How to Monetize Your Instagram Without Doing Sponsored Posts

What's up, guys? Today's episode is for those of you who are influencers or who have followings on social media. Most people are monetizing their audience in the most bass ackwards way that I could imagine. Sponsorships and paid posts are the least lucrative way for you to monetize your audience. If you're first going full time and you've got an audience that you need to take an income from, it can sometimes be a bridge, but it is expensive when it comes to the relationship you have with your audience. The most valuable asset you have is the connection and the responsiveness that you have with the people who follow you. They're the key to everything. So in this episode, I share how you can monetize your following without compromising your relationship with your followers by doing paid posts and sponsorships. There are better ways to monetize your audience and we'll go into it in this episode. This is repurposed over from YouTube. We're putting a ton on YouTube right now and you can just search my name if you want to subscribe to the YouTube channel. And if you know somebody who is an influencer, an audience leader, or creating a lot of content, please send them this episode because these are the ways that you can monetize an audience that are cool, that are profitable, and that add value to your audience rather than take away from it. Enjoy.

Sponsored posts suck. Sponsored posts are a terrible business model. Not only are they annoying for your followers, they're also not that profitable. And contrary to popular belief, they're not that effective at at driving sales. Most Instagram influencers build up these followings of tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people. And the only thing that they know how to do with it is run sponsored posts to their following. But that burns your audience, reduces trust, and creates a churn and burn business that is no fun and really doesn't make that much money. In this video, we're gonna talk about how to monetize your following without doing sponsored posts. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran. This is Capitalism tv. Let's go ahead and dive in. There's a big distinction that most Instagram influencers don't understand, and that's that Instagram is a traffic and audience builder. It's not actually the best way to get your following to take action. So when you put up an ad in front of your followers, that is a call to action for something, it's one of the least effective ways to generate sales or even generate leads. So the first thing that we're gonna go into is how to take your following from Instagram to a different platform that is more easy to monetize because the best thing that you can do for your following is to keep them on Instagram engaging with the type of content that they're following you for. Now, my favorite channel for sales is email marketing. In fact, more buying decisions are made via email than any other platform. It far outperforms Instagram and any sort of social media channel. In fact, if someone is following a social media channel, they by and large don't want to be sold. But if someone is on an email list, that is where a more direct response experience exists where people are expecting to be sold and, and people are expecting to make buying decisions there. Now you can monetize an Instagram following by running an ad that is separate from your regular feed. But in most cases you want to keep your posts free of anything that would scream sponsorship or recommendation. Save that for another platform. I like email because it's the most direct way to be able to do that. But there's more of a process to this that can allow you to make product recommendations or sell your own stuff or take on coaching clients or whatever it is that you sell in order to pay the bills. And the strategy that I like to run is by having an email list alongside a blog and using Instagram as the way to develop eyeballs and an audience that you then send to those two other places. So for example, a lot of Instagram influencers will take a product or a brand and they'll talk about it directly on their Instagram. And I think that diminishes the influence that you have with your Instagram following. But if you were to take this same type of a post and make it a blog post and then just say that you've got a new post in your stories on Instagram and send them over to the blog, that's a more effective long term way to both sell product and to engage your customers. Because, because again, Instagram is where people are finding you and it's where people are engaging with you, but it's not where they're making buying decisions. They're going over to blogs and to email list in order to make those decisions. Email is going to be your highest converting platform. So if you have a product or if you are an affiliate for certain products, or if you have a coaching program or you take on clients, the vast majority of those are going to come from your email list. So the most profitable thing that you can do is, is run stories, swipe ups and posts that send people to your email list and you start building that up. If you have a following of 100,000 people and you can bring 5% to 10% of those people onto your email list, that can be a million dollar business. So what you may not understand right now is if you've got a few thousand or even tens of thousands of Instagram followers, you're sitting on the foundation of something that is way more valuable than you realize right now. In fact, it's kind of a waste of time and attention to take that following and make a few hundred dollars with a sponsored post. You're diminishing your trust when you could be taking those same eyeballs and using them as the foundation for what becomes a seven figure business. Most influencers don't understand the asset that they're sitting on and, and they're cashing a really small check by taking sponsored