How to Make Money on Instagram in 2024
Introduction
If you're not turning your Instagram engagements into dollar bills, you are missing out on something! Yes, welcome to our guide on how to make money on Instagram in 2024.
Instagram isn't just for posting selfies anymore; it's a bustling marketplace where influence translates directly into income. Whether you're an artist showcasing your latest work, a fitness guru sharing workout tips, or a foodie posting mouth-watering recipes, there's room for you.
But how does one transform a following into a flowing income?
From creating persuading content to Instagram Shopping, the platform allows you to explore many business-friendly features. Keep reading to discover actionable tips and insights on monetizing your passion!
Setting up Your Instagram Business or Creator Profile
Instagram is the most preferred platform for sharing visuals like videos and images, and it has become a favorite spot for businesses looking to connect with customers. Nearly 90% of Instagram users follow at least one business account, highlighting its significance for brand exposure and customer engagement.
Both Instagram Business and Creator profiles serve different purposes. Creator accounts are tailored for public figures, artists, and influencers, focusing on personal brand growth and audience interaction.
In contrast, business profiles are ideal for companies, organizations, and service providers. They offer tools for wider brand management and paid advertising to make money on Instagram. Creating a business profile gives you access to key Instagram analytics and features like Badges and Shopping.
How to Set Your Instagram Business Profile?
To start a business profile on Instagram, you’ll first need to set up a personal Instagram account. Here’s how you can switch to your Instagram business account in simple steps to make money:
- Go to your profile and click the “Edit profile” button below your profile image.
- You’ll find an option labeled “Switch to professional account.” Tap on it to proceed.
- Don't worry. You have the flexibility to choose the category that best fits your business. You can even decide if you want this category displayed on your profile.
- After selecting your category, you’ll be asked whether you are a business or a content creator. Choose “Business”.
- Next, check your contact details. Make sure to add your business email address and contact number, especially if you wish to have a direct “Call” button on your profile. If you have a physical store, adding an address can lend more credibility to your profile.
- Tap on “Next” after updating your details, and your Business profile is all set up. You can start experimenting with how to monetize on Instagram.
Optimize your Instagram profile
After switching to this account, it's time to create a profile that captures the essence of your brand and attracts your target audience:
Profile name and picture: Use your business name and a recognizable profile picture, such as your brand's logo.
Bio: Write a concise and engaging bio with a clear value proposition, letting visitors know immediately what your brand is about and what they can expect.
Contact information: You must now include all your relevant contact info, such as email, phone number, and location, to make your business appear credible and accessible.
Website link: Add a link for followers to your own website or online store directly. This will drive traffic and support your sales and Instagram marketing services.
Strategies to Make Money on Instagram
Before you start making money online through Instagram, it’s important to understand the platform's rules for what you can post. Here's a simpler way to understand Instagram’s rules to earn money from your content:
Stick to supported content types: Don't use formats that don’t support Instagram monetization, like videos that just show a static image, GIFs that loop endlessly, slideshows, or videos made mainly of text.
Engage authentically: Don’t ask your followers to like, share, or comment on your posts just to boost engagement. It can hurt your reputation and make brands wary of working with you.
Avoid sensitive and prohibited content: Do not post content that could be misleading, plagiarised, or offering questionable medical advice. Also, avoid talking about politics, religion, or crime.
Keep it clean and professional: Content that’s sexually suggestive, uses strong language, or includes disturbing images can turn off advertisers.
Considering all these, use the following strategies to learn how to make money on Instagram in 2024.
Partner with Brands
Brand partnerships help creators make money on Instagram by collaborating with companies to promote their own products or services through quality content. This includes sponsored posts and stories, affiliate marketing, and exclusive collaborations.
The key is to partner with brands that have similar values as your personal brand and audience interests to improve engagement. Consider some of the following tips.
Find the Right Brands
To find suitable brands to partner with:
- Identify your niche: You must clearly define your niche and understand what products or services resonate with your audience.
- Use tools: Platforms like Instagram’s Creator Marketplace help connect creators with brands looking for partnerships, making it easier to find matches that align with your audience.
3. Network: Consider attending industry events and using social media to network with brand representatives.
Negotiate partnerships
When entering into a partnership, it’s crucial to negotiate terms that benefit both parties. Consider the following negotiation tips to make money on Instagram easily through sponsored posts.
- Define the scope: Clearly outline what is expected regarding content creation and the timeline.
- Discuss compensation: Compensation can be in the form of money, free products, or commissions. Base this on your reach, engagement rate, and the effort required.
