History of Instagram
Before 2012, when Facebook was acquainted with Instagram, very few were aware of the potential of the platform, and surprised everybody as Facebook invested $1 billion to acquire it.
Instagram was launched in 2010 by the partnership of Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, as an application which has a lot of potential. It became popular because of its uniqueness allowing users to edit and share content on the same platform and the user interference is so easy and comfortable that even a newbie to technology can use it.
Initially, it was built to target IOS devices allowing square-sized posts with an aspect ratio of 1:1. But as it grew in popularity, it expanded its horizon to all kinds of devices including laptops and desktops, and varieties of posts like a carousal, videos, GIFs, etc with different aspect ratio.
The platform is also using the functions of hashtags and geo-tagging extensively allowing the users to expand the reach of their post and ensuring all concerned people must see it. The application continued to evolve itself providing the value of its services to the users and giving worth to studying how to make money on Instagram.
Benefits of Instagram
1. Growing Number of Users and Entrepreneurs
Instagram is a growing platform for all the business houses that want to create a digital presence, with more than 25 million active businesses using Instagram to market their product. Instagram allows businesses to target their ads to reach a concerned group of people, who can be the most likely to purchase the product.
The fact that there are more than 1.4 billion Instagrammers who on average spend 53 minutes daily on the platform, keeps the entrepreneurs interested and they keep on hovering over the platform with varieties of products and services, that can be sold online.
2. Instagram Allows Visual Marketing
As we all know visuals have the potential to make a long-lasting impression on our memories and viewers take a lot of interest if the ads are presented in a visual format.
Visual content authorizes shoppers to make purchases with more in-depth specifics and images of what they want to buy and apart from videos and images it also possesses information regarding the product and a call to action.
Additionally, brands and retailers are getting smarter and creating better content to lure viewers to the path where they end up purchasing.
Here is an example of a brand-named Overstock which has 470k followers and most of their posts are story-based ads, so beautifully designed that they are fully capable to deliver the idea to the viewers.
If you want to extract the maximum from the Instagram ads, you can try the following tips:
- Use images that suit the most for the concerned ad, and remember nothing is good or bad, the only important thing is that the image should be compatible with the ideology of the ad.
- Enhance visual enhancement by giving more focus to some specific characters which you want to highlight by using a different colour or font size.
- Avoid using too many elements in the design and ads with more white spaces are known to give better results.
- Never miss the call-to-action button which will lead the viewers to fill in their details or complete the purchase.
- Go for carousel or video ads as history shows that such ads have a better conversion rate.
3. Easy Targeting and Re-targeting
When it comes to targeting or re-targeting the audience, Instagram is loaded with options together with Facebook Ads manager or individually. Being a secondary application linked with Facebook, Instagram gives you access to all the facilities and functions of the Ads Manager platform offered by Facebook.
You have the option to decide your customer persona, by choosing between different locations, demographic profiles, interests and behaviours. Apart from this if you feel that the audience size selected by you is too less, you have the option of creating a lookalike audience.
4. Build Up User-Generated Content and Reviews
According to 54% of the US youth between the age group of 18-29 feel that it’s more comfortable to buy through the reference obtained from the previous buyer, via reviews, images and videos uploaded by them.
These users generated content is growing in popularity as people tend to trust the commoners more than the businesses. And when it comes to the platform Instagram, is an ocean of user-generated content, which can be highly useful to businesses if they successfully achieve positive reviews in favour of their name.
Many brands know the value of user-generated content and are constantly organising programs to acquire more of such content to increase the trust of consumers.
5. Constantly Updated Marketing Features Within Ads and Stories
Instagram is like a Wikipedia of the users, as it knows everything concerned with the users. It is aware of the fact that businesses are willing to improve their brand value and thereby increase their sales and on the other hand viewers love to shop on the digital platform.
Instagram is aware of who is willing to buy which kinds of products and that too when they buy the most. To fulfil the requirements of both businesses and users Instagram is loaded with numerous tools which can be handy to them.
The story post on Instagram enables businesses to keep their followers updated on daily basis and at the same time, users can remain connected with their favourite brands with every micro change made.
Since the launch of the feature of Stories, there are more than 500 million posts on daily basis and over 90 million accounts are tapping product tags to reveal details in every single post they come through. With the ads that you publish on the Story mode of Instagram, you have the liberty to add a call-to-action button, like “Buy Now” or “Subscribe” which can increase your sales many folds.
