It doesn’t matter if you have 100,000, 10,000, or 1,000 followers on Instagram. If you’ve established yourself as a constant presence, as someone trustworthy, and as someone people will actually listen to, then you can make money on Instagram.

If your followers actually engage with you, as in they like your pictures, comments, watch your lives, send you direct messages, etc., and they watch/read your content outside of Instagram too, then you’ve reached a spot in which you can try some of the various methods below to start making money on Instagram.

If You Have Raving Followers On Instagram, Then You Can Start Making Money

1. Doing sponsored brands

One of the most popular ways influencers make money through Instagram is by doing sponsored posts for brands. This means that a business that shares your ideal (but new) audience reaches out to you to promote a product of theirs because you have a big audience.

Every brand offers a different amount of money, but the reason they’re willing to invest in you is because you’ll introduce them to a new set of people, and because those people love you, they’re more likely to buy the things you recommend. Usually brands will give you a discount code specifically for your followers. That makes your followers even more likely to buy because they get to save money simply for knowing who you are.

Jumper Media states, “If you want to work with brands, you have to make your intentions clear that you’re interested in doing so.” You have to wait for brands to reach out to you, and if you want that to happen, make them aware of who you are.

You can do this by tagging them in your posts when you share something of there’s. For example, say you love Gym Shark’s workout clothes. You can take pictures of your outfits, selfies and what not, and tag them every time you do so. Eventually, Gym Shark will see that you’re constantly tagging them, click on your profile, and realize that you have a good amount of followers they can take advantage of. From there, they’ll reach out.

You need to have your email link, where you specify that’s where people can reach you for any business inquires in your bio, or your website link on your profile page. If you have your website link, then be sure to have a contact page on it. Make it easy for brands to reach you if they want you to make a sponsored post.

A caveat, though. I know that you’ll be eager to jump into your first sponsored post once a brand reaches out, but make sure that the brand is something your followers would be interested in. If you’re Instagram is about travel and good food, but a brand about makeup wants to work with you, it wouldn’t make sense, and your followers wouldn’t like the partnership. Your followers need to come first.

2. Make a product and sell it

If you don’t want to work with others just yet, you can also create your own product. Whether you write a book, make an online course, or make an physical product is up to you. This would require a lot of work, but based on what thousands of bloggers are making nowadays, simply by creating an evergreen course, on a daily basis, it’s worth the effort.

Just like the sponsorships and what not, you have to think about what your followers would be interested in. If your followers are busy travelers like you who don’t have much time to read, then writing a book might not be the best idea. But if you make a hat with your logo on it, that might interest them. You can also create an app—one that makes their life easier, helps them connect with you better, or any other idea you can come up with.

Once you create the product, you would market it to your followers on Instagram constantly while continuing to post your regular pictures and other content. You put the product in front of them, talk about the benefits of it, and send them to the link in your bio. The link will lead them to an opt-in page or a sales page where your followers can make the purchase.

3. Pair up with brands

There’s a difference between making sponsored posts for a brand, and pairing up with a brand. This combines the first way of working with other brands to make money on Instagram that we talked about earlier, and the second way of creating your own product.

Create a bundle

Let’s assume that you created an app. If you’re a baker, and you wrote a recipe cookbook about your desserts in the form of an app, you could find a brand related to yours that also has a product. Together, you would sell your products as a bundle.

For example, say you found another baking brand. This brand sells baking materials they created. You could get together to sell the “Become The Best Baker You Can Be” bundle in which the buyer gets your $10.00 app for $6.00, and a mixer the other brand has from $20.00 to $12.00. So, instead of paying $30.00 for everything, they pay $18.00 with your bundle special. That’s a fantastic deal!

How you split the money between you and the other brand is completely up to you.

Promo for promo

Besides making bundles with other brands, you could also pair up with another brand to promote each other’s products. Basically, you would be doing a sponsored post, but this time you can reach out to the other brand yourself, and agree to do a type of exchange. You would do a sponsored post for this brand, and the brand would do the same thing for you.

You can find other brands that sell things like you by asking your followers directly or looking them up on Instagram through hashtags.