How many followers do you need to make money on Instagram?
If by now you're wondering how many followers you need to make it happen, the short answer is “not as many as you think”.
The long answer depends on factors that range from:
- What niche you’re in and how easily you can directly tie it to a product category (fashion, food, beauty, and fitness are popular niches, based on top hastages
- How engaged your followers are 100K .
- Which revenue channels you explore.
Naturally, the more engaged followers you have, the better. Check our tips on
While top Instagrammers make thousands per post on the even those with a smaller-but-engaged following of 1000 have the potential to start making money.
How do I work with brands on sponsored posts?
The term “influencer” gets thrown around a lot these days.
An influencer is basically anyone who’s built themselves an online reputation by doing and sharing awesome things online. To their audiences, influencers are tastemakers, trendsetters and trusted experts whose opinions about certain subjects are respected.
Many brands just can't compete with that and so they partner with influencers instead for sponsored posts that help get the word out about their products.
But it’s not just the size and reach of your Instagram account that brands want. It’s your audience’s trust and engagement with your content.
It can be hard to balance your revenue as an influencer and your integrity as a creator, but if you’re not relying on your Instagram income to stay afloat, you always have the freedom to be selective about the brands you work with, just as brands will be selective about the Instagrammers they work with.
How do you decide what to charge as an influencer?
Typically these influencer deals involve the creation of content—an Instagram post, video or Story—and will sometimes include permission for the brand to use this content on their own site or in an ad.
Most of these deals are negotiable and can involve a single post or an entire campaign in exchange for a fee, a free product, a service, a gift, the promise of exposure, or some combination of these.
Keep in mind when negotiating that you’re not just offering content but access to your audience, a potentially large reach on one of the most popular social platforms around, and usage rights too.
In a survey of 5,000 influencers,just to give you an idea of what some brands are willing to pay, and how to negotiate based on the cards you’re holding.
Finally, it's important as an influencer to also know your own audience.
What is the make-up of your audience and what is your engagement rate (total engagement divided by your number of followers)? You can dig up numbers to back this up in your Instagram Analytics report, if you've switched to a business account. This will help you be prepared when it comes time to negotiate.
Sell your photos online or on things
Someone might get famous on Twitter by telling 140-character jokes, but Instagram is a photo-sharing app at its core. And photos are assets that can be licensed, printed, and sold in a variety of ways.
If photography is what got you into the Instagram game in the first place, you can list your photos in marketplaces like 500px or Twenty20 where brands and publishers might license them.
However, you can also sell your photos as prints and on other physical products using a similar methods described in the last section. Services like Printful and Teelaunch can let you put your photos on posters, phone cases, pillows, and more, taking care of fulfilling orders and customer service so all you really need to worry about is making sales.
Take the story of Daniel Arnold who went from “eating toast 3 meals a day”, according to an interview to making $15K in a single day by offering to sell prints of his popular-but-controversial photos. If you've already got the demand, all you need to do is take the initiative and offer your audience the opportunity to buy your photography from you.
Do it for the 'Gram (and get paid)
What started as a hobby—making people laugh, doing silly photoshoots with your dog or sharing pictures of food—can snowball into the chance to turn Instagram into a source of income fuelled by your engaged following.
There's a world of possibilities out there as a creator with a large online audience made up of people who can't help but stop when they scroll past your post in their feed. It's this special appeal that you have that opens the door. You just have to walk through it.
By selling your own stuff, you don't need to worry about integrating messages from other brands into your posting strategy. Better yet, you can get your own brand out there on the products you sell.
Fans can show their love and support your work by buying from you—a purchase they can feel good about.
There are a few ways to do this:
- You can use a print-on-demand service to print and ship your own t-shirts, pillows, coffee mugs, wall art, and more.
- You can sell services such as photography or consulting, using your bio to direct interested people to a contact email or a link to your professional website.
- You can sell digital products such as courses, ebooks, or design templates.
- You can use your Instagram account to launch a business selling your own original products, or even a book.
If you plan on selling several items in your own Shopify store, you can also make purchases through Instagram possible on your website using one of the available Instagram gallery apps.
Take it a step further with our shopping on Instagram integration to enable product tags and product stickers that make the experience from Instagram Stories and posts to your own products more seamless and fluid. To use it, you'll also need to switch to an Instagram business account, have a Facebook page, and an approved Facebook shop (all of which you can set up for no additional cost).