6. Customers Are Engaged Where They Like to Spend Time
The average time spent on Instagram is 53 minutes per day, which means users love to spend time on this platform, which is also evident with the mammoth 1.4 billion active users that Instagram has to own its supremacy and an average of 500 million stories post on daily basis.
The users of Instagram love to follow their favourite brands on the platform as more than 50% of the users are following at least one brand, which is good enough for the entrepreneurs to be in avarice to make the best utilisation of the platform.
7. Enables In-Depth Insights About Your Audience
Instagram offers varieties of analysing tools to analyse the data related to your audience and help you to understand the nature of the audience in detail which will help optimise campaigns.
You can also target your ads to a group of people having an interest in a particular hashtag, which is fruitful for your business. By following popular hashtags related to your industry, you’ll get to know, what people are talking about, their chief concerns and problems, as well as their happy moments and daily victories.
You can also follow a particular age group, gender, caste and much more with the tools offered by Instagram and at the same time keep track of the ROI of your ads.
Before you get to know how to make money on Instagram, we must complete our discussion on the benefits as these benefits will be better utilised to get converted into money-earning opportunities.
How to Make Money on Instagram
#1 Sell Your Affiliate Products
Affiliate marketing is growing into popularity at a very fast pace and most digital marketers are influenced by it. It is a great tool for all businesses to increase their sales without laying much effort.
Most of the top-level businesses like Amazon, Flipkart, Pabbly Connect, Zapier, etc. has their affiliate links that digital marketers use to sell the product and earn commission bonuses.
These products with affiliate links can be advertised and sold on the Instagram platform, at the minimum cost incurred and maximum benefit accessed. In reality, most of the products sold on Instagram by different digital marketers are coming from an affiliate link only.
You can add a call-to-action button to all your post so that the buyer will land up to the buying link and you can show some amazing visuals which will lure them to complete the purchase.
Affiliate marketing can be done by any person, even though they don’t have a great number of followers in their account.
This affiliate website coming from the leading e-commerce business worldwide is equally famous among the digital marketer, and most YouTube videos which are providing information related to some products available on Amazon must compulsorily have the affiliate link in the description.
This is the first option when you want to know how to make money on Instagram, which may seem to be an easy way out, but when it comes to money making nothing is easy. In the case of affiliate marketing too, it doesn’t matter which platform you are using but to be successful, you have to choose all your products wisely and be continuous in your efforts.
#2 Become an Influencer
To be an influencer is more fun than an option for money-making as it gives you popularity, and many do influencer marketing only because of this. When you go for influencer marketing and acquire tons of followers, naturally, entrepreneurs related to your niche will try to connect with you.
For promoting their brand, they are ready to pay you handsomely and it can be a permanent source of income for you. But the most important thing for you to remember before starting the promotion for any brand, that be loyal to your followers.
Through this blog you want to learn how to make money on Instagram, you will get many options and opportunities but should never forget your ethics.
No matter how much you are paid never promote anything which you are not aware of, as it takes years to create followers, it can only take days to lose them. And to prove your loyalty to the followers whenever you are doing any sort of promotional stuff, there must be some hint of promotion in some corner of your website.
You can also use the hashtags like #ad #sponsored #prmotional which can help you in two ways. Firstly, it will clarify all your followers about the sponsorship and they will purchase after thorough research and you will be saved from getting your name spoiled. Secondly, your posts will get free promotion as Instagram is known for promoting kinds of stuff with these hashtags.
#3 Assist an Influencer
Influencers are important people with millions of followers, and lots of businesses trying to get in touch with them for promoting their products. But everything can’t be done by the influencers alone and they too need helping hands.
If you find yourself suitable for this kind of job, you can approach a few influencers and share your profiles and achievements with them. As an assistant to influencers, you have to work behind the scenes and no one will get to know the efforts you have made but it will sure make money for you.
As a virtual assistant, you can help the influencer to talk to the sponsors, run ads, edit videos and images, write copy, and many more. If you are efficient at your work, the influencers will be more than happy to engage you as their support system.
#4 Sell your Physical products.
If you are in some sort of physical business selling products on your own and want to increase your digital sale, Instagram is always a robust option to promote your products.
Normally with digital marketing, you will get a huge market worldwide to sell your products, and there are varieties of options available to do so, in which having an e-commerce website has the top-most priority.
