4 Popular Ways to Make Money from Instagram (2020)

4 Popular Ways to Make Money from Instagram

Instagram marketing is not just for brands and businesses to build a brand image or have a social media presence. There are many small-time entrepreneurs and other users making good money from Instagram.

While it’s certainly not easy, if you’re determined and willing to put in the effort, it’s definitely possible. With that said, let us walk you through some of the most popular ways of making money on Instagram.

Selling Shoutouts

It’s the most straightforward way of making money from Instagram, and a lot of influencers (users with a large following on Instagram) do it.

A shoutout basically means a sponsored post on Instagram. Someone pays you to make a post on your account about their product, service or brand to get exposure, followers or sales.

When you have a large enough following, it isn’t difficult to find people and businesses who would be willing to pay you for making a promotional post about their product or company. In fact, many times, these users would end up reaching out to you themselves instead of you having to look for them.

However, you must note that this may vary quite a bit from one niche to another. There are some niches which are very hard to monetize selling shoutouts. For example, if you own a meme related Instagram account, it would be hard to have people pay you for a promotional post as the audience is very generic and they may not get much benefit out of it.

On the other hand, niches like pets, health, fitness, arts and so on, have a more valuable audience and followers who are more likely to buy promoted products and services. So if you’re looking to start an account on Instagram with an intention of making money, then you must choose your niche carefully.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular way of making money from digital assets, and large Instagram accounts do pretty well monetizing with affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing is simply promoting someone else’s products or services, and earning a commission every time your referred user purchases something from them. Some of the most popular online stores and businesses like Amazon and Etsy have affiliate programs.

So for an example, if you have an account in the health and beauty niche with a good following, you can promote health and personal care products from Amazon on your account. When anyone purchases something from Amazon using your affiliate link, you will get a commission based on the product’s price and the commission percentage for the product category.

There are many other online stores and websites with affiliate programs that you can promote based on your niche.

Selling Own Products

This is a bit “next level” monetization method for your Instagram following, but if you’re willing to put in a fair bit of time and effort, then this could be the best way to monetize a loyal, engaged follower base.

There are different ways to do this. One of the most common ways is to start an ecommerce website selling products in your niche.

You need not store inventory at the beginning, and can just find suppliers who would ship directly to your customers. This is called dropshipping. There are different websites that you can use as well for dropshipping, by just marking up the prices on your website.

Another option is to sell digital products like courses, especially if you’re knowledgeable about your niche and can share useful information and knowledge with your audience and customers that would really help them.

Selling Your Instagram Account

Now, this might sound a little weird, especially if you’re looking to make a consistent income from Instagram. However, you would probably be surprised to know that there are many users on Instagram who make good money simply starting new accounts in good niches, growing them over a few months and selling them when the accounts have got a good number of followers and are getting good engagement.

These accounts fetch good money given you know where to sell them. There are Reddit groups dedicated to buying and selling Instagram accounts, and they are a good place to sell smaller Instagram accounts.

If you have a large account, you can directly reach out to brands and businesses in your niche and offer to sell your account.

You must note that Instagram doesn’t allow operating many different accounts together. But some users manage to do it using proxies and software.

However, if you don’t want to get into that kind of stuff, you can just grow two to three accounts at a time, sell them when they have grown well, and then start with another batch of two to three accounts.