Instagram is an addictive social platform that allows you to share your pictures and 15 second video clips, with the world. You can also edit your pictures with the application’s wide range of filters and enhancement tools; you can literally transform your visuals. Instagram’s initial popularity encouraged Facebook to buy it for $1 billion! They saw huge potential in the photo sharing network. Whether it’s been worth it, or will be worth it, is something we’re still a little unclear about. However what we do know is, that as a user, you can generate a lot of money every month through the network.
We’ve personally been there and have been able to create a revenue model based around Instagram. We actually started an account to share visuals that would inspire people. That was it; there was no intention of making money. Although, we did recognise that there was always the potential to. As the account grew, we had advertisers from all over the world contacting us for our rates, so that we could post their content on our feed. This would help them gain followers, or improve awareness and increase sales. Unfortunately, we had to sell the account earlier this year due to time constraints – running a successful Instagram account and continuing its growth is harder than it seems, especially when you are running it parallel to other activities. Having a business through Instagram was not our focal point, it was just a passion that turned into a side venture.
During our time on Instagram (not as our brand but as a page that generated money through ads), we met a lot of people that were doing the same thing. Amongst these people there were individuals who were earning from as little as $500 a month to $40,000 a month! That’s right, all from posting on Instagram! A lot of their pages were providing them with a regular income and becoming their primary, if not only, source of income. For many, they had built a business around it. The greatest thing was, that a lot of these people were children aged 13 and upwards! They attended school and were literally making money through Instagram as a hobby.
Now one may ask, “How can I make decent money through Instagram?” You’ll probably get a variety of answers; however the best way we’ve experienced is through advertising. As mentioned earlier, brands and others pages that want to increase their following or reach, will happily spend money on advertising through Instagram. What this usually means is that they will ask you to repost one of their pictures, or mention them in the caption of a post, for a fee in exchange. This is commonly known as a shoutout. How much you decide to charge per shout is entirely up to you. Some advertisers may find your prices reasonable; others may choose to look elsewhere. Developing a relationship with advertisers can be crucial, as they can provide repeat business.
18 Year Old Instagram Entrepreneur
Recently, we had the chance to catch up with an 18 year old college student, Noah, from Maine, USA. Noah has over 30 Instagram accounts that reach over 5 million users. As you can imagine, Noah is able to make a living from Instagram and he has kindly shared some of his wisdom to help encourage young people to follow in his footsteps. Noah has seen so much success through Instagram that he represents his school’s work programme, as a young entrepreneur with his own business. He has also created opportunities for his friends by sharing his knowledge with them and by helping them start their own pages.
Noah’s story began when he joined Instagram and created a personal page as most people do. He also has a wholesale business in high-end watches and decided to create a page for it to gain some worldwide exposure. He followed lots of accounts with over 100,000 followers and asked them for their help. He then realised that they were making money off advertising and this inspired Noah to purchase his first account, which already had 96,000 followers. As mentioned previously, he now has over 30 accounts and these are his top 5 by following:
- Boss_homes – 737k followers
- Speed_class – 563k followers
- Automotivegramm – 429k followers
- Ferrari.automobili – 312k followers
- Thecarreport – 269k followers
Even though Noah acquired a large sized account, he still had to grow it further. Accounts can grow naturally if you don’t do anything to them, but the rate will be extremely slow. We’ll discuss his recommendations for growth a little later. His key advice is that you should only start a page that is based around an interest. For example, if you’re into watches, you could very well start up a page full of pictures of different types of watches, including those from less known brands. You’ll notice that 4 out of the 5 pages listed above are car accounts; Noah has a passion for cars and therefore posting on these accounts is literally just a hobby… That results in money!
Noah isn’t just using Instagram to make money off ads, he also has a long-term vision. He is using it to build his brand called Boss Collection; a high-end boutique with over $300,000 in products thus far. He wants to make it into the next super brand!
Tips
Using the information that Noah and several other users have shared with us, along with our own experiences, we have put together some tips you can use to make money through Instagram. We’ve listed these tips as steps:
1. Create or buy an account
Some people like to buy accounts as they see this as an investment. Instagram is actually a powerful marketing tool for your own business, as well as for others. You can easily make the money back by posting ads, or promoting your own business and influencing sales or leads.
If you’re making a general page around a niche, make sure the name is catchy and illustrates what your page represents. Shorter names are better as they are easier to remember and type out. For example, a page named “yummypix” is probably going to be associated with food and will encourage food lovers to check it out.
If you’re creating a page for your brand or business, stick to the name of the company. If the name is already taken, get something as close as possible to the name.
