How to monetize Instagram and how much you can earn from it 

In today’s digital age, nearly everyone has an Instagram profile, with users globally sharing upwards of 694,000 videos per minute. The visual concept of the platform allows some to use it as a sales tool while others use it to express themselves or have fun. However, not everyone is aware of how to monetize Instagram beyond direct sales. At its core, Instagram is an online platform teeming with a vibrant audience and numerous tools for monetization.

Are you wondering how Instagram generates revenue, or are you under the impression that only millionaire bloggers can profit from it? This might have been the case in the past, but the landscape has since evolved. Today, not just online stores and influencers but virtually anyone can tap into social network’s monetization potential. In this guide, we’ll look into the ins and outs of making money on Instagram, proving that monetization opportunities are within reach for all. Let’s dive in!

Is Earning on Instagram Feasible?

To answer whether it is possible to earn money on Instagram, we can briefly and unambiguously say yes. Today, Instagram is rated as one of the most popular platforms, but it has its own concept and is not similar to others. In fact, having an audience of millions is unnecessary to earn income.

According to forecasts, it is expected that in 2025, Instagram will have almost one and a half billion active users per month, which is one-third of the total number of users of the World Wide Web.

A global survey among marketers showed that 25% of B2C and 15% of B2B respondents view Instagram as the most important social platform for business promotion.

Direct monetization on Instagram, as it is on YouTube, is not available. The social network does not embed advertising directly into the content, meaning views don’t directly translate to earnings. But there are other ways how to make money on Instagram. The potential income level is directly proportional to your efforts and depends on the number of followers and reach. To start earning in the available ways, having a well-curated account with a certain theme and 1000+ subscribers is enough. 

Elevating your profile to meet the platform’s standards and encourage audience engagement involves mastering the creation of appealing, original, and valuable content—both visual and textual. Understanding and connecting with your audience, alongside a solid grasp of Instagram account promotion techniques, are also important. Success on this popular social network doesn’t come as effortlessly as it might appear, but monetizing Instagram traffic doesn’t require extraordinary talent. We recommend trying all the options for earning money on Instagram, which we will now look closely at.

Who Is Suitable for Monetizing on Instagram?

Monetizing Instagram is particularly advantageous for retail stores, brands, active bloggers, and experts. Since this is a platform for visual content, it is perfect for business areas where you can create great photo and video content. It is also convenient to sell services here, as the social network’s text posts allow you to communicate thoroughly with the audience about your activities.

Bloggers have a different way of monetizing an Instagram account. They must continuously improve statistics, build up the audience, and keep in touch with subscribers. Before earning from advertising on Instagram, you need to show the customer that your follower base aligns with their target demographic, ensuring that the ad placement will indeed be beneficial.

What Generates Income on Instagram?

The primary methods for monetizing Instagram are:

• Selling advertising (direct and native);
• Promoting your own brand;
• Services and consulting.

 Let’s explore each of these to clarify what Instagram pays for.

Integrated Advertising

Having a loyal audience that trusts and engages with your content, you can safely monetize through advertising integrations on Instagram. There are several ways to do this:

• Mentioning the advertiser’s account in the description of the post, encouraging followers to visit and take a specific action;
• A direct active link in stories to the advertiser’s website or to a chatbot in a messaging app (if the account has more than 10,000 followers);
• Native advertising – as a rule, all methods are good here: you can just casually mention the promoted object in your content or simply include it visually within your posts.

By the way, this guy has almost 80 million followers.

All three advertising formats are effective, but active advertising tends to be more sought after by influencers with significant followings rather than by emerging bloggers with smaller audiences. Platforms like Epicstars.com or LabelUp act as intermediaries, connecting bloggers and advertisers, although advertisers frequently seek out influencers with large, engaged followings on their own. If a profile has a lot of content dedicated to the beauty industry, its owner can make money from advertising cosmetics, perfumes, costume jewelry, and anything related to beauty. Athletes who highlight their lifestyle and sports achievements in the profile can advertise sports nutrition products, equipment, and healthy lifestyle products.

The question of how much Instagram bloggers earn per advertisement varies widely. While a larger audience generally commands higher rates, not all advertisers aim for macro-influencers, especially if working within a limited budget.

Profile activity, subscriber growth rate, engagement levels, and other statistical measures are often analyzed using both Instagram’s native tools and third-party services to distinguish between authentic engagement and inflated stats. Earnings for a promotional post can start at $10 for smaller bloggers, with Instagram celebrities and macro-influencers fetching anywhere from $1,000 to $20,000 per post. Impressive, isn’t it?

Brand Ambassador

Can you earn money on Instagram by promoting something you genuinely love, without directly selling products on your page? Absolutely, this can be accomplished through becoming a brand ambassador. This role serves as an unofficial representative for a company, using and promoting its products by choice. How does this differ from the usual direct advertising? The key difference is that the blogger openly endorses the brand, encouraging followers to try the products, dedicating content to it, and sometimes even organizing events. Being popular isn’t enough here; aligning with the company’s values is also important. Compensation varies, including set fees or personalized discounts.

