4 Ways You Can Make Money on Instagram Without the Swipe Up Feature

Jul 4

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You can start making money with your dog’s Instagram account today! One of the biggest myths about influencer marketing is that you need a huge following or the swipe up feature to start making money. That’s just not true!

In fact, with a little hustle, you can make your dog’s Instagram account quite profitable with even a small following. It helps that Instagram recently started rolling out new features to help creators monetize right in the app! Read to the end to learn all about using the new monetization features:

1. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to initially monetize your social media. When a follower makes a purchase using your affiliate link, you receive a small percentage of the profits.

Affiliate marketing is great because it is flexible. You can promote your affiliate links anywhere: Instagram, a blog, Facebook even! While using affiliate links on Instagram is much easier with the swipe up feature, it is also possible to do before you unlock that feature. Before I had 10,000 followers and the swipe up feature, I simply wrote in my caption or my stories “DM me for my affiliate link.” I made a decent amount of money with affiliate sales well before I had a significant following!

You can also ask brands for affiliate codes. Instead of a link, you simply share the code given by the brand. No “DM me!” needed! Followers can enter that code like they would any other discount code at checkout and you will get the credit.

Don’t forget – affiliate links and codes require disclosure according the FTC guidelines.

You can apply for affiliate links on many different platforms. A couple of my favorites are ShareASale (this one has a ton of dog brands on it!) and AvantLink.

2. Content Creation

Creating content involves working for brands, but not in an advertising capacity. User generated content is especially valuable to brands. They need a diverse range of models (dog models included!) to best show off their products.

Your follower count does not matter for content creation. Let me repeat that: your follower count does. not. matter.

What will affect the prices for content creation? Photography skill, videography skill, writing skill, commercial use/licensing rights.

You can create photo, video, and written content like blog posts for brands, all without being required to post about the product. You are charging for the artistic creation and how the brand will use your content, not the advertising.

3. Advertising for Brands

Traditional influencer marketing is simply advertising. Even if you have a smaller following, you are still a valuable advertiser for brands! In fact, many brands prefer smaller accounts because they typically have higher engagement and closer relationships with their followers.

There are a few different methods to charge for advertising:

$10/1000 followers: This is an older method of determining your advertising/influencer fee. Honestly, it isn’t my favorite, but it is the most well known. Under this formula, you would charge $10 to post about the product for 1,000 followers, $20 for 2,000 followers, and so on. You can increase these rates if you have higher than average engagement.
$1/average like: I prefer this method because it is more modern and takes into account engagement without having to outright calculate engagement rate. $1 per lead is not expensive for traditional advertising fees and because influencer marketing is more effective than traditional advertising, I feel this method is very fair. Under this formula, an account with 14,000 followers that gets an average of 350 likes on their posts would charge $350. Likewise, an account with 5,000 followers that also gets an average of 350 likes on their posts would also charge $350.
3-4 cents/follower: Under this method, an account with 3,000 followers would charge $90 – $120 per post, and an account with 9,000 followers would charge $270 – $360 per post. I like this method because I think it more accurately values creators and providing access to their audience; however, I do struggle with the higher numbers this formula generates. I believe creators are worth it, but I do find it difficult to know my own worth sometimes!
Average them all: Another method is to calculate your prices under all these methods and then find the average to determine a sort of middle ground rate.

Remember, all these methods are based on an average engagement rate of 2-3%. If your engagement rate is higher, make sure to charge for that!

4. New Instagram Creator Account Tools

In an effort to compete with Tik Tok and YouTube, Instagram has finally allowed creators to monetize their content right within the app! These are fantastic opportunities, so make sure you have a creator account set up so you can take advantage of these features. Instagram is slowly rolling out the following features:

Badges: Badges are basically Instagram’s name for leaving a creator a tip if you like their content. If you are familiar with Tik Tok, these are Instagram’s version of gifts. Check out this list of 28 livestream ideas for dog accounts.
Badges Milestones: Instagram is trying to promote the new Badges feature by offering incentives to creators for going live with Badges enabled. These incentives range from $100 – $250, so it’s totally worth going out of your comfort zone and hopping on live! Make sure you activate Badges as soon as you get the notification.
IGTV ads: Similar to YouTube ads, creators will receive a percentage of the revenue from ads placed within their IGTV videos. Instagram is currently testing this feature out with a small group of creators and has not released the qualifications for monetization yet, but make sure you set up a creator account now so that you have access as soon as possible.
Affiliate marketing: Instagram is now allowing creators to include their affiliate links right in their posts, similar to the shopping features on Instagram. This program has not been launched yet, but keep on the look out! This will make affiliate marketing on Instagram even more powerful.

Make sure you set up your creator account and start using these features now. I haven’t found any support direct from Instagram for this theory, but I hypothesize that if you use the features available to you and are more active on Instagram, you will be included in earlier roll outs of new features.

So what are you waiting for?! Go out there and make some money!

Additional resources for learning how to monetize your social media accounts:

“How Do I Set Sponsored Rates as an Influencer?” by Chas of Through the Lyns

How to Work with Brands as an Influencer (Pitching, Rates, & More) of the Hey Bitches podcast by Your Girl Karley

Pitching Brands as a Creator 101 on the Cherry Lounge podcast by Tanisha Cherry