In a decade of its existence, Instagram has gone from being a photosharing app to a potent platform for both businesses and consumers. The popularity of Instagram has given rise to a new breed of professionals known as influencers. These influencers bridge the gap between brands and their target consumers.
Businesses are also working with the influencers to ensure their visibility and growth. So, if you’re keen on becoming an influencer on Instagram and earn money through your content, then you have a lot to look forward to.
But even though Instagram is an immensely useful platform, you still need a strategy to leverage the potential that this platform has to offer. Also, you need to be prepared to put in an extensive amount of time and effort because it isn’t going to be an overnight process.
Presented below are several strategies to gain success as an Instagram influencer and earn money.
Insight #1: Select a niche you’re passionate about
To become an influencer on Instagram, it’s vital for you to find a niche that suits your personality. This needs to be something in which you have a strong interest. Selecting the right niche is crucial because you’ll have to spend a substantial amount of time researching about it and posting content in that area.
Maybe you’re great at digital painting. Or, you may have an immense interest in food and love cooking/ trying out different types of cuisines. Or, you could be interested in fashion and always keep tabs on the latest styles and trends.
“Your Instagram posts have to clearly reflect whatever truly interests you and not any random stuff”, states Alice Jackson, an expert from a research paper writing service online. Your niche can be a blend of different things, as long as they’re not random. For example, Huda Kattan is a famous influencer who owns the popular makeup brand Huda Beauty.
Insight #2: Learn about the audience of your chosen niche
You need to know more about your audience than the basic demographic information. It’s useful to know the kinds of brands your followers love, their struggles and goals.
To make it as an Instagram influencer, you truly need to understand everything about the people following you. Ultimately, it’ll help you create content that they resonate with, and then the content will perform well. Also, you must take on the right kind of collaborations with brands that resonate with your audience and that your followers might buy from.
Insight #3: Make your Instagram feed visually appealing
Since Instagram is a visual platform, one of the prerequisites if you want to become an influencer is to post content that’s appealing. Not only should each of your images and video be visually enticing, but the whole feed should come across as aesthetic. This means that all of your pictures in the feed should look good, both collectively and individually.
Many influencers adopt a specific style of editing their photos so that there’s uniformity in colour or composition. You can use tools like Lightroom to edit your photos, or you can just use the built-in filters on Instagram. Also, see that your photos are taken in high-resolution and with ample natural light to make them look good.
Insight #4: Maintain consistency in posting
Consistency in your posting schedule is another crucial aspect of becoming an Instagram influencer. Many of these professionals post daily or once every two days. In fact, some of them post a few times a day or even a few times a week.
Now, when you decide on your posting schedule, you must make that decision wisely. The schedule needs to be realistic, something that you can actually stick to. Setting unrealistic goals isn’t going to help you in any way.
If you find it difficult to follow a proper posting schedule, you can schedule your posts with tools like Ripl or Buffer. These platforms let you create your content and set the time and date for posting. These tools reduce your efforts, and your content gets posted automatically.
Insight #5: The right hashtags matter
Using hashtags the right way is no less of an art. So, if you’re keen on becoming an Instagram influencer, you need to know how to use them perfectly. Hashtags are crucial because they let your content be found by other Instagram users. Instagram lets you use a maximum of 30 hashtags on a post, and you should make the most of it. But what sort of hashtags should you use?
What you need to understand is that hashtags having high search volumes aren’t always ideal for your posts. That’s because high search volumes imply high competition too. So the chances of your post being discovered through those hashtags are bleak.
This is why select hashtags that come with decent search volumes and maximises your chances of featuring in the top posts. You can use hashtag generator tools like All Hashtag or Hashtagify to find and analyse the right hashtags.
Insight #6 Develop a close-knit community
While engagement rate and follower growth are vital metrics to consider, influencers should be focusing equally, if not more, on creating a community with their audience. Regardless of the stage, you’re at in your career in Instagram, building relationships within your community is the most important thing you can do for your growth.
After posting your content, stay on the app for at least half an hour after you’ve posted. Use that time to reply to comments and come back later in the day to respond to some more comments. When you get DMs, always make sure to reply strike up a genuine conversation.
Insight #7: Leverage Instagram stories
The Instagram stories are probably all the rage right now on Instagram. In fact, millions of Instagram users are using the story feature every day. This gives you a perfect opportunity to garner more followers and maintain visibility.
Even the users who aren’t your followers can find you from your Instagram Stories. When you add hashtags or locations to Instagram stories, you’ll be discovered by more people. And if you have 10,000+ followers, you can incorporate an outbound link with the help of a “swipe up” option on stories.
You can also tag others on your stories and give a shout out to other accounts. This is not only an excellent way of maintaining relationships but also growing your own following because those accounts are likely to return the favour too. This means more visibility to your account.
Insight #8: Present winning captions on your posts
Captions are an excellent opportunity to spark dialogues and start maintaining meaningful connections with your community. They’re also a part where you can through which you can add value and inspiration to your audience.
Make sure you use long-form captions in your Instagram posts as much as you can. These captions are like a mini blog post. For instance, If you’re a travel influencer, the long-form caption can describe the ten best things to do as a visitor to a specific destination.
Now, there are several things to remember when writing these captions for your posts. When scrolling through Instagram, you aren’t able to see the whole caption without pressing “more.” This means what you present in the extended part of the caption is incredibly important. That first line has to be compelling enough to prompt readers to stop scrolling and read the whole thing.
Also, end your captions with a CTA. This is where you ask your audience to comment and start a conversation with you. Make sure your caption is relevant and easy to read. There’s nothing worse than a long caption that’s condensed in one paragraph, so break the paragraphs up.
Insight #9: Tag relevant brands and contact them
There are two stages of becoming an Instagram influencer. The first is to grow your followers organically and engage them through your content. The second, and probably more crucial for some, is to make money as an influencer.
So, once you have sizeable followers and have a decent engagement rate, begin with your brand outreach. You can tag the brands relevant to your niche on your photos to put yourself on their radar. Some brands even feature such photos on their Instagram account, which gives you higher visibility. You can also send DMs to brands you think are relevant to your niche. This is particularly if you’ve seen them tie-up with other influencers in your field.
Wrapping it up,
As glamorous as it looks, being an Instagram influencer and vying for organic engagement is a lot of work. Apart from all these steps, you need to be patient and allow the results to show gradually. With consistent attempts, your efforts will be fruitful.
