Have you ever wondered how you can make money on Instagram – or even if making money on Instagram is possible at all? If this is something you’ve been considering, this guide will help you learn more about the different earning opportunities available through the Instagram. I hope these tips will help you learn more about making money through this ever-growing platform – and maybe even provide a part-time or full-time income as a result.
Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decided to make a purchase through my links, at no extra cost to you.
Is Making Money on Instagram Possible?
Is making money on Instagram possible? It’s a reasonable thing to ask; after all, no one wants to sink their time and money into an endeavor that won’t pan out for them. Considering that the average number of Instagram followers per account is 150, it’s easy to question whether these followers could begin generating a passive or active income.
Fortunately, making money on Instagram is absolutely possible, and there are plenty of different earning opportunities to help you monetize your content and begin drawing in revenue from your social efforts. However, the average Instagram account with 150 followers will likely struggle to make a reliable part-time income through the platform, and as such, it’s crucial you first begin to grow your exposure to make the most of your Instagram account and every post you publish.
How to Increase Exposure for Your Instagram Account
Making money on Instagram is not only possible, but can also provide a very lucrative earning opportunity for many people! Still, before you can begin looking at how to make money on your Instagram content, you’ll need to start by gaining more followers.
This can seem a little daunting, but there are over 1 billion monthly users on the platform. What’s more, the 150 followers average is usually achieved without much effort through friends and family alone – and as such, growing your exposure doesn’t need to be a major source of stress. We’ve outlined some key milestones and goals as follows to help you begin gaining more exposure through your Instagram account and help get you to a good position for making money online.
If you’re willing to invest some money in tools to help your Instagram grow, consider a service like Social Auto Boost. It offers features such as auto liking relevant posts, auto following and unfollowing relevant users, auto commenting, and gives you access to detailed insights and stats for your account. If you don’t want to spend a lot of time manually growing your Instagram account, then options like these can take the pressure off and speed up your account growth.
How Many Followers Do I Need to Begin Making Money on Instagram?
Before we can look at the best methods for how to make money on Instagram, we need to start by outlining a suitable goal for account exposure. There are several key points to consider here, but we’ll start small to ensure your account has the best chance of achieving early growth.
We’ve already outlined that the average number of followers on Instagram is around 150. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most (if not all) of these tend to be friends and family. However, to begin making income on Instagram, you’ll need to attract a larger following to your account – and we’ve outlined several key milestones as follows to give you an idea of a suitable target.
Nano-influencer status
When establishing your Instagram account, the first goal you should aspire towards is to achieve around 1000 followers. At this level, you may want to begin looking at monetization options to begin earning an income for your Instagram account – and it’s from this point that most people also begin to notice more rapid growth on their accounts as well.
Micro-influencer status
There’s a much larger gap between becoming a micro-influencer and a beginning influencer – which is why we recommend starting to consider monetization opportunities from around 1000+ followers.
By the time you hit around 10,000 followers, you will then be considered a beginning influencer. When you hit this new milestone, you’ll likely begin to see new opportunities for your Instagram earnings overall – and if you’ve not begun monetizing your content already, you should definitely begin considering the opportunities this new status could offer.
Mid-tier influencer status
For most people looking to earn an income through Instagram, a mid-tier influencer status will be the end goal with 50,000 followers. While this might seem like a lot of people, it’s not impossible to achieve with dedication and perseverance (but you’ll need to dedicate time to this effort).
At this level, you can gain access to many more lucrative earning opportunities. What’s more, managing this number of followers often tends to be a lot easier; as you begin to look at higher numbers of followers, you may need to begin seeking help for your earning opportunities.
Macro and mega influencers
Finally, there are the mega influencers, and these typically tend to be household names and highly popular celebrities with over 500,000 and 1 million followers, respectively. Now, if your end goal is to earn hundreds of thousands, if not millions, through Instagram, this is the level of followers you’d need to target.
Still, this goal isn’t for the faint-hearted, and it takes a good deal of dedication and patience. Even then, most people will struggle to get anywhere near this level of engagement without a lucky break, and you’d need to work tirelessly to gain thousands of new followers every day. Just to put this figure into perspective, even if you gained 1,000 followers per day for your account, it would still take the best part of 1.5 years to reach this level – and that’s a very optimistic goal. For most, a target of 50-100 new followers per day is more reasonable.
So, if you’re looking to monetize your Instagram account, we highly recommend focusing on achieving either micro or mid-tier influencer status. And, if you continue to grow to reach macro status, that’s an added bonus!
