You love Instagram. It’s one of your favorite platforms for sharing about your business and showing off your photos, but can you really make money from it? The answer is absolutely yes! People everywhere are making money on Instagram every day, and with a little help, you can too!

I’ve generated so much money in sales directly from Instagram and I want to share with you the steps you need to take to start generating revenue from the platform (and not in an uncomfortable car salesman way!)

Making money on Instagram is all about attracting your ideal clients to you.

That means you can’t stay in the “I’d rather hide under my desk” territory that a lot of us tend to hang out in when we start talking about selling on social media. The good news is that using Instagram to bring in income doesn’t actually have to feel like selling.

It can feel easy.

When your Instagram strategy focuses more on attracting and engaging with your ideal customer instead of putting the focus on selling to them, you’ll start to convert followers to clients like never before.

Your followers don’t want to feel like they’re constantly being sold to. They want to get to know you and what problems you can solve for them, and they want to feel like you value them more than their wallet. That’s why creating a strategy around them instead of the sale is so important.

So how can you make money on Instagram?

3 Steps to Attract New Clients on Instagram that Make you Money

1. Start with your current followers.

Most people make a huge mistake in their Instagram strategy: they think that in order to make more money they need more followers, so their efforts are directed at finding new people to “connect” with, all while they avoid building a genuine connection with their current audience.

Of course a huge following (preferably a highly engaged one) is ideal. But it's completely untrue that a big audience is required to be successful. It doesn't matter how many followers you have to make money on Instagram. When you build a community with the audience that you currently have they will be more likely to bring outsiders into that audience.

Engage with your people. Let them get to know you, your story, and the behind the scenes of your business. Treat them like they are your most valuable resource (because they are!) and most importantly, solve a problem for them. Your followers are going to stick around for the long haul when they know you care and when you are providing value by removing struggles they have.

2. Create irresistible and SHAREABLE content.

Being a great problem solver is an awesome start, but you also have to have great content. You want your followers to see your post and immediately feel like it was written for them and they need to share it with the world. You want them to watch your Stories and feel like they're tapping into your world, not tapping next.

Test out different types of content. If all of your posts are photos of your desk and your Stories are nothing but you talking into the camera, then your content will go stale pretty quickly. Mix up your posts with photos of you, your workspace, stock photos, quote cards, and infographics. Show your face in your Stories, but also show the behind the scenes of your business, reshare content you love that your followers might like too, use music, ask questions, try polls and text and GIFs and anything else you think your audience will enjoy.

Try out different options and then pay attention to what's working. What posts are getting the most engagement? The most reshares? What are your followers saying that they enjoy from you? When you create irresistible content that people want to share, you'll intrigue newcomers that will want to stick around for a while.

3. Utilize ALL of Instagram's resources.

Posting on your feed alone isn't a great Instagram strategy. You're missing out on potential customers (and various types of content) if you're only focusing on one area of the platform.

You can post different types of content in your Stories than you can on your feed, and do different types of videos and trainings on IGTV or a live stream than you can in Stories. Engagement and selling looks different in your DMs than it does in your captions. Utilizing various types of content on Instagram gives you a larger reach of potential clients, and engages your current audience in more than one way which makes you seem more approachable and fun to follow.

When you shift your Instagram strategy to include these 3 steps, you'll start to attract new clients more often and engage your current audience enough to convert them to clients too.

More clients = more money, and you'll be bringing in clients that are a perfect fit for you because they've already spent time getting to know you and your business, and want to work with you because of the specific problems you solve.

What's your favorite way to make money from Instagram? Are you a Stories seller, a DM closer, or prefer a caption's call-to-action? Tell me below!