How to Earn Money by Reposting on Instagram [Low-Risk Business]

Whether you are a marketer, content creator, eCommerce seller, or just a fan of Instagram, there is plenty of opportunities to earn on this social media network. Here are low-risk strategies for how to make money by reposting on Instagram.

Usually, when people talk about making money online and on Instagram, they talk about how to use paid ads to target potential buyers. But there is another way to make money there, by monetizing organic traffic.

This way of earning money on Instagram doesn’t require paying for ads, neither to create any content nor to show your face. It’s a relatively simple, low-risk business model. It’s called content curation or “reposting”.

And in this article, I will go over the most frequent questions about it and ways to grow your Instagram account to start to make money by reporting on Instagram.

Make Money By Reposting On Instagram

This way is a low-risk business model that results be easy and profitable. A good example of it is one of the most famous curators in the world – 9gag. Think about it – how much time do they spend on creating content themselves? None. Ads? None.

So what do they do and how do they make money? They are constantly reposting on Instagram the content created by others.

How many sales could you get with 58M followers?

Besides, such type of content is also sometimes called User Generated Content (UGC).

In general, this term is used in different ways in social media marketing. For example, if you see someone posting a picture of their outfit tagging the fashion brand they’re wearing, that’s also a UGC.

Many people like to do it so much because they also hope that the brand they tagged will share their posts. They might as well share the content you repost and tag them. It will bring you more free traffic.

Think about it, wouldn’t you proudly share on your Instagram story a post of yours that “was featured by 9gag”? I would. By doing it I will send my friends organically to the 9gag account to watch a piece of content they did spend a second to create!

Now you get the idea of one of the ways to earn money on Instagram. But still, there are a lot of “how” questions. Let me explain it better.

Can You Earn Money by Reposting Content on Instagram?

Let’s see how much approximately such an account as 9gag makes money on Instagram. I used a collaboration pricing calculator to calculate how much I should expect to pay 9gag for one story and one post. According to this calculator, it can make up to $233 to make a couple of these every day.

However, I am not sure that the calculator is correct. And in discussions with professional Instagram marketers, I hear a different story.

I kept the identity of the marketer and the accounts he manages private. But I can tell you that these accounts have together, in total, less than 10 Million followers. I’m not saying it’s easy to get there, but if you do…

But it’s not only promotions, there are many ways to monetize a successful Instagram account. Even if all you do is curate (and not create) and do reposting on Instagram. This is, for example, a comment on my post on Reddit by a dropshipper.

“I’ve been building social accounts by reposting viral content since 2018. I make 6-figures by drop shipping products to my followers.”

Curation and reposting of viral content on Instagram is just a great business model. It takes some time to get to the point you can monetize the account, but once it gains enough traffic – the potential is huge.

Christien Bouc (@christienbouc) shared the organic reach of one of his repost pages. The screenshot shows a reach of 1M people in the last 7 days, He commented on it: “The fastest way to grow is by posting viral reels”.

This article is going to cover all of the practical steps you need to take to get started reposting on Instagram, and the reason behind them.

How to build a repost account and curate viral content on Instagram

You can follow Instagram’s help center guide on how to signup and set up a creator account. Instead, I want to focus on what to do right after you created a new account: start generating growth.

The Instagram organic growth strategy is based on the engagement of your audience. Similar to how you would optimize your ads to get the most clicks at the lowest cost, you want to get the most organic reach out of every piece of content you post there. So the best tool to get organic traffic and growth is to increase engagement.

The process of reposting on Instagram is conducted in 3 steps:

1. Curating and reposting viral content
2. Using growth tactics
3. Monetizing the account

I will go over them one by one sharing the best practices you can apply to succeed in these activities. Let’s start with curating and reposting Instagram viral content.

Curating and reposting on Instagram – What to repost and publish?

There is an endless stream of content on social media, how do you know what to curate and repost on Instagram? Should you just repost everything as often as you can?

The answer is that reposting on Instagram without a plan is something that you need to avoid! You will most likely end up harming your account if you don’t curate the right content to repost.

But why?

When you understand how Instagram works it becomes clear why it is so important to use a data-driven approach for the curation process of what you repost. 

In an article titled “Shedding some light on how Instagram works” Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, says:

“The more likely you are to take any action, the higher up you’ll see the post”.