- Set clear terms: Agree on the content's use and any exclusivity terms.
Creating Content
If you want to know how to make money on Instagram in 2024, your content creation for brand partnerships should focus on integrating the brand into your style. You can do this in a way that feels natural and engaging in the following ways.
- Be Transparent: Use disclosures like #ad or #sponsored to maintain transparency with your audience. Instagram has its own tool, paid partnership labels, to help with transparency. Here is an example of how Kendall Jenner uses the ‘paid partnership’ label in her post.
- Focus on Quality: High-quality, creative content that aligns with your brand's and the sponsor's aesthetic will drive better engagement.
- Engage Your Audience: Encourage interaction by prompting your Instagram subscriptions to comment, share, or visit the brand’s page.
Examples of successful partnerships
Look at successful brand partnerships for inspiration:
- Fashion Influencers: Fashion influencers often partner with clothing brands to showcase their outfits in sponsored posts and stories, driving sales through tagged products. Look at how creator Georgina promotes two other brands in one of her styling posts. She also mentions that it is part of a paid partnership.
- Fitness Gurus: Certain sports and health brands pay influencers by collaborating to promote equipment, supplements, or apparel through workout videos and discount codes. Look at how this trainer promotes her attire sponsor casually in her post.
Monitor success
After the campaign, analyze the performance of your sponsored posts:
- Track engagement: Use Instagram’s built-in tools to track your content's performance in terms of likes, comments, shares, and more.
- Report back to brands: Provide brands with detailed reports on engagement metrics and ROI. This can help in securing future partnerships and adjusting strategies for better performance.
Affiliate Marketing
Combining Instagram and affiliate marketing, two multibillion-dollar sectors, can make a great, profitable side business. 40% of consumers make a confident purchase when an influencer recommends a product. Affiliate marketers make money on Instagram when their followers buy a product they recommended.
Set up your affiliate marketing strategy
To make money on Instagram affiliate marketing, you must first switch your personal Instagram account to a professional one, choosing either a Creator or Business profile. Next, choose affiliate marketers that align with your brand and audience.
Don’t forget to set a clear expectation. Is your compensation based on pay-per-click or cost-per-acquisition?
Optimizing affiliate link usage
Your affiliate links are vital for video monetization. Place a single, versatile link in your bio that can redirect to a landing page with multiple affiliate links, or if promoting a single product, update this link accordingly.
While you cannot have clickable links in captions on Instagram, including a clear call to action asking followers to click the link-in-your bio can be effective. Look at how @nailsbyalsn, a creator, maintains all her affiliate links in a single place.
Leverage Instagram’s features
Utilize Instagram's features to maximize your Instagram marketing efforts:
- Reels and Stories: These features are excellent for engagingly promoting products. Ensure each Instagram story or Reel has a strong call to action, encouraging viewers to check out the link in your bio or use your affiliate code. Apparently, 40% of consumers expect coupon codes before a purchase.
Look at this creator, Karen offering a 12% discount exclusively for her followers who wish to purchase the coat using her coupon code. This way, she earns a commission for every purchase.
- Posts: Regular feed posts can also be used to promote affiliate products. Again, direct followers to the link in your bio and ensure that each post adds value to maintain follower interest and engagement.
Analyze and adjust your strategy
You should regularly review the performance of your affiliate posts. Analyze the content types that generate the most clicks and sales, and adjust your strategy to optimize results. Tools provided by affiliate networks can help track performance and manage Instagram payments more effectively.
Sell Your Products
A recent survey found that 68% of men and 74% of women prefer Instagram shopping over other social media platforms. Instagram users, on average, spend 12 hours a month on the app. Why not monetize this opportunity? Start with the following considerations.
Setting up your Instagram shop
As mentioned already, switch to an Instagram business profile to begin. This will enable you to access essential business features like Instagram Shopping. You can then manually add your products to the Instagram catalog or sync with platforms like Shopify for easier management.
Marketing your products
Once your Instagram shop is set up, you can start to focus on marketing strategies to promote your products:
- Product Tags: You can use Instagram’s tagging features to tag products in your posts, which will directly link viewers to your online store, where they can make purchases. Here’s an example of where you can use product mentions and tags. It makes it easy for the followers to locate the products and make a decision.
- Engaging Content: Remember to share high-quality content with calls to action, such as “tap to shop,” to direct Instagram users to your product pages.
- Instagram Reels: Use reels to showcase your products dynamically. This will help you get the attention of potential customers and boost sales.
Building engagement
Where there is no engagement, there is no conversion. These two strategies have proven to increase engagement among Instagram followers.