Promoting Services and Infoproducts

If you’re an expert in your field, Instagram offers a platform to attract clients. Before monetizing your Instagram account, you need to carefully work out your image, demonstrate your expertise, and earn a positive reputation. Concentrate on a narrow niche, publish reviews, your client’s results (with their consent), and useful lifehacks. In short, the page should have everything that can build the trust of a potential consumer. Instagram is ideal for promoting services; here, you can take Before/After photos, live broadcasts, and do polls. This monetization strategy works well for photographers, designers, lawyers, content creators, IT professionals, astrologers, tarot readers, and other online specialists.

Infoproducts represent a distinct category of service that can be effectively promoted on Instagram. Marathons, webinars, online courses, and podcasts are easier to promote and conduct on a social network than offline. You can publish and sell E-books, and income can be generated from paid access to guides and masterclasses. Essentially, anything that can be digitized stands a good chance of being successfully marketed on Instagram. Another question is, how much can you earn on Instagram doing all this? Here, it matters not only the expertise of the author but also charisma, presentation, and style. As a rule, the audience is interested in the personal life values of the profile owner and is very picky about words. Before you monetize your Instagram page with services, you need to create a landing page. This page’s link should be prominently placed in the profile’s bio, making it easily accessible to potential clients. The landing page must include detailed information about the product or service, persuasive copy, credibility indicators, an order form, and payment options. Crafting an effective sales landing page is an art in itself.

Selling Your Own Products

If you can advertise other people’s products on Instagram, why not try to sell your own products or even start your own brand? Everything that looks attractive in the photo – soap, candles, clothes, handmade toys (in general, Instagram is a godsend for needleworkers), cosmetics of own production, delivery of proper nutrition, confectionery, original design of gifts. Here is more trouble than with services, as it is important to think about the visual of the profile on Instagram, create beautiful packaging, establish a brand name, and, perhaps, even set up a warehouse.

There are two ways to sell goods through Instagram: to promote the site with your goods or to combine the promotion of your personal brand with your goods. In the first case, the link is left in the profile description and occasionally in publications. The second strategy involves comprehensive coverage of your product and brand across various Instagram formats: IGTV, Reels, Stories, live broadcasts, and Guides. It’s crucial to present your product in formats that cater to the preferences of different users, allowing them to explore your products or services in the way they find most accessible. Create a unified visual style of the profile and stick to it. The Canva tool can help with profile design. It can even do all the basic work for you, as there are many templates, including free ones. You’ll just have to add your text and media files.

Earning Potential Based on Followers on Instagram

It’s time to answer the most frequent questions of those interested in Instagram monetization – how much can you earn, and how many followers are needed to start earning? The good news is that you can start monetizing an Instagram account at any stage. The critical factor is ensuring your profile is primed and ready to engage potential followers, clients, and customers. A profile that appears sparse or inactive is unlikely to attract subscribers. At a minimum, your page should feature an introductory post, a collection of photos and videos in the feed, highlights containing valuable information, and several reviews or descriptions of your products or services.

When considering the necessary follower count to start earning from advertising third-party brands (products, services), the size of your active audience becomes significant. Typically, having around 10,000 followers is sufficient for brands to consider collaboration worthwhile.

How to Earn on Instagram with 1000 Subscribers

The prospect of earning on Instagram doesn’t necessarily hinge on having many followers, but we will talk about them later. If you’ve chosen to make money from advertising, the amount of potential income depends primarily on factors such as:

• how difficult it is to organically implement an advertising campaign into a profile, given its subject matter;
• audience engagement and publication reach;
• the prestige of partnering brands – the more serious the brand, the higher the compensation for advertising;
• the chosen method of monetization of Instagram traffic.

It’s worth noting that Instagram doesn’t enforce a minimum follower requirement for monetization, making it feasible even with just 1,000 followers. Interestingly, accounts with 20,000 active followers can sometimes generate more revenue for their owners than those with 80,000 followers, 75% of whom are inactive. Brands that are interested in increasing recognition and sales are looking for sites with a wide audience, but the priority is always quality interaction. That’s why it’s still recommended to work on increasing engagement, reach, and follower base before you enable Instagram monetization.

There are also several informal Instagram jobs, such as curator, blogger assistant, dropshipper, and page administrator. You can take photos and videos on demand or create filters. All this can be done without a large following base. Not all users are often interested in monetizing their Instagram, but this is only because many simply have not heard of various tools available for monetization.

Ways to Monetize Instagram for Affiliate Marketers

For affiliate marketers, Instagram is a source of essentially free traffic. This social traffic effectively converts across numerous verticals and is welcomed by nearly all affiliate programs. Thus, for an affiliate marketer, monetizing Instagram is also a pathway to earning online without initial financial investment.

Diverting Instagram Traffic to Third-Party Platforms

Traffic from Instagram can be directed to any platform, including those that compensate for content creation. For instance, the YouTube affiliate program enables monetization for channels with over 10,000 subscribers. Yandex.Zen requires a weekly content view time of at least 10,000 minutes, meaning audiences need to fully engage with the article (i.e., finish reading it). It turns out that double monetization of Instagram subscribers is possible, which means twice as much income. Beyond earning through in-app advertising, applying the same monetization strategies as on Instagram can significantly increase earnings across platforms. To guide followers to these external platforms, strategically place links in your profile bio, posts, and stories, reminding them that your content extends beyond Instagram.

