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Micro-Influencer On Instagram
Want to be a micro-influencer on Instagram?
Want to make money on social media, but you don’t have a large following?
You can make money as a micro-influencer on Instagram.
What is an Influencer?
An influencer is someone who influences other people on social media.
People look to them as an authority somehow, and influencers can sway their followers purchasing decisions.
What Is A Micro Influencer?
What is a micro-influencer? A micro-influencer is an influencer who has approximately 1000 to 100,000 followers on a social media platform.
Influencers have influence, and people like to listen to what they have to say.
Brands look for influencers large and small for influencer marketing.
They want to sell and market their products, and who better to do that for them than someone active on social media?
When they use a micro-influencer on Instagram, they do the marketing for them. So that influencer already has the know, like, and trust factor, and their followers are more likely to buy the product.
When you see someone talking about a product and offers you a special discount code, they are in some paid partnership with a brand.
Why Am I Writing This Post?
That’s a great question, and I want to be completely transparent.
This is a science experiment because I’m just beginning my journey as a micro-influencer myself. However, I signed my first influencer contract this week, and it happened really easily and naturally. (Full disclosure, I have four online businesses, so I do have a lot of business experience.)
I specialize in helping kids start online businesses, and an influencer is a perfect business for teens. But, of course, kids naturally gravitate toward social media anyway.
I’m “cracking the code” and learning the ropes, so I can teach them how to get their own brand deals.
Just because I specialize in kids doesn’t mean I don’t help adults, too, so keep reading!
Why Do Brands Like Micro Influencers?
I’m always preaching about niching down because niching down builds your business. The same thing goes for you as an influencer. Having a niche as an influencer makes it easier to grow your personal brand and get deals from other brands for sponsored posts and content.
What Is A Nano Influencer?
A nano influencer is an influencer that has a follower count of around 1000 – 10,000 followers, and they can get brand deals too!
Do you fall into that category? If you do, you can definitely start marketing yourself as an influencer. You don’t need a lot of followers to get started.
What Type Of Influencer Am I?
I consider myself to be a nano influencer more than a micro-influencer as Your Business Fairy Godmother.
The account I just signed my first influencer contract for has only a little over 1200 Instagram followers.
I post to that account daily and engage with my followers all the time. I will eventually niche it down even further because that will be even more beneficial to that brand.
I have another Instagram account with 4000 followers that I barely post on (I literally only have 25 posts from the past year), and it grows on auto-pilot, and the reason for that is because it’s very niche.
How Do You Become A Smaller Influencer?
The first thing is to niche down. As I said, the niche is important. Brands are looking for niches that are aligned with their products.
If you choose the right niche everything you do to grow as a micro-influencer will be easier.
If your audience fits their product, a brand will see you as a valuable advertiser.
If you have only a small number of followers but are the perfect audience for a product, that’s better than paying a larger influencer that is not relevant to their brand.
Relevant micro-influencers with high engagement can be a better return on advertising dollars for a brand.
How Much Money Can You Make?
The amount of money that influencers can charge will vary. With higher engagement, they can charge more.
Honestly, there is no “set rate.”
So many things can factor into your rates depending on your micro-influencer campaign, such as:
Will this be just one photo? Will you also do a story? Will it only be on your story? Will you create a video or a photo?
Micro-Influencer Marketing Campaign
Do you have a blog? Will you write a blog post about it? If you do have a blog, how many page views do you get a month?
If you are a smaller micro-influencer with a blog that brings in a lot of traffic and repurpose your content over your blog for the brand, you can charge more.
What other social media platforms are you active on? Will you be cross-posting?
Do you have a YouTube channel? Even if your subscriber count is not high over there, if you create a high-quality video, the brand can post it to their channel as content.
How big is your Pinterest following? Will you be posting to idea pins for more brand exposure. I have idea pins that get well over 10,000 views.
People interact with my idea pins to highlight all of these factors in my media kit. If you want to learn about how to create an influencer media kit, this post by Shane Barker has some great information.
If you are active all across the internet, you probably are more of a micro-influencer than you realize.
Just because you are a micro-influencer on Instagram doesn’t mean that you can’t use your influence from other platforms to land your brand deal.
What established brand only has a presence on one platform? Sure they may have a bigger presence on one platform as opposed to others.
But you never know if they are trying to grow their presence on other platforms and you reaching out with your micro-influencer marketing plan is just what they are looking for.
Brainstorm Aligned Brands
Make a list of all the different brands that you would like to work with.
Look at brands that have the same niche audience as you do.
What products do you love and already use? If you love a product and you already tell people about it, that’s a natural fit.
Promoting the brand product won’t be forced. You will enjoy creating the content, and you can start taking pics and tagging them in your stories for practice and recognition.
Write down every single brand you can think of that you would love to work with. You don’t have to edit your list. You can always edit later if the brand is not a good fit.
Please don’t be afraid of large brands. They can say no. So what? They can say yes too. It doesn’t hurt to try.
If they say no today, you can always approach them later and try again. Or, if they do turn you down, ask them what you need to do for a yes. For example, ask, “Where can I focus my efforts to improve to be able to get a deal with you in the future?”
Maybe they say your price is too high, or your followers are too low, or maybe they hit their budget for the year. You won’t know until you ask.
Then you can go back and ask again at a later date once you have had a chance to improve and took their recommendations to heart.
Have No Fear
Businesses have an advertising budget. They love to try new things. Give them some options and show them what working with you would look like.
What do you have to offer them for what they are paying for?
If you approach a brand and they say no, you can use that as a learning opportunity.
Sales are a numbers game, and what you are doing is selling yourself as an Instagram micro-influencer.
Everyone starts somewhere. No one starts out knowing everything or having a million followers.
I respect people who say no. No is a powerful word. Of course, I love a yes, but no isn’t something to be afraid of.
Be Professional
Go in there with a plan. Be professional when interacting with a brand.
Cross all of your t’s and dot all of your i’s.
Get yourself a sponsored post or influencer agreement contract to protect yourself.
The brand will have a contract, but you need one too to protect your own brand. I get all my legal templates from a lawyer who is also a blogger, and her name is Lucrezia Iapachino.
If you need an influencer contract, this is my affiliate link to purchase Lucrezia’s template.
Contacting Brands
When contacting brands, you can contact them through their social media accounts or email them directly.
They likely have a dedicated social media management team, so you know they will get that message.
You can also email a brand through their contact info on their website.
Once you get the correct person to contact, be sure to save that information for later so you don’t have to go through multiple people to get into contact with the person who handles the marketing.
When corresponding with brands, use a professional email address and have a professional email signature that links to your social media accounts.
Make it easy for them to learn everything they need to learn about you. If it’s not easy dealing with you, they won’t want to work with you.
So there you have it, how to become a micro-influencer on Instagram.
The more you do, the more you will learn. So I hope I gave you some good food for thought and some direction to get started.
It’s inspiring to get paid to post on social media. Did this give you some ideas and inspiration? Let me know in the comments, and I would love to hear from you.
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Great tips, I have few followers on my personal account maybe start from there will get me some Brand deals in the future.
There is so much great info in this post! I am looking at finding some sponsored posts to do soon. These will be really helpful. Thanks for sharing!