Making Money on Instagram
By now, you’re probably wondering how all of your hard work is going to pay off.
How are you going to monetize your followers and following? Well, there isn’t one correct method or way to do this. It really depends on your niche, your engagement, and what your followers want.
In the next sections of this book, I’ll be covering all the ways that I know of to monetize your Instagram account. (You can even use several at the same time!) This next chapter is going to be absolutely packed full of information.
What I’d recommend you do is to read one method a day, and do your own research on each monetization method.
Grab a notepad, watch YouTube tutorials, read blogs, and research the method until you fully understand it. In order to properly monetize your Instagram page, you’re going to need to know all the options, and pick the best one for your audience.
This book would be extremely long if I went into detail on each method, however I will try to be as concise as possible.
Selling Shout-outs:
This is the most common way to make money on Instagram. The more followers that you have, the more you’ll make selling Instagram shout-outs. Personally, I make around $300 a day just selling shout-outs on my different Instagram accounts. And the best part is, I don’t need to do much advertising. For the most part, people come to me, asking how much I charge for shout-outs.
I leave my email address and my username in my page's description, and people contact me daily. Because I have many Instagram accounts, I’ve created multiple emails for each account, so that I don't get confused. I then set up an auto responder, that will automatically give people my rates, my PayPal email, and information. This completely automates the shoutout process. I can literally wake up, check my PayPal account, and find people who have paid me to post shout-outs for the day.
When you're just getting started with selling shout-outs, I'd recommend not automating the process at first. Deal with people directly, as you will have a higher conversion rate. The reason why I've made my shoutout process automatic is because I get too many requests anyway, and I don't want to constantly spam my pages with ads and promotions.
A good guideline is to only post a maximum of two shout-outs each day, so that you don't anger your followers. The more shout-outs you post, the slower your Instagram account will grow because people tend not to tag their friends on sponsored posts.
If you’re just starting out with selling shout-outs, I’d recommend creating a GIG on fiverr.com or creating an eBay listing.
This will get people purchasing shout-outs from you, even if you only have a small following (10k-50k followers).
Once you get an initial base of people buying shout-outs from Fiverr, you can make them reoccurring customers off of Fiverr through direct messaging and PayPal.
Another tip is to make sure you grab each person's email address. Create a mailing list compiled of people that have purchased shout-outs in the past. Each month, offer discounts to everyone on this mailing list, to remind them of your Shout-outs services. Often times, companies forget about the positive experience that they had with your Instagram account. A friendly email, is a great way to remind them.
Pricing Shout-outs:
How you price your shout-outs and rates generally is based on your niche and the amount of followers you have. Some niches simply have more shoutout demand than others, raising the prices higher. Car and fitness pages for example make much more than a humor page of the same following. This is because it’s easier to sell things on car and fitness niches, as the audience is more targeted.
Another tip when selling shout-outs is to include bundle prices. If you normally charge $100 for a 24-hour shoutout, tell your potential buyer that you’ll sell them three 24 hour shout-outs for $90 each or five 24 hour shout-outs for $80 each. The more people buy in bulk, the more money you will make in the long run.
The reason I’m able to make so much from shout-outs is because I have around 10 companies that buy 5+ bulk shout-outs each month, giving me a solid basis of income.
Reaching Out to Companies
Once you've reached around 200k followers or so, and have a well established Instagram page, it's time to start contacting companies. You'll want to find businesses that are run by their original owner, so that you can contact them directly. Don't try and make deals with massive companies like Walmart or Best Buy.
You should be looking for small to medium-sized companies that are run by one to five people. Online businesses and companies tend to have a higher conversion rate, although local businesses buy shout-outs as well. Try to look for online companies that are selling a specific product that is directly related to your niche. They'll immediately realize the value that your Instagram page can be to their company.
Your goal should be to sell these companies a package of shout-outs (a shoutout each week for a month), for a bulk price. So if you have 250k followers, and sell shout-outs for $100 each, sell the package for $350. Most companies have an advertising budget, and will happily spend $350 each month for some quality advertising.
If you have 10 companies or so buying from you each month, you'll be making $3500 on autopilot. As time goes on, you can raise the prices with these companies, and keep up a good relationship.
When wording your email to these companies, make sure that you include the amount of followers that you have.
As soon as the owner sees, "250k niche related followers" they'll instantly become interested. Here's an example of an email:
Dear (Company Name) My name is Rick, and I'm reaching out on behalf of my Instagram page @puppyphotos. We have 250k followers that all own and love puppies. We think that your product would work really well with our page, and were wondering if you'd be interested in doing some monthly advertising with us. We offer a package deal of 4 featured promotions for $350 a month.
Let me know if you're interested, thanks for your time, -Rick.
It's important to get the company thinking about monthly rates. If you make it seem like a onetime deal, chances are it will be. You want to get the subscription mentality in the back of their head
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