Effective Marketing Tips to Maximize Your Brand’s Exposure on Instagram

With over 1 billion active users worldwide and a high engagement rate, Instagram is presently a very powerful platform for businesses to maximize their brand’s exposure. Marketers no matter the sizes of their businesses are taking advantage of this to establish a strong online presence for their brands on Instagram. These here tips are quite handy to help smart marketers maximize their brands’ exposure on Instagram.

 
Setting up Your Instagram Account

To have a strong presence on Instagram, it is crucial for businesses to carefully set up their Instagram accounts properly. An effective Instagram account must include a strong bio and profile picture that accurately represents your brand among other requirements. You can utilize relevant hashtags in the bio and content to help your visibility by reaching your desired audience. If you can in addition switch the account to a business account, you can take full advantage of the valuable insights it offers and the added ability to promote posts. These steps may look small but they are sufficiently impactful to ensure a successful Instagram marketing strategy.

Consistently Creating Engaging Content

You need to consistently create engaging and visually appealing content that resonates with your audience if you want to stand out on Instagram. Such content usually starts with high-quality visuals and consistent branding that must reflect your brand’s identity. It helps to use the power of storytelling to connect with your audience and make your content more relatable. If feasible, you must try to incorporate user-generated content and collaborations. This helps in building trust and authenticity with your followers. Limiting yourself to static posts is not helpful for your content. Instead, it is advisable to use more of Instagram Stories. Doing so is a great way to keep your audience engaged and this directly helps to increase your visibility. For more audience engagement, you can use features like polls, Q&A, and countdowns to interact with your audience and to keep them coming back for more. If you want to maintain a strong brand presence, it is hugely important to regularly post on Stories.

Create a Consistent Brand Aesthetic

If you consistently create brand aesthetic on Instagram, it is great for creating a strong and recognizable brand identity. This simply requires that you use consistent colors, fonts, and themes in your posts, stories and profiles while making sure it is cohesive. This is because a cohesive brand aesthetic creates a visually appealing feed which helps your audience associate your brand with a specific style and message. You must clearly understand your brand’s values, tone, and target audience if you want to create brand aesthetic. You can then use high-quality visuals and custom graphics to maintain a consistent look and feel. You can easily get this done by using Instagram’s in-house built-in filters and editing tools to achieve a cohesive aesthetic.

Effectively Utilizing Instagram Stories

Because of their huge popularity, (over 500 million active daily users), Instagram Stories have become really essential for marketers looking to increase their brand’s exposure. As a marketer, if you use Instagram Stories well, it can significantly increase your visibility and engagement with your audience. These Stories have various effective features for engagement, such as polls, Q&A, and countdowns. These features help marketers to connect with their audience in a fun and interactive way, thereby helping to make their brands more relatable and memorable. If you want to maintain a consistent brand presence, you must regularly post on Stories. You can add links, hashtags, and location on your posts. This helps, to drive traffic and increase reach for your brand. By re-posting user-generated content and interacting with their posts, you can directly engage with your audience’s Stories. Doing so helps to make your audience feel valued, thereby helping to create a sense of interactive community around your brand.

Directly Engaging with Your Audience

Building a strong relationship with your audience is one of the critical factors in successful Instagram marketing. This relationship involves engaging with your followers positively. Doing so not only helps to foster a loyal community, but it also helps to increase your brand’s visibility on the platform. Now what to do to foster a loyal community? Make sure to respond promptly to comments and messages from your audience. This shows your audience that you value their input and actively listen to them. It can also lead to meaningful conversations and feedback that can help to improve patronage for your brand’s products/services. So, if you actively engage with your audience on Instagram, it can lead to increased brand loyalty, higher reach, and, ultimately, a boost in your brand’s exposure.

Cross-Promoting on Other Platforms

Actively promoting your Instagram content on other social media platforms is a great way to increase your brand’s exposure and to reach a wider audience. If you cross-promote your content, it can help you to drive traffic to your Instagram page and potentially gain new followers. You can use your other social media accounts to widely share your Instagram posts, stories, or promotions to increase your brand visibility. You can also add your Instagram handle to your website, email signature, and business cards to encourage people to follow you on the platform. For more effective exposure, be sure you include a link to your Instagram page in your social media bios, use relevant hashtags and tags when sharing your Instagram posts on other social media platforms. You can in addition share your Instagram stories on very popular social media platforms like LinkedIn, X, Facebook and others. This helps to increase brand visibility.

Utilizing Instagram Ads

Instagram Ads are a powerful tool for businesses to significantly increase their brand exposure. Businesses that use paid advertising can reach a wider audience and target specific demographics that align with their target market. On Instagram marketing, marketers can take advantage of various formats to get their messages out. These include photo, video, carousel, and story ads. These formats each come with their own unique marketing benefits. For effectiveness, it is important to carefully select the right ad format for your brand and audience.

Leveraging the Power of Hashtags

Technically, hashtags play a crucial role in increasing your brand’s reach on Instagram. This is because hashtags are simple but powerful tools that help categorize your content, making it more discoverable for your target audience. To leverage hashtags effectively, do some diligent research to help you create branded hashtags specific to your business. Doing this does not only help to make it easier for your audience to find and engage with your content, but it also helps to build brand identity. If in addition you take steps to incorporate popular and niche hashtags relevant to your industry in your content, it can help expand your reach and attract new followers. So, if you utilize hashtags effectively, it can significantly help to maximize your brand’s exposure on Instagram.

Leveraging Influencers and Partnerships

Influencer marketing can no longer be ignored in today’s digital landscape. When marketers partner with influencers, particularly those with a large and engaged following, they easily tap into new audiences that significantly increase their brand exposure on Instagram. For this reason, it is particularly important to consider their relevance to your brand and the authenticity of their following when choosing influencers. You can leverage influencers and partnerships by way of collaborations to expand your reach on Instagram. What is most important however is to maintain genuine and authentic partnerships to ensure long-term success and credibility. If you are able to utilize influencers and partnerships this way, it is possible for you to maximize your brand’s exposure on Instagram. Smart marketers never fail to make this a key component of their marketing strategies.

