How to earn from Instagram and How Fanbee is different?

If you are producing great content and have tons of followers on Instagram. Now you have realized that it’s time to start earning a living doing what you love. Here are the few options for you and their pros and cons:

1. Ads

The first way is to do products/branch endorsements and put those product ads in your content. Since you have a great reach, this is an easy way for brands to promote their product. The influencer gets paid for doing this, the payment is mostly based on the number of followers and the reach of the ads.

Pros

1. It’s been there for a while, so there is less ambiguity involved if it would work or not. You already have the followers so they are definitely going to look at your ad.

Cons

1. The followers are easily able to see through your attempt to mix brands and content. While this seems okay in a few cases. It becomes irritating once it starts happening frequently.
2. Unless you are okay endorsing difference, sometimes even competing, brands every few weeks this is not the right choice for you.
3. The deals are mostly one-off with no way to make a sustainable living. Long term contracts are very rare.
4. No established process to make deals. Either you run after the brands or they run after you. No deadlines for payments which usually gets delayed.

2. Start selling

The second option is to start selling your own merchandise. This could include things like T-shirts, tops, mugs, etc. The money comes directly to you and your fans get to enjoy their merch.

Pros

1. Lesser uncertainty you get the money directly from the people.
2. No man in the middle, it’s a direct transaction between your and your followers.

Cons

1. The initial cost is huge, you need to set up your production and supply chain pipeline.
2. There is a cap on the products you can sell. No follower is going to buy the same thing twice and unless you hire a bunch of people to come up with new designs, the sale is going to saturate.
3. You have to set up the website and all other stuff to handle payments, shipping, refunds, etc. While there are many solutions to do this, none are easy to set up and cost a bunch of money.

3. Convert followers to YouTube subscribers

You can start a YouTube channel and request your followers to subscribe to you. You start posting more content on YouTube and as the fanbase increases, money starts rolling in.

Pros

1. YouTube is a stable source of income, you not only get paid for new content but also the older ones.
2. No man in the middle, YouTube is paying you directly (not all true, read the cons)

Cons

1. The content that works on YouTube is very different from what works on Instagram. Plus the options are limited, with no photos, polls, AMAs, etc.
2. The money that you get from just views isn’t enough, so again you go back to the cycle of finding brands and doing ads.
3. A few mistakes and copyright claims can make a huge impact on your views and can even lead to the termination of your account.
4. Since the content is on YouTube, your Instagram account is not able to benefit from it.

4. Patreon, Gumroad, OnlyFans

You ask the followers to go to these websites, pay a fee for a subscription. This gives them access to premium content that you post on that website. These websites take a commission and pay you the rest of the money.

Pros

1. Since you are getting money directly from the followers no hassle of finding brands.
2. More stable source of income than ads and selling merch.

Cons

1. While it seems to work in the beginning, soon followers end their sub. The reason is simple, it’s really hard to open another app/website just to see content from you. Everyone is used to Instagram, YouTube, etc. but opening other apps to see content is tedious and when followers realize this, they leave.
2. You are losing on gaining more followers on Instagram. Since most of the content is shifted to these sites your Instagram account loses momentum and in turn followers.

Fanbee — our model

You ask the follower to subscribe to your close friends by paying a small fee. The money gets transferred to you monthly. Your paying fans get to see the exclusive content you post in close friend's stories on Instagram itself.

Pros

1. Since the fans are directly paying you, there is no need to do ads and marketing. You can serve quality content.
2. The fans don’t have to leave Instagram, the close friend's stories just come like normal stories for them.
3. Provide them with different kinds of content in stories like photos, videos, polls, AMAs, quizzes, etc.
4. Stable source of income since you decide the subscription fees.
5. No headache of money management. The money gets transferred to your account automatically.
6. Access to a lot of stats that help you give direction to your content and other suggestions from fans to increase followers.

Cons

Do let us know if you can think of any.