Believe it or not, but some of the most prominent and successful influencers have never appeared in a movie… or in the pages of popular magazines. Most people have never heard of them. Yet, they are quietly (or quite publicly) making money by catering to the right audience and delivering the right content to them.

It’s all thanks to the advent of technology that has allowed just about anyone to become famous (at least on the Internet). As a result, more and more people are making money by becoming an influencer in different platform.

For example, being an Instagram influencer means you’re capable of reaching a target audience with visually appealing photos.

To be a successful Instagram influencer, you need a strong base of followers who are interested in what you do and promote. You must stay consistent and build up a vast following of people if you want to charge brands anywhere $75 and $4,000 per post.

Yes, you read it right! This is exactly how much money an average influencer with a substantial follower base and an engaged audience charges per post promoting products like clothing, food, hotels, and even vitamin supplements on their pages.

At the same time, becoming an Instagram influencer with a substantial follower base isn’t always an easy path. You have to put lots of effort and persistence to succeed and stand out on Instagram. Then you have to choose your niche to make it your own niche of work. Make sure it matches your interests and characteristics and gets down to business.

If you are eager to learn more about building a personal brand, in this post, we have put together a list of things that you need to do to become an Instagram influencer and start earning money. Are you ready to discover what does a social media influencer do and how can you actually make money from it? Let’s dive right in.

What Exactly Is An Instagram Influencer?

In case you missed it, an Instagram influencer is a person who has achieved a great deal of and credibility among Instagram users and can affect buying decision of their fans and followers based on their online presence. Bloggers, celebrities, and industry leaders have this effect on users because of their knowledge, skills, or experience in a particular niche.

More often than not, if a particular blogger promotes a certain brand, some audience members might have a tendency to follow the recommendation and buy the product. Therefore, influencers possess powerful influencer marketing tools, especially for new or small businesses, and can actually influence people who keep track of them.

 

If you’re looking for easy ways to make extra money at home in your free time consider becoming an Instagram influencer. This will actually allow you to basically work wherever you want, whenever you want without reporting in a specific schedule because you’re your own boss.

Can I Become An Instagram Influencer Full-Time?

In a nutshell, yes you can. Although if you want to be a full-time influencer it takes more than just posting engaging photos. It also takes time to establish yourself and a full-time commitment. You have to be flexible to keep up with changing trends and protecting your reputation. Ultimately, it takes hard work, patience, and consistency. But hard work pays off.

Successful Instagram bloggers get paid for making posts and stories which introduce service or product to their followers. Naturally, the cost varies depending on the audience size, engagement rate, and content quality.

If you are thinking of becoming an Instagram influencer you should know there are two kinds of social media influencers – micro-influencers vs. macro-influencers. Below you will find the differences between them:

 

The differences between Micro- and Macro- Instagram Influencers

Who are Macro-influencers?

Macro-influencers have lots of followers (at least over 100,000), and lots of Instagrammers know them. Some are celebrities like Selena Gomez who have thousands or millions of followers.

Becoming a macro influencer is a difficult goal to achieve but totally worth the effort. Huge brands and businesses are more likely to approach well-known bloggers to promote their products or service since they’ll be shown to millions of people this way. Macro-influencers are also characterized by a higher level of professionalism.

Who are Micro-influencers?

In recent years brands show an increased interest in working with micro-influencers due to high conversion rates, the possibility of reaching a new niche audience, and less investment. Micro-influencers are just like ordinary users on Instagram who have less than 20k followers (typically from 1000 to around 100,000). They usually have higher audience engagement rates, which leads to more genuine support for sponsored posts.

Instagram earn money

How to become an Instagram influencer? The step-by-step guide

To achieve this goal, there are some basic things to know and some information you need to get. Below you’ll find the essential steps to becoming an Instagram influencer and getting paid for merely sharing awesome content.