- User-Generated Content (UGC): It is good to encourage your customers to talk about their experiences with your products. So you have your social proof and extend your reach as new users see real people endorsing your products.
- Influencer marketing: Are you considering a wider reach? You can partner with influencers aligning with your brand to tap into their followers and gain credibility.
Let’s look at how the influencer @that.veganbabe uses a video to promote plant-based milk from Almond Cow. Also, note how she uses the hashtag #ad to inform her followers that it’s a marketing collaboration.
Utilizing Instagram features
Instagram features like posts, reels, and stories provide entertainment. But they offer you even more if you want to earn money.
- Instagram stories: Stories help highlight new products, share promotions, or link directly to your selling products. If your Instagram followers are over 10,000, you can add swipe-up links to drive traffic directly to your online store. In the example below, Spotify uses the swipe-up option in their story to get their followers to create an account.
- Behind-the-scenes content: Share content that gives insights into how your selling products are made or who makes them, building a deeper connection with your audience.
Email List Building
When you look at it from a business perspective, Instagram subscribers are potential leads. If you need to expand your business, you must nurture them. But how do you do that on Instagram without sounding intrusive? Get them to be on your mailing list.
Over 25 million businesses promote their products on Instagram. That’s why the app provides many business-friendly features that make it easier. You can leverage these features to build your mailing list, too. How? Consider the following steps.
Optimize your Instagram bio
Remember, your Instagram bio is your audience's first point of contact, so make it count. Include a clear and compelling call to action (CTA) and a clickable link to a landing page where followers can sign up for your email list. Look at how Moral Melody Skincare uses a link for the followers to join their email list in their Instagram bio.
Leverage lead magnets
You can offer something valuable in return for email sign-ups. This could be a free download, exclusive content, or a discount code. Promote these lead magnets in your Instagram posts and stories to incentivize followers to provide their email addresses. Ensure your lead magnets are relevant and valuable to the target audience to improve your conversion rates.
Run contests and giveaways
Instagram contests and giveaways are highly effective for boosting engagement and growing your email list. Make email sign-up a condition for contest entry. This can expand your email list with potential customers interested in your offerings. Look at this contest, for example.
The creator promotes another page while also increasing their own reach. They invite followers to participate in a contest. This naturally increases the followers for both pages. Not just that, the contest participants are rewarded with their products, which is again a great way to launch and promote new products.
Create a custom landing page
This one tip can double your chances of becoming a big brand— develop a landing page specifically for your Instagram audience! This page should be straightforward, with a simple form to fill out and clear information on what subscribers receive in return.
Targeted landing pages can help you track the effectiveness of your Instagram campaigns by using UTM parameters to monitor traffic and conversions.
Regularly post about your email list
Don’t hesitate to frequently remind your followers about the perks of signing up for your email list. Create regular posts highlighting exclusive content, insider access, or special offers they’ll receive by subscribing. This keeps the email list at the top of your Instagram followers' minds like the influencer does here. Creator Johanna here invites her followers to subscribe to her newsletter through her post.
Live Badges
Instagram Live Badges offers a new concept for creators to monetize their live streams by allowing viewers to purchase badges during broadcasts. These badges appear next to the viewer's name in the live chat, providing them visibility and showing their support for the creator.
Live Badges function similarly to digital tips. Viewers can choose from different badge levels, which are represented by hearts. Each heart has a different price point, from $0.99 for one heart to $4.99 for three hearts.
This is how badges appear next to your names in a live stream.
These purchases support the creators financially and highlight the supporters’ comments, making them more visible during the live session. Here’s how to make the most of this feature:
Eligibility and setup
To use Live Badges, Instagram creators need to meet specific criteria:
- Reside in an eligible country
- Be over 18 years old
- Have a professional account (either a creator or business account)
- Have at least 10,000 followers
- Comply with Instagram monetization policies
If eligible, you can enable Live Badges by navigating to your Instagram feed, tapping "Professional dashboard," and selecting "Badges."
Why use Live Badges to make money on Instagram?
Live Badges not only provide a direct income stream but also allow creators to:
- Identify and interact with top fans during live sessions.
- Receive financial tips as a token of appreciation from their highly engaged audience.
- Enhance community building by acknowledging and rewarding supporters during live streams.
Now that you know how to set and monetize Instagram badges, consider these best practices, too:
Promote your live sessions: Use tools like the Countdown Sticker in Instagram stories to let your followers know when you’ll go live. This can help increase viewer numbers and potential badge purchases.
