How to Become an Instagram Influencer in 2021 and Get Paid For it

Earning on Instagram is a dream of everyone who adds posts there, isn’t it? However, this dream can come true only when you become an Instagram influencer. What a pleasure it is to take beautiful photos, add them to your account, attract more followers, and even get money for the things you love doing! In fact, there is hardly any person who will refuse such an opportunity. You will agree that it is a perfect way to get an income and you would probably like to find out how to do that.

Look: this article will explain how to become an Instagram influencer and get paid for it, so read up carefully!

What is Instagram influencer

Could every Instagram user be called an influencer? Of course, not. An influencer is a person who creates content for his own or business Instagram account and creates communities covering a certain topic or niche. These are usually topics devoted to traveling, beauty, fashion, nutrition, sports and they are accompanied by appealing photographs and stories.

In fact, there are two types of influencers distinguished and the main difference between them is the number of subscribers they have. Micro-influencers are users with up to 10k followers and their income is not so impressive. Macro influencers are people whose number of followers is over 10k and can reach millions of people. For example, a post of Selena Gomez who has over 130 million followers can cost $550,000 and it is really impressive.

Why become an Instagram influencer

There are people who got accustomed to showing their personal life to the public and add regular posts to Instagram only because they love doing that. They have never thought about becoming an influencer but it may be worth considering this. Why do so many people decide to join the army of Instagram influencers? There are several objective reasons for that.

Income

One of the most convincing reasons for many people to transform their popular personal account into a business one is, of course, money. Instagram influencers get paid and their annual income can be enough to quit a job. It goes without saying that earnings depend on the number of followers and a company you collaborate with, but still, it is a great opportunity to get money for the thing you love doing, isn’t it?

Flexible working schedule

If to consider Instagram posts the second job, one of its greatest benefits is the possibility to organize your working schedule as you want. There are no frames and you have no boss to control your efficiency, but it may be also challenging to develop your business since you need to learn more about it to achieve better results too.

New acquaintances

When people open an Instagram account, they usually start following only those people who they are familiar with. However, with time and multiple regular posts, they begin to spot that many new people start following their pages and leave comments under the posts. Even a minimum of written communication can result in getting acquainted and learning more about this person, so it is inevitable to meet new people if you are an influencer.

Boost brand awareness

Influencing can be used as a means to boost brand awareness and if you run any business in real life, your influencer account can be used for generating leads too. Naturally, if you don’t have your own company, other firms will contact you with the request to advertise them for a certain amount of monetary reward.

Fame

It is not a secret that many people who have never been popular or known to a wide circle of people have become famous when they achieved success as Instagram influencers. Having once attracted people with a certain topic or their vibrant life story, they have received recognition and are invited by television, advertisers, other companies as guests too.

As you can see, this way of entertainment can be also connected with earning money and getting famous, but it is necessary to work hard to achieve this success. One of the main questions that interest thousands of social media users is how to become an influencer on Instagram and get paid. If you want to know the clues too, keep on reading and you will learn 8 tips on how to make your dream come true.

Choose your niche

If you think that you can get thousands of followers within a short period of time by posting low-quality photos from your everyday life, you are mistaken. There are thousands of such daredevils and they can hardly become influencers ever if they do not provide great content. How to understand which content is great for users? In fact, you need to take a certain niche and give information about the thing you are passionate about. It means that you must be knowledgeable in this sphere and be ready to learn more about it working in this direction. Of course, there is always a desire to take a trending direction like makeup, repairs, traveling, but it is also worth remembering that there is tough competition in these fields and it will be very challenging to climb the ladder to your success. Nowadays, it is important to offer unique material rather than follow general trends. Don’t be afraid to present others something that can be appreciated by a small group of people to your mind – you will be surprised to know how versatile modern people are and how they want to be experts in the bigger number of directions.

One more reason to choose the sphere close to you is a necessity to make regular posts. It will be difficult to present other things or solutions you are badly familiar with. However, if you are a keen DIY master with hundreds of creations, you have a great list of themes for posts for several upcoming months. If you have several spheres of interest, you can make combinations and devote one account to several directions.

Work on your bio

When people look for a page of interest for them, the first thing that strikes their eye is, of course, information about this account. They learn the name and would like to understand what is waiting for them if they subscribe to this page. That is why a noteworthy bio is a necessity. It is important to remind that Instagram does not provide too much space for user biography, so you should sound briefly and accurately to be able to catch other people’s attention at first glance at your account description. Moreover, it should not only sound appealing and inspiring but also look curious and funny. Experts advise capitalizing certain words, add different emojis, links, etc.

One more thing to remember is connecting your Instagram account with other social media accounts. Since Instagram’s bio is not big, your potential followers can visit your Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter profile and learn more about you to understand if your sphere of interest and way of life is close to them. However, the most important feature of your bio is being heart-grabbing – sincerity and emotional feedback are the best incentives to join your account.

Create your own style

Every successful influencer account has certain features that help to distinguish it from others. Therefore it is important to develop your own style and select a certain group of posts, the style of photographs, descriptions, other content, etc.

Most of the influencers got used to posting photos, but multiple types of research of social media experience confirm the fact that Instagram stories are even more popular than photos. It means that you should not stick only to stories; it is better to combine photos and videos making your experience various. Some accounts are devoted to certain color shade and provide the respective content, others pay more attention to descriptions rather than photos. They touch people’s emotions and nerve strings, so visual content turns out to be less important in this case. There is also a viewpoint that you should have a certain photographic style. It would be strange to see images of new vehicles in the account devoted to foods, dishes, and recipes. It is necessary to follow a certain path, but if you decide to create a combined account, it is important to understand if there is any sense. If you provide content not appealing to your followers, there are high chances that they will leave you forever. That is why you should be very careful with the selection of posts and communicate with your audience on the topic of new posts.