Diligently Monitor and Analyze Performance

The success of your Instagram marketing strategy ultimately depends on how well it performs. This you cannot determine unless you are able to diligently monitor and analyze your performance on the platform. It is therefore crucial to regularly monitor and analyze your Instagram performance to ensure that you are on the right track. Utilizing Instagram Insights and third-party analytics tools can provide valuable data and insights on your content, audience, and engagement. It is hugely important also to track key metrics such as post reach, engagement rate, and follower growth to understand what is resonating with your audience and what isn’t. The insights from such data can help you to make informed decisions on adjusting your content and strategy for better performance. It helps to keep an eye on industry trends and adjust your strategy accordingly to stay relevant and competitive. Consistently and diligently monitoring and analyzing your Instagram performance is key to maximizing your brand’s exposure and success on the platform.

Wrapping Up

If you follow the foregoing tips diligently, it can help you to maximize your brand’s exposure and visibility. What is most important however is to continuously monitor and analyze your performance on Instagram platform. The insights from such analysis can help you to adjust your marketing strategies accordingly, all with a view to staying up-to-date with the latest Instagram trends. It is essential to have a strong presence on Instagram and continuously evolve your marketing strategy to stay ahead of your competition. That’s about the best way to safeguard your success on Instagram marketing.

How to Monetize Your Instagram Account to Maximize Earnings

In recent times, Instagram has rapidly gained such popularity for digital marketers to now recognize it as an essential part of their business marketing strategy. That’s no surprise at all with about 2.4 billion monthly active users. The platform now offers a massive opportunity for many businesses to increase their profits through effective monetization strategies. In this article, we’ll be discussing how you can turn your Instagram account into a profitable business asset by way of monetization. Here is what you need to do:

Join Reputable Affiliate Programs

Undoubtedly, affiliate marketing can be a lucrative way to monetize your Instagram account. Through affiliate marketing, you can partner with other brands, promote their products/services to your audience and earn commissions. Simple! All you need do is to thoroughly research brands that align with your niche and target audience and decide on which to market. Alternatively, you can simply join a reputable affiliate program like Strong Future International, SFI, commence promoting products/services and earn commissions. Make sure to choose only products/services that are relevant to your audience and align with your brand’s values. These are the kinds of products/services that you can market easily on Instagram and earn good commissions.

Set Up an Instagram Shop

Owning your own shop on Instagram is one direct way to monetize your Instagram account. Once you set up an Instagram shopping feature, it allows your followers to purchase products directly from your posts or stories. This makes it convenient and easy for them to shop from your account. But first, you must create an Instagram business account which you can easily connect to your other social media accounts on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Pinterest and so on; making sure your type of business is eligible for Instagram shopping. This you can ascertain by meeting the requirements of eligibility and following Instagram’s commerce policies. Always remember to tag your products appropriately in your posts and stories to make them shoppable.

Build Trust with Your Audience

You can try to build trust with your audience using deliberate efforts by way of direct engagement with your audience, showcasing your brand’s values and consistent with your content. This is because Instagram is a highly visual and interactive platform. It thus provides the perfect opportunity to connect and engage with your audience in a more personal and authentic way. This is what helps to build trust quickly. On the platform, building a solid and trustworthy brand is crucial for monetization efforts and for the success of any business. If you can effectively use your Instagram account to highlight your brand’s values and mission, it helps your audience understand and connect with your brand more deeply. That is trust building which helps to enhance your likelihood of making good sales on the platform.

Use Sponsored Posts and Instagram Ads

You can use sponsored posts and Instagram ads as powerful and effective tools to reach a wider audience and make more sales. Such paid promotions allow you to directly showcase your products/services to a targeted audience. This helps to make it more likely for them to convert into customers. This is because, if your posts are sponsored or in form of paid Instagram Ads, you can target them better, easily measure them for effectiveness and make them reach a larger audience through increased visibility. This is possible only if you create visually appealing and engaging content that resonates with your target audience. Your content can be visually appealing if you use high-quality images and videos, compelling captions, and relevant hashtags that make your posts and ads stand out in a unique way.

Collaborate with Influencers and Other Brands

Collaborating with influencers and other brands is a great way to monetize your Instagram account and increase your reach through sponsored posts and ads. If you partner with other businesses, you can tap into their existing audience and gain new followers who may be interested in your products/services. For potential brand collaborations, make sure to choose products/brands that align with your business and target audience. Doing so helps to ensure that your partnership is authentic and resonates with your followers. If you collaborate with other brands, you not only monetize your Instagram account, but you also build relationships and trust with your audience and other businesses in the bargain. For transparency purposes with your audience however, always remember to disclose your brand collaborations.

Maximize Your Instagram Fan Base

One of the most essential elements of monetizing your Instagram account is having a large and engaged fan base. Significantly, your fan base consists of people who are potential customers for your business. To maintain your fan base, you must consistently interact with your followers by creating high quality content. You can also partner with influencers in your niche to reach a larger audience and gain more followers. The larger, more engaged and loyal your followers are, the more the likelihood they’ll support your business and help increase your sales.

Utilize Instagram Live Badges

Live Badges are relatively new on Instagram. Even at that, they are some of the most effective ways to monetize your Instagram account. Live badges allow your followers to support your content by purchasing a virtual badge during live streams. By doing this, it not only directly creates a sense of community and connection with your audience, but it also allows you to earn money directly from your followers. However, to earn income from Live badges, you must have no less than 10,000 followers and be at least 18 years of age. These badges can help you to build brand trust and loyalty for your business, leading to increased sales and profits in the long term.

Wrapping Up

If you have the right approach and you are creative enough, the foregoing methods can help you to reach a wider audience, increase sales, and ultimately boost your business’s profits as you market on Instagram. These methods can help you to effectively monetize your Instagram account, grow your business through it and make more sales.

6 Ways to Make Money on Instagram even if you are Not an Influencer

Even if you are not an influencer, there are several different options available to you to generate income and make money on Instagram. If you are discerning enough, you can uncover the hidden money-making potential of Instagram. Even if you are an aspiring online entrepreneur, you can convert your passion into a profitable business on Instagram. This applies also to talented content creators who are simply looking for a side hustle to earn a second paycheck or just having fun doing what they like to do.

This blog article will discuss some 6 legitimate and practical ways to make money on Instagram even if you are not yet an influencer properly so called.

1. Affiliate Marketing

If you are a talented content creator, you can do affiliate marketing on Instagram and earn commissions from your efforts. This you can do by tactically adding affiliate marketing into your Instagram strategy. This allows you to open up a reliable new revenue stream even if you are not a typical influencer. Through affiliate marketing, you can directly promote products/services for product merchants and earn good commissions for your efforts. Any sales or desired action you generate through your Instagram account qualifies you to earn a predetermined percentage of the sales value as commission. If you join FREE a reputable affiliate marketing program like Strong Future International, SFI, you can carefully choose products that resonate with your target audience to promote. Through the unique promo code provided by SFI, you can promote these products widely on your Instagram account and any sales you generate from these efforts entitles you to a commission.

