Learn How To Make Money on Instagram With My Simple Guide

A brand partnership is a two-way relationship where a third party is paid by a brand to endorse its products.

You’ve likely seen influencers make money on social media from brand partnerships (more on that later!) but they’re also a great way for your small business to increase visibility, reputability and overall sales.

Opportunities for Instagram partnerships can be found in almost any industry. It’s the type of content you make that determines your suitability.

If you’re looking to prime your Instagram for brand deals, then listen up:

• Make unique, relevant, and helpful content – think about the problems your brand solves and how it adds value to your niche, then reflect it through your content
• Post a variety of content – the more variety in your topics and formats, the more opportunities you’ll find to work with different brands. Just make sure to keep it relevant to your audience
• Encourage engagement – this will develop a relationship with your followers, which brands look out for

Once your Instagram profile is up to scratch, you can start to reach out to brands for paid collaborations. However, when done wrong, brand partnerships can frustrate your followers and break the trust you’ve built. You should work with brands that:

• Align with your own brand values – this keeps your promotions feeling authentic and relevant to your audience. Plus, the more relevant the partnership is to your brand, the more naturally it’ll integrate into your content schedule
• Continue to provide value to your followers – finding brands that also hit the pain points of your followers will be genuinely helpful to them and increase the success of that partnership

To start selling on Instagram, you’ll need to open an Instagram shop, which is a digital storefront that your followers can purchase your products from without leaving the app.

With an Instagram shop you can:

• Organize your products into collections
• Create product pages that include product pictures, product descriptions, and any content where the product has been tagged
• Add product links to your reels, stories, and main feed posts
• Optimize your Instagram Ads with product links

How to Set Up an Instagram Shop

To be eligible for Instagram Shopping you must:

• Sell physical products that align with Instagram’s commerce policies – digital products, subscriptions, and services are prohibited
• Be in a supported country
• Have an Instagram Business or creator account – personal accounts won’t be able to sell
• Have a Facebook Business page that can be linked to your Instagram shop

Once you’ve checked this, it’s relatively easy to set up an Instagram shop in the Instagram app, Commerce Manager, or any other supported platform. Here’s how I did it in Commerce Manager:

Firstly, select “Create a shop”. If you use one of Instagram’s partner platforms, you can then use it to set up your shop quickly.

But don’t worry if you don’t – you can skip this step and set up your store from scratch.

Next, you’ll have to link a Facebook Business page to your shop. If you don’t have one, you can select “Create Facebook page” and write a name, category, and optional bio.

All you need to do is link a product catalog or create a new one that includes all the items you’d like to sell on your Instagram shop and submit your shop for review! This process can take up to four weeks to be approved, but usually takes a day or two.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money on Instagram.

You might be struggling to see the difference between affiliate marketing and sponsored posts, since they both involve paying a third party for promotions.

• Sponsored posts are based on participation. A creator is paid by a brand to endorse them in whichever way has been agreed, and once they have fulfilled this – for example, by creating five stories about the product – the brand will pay them
• Affiliate marketing payments are based on conversions. The affiliate will be able to promote this product however they want to and they will be paid depending on the performance metric

Affiliate marketing is beneficial to businesses because it requires continuous output from your partners. Unlike sponsored posts, you’ll also be able to avoid overpaying for poorly performing posts.

To pay your affiliates, you’ll need to track how many clicks or purchases they are responsible for which you can do in a number of ways. If you want them to share links to your products you can add a unique UTM code to the end of their link so that, when they share this link with their followers and it’s clicked, it will trace back to your affiliate.

Custom discount codes are another option that works by recognising each time someone checks out with an affiliates person promo code. These codes can be applied on Instagram Shopping products, so it’s a great way to encourage earnings within the app!

If you want to know how to find affiliate partners, check out our guide here!

Shoppable posts have made waves since being added to the platform in 2018. They allow you to tag up to 20 products per post, much like you’d tag people. If users are interested in learning more about a product, they can simply tap to be taken to your Instagram Shopping product page and purchase it within the app.