The article was written for the users of Instagram, not for marketers. But it’s important for us as well, by understanding how Instagram works we can squeeze more organic traffic out of it.

I interpret Mosseri’s message in the next way: if you want to get traffic, people must engage with your content. It’s true not only for your followers but also for people who use the “explore” feed.

“We look at signals like what posts you’ve liked, saved, and commented on in the past. Let’s say you’ve recently liked a number of photos from San Francisco’s dumpling chef Cathay Bi (@dumplingclubsf). We then look at who else likes Cathay’s photos, and then what other accounts those people are interested in. Maybe people who like Cathay are also into the SF dim sum spot @dragonbeaux.”

Instagram (like other social media platforms) has multiple feeds within it. The first feed you see when you open the app is the feed of the accounts you follow. But right next to it, there is the explore feed which exposes you to accounts you don’t yet follow but which produce content you might like.

Perhaps you already know these feeds as an Instagram user. But it’s time to look at them as a marketer. If you want to get that organic traffic from Instagram and monetize this traffic, you will have to outrank other accounts that compete with you on the top placements of these pages.

In other words, if you want to rank, you need engagement. And that’s where you need viral content.

The number of likes, comments, and views of content that was posted by other accounts is the footprint of how high their content ranked. Since viral content has already ranked high, and since you anyway don’t create any content yourself, you should curate the content that has the highest chance to rank.

Besides, what happens if you repost low-engagement content? One of the ranking factors of Instagram is the history of interactions of your followers with your account. 

The less they interact with your content, the lower new content will rank in their feeds. If you don’t show up in your followers’ feeds – you can’t reach other feeds like the explore feed. That’s how reposting the wrong content can harm your organic growth.

Enough with the theory, where do you practically find those viral posts?

How to find viral content for reposting on Instagram?

I want to show you how to use Flick, the Instagram managing and growing software, in order to find viral content on Instagram to curate or repost.

It is very simple to use, designed to save you time, and provides you content to curate in no time compared to trying to do it manually. Here is how you curate content to repost in 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Collect hashtags

In order to gain insights from the entire niche all you need is one hashtag related to it. For example, if your niche is dogs then #dogs would be a great starting point.

You can use Flick to analyze multiple hashtags. But even a report of just one hashtag includes a section of similar hashtags categorized by competition score into three groups:

• Low competition
• Medium competition
• High competition

The competition score shows the estimated level of difficulty of ranking in the top posts feed of the hashtag.

Step 2: Analyze the hashtags

To get insights, change the view to Table view which gives more information.

Flick scans and analyzes the data of the posts of the accounts and hashtags you choose for the report. Doing this manually will take much time, which is exactly what makes it such a powerful research tool.

The Table view shows six different metrics for each hashtag:

• Competition score – shows how competitive a particular hashtag is.
• Potential reach – the estimated number of people that a particular hashtag could potentially reach.
• Daily average post count – the average number of posts that use a particular hashtag on a daily basis.
• Average likes – the average number of likes that posts with a particular hashtag receive.
• Total posts – the total number of posts with a particular hashtag.
• Average comments – the average number of comments that posts with a particular hashtag receive.

I then applied the Average likes filter to leave only engaging hashtags and sorted them by Competition score.

This way, I can see hashtags that are trending, engaging, and reasonably competitive at the same time.

Step 3: Build a repost schedule

Now that you have the hashtags you are interested in, preview them on Instagram to get an idea of what content to post.

Once you decided what to post, build a schedule. Building a schedule is not only the process of deciding what will be posted and when. You are going to need to find new content every 1, 2, or 4 weeks. I personally like to work in 2 weeks iterations, but it depends on your personal preference.

After you decide how often to update your reports and collect content, choose how much content you want to repost. Curation accounts repost on a daily basis, sometimes even 2-3 times per day.

Since you don’t create the content but rather curate it, it will take you far less time to schedule content in advance. 3-4 hours of curation and scheduling can fill up 2 weeks, maybe not the first time you do it but within a couple of cycles, you could easily do it as quickly as that.

In order to schedule your posts, you can use the Flick Scheduling feature or the Meta Business Suite planner which you will need to set up. There are also many free scheduling apps that are useful if you plan to post on multiple social media platforms at the same time.