posts rather than using that to build up a list of people who want whatever it is that you have to sell. Now, if you don't have anything to sell right now, you can start by just running affiliate offers to your existing list and the same people who are offering to sponsor you can become affiliate relationships as well. The second thing that's important for Instagram influencers to know is, is that your best buyers don't come from the posts that get the most attention or get the most likes. The best clients and customers come from the type of content that is result driven content or specifically that shows the transformation of point A to point B or makes the offer to take people from an experience of point A to point B. You, you might remember the story of the girl who had a few million followers on Instagram and she launched a T shirt line and she sold like 16 shirts and went out of business. Well, the reason for that was because people weren't following her for any other reason than she was hot and she was posting pictures of her butt all the time. That gets attention, it gets traffic, but it doesn't set the client or the customer up for any sort of desired transformation. Now, if that same person had posted her workouts and the food she was eating in order to maintain that type of a physique, and then she made an offer to help women have a certain transformation, she would have had a much higher chance of getting clients, customers and buyers of whatever clothing or whatever product it was that she was selling. But when you're just doing the things that get attention, that doesn't turn into money. This is why talking about politics, talking about divisive issues do get attention, but they don't result in money and they don't result in helping your customer have a transformation. That's why you see so many Instagram accounts that are only able to make money through sponsored posts. It's because they're not doing the content side of things well. The way that you do the content portion of this well is by establishing yourself as an authority and, and the authority of getting a specific result, whether that's getting into shape or making more money or starting a business or whatever it is that your audience wants. If you don't know the answer to what your audience wants, ask them. Make a post that says, hey, I'd really like your feedback. What type of content would you like to see me focus on more? And then give a few results that you think your audience might like and, and let them vote in the comments. You will see that that is one of the most engaging posts that you can make on your entire feed, because people will start to engage with what they want and you'll start to see what you can provide more of when you start doing that. And you show transformations of your clients, of people that you work with. Celebrating the progress of other people in your community, giving them a platform on your own page creates desire for people to work with you as a client or a customer. And that becomes the pivot point for you to go from sponsorships to actual clients and customers. Now you've got a business and now you're an influencer rather than somebody who just gets traffic and attention. The next thing that I want to go through is some ways that you can use your audience and your influence that are simple and fast, but are more profitable and don't have an ick factor to the sponsorship posts that you might have been doing up until this point. Influencers don't recognize is the power that they're sitting on, the asset that they are sitting on. You're basically a media company. When you've got around 100,000 followers or more, that's significant media. That's a significant amount of authority and influence. And to trade that for 500 bucks or $1,000 is such a wasted opportunity. In fact, you sit in the position right now where you could take equity positions in small businesses. Now, in order to do this, you'll have to show that you have influence rather than just traffic. In the example we talked about earlier with the girl who was just showing booty shots, she didn't move a lot of T shirts. She was just getting dudes clicking over and over and over again. That isn't real influence. But if you have the ability to drive behavior because you've inspired someone to take an action, or you've inspired someone to help have a transformation, then you can be tremendously influential to a business that you own a small stake in. One of my acquaintances, I call him a mentor, but we're really just buddies. His name, Brian Lee, he's actually this guy right there. He was the founder of LegalZoom. He was a founder of the Honest Company with Jessica Alba. And his entire strategy was to create partnerships with people who have influence or celebrity and then to launch a product line around that person's audience and use that as the firestarter for getting a lot of attention around a new product or a new business. Well, today's celebrity is the influencer. And if you can show that you influence a group of people, it makes total sense that you might be able to carve out 5 or 10% of a business. And as long as you are committed to that business and you're willing to be involved in the overall direction of that business. So rather than taking $500 for a sponsored post, it makes sense that you would create a long term relationship with an organization and get 5% of the company that over time might end up being worth hundreds of thousands, even a few million dollars for the right company. Now, if you don't want to do that or that sounds complicated to you, then I would recommend that instead of doing sponsored posts that you solicit clients in the form of advertisers. So rather than doing one off sponsored posts, make a list of a few companies that you would love to work with. And Instead of taking $1,000 for a post, you take $1,000 a month from the same advertiser in exchange for a certain amount of attention. You want long