How easy is it to make money on Instagram?
As I’m sure many of you are aware, our main source of traffic to this website comes from our Instagram page which has amassed over 2,000 followers in the 9 months since launching The Bank Engine. If you haven’t checked out our Instagram page yet, you can find it here.
As a result of the majority of our traffic coming from Instagram, it is pretty clear that almost all of the revenue that this page makes comes from our Instagram followers.
Our business model is different to most pages, where none of our followers actually have to give us any of their own money. Instead, they can sign up to investment platforms and apps which will pay them and us. It is a win-win situation really.
However, even where our followers may benefit from an offer such as “free shares” this doesn’t necessarily convert to guaranteed revenue.
The reason behind this is simple. Not everyone has enough time to be looking at our various ways to make more money and they are only following us to learn more about finance.
A lot of Instagram pages would get frustrated with this but our soul purpose is to improve the financial knowledge of all of our followers; any income that we make in the process is an added bonus.
Therefore, it really isn’t as simple as it may seem to make money from Instagram. We know pages with 10,000+ followers who are making less from their Instagram pages than we are.
Why is this the case?
We interact with our followers on a very regular basis, either through stories, replies on posts or the 100+ messages we receive a week (we reply to all of them). This is helping to build the trust that they should have in an education page, and allows us to understand their needs at the same time.
Is it easy?
By no means is it easy to make money from Instagram. It takes time to build a platform (2 months of daily posts before we made our first £1) and then it takes commitment to build a strong community which trusts you.
If you were trying to sell an e-book every single day to your followers, they would get bored and simply unfollow you, so it is all about balance. We try to ensure that we have enough balance between offers that help monetise the page and strong financial education.
Should you start?
It is a great side hustle if you have a hobby/interest which you want to share with lots of people online. However, please be wary that it isn’t an easy way to get rich. It takes a lot of time.
If you are interested in it, please do drop us a DM or an email and we are always happy to discuss this with you!
Thomas, The Bank Engine