How To Start Affiliate Marketing On Instagram Will Be A Thing Of The Future, And Here’s Why

Knowing how to start affiliate marketing on Instagram is made easy.

Parvaiz Yousuf
Easy Money Making
7 min readJul 24, 2022

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Looking to know how to start affiliate marketing on Instagram? Instagram marketing and Affiliate marketing are both multibillion-dollar businesses. If you combine them, you could have a profitable side business. Affiliate marketers on Instagram get paid when a product they recommended to their followers sells.

In addition to the fact that half of Instagram users shop on the site every week, photographs, videos, and live streams give most individuals the whole picture they need before making a purchase.

In this post, you’ll learn how to set up an Instagram affiliate marketing account and get seven ideas on how to maximise your earnings.

How to start affiliate marketing on Instagram

Follow these three steps to get your Instagram account ready for affiliate marketing before we talk about how to make money on Instagram.

Create a Creator account

To use Instagram for affiliate marketing, you’ll need to change your account to a Creator account. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open your account on Instagram.

2. Select Settings.

3. Visit Account.

4. Tap and Change your account to a professional one and select Creator.

5. Pick the one that fits your affiliate niche the best.

6. Type in your contact info.

Bloggers, people with a lot of followers, and people who make their own content can use Instagram Creator profiles. It gives you access to tools like advanced insights and simplified messaging that will help you grow your affiliate business on the platform.

By separating your Instagram DMs, you can see how many followers you have gained, what your audience looks like, and handle questions from people who are interested in your affiliate products.

Keep building your influence.

Affiliate marketing on Instagram is all about quality over quantity. A survey by Statista found that Instagram influencers with less than 10,000 followers can charge about $193 per sponsored post. This shows that you don’t need tens of thousands of followers to start making money as an affiliate marketer through the app. People who know and like you and believe your words are all required.

For Instagram affiliate marketing to work, you need to be seen as an influencer by your audience. Then you’ll have a chance to get them to click on your affiliate links.

Choosing the right affiliate partners is quite important

Affiliate marketing is a nice way to make money on Instagram. To do this, you need to find brands that give you a cut of the sales you bring in.

You can start in two places:

  • Affiliate networks. Platforms like Rakuten, ShareASale, CJ Affiliate, and Awin let marketers make custom links, track commissions, and get paid all from one dashboard. Note that the commission rates for each program in a network can be different.
  • Affiliate marketing programs. All kinds of brands offer commissions to customers who promote their products. The eBay Partner Network, Shopify, and Amazon Associates are all popular programs.

Even though these two ways to make money are the easiest to start, you can grow your affiliate marketing business by trying to work with brands you already like.

About 80% of brands work with affiliates, but many high-ticket affiliate programs are only open to people who have been invited (or at least require some digging). You can get affiliate links to share on Instagram if you can show that you already buy from the brand.

Marketing Tips in Future: How to start Affiliate marketing on Instagram

Once you’ve set up your Instagram affiliate account, you still have a lot of work to do. Use these seven tips for affiliate marketing to make the most money you can from Instagram.

Make a storefront for Instagram affiliates.

Back in June 2021, Instagram announced its new affiliate features. One of these is an in-app storefront for content creators on the platform, similar to the eCommerce brand’s Instagram Shops.

From their profile, creators can show off the products they work with. The View Shop tab shows recommended products, which affiliates can tag in their Instagram posts to get people to buy them.

The affiliate shops feature on Instagram is still being tested in beta, but US creators should be able to use it soon. In the meantime, try out different affiliate products to see how popular they are. When the feature is available to all creators, you’ll be able to tell which items should get the most attention in your affiliate storefront.

Put links to your affiliates in your Instagram bio

People who use Instagram often complain about the fact that they can only put one link in their bio.

Even though the platform listened and took this into account for Stories (more on that later), affiliate marketers have had to find ways to get Instagram traffic to their affiliate links.

Affiliate products should be marked as paid partnerships.

