Making Money with Instagram Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide

With over 1 billion monthly active users, Instagram is definitely the internet's highly-loved social media platform.

An online place where people share their life with photos, stories, and newly launched short videos feature Reels.

Having a larger Instagram following means more leads, sales, or traffic to your blog.

The reasons to start with Instagram are many.

Instagram provides a higher organic reach than Facebook, the inbuilt search option offers more exposure to content, stories, and Reels help to improve follower engagement, and so on.

Businesses leverage the power of Instagram to improve brand awareness, showcase their products, and promote them in a friendly way.

90% of Instagram users follow at least one business, and over 80% say it has helped them discover new products they purchased later on.

Influencer marketing is a big thing on Instagram. People make a living out of it.

Businesses spend a substantial amount of their social media budget on Instagram.

Top Instagram influencers make thousands of dollars for just a single promotional post. 

Instagram sensation Kylie Jenner maker around $1.2 million for a single post.

Today, even smaller to mid-level influencers easily make a significant amount of money to sustain a good lifestyle.

So, if you're ready to put in the time and effort, you can grow your Instagram account to a level that can fetch you serious money online.

Who is this ideal for:

Simply, it's ideal for someone who loves Instagram, loves creating and sharing photos, images. 

Perfect for someone who likes to interact with people and share knowledge.

What skills will you need:

Ability or means to take high-quality photographs and professionally edit them are the first and foremost things you'll need.

You'll also need skills to create graphic images using tools such as Canva.

If you're creative and come up with various creative ways to present your content, you'll be rewarded with organic followers.

Other than that, you'll need to learn the nitty-gritty of Instagram. 

It will include following other niche related pages, studying them, building relations with other influencers in your niche, interacting with your target audience, running ads, etc.

How much money will you need to invest:

There are paid as well as free and organic strategies to grow your Instagram profile.

As Instagram's organic reach is much better, you can grow your profile slowly and steadily by organic strategies until you're ready to switch on to paid tactics.

Creating your Instagram profile and growing it organically will cost you nothing.

But as you switch to paid tactics, you'll need investment that will depend upon your niche, the kind of marketing channel you choose, the number of followers you want, and your followers' country.

How much time is required to get started:

Technically setting up your profile and creating your first post is a matter of a few hours, even if you're new.

Some helpful tips:

1) Pick a niche that works on Instagram

Before you make a niche pick, understand why people visit Instagram.

No one comes on Instagram to get pitched new products or see promotional posts. 

The core thing you need to know about Instagram is that people visit it mostly to get ENTERTAINED. 

In short, if you select an entertaining niche, it will be easier for you to grow.

That doesn't necessarily mean you can't choose a not so entertaining niche, but the more fun the niche, the better.

Select your niche based on one or more of the following 3 points.

• Based on your business
• Based on your passion
• Based on something you love to share or talk about

We have already found a few niches that work great on Instagram. Take a look.

• Luxury
• Fashion
• Memes
• Entrepreneurship
• Travel
• Fitness
• Beauty
• Food
• Arts
• Cars

You can select either one from those mentioned above or find one that suits you.

2) Know everything about your niche on Instagram

Once you've finalized your niche, the next step is to find everything related to it on Instagram and formulate a strategy.

Start by finding and following all big to medium-sized niche related accounts.

Next, study all the things mentioned below to get a clear picture of your niche.

• How many followers these accounts have?
• What is the frequency of their posts?
• Which are their most liked posts?
• How they create their post images?
• Which hashtags do they use frequently?
• How do they run promotions?
• What type of posts they make? (Informative/Interactive/Motivating/Funny/Trending)

3) Create your Instagram profile

Instagram offers three types of profiles personal, creator, and business.

The personal profile comes with necessary features, while creator and business profiles come with additional professional features that help you grow your account.

Select any type of profile as per your needs at start, later one if you think you can switch it to remaining others.

While creating your profile, you'll need to add a profile pic and write a bio.

Based on your niche research, select a profile pic that will relate to your audience or represent your business.

Bio is the first thing that people will read when they'll visit your profile. 

Bio is your chance to hook your audience and create an excellent first impression on them.

Hence, put efforts into it and come up with a creative bio that will instantly strike a chord with them, and they'll be compelled to take a look at your posts and follow you.

Use emojis and call to action (CTA) to make your bio more eyecatching.

4) Create posts

If you've done your research right, you'll have lots of ideas about creating posts.

Depending upon your niche, you can use actual photographs, image graphics, short videos in your posts, or a mix.

For creating image graphics, we recommend you to use the online graphic design tool named Canva.

It's the best. 

It's free, easy to use, and has many pre-made templates for Instagram, which lets you create stunning designs without design experience.

Next, create a posting strategy and diversify your posts. 

Use a combination of informative/interactive/motivating/funny/trending, etc. posts, and see which works with your audience the best.

5) Write great captions

Captions are a great way to elaborate on something that you're showing in an image.

