Earning From Instagram Without Being A Shill
Sell your work, not yourself
By Rick Boost
With over 500 million active accounts, Instagram is, to put it mildly, kind of a big deal. Now members of the image sharing site have begun to avoid traditional earning strategies and adopt more savvy techniques towards photo monetisation that maintain the appearance of integrity.
Monetisation of social media is hardly new, but Instagram has always had to navigate a tricky course. The site originally marketed itself as a hive of visual creativity, geared towards artistic freedom and flair. To many potential users, advertising and sponsorships have no place on a creative platform, and such practices amount to nothing more than selling out. However, as the old adage goes, “People gotta eat”, and for hardworking photogs in an oversaturated market, the allure of those extra funds is difficult to resist.
“A quality Instagram page is a carefully curated portfolio, not a series of billboards.”
Indeed, there is nothing inherently wrong with making money from Instagram. However, how you do it makes all the difference in 2016. Instagram monetisers require a successful Instagram fan base. Potential advertisers are only going to work with uploaders who have an audience they can reliably reach. For major celebrities like Kim Kardashian (who earns US$300,000 for a single post), fine-tuning a unique identity to attract potential brands isn’t as much of an issue. However, most photographers can’t rely on fame and name recognition, meaning that producing quality content and building a follower base takes a lot of hard work. It’s now very easy to throw away all that built up social capital in a foolhardy get rich quick cashgrab.
The first temptation for many aspiring Insta-preneurs used to be the reviled method of skipping the grind of earning followers by simply buying them. Though it’s always been considered a bit vulgar, in 2016 it’s simply no longer viable at all. Instagram admins are cutting through fake follow-for-cash accounts like a scythe at harvest time.
Even having an account populated by many organically gained followers doesn’t seem to be enough to stand out for monetisation any more. Potential brands want their sponsored account followers to be engaged and they avoid artificially inflated accounts like the plague. Brands look for fans leaving comments and want to see the uploader responding to them with a personal touch. An Instagrammer may not have follower numbers in the millions but can accrue a healthy income from sponsors if they project a genuine and distinct identity to those that do follow them.
The bane of established accounts that are contacted by brands is that they will be offered to sell, sell, sell. Caption space below a photo can be sold to include an advert or shoutout to another account; areas of an uploader’s bio can be rented out to have a URL link placed there; accounts can let others post adverts on their feeds for a limited time; Popular uploaders can be paid to like product posts and to pose wearing or holding items in their photos.
Though immensely lucrative, almost all of these schemes seem atrociously tacky and will likely result in a loss of followers who will see the account as tarnished. The alternative (and far more subtle) strategy others are taking is what we can describe as ‘leveraged sponsor relationships’.
TIME has highlighted several Instagrammers that are successfully using this technique. The key is that unlike the other in-your-face approaches, sponsored relationships allow the photographer to have relatively free reign with the content of their pictures and to express their creativity while they work with their sponsor.
Pharmaceutical company Pfizer attempted this with the concept of a promotional photojournalist series #StoryHalfTold. Five professional photographers were tasked with covering the day-to-day lives of women suffering from metastatic breast cancer. The photographers were given the freedom to cover their subject in their own style, but were required to add a link in the photo caption to the Pfizer website. This allowed the audience to see an underappreciated subject examined from different perspectives, with the photogs being paid for their work, and the brand gaining further awareness.
Instagrammer Travis Jenson shows a different angle to this technique. A loyal user of the iPhone for his stellar photography, he tagged his uploads from the device with the hashtag #iPhone6s. Noticing his love for their devices, he has been occasionally hired for promotions by Apple for their various events. Jenson keeps his feed mainly personal but will occasionally upload his favourite pictures from the campaigns he works on. This means that he continues to provide exposure for the brand but because the iPhone was already an essential part of his photography toolset, the sentiment is seen as genuine by his fans.
Lauren Randolph has perfectly combined her professional career shooting for major brands like Disney and Lufthansa with her personal life. Lemon will only sparingly post work from her campaigns, picking and choosing what shots to share with her followers.
However, what sets Randolph apart is that she make it resoundingly clear when a post is in any way part of a campaign. This means that she will even tag uploads from when she’s taking photos behind the scenes or even just around a location she’s had to travel to for a shoot. This means that her audience feels like they have access to exclusive, beautifully shot content, but can also trust that they are never being made to look at anything sponsored without their consent.
The overall lesson to be learned from these examples is that a quality Instagram page is a carefully curated portfolio, not a series of billboards. Crafting a specific tone for a monetised brand and maintaining trust are very important. With over 500 million accounts, Instagram has enough generic sales pitches to last a lifetime. Companies are instead choosing to work with uploaders that can sell the benefits of the product without selling themselves. Accounts that can do that and hold onto their established audiences are now the equivalent of marketing gold dust.
This article was written by Rick Boost and was first published on DigitalRev. You can follow us on Facebook or Twitter for more photography stories.