2. Selling Your Own Products

Yes, you can sell your own products and services through your Instagram account and make money. If you create an online store on Instagram, through it, you can effectively exhibit, promote and sell your own products. This is most effective if you have a direct relationship with your followers. You can leverage this relationship to sell products that resonate with them and are related to their interests. You can effectively tap into the authenticity that connects with your audience by totally believing in your product/service, resulting in a seamless and compelling purchase experience. You can use inventive promotions such as intriguing discounts or compelling prizes to pique the interest of potential customers and increase engagement. These dynamic marketing strategies, if used correctly can create an explosive buzz around your promotional activities. This ultimately helps you to attract more new customers and increase your sales on Instagram.

3. Helping Creators Build their Profiles

You need a bit of skills and the right knowledge to be able to help content creators build their profiles for a fee. Knowing how the Instagram algorithm really works can help you to build a great following on Instagram. Armed with this knowledge, you can approach content creators to handle their Instagram profiles and help them to build followers, for a fee of course. So, you can conveniently approach talented and upcoming creators to help build their Instagram profiles. You can make good money from this service.

 
4. Selling Intellectual Property
 
This too requires great skills and talent to make money. If you have the knowledge and the skills, you can create e-books, online courses, or templates and sell through your Instagram account. Instagram thus provides you an enormous potential to monetize your knowledge and expertise by transforming into your virtual storefront. There, you can promote and sell your intellectual property, create an attractive shop directly on Instagram or use third-party networks to reach a larger audience and make more sales.
 
5. Increasing Brand Awareness and Recognition

Instagram platform because of its unique peculiarities has enormous potential for brand promotion. It allows you to consistently create engaging content, and you can leverage that to introduce your viewers to your distinct brand and its services. By the time your brand gains some traction on Instagram, the setting becomes ideal for you to capture the attention of your audience with the attractive products/services you are promoting. This helps to stimulate more sales. You may in addition choose to form profitable alliances with other businesses, promote their products/services and earn commissions by way of affiliate marketing.

6. Dropshipping Products

Dropshipping is a marketing arrangement that offers an intriguing potential to earn money on Instagram. With dropshipping, product merchants can do away with large upfront expenditures. They are thus willing to pay third party entrepreneurs who can help them generate sales without the inconvenience of warehousing products. These third party providers help to fulfill orders and the merchant delivers to addresses provided by the dropshipper. So, if you build an enticing Instagram store, you can easily transform your digital presence into a vibrant marketplace. From this store, you can fulfill orders and get the merchant to deliver the products, and for a fee of course.

15 Effective Tips to Earn Money on Instagram Threads

Instagram Threads have proven to be very effective avenues to earn money on social media. Once you have the digital skills and the determination, you too can earn money from Instagram Threads. It is quite simple really. But first you must be active on Instagram platform before you can expect to earn money on Instagram threads. That said, you are good to go after carefully building a significant following on the platform.

Here are some 15 tested and effective strategies you can use to earn money on Instagram Threads.

1. Influencer Marketing: By the time you have a significant following on Instagram, many businesses will be interested in partnering with you to promote their products/services. This is the time you can effectively use Instagram Threads to build stronger connections with your followers and engage in direct conversations with them. At this time, you are effectively an influencer. You can take advantage of that to make money by searching for the right opportunities. At this time, you can discuss potential collaborations with businesses/brands and negotiate sponsored content deals. This is when money starts rolling in.

2. Affiliate Marketing: You can join a reputable affiliate program like Strong Future International, SFI to market products and earn commissions. Make sure the products you are marketing are related to your niche before sharing your affiliate links on Instagram. You can then use Threads to discuss and recommend products/services to your close friends, family or associates and to specific groups. When people make purchases through your affiliate links, you earn a commission from each sale. Simple!

3. Build a Strong Personal Brand: You can effectively use Threads to engage with your close friends and followers in a more intimate way. If you consistently post high-quality content that aligns with your personal brand, the brand becomes stronger if your content resonates with your target audience.

4. Connect with Creators in your Niche: Because Threads do not utilize hashtags or private lists, it is imperative that you actively engage with creators in your niche. You can identify influential creators and engage with their content. This will help you to improve your visibility and attract more of their followers. You can like, comment, and follow other creators to foster meaningful connections. Doing this helps to expand your reach within the Threads community.

5. Collaborate with Brands: As your Instagram presence becomes stronger, many businesses/brands may approach you for collaborations. This is one great opportunity to make more money. You can thus leverage Instagram Threads to communicate and negotiate with these businesses/brands, plan content, and share updates on the collaboration process.

6. Promote Sponsored Content: The time to really make money on Instagram Threads is when you have a significant following. This is the right time to work with brands to create sponsored content. Threads help to facilitate discussions about campaign requirements, exchange ideas, and provide feedback. This ensures smooth collaboration process and money comes rolling in from paid sponsorships.

7. Engage with your Audience and their Followers: You can foster a loyal following, actively engage with your audience by acknowledging their comments, responding to their queries, and showing genuine interest in their opinions. You can further interact with the followers of other accounts by liking their comments, following them, and engaging with their posts. This strategy does not only help you to build a sense of community, it also helps to train the algorithm to recognize and promote your content. That helps to deepen your engagement no end.

8. Utilize Diverse Post Types and Styles: Very fortunately for marketers, Threads allows them to use various post formats. These formats include videos, GIFs, and even unique one-time posts. If you experiment with different types of content, it can help you to easily identify what resonates best with your audience. In furtherance of that, you can diligently analyze the algorithm’s patterns by observing the performance of different post styles. That allows you to correctly replicate successful strategies in future content. Additionally, if you diversify your posts, you’ll manage to keep your audience engaged and attract more new followers.

9. Optimize Identified Successful Strategies: You must take special note of strategies that yield positive results for your brand on Threads. These are the strategies you must concentrate on and use more. The timing of your posts, using specific content formats, or engagement triggers are strategies you must closely monitor to help you gauge the performance of your posts. If you analyze algorithm patterns and optimize your future strategies accordingly, you get better results. By continuously adapting and refining this approach, you can ensure sustained growth and engagement in your business.

