Can You Really Make Money on Instagram?

Click Here to Get My Instagram Checklist

How Can You Earn Money with Instagram?

As I mentioned above there are a plethora of different ways including and not limited to...

• Selling Shoutouts. If you've got a large following then other Instagrammers will be interested in paying you to shoutout their accounts. This will drive them some new followers. Shoutouts can make a lot of money if you've got a big following. I wouldn't try this method until you have at least 10,000 followers though.
• Growing Instagram Accounts. You can create and grow Instagram accounts with the sole purpose of selling them later. Just yesterday I heard one guy bought an Instagram account with 105,000 followers. He paid $1,200 for it.
• Affiliate Marketing. You can't add a direct affiliate link in the bio of your Instagram account but you can add the url of your domain. Use a landing page to collect emails then when someone enters their email address you can a) send them the details of what you're promoting, and b) Sell things to them in the future because they're now on your list. Never send people straight to an offer page. You're leaving money on the table if you do.
• Your Own Products. You could be selling your own products using an eCommerce website such as a shopify site. Any product could be sold this way. You could have Amazon products on there or digital products from Clickbank or JVZoo.

Those are some of the ways most people make money with their Instagram accounts. Some will buy accounts and clean them up just to sell them the next day at a profit. The world's your oyster when it comes to the many ways you can make money with Instagram.  

How to Make Money from Instagram

Recently I wrote about Instagram and how the link in the bio is the most important thing to consider. You can read it here. If you had a huge following then you could sit all day doing nothing but shoutouts all day long. This could turn a nice profit.

But first, you need to grow your account before you monetize it. A big mistake some make is trying to monetize too soon.

This scares off potential followers and your growth will be stunted because people don't want to be sold to, but, paradoxically, they do love to buy stuff. Grow your account and post content of high quality for a month or two to make sure your followers are building up.

Don't be salesy, don't advertise anything, just provide value, value and more value. Post a few times a day. I recommend at least twice per day. Shoot for the best times of day, also. Who is your audience? Are they on Instagram at the time you're posting?  

And Then?

Then, when you have heaps of followers, start slowly introducing the odd sales pitch from time to time. Not every day, maybe once or twice a week to begin with. After the sales pitch post has been up a few hours, take it down.

This will keep your feed nice and clean of spammy looking posts that are trying to sell stuff. Start making money gradually or you'll lose more followers than you gain.

The most important thing for you to take away from this advice is to have plenty of followers before thinking of money. The money will actually come sooner if you understand this point. If you go at it with the intention of making money from 100 followers you're making a grave mistake. Your account will have super stumped growth.

It's better to grow big first then you have something more to work with. If people don't see any salesy stuff on your page they're more likely to follow you. If they see nothing but "hey, get this thing for $x amount of dollars they'll skip over you.  

One More Thing!

One more important point I'd like to leave you with is that you should ALWAYS collect leads before sending people to buy something. I use Aweber for that. Remember how I told you I get between 10 and 20 subscribers from instagram onto my list every day?

That number will grow for sure, as I learn more about Instagram and how to get more and more followers. For now though, I'm quite impressed with the way Instagram gets me those subscribers. All I have to do is post a picture or few per day, use hashtags, make sure the link in my bio goes to my free Instagram Checklist and I get lots of subscribers I wouldn't have got.

It beats solo ads because it's free and targeted traffic. You see, only people definitely interested in getting my Instagram Checklist will click the link in my Instagram bio. Makes sense, right? Oh, before I forget, make sure you're giving something away for free in your Instagram bio link, there's my final tip of the day. This will get you more subscribers for sure.

Do me a favour, would you? Share this post with your friends so they can it too. Thanks in advance for that. (It really helps)

I'm Jim. Thanks for reading.

P.S. More Instagram Marketing Tools You Might Find Handy

• Canva.com for creating graphics
• Hashtagify.me for finding hashtags relevant to your niche on Instagram
• Shoutcart.com for buying and selling shoutouts
• Iconosquare.com for analyzing your Instagram account stats (or your competitors)
• Sproutsocial.com for a list of 21 cool tools for Instagram
• Pablo Another Free Graphics tool
• Tagsforlikes.com Another resource for finding/researching your hashtags

Many more goodies in the free Instagram Checklist.

Bye for now and good luck.