When you schedule the post, decide whether to use a similar caption to the post you are reposting or to create one of your own. 

In this article, I am not going to cover the topic of caption writing. I will just mention that there really isn’t just one way to do it, the best captions depend on what feelings you want to trigger within your audience.

Make sure to schedule different types of content: videos, carousels, single pictures, and stories.

The biggest advantage of curating and reposting on Instagram in advance is what you get to do with the rest of the time. That is, focusing on growth.

Growth tactics

The social accounts you build are part of your online business, and just like any business – you must be able to attend to be in conversation with your potential customers.

How to do that?

Manual engagements

Talk to your existing or potential followers. Once you obtain a large number of followers you will get many comments on your posts that you could interact with, but as a complete beginner, you should focus on interacting with others’ posts.

There are a couple of ways to do that:

• Comment on posts of the accounts you monitor, if you make a meaningful comment other people will like it then the comment appears as a top comment and get you exposed organically
• Comment on posts of people that interact with the accounts you monitor, literally enter the accounts of people that commented on these accounts, and comment on one of their posts.
• Comment on “recent” and “top” posts of the hashtags that you use.

Make sure to leave a contextual comment, not a spammy one. It will help you in two ways: first, it will expose your content to potential followers.

Second, you will start building relationships with influencers and big accounts which you can later collaborate with.

There is another reason to engage with your audience, you are going to get valuable feedback from them that will help you understand why some of your content works better and what to curate next.

In a reel about how she gained 8,000 new followers in one month, I asked Britt Havens (@havencreative_co) if she performed research on viral content in order to come up with data-driven content ideas.

In her answer, she mentioned another data source for her content ideation process – the feedback she gets from her audience.

By engaging with your audience or in conversation with followers of accounts in your niche you can understand better the reasons why certain content performs better than others.

But manual interactions depend on the most expensive resource at hand – your time. That is why many social media marketers use automated engagement solutions.

Automated engagements

There is a debate about whether you should or should not use bots to automate the growth of Instagram accounts. 

The most common type of growth automation is using a bot like Jarvee or Nextpost to follow targeted accounts, and then unfollow them within 24 hours. This way the accounts you target get a notification that you started following them and are likely to enter your account to check you out.

Those against saying you shouldn’t do it explain the risks involved. In short, these bots can raise the security alarms of Instagram and can impact your account. 

The impact varies, it could get you “shadow-banned” which means a reduced reach for your content or the disappearance of your account from the search results. In some cases, it can get you completely banned from Instagram.

Those in favor say that if you learn how to operate these bots the right way the growth you will experience is worth a hundred times the risks. Using 4G mobile proxies, tuning the bots to imitate human actions, and taking a moderated number of actions per day.

You can try to learn about Instagram automation by joining the Facebook community Jarvee Instagram Automations or Tal Klinger’s live session recording on his website. 

Take into account that it’s a bit tech-savvy, it doesn’t require coding or anything but it is still somewhat technical. If you don’t feel comfortable learning it yourself, use the community to hire an expert to set it up for you.

There are other types of automation you will learn about throughout the journey. For example, chatbots that engage with anyone new who likes, comments, or follows your account. It is an interesting topic to dive into as you start your growth journey.

This leads us to the last growth tactic for today…

via GIPHY

Collaborations on Instagram

Collaborations expose accounts to each other’s audiences. If you ever tagged a friend in a post and they shared it in their story, you have experienced it yourself. Your friends were exposed to the person you tagged and you to the people who watched their story.

As a curator, you’re in luck. The bigger and more popular your account gets the more likely people are to share the posts you curate and repost. 

You are reposting their content anyway because you don’t create content yourself, wouldn’t it be nice if they share it in their stories? But no one will share your reposts in their stories unless you are a known brand or you have built a relationship with them first. 

I already emphasized the importance of contextual comments on posts of other accounts in the niche you’re building your account in. Getting your reposts shared in stories is another reason why you should do it.

There are endless collaboration opportunities out there and they come in many forms, I only mentioned one kind. As you go through this journey of growth, keep your eyes open and follow social media growth content creators (like the ones I mention in this article). 

New methods are being created all the time.

The mix of pre-scheduled viral content and growth tactics like building a community or using automation bots is the way to generate growth. Now let’s talk about the endgame, and how to turn this traffic into money.