10. Deliberate Consistency: Consistency breeds success on Instagram threads. Instagram’s algorithmically driven single homepage relies on regular posting to train the algorithm and increase visibility. So, if you post high-quality content consistently, you can establish a strong presence on the platform and engage your audience better. It is a good strategy therefore to maintain a regular posting schedule on Instagram. Doing this helps you to stay at the forefront of your followers’ feeds. This translates to more traffic and better engagement.

11. Earn from Donations and Support: To earn money on Instagram Threads by way of donations and support, you must have a dedicated community. If you have that, you can use Threads to connect with them on a much deeper level. Through this connection, you can offer exclusive content, behind-the-scenes access, or personalized interactions. You can do this to your close friends and associates in exchange for donations or support through dedicated platforms.

12. Offer Personalized Services: You can effectively use Instagram Threads to communicate with your audience and offer personalized services such as coaching, consulting, or one-on-one teaching/learning sessions. You can discuss requirements, provide guidance, and share progress updates with your clients who pay money for your services.

13. Drive Traffic to External Platforms: You can use Instagram Threads to share links that direct your close friends and followers to external platforms. These are platforms such as your website, blog, or online store. This way, you can encourage them to explore your offerings or make a purchase through these links.

14. Sell Digital Products: If you are good at creating digital products such as e-books, courses, or presets, you can sell them through Threads. Through Threads, you can effectively promote and sell these e-products to your close friends, associates and followers. On Threads, it is easy for you to share product updates and exclusive discounts. You can even provide personalized assistance through the app.

15. Offer Exclusive Discounts/Deals: You can effectively use Instagram Threads to provide exclusive discounts or limited-time offers to your close friends, associates and followers. Doing this can create a sense of urgency that encourages these people to take positive action. If they do, it results in increased sales or conversions.

Wrapping Up

Building a successful monetization strategy on Instagram takes valuable time, effort, and consistency. If you focus on consistently creating valuable content, engaging with your audience, and maintaining authentic relationships with them, you can exploit the relationship to earn money on the app. Instagram Threads can be a very valuable tool to help do this successfully. This is because it effectively helps you to strengthen your connections and facilitate your business activities on the app.

Effective Techniques for Successful Affiliate Marketing on Instagram

Digital marketers looking for new ways to monetize their Instagram accounts are increasingly turning to affiliate marketing. What they do is to promote products on Instagram and earn a commission on each sale they generate. Now, that’s one cool way you too can turn your Instagram following into a source of income to make money online. If you are able to put in consistent efforts in combination with strategic promotion, affiliate marketing on Instagram can be a lucrative way to make money online.

Here are some of the most effective techniques you can deploy on your Instagram account to make money with affiliate marketing.

Choose the Right Affiliate Program

Carefully selecting the right affiliate program to work with is essential to the success of your affiliate marketing efforts on Instagram. You can diligently research the various affiliate programs available out there on the internet and select which aligns with your niche. What you must look out for are reputation and credibility, commission structure, mode of joining, training, marketing tools and customer service. These will help your choice. With reputable affiliate marketing programs like Strong Future International, SFI, you can sign-up for free, get your unique affiliate link you can share with your Intagram followers and start your products promotion immediately. You can then take full advantage of all the in-house marketing tools as well as free training in SFI. Your commissions earnings start immediately too. As you build up your following on Instagram and promote more affiliate products, you can earn more commissions on the sales you generate through your unique affiliate link.

Create an Instagram Business Account

The only suitable account for affiliate marketing on Instagram is a business account. It is only a business account that allows you to access special marketing features on the platform. You have access to Instagram Insights which provides valuable data on your audience and content performance. Once the business account is functional, you can clearly define your niche and target audience. Knowing who your audience is helps you to select the right affiliate products to promote and to consistently create the right content that resonates with your followers. You must however make sure that your business account is optimized with your profile for affiliate marketing. This optimization must include your precise and clear bio, sharp profile picture, and a link to your website or unique affiliate link.

Choose the Right Products to Promote

To choose the right products to promote, you must look for products that align with your niche and such products that your followers would be interested in. This you can do by fully understanding your audience’s needs and interests. This is crucial to finding the right products to promote on Instagram. You must therefore diligently research and evaluate the products you want to promote and ensuring that they align with your niche. These products must be able to provide value to your audience to help solve their problems. Tip: look out for products that perform well on Instagram, such as fashion, beauty, and lifestyle products. This done, you can then determine the best way to present these products on Instagram for maximum visual effects. You can do this by using high-quality and high-resolution visuals/photos/videos and captions that align with your niche, products and CTA.

Consistently Create Quality Content

Consistently creating high-quality content is essential to successful affiliate marketing on Instagram. To make this happen, you must develop a content strategy that aligns with your niche and audience, then consistently create high-quality and impactful visuals and captions that resonate with your followers. Take advantage of in-house Instagram Stories and Reels to promote your products. These are popular Instagram features that allow you to showcase products to your audience more engagingly. The content you create can be in the form of Instagram posts, stories, or even IGTV videos that allow you to embed your unique affiliate links.

Diligently Track Your Progress

You need to diligently track your marketing progress while optimizing your marketing strategy. You must therefore closely monitor your affiliate marketing performance on Instagram to gauge your performance. Gauging your performance is critical to optimizing your Instagram marketing strategy and improving your results. To make this happen, you can use Instagram Insights to carefully track vital metrics like engagement rate, reach, and click-through rate on your affiliate links. By carefully analyzing this data, you can find out what works and what isn’t working then you adjust or rejig your marketing strategy accordingly to ensure your content resonates well with your audience. By continuously improving and optimizing your content this way, you can maximize your affiliate marketing earnings potential on Instagram.

Consciously Grow Your Instagram Audience

If you deliberately grow your Instagram following, you can directly expand your reach in affiliate marketing. Doing so helps you to generate more leads and sales. But, you must engage real time with your followers and target audience by responding to comments, asking questions, and encouraging user-generated content. You can then take good advantage of various Instagram’s in-house features like hashtags and geotags to attract new followers and expand your reach the more. You can earn more income if you collaborate with others, particularly Instagram influencers and products merchants to cross-promote products, reach new audiences and grow your following.

