Business

Can you really make 6 figures as an Influencer?

July 24, 2022

I’m Tara.
 I'm an influencer strategy expert, the host of Project Influence the Podcast, and the founder of Creator Cube™, a co-creating space for content creators. 
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Gimme that

Today I’m going to talk to you honestly about how you can make 6-figures as an Influencer. As a full-time Influencer and Influencer coach, I want to always be honest and transparent with you about the ins and outs of Influencer Marketing. 

Here’s the first thing I am going to tell you. 

You don’t need 50k or 100k followers to make a consistent, 6-figure income on Instagram. 

I started my Influencer business in 2018 with a single goal: to earn an income from my content. With less than 3k Instagram followers, I hit the ground running… And I made $5K through partnerships with brands like J.Crew, Walmart, and Green Chef — all in my first 90 days!

Today, I still have less than 25K followers, yet my content creation business brings in $20K a month using the same formula that I started with. 

With that in mind, don’t let your follower count stop you from monetizing your Instagram account. 

Read Next | Setting your rates as an Influencer

So what do you need to get started?

Let’s make some calculations! To make $100,000 a year, you’ll need to start making about $8,333 a month. In this guide, I’m going to walk you through various ways that you can make this income. (Make sure you read until the end) But the good news is that you’ll definitely be able to start making between $500-$2,000 in your first month, without a huge following! 

Before I jump into my strategies to help you monetize on Instagram, here are a few Instagram marketing tips that you need:

Those are the first steps toward monetizing your Instagram account. But now let’s talk about the exact ways you’re going to make 6-figures a year on Instagram. 

5 Ways To Make 6-Figures a Year as an Influencer

#1: Collaborate with Brands 

The first way that I want to teach you to monetize your Instagram is through brand collaborations. Brand collaborations are an easy way to start connecting and selling to your audience. Because let’s face it, monetizing your Instagram is all about creating a connection with your audience, and building up trust with them, so that they’re willing to buy what you’re promoting or selling. Whether you’re promoting another brand or your own product, you need your audience to trust you!

If you’re new to brand collaborations, read this post next! 

#2: Affiliate marketing

There’s a common misconception about affiliate marketing. People think that Affiliate marketing is ‘passive income’ and that you can make affiliate income without really ‘working’. This is not true at all. Affiliate marketing can be really beneficial to your business as an income stream, but it is not passive. You need to be working and promoting your affiliate links at any chance you get. 

And once again, you need to build that trust with your audience. Having a connection with your audience where they want to shop what you share is vital. 

A lot of Influencers want to start their business with affiliate marketing (mainly because they don’t have the confidence to pitch to brands!) But when you start monetizing with affiliate marketing, you’re doing a lot of work, without being paid upfront. You’ll be paid when your audience trusts you enough to shop. With a brand collaboration, you’re being paid upfront for the content you’re creating. 

So I recommend starting with brand collaborations and then building up your affiliate marketing income as you go. Affiliate marketing can burn you out if you’re not seeing sales right away, so be patient and don’t use this as the only stream of income that you have. 

What affiliate programs do I recommend for Influencers? Find out here.

#3: Selling your own merch

Do you have a distinctive trait that your audience loves about you? For example, you could wake up every morning and share your coffee routine with your audience. If this is the case, you could create your own coffee to sell to your audience, as this creator did

Or you could sell t-shirts and sweatshirts with your personal catchphrases on them (if that’s something your audience really knows you for!) A great example of this is a couple in Canada that posts a new YouTube video every Sunday and they coined the catchphrase “see you Sunday”. When they launched merch with this saying, their audience went crazy for it! 

#4: Offer your services

Another way to make 6-figures a year on Instagram is by offering your services to your audience. 

I got started in Influencer Coaching because my audience started asking me if they could pay for a call with me, to learn how to grow and monetize their accounts. I started offering hour-long coaching sessions to help my audience do exactly what I was doing on Instagram.  

You don’t need to coach about ‘Instagram’ though. If you’re a fashion expert you can coach people on putting together better outfits. If you’re a gardening Influencer, you can coach people on how to keep their plants alive. Your audience is going to ask you questions. Offer coaching calls to answer them. 

#5: Sell digital products

Lastly, if you want to make 6-figures a year as an Influencer, you can offer digital products to your audience! These can come in the form of eBooks, Digital downloads, Presets, or online courses. This is a great place to grow from coaching calls. There’s a limit to how many coaching sessions you can do in a day. But by turning the content from your coaching calls into an online course, there’s no limit to how many people you can teach! 

If you’re wondering how to start selling digital products to your audience, start small. 

  • Create 10 presets so your audience can edit like you 
  • Build a 20-30 page eBook teaching your audience how to do something their always asking you about
  • Create a small workbook helping your audience to launch a business like yours
  • Build a mini challenge that helps your audience solve a common problem over the course of 3 days

Those are just some ideas to help you start monetizing your Instagram through digital products. The most important thing is to start small, and don’t feel like you need to launch an online course in the first year of your business.

The beauty of having multiple streams of income is that you can be making money from each stream and you don’t have to be so reliant on a digital product or brand collaboration making $8,333/month. 

Can you really make 6-figures as an Influencer?

So knowing that to make 6-figures a year, you’ll need to be making $8,333 a month, let’s explore what that would look like with these 5 income streams. 

Each income stream would be a percentage of the income you make every month. With the help of the Influencer Blueprint™, you can easily start making between $2,000-$5,000 a month from brand collaborations. 

Let’s say your income breakdown looks like this:

Brand Collaborations: $4,000/month (5 brand collaborations a month, charging on average $800 per collaboration

Affiliate marketing: $800/month ($200/week in affiliate sales)

Coaching calls: $3,000/month (5 coaching calls a week/20 calls a month if you’re charging $150 per call)

Presets/eBooks/personal merch: $800/month (making $200/week in digital sales) 

Total monthly income: $8,600

When you break it down, it’s so easy to see the income possible on Instagram. And you’ll be able to see how easy it is to hit $8,333/month or 6-figures a year from Instagram. 

So here’s the thing, babe. You can start making money as an Influencer right away, as long as you have the right foundations: quality content, an authentic following, and the ability to work hard and deliver on your promises. But the key here is that you shouldn’t be doing this alone. 

Take all the guesswork out of Influencer marketing and fast-track your Influencer business to make 6-figures a year as an Influencer! Join my 7-week self-guided program, your official A-Z guide to earning a full-time income as a content creator, so you can finally get paid for your talents, influence, and personal brand.

If you’re serious about making this your full-time gig, it’s time to start treating your content creation as a business, not a hobby.

Join The Influencer Blueprint™ today.

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