One thing that comes up pretty often is how to actually go ahead and make money from an Instagram page. Therefore, in this article, the different ways that you can actually go ahead and monetize an Instagram theme page will be covered and broken down.
Before jumping straight into it, one thing that needs to be made clear is that you need to grow an audience first before you can start to think about monetizing it, especially if you’re doing a faceless page.
If you have a page that has a face behind it, then you might be able to monetize a little bit earlier on in your journey. But if you’re doing a faceless page, you need to make sure that you gain that attention first and then you can start to think about making money.
1. Page Shoutouts or Promotions
The first way that you can go ahead and make money with your page is through page shoutouts or promotions. This is simply where you’re going to use your audience to promote someone else’s personal brand or their business.
This way of monetization is very simple once you have actually grown an audience within a niche, and it is suggested having at least about 10,000 followers before you do go ahead and try and sell any promotions. However, this number can vary depending on what niche you’re in, but around the 10,000 mark is probably the point where you’d actually want to go ahead and start selling some promotions on your page.
Once you have grown a large enough audience within a specific niche, all you will need to go ahead and do is:
- Communicate with the person that is interested in buying a promotion.
- Negotiate with them for a price that you are comfortable with and a price that is fair for them.
Once you have that and you’ve agreed a deal, they are simply just going to pay you, you’re just going to post on your page, and that is pretty much how it works.
How to Find People Interested in Promotions
In terms of how you can go ahead and actually find these people, there are a few different ways that you can go about this.
1. Focus on Growing Your Page
The first way, and the simplest way, is to simply just focus on growing your page. As your page is growing and as you’re getting more traction and more attention on your page, you’re probably going to get people reaching out to you that are going to be interested in promotions, and this can be quite a good indicator of maybe when it is a good time to start selling promotions.
2. Look at Competitors’ Pages
The second way you can go about getting more promotions for your page is actually looking at your competitors’ pages or people within your niche and then going ahead and seeing who is running promotions on their pages. Then you can try and reach out to them saying something along the lines of:
“Hey, I have a similar page to this page. I see you’re running promotions on their page. Would you be interested in buying promotions from my page?”
Something simple like that. You’re just going to reach out to them saying that, and this can help you attract some more promo deals for your page.
The only issue with this is a lot of businesses or people that do promote on Instagram through theme pages, a lot of the time, especially if they are bigger influencers or bigger businesses, they are probably going to have an agency doing the promotions for them and running the promotional ads for them. Therefore, you reaching out to them is probably not going to be the right people to talk to. However, if you do want some more promotions, this is still a viable strategy to try and get some more promotions.
3. Make Connections Within the Space
This then leads to the third way to go ahead and get more promotions, which is to make connections within the space.
As you sell more promotions and your page gets bigger and you get more immersed in the sort of space, you’re going to be connected with new people and people that might know people who have agencies, or you might get connected to people that are interested in running ads, and your network is just going to make it so much easier to sell ads. So this is the best way to go about it.
Once you have sold a few ads, hopefully you’ll get some repeat customers and people returning to you. Another thing that happens when you start selling ads on your page is other people are going to go ahead and see that, and if they’re performing well then they’re going to be interested in running ads on your page. A lot of the time what can happen is you might not run any ads, and as soon as you run your first ad you’re going to get a bunch of people jumping at the opportunity to run ads on your page.
How to Scale This Monetization Method
As for how you can scale this monetization method, there are once again a few different ways you can go about this.
- Grow Your Page Bigger
The first way is simply just to grow your page bigger. Obviously, the bigger your page gets, the more attention you’re going to have on your page and the more money you can charge for your promotions. - Build Out a Network of Pages
The next way is to build out a network of pages. This is where you have a bunch of pages and you can charge people to run ads across all of your pages. Ideally, your pages will be in the same niche so people that are interested in running it on one of your pages will be interested in running it on another one of your pages. Then, once again, you can just charge more because you have a bigger network, and you can sort of create your own little agency that is like an ad agency and you’re doing it on your own pages, so you don’t have to pay to actually go ahead and fulfill these ads; you’re just keeping all of the profit.
This is a great way that you can scale this monetization method and a way that a bunch of people are making multiple thousands every single month.
2. Selling Physical Products
The second way we can go ahead and monetize an Instagram page is through selling physical products.
There are many different ways in which we can go about this. We could:
- Drop ship products.
- Create our own physical products.
- Create our own sort of clothing, to name a few.
However, if you are going to go down this route, an honest recommendation would be to not buy the stock up front, just because if you do this you’re putting yourself at risk. That is one of the good things about theme pages: you don’t really need to invest a bunch of money up front to make money, and that stays true for all of these monetization methods as well.
So here is how you can try this monetization method with basically no risk on your end.
Example: A Theme Page Selling a Branded Journal
A theme page that has done this really well is a page called Selfology.
They have done this really well. They have a really nice branded page, they’re getting really good engagement on their page as well, and they are selling some sort of journal. This journal is nicely branded and it looks pretty clean, and they’ve got good photos. This is really important if we are going to sell a physical product: it needs to look premium and it needs to look good.
If you go over to their website, it is really clean. They’re selling this for £25 and you can buy it in bundles. At one point they were sold out of this; they were sold out of this product, so it’s clearly selling and it’s pretty interesting. This is an example of a page that has done this really well in terms of selling a branded physical product.
Using Print-on-Demand Instead of Holding Stock
To go ahead and try this out for totally free without any upfront risk, you can use a print-on-demand site such as Printery. This type of website will:
- Ship the product for you to your customer.
- Allow you to customize and make your own product on their website.