Generously Use Niche Hashtags

Do you neglect to use niche hashtags to promote affiliate products on Instagram. Niche hashtags are hashtags that are specific to your product or industry. The right niche hashtags help to increase your visibility and drive more traffic and sales to your affiliate offers. They can help you to reach a targeted audience that is more likely to be interested in the products you are offering. For best results on the use of hashtags on Instagram, make sure you research well using in-house search tools to choose the hashtags that are most relevant to your products and target audience. It is such hashtags you can include in your Instagram posts and stories to help generate engagement. They help to increase the likelihood of more click-throughs to your affiliate link. Significantly, using niche hashtags on your Instagram business account is a very effective strategy for promoting affiliate products and reaching a targeted audience on the platform.
 
Wrapping Up

If you want to market on Instagram, it is important to have at the back of your mind that successful affiliate marketing on Instagram takes time, patience, and persistence. However, if you take advantage of the foregoing techniques, you can continuously improve your marketing approach on the platform. Doing so puts you on a very promising affiliate marketing journey to earn significant income on Instagram.

Top 5 Tips to Monetize your Instagram Account

If you already have an Instagram account, there’s no better time to start making money from the account than now. If you don’t have an account, there’s no better time to have one than now if you want to make money on Instagram. With more and more people taking their businesses online daily and many more people looking for alternative sources to earn income, monetizing your Instagram account is quite an attractive and profitable way to earn income on Instagram. This has directly opened the way for influencer marketing. Presently, on social media, and particularly on Instagram, influencers help businesses of all sizes to reach their target customer audience. They help showcase the most recent products, test numerous marketing hypotheses, and boost sales and loyalty for businesses. Instagram is one of the most popular social platforms out there ranking fourth behind Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It boasts of over 1.5 billion visitors monthly. Now, that’s one huge market out there on Instagram and a great place to earn money by creative content creators and influencers. However, before you decide to embark on content creation and marketing on Instagram, please pay close attention to Instagram monetization requirements and community guidelines so as to avoid penalties and even outright ban if you fall foul of the rules.

 
Here are top five tips on how to monetize your Instagram account and earn money on it.

Live-Streaming Broadcasting

One great place to make money on Instagram is the live-streaming market. Instagram live streaming broadcasting allows content creators to talk to and be seen by their audience in real time. You can help product merchants advertise their products/services on your live streams. If the content you are broadcasting has a large number of listeners, you earn good money from products merchants if you run ads for them. This is one viable monetization technique on Instagram you can earn good money from.

Collaborating with Brands

One other way to earn on Instagram is by collaborating with various brands to promote their products/services. Even if a brand wants to conduct a fresh product launch or re-animate an existing one, you can help the brand to highlight the product’s features by providing an honest review. The brand may choose to pay you commissions or even gift you a sample of the product to enable you try it out yourself. Through your Instagram account, you can in addition help brands to engage in brand awareness, promotional and educational campaigns and so on. These are all aimed to spread the word about the brand’s great products and its mission. Among the other vast areas you can collaborate with brands and earn income are writing posts tagging the brand’s official account in your feed, creating a Story with a clickable CTA (call-to-action) button, shooting a short Reel video depicting a product’s peculiarities, or by simply putting a link with all the details in your Instagram bio and so on.

Instagram Reels Ads

You can also earn money on Instagram Reels. Reels are highly-engaging, short-form video clips which allow users to explore concise visual content based on their AI-derived interests in an endless loop. You can monetize your Instagram videos if you are granted an invitation to enroll in the Reels Play Bonus program. This program rewards you if your reel performs consistently well, the volume of reels you upload is considerable and if you accept a prompt to create a special reel dedicated to a certain special event. Doing these, you stand to benefit a great deal from income shared periodically from ads shown on creators’ reels.

Instagram Subscriptions
 
You can earn income from Instagram Subscriptions services too. In this service, for a predetermined monthly fee, subscribers get faster availability of new content, access to exclusive content, and some other perks and benefits. This special service is what attracts the fees subscribers pay. In addition, users can also contribute to their favorite blogger’s earnings and they get a chance to receive a shout-out for doing so. This allows content creators to not only monetize their Instagram posts, but to also set up a stable recurring income flow.

Instagram Affiliate Marketing

Another way to earn income on Instagram is through its in-house e-commerce shop. Instagram e-commerce shop provides sellers with a built-in funnel. This funnel now removes the need for customers to leave the app to continue shopping. This development has made it really convenient for about 50% of Instagram users who now shop directly on the platform. For content creators therefore, this shop translates to yet another earning opportunity by way of affiliate marketing. When content creators through the content they create manage to attract shoppers to this shop, they earn a commission on each unit the shop sells with their help. Usually, the commission payout takes place within one to three months after a sale is sealed.

Wrapping Up

Instagram is quite a young and rapidly developing social media platform and its popularity is phenomenal as well. Therefore, aside the foregoing ways to earn income on the platform, many more ways could be coming on stream going forward. There are already in-house signals to this effect.

How to Make Your Business Stand Out on Instagram

Instagram which started as a simple photo app has gradually become one of the most popular social media platforms on the internet. Presently, it has more than one billion active users and it is still growing by the day. Digital marketers have found Instagram to be among the most effective marketing channels online. The platform manages to help marketers to have a strong digital marketing strategy and a highly valuable online presence, without which these businesses cannot hope to succeed online. Even though Instagram users use it primarily for fun and socializing, the platform has proved over time to be a very precious online tool for business. For this reason, Instagram comes very handy for marketers who want to build their brand reputation, source new leads, understand their ideal customers better, grow their revenue and increase their profits.

It is however near impossible for marketers to achieve these lofty goals if their Instagram accounts cannot stand out and compete successfully with global competitors. If as a business owner you like to market on Instagram, be sure you are marketing with a strategy that can make your business stand out on the platform. If you are already on the platform, here is what to do if you want to start seeing improvements in no time at all.

Create and Post High-Quality Content Consistently

Human beings are visual in nature the reason video content is really impactful with them. In online marketing, video content proves to be a very effective marketing tool. It is highly effective to attract the attention of prospects and for creating a lasting impression in their minds. Marketers can effectively use Instagram to create brand visibility for their brands if they are able to create and post high-quality content on the platform consistently. Most Instagram followers always go for content, high quality content that is. That is the type of content that gives them what they want and induces them to stay connected. So, if marketers habitually create content on Instagram that reflects their brands and show off the quality of their products, such content usually helps anyone wanting to purchase from them to make their buy decisions. For best results therefore, you should not only create quality content, you must also endeavor to post it consistently making sure it is well timed for maximum impact on your followers. It is such impactful content that usually generates positive reactions from your audience and also helps to inspire user-generated content from them.