Start With Family and Friends
So, we’ve outlined the rough number of followers you need to begin monetizing your Instagram account – ideally, a minimum of 1000, with continual growth thereafter. However, it’s the earliest followers who can often be the hardest to get – and with this in mind, we recommend you start with your friends and family.
Generally speaking, friends and family members will be happy to follow your account even if they don’t have a large vested interest in your content. As such, this can put your account in good stead initially to attract the remaining 850 followers or so whom you’ll need to begin monetizing your content. However, it’s those people who are much harder to target – but we’ve outlined some additional ideas to help your account gain early exposure as follows.
Focus on Content You Enjoy
One of the first tips we can give to begin growing your Instagram account beyond just your friends and family members is to focus on publishing content you genuinely enjoy creating. It’s easy to get lured in by lucrative earning opportunities, such as makeup content or the like. But if you don’t have a genuine passion for the niche you’ve picked as your Instagram specialty, you’ll likely struggle to keep up with content.
As we’ll cover shortly, providing regular content on your Instagram channel is crucial so you’ll want to choose a niche you can commit time to. By contrast, if you pick a niche that seems to be a big money-maker, but which you don’t have a vested interest in, you’ll inevitably struggle to keep up with content schedules and the like.
Quality is crucial for Instagram posts; therefore, if you’ve picked out a niche that you’re not genuinely invested or experienced in, you might find that the engagement with your content suffers as a result. Therefore, it’s often a far more lucrative option to target a niche that you can specialize in and genuinely provide quality content for, rather than one you’ll struggle to grow over time.
Publish New Content Regularly – But Not Too Often
In order to attract new followers to your Instagram account, it’s crucial that you’ve considered an effective publishing schedule. In all too many cases, new Instagrammers make the mistake of posting sporadically, at times posting multiple times in one day, and at others going weeks without posting new content.
Unfortunately, this can seriously damage your reputation and the engagement with your content overall; instead, sticking to a more regimented posting schedule can often be a good way to encourage long-term engagement with your posts and encourage more people to follow your account.
So, what would an effective posting schedule be? This will vary depending on the type of content you publish and the number of followers you have, but posting daily or every other day is often a good place to start. As the number of followers grows, you may be able to dedicate more time to posting – and this increase in posts may also be a good way to reward existing followers for referring their friends to your account.
Schedule Posts to Hit the Right Times
Scheduling posts for a regular interval is important – but so is the time of day that you’re posting. You ideally want posts to be published at a time when your followers are more likely to be online – for example, during lunch breaks at work or after the office has closed.
According to an engagement test conducted by Kicksta, the following are the best times to post on Instagram:
- Monday: 6 am, 10 am, and 10 pm EST
- Tuesday: 2 am, 4 am, and 9 am EST
- Wednesday: 7 am, 8 am and 11 pm EST
- Thursday: 9 am, 12 pm, and 7 pm EST
- Friday: 5 am, 1 pm, and 3 pm EST
- Saturday: 11 am, 7 pm, and 8 pm EST
- Sunday: 7am, 8am, and 4pm EST
Carefully choosing when to publish new content can be a highly effective method to drive new engagement with your account. Ensuring that your followers are able to enjoy new content at a time when they need it most is one of the best ways to drive new engagement with your channel.
If you are unlikely to be available at the time that most of your viewers are wanting content, pre-recording/writing or scheduling posts for a more suitable time of day can be a good strategy to implement. Tailwind is a website and app that allows you to schedule posts to Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest. The service comes with a free trial of 30 scheduled posts if you want to try it out.
Quality Over Quantity; Target Organic Followers for your Account
A common mistake that many new Instagrammers make with their accounts is to try and drive new followers quickly – without considering the engagement of each follower. It’s far more valuable for an account to have 500 engaged followers than 5000 who never bother to engage with your content; with this in mind, it’s critical that you target organic, vested followers rather than fake accounts or disinterested followers.
There are several key reasons why the quality of followers is crucial:
- One of the most common strategies to gain new followers inorganically in a short space of time is to pay for follows – however, this offers an incredibly poor investment opportunity overall. Since only a handful of these followers will ever engage with your content (if any), you’ll struggle to see any genuine return on investment from these accounts, and will merely have spent money on an ineffective marketing campaign for your account overall.
- Unengaged followers will often provide a deceptive outlook for your account, which can harm both you and your genuine followers. If a new organic follower goes to subscribe to your account but then notices that you get very little engagement on your content (despite supposedly having thousands of followers), this can give the impression that your account offers low-quality content – and may actually put people off following your account as a result.
