How to Make Money on Instagram for Free

In this video, you will learn about how to make money on Instagram for free.

Let me know what you think in the comments below!

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Here's a strategy that works well using affiliate marketing:

Why affiliate marketing?

Here are some reasons I recommend affiliate marketing for monetizing Instagram:

It's free to start
You can make unlimited money (see Pat Flynn's results and John Lee Dumas')
There is basically no risk because you don't even have to create the product, do customer support, have a website, etc.

Find good sources of affiliate products

2 places I recommend when it comes to looking for affiliate products are Clickbank and Amazon Associates.

Clickbank has vendors who put their (usually digital) products on the site and pay people to promote them in exchange for commissions.

You can also be an affiliate on Clickbank, choose products you want to promote, and earn commissions by driving traffic to the links.

Amazon Associates pays you up to 10% commissions to promote just about any Amazon product. It's probably the largest affiliate program now.

How often and when to post on Instagram

According to CoSchedule which combined 14 studies on this subject, you should post 1-2 times per day.

Also, here's when to post:

Once between 8 and 9:00 A.M.
Once around 2:00 A.M.

Follow these suggestions, tweak based on your results, and you should get the most engagement possible per post.

What to post on Instagram to gain followers

You want to post 80% value with no strings attached and 20% promotions. Post too many promotions and no one will follow you. Post too much value without promotions and you won't make money.

Here are a few “value” post suggestions:

Quotes
Scenery
Lifestyle pics
Behind the scenes content

Promotional content would be:

Promotion of latest blog post, video, or podcast reviewing an affiliate product
Picture or video of product with link to it
Picture or video of testimonial from someone using the product

Here are some helpful resources to help you make good posts:

BrainyQuote will help you find good quotes related to your brand.
Google images using the “labeled for reuse with modification” (see video) will help you find non-copyrighted background images.
Quotes Cover will help you create quote images that are optimized for Instagram.

How to get commissions

To get affiliate commissions you obviously need to include affiliate links somewhere.

Places to put affiliate links on Instagram:

On the image (shorten the link to make it easy to type into a browser)
In the post description
In your profile description

Tools to use for this:

Bitly will help you shorten links and track clicks.
Linkedin gives you a place to do free blog posts where you can review products and include affiliate links.
Google Drive is helpful suite of products including Google Docs, Google Slides, and Google Sheets. I sometimes use Google Slides as a free way to put together social media images.

Posting affiliate links directly can work, but it may be more effective for you to link to a blog post, video, or audio with more details about the product.

This way you can review it and then give them a direct link, giving the customer a better understanding of why they may want it.

If you don't want to use free videos through YouTube or blog posts using Linkedin, you could even include links to pages that get people to subscribe to your email list using a tool like GetResponse.

Getting more followers on Instagram

It can be hard to get those first few thousand followers on Instagram to give yourself some momentum.

I suggest you try some of these methods if you want to avoid spending money:

Follow people and let them follow you back (don't do this for long).
Do cross-promotions with people who already have followers after you have some good content published.
Promote your profile on your other social profiles like in the bio of your Twitter page or on your blog.