- Fulfill orders as soon as someone buys your product from your store, without you needing to hold any inventory or buy stock up front.
There are usually many different things that can be created, such as clothing, merch for your page, journals, notebooks, posters, and other products that fit your niche and branding.
The key idea is that you design the product to match your page (for example, matching the color scheme and style of your theme page), use good photos and mockups, connect it to an online store platform like Shopify, and then the print-on-demand service handles production and shipping in the background.
Recently, people have made a good amount of sales on things like posters made with print-on-demand services and even jumpers and merch.
Making Your Store and Product High Quality
If you are going to go down this route of the physical product, it is important to:
- Put a lot of time and effort into making the store as good as possible, because if your store isn’t very good, it doesn’t have good copy, it doesn’t look clean, people are not going to buy.
- Put a lot of time and effort into making sure that your photos and your mockups of your product are really good and your designs are really good.
Once again, it’s a physical product. It needs to be something that people actually want to buy. Unfortunately, your page is not a char, and people are not just going to buy something just because they like your page. A lot of the time they’re going to naturally want to have the product for them to be able to buy.
So make sure you spend a lot of time trying to make it as good as possible; otherwise you’re probably going to struggle to see any sales with your page.
3. Digital Products
The third way that we can go ahead and monetize our pages is through digital products. This can make thousands of dollars every single month and it works similarly to the last one that was just spoken about, so it will be covered very briefly.
First of all, we need to create the digital product. We need to decide what this is, whether it is something like:
- An ebook.
- An audiobook.
- Both of those things.
- A resource package that helps people with something.
Things like this are just going to be something that people would want to buy from your page.
The great thing about digital products is you just need to invest your time once up front to make the product, and once you have made this product you can sell it over and over again.
Another thing that is great about digital products is you keep 100% of what you do make when selling this product because it is digital. Once again, it doesn’t cost you anything to make it; it just is your time up front and is not something that’s physical that needs to be made. Secondly, it’s not something that needs to be posted to someone and it isn’t going to cost you anything in postage because of the fact that it just gets emailed to them as soon as they buy.
How to Sell Digital Products
To go ahead and actually sell your digital product, you can use sites like:
- Shopify
- Beacons
- Gumroad
These sites are great for selling digital products because they’re very simple to use to go ahead and actually make the store, and then they also deal with processing the payments for you. So once again, when people go and pay, you’re going to get that payment.
When using digital products, they are also going to deal with the delivery for you, so as soon as someone purchases, it’s going to then send them an email with their digital product, and that is basically it. It’s very nice and simple and it is a very passive source of income.
4. Affiliate Marketing
The fourth way in which we can monetize our Instagram theme page is through affiliate marketing.
This is where you promote someone else’s product with your own unique link, and when someone purchases through your link you’re going to get a percentage of that sale.
This is probably the easiest way to go about making money with your page, as you don’t have to make any of the shops, you don’t have to make any of the products, and also you don’t have to deal with any of the customers. All you do is you simply just put your link in the description, push traffic towards that link, and then as people buy you will then get paid.
However, there are a few downsides to affiliate marketing, such as:
- It’s not your own product, so you’re basically helping someone else build their own product.
- You’re not going to be able to keep the customer emails and things like that.
- You’re not in control of how good the product is or things like that.
So this is something you need to be wary of if you are going to go ahead and do affiliate marketing.
As for how to find products to affiliate for is a little bit difficult, but one way to go about doing this is to go ahead and look at people within your niche and see if they are promoting any products, and if they are, see if it is an affiliate product. Or you could even reach out to these pages and ask if you can be an affiliate for them.
5. Creating a Free Community
The fifth way that we can go ahead and monetize our page is by creating a free community.
This is a method that has been used with theme pages. A free community can start off as just a community for a faceless page.
While it is a free community and you might be thinking how you go ahead and make money off this, there are a bunch of different ways you can go about it. But at first it needs to be free to actually go ahead and get some people in, as if it is not free at the start you’re going to struggle to get people in, as you’re a faceless page and people are probably not going to trust you too much.
So you’re going to market it as a free community, trying to get people in, and then once these people are in you just need to build up that trust with them. You’re going to help them out and you’re just going to be active in the community and you’re going to give tons of free value for a while.
Once it is about time or you feel like you want to start making money and you’ve got some people in there, what you can do is:
- Create a paid section, where basically you offer extra perks to these people that are in the group.
- Or try and use it to push some more traffic towards selling some digital products or whatever you want.
Having a community is a great way to bring a bunch of people together, and then from there you can once again give them a bunch of free value. Some people are just going to be there for their free value, and that is fine, and you’ll also get some people that maybe are interested in what products or services you have to offer, and this is just an extra way that you can push some traffic towards those products or services.
This method can be scaled to a few thousand per month, even with a faceless page, as long as you are consistent and provide real value.
Other Ways to Monetize Instagram Theme Pages
These are just the main ways that are discussed here on how to monetize Instagram theme pages. However, there are so many things that can be done with Instagram theme pages and so many different ways in which they can be monetized.
A few of the extra ways not talked about in depth here that you can go ahead and monetize your theme pages are:
- By pushing traffic to things like a personal brand.
- Using them to start up an email newsletter.
- Using them to test dropshipping products or create a dropshipping store.
- Using them to sell services or start an agency.
There are many, many more ways in which you can monetize theme pages.
Final Reminder: Attention Is the New Currency
The main thing to remember here is that attention is a new currency, and you need to focus on first getting that attention. Then, once you have that attention, it is not going to be too, too difficult to go ahead and turn that into money.
