How to make Instagram your side hustle
Credit: Laura Chouette on Unsplash
- If you choose a niche you are passionate about and people are interested in, you can create a lucrative side hustle on Instagram.
- Once you gain an engaged fanbase, you can monetize your account through advertising and affiliate links.
- Here are 5 simple steps to get your on your way to becoming an influencer.
Instagram is more than a photo-sharing social media platform. It is a tool for making money if you know how to use it properly, which anyone can learn to do.
You won’t make money immediately, so don’t quit your day job just yet. But you can turn Instagram into a side hustle and make some extra cash if you follow a few simple steps. At some point, perhaps you can become the next big Instagram influencer.
Below are the top five steps for making money on Instagram.
Like any business model, you must center your Instagram side hustle around a particular niche. It must be a niche that is popular and attracts an audience regularly. Some of the most popular Instagram niches are fashion, food, travel, and entertainment.
For instance, you could start a travel profile where you take trips and upload pictures of what you saw in various exotic locations. People love to follow Instagram accounts with travel themes because it gives them a chance to see places they don’t get to see normally.
Whatever niche you choose, make sure it is something that interests you so you can stay committed and passionate about it for the long haul. Also, make sure you’re in a position to take photographs of things that relate to it.
Instagram is all about visuals. If you want to maintain a long list of followers, there’s no question that you need to upload high-quality photographs to your account. Instagram requires you to take pictures on your smartphone or tablet camera and upload it to your account with the Instagram app.
However, there is a way you can upload photographs to your Instagram account from your computer desktop or laptop. For Mac and PC users, you can try Chrome extensions like Desktopify or Desktop for Instagram. After these are installed, you can start uploading pictures from your computer.
That way, you’ll have more opportunities to photoshop your pictures and make them look even better with advanced touchups.
Building up a new Instagram profile is difficult. Everyone wants to create a special post that ends up trending and attracting thousands of people. But there is nothing you can do to guarantee that will happen. The best you can do is get likes to your Instagram posts. The more likes that your posts receive, the more people will want to check them out because they will appear to be popular posts.
Since it is so challenging to get likes to Instagram posts when your account is new, you can speed up the process by buying Instagram likes. When you buy automatic Instagram likes, you get a service where a specific number of likes are automatically applied to your posts each month.
For instance, you can spend $15.99 per month and get likes on up to 120 posts for that month. The most likes you can have per post is 50 likes. If you want to pay extra, you can have up to 100 likes per post for $24.99 or up to 250 likes per post for $33.99. It is recommended that you don’t flood a single post with too many likes at once. Try to spread them around a little so that they look more natural to your audience.
Hashtags are essential if you want to attract more attention to your Instagram posts from people who are interested in your niche. Each time you publish an Instagram post, you’re allowed to include hashtags in the post or in the first comment. Users can select a hashtag and view all the Instagram posts that have the hashtag in it.
The idea is that if you research popular hashtags used in Instagram posts that are related to your niche, then you can use the same hashtags in your posts. Then it will be easier for people (and the discover algorithm!) to discover your Instagram profile and follow it.
The part where you make money comes from advertising in your posts, both directly and indirectly. Once you have a popular Instagram account, you can become an influencer.
As an influencer, you get paid for promoting the products or services of other companies or people. You can also do affiliate marketing through your Instagram posts as well. Just get creative by finding ways to monetize the thousands of new followers that you’ve received.