About the topic of how to make money on Instagram, this could be considered one of the safest and easiest ways you are dealing with physical products and people can judge you by the quality of the product.
Instagram also allows you to sell directly on the platform, just by setting up an Instagram Shop and tagging the product images to your followers which can lead them to the shopping page when clicked.
If you are on to a start-up promoting on Instagram is probably the safest option to choose, as it gives you in-depth analysis and you can understand the mistakes you are making in a better way.
#5 Sell Virtual Products on Instagram
Instagram can be considered a hub when it comes to virtual product selling because of the ease with which the product can be promoted.
The virtual product can be anything like a photo, GIFs, video, software, etc which is available only in a digital format and are considered the best value products because the cost of production is low whereas the returns are extremely high.
People all around require these virtual products, to cater to their variety of needs which occurs due to their activities on the internet giving you a high chance to earn a good amount of money by selling them.
#6 Sell Caption Services for Instagram Posts
A good caption can be a game changer for any ad campaign and believe it most Instagrammers don’t possess the skill to write attractive captions to their images or videos.
Captions are like a shorter version of content writing which has the potential to catch the attraction of the people and keep them bound till the very end of the post. If you believe in your skills as a caption writer, scopes are there and are in unlimited number, but you need to hunt for the scopes, as they will not come in front of you as an opportunity.
You have to minutely diagnose the captions written by different businesses for their posts on Instagram and find the mistakes in them and also how you can do it in a better way, then approach them through direct messaging on explaining to them about your utility.
Believe it or not, if the business needs a caption writer, they will consider your case.
Here is a screenshot from the famous freelancing website Upwork where an entrepreneur is looking to hire a closed caption editor, and he is ready to pay up to $50 per hour if you are a deserving candidate.
#7 Sell Dropshipped Products.
Question on how to make money on Instagram, you don’t have the capital to invest, you don’t have your product, you can’t create virtual products and you are good at writing captions. Then what are you supposed to do, that you can earn a lot of money even after so many limitations, the answer is very simple, DROPSHIPPING.
A newly gaining popularity over the past decade, dropshipping is a business model where you can run your store, without holding inventory, and just sell other’s products on a commission basis.
The good part of dropshipping is, that the buyer never gets to learn that the product is not coming from your side, but believes you to be the owner of the business. What you need to do is just promote the product on Instagram through posts and ads and book the orders.
The Dropshipper will take care of all from product packaging, courier, delivery, cash collection, return, and commission payment. You just need to take care of creating good posts and if needed invest a little amount in advertisements, and make people click and purchase through your link.
Shopify is an online platform where you can easily set up your dropshipping store by investing a very minimal amount after the expiry of the trial period of 14 days.
#8 Provide Social Media Marketing Services.
According to Business Instagram, over 25 million businesses are active on Instagram actively promoting their product and out of them 2 million use advertisement services offered by Instagram.
This gigantic data shows the opportunities that you have if you start to provide social media services to these businesses. All these 25 million businesses have appointed someone to take care of their social media stuff as none of them have spare time to invest in social media.
#9 Make Instagram Stories Masks and Filters.
On daily basis, more than 500 million stories are posted on Instagram and most companies use it to hook the consumers and it remains for a short time. Companies also look for professionals who can create brand-exclusive masks and filters which can gel with their posts.
As it is a daily task for businesses, they need masks and filters which are exclusive to their brands, and they can be applied to any design to make it look like something coming directly from the brand.
#10 Find Freelance Clients
Last but not least how to make money on Instagram is to work as a freelancer for various brands that are active on Instagram.
How Instagram will help you to become a freelance, well it is a simple question to answer.
All you need to do is to post your work constantly on Instagram and make it reach different businesses, and if they appreciate your work, they will give you a chance to work for them.
Conclusion
Instagram is an emerging platform where you can rely if you are searching, for how to make money on Instagram, and definitely, it’s not an easy task to earn over any platform.
The competition is big and you have to be two steps ahead of your competitors, which needs you to develop yourself professionally. For this, you can take my advice and join the best course related to learning about Instagram, offered by Digital Scholar.
The Instagram Reels Mastery Course is offered at a valuable price of ₹699 by the best digital marketing influencer in the world, Sorav Jain and it contains bonuses and surprises worth ₹14,195.
So, don’t waste your time and immediately apply to join the course as the offer price is for a limited time and you never know when it is going to be expired.
