what industry you wanna get into. The easiest way to go about is to start with what you already love doing. Because then, you would be more excited and motivated to do it every day.
So, for example, say you’re into fitness. Then, you’re going to start bringing value by sharing videos, how-to, nutrition, and all other stuff to build a community around fitness.
Once you build a community of people who love fitness or wanna be fit, you can then create products like ebooks, courses, personal coaching, etc., to start monetizing.
Providing value is the key to building a community because people are very result-oriented, and there are a lot of other options available.
Value is really about what you can teach. What is something that you’re good at, that you can give tips about, so it brings people a quick win, and they wanna learn more from you.
Give some value for free to position yourself as the expert in your field so that people wanna come back and purchase something from you because they know you can help them.
Remember, It’s not about how many followers you have or how many shoutouts you’ve got, but making people feel that you’re someone with value who can help them.
2. Be Consistent With Your Content
Once you figure out what your niche or industry is going to be, you have to be consistent in creating content in that niche. Content is what will convert those people to either follow you or purchase from you.
A lot of gurus will tell you different things about posting frequency, but Paula believes that it’s important to post every day. The Instagram algorithm prefers and shares content from pages that are more consistent.
Instagram wants its users to visit every day, so it gives preference to pages that posts every day as well. Also, it helps people recall your brand when you’re consistently present in their feeds. So post every day.
Now, do not just post anything for the sake of consistency because it is visible when you’re just posting for posting. And, also don’t overpost stuff because that may get annoying to your followers.
Post consistently anywhere from one to six posts per day. If you’re posting five times per day, then be consistent with five. Don’t make it five for one day, two for the next day, and nothing on the third day because that will not go well with the algorithm.
If you do not have the time to be consistent, then hire someone or automate the process as much as you can.
Also Read: Affiliate Marketing for Beginners in 2021
What Type of Content to Create?
People come to social media for three things: They want some education or value, they want some entertainment, or they just wanna feel good.
If you can combine these three things into your content, your account will grow super fast without needing any paid promotions.
So any piece of content that you create should serve at least one of these three things. Either it should be educational or valuable, entertaining, or inspiring or motivating.
Also, make sure that you stick to your niche or industry while trying to apply these things into your content because else, it will look irrelevant.
So, for example, if you’re a fitness page, you shouldn’t be sharing political memes for entertainment or entrepreneurship quotes for random motivation because that will probably not connect with your audience.
Another important thing to do is create sharable content. Content that people would like to share in their stories, feeds, or with their friends. The more people share, the more audience your post will reach.
Educational posts are sharable, quotes are sharable, memes are sharable, but random pictures or pictures of you are not sharable content.
3. The Hashtag Strategy
Hashtags play a very important role in your growth because that is one of the ways to reach a newer audience who aren’t following you yet.
The most common mistake people make while using hashtags is they keep on repeating the same hashtags every day. When you use the same set of hashtags every day, the algorithm thinks that you’re a robot who’s spamming.
To save yourself from getting labeled as a spammer, create some groups of hashtags for different types of posts. For example, a different set of hashtags for educational posts, a different one for motivational posts, and so on. Change your hashtags continuously.
Another big mistake that people commonly make is using very large hashtags with millions of posts, thinking that it will give them a bigger reach, which can’t be further from the truth.
The broader the hashtag you’ll use, the lesser your chances will be to get ranked on the first page of that hashtag, let alone the top 9 posts.
The whole purpose of using hashtags is trying to get to the top 9 posts because that’s where all the reach and all the engagement is.
By leveraging smaller hashtags that are very specific to your niche, you’re going to have a better chance of getting to the top 9 and get more people to interact and engage with your content.
For example, instead of using the hashtag fitness, try being specific and use #women’s fitness or #women’s fitness tips.
You don’t need to keep all your hashtags super small but have a healthy combination of both smaller & specific and larger & broad hashtags. Of course, it depends on the number of followers you currently have to decide how many bigger hashtags you can use.
It’s also important to track your hashtags and go through your insights every once or twice a week to see what’s working and what‘s not.
Instagram insights don’t really tell you which hashtags are working. So for that, you can use a tool called Flick, which lets you analyze and track your hashtags.
If you can get your hashtag strategy right, you’ll have a much higher chance of going viral and reaching hundreds of thousands of people.
4. How to Monetize
Ok, so the point of everything, in the end, is to make money. There’s no point in growing an Instagram account if you can’t monetize it.
For the inspirational purpose and to let you know what’s possible, Paula made six figures just with one product, her ebook, that she sold to her followers.
You can also make a serious amount of money with Instagram if you see it as a business instead of just a hobby.
You can monetize your Instagram by creating your own products, services, or coaching, like Paula, or help other people grow their own Instagram.
Even if you don’t wanna create your own products or services, you can monetize your Instagram by promoting and selling other people’s products, commonly called affiliate marketing.
You can partner up with different companies and people who have a product that can benefit your community and promote that on your page for a fee or commission. Share only the products that you believe your audience will love, or it will reduce your credibility.
You can also do advertising on your page. Once you have a big enough community in a particular industry, brands and companies in that space will reach out to you to give them shoutouts for brand awareness.
There are literally hundred different ways you can monetize your Instagram. All you need to do is just pick a niche, be consistent with your content, put in the work, and see yourself grow.
#1 Best Selling Author. Helping you accelerate your retirement with Triple Compounding™ Former engineer on a mission to help 1 million households take control of their finances. Founder & CEO of Invest Diva.