 

Use Instagram’s In-House Tools Correctly

Most marketers know that Instagram as a versatile social media platform is a powerhouse of marketing tools. Marketers who use these tools correctly find it much easier to create brand visibility for their brands, raise brand awareness, and gain more leads and customers. Ultimately, they make more sales with the help of these tools. These tools are particularly available to you when you take simple steps to create a business account on Instagram. You can use the tools to know the trends, track your marketing metrics, and for better audience targeting. This way, you can do more and better marketing on Instagram as an effective social media platform.

Leverage the Most Popular Instagram Features

If you have a business account on Instagram, there are in-house features you can leverage on to do business better. With these features, your business account can easily meet some of the most important conditions it needs to succeed on Instagram. First condition is to consistently create quality valuable content, while the second condition is to find additional creative ways to inspire followers to interact with your content. For these reasons, any marketer with a business account on Instagram must know how to effectively use some of the most popular in-house features like Stories, Reels, Live Streaming, Hashtags and so on. Depending on your type of business and the products you are marketing, you can experiment with these features to find out what’s most suitable and works best for your business. Some of these features have an effective way of reaching and matching your content with users that are already actively searching for similar content. Such users being already active are more likely to positively engage. That helps to get more leads and conversions.

Effective Influencer Marketing Tips on Instagram

Smart marketers always like to tap into the power of influencer marketing to maximize their social media marketing returns. Marketing with influencers on Instagram is becoming increasingly popular and hugely beneficial to marketers. This is because Influencer partnerships really have a huge impact on the success of marketing campaigns on the platform. When the partnership with influencers is right, it helps to give the brand a big boost in the market place. On this relationship, Instagram itself shares some tips which include the following.

Generously Share Customers Stories

Marketers can benefit immensely if they habitually use their stories to better connect, and communicate about their business. If marketers capture these stories, then pay to turn them into promotions, the rewards are great. Customers’ stories come from real people and real experiences. Marketers can experiment with many stories to design brand messaging then determine what works best with their marketing strategies on the social platform. If properly done, it can help boost the brand presence on the platform.

Market with Branded Content Ads

Instagram's branded content ad is potentially the most effective ad format marketers can work with to get results. They are very effective to maximize connective messaging. Technically, these ads help to combine the improved resonance of influencer posts with the platform's ad targeting tools. That helps to confer authenticity on those more personal messages with the focus of ads. These ads allow marketers to add Call-to-Action, CTA to their posts making them more responsive. That allows marketers to get the added credibility of the message coming from a person, as opposed to a brand handle. This gives marketers the capacity to focus their messaging directly to the most receptive audiences. Results from such efforts are great.

Take Advantage of Customer Creativity

Everyone can be creative in various degrees. When content is from real people, that makes it authentic and it performs. No one is better to create content that customers love than the customers themselves. The views and opinions from customers are always many and varied, and that makes the content rich and very valuable. Brands can therefore utilize this as influencer content through their campaigns to boost engagement and brand resonance. With so many customers already posting valuable content online, giving them a prompt to work with can be all it takes to get powerful, valuable branded material for your promotional efforts.

20 Best Instagram Marketing Tips for Social Media Marketing

For most social media marketers, Instagram has become an indispensable visual marketing platform. It comes with very powerful tools social media marketers find irresistible in their marketing activities. Any marketer who is desirous to convincingly tell his brand’s story, engage with customers, gain leads, and positively drive sales, Instagram is where to be and these 20 tips are very handy in that quest.

1. Set Up Your Business Account

Marketers can hardly experience the full potential of Instagram and benefit from its free tools unless they have a business account. It is therefore advisable to follow the prescribed step-by-step process to set up a business account of your own on the social media platform. It is only by doing so you can get to benefit maximally from the social platform’s most powerful features reserved for business users only.

2. Enhance your Business Profile

To enhance your business profile on Instagram, just follow the rules. Be sure your profile is brief enough and packed with sufficient aesthetics to be eye-catching. That is what helps to arrest the attention of users even if they are scrolling by very fast. Be sure the info you supply is within to the required limits and give the correct info only in the spaces provided. That is what helps to enhance your promo activities.

3. Use Eye-Catching Profile Photo

If you want to market successfully on Instagram, your branding efforts matter a lot. Consistent branding is vital to building credibility and earning the trust and loyalty of prospects and customers. Be sure your profile photo and or logo have the right aesthetics, sizes and are sharp enough to be attractive and appreciated by your users.

4. Create an Aesthetic Theme

A good aesthetic theme helps your branding and business credibility. You never know who will come around to view our profile. Whosoever they may be, your duty is to ensure they like what they see when they get to your profile. If you establish and follow an aesthetic theme, it creates coherency and somehow communicates a sense of professionalism for your business. In addition, an aesthetic theme helps users to quickly and confidently recognize your brand’s posts in their feed. That is good for branding. Your aesthetic theme doesn’t necessarily have to be too loud. What you need is simply a subtle visual thread that connects your posts well enough to boost the all-important brand awareness and recognition for your business.

5. Clearly Identify your Goals

It is not advisable to kick-start your Instagram marketing efforts without a very clear objective/goal. Using Instagram to market your business without clearly defined goals is like driving in an unfamiliar and uncharted territory without a map. Be sure to have a clear goal and a good strategy in place to achieve the goal(s). Build your goals around growing an audience, brand awareness, getting leads, making sales and growing your business.

6. Understand your Audience

You can better market to your audience if you know them well enough to be able to segment them for marketing purposes. The demographics to target include age, educational background, location, gender and such other important info that will enable you to package a marketing message for the right audience. The type of product or service you are marketing will also depend on what you know about the demographics of your audience. Not only do your target audience’s demographics define your content strategy, but they also play a major role in your sponsored advertising approach.

7. Know your Competitors Well

Experienced marketers like to advise other marketers to always keep an eye on their competitors. Be sure to follow what they do and how they do it. If you do a detailed competitive analysis, you can get to find out how other successful marketers in your niche benefit from Instagram and how they use it to their maximum advantage. The main aim of a competitive analysis however is not to just replicate what other marketers are doing, but to uncover what resonates with your own target audience and to recognize any untapped opportunities you can tap into for the benefit of your business.