term relationships with companies that you really like to work with. So when someone reaches out to you and says how much for a sponsored post, realize that you're in the position of authority, not them, that you have the thing that is wanted the most, which is media and attention. Money is everywhere. And the more choosy you are about the people who sponsor your posts, the more control you have over the types of clients that that you work with. Now, there's one more really important thing that I want you to get. If you have any sort of audience at all. Listen, if you've got an audience of 100,000 people, we'll say, you know, other people in your space that also have large followings and so if you can round up four friends who also have 100,000 followers, or four people that you'd love to work with, so your collective audience size is half a million people. If you can get that many eyeballs, you can very quickly launch a million dollar business. I wrote a book called 12 Months to 1 Million and I talk about how you can launch a business with as little as a thousand followers and have a seven figure business. So if you've got 500,000, you only need like 0.0001% of them. Was that the right math? Probably not. But if you've got this much of your audience engaged, then you can have a seven figure business. Now here's the strategy that I would use for something like that. What I like to do is carve out about 20% equity for the other audiences and influencers that I want to work with. So if you got one of those audiences, I'd be willing To Divvy up 5 points each to 4 of your friends that you would love to work with. And now you've got 500,000 people who have the potential of seeing your business and you're in control of 80% of it. Now what I would do next is I would build a pre launch email list for that business that you are launching and get all of your friends who are in on this to do sponsored posts and swipe ups in order to get people onto the email list. If you can get 1% of those people, that's 5,000 people on a pre launch list which can put you on the map right out of the gate when you first release the product. The whole point of it is to get a small group of people paying attention to the business that you are launching and then getting enough attention centered around that so you can smash the launch and get to 25 sales per day on a product. The reason for that is because if you have four products that sell 25 sales a day, that's 100 sales a day. And at a $30 price point, 100 sales a day times $30 is a million dollar business. And if you've got a following even as small as a few hundred thousand people, meaning you control that among you and your peers, you can get to 100 sales a day very quickly, in some cases a a few months. This is also a lesson to those of you who are entrepreneurs. The fast lane to getting to that hundred sales a day mark is not for you to be pounding pavement all the time. It's for you to create relationships and partnerships with people who have the audience and being willing to consider giving up a piece of your company to the people who can help you get to 100 sales a day faster. Because if someone has 100,000 or a million followers, you, you'll be able to cut months, sometimes even years off the process of getting to that first million. And that's worth giving up points in your company for. Listen, if you're an influencer, you are the one in the power position and most people just waste that by doing sponsored posts and advertisements for companies they don't even really want to work with. That's not the best way to monetize your audience. Since you're in the authority position, you have the ability to build an email list, to take equity in companies, to take on long term sponsorships, or even to launch your own business by leveraging the audience that you have built and creating your own business that can reach seven figures and beyond. If you want help with any of these, make sure you're subscribed to the channel and you check out some of the resources that we have linked in this video and in the description below. The most fun people to work with are those who have audiences and they're not sure how to monetize them, but they would love the idea of launching a business to that following. If somebody has that desire and they've got a following that really believes in what they're trying to do, man, is it fun and simple to help them launch a profitable business that is scalable and can be taken into the mid or even upper seven figures. If that's you, we'd love to help you and we have resources here on the channel and@capitalism.com that can help you do that. I'm Ryan Daniel Moran. My company's capitalism.com and I believe that entrepreneurs create the most change in the world. Thanks for being one of them and thanks for watching this video. I'll see you next time. If you listen to this episode and you're not an audience leader and you don't want to be an influencer, but you're an entrepreneur who is a business owner, I got to tell you, I think we vastly overlook the value of partnerships and creating long term relationships with the people who do make a lot of content and we overvalue this idea of sponsoring posts rather than just partnering with people or giving them even equity in the company. That's something that I do and it can be very lucrative when done well. It's also one of the foundational strategies we're helping people do in the capitalism incubator, which is we're just helping them create those relationships with influencers that give them immediate lift off rather than trying to build the audience themselves. Both are great, both work, but it's just 18 months of skipped work when you create a partnership with somebody who already has the audience. So it's something that you might want to consider if you aren't an audience leader, but you are building the business yourself. Hope you enjoyed today's episode. I'll talk to you guys soon. Take care.