How to monetize Instagram traffic

There are many ways to monetize your Instagram account, here are some examples:

1. Paid collaborations – an example of that is models that get paid by brands to post pictures of themselves wearing clothes of the brand
2. Affiliate marketing – Sending the traffic outside Instagram using an affiliate link and getting a commission from the sales
3. Selling digital products and services – Selling online courses and different kinds of services.
4. Dropshipping – Selling physical products using the dropshipping model.

There are a couple of methods you can use to drive traffic to the offer you promote. The simple ones are through the link in the account bio, by placing links in stories, buying Instagram likes, or tagging other accounts in your content.

A more sophisticated approach professional marketers use is building a network of accounts using a master-slave architecture. 9gag for example has also “Barked by 9gag” and “8fact by 9gag” all of these cross-promote each other.

But there is something more important than the technical how-to. I want to focus on your promotion strategy, which is relevant no matter how you monetize the account.

How to promote your offers on Instagram

I call this strategy “value-value-value-value-offer”. It means that as you plan the content schedule, you include offers you want to promote in a ratio of one to a big enough number of value posts.

What are value posts? There are a couple of ways to look at it. Some marketers would consider their reposted content as value content and simply add promotions every 10-20 Instagram posts.

For example, @memes posted a paid promotion, sponsored by @thrivemarket, its next story was already a reposted funny meme. The monetized content is diluted with the general funny reposted content.

Another approach is to use a value-based “build-up” to the offer. It’s popular among creators that sell their own digital products such as online courses (less common among curators that repost content). The idea is that you build up a story before you share the promotion.

A good example is this carousel by @istacoachmike. The first 4 slides speak about a new feature by Instagram. Then, he relates them to his product by pitching the idea of making money online. Last, he presents his students’ successful use cases and calls for action – to contact him to learn more.

With the knowledge of how to find viral content, growth tactics, and monetization tactics – you can practically start your own curator account for reposting on Instagram. But before concluding this article, I’d like to answer some of the most common questions people ask before they get started.

Promote Your Dropshipping Store With Instagram

Promotion of your dropshipping products on Instagram is quite simple and immensely effective for a dropshipping store. Taking into account the huge popularity of Instagram and its focus on visual content, every store of this kind will find its receptive audience there. If you’ve been wondering how to run dropshipping on Instagram easily and efficiently, keep reading!

Follow these steps if you want to boost your dropshipping sales with the help of Instagram:

1. Create an Instagram Shop for your dropshipping store and fill it with product posts and entertaining materials. Don’t forget to add calls-to-action, hashtags, and enticing captions.
   
2. Use Instagram search to find other niche-related accounts with the highest possible number of subscribers.
   
3. Contact the owners of these accounts via Direct mail, ask if they publish paid shoutouts, and discuss the details.
   
4. Make the payment and provide the materials for the shoutout: a product image, a link to the product page, a short caption, and hashtags. Wait until your shoutout begins.
   
5. Duplicate the post on your store’s Instagram account. Answer comments and questions about the product, and advise where to buy it (link to your store, of course).
   
6. Watch your number of subscribers grow and the curve of social traffic rise in Google Analytics.

If you are starting an account from zero, if your budget is extremely limited and you don’t want or can’t spend any cent on it, then you will choose another strategy for boosting your sales. It will actually depend on your store’s niche. You will see what fits your better:

• Selling before the specific event or occasion, such as an Independence Day, Mother’s Day, movie, or series (new season) release (in case you have a dropshipping store with some cool stuff for fun or entertainment).

• For Instagram, it would be cool to make customers “post and tag you” + you could create a specific hashtag that they also can use and it will become a benefit for you.

• Duplicate the sales from your site or online store.

• You always can create a new SALE reason just for IG followers/subscribers, to give them a special discount (let’s say 10% on the next payment) if they tag you now with their last (first) sale.

• Create every month a happy month! All the customers from IG who buy products from your store will automatically take part in the contest. So, every month someone can get a nice bonus from your store. Could be strategically rewarded if you manage a branded store and the gift includes your own branding printed over it or signed by you. All these will bring you a loyal customer base.

Not as complicated as you thought, is it? Every dropshipping store owner can easily follow the steps described below and reach great successful results.

