How my theme page makes $26196.25 in 90 days, Passive Income

Over the last 90 days, my Instagram theme page has made twenty-six thousand one hundred and ninety-six dollars and 25 cents in passive income, which works out to be eight thousand seven hundred and thirty-two dollars per month. Here’s how I’m going to cover how I started the account, how I built the account, how I monetize the account, as well as how I automated it to turn it into a passive income stream. So stick around and you’re gonna get all the good stuff.

My Name is Awais and this is my first article on medium. Well, I am sharing my journey of my Instagram theme page, hope you will like it.

Now, long story short, I started this account back in 2015 as a kid posting content around cool travel destinations, cool cars, cool houses, inspirational sort of photos. Then I pivoted to adding equally motivational quotes over the top of the content. Once I found out people were actually getting paid for this and there was a business behind the scenes of building a large audience and then promoting different businesses, I became really fascinated by it. I spent all of my spare time trying to figure out how to build an audience.

Seven years of trials and tribulations later, and we’re sitting at just over 830,000 followers. Engagement and growth has slowed down a lot on the account over the past 60 days, but that’s normal to have periods of explosive growth and then things slow down and then it picks back up again. This page is not really my sole focus anymore. It’s more of a cash cow on the side while I focus on building a YouTube channel, building my agency behind the scenes, and building other digital businesses. We will talk abut that later.

Over the years, I’ve tried monetizing this account with drop shipping stores, affiliate marketing, CPA marketing, email newsletters, selling services, shout-outs, blogs, YouTube automation, and everything else in between that you can possibly think of. I’ve grown the account extremely fast at different points. I’ve had the account hacked, I’ve had growth come to an absolute standstill for a couple of years, I’ve had dozens of people… So these insights come from someone with a lot of experience across a variety of different areas with Instagram theme pages, and hopefully this can help you shorten the learning curve to become successful faster.

So first things first, I had to grow the audience before I could turn it into an income and then obviously turn it into a passive income like it is today. The secret to the high follower count is actually the number beside the follower count: 5,842 posts. We’ve posted nearly 6,000 pieces of content on this account, constantly adapting over the years to what’s working, new trends, and sticking consistent to the theme throughout. I guarantee you if you pick a niche and post five times a day for four or five years to stack up 6,000 posts, and each time you’re posting content you’re looking at what’s working, what’s not working, you’re engaging with your audience, you’re building a community, you cannot fail. If you want some more strategies to learn how to grow your audience please let me know we will talk about it later.

Now, the second thing is when I started earning, I reinvested all of that money back into my business. Now, saving that money and getting seven percent in the stock market is absolutely nothing compared to what you can get from putting that back into your area of expertise and reinvesting it. Not financial advice though, don’t sue me. And it’s a heck of a lot better than spending it on some expensive clothes or designer shoes or something ridiculous like that, which is okay if you’re rich, but when you’re starting out, you want to invest it to start really building and compounding those results.

In all honesty, I wish I’d been even more aggressive with this. I reinvested 100% of my income for the first probably six or so months, but once I was earning like a thousand dollars a month or so from selling shout-outs, I somewhat stopped and instead tried to save it all in an investment account, which like I said before, is probably not the smartest thing. Straight away, you want to build that income up first by reinvesting it into your business, and then once you start making bigger numbers like I am now, then you can start to look to put it into other investments. That’s just my personal opinion, definitely not advice.

Now more specifically, what I would do when it came to reinvesting my income into my business would be buying promotions from larger accounts to help me speed up my growth. Back then, there wasn’t an algorithm, so you couldn’t really have content go viral. You could only grow through cross-promotions with other accounts, ranking on hashtags, sometimes a little bit of follow-unfollow, and then buying promotions from larger pages, because when other people reposted your content, you obviously grew. This theme would build my audience and would build my engagement and would mean that I would be able to charge more for promotions, and that would in turn increase my income.

I’d also pay to get access to networking groups and different coaches where I would learn new strategies. This was both a new strategy to grow on Instagram as well as actually build the business. I didn’t invest massively into coaches; I more found people where I could buy products from them or services. So I would buy promotions from accounts, and I’d buy them in bulk, and then we had a good relationship and they would sort of give me advice for free because I was already spending a lot of money with them.

I’d even buy other Instagram accounts so I could build my network faster because it was easier to go out there and buy an account with 100–200 thousand followers than it was to start one from scratch and invest money into buying promotions to get it. I eventually sold those accounts. I wish I didn’t, because if I’d kept those pages and bought more, I’d probably be a multi-millionaire now. Oh well, you live and you learn.