Engage with your audience: You can host Instagram FAQs and acknowledge those purchasing badges during live streams. It encourages more viewers to buy badges and builds a sense of community and appreciation. Look at how creator Jon Youshaei hosted a live stream to do this.
Experiment with content: Monitor which types of live content attract more badge purchases and adjust your strategy accordingly to maximize your earnings.
Instagram Ads and Reels
Instagram Reel ads are an exciting avenue for reaching a vast audience, with ads capable of reaching up to 675.3 million people. These ads are displayed full-screen and can last up to 30 seconds, offering a dynamic way to capture attention.
They autoplay and loop, similar to regular Reels, but with the added benefit of directing users straight to your own website or product page. The algorithm favors content from Instagram accounts users interact with, so creating content that encourages engagement will help increase your visibility.
Before we look at how to make money on Instagram in 2024 through Reel ads, let’s first understand the best practices for reels.
- Optimal Length: The ideal length for Reels is 15 to 30 seconds, catering to Instagram users' short attention spans.
- Posting Time: Post your Reels during high-engagement times, generally in the mornings from Monday to Thursday.
- Content Quality: Ensure your Reels are high quality, with a resolution of 1080x1920 pixels, to avoid blurry or awkwardly cropped visuals.
- Engagement Features: Use features like hashtags to increase visibility and explore the use of trending audio to make your Reels more discoverable.
In the following example, Bearbottom Clothing increased engagement and conversion by 19% using licensed music on its Instagram ad Reel.
Setting up Reels ads:
Instagram also allows you to turn your Reels into ads, which can appear in feeds, stories, or the explore tab, thus broadening your potential audience reach. You can consider the following when setting up Reels as ads:
- Ad Objectives: When setting up your Reels ads, you can set objectives such as brand awareness, reach, traffic, or conversions.
- Targeting and Budget: Customize your target audience and budget according to your marketing needs. Using precise targeting will ensure that your ads get viewed by users who are most likely interested in your products or services.
- Boosting Reels: If a particular Reel performs organically well, consider boosting it to maximize its reach and engagement. This is a cost-effective strategy to capitalize on content already resonating with your audience.
Here is a good example of Reel ads from Allbirds.
Wrapping Up
With Instagram's expanding toolkit for monetization and engagement, there's never been a better time to transform your Instagram presence into a revenue stream. From affiliate programs to selling personalized merchandise, each scroll and click can potentially bring in new financial opportunities. But if you think beyond social media platforms and ads, try optimizing FreshLearn for a stable income stream.
Yes, if you have skills and niche expertise, you can use them to create high-quality content. FreshLearn could be your next big milestone.
FreshLearn allows creators to easily create and market online courses, live workshops, and digital products. With features like a 0% commission on sales, integrated payment gateways, and a drag-and-drop course builder, our platform empowers creators to turn their expertise into income efficiently.
Looking for a reliable platform to monetize your content? Try FreshLearn today!
FAQs
1. How many followers do you need to make money on Instagram?
There isn't a strict follower count required to make money on Instagram, as the engagement rate is often more crucial than how many Instagram followers you have. You can begin to monetize with as few as 1,000 followers if they are highly engaged. However, more followers typically enhance your earning potential, especially if you start reaching 10,000 or more, which opens up additional features like Swipe Up in Instagram Stories
2. How much can you earn on Instagram?
Earning on Instagram depends widely on factors like your niche, engagement rate, how many followers you have, and the type of content you create. Micro-influencers often make between $150 and $500 per post, while top Instagram influencers with higher follower counts can make substantially more, even up to several thousand per post. The most lucrative sectors are typically beauty, fitness, and fashion.
3. What are Live Badges and how do they work?
Live Badges allows viewers to support their favorite creators during live videos by purchasing hearts (badges) priced between $0.99 and $4.99. Creators can make money on Instagram directly from their audience by showcasing their real-time content. This feature is currently available to eligible creators in the U.S. and is being tested in other regions.
4. How do you optimize your profile for success?
To optimize your Instagram page for success, ensure your bio communicates your brand message. Use relevant keywords, maintain a consistent content style, and leverage Instagram's features like Stories, Reels, and IGTV to engage your audience. Regularly updating your content and interacting with more followers through comments and messages can also help boost your profile's visibility.
5. What is the best niche for Instagram success?
Profitable niches on Instagram include health and wellness, travel, fashion, beauty, business, and lifestyle. These niches engage large audiences and are frequently targeted by brands for collaborations and sponsorships. You must choose a niche that aligns with your passions and where you can consistently create engaging content for long-term success.
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