Use captions to explain things more deeply, provide value, ask questions, or share something in textual format.

Here are a few tips for writing great captions.

Always place important words at the beginning. 

Ask a question to boost engagement.

Add a call to action. 

Use eye-catching emojis.

Use line breaks to make long captions readable.

6) Grow your followers

Once you've set up your account and posted the first few posts, the next logical step is to promote them and gain more followers.

Followers are the only thing that will help you make money from Instagram, and getting as many as possible should be your goal.

But how to get followers? We've got some tips for you.

Let's take a look.

1) Use relevant Hashtags

Hashtags are a great way to let the Instagram algorithm know about your post and reach an interested audience that's not following you.

To find the best hashtags in your niche, search other niche related profiles and see which hashtags they're using.

Alternatively, you can find more hashtags into the "Tags" section of Instagram's search feature.

If you still need more help with the hashtag research, use the tool Hashtagforlikes to find the relevant hashtags you can easily rank for.

2) Post at regular intervals

A research conducted on Instagram showed accounts that posted at regular intervals had a better organic outreach, greater engagement, and higher follower growth rate.

From this, you can see that posting regularly on Instagram is a good practice, even though it might not show promising growth initially.

You can test posting 2-3 times a day at a specific time and see what works best for you.

If you don't have time to post regularly, then use can schedule your posts using Instagram post scheduler tools such as Hootsuite, Later, or Buffer.

3) Encourage followers to create content

Creating content on your own for a long time can lead to your ideas running out.

Encourage your followers to create videos, photos, stories with your products.

Create a branded hashtag and ask followers to use it while posting the content they've created.

You can then showcase user-generated content on your profile and tag the original creator.

This helps in increasing your brand awareness as well as get more content.

4) Organize contests

Contests are a great way to improve engagement while using our followers' power to reach more audiences.

Run contests and offer some exciting freebies to your followers in exchange for asking them to perform some action.

For example, if your Instagram page is in the Yoga niche, you can run a contest and offer an exclusive one week Yoga training to the winning participant.

In exchange, you can ask your followers to participate by reposting your post, liking it, and commenting on it. 

5) Collaborate with other influencers

Reach out to other influencers in your niche who have a massive following.

If you get featured on their profile, it can bring in a flood of new targeted followers.

To get featured, you can ask them to try your products, offer them a commission for every sale made from their efforts, or feature their profile on yours.

You can also ask them to promote your profile on their's for a specific fee; this is often called a shoutout.

Shoutouts are a great way to quickly increase the right followers as other influencers have already worked hard to gain them.

6) Post stories

Stories are a great way to engage with your audience. It's an excellent medium to share temporary content. 

Most influencers use stories to tease their upcoming content, present small updates, show behind the scenes procedures, feature user-generated content, make announcements, etc.

Use stories regularly to connect with your audience just in a creative way.

7) Engage with your followers

The last but not the least strategy is to communicate with your followers genuinely.

Start by posting conversation starter questions in your post captions, and once your followers start replying, you can reply to them.

In general, you should participate and encourage healthy discussion in the chat section.

Engaging in a meaningful conversation with your followers helps build trust with them, which allows us to sell or promote things to them.

How to make money:

There are multiple and stable ways you can use to monetize your Instagram account.

But before you get into monetization, it is crucial to build a strong community of loyal followers.

We recommend you to at least get 10k followers before you start any kind of monetization.

Building a loyal follower community isn't rocket science, but it will demand a lot of time, consistency, and effort from your side. 

If you can endure all these, you'll be rewarded with a follower base that will respond to your promotions, and you'll consistently make money.

Having said that, let's take a look into some of the best options to monetize your Instagram account.

1) Promote affiliate products

The best monetization technique to start with even if you have a few thousand followers.

Find affiliate products in your niche and see if they're a fit for Instagram promotions and will provide value to your audience.

Once you've finalized a few products, start promoting them via posts, stories, and short videos.

2) Do influencer marketing

Get paid to create sponsored posts promoting other brands' products or services.

There are multiple influencer platforms available where you can register yourself as an influencer. 

Brands regularly hire influencers from these platforms to create promotional posts for their products and services.

Below is the list of some of the best ones. You can register on them and start doing influencer marketing.

• Upfluence
• AspireIQ
• Hashtagpaid
• PostForRent
• HireInfluence

3) Drive traffic

Add a call to action in your bio or posts, stories and drive traffic whatever online space you want, such as websites, landing pages, YouTube channel, etc.

Use this traffic to build your email list, generate leads, earn ad revenue, etc.

4) Sell your own products or services

If you have your own product line, what better place would it be to promote them other than your own Instagram profile?

Leverage your Instagram following to generate more sales for your products or services.

5) Grow multiple Instagram accounts and sell them

Over the period of time when you've successfully grown your Instagram account, you'll definitely become an Instagram expert.

Use your expertise to grow multiple Instagram accounts in different niches and sell them to other people.