Make Use of Hashtags and SEO Strategies carefully
One of the easiest ways to get your content seen on Instagram is by using trending hashtags in your post. This simple form of search engine optimization helps passionate, genuine followers find your content and can potentially help you drive new engagement overall.
Naturally, hashtags can often be competitive, so it’s best to try and jump on trends early to make the most of the opportunity. What’s more, we highly recommend that you only use hashtags that are genuinely related to your content; including an irrelevant, trending hashtag won’t drive new conversions and followers for your account.
Services like Tailwind, which we mentioned earlier, can show you how competitive each hashtag is and can recommend you the best ones to use based on the content in your post. This way, you know which hashtags are likely to net you the best engagement.
Keeping track of popular hashtags is also a great way to find ideas for new posts! Knowing what topics are trending and what doesn’t offer to much competition can help you curate content with the best chance of going viral.
Keep the Number of Target Keywords and Hashtags to a Minimum
A common mistake that many people make when it comes to their Instagram content is trying to target too many keywords or hashtags. Keyword or hashtag stuffing the content will often just result in your account posting poor-quality content that leaves little impact on your followers and struggles to drive new conversions.
Instead, a more effective strategy for Instagram SEO is to focus on just one or two keywords or hashtags per post – and if there are more to target, simply put out more posts. This can help your account target the necessary number of keywords while still remaining focused on providing high-quality and valuable content for your followers.
Try to Create Valuable, Effective-Length Content
Compared to other social media channels, deciding the most effective content length on Instagram can be quite challenging, namely due to the many different content types available. As such, when publishing content on Instagram, you should carefully consider the most appropriate length of content to target SEO and engage your followers without making the text drag on for too long.
The most popular forms of content that drive high engagement include images, videos, and text based posts, with stories, polls, and live videos following closely behind.
With this in mind, if you’re focusing primarily on images and videos, you may want to consider the length of description you provide carefully; around 100 words is likely the most effective in this case. Meanwhile, for a text-based post, you’ll want to carefully balance length with engagement to ensure that as many readers as possible finish the post; around 300 words is generally a good target for posts of this kind to balance length with engagement potential overall.
To recap:
- Around 100 words for image/video descriptions
- Around 300 words for text-based posts
Struggling with Growth? Reach Out to Other Instagram Accounts for Support
SEO and natural keyword/hashtag inclusion can be difficult, and these strategies often require your account to publish content at just the right time to hit the early trend. As such, if you have been struggling with this, another option that could be effective is to reach out to other Instagram accounts for promotion.
While the big-name accounts may be unwilling to help, accounts with a similar number of followers to you are much more likely to get on board. So, create valuable content, and see if other accounts would be willing to share it to their own followers; even if you can only target people with 200 followers, five shares would result in a total exposure increase of 1000 viewers. And, even if only 10% of viewers saw the content and followed your channel. As a result, this would still boost your followers by 100 – 10% of the total nano-influencer goal from just one post!
How to Make Money on Instagram
So, you’ve hit that milestone one-thousand followers, and you’re now ready to begin making a little income from your Instagram posts. But how can you go about this? Well, there are actually numerous earning opportunities through Instagram, and carefully considering these may help you make the most of your channel.
But remember – just because you’ve hit that goal doesn’t mean you should stop striving for greater numbers of followers. Continual growth is key even once you’ve achieved your initial goal if you want to keep your Instagram account drawing revenue. Even if you’re satisfied with the income potential from your early account, attracting new followers is crucial to replace those who’ve stopped watching out for your new content or have left the platform overall.
Therefore, every post you publish on the platform should still be aimed at attracting new followers through effective SEO strategies and the like; with time, this can help your Instagram account grow to new heights. With a modest and achievable goal of 30 new followers per day, you’ll then reach micro-influencer status within a year – and this is when the real income opportunities begin.
#1 Use Live Badges
It’s one of the newest earning opportunities on Instagram, but definitely offers a valuable opportunity for many creators who produce live content. The live badges system allows viewers and followers to purchase a badge, which allows them a space on the creator’s badge list – and offers income potential for creators as well.
How Much Can I Earn Through Live Badges?
Badge prices begin at $0.99, and this low price ensures that badges are an effective way to encourage your followers to donate to your live streams.
Even if only 2% of followers purchased badges to begin with, and only purchased one heart at a time, that would still offer an earning potential of approximately $20 per live stream (assuming our minimum threshold of 1000 followers). Over the course of a year, with just one live stream per week, this would offer an additional $1000 in revenue alone – something that’s well worth considering as part of your income potential on Instagram.