8. Market with the Right Hashtags

The use of hashtags on Instagram helps boost business visibility. The platform may allow you to use up 30 hashtags per post but what you really need is fewer than 10 hashtags per post (depending on the length) if you don’t want the content to appear spammy. Be sure to use only hashtags that relate to your post.  Avoid hashtags that are outside your niche or overly baiting. It is best to create and use your own campaign-specific hashtag. That is usually a more effective way to increase engagement, reach new audiences, and boost your follower count on Instagram.

9. Engage With Your Followers

Always remember that Instagram is a social media platform. If you want people to engage with your content, you must engage with theirs, too. Do not ignore user comments, questions, enquiries, likes and so on. Just keep the conversations going. That is what matters most in social media interaction. How you engage with other users contributes to your brand’s voice and relevance. Be consistent and appropriate in your engagements. If things escalate as they are most likely to do once in a while, do not cut the discussions. Explore the possibility of continuing the discussions privately maybe through direct messages or via email. Whatever the situation becomes, just be sure to keep the discussions going with the other parties in a civil manner.

10. Emphasize Visuals

Instagram is largely a visual social media platform. This means you must market to please the eye by using visual elements to attract, engage, and inform your target audience. Make sure you are real and the photos you post are real, authentic and visually attractive. People generally like to connect with people and you can connect better with Instagram users when they perceive you as real, natural and authentic. For this reason, the photos you post must be well focused and eye-catching. Your videos must be sharply focused, with closed captions, well lit and clear in audio. Your graphics must be crisp and easy to load.

11. Generously Share User-Generated Content

It is usually too tasking for a marketer to create and publish high-impact Instagram posts daily. There is a credible strategy you can use to get around that and still be able to have access to excellent and authentic content. That strategy is by deliberately sharing user-generated content. That is one great way to directly involve your customers to build a great community of active and interactive participants on Instagram. This relationship is mutually beneficial to all parties. If any of your customers publishes a high-quality image relevant to your brand, you can re-share this image to your business’s profile with a clear credit to the original poster by tagging their username in your own caption.

12. Convert Followers to Customers

Your first major assignment on Instagram is to build a credible following. Once established, you can strategically begin to convert them into loyal customers. This you can do by baiting them with promo deals and discounts, new products, running contests and special marketing treatments and so on.

13. Plan your Strategy with Marketing Insights

Marketers always have access to in-house Instagram insights. From these insights, they get to know the key performance metrics of their business. These key performance metrics include, engagement, post reach, follower demographics, impressions, and the number of views your Stories get. These are the key metrics marketers rely on to formulate marketing strategies and to refine existing ones. As a marketer, the more you know about your followers and what resonates with them, the more you can fine-tune your content to meet their needs and expectations. The insights from past marketing activities are thus very vital for marketers to plan for and work for the future.

14. Write Compelling Captions

Because Instagram is largely a visual medium, it is very important to write good captions for your marketing business. Just as is expected of the images you are using, your captions must be bold and compelling enough to reflect your brand’s personality and maintain consistency across posts. Keep an eye on the characters you use and the length of your captions. Typically between 100-150 characters is recommended. The shorter the better but it must be sufficiently informative since only the first two lines of your text appear in the feed. After these two lines, users who are interested in the rest of your text must click “more” to read the rest.

15. Take Advantage of Free Instagram Tools

The power of Instagram lies in the tools it makes available free for business owners. Many of these tools are tools created by third-party companies to enhance Instagram for business users. If you want to create high-quality and high-impact images, you can use Canva. You can use Caption Writer to format your business captions for maximum impact. You also have access to free photo editing tools and others.

16. Market with Paid Ads

Instagram ads are hugely effective because they can be targeted to specific demographics and they appear in both users’ feeds and Stories. Depending on the size of your marketing budget, you can also pay for and sponsor ads on Instagram. Sponsored ads can be highly engaging, appeal to your target audience better and can include CTA, Call-to-Action. That is what makes them to be highly effective. When you advertise on Instagram, do not forget that the visual is key to the effectiveness of your ads. When you sponsor ads, be sure that your caption is strong enough to compel your audience to take action. That is complimented with great images/graphics that can make your audience to stop scrolling and spare a bit of attention to what you are offering.  

17. Be Consistent

From experience, it appears consistency is readily one of the most important ingredients for effective Instagram marketing. If your audience knows you make posts regularly, you earn valuable credibility. Consistency in making valuable and informative posts helps to enhance your engagement with your followers, run ads and build your following. Growth may be slow in coming but persistence ensures that it comes.

18. Open an Instagram Shop

If you have your own products to market, Instagram allows you to set up an online shop to directly market your products. However, you can only do so if you have successfully set up a business profile on the platform. In addition, you can tag products in your posts so that users can have the opportunity to instantly purchase any products that catches their fancy since they access your shop via your profile, their feed, or Stories.

19. Publish Content at the Right Time

Depending on the demographics you are targeting and the part of the world you are marketing to, timing your posts on Instagram tends to get very good results. Timing of posts aims to target the best times for driving engagement depending on the product, niche and need requirements.

20. Market with Influencers

There is credible evidence that many Instagram users make their buy decisions based on influencer recommendations. It is smart marketing on Instagram therefore to market with influencers. But first, the decision must be taken on who you want to target and market to. That is what helps you with the kind of influencer you need to approach. Generally, the size of followers an influencer has is a foremost consideration in deciding which to work with. An Influencer with say 5000 followers is not in the same league with the one that has 5 million followers. This directly affects marketing campaign costs because the more followers an influencer has, the more your marketing campaign will cost. Next is to determine what kind of influencer the audience you want to market to trusts. Influencers’ charges are based mainly on two parameters. They can charge for sponsored posts to their audiences, and if they directly recommend or endorse your products to their audiences. If influencer marketing is properly set up on Instagram, it can generate very good returns on investment.
 

How to Enhance your Business Profile on Instagram

If you want to market successfully on Instagram, be sure to have a business account. Naturally, Instagram business profiles are always very brief. That is what the social media platform requires. What you need is to have on Instagram is a business profile account that is attractive, very brief and eye-catching enough to attract even the attention of notoriously hurrying users just scrolling past. If your profile is effective enough, it compels users to tap the “follow” button. By doing so, the user enters your ever-growing list of followers. That means your business pitch effectively communicates your brand’s promise, personality, and unique selling points to users. Getting leads and business comes next as an expected consequence from there. The larger your list of followers, the larger the audience you can directly market to. A good business profile on Instagram helps to grow this audience faster.