This feature lends itself particularly well to visual sectors – fashion, interior design, things like that. Posts can showcase your brand while guiding users to your products.

IKEA, for example, is able to share posts that serve as sources of inspiration and as a kind of shop floor.

Stories provide a more intimate space to interact with your followers. Because they expire after 24 hours, they also have a sense of urgency that posts don’t.

These are great for seeing products “in action”, or simply having some fun with your brand personality.

How to Add Product Links to Stories

To add a product link to your story, firstly swipe right from your feed and take a photo, video, or select an image from your camera roll. This can be any image descriptive of the link. If you have it to hand, user generated content is great!

Next, click the second icon at the top of the page – look for the smiley face on a sticky note. There’s a lot of elements you can use to make your stories engaging, like polls, music, and hashtags. 

If you’ve connected your online store, there should be a “Product” sticker. Select this, choose the product you want to tag, and voilà – your link has been added!

If you don’t have a linked ecommerce store then don’t worry – you can still add regular story links to your products. Follow the above steps, but select “Link” instead of product, paste your product URL at the top, your link text at the bottom.

You might be wondering what the difference is between product links and regular links. A regular link appears as shown in the image above and directs story viewers to a webpage link in an external browser.

Benefits of using Product Tags include:

• A fast and seamless checkout – the links directs to a product page and checkout within the app
• Dynamic CTAs – any discounted products will be automatically reflected
• Your product link can be shared by any Instagram user

Live streams are a popular way of earning extra cash – and for good reason. There’s a few different ways to earn money on Instagram Live which attract businesses and creators alike. Let’s get into them!

Earn Badges

Badges are a type of currency your viewers can purchase and gift to you during your live streams.

But there are some strict terms you must comply to if you want to earn badges on Live:

• You must have a minimum of 10,000 followers

• Your content must be targeted mainly towards adults, not children
• You’re over 18 years old
• The live account must also be a Creator or Business account

Sell With Live Shopping

If you have an Instagram shop your business can promote your stock during live streams. The live format encourages tons of engagement by creating a sense of urgency, which is a great way to upsell items you’re struggling to sell.

Plus, you’ll have the opportunity to answer real-time questions your viewers have about your products, squash any worries about purchasing, and demonstrate your product in action.

How to Maximize Your Instagram Live Earnings

Here’s how you can earn big from Instagram Live:

• Schedule in advance – schedule your live engagement for a repeated date and time, like the first Wednesday of the month, or Mondays at 9pm. This routine will build anticipation for your streams and be memorable to your followers which should result in more people watching
• Promote widely and often – once you’ve scheduled your Live you’ll be able to post a countdown. Use this to excite your followers and provide sneak peeks about what can be expected
• Invite other brands and influencers to join – this will show on their profiles and boost the visibility of your live stream. It’s also a great way to maximize any influencer or partnerships
• Involve your audience – ask viewers what they’d like to see in your livestream and provide incentives like Instagram Shopping sales once you hit a certain number of viewers or badges
• Show gratitude – remember to thank your viewers during and after your live stream to strengthen your relationships

Yes, among all the intrigue of feed strategy, tagging, and user generated content, there is still a place for good old fashioned advertising.

The main benefit of ads is reach. You’re able to put your brand in front of people in your target audience who likely haven’t seen it before. While not the be all and end all, ads are an important part of an Instagram, and wider, social media strategy.

There are a few ways to approach Instagram ads:

Boost Existing Posts

If you have a business account, you can “Boost” a photo, video, or carousel post you’ve already made. This is the fastest, simplest, and cheapest way to make ads on Instagram, which makes a great first step if you’re new to social media advertising.

The downsides of boosting your posts is that 1) you have little choice over the post styles 2) you can only target based on demographics and interests.

Create New Meta Ads

Your other option is to use Meta Ads Manager to create new content designed to be used for ads. This option is slightly more time consuming than boosting old posts but offers more precise targeting (behavior tracking and audience segments).

