With the rise of social media marketing, a new version of celebrity endorsement emerged. Social media influencers have revolutionized the way brands market their products.
Instagram that has more than a whopping 1 billion users worldwide is the best place for influencer marketing. Fantastic marketing features, beautiful design, visualization tools, and a user-friend interface has made it unique in the world.
Although some newly emerged platforms such as TikTok are remarkably growing, Instagram still has significant potential for marketing.
Influencers are definitely the winners in the current situations. Apart from marketing and advertising, experts from Social Tradia claim that influencers' accounts on IG will be sold easily, and therefore, they can earn a significant amount of money.
But the question is how influencers make money on Instagram.
Here is how:
Brand advocate
Being a brand ambassador is a common way of earning money among Instagram influencers. Ambassadorship is actually the most effective means of influencer marketing on Instagram. Companies hire influencers with long-term contracts and pay them out.
This is very profitable for influencers because they don't need to think about new clients. But to be a brand ambassador, you should naturally align with the brand's style and the target audience.
Sponsored posts
Unlike ambassadorship, which is usually long-term partnerships, sponsored posts are short-term collaboration for brand awareness.
This is the most prevalent means of making money for Instagram influencers, especially for beginners. Actually, it's also the simplest way because you need only share previously generated content and get money in return.
Brands are usually willing to have influencers share their posts featuring their products/services. It could be just one post or even a series of scheduled posts.
Branded content, tutorials, moments of even marketing, introducing new products, and much other content can be considered as sponsored posts.
Affiliate marketing
When you earn a portion of sales of products/services, you're doing affiliate marketing for a company. This kind of collaboration is great to ensure influencers get money based on their performance.
The more sales they earn through your activities, the more money you'll make. However, it's common among brands to offer pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, or other kinds of deals.
Content generation
Influencers are usually great content generators, so they can earn money by this skill. Creative copywriting, photography, info-graphic, video editing, and many other skills can help influencers earn money.
These skills can also enhance the quality of their own content on Instagram, so they will kill two birds with a single stone.
Event marketing
Event marketing is a great way of advertising products/services and can have long-term results because of face-to-face connections.
Influencers can earn money by holding such events. Brands can collaborate with niche influencers to capture the attention of more audiences to their event.
This is especially useful when companies want to launch a new product/service and want to broadcast their message as much as possible.
Education
Teaching is also a sought-after way of making money on Instagram. It is a bit upper class compared to other methods because you're not advertising other accounts' content.
If you have special skills and believe that people are ready to pay for these skills, you're highly likely to make a good fortune on Instagram.
For instance, if you know foreign languages, you can easily produce educational content and share them with your Instagram followers. You just need to encourage them to attend your online classes.
Live videos on Instagram are a great way to hold your class and earn money without any extra expenses. You don't need a traditional class to teach your students.
Webinars that are now common can either be live or pre-recorded. Apart from the money, you can appear like a niche thought leader by a good performance in these webinars.
Tips for newcomers
The competition in Instagram Influencer marketing is now really fierce, and it's really hard for newcomers to gain fame.
Here is a set of tips to help you optimize your Instagram performance and become an influencer.
Choose the right niche
It's obvious that people from all industries are now active on Instagram, but the thing is which industry can be more lucrative for you.
This is important to choose the right niche in which you can be useful to users and gain fame. Here are the top niches on the platform:
- Traveling
- Beauty
- Fashion
- Health and Fitness
- Lifestyle
- Parenting
- Business
- Music
Use Instagram to the full
To get the maximum exposure possible, you need to use all the features on Instagram. Apart from Feed Posts, Instagram has many other multi-media features like Stories, Live, IGTV, and Reels. Try to generate content for all these features to put your content in the eyes of as many users as possible.
Leverage the power of #hashtags
Hashtags are central to the search algorithm of Instagram and all other social media platforms. Using the right hashtags can help you rank for related searches on the explorer pages on Instagram. You need to know the most viral hashtags in your niche and use them under your posts.
Be informative and entertaining
Entertaining and also learning some new things are the major reasons for which users search through Instagram posts.
Therefore, you need to create informative content for your niche audiences and simultaneously avoid being boring.
Try to be as much creative as possible to make users remember your style and keep following your posts. Having a bit of humor in your posts can also be helpful.
Final word
Several different methods for earning money as an Instagram influencer were discussed in the article. Of course, there are other ways like opening an online shop or even developing tools or extensions which require more expertise. Obviously, these methods need more specialty, and not all influencers can afford to do them.