FAQ about Instagram

How long does it take to get a lot of followers on Instagram

It’s hard to give an exact estimation because the growth of accounts depends on many factors. Trending topics gain followers quickly (like Simon Levi or TikTok topics that happened recently). But one-time trends or seasonal trends also tend to pass.

Evergreen niches are ones that have demand throughout the year. It is unlikely to expect that the topic of digital marketing or dogs will experience a sudden dramatic decrease in interest.

Having said that, these evergreen niches usually come with higher competition. There are no free meals as they say, let me share with you my personal decision-making process for my businesses.

For example, the topics related to making money online or digital marketing business has been growing steadily for many years. I don’t think they will have an unexpected drop soon.

Within the massive niche of digital marketing I chose, over the years, to focus on different sub-niches and money-making business models.

In 2016 I started focusing on the most trending topic at the time, eBay dropshipping. The company that I still own to this day, DSM Tool, keeps up with the trends.

The team DSM Tool is working these days on a Facebook Marketplace dropshipping product and already started releasing guides on how to dropship on Facebook. When I got started Facebook dropshipping barely existed, today it’s almost as big as eBay dropshipping.

It’s recommended to find a small enough sub-niche to start from and then go up in small steps that got me to this point. Growing one sub-niche at a time.

But the niche you’re active in is only one thing that will impact your growth. Your curation skills, community-building skills, collaboration skills, and automation skills will impact it as well.

But the most impactful factor is yourself.

Commitment is going to be your best friend if you plan to make money online. It’s true for any business, you’re building a digital asset and it takes time. Look for ways to enjoy the journey and try to set goals that are bigger than just seeing profits within 30 days.

How about becoming a professional digital marketer as a goal? If you take one account to 100K, what would stop you from taking 10 accounts to that number and then even selling some of them for profit?

How much does it cost to grow on Instagram?

Can you grow on Instagram at no cost? It is definitely possible. But there are a couple of things you should consider investing in if you want to grow faster

Software Expenses

• Flick – to save you time in finding viral content to repost
• Jarvee – to automate engagement with potential followers
• Canva – to create promotional content
• Manychat – to create chatbots

I probably miss a few, but using software to pump up your growth is a common practice you should take into account.

Training programs and services expenses

A lot of the knowledge about Instagram growth marketing is shared for free on YouTube (like this one), Facebook communities (like this one), Instagram growth influencers, and blog posts like this one.

But you might find a paid training program you wish to take. Many of the creators that share free content also offer an in-depth training program or a done-for-you service.

By the way, one nice thing about becoming a professional digital marketer yourself is that you could do the same as you grow.

Paid promotions

You might decide you want to pay for shoutouts or boost some of your posts to grow quicker. I am talking in this article only about organic growth, but as you become more experienced with Instagram marketing you might encounter paid tactics you’d want to use.

What is the master-slave method to grow your account for reposting on Instagram?

As you’re gaining skills in growing Instagram accounts you are going to be able to implement more complex growth architectures. The idea behind this method is that you grow a page by promoting it with other pages. 

By using this approach you could build not only repost pages, but also brands. On the report page, you could monetize the traffic in various ways, one of them being by promoting your brand. For example, a Facebook store.

Professional Instagram curators that manage multiple Instagram accounts refer to this architecture as the “Master-slave” method. It is also sometimes called the mother-child method.

One of the advantages of it is that it gives you further freedom to take risks when it comes to using Instagram automation bots. You can use the bots for the “slave” accounts and keep the risk away from the “master” account, while still promoting it.

Issan Tinashe (@theinstahustle) illustrates the method nicely in his blog. He demonstrates how the method can (and is being) used not only by repost accounts or brands but also by famous people.

(Note: I do not know if Kylie Jenner uses this method or not, I did not create the illustration below)

Conclusion

It’s one thing to build a business that makes money, and another thing to build a valuable digital asset you can one day sell for a lot of money. Not that you have to sell anything, there is a wide range of monetization opportunities available to you when you choose to become a professional curator.

Let me know in the comments below what questions you still have about reposting on Instagram after reading this article. But even if you still have questions, don’t be afraid to just go ahead and get started.

Make the decision and commit to the process, take a pen and paper and write down your plan and goals. Believe in yourself, they say “the only way out is through” and I say “the only way UP is through”.