Use hashtags

Hashtags are a very important feature of the account and posts since they help them to go viral. Moreover, they make your posts searchable increasing the amount of traffic to them. It means that hashtags can be a key to your influencer account success, so their choice must be very careful. Experts advise selecting trending hashtags in the niche you work in. It would be enough to provide every post with 3-5 hashtags though Instagram allows adding up to 30 of them. At the same time, it is crucial that one of the hashtags should be your personal one. You need to create a unique hashtag that will be associated with all your posts. It is a necessity since people who will appreciate your account can easily check your latest add-ons.

One more thing to mention is search volumes of hashtags. You will agree that there are billions of posts with a hashtag ‘traveling’, for example, and you will understand that looking at its search volume. There are very few chances that your post will be viewed following this hashtag. Therefore, it is better to choose hashtags with the search volume between 10,000 and 1,000,000 and you will appreciate the consequences of this solution.

Influencers should also add brand hashtags and the best thing to do that is to tag them in photos or even add one to your bio if you work with one big company, for example.

Work on content

It is natural that the content you post really matters. If it lacks consistency and sense, there is hardly anyone to be interested in it. You should create unique and high-quality content and it is better to publish it at a fixed time for your followers to know when they can find something new. It is also important to engage users and keep them anxious announcing certain significant events, so always prepare exciting activities to interact with your audience. One more great idea is to give prizes to your favorable followers. You can even avoid extra spending rewarding them with those prizes given to you as a gift by companies, but this is also a perfect way to attract a bigger number of followers not only by getting them interested by simply asking your followers to invite new ones and mention their names in the comments.

One more hint to develop yourself as an influencer is to use analytics and special tools with metrics. They can help you to understand when your traffic is the largest one and schedule your posts for this time.

Interact with followers

What distracts followers most of all? Naturally, it is a lack of communication with the person they keep track of. Interaction is very important if you want to remain interesting to your public. Even if you are short of time, it is important to devote a couple of minutes to several responses.

Not only comments are referred to as interaction. You can conduct polls, encourage your followers to ask questions and give sincere answers to them, announce giveaways, etc. One of the ways to increase the number of followers is to subscribe to other influencers and communicate with them too. People feel that they are ‘important’ for you and they never leave your account.

Set up business account and use advertising

When you feel that you are growing as an influencer and your number of followers increases gradually to beat the level of 10k, it is time to act a little bit differently. Experts advise switching to an Instagram business account that gives plenty of opportunities for influencers. One of its greatest benefits is more chances to attract other businesses and companies to select your account for advertising and it is the thing every influencer dreams of.

Another great feature of such an account is the possibility to track fan data. You can see statistics on the age, preferences of your followers, the time when they are most active, and understand which posts have been appreciated most of all. It will allow you to post at the best time and create posts that will draw user attention and keep them engaged. In addition to insights, a business account allows adding a contact button to get messages from your followers, select the industry and reflect it in your profile, doing links to stories, etc. The business account is created for promotion, so it allows advertising and making promotional posts too. It is possible to switch to the business account in the settings.

Contact and tag relevant brands

How to earn money if there are no companies to contact you? If you have a necessary number of followers, you can make a step towards advertisers. It is possible to reach out to the brand and highlight the expertise, engagement rate and all the important statistics to interest it. One more important point to include in an email is a sponsor fee you want to get for every post. Usually, when you ask a brand for collaboration, it reviews the offer and sends a response. It often happens that companies wish to negotiate the sponsor fee and collaboration terms, so read out messages attentively. Naturally, you should include a link to the brand to your post if it is possible too. One more way to attract brands to your account and collaboration is to tag them and follow their accounts. Your activity can result in attracting attention to your account and suggestion to create sponsored posts.

It is also important to mention that there is no sense to buy followers to attract sponsors since your cheating can be quickly identified and result in poor consequences.

How much money you can make as an Instagram influencer

Since money is one of the main reasons why people take up the influencer job, you would probably like to know how much it is possible to earn being either a micro or macro influencer. It will sound predictable for people to know that macro-influencers earn more than micro ones. The reason for that is the possibility to increase brand awareness of a biggie number of people simultaneously. But what are the numbers, by the way?

Experts say that influencers usually charge $75 and more for one post. However, there is a viewpoint that influencers can get about $1,000 for a post for every 100,000 followers they have. Moreover, in addition to monetary rewards influencers often receive free gifts that can cost thousands of dollars too. When it comes to the accounts of celebrities with millions of followers, their posts can be worth several hundreds of thousand dollars.

Instagram influencer business is constantly developing and according to the forecasts, the amount of money spent on influencer marketing in 2021 is predicted to be $8 billion.

Conclusion

Many people consider the job of Instagram influencer their luck, but in fact, it is impossible to achieve success in this sphere without hard work. Of course, people with popular accounts in other social media networks, video channels, celebrities, and other famous personalities spend less time to get a necessary number of followers and start earning. Ordinary people will spend much more time to learn how to become an Instagram influencer and get paid. It goes without saying that you may spend months until you attract people to subscribe to your page and only then you can start earning money. Therefore, if you want to become an Instagram influencer and is ready to work persistently and patiently to achieve results, follow the tips provided and have good luck!