Whatever it is that you choose, make sure you do it because you are passionate about it. Remember you are not only representing your page, but the whole industry that you’re posting about. If you have your own brand of watches for example, post about watches in general, not just about your products. This doesn’t mean that you should advertise other watch brands, but rather that you demonstrate your knowledge about watches through your content. This builds trust, so that when you do post about your products (or other products if you’re not a company), your followers are more likely to be open to your suggestions.
2. Make the page look good
As simple as this is, many don’t do it. Have a logo that’s easy on the eye and make sure you fill out your bio with key details. Include a short description of what the page is about and leave contact information so people can send you business enquiries, unless you don’t want this option available. This also makes the page look much more professional.
3. Post good content
By good we mean original or engaging content. Clear pictures that are rich in colour usually work well. Also remember that if you’re posting the same pictures as every other account, or accounts bigger than you, how will you stand out? Finding unique content or posting your own pictures is great in this sense. However if you do use other people’s pictures, don’t forget to give them credit. Instagram have a 0% tolerance to copyright infringement. After a certain amount of flags, your account can be deleted immediately. We’ve seen pages with over a million followers get shut down due to this. Give credit where you can.
People are more likely to follow a page that is very active on Instagram; posting at least twice a day. Work out what your best times are to post by either observation or by using free tools such as Iconsquare. Use this information to make your posts around these times.
4. Engage with followers
You can engage with followers in numerous ways. A lot of the time, people like knowing that there’s a human-being behind a page. They also feel special when you get back to them, so every now and again reply to some of your comments.
Also try and encourage people to tag their friends into your posts – this of course increases exposure by bringing more attention to it, and is likely to get you new followers. You can do this by saying things in your captions such as “Tag someone you love.” Make sure it relates to the post though. You wouldn’t ask this question under a picture of a doughnut that had no relation to love whatsoever!
5. Grow your page
The more people that follow your page, the more engagement you’ll get. Now we mentioned earlier that Noah bought his first big page which made things a bit easier for him. However, not everyone has money to invest in buying pages. Alternatively you can buy shouts from bigger pages by contacting them for their rates. This will help attract new followers and will be cheaper. It’s also a faster method than natural growth.
Natural growth can occur but it’s usually much slower. We feel that hash-tags are less effective than most claim they are. Usually they attract people using bots and spam followers; this won’t give real engagement at all and thus has little value. What Noah has suggested, and what we suggest is that you do shouts with other pages in your niche, of the same size. You can approach bigger pages but they are less likely to do shouts with significantly smaller pages. Shouts will help you attract another page’s followers. It’s the best way to grow organically, and it’s also free. Keep these shouts consistent so you gain constant exposure.
You can use bots which automatically follow and comment other people’s accounts. You can also manually follow people so they follow back, and then unfollow them. However these methods are not advised. Instagram have recently changed their algorithms to detect pages that are using bots to increase their followers. As a result pages are experiencing bans and are even being deleted. When you follow people to get followers back, it’s not only time consuming, if you eventually unfollow some users, they may also unfollow you back. Also, they might not actually be interested in what you have to offer, they might just be following you back for the sake of it – thus they won’t engage much. The whole point is to have followers that are engaging. There’s no value in quantity without quality.
6. Advertise
If you’re a business or brand, this will be less applicable to you as you’re probably going to be self-promoting. However, for pages that post content around a niche, you’ll probably start to gain interest from advertisers as your page gets bigger. Don’t out-price yourself straight away, be reasonable. If you’re completely unsure about what to charge, try and speak to other pages and see if they are willing to share their pricing structure.
One thing we should mention with ads is that if you post content that’s unrelated to your page, it can come across as spam and you may lose followers as a result. Most people dislike adverts, especially ones that are blatant adverts and will be of no interest to your followers. Keep this in mind.
“With a community of over 300 million, Instagram is one of the world’s largest mobile ads platforms.” – Instagram
We hope this post has helped you gain some inspiration and insight into making money through Instagram. We’re not suggesting that you all go and start pages to make money. Nevertheless, if you do have a passion for using Instagram, or are considering using it to market your brand or business, Instagram can prove to be a really powerful tool. It doesn’t matter what age you are either, as we’ve demonstrated above, you can start turning your passion into a business!
Author: Vex King
I am the founder and owner of the Bon Vita lifestyle brand. I could give myself a title and call myself a lifestyle entrepreneur, personal mentor, writer, designer, innovator, CEO, or anything else I see as fitting. However no title can define me as an individual. I’m just an optimist, a visionary, a philanthropist and jack of many trades. I’m using my positive influence to redefine the creative industries using Good Vibes Only #GVO so that people can fulfil their dreams, purposefully, and enjoy The Good Life #TGL. My daily words of intent are to make people… Think, look & feel GOOD!
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