Social media has offered many new things into this world. One of the most contentious things is the idea of influencers. Some people love them, many people hate them.
A social media influencer is someone with a large following on social media platforms. In turn, they often make a lot of money by being paid to advertise companies, products, and so on. Influencers can take home a lot of money every month, all from the comfort of their home.
Instagram is the birthplace of influencers and it remains the best platform to make a living. So, in this post, you will learn how to make money online through Instagram.
Step 1: Find your niche
The first step is to decide on the direction of your account. Unlike a personal Instagram account, your influencer one needs to focus on a specific thing. This could be fitness, baking, business, food, TV/movies, makeup – the list goes on and on. Think about what you enjoy and make that the focus of your account.
A lot of the most popular influencers are celebrities, but the ones that aren’t will have a niche market that they appeal to. This helps you create content for a specific audience. In turn, this helps you grow your brand.
Plus, when it comes to making money, having a niche is essential. You’ll learn more about why this is necessary in a moment.
Step 2: Grow your follower count
Followers are very important on Instagram. The more followers you have, the more influence you’ve got. As a result, brands will be more inclined to contact you about possible deals.
Thus, you need to grow your follower count as much as you can. This will be done by producing content for Instagram and using hashtags. A hashtag is basically a keyword that people might search for. It’s how users that don’t already follow you will find your page. They are essential and cannot be overlooked!
Some people are tempted to buy followers to inflate their presence. Unfortunately, this never works. It may look like you have a large influence, but the interactions on your post say otherwise.
Anyone can buy 10,000 followers, but it looks weird when you get a few hundred likes and under 10 comments. Instead, as this Upleap review shows, there are ways to get help when growing your page.
A platform like Upleap is useful as you get an advisor that helps you find your target audience and reel in new followers. That’s the key thing here – you don’t just need to grow your follower count, you need to gain targeted followers. This is how you increase engagement, which ultimately improves your influence.
Step 3: Use affiliate programs
Affiliate programs are set up almost specifically for influencers. They exist to promote brands or products to a wider audience. You can register with something like the Amazon affiliate program and start earning money.
With this approach, you have an affiliate link that you encourage people to click. As such, you basically advertise the products relating to the link. Whenever someone clicks the link and makes a purchase, you get a cut from the sale.
The trick is to only promote brands or products that:
- You believe in
- Relate to your audience
This increases the chances of people actually buying what you put out there. Also, the benefit of affiliate marketing is that you can sign up for as many programs as you like.
Step 4: Work directly with brands
Contact different brands and ask if they’re willing to work with you. Many brands will pay influencers for sponsored posts. In essence, they provide a brief for a post, you follow it, post it, and get paid. It doesn’t matter if anyone buys anything as a result of the post, which is an advantage of affiliate marketing.
As you get bigger, more brands will contact you for services like this. Therefore, you have to know when to agree or not. Some brands align with your page perfectly. For example, a fitness page that’s contacted by a resistance band company is the perfect fit.
Conversely, the same fitness page being contacted by McDonalds isn’t a good fit. You’d look stupid if you promoted a fast-food brand on your fitness page!
Brand deals can be highly profitable as people pay a lot of money. The bigger you get, the more money you will earn from deals like this. In fact, you can start setting your own rates!
These are the four basic steps to follow if you want to make money on Instagram. It seems easy, but it can be a long journey. Still, it’s worth the effort as you can make a mini fortune just by being an influencer.