Step 1: Find a Niche You’re Passionate About

To start with, you need a niche in order to get started. While on Instagram you can find experts in different fields, to succeed you need a niche that suits your personality. Think about that one industry or field in which you have a good deal of knowledge and interest. Simply because someone has been successful at doing something, doesn’t necessarily mean you will be too. The main point here is that the niche you choose either makes or breaks your success as a social media influencer.

For example, if you’re into DIY projects and crafts, publish photos and captions that can help your readers start their own business by selling handcrafted products. Don’t provide content for choosing an eye makeup color if you no idea about makeup and how to apply it.

As long as your Instagram posts truly reflect what interests you, it would be easier for you to develop great content and consistently publish it over the course of weeks, months, and sometimes years.

Step 2: Create An Eye-Catching Instagram Bio

Once you have decided on your niche, you need to create an eye-catching meanwhile, thorough profile bio. Never underestimate the power of your Instagram bio because it affects how others view you. Moreover, if you want to become a successful influencer, one of the things you have to care about is to have a bio that immediately catches people’s attention. It should offer a short story in a way that engages users to depict who you are.

Keep in mind that your profile bio is like the cover of a book. This is one of the first things people see when they visit your account. Avoid being too generic. Instead, introduce yourself briefly and describe a bit about the thing you are interested in. The information you shared on your bio is searchable by others so make sure to create text that helps others understand who you are and helps people find your profile.

And don’t forget to include at least one contact way such as an email on your bio to make it easier for brands to stay in touch with you. Also, you may add a link back to your website to demonstrate your expertise.

Step 3: Tell Your Audience Engaging Stories

Nowadays, you can’t become a successful Instagram influencer and start earning money without interacting with your audience through Instagram Stories. With more than 500 million Instagram users using stories every day, this is a perfect tool to grow more followers and gain visibility.

Even people who aren’t your followers can discover you by browsing through hashtag feeds and if you have 10k+ followers, you can include an outbound link using a “swipe up” option on Stories.

You can also use Stories to build relationships with other accounts and, therefore, grow your own following. Those accounts are likely to return the favor too. And this means you get more visibility.

Another thing is that Stories give you a chance to “be real” with followers and if you are serious about becoming an Instagram influencer, you should start using Stories now.

Step 4: Create a Unique Instagram Aesthetic

When it comes to curating your Instagram aesthetic, try to stick with the overall theme of your feed. Make sure you create photos and use filters that are visually appealing individually and collectively.

The main benefit of having a beautiful feed theme is that it would catch the eyes of any visitor and motivate them to want to see more of your posts, and it brings engagement to the account. On the other hand, a consistent Instagram feed theme makes your design look professional, an interesting account anyone would like to go through.

How can you achieve it?

Pretty much all successful Instagram influencers follow a particular style of editing their photos so that the color or composition is uniform. They often use tools like VSCO or Snapseed to edit their photos or they just use the default Instagram filters. Do your best to shoot high-resolution photos in high-light environments to make them look really good.

Step 5: Use Relevant Hashtags

Like other social media networks, Instagram makes use of hashtags to help users find relevant content and connect its similar pieces together. While Instagram allows you to use a maximum of 30 hashtags on a post, utilizing them will greatly improve the chances of new followers finding your content.

It’s generally recommended that users compile a collection of photos fitting a certain theme. Hashtags are just there to help with that. But before you start adding them you should choose which hashtags you actually need.

As you probably know, some hashtags with high search volumes aren’t always good for you. Merely because high search volumes imply high competition. The chances are very slim that your post will be discovered using those hashtags.

Instead, opt for using hashtags with lower search volumes to maximize your chances of appearing in the top posts. If you want to boost your Instagram reach use a combination of hashtags varying in search volumes from above 10k to 1 million. But certainly, not more than a million.

Step 6: Post Content Consistently

Posting content consistently is incredibly important if you want to learn how to become an Instagram influencer. Whether you’re taking, editing, and sharing Instagram photos from your phone or uploading videos to YouTube, your followers need to rely on the content at specific intervals.