Now when it comes to actually monetizing the account, it’s not a one-size-fits-all. Some strategies will take more time and therefore make more, whereas other strategies will take significantly less time and make a lot less. This can both be seen as in how much time per day it takes to actually do the action, but also how long as in how many months is it going to take to actually start earning income. If you start a brand, you’re obviously not going to be earning income from day one. You have to build the brand, you have to build the product, you have to put all of that together, which might take months and months and months, and then each day you have to market it and do the customer support and all of these different things. So it’s going to take a lot longer to start making money that way, as opposed to selling promotions where from day one you can start earning income. The trade-off there is that if you build a brand, it’s probably going to make a lot more in the long term than promotion.

Personally, I started out with selling shout-outs where a brand would simply approach me and pay me to promote their business. I also tried affiliate marketing, building an email list, I launched multiple drop shipping stores, I created blogs, a YouTube channel, sold services, done a whole range of things. Shout-outs, however, are the easy way to make a good bit of income, but I realized once I’d finished high school and decided to go full time and try and make it happen online (which at the time I didn’t have a personal brand or any of this, I just had a couple of Instagram accounts), I realized that selling services, high-ticket services specifically, is actually going to make you a lot more.

I ended up offering Instagram management and Instagram growth services to clients to help them build their audience. Like I said before, this takes a lot more effort than shout-outs, but it will also pay you a lot more. You can also do the same with affiliate marketing. You can find high-quality, highly-priced affiliate products or even high-quality, low-priced affiliate products, promote them to your audience, and it’s a lot more scalable than shout-outs because you can only sell so many shout-outs per day. So it is a good way to make a cash cow style business, but it’s trickier to scale.

Nowadays, this page is a passive income to me and more of a side project than my main focus, and because of that, we mostly monetize it through selling shout-outs as it’s very easy to automate this. If I didn’t have my YouTube channels, I didn’t have a personal brand, and I didn’t have any of that to worry about, and this was my sole focus, I would probably be selling some sort of high-ticket coaching or services because if you can dedicate your full focus to that, that’ll make more. Shout-outs, however, my focus is elsewhere.

And now moving on to the fourth and final part of this story: how did we actually automate it and turn it into a passive income? Well, after I’d built my audience and started earning an income, I would write everything down which I was doing. I wrote down how I would source content for the page, I’d write down my posting routine, which strategy I used to monetize, which strategies I was using to grow. I wrote all of it down inside of Google Docs, and this meant I’d put together a rough system that someone else could follow and implement to get similar results.

When it came to actually practically getting these results and hiring the right person and having them, you know, run through the system correctly, it took a while to be completely honest with you. The first couple years of me doing this didn’t go particularly great. At the start of 2018, I shifted my sole focus from this Instagram account to building my agency, and so the account went on the back burner and I tried to outsource. This caused the page to not grow as well and not make as much money, but that was fine because in 2017 the page made me, I believe, 15 to 20 grand, whereas in 2018, shifting my focus to my agency helped me have my first six-figure year.

Then three years later in 2021, we finally cracked the code with, you know, fully systemizing us the right way. The page had only gained 60,000 followers across those three years where it wasn’t a priority, but after that, we’d finally got the right systems in place. The 18 months since that point, we’ve grown the page from 490,000 followers to 830,000 followers. From the shout-outs and services sold through the page, it makes around eight thousand dollars a month in income. There’s a few expenses to that obviously; you have to hire someone that can post the content, create the content, and close the sales, but that’s the income.

Before I wrap this article up though, I do want to say that if you’re going through this process yourself, whether you’re in the phase of building an account from scratch and trying to build your audience, whether you’re starting to monetize that account, or whether you’ve done both of those and you’re starting to automate it, things will go wrong. I’ve had accounts die off where they don’t grow for months and months, even over a year. There was a point where my account just didn’t grow. I’ve had people scam me out of thousands and thousands of dollars of promotional money that we were doing. I’ve had my accounts hacked and more, and so many different things. Don’t let this discourage you or cause you to stop. Instead, simply push through it, fix things as they break, and make it happen. Learn from your experiences. If you try one strategy and it doesn’t work, then cool, don’t do that strategy again. If you hire someone and they do something wrong, they rip you off, learn from that so you can learn how to protect yourself moving forward and then hire a better person next time with that experience.

I will return with more exciting story like this..