Farming accounts

Affiliate marketers excel in scaling accounts crafting pages across various niches to gather audiences and foster engagement—primarily because they do it for their gain. Not everyone possesses the skill or desire to enhance an Instagram profile, as it can be costly, time-consuming, and tedious. This creates a demand for ready-made profiles, both new and established. Selling accounts can be quite lucrative, contingent on the effort invested.

Note both the profile and the account itself look uncomplicated. A simple sales post is enough, as most people know what they are coming for.

Yes, and there are nuances:

• accounts that are not linked to a Facebook profile are valued less, so there are two ways – make a few and sell them at a premium or farm them in bulk to sell at a lower price.
• to register multiple profiles, you can link virtual numbers.

Monetization of Instagram with Giveaways

Giveaways allow you to quickly collect subscribers by offering valuable prizes (cosmetics, gift cards, gadgets, appliances). There are two main approaches: creating promotional posts in the form of contests or organizing these contests for other bloggers while acting as a guarantor. The first approach follows a model similar to direct advertising – partnering with a brand relevant to your theme that intends to promote through a giveaway. Typically, a contest post commands a higher price than standard advertising due to the “Subscribe to sponsor” requirement and increased audience engagement.

Organizing a Giveaway often involves a collaboration of multiple bloggers or brands that need to gather an audience quickly. The organizer takes on most responsibilities, including defining the scope, theme, budget, and objectives, before proposing partnerships to sponsors. After the giveaway, people usually unsubscribe en masse, and engagement and reach drops, but these aftermath effects are typically considered the client’s concern.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate marketing is considered a very lucrative way to monetize Instagram traffic. Its scope is broader than you could imagine. More than 80% of advertisers have affiliate programs and prefer this promotion method. You can promote any business through affiliate programs, particularly “gray” areas. Moreover, for some verticals, this is almost the only way. 

It is important for an affiliate marketer to choose the right affiliate network to have a good earning potential. The earning mechanism is straightforward: an Instagram account owner selects an offer targeted at a specific audience and promotes an affiliate link through various means—both paid and free. Compensation is received as a percentage of conversions following the affiliate’s pricing model. Since social traffic is mainly mixed, it is most profitable to monetize it with Smartlinks. These links contain multiple offers and feature an automatic rotation algorithm that directs traffic without needing manual intervention by the partner. LosPollos Smartlinks are one of the best ways to monetize mixed traffic, including for those who are new to affiliate marketing. By the way, this is also a good way to make money on Instagram with 1000 followers.

Remember, Instagram is not just about beauty and sports. There are many car enthusiasts, builders, plumbers, business people, economists, financiers, and artists. You can test any offers here by leaving an affiliate link in your profile and posts. If you’re aiming to target more lucrative verticals that are typically restricted on Instagram, consider redirecting traffic to a Telegram channel first. 

Earning Potential for Affiliate Marketers on Instagram

If you’ve chosen affiliate marketing to monetize Instagram traffic, you’re probably wondering how much affiliate marketers earn on Instagram. The big plus of monetizing Instagram with affiliates is the lack of any income limits. A solo affiliate marketer earns less than affiliate marketing teams because they are often limited in budget and time for all processes. However, it’s entirely feasible to start monetizing Instagram without any initial investment, especially if you are just practicing or do not expect a global income yet. If you want more – scale up, choose more profitable niches, and test various strategies, offers, and Smartlinks. 

There are many factors that influence the profit: bid, pricing model, KPI, region, advertising budget, and the prospect of specific promotional bundles. If you work with the LosPollos CPA network, your account manager will tailor a Smartlink to your traffic’s characteristics to optimize conversion rates.

Working directly with the advertiser, you are left alone with the task; often, the final decision may not be yours. An affiliate marketer’s income is closely tied to the quality and amount of traffic they generate, bearing risks with each new promotional link. But direct partnership, in our opinion, is an unnecessary risk. Reputable platforms, such as LosPollos, partner with trusted and loyal advertisers, provide the best offers and can afford to provide additional benefits for partners. It is necessary to look at things realistically; affiliate marketers do not always have enough experience and intuition to find a promising offer and an honest advertiser. The choice is yours, but remember, choosing the appropriate network significantly shapes your earning potential.

Conclusion

While many are familiar with the concept of Instagram monetization, stepping into this arena often seems daunting. Common hurdles include questions about the minimum number of followers required to start earning and strategies for follower acquisition. We have looked at ways to monetize on Instagram with advertising and the benefits of 1000 followers. In fact, it’s incredible that the platform allows everyone to earn, from beginner bloggers with a small number of followers to affiliate marketers without an advertising budget. With the diverse monetization strategies highlighted, there’s something for every aspiring Instagram entrepreneur. Predicting exact earnings on Instagram is challenging; the true potential unfolds only when you dive in and give it a try.