Most Instagram influencers maintain a regular flow of content that keeps their audience engaged and following social profiles. While some of them post daily or once every two days, others post a few times a week or even a few times a day. Surely there is no a “one size fits all” number of posts that you should send out weekly.

In fact, it all depends on the quality of the content itself. Thus, instead of setting an unrealistic posting schedule and uploading many low-quality photos, focus on producing beautiful photos, engaging captions, and stick with a consistent flow of content that works best for your audience.

Step 7: Get an Instagram Business Account

Switching to an Instagram Business Account can be beneficial in several ways.

Firstly, having a business account makes the process of growth much easier and all of the successful influencer accounts on Instagram have it.

Secondly, you’ll get access to Instagram Analytics and more detailed information about your audience, posts, and engagement rate. With these insights, you will exactly know when your posts got the best impressions and which posts have the best engagement.

Of course, it goes without saying that you must understand your audience and learn what content works best for them.

Audience Demographics is like a magic wand when it comes to pitching to brands for a partnership. You can also use it to run ads and your posts if you want, in order to get some additional engagement.

As you can see, getting an Instagram business account is an important step on your way to becoming an Instagram influencer.

Step 8: Interact with Followers

Nobody can ever succeed in becoming an Instagram influencer by just sharing content. You need to interact with your fans and followers.

If you plan on building a relationship with the audience you should always comment back when a follower comments, use polls through Instagram Stories to engage actions. To become a more successful blogger consider promoting giveaways, holding contests, and commenting on other people’s photos.

If you feel shy or socially awkward, you may want to think of your followers as friends. Let them see who you exactly are, show them both light and dark aspects of your personality. Everybody hates misinformation and disinformation on social media. If a blogger fakes everything about his/her life on Instagram would never make a successful Instagram influencer. Instead, share stories on Instagram captions and make followers interested in keeping track of the posts you make.

Step 9: Tag and Mention Brands

If becoming a top tier influencer and getting the immediate attention of a potential sponsored brand is something you’re into, start tagging them in your posts. You’ll become more visible in the brand’s feed, with the hope of driving their interest.

Alternatively, you can send direct messages to businesses or other influencers who are closely related to your niche. With time, you come across countless people who may be in a position to help you grow and advance.

Just make sure you’re trying to contact influencers and brands who are relevant to your niche.

But before you contact them you should demonstrate a steady social media follower growth rate, though. Brands are less likely to pay you for a sponsored post if you only have 100 followers.

Step 10: Do Not Buy Followers

To make your account seem more likable, you might be tempted to take shortcuts wherever you can in order to pave an easy road to success, including ‘buying’ Instagram followers. While the vast majority of purchasable followers are either bots or inactive accounts, buying Instagram followers is considered poor practice and really doesn’t support being called an “influencer.”

To become an Instagram influencer you need to actually influence the behaviors of followers. This is precisely why businesses pay for sponsorship posts – to drive additional sales from an influencer’s audience.

If you have paid followers, then it’s unlikely a brand will notice a high ROI (return-on-investment) by collaborating with you. Keep in mind that many companies track such data, it’s easy to identify influencers with paid followers as well as the reason why they are losing money through sponsored posts.

Another thing worth mentioning is that with a high percentage of fake followers, you definitely lose your credibility in your niche. This could negatively affect all of your future collaborations.

The Final Words

Ready to get started earning money on Instagram?

While not as easy as it may seem, becoming an Instagram influencer is a great way of earning money online. Yes, it won’t happen overnight and you will need to be patient and make sure that you follow the above steps.

It might take time but eventually, you will definitely start seeing results. Don’t get overwhelmed, if you consider the tips mentioned in this post carefully, then you are all set up and ready

Do you have any other tips on how to become an Instagram influencer? Let us know in the comments below.