Because more and more Instagram users are being paid to share products with their followers, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has strict rules about how marketers must disclose their relationship with a brand they are affiliated with: “When your relationship is clear and easy to see in the review, and the reader can see both the review and the link at the same time, the reader has all the information he or she needs.

You could say something like, “I make money when people buy things through the links in this post.” But if the product review with the disclosure and the link are not together, readers might not make the connection. This thing is very important regarding how to start affiliate marketing on Instagram.

Use hashtags to reach more people.

To build an affiliate marketing business that makes money on its own, you need a steady flow of new Instagram followers. Audience fatigue is less likely to happen when more people see your content. This is when people get tired of seeing the same content over and over again.

Hashtags help you reach more people without a lot of extra work. As an Instagram creator, you can follow hashtags inside the app, so your posts can show up in their feed even if they don’t follow your account.

Tracking performances

I already told you that an Instagram creator account gives you access to Insights, Instagram’s analytics tool. Use this information to figure out how well your affiliate marketing campaigns on the platform are doing.

Some important metrics to keep an eye on are:

  • Profile activity. Check how many people click the link in your bio if you’re sending followers to a tool that collects links.
  • Awareness of a brand. Use Post Insights to find out how people find your content through the Explore page, their feed, or your profile.
  • Engagement rate. Consider the affiliate product being offered, the type of content, and the format. If tutorial-based Instagram Stories get more likes than regular grid posts, give them more attention in the future.

Create a discount code

Did you know that 88% of US shoppers who buy things online use coupon codes? Use this in your affiliate marketing plan by giving discount codes to people who follow you on Instagram.

This is a great place for Instagram Stories. Instagram’s Story format is one of its most popular — over 500 million people use it daily — and affiliates can use the link sticker to send people to their products without having to send them to your bio link first. (This takes the place of Instagram’s swipe-up feature, which was only available to accounts with more than 10,000 followers.)

Recording product demonstrations are vital.

Affiliate marketing works when the people who follow you on Instagram like and trust you enough to buy the products you suggest. Help potential customers do this by showing them how to use the product. They won’t have to leave their Instagram feed to look for answers.

This includes:

  • Instagram Live can be used to live stream tutorials for products in real-time.
  • Instagram Stories for vlog-style videos
  • Instagram Reels for short, TikTok-style videos

Bottom line

By now, you must know well how to start affiliate marketing on Instagram. Instagram is always making changes to make its platform better for creators. This is great news for affiliate marketers who use social media as a way to make extra money.

Start off on the right foot by switching to a creator account right away, finding affiliate partners, and building your influence. Then you can start promoting affiliate products in a way that makes your followers more likely to buy.

FAQs

Does Instagram allow affiliate marketing?

Yes, you can work with more than one affiliate network at once. Pro tip: The affiliate link that gets the last click is the one that gets paid.

How many followers do you need to become an affiliate on Instagram?

Affiliate marketing doesn’t have a perfect number of followers, but a good number is between 5,000 and 15,000. This is enough to become an affiliate marketer.

Does Instagram pay money?

You can make money on Instagram in the following ways, depending on your unique Instagram content, your audience, and your level of commitment: Putting up sponsored posts for companies that want to reach your audience. Becoming an affiliate and getting paid a commission to sell products from other brands

How much money do 1k Instagram followers make?

As per the experts, the average monthly income for micro-influencers (those with 1,000 to 10,000 followers) is $1,420. It costs $15,356 a month to be a mega-influencer (with more than one million followers).

Does Instagram pay famous?

Those with fewer than 10,000 followers can expect to get paid an average of $88.00 per post. The average cost per post for accounts with fewer than 100,000 followers is $200.00, but this varies widely from account to account. Rather, the majority of accounts at this level are given free products or discounts in exchange for their posts.

Are 500 followers on Instagram good?

Aiming for 500 followers as soon as you pass the 100-follower mark should be your main aim.

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Parvaiz Yousuf
Easy Money Making

A master’s in zoology, science journalist and a flexible author. Here, I help people with earning money. Our other blogs: https://animalplanetory.com/.