The Quickest Way to Make $1,000 per Month on Instagram
By: Charles Tumiotto Jackson
Tags: Influencer Marketing, Social Media, Marketing, Instagram, Business

The Quickest Way to Make $1,000 per Month on Instagram

You don’t have to be an influencer to make a living off of Instagram

Photo by Aaron Wu on Unsplash

Imagine if you could make the time you spend on Instagram profitable. Instead of spending hours every day pointlessly scrolling, you could make money out of your account. It sounds tempting, I know.

You have probably heard of influencers, these people with thousands of followers that are living the dream, getting free stuff from brands, eating out in the best restaurants in exchange for an Instagram story, traveling all around the world…

Lots of gurus online will tell you that it’s easy and that you can also do it. The truth is, getting to this level of fame on Instagram is a proper full-time job, and most people are not ready to make the sacrifices to get to this lifestyle. Trust me, I’ve worked with influencers before, and it’s a lot more stressful and dreading job than they let it seem.

However, what if you could make some money out of Instagram without having to put in all this work, time, and dedication?

Of course, we’re not talking here about the same level of income, but with a little bit of work, you could build a real empire through this strategy.

That’s how I started in social media. Through this strategy and business model, I got into this field, and it was the best and quickest way to learn all about the platform. So why buy a course to learn Instagram when you could make money mastering it?

So what exactly is this strategy? Instagram theme pages.

What’s an Instagram Theme Page?

Niche pages, or theme pages, are trendy on Instagram. They post consistently, have very high engagement, and usually have thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of followers. You might be following a few niche pages without realizing it.

Theme pages don’t create their content. They curate popular content in a specific niche on their account while giving credit to the original creator. These accounts are an extensive collection of popular content on a particular niche. Because these accounts are reposting viral content, their posts usually drive considerable traffic and generate impressive numbers of likes or video views.

The high engagement helps with having the niche accounts featured on the explore page often, which increases the engagement even more, driving thousands of people a day on such profiles.

Because they have lots of followers and excellent engagement, these accounts are often targeted by brands or by people trying to grow their accounts in a particular niche. These people would pay a fee to be featured on a niche page.

Here is a practical example: you have a print-on-demand business where you sell T-Shirts with dog designs on it. You could build your own Instagram account, but it would take you around a year to have a big-enough audience to start selling your products through your account. So instead, you identify a few Instagram accounts in the dog niche, you DM them, pay them a little commission, then they post on their account, advertising your product with a link to your e-commerce site in their bio. Most niche account would leave the promotional post for 24 hours before taking it down. The goal is to make more profit in these 24 hours than the amount you spent on the promotion. As the Instagram niche page owner, this is pure profit. All you have to do is collect the money and publish the post prepared by the person asking for the promotion. After 24 hours, you delete or archive the post, and your feed looks beautiful again.

To sum up a niche page’s business model: niche pages sell their high engagement and high followings to brands or to other accounts that want to grow in a specific niche.

The job of the owner of a niche page is to grow their audience and maintain high engagement numbers. The more subtle part of the job is to keep a balance between regular posts and paid posts to make sure people don’t disengage or consider the account as a spammy promotional account.

Once the theme account gets big enough or hits a plateau, the owner will usually sell it and buy another page. The buying and reselling aspect of the business usually allows theme page owners to scale their Instagram business. Once you own a few pages in different niches, the micro-income can add up to quite significant amounts of money.

It’s a popular business model as it doesn’t require any investment to get started. It doesn’t require any content creation knowledge. It can get quite profitable if the account gets big enough.

How To Create a Successful Instagram Theme Page

The first step is to find the right niche. You need to pick a niche that has a high-growth potential. But it would help if you also targeted a specific sub-niche to make sure that it’s not as saturated. That means you need to pick a niche that’s mainstream enough and then go for a more specific niche in that mainstream niche. For example, Photography could be your mainstream niche, and Film Photography or US Cityscapes could be your sub-niche.

As a general rule, try to stay away from the niches that are too specific or seem to have no competition. If you go too narrow, it will be hard to grow your account. If you pick a niche that appears to have no competition, it might mean the niche is too small, or there’s no interest in that topic on Instagram.

Once you chose your niche, you need to come up with a name. Don’t overthink it, try to make it readable, and try to make it visible what your niche is. Let’s take the film photography niche; for example, thefilmphotographyproject, capturedonfilm, filmshots, filmphotosonly could all be decent Instagram handles.

Regarding the bio, the same rules as a regular account apply. You want to make sure you explain what you will post, for whom, and you might specify that you take requests via DM. This will let people know that they can advertise on your account.

How To Find Good Content

Now that you have your account set up, you need to find the best content to repost.

You can use whatever tool you have to find content in your niche. The most obvious one would be to browse through the popular hashtags relevant to your niche. From there, identify content that has performed well, save the content (lots of websites and third-party apps exist to do that), and repost it on your account without forgetting to mention the original creator of the photo or video.

It can be tempting to repost the content that performed the best, but keep in mind that a lot of other niche accounts are doing the same thing as you, so you may want to stay away from the content that has been shared over and over again for years. Try to find more recent content or that haven’t been shared a lot by other accounts.

Regarding your hashtag strategy, use all 30 available. You want to rank on as many hashtags as you can. On each of them, you want to make sure you can appear on the top posts. The best way to do that is to estimate the average engagement of your posts. Then, while browsing hashtags, take a look at the engagement of the top posts. If it is similar to the engagement you usually get, that’s a hashtag you can use.

Growing Your Instagram Theme Page

Now that you know your niche and how to find viral content, you need a strategy to grow your account quickly.

Fortunately, you will be using content that is already proven to be viral and engaging, so that’s an aspect you don’t have to worry about. But imagining the content will be enough to get you tens of thousands of followers in just a few days is wrong.

You will have to drive traffic to your page. The best way is to engage with people interested in your niche. Lots of niche page owners are relying on bots to follow and unfollow accounts automatically. While I don’t recommend using bots to automate your Instagram account, it’s a lot let risky to use them on a niche page as your brand is not associated with the account. Since you’re reposting content, you won’t be losing any of your hard work if your account gets suspended or deleted.

If you don’t like the idea of using a bot to automate your account, you can do it by hand. Please take a few minutes a day to follow a few accounts, like their posts, comments on some of their content. The more you behave like an actual account, the better it will be.

Engaging with others is the best way to get started and grow your account to a few thousand followers. But once your account gets big enough and generates good enough engagement, you may want to switch to a different growth strategy such as optimizing your hashtags, doing partnerships with other niche accounts, and so on.

Some people recommend using ads to boost your niche page. While I’m sure that works, it’s not mandatory, and you can grow your accounts to tens of thousands of followers without spending a dollar in ads.

Theme pages can make from a few hundred to a couple thousands of dollars per month. It all depends on the niche and the size of your account. While they require some time to maintain and time to grow, they’re usually relatively straightforward to manage as you don’t have to spend much time on content creation, which is the more time-consuming part of every Instagram strategy.