Plus, you can create Meta Ads in all the same formats as regular content, which is to say they can be:

• Photo and video Feed posts
• Reels (long form videos)
• Stories
• Carousels (a post with up to 20 pictures)
• Collections (a curated group of products on an Instagram shop)

• If you’re wondering how much it costs to advertise on Instagram, check out our dedicated guide on this topic.

It’d be remiss of us to talk about selling on Instagram without dedicating time to influencers.

It requires time and care, but with a well-considered influencer marketing strategy has the potential to rapidly grow your business online.

How to Find Instagram Influencers

You can find influencers to work with on Instagram in the following ways:

• Influencer marketplaces like Tribe and Activate
• Searching keywords and hashtags on Instagram that’re relevant to your niche

Marketplaces provide lists of influencers open to work and clearly show their rates, follow counts, and other key information. They are the easiest method of finding influencers and are useful comparison tools.

Meanwhile, searching on Instagram may be more time consuming but you’ll be more likely to find authentic influencers within your niche that are the closest fit to your brand. Organic search might also help you find smaller influencers that haven’t yet thought to sign up to marketplaces.

Another way you can make money with your Instagram shop is by dropshipping. If you’re already dropshipping on Shopify or one of Instagram Shopping’s partner platforms, linking an Instagram shop will give you a platform to find new audiences and also build relationships with your existing customers.

You can use Instagram to simply drive traffic to your dropshipping site or use it as another sales platform – or both! To sell within the app, you’ll just have to link your site to your Instagram shop and carry your catalog over.

If you’re thinking about starting a new dropshipping business on Instagram, here are some tips:

• Source high demand products and high-margin products
• Use reliable dropshipping suppliers
• Use paid Instagram Ads to promote your products

If your business shares valuable content with high engagement on Instagram, you might want to consider turning this into profit with Subscriptions, Instagram’s newest monetization feature.

This means you can provide exclusive content to subscribers paying a monthly fee of your choice, between $0.99 and $19.99. Subscriber content can come in the form of:

• Stories
• Live streams
• Posts and reels
• Chats – Up to 30 subscribers can join a chat with you for 24 hours
• Badges – a badge will be displayed next to a subscribers username when they interact with you within the Instagram app

The main benefit of subscription content is that you’ll be able to secure a monthly income on social media

Instagram is our favorite social media platform for artists. Its image grid layout, discovery, and collaboration features are perfect for showing off your portfolio of work and networking with other artists. But did you know that you can also sell your art on Instagram?

A method, doesn’t require an Instagram shop, Facebook page, or website is to take bookings through direct messages. This is particularly useful for artists that take commissions because you can discuss details and decide on custom pricing.

However, adding your artwork to an Instagram shop can encourage more sales because it:

• Provides more details about your artwork with product pages
• Has a secure in-app checkout process
• Encourages sales by adding shopping tags to close-up, high-quality pictures and videos of your work

There isn’t a set amount of followers you need to qualify to earn money on Instagram. With a little determination, brands could start making money on Instagram with as little as 1,000 followers.

This said, some revenue streams on Instagram live stream monetization and subscriptions won’t be accessible until you have at least 10,000 followers. Once you reach this limit, you’ll be able to reach for the stars.

The sheer variety of Instagram revenue streams means that this answer isn’t clear cut. In reality, there are a number of factors that, combined, will determine your earning potential.

• Niche – some niches will provide more money making opportunities than others
• Engagement rate – this is crucial to your earning potential. Not only do engaged followers earn you money first-hand through ways like gifting badges and buying subscriptions, but they’ll also attract new partnerships
• Follower count – brands will consider your engagement and follower count when deciding whether to work with you and the rates they’ll offer
• Monetization methods of choice – some methods will earn you more than others. As well as this, the high earning creators are often using multiple methods together

Earning extra money on Instagram is possible for almost any business, as long as you have a solid sense of what your brand is, how you want it to behave and are willing to put in time and effort to post regular content that engages your followers. Get those things right, and everything that follows is infinitely easier.

We’ve gone through each stage of how to make money on Instagram, now it’s time to have some fun with it. Experiment with different methods and monitor how they work for both your business and your followers.