But, as with most online earning opportunities, your income potential is closely linked to the number of engagements you receive. Therefore, on the same example, if you grow your account to 10,000 followers over a year or so, the income from badge purchases would further increase to a staggering $200 per stream, or $20,000 annually. That’s almost a full-time income just from a weekly live stream – a highly lucrative earning opportunity indeed.
#2 Add IGTV Ads
Unfortunately, IGTV ads are only available for creators from the UK, US, and Australia at present – but if you live in any of these countries, they can offer excellent earning opportunities.
Of course, ad revenue is one of the obvious earning options for online content – but for a good reason: it’s reliable and effective! And, since Instagram offers its creators a very generous 55% share of advert revenue, it might be a good option to add to your content, allowing Instagrammers to increase the monetization potential of their accounts.
#3 Seek Brand Partnerships and Sponsorships
Another excellent earning opportunity for Instagram accounts, particularly as your account begins to grow higher, is to seek out brand partnerships and sponsorships. The number of businesses who are willing to pay to have their products promoted is high, and so extending the reach of your account to the wider business field within your niche may offer many lucrative earning opportunities.
A notable point here is that anyone can earn decent revenues through brand partnerships and sponsorships, even if they’re only a nano-influencer. Of course, you’ll likely want to look for sponsors outside of the big-name brands; companies such as Maybelline New York and Prada will inevitably already have their chosen Instagram sponsors and will pay huge sums of money for the privilege.
Instead, as a newer influencer, you may want to set your sights towards new startups and smaller retailers whose marketing budgets will be more limited. Naturally, you won’t make thousands per sponsorship like macro and mega influencers would – but you can easily earn a few hundred dollars with a smaller follower base by targeting smaller startups and the like.
With this in mind, with one sponsorship per month, you could potentially be looking at an easy $1000 revenue per year. What’s more, it’s worth remembering that your small Instagram account offers something potentially more valuable to marketers overall; a personalized service, something that many mega influencers are simply too busy to offer.
#4 Open an Instagram Shop
Another option you could consider to monetize your Instagram account is to open a shop on the platform. Not only is it completely free to set up a shop on Instagram, but users also only pay a commission when customers make a purchase through the shop; as such, there’s no risk of paying for a shop that doesn’t bring in a positive return on investment.
A notable benefit of establishing an Instagram shop is that the shop can be effortlessly integrated with numerous other features on the Instagram platform, too. For example, if live streaming content is your preferred option, you can easily use the live shopping function to promote and market your products. Alternatively, the use of shoppable posts and stories further helps creators extend their product range’s reach.
Earning opportunities will vary depending on the number of viewers you receive for your content and the price of your product range. Still, let’s assume the following scenario: you sell a choice of five $15 print-on-demand products per month – for example, a branded t-shirt with your Instagram account’s logo – through your Instagram shop. Even if you were able to sell each of these to a minimal 0.5% of your total followers, you’d be looking at a total sales volume of 25 sales per month from 1000 followers, or $375 before costs. That’s $4500 per year in total – not a bad revenue at all for a nano-influencer.
Meanwhile, if you were able to grow your followers to the aforementioned goal of 10,000 after a year, you’d likely be looking at even higher income potential. This could potentially be as much as $45,000 before production costs from just a handful of products alone – and so this option is definitely worth considering. What’s more, many followers will be happy to purchase your products solely to support your channel, so the expected sales potential may be much higher than this with a good design and engaging content overall.
#5 Promote Your Content on Other Channels
As a final point of note, it’s worth considering how you can use your Instagram account to bolster your earning potential on other channels, too. If you own a blog or have a YouTube channel, both of which are able to draw revenue, you can easily link to these from your Instagram account – and every redirect has the potential to bolster your revenue and income potential overall.
Therefore, this is an increasingly popular strategy for driving new engagement with your other earning channels and can also provide excellent engagement results on Instagram itself. But remember – you should never treat your Instagram account as solely “sacrificial.” It’s easy to fall into the trap of using your Instagram account solely to redirect viewers to your other channels – but it’s always important to keep your Instagram engaging in its own right to be successful with monetization.
Final Thoughts
Without a doubt, making money on Instagram doesn’t need to be impossible, and there are numerous excellent methods you could consider for how to make money on Instagram easily and reliably. However, before you can begin monetizing your social media content, you’ll first need to develop a following on the platform and establish yourself as an up-and-coming Instagram influencer. Therefore, to see the best results from your efforts to make money on Instagram, we highly recommend you start by dedicating time to gain exposure for your account before looking at earning opportunities.