Here is a breakdown of what you need to do to enhance your business profile on Instagram. Follow this guide in filling up and setting up yours.
•    Name: Max. 30 characters.
•    Username: This is your business handle. A unique name is required. Max. 30 characters.
•    Website: This is your “link in bio”: Linked with clickable URL that you can change as often as you want when you want.
•    Bio: Max. 150 characters.
•    Category: A feature that tells users what your business does.
•    Contact: Your reliable address, phone number, and email for easy communication.
•    Call-to-Action, CTA button: A customizable button that allows users to interact easily with your brand. A Call-to-Action, CTA acts as a prompt for users to follow or tag your business or use a specific hashtag. This is good for traffic, leads and sales.

If your business account is well set up, you can reap the huge rewards Instagram as a versatile social media platform offers to its users. Once you deliberately enhance your profile, you can build your audience, refine your advertisements, and if you are consistent enough, your business will reap these rewards.

How to Set Up an Instagram Business Account

Without Instagram business account, it is not possible for marketers to realize the full potential of Instagram social media platform. This is because Instagram is not an ordinary social media platform for people to simply socialize. It appears Instagram was set up for business and it is only with a business account marketers can get to access what it offers for them to promote and grow their businesses. The good news for marketers is that the most powerful features of Instagram are reserved for business users only. These features can only be accessed with a business account. Some of these powerful features include features that allow you to:

•    Set up an on-platform shop.
•    Create ads without using Facebook’s advertising tools.
•    View Instagram’s analytics/Insights.
•    Publish your contact information.
•    Include a call-to-action, CTA button in your profile’s bio.

For these reasons, it is smart social media marketing therefore for marketers to set up a business account on Instagram. Here is a step-by-step process how to set up an Instagram business account.
1.    Download the Instagram app for iOS or for Android smart devices.
2.    Create an account with your email address or phone number.
3.    Choose a username that’s as close to your brand name as possible. It should ideally be unique and even iconic.
4.    Select a password and confirm the password.
5.    Complete your profile.
6.    To create a business account, navigate to your profile and click the hamburger menu on the top-right of your screen. Tap Settings > Account > Switch to professional account. Select your type of business and follow the instructions. BOOM, you are on.

Wishing you smooth, safe and profitable marketing!!!!

How to Earn Money on Instagram

As a user-friendly social media platform, Instagram has gained immense popularity as a photos-sharing medium. Presently it has over one billion active users. Instagram with its very high user-engagement and immense popularity has become a veritable platform for making money by its smart users. It is available to everyone irrespective of whether you have a business or whether you want to earn some quick cash for yourself. Even though new ways are getting discovered how to use Instagram to earn some money, some of such ways are already very popular with users. Experts now reveal these here as the best and most creative ways to earn some money on Instagram.


 
Selling Photos:
Are you a good photographer? Welcome to Instagram where you can make some money sharing and selling your photos.  Images/photographs are creative assets which you can have a patent on. You may decide to license them or simply print them to sell online. Instagram has become increasingly popular as the best place to showcase your portfolio and sell your images/photographs to individuals as well as agencies. That is irrespective of the fact of whether you are a budding photographer or a raving professional. Instagram is the place to display, share and sell your photos and you can make good money as a result. The money you make is directly dependent on how creative you are. Aside from direct selling of prints, you may choose to creatively print your images onto lots of different physical products before selling the products. Once physical items are photogenic, they sell well on Instagram. For that reason, you can also consider putting your images on physical items like calendars, T-shirts, tea cups, flower vases, handkerchiefs, towels, napkins, pillow cases, phone cases and mugs. The more of such products you are able to imprint your photos, the more of them you can sell and the more money you can make as a consequence.

Influencer Marketing:

On Instagram, every user consciously and deliberately builds a following. The higher the numbers of your followers, the higher and better your online reputation! By continuously sharing photo/images on Instagram, your online reputation continues to grow enabling you to gain influencer status as a consequence. With the good and sizeable following you now enjoy, that translates to good trust building which puts you in a vantage position to influence and convince audiences about trends and products. That enhances your reputation as an influencer. When you become a trusted influencer, you can make money from sponsored posts by mainly creating awareness about products and or services. With Instagram Analytics report, you can get to know more technical details and demographics of your followers. That information will enable you to specifically target them with suitable and appropriate brands. Sports personalities, celebrities and public figures with high Instagram following are the most well-known influencers. However even if you are not a popular figure offline, so long as you can work hard, make good posts and earn huge following on Instagram, you too can become an influencer and you can make good money as a result.

Affiliate Marketing:

Affiliate marketers earn commissions from the posts they regularly make on their websites or blogs. By that, they are required to promote other people’s products and taking a cut of each sale by way of commissions. These commissions get paid by way of agreed percentages. On Instagram, if you post very attractive images of the brand’s products, you can embed the product owner’s URL on the images. When your site visitors click on this URL and by that action visit the site and make a purchase, you get paid a commission on the sale. Some producers even pay per click even if a purchase is not made at that material time. You can become an affiliate through various methods. What makes producers to accept you as an affiliate is directly related to the size and number of followers you have on your Instagram site. Therefore, the more followers you have, the better your influencer capacity and the more likely producers will accept you as an affiliate.

By Line:

On Instagram, what matters most is the size of the following everyone has. That’s why everyone consciously and deliberately grows their size of following in many ways like:

Regular posting: You must develop and deploy a practical routine on this. Meaning, you’ve got to post several engaging images every day if you want to build up your number of followers real quickly.

Posting Good Quality Photos/Images: On Instagram, quality is king. It is therefore really imperative to take good time to create the best photos you can because your size of followers won’t grow as expected unless you endeavor to regularly post high quality and attractive photos/Images.

Using Relevant Hashtags: Because you need more and more people to see your images, you must ensure to use relevant hashtags. With the right keywords wisely used in your posts, hashtags allow other Instagram users to easily find your interesting topics, which can influence them to follow your account.

Specific Marketing Strategy: A good marketing strategy will help you to quickly increase your number of followers. This you can do by setting specific deadlines and working real hard to achieve your goals by the deadlines. Everyone gets to set their own deadlines depending on their experience and capacity. Getting the right results is what counts here so it is these results that determine how good your marketing strategy is. Once you manage to increase your number of followers to influencer capacity, you can then start searching for companies whose products you wish to promote.