How to start earning money through Instagram, you first need to build up your page (get followers). My advice is to always wait and not monetize until you reach 10k followers and there are two reasons for that:
- You don’t want to start promoting and monetizing too early because it will slow down your growth and limit your ability to earn in the long term
- You want to wait for the swipe up feature in stories (which gets unlocked after you pass 10k followers and switch to creator or business profile)
Now let me tell you how to get those initial 10k followers fast and easy.
First of all, you need to have good content and post consistently (at least once per day). You need to choose a niche, and try to niche it down a bit especially in the beginning of your account (what I mean by it is you don’t want to make general account where you posts selfies or your content is all over the place cars, travel, memes, motivational quotes, fitness, etc) you want to choose one niche like for example travel and than niche it down some more for example showcasing just beaches or mountains or Arial pictures, etc. It will be much easier to grow if you niche it down like that.
- Make nice profile picture, if your username doesn’t look clean, short and kinda memorable, try to come up with a new username that does, write down good BIO explaining what your followers can expect and mention your niche if we use example of a niche from above you can do something like: “Showcasing best beaches all around the world Every traveller loves gorgeous beaches” add some emojis as well (it’s easier to grab people’s attention with emojis ) as you can see I’ve mentioned two keywords beaches and travel.
- You also want to have good caption structure and do some hashtag research and write down several sets of hashtags (I usually use 25–30 hashtags, 30 is the limit set by Instagram btw).
- Post stories as well it helps engage with your audience and you get nice circle around your profile pic which makes your profile stand out more
- Now the thing with Instagram is, you need to get the initial following in order to start ranking for hashtags and to grow organically. The best method that works right now to get those initial 1–2.5k followers (depending on your niche and quality of your content) is follow-unfollow method, you basically find a page in your niche that’s bigger than yours and start following people who liked their recent photo, people get notification that you’ve followed them, check your account and follow you back if they like what they see. You need to do this manually, especially since recent updates, don’t try any bots and tools, that’s the reason why most people fail with this method.
- If you have time you should also post meaningful comments on other peoples photos (especially those you are following) because it will help you gain more followers and also get you more follow-backs from the previous method.
- If you did everything right and post consistantly once you get initial 1–2.5k followers your account will start to grow on its own organically just from posting consistently. When this happens and you start ranking for hashtags, it’s usually a good idea to increase the posting frequency because it will help you grow even faster.
- Once you hit 5k followers you can start contacting other similar pages in your niche to exchange shoutouts and collab which will help you get more exposure and accelerate your growth.
- Once you hit 10k followers, you get the swipe up option in stories (linking out) and you can start monetizing your account.
Depending on how you execute this, you can grow pretty fast and completely free.
Now once you got your 10k followers it’s time to monetize.
Monetization methods are really niche dependant, and you have two options here, test several different methods that you think can work for your niche or see what other bigger pages in your niche are doing.
Most popular monetization ways are:
- Selling Shoutouts (To answer your question exactly, this is for sure the easiest way to make money on Instagram, but also the most unprofitable way where you will be leaving a ton of money on the table)
- Brand Deals
- Account Flipping (This one is also pretty easy but you can do it only one time)
- Affiliate Marketing (This is probably the most time-efficient way)
- Selling Your Own Digital Products (Most profitable way)
- Selling Physical Products (Great for transforming your account to a brand, and getting long term business out of it)
- Donations
So to sum things up two easiest way to make money on Instagram is to sell shoutouts to other people or two sell your Instagram account. The most profitable on the other hand are selling products either digital or physical and after that affiliate marketing, which is pretty easy, time-efficient and can be very lucrative, so I advise you to choose that one.
There are several more ways to make money on Instagram which are less popular so I’ve left them out of this list.
Hope that helps :)