This Is How Much Money You Can Make With 100K Followers on Instagram

You’re about to learn one of the best ways to make money from Instagram.

There’s gold in your list. Whether you’re a newsletter creator or you’re thinking about how to get more brand deals on Instagram, the key is to know how to leverage your community.

Then, it’s just a matter of monetizing your list.

How Much Money Can I Make With 100K Followers on Instagram? 

If you’re wondering how to earn from Instagram, there are a few ways. You can sell affiliate products, or work out sponsorship deals as an influencer.

As soon as you start making money, you can begin to calculate an average dollar value per follower. 

Let’s assume, on average, you generate an average of $0.50 per follower each year. With 100,000 followers, you could expect to make $50,000.

That’s not bad. That could be enough to pay most of your bills and live comfortably. But you can do even better.

How To Make More Money on Instagram

Once you have a strong following, you can make a lot more money on Instagram by raising the bar.

You can start your own brand, launch your own products, or start a podcast.

Thinking long-term, a great way to kickstart your empire is by slowly capturing emails from your Instagram audience. Then, launch a newsletter that will introduce your followers to your products.

Why Start Your Newsletter?

Newsletter creators can make a lot more money than influencers. There are many reasons for this, but they all come down to one thing: Ownership.

On Instagram, you don’t have control over who sees your content. You’re dependent on algorithms, and you never know when your account might be suspended.

As a newsletter creator, you own your audience. You can send them any kind of content you want, whenever you want. It’s a great way to grow your brand.

There are many ways to monetize a newsletter. In addition to selling products to your readers, you can create a separate subscription-based newsletter. You can generate revenue through sponsors or advertisers. 

Acquisition is the holy grail of newsletter monetization, and in some cases, it can happen in less than a year. 

Your success and comfort level with different strategies will determine the value of your email subscribers, and it can vary widely. 

For all these reasons, very few newsletter creators are surprised by Statista’s findings. Their research determined that email marketing generates an average of $38 for every dollar spent or an ROI of 3,800%.

How To Get Instagram Followers To Subscribe to Your Newsletter?

There are several ways to get Instagram followers to subscribe to your newsletter.

The usual way is to offer your followers a special freebie, in exchange for signing up. It could be a PDF, a special video or sound recording, or basically anything that’s downloadable.

Followers go to a signup page, give you their email, and get the gift.

This old-school tactic should definitely be a part of your list-growing plan, but there are many other tools and techniques available.

One of the easiest tools, for example, is magic links. A magic link automatically subscribes a follower as soon as they click on it. They don’t have to enter their email or go to a subscribe page. 

As a newsletter creator, you simply add magic links to your profile and Instagram posts. Your followers can subscribe without any friction and without leaving Instagram.

You can get pretty far using magic links and a free gift alone. But if you’re using an email platform like beehiiv, you have many more options available.

In late 2022, beehiiv launched a new tool called Recommendations. This gives creators the ability to recommend other newsletters. That may seem like a small deal, once you realize that other writers can recommend your newsletter in return. 

Within two weeks of launching the Recommendations feature, beehiiv users noted thousands of new subscriptions.

There are two other successful features you should know about, Referrals and Boosts. 

Referrals are more than just a signup link that you ask readers to forward to a friend. You can offer your readers gifts and incentives in return for a certain number of referrals. The beehiiv platform will track these for you, making the program almost effortless.

Boosts are a way you can name your price for a new subscriber. If you’re willing to boost for $2.50, then other newsletter publishers will recommend your newsletter. You pay $2.50 each time someone new subscribes to your newsletter, and you only pay when you get subscribers. 

Boosts are the top acquisition source for many creators. Better yet, Boosts can be a significant revenue stream if you recommend boosted newsletters to your readers.

Now, these growth tools may sound good on paper, but how well do they work in the real world? Let’s take a look.

Real-Life Success Stories

We dug into our archives and case studies to find proof that you can make money on Instagram by converting followers into subscribers.

We found that by using the growth tools described above, you can quickly exceed the results and followers you have on Instagram when you launch an email newsletter.

Instagram account Little Chonk has 50,000 followers, but they’ve managed to get 80,000 subscribers for their beehiiv newsletter, Dog Juice.

Jack Raines has less than 3,000 followers on Instagram, but he went from 2,000 subscribers to 35,000 subscribers when he began using beehiiv tools for his newsletter, YoungMoney.

The B-Side has just over 31,000 Instagram followers. Within five months of launching, their newsletter had 10,000 subscribers. 

The B-Side has managed to do something else that's incredible: They have a 60% open rate for a daily email. More than 6,000 Gen Z readers are opening The B-Side every single day.

This is an example of quality versus quantity, which brings us to the question of monetization.

Why Trust Us? All beehiiv writers are carefully vetted for their knowledge and experience. Jacob Bear has been writing email campaigns for nearly a decade and was recently named a Top Copywriting Voice on LinkedIn. He learned about the potential of email newsletter revenue the hard way: By ignoring it.

See How Much You Could Be Making With a Newsletter

Not all followers are equal. 

People may follow you on a whim, because of a single post they loved, or because their friends follow you. 

Some of your followers just want to promote their own content, and some of them may be your direct competitors.

But an email newsletter implies a deeper commitment. The subscriber has volunteered some basic contact information. They’re interested in getting more of your content, beyond just a photo or a 30-second video clip.

When the time comes, your newsletter subscribers are more likely to take out their wallets and buy from you.

Not only does a newsletter give you a more loyal following, but it also gives you more options.

Let’s compare the possible revenue streams.

A newsletter gives you almost twice as many potential revenue streams right out of the gate. And since you have more control over your audience and your newsletter, you are free to develop new sources of income as you go.

Creators on beehiiv have generated $1,200,000+ in revenue, in a month. There’s so much that creators can do with an audience they own.

Dog Juice has 50,000 Instagram followers and 80,000 subscribers. Let’s assume Instagram generates an average of $1.25 per person each year in revenue through affiliate sales and sponsorships. 

This means they’re making $62,500 a year from Instagram. 

Next, let’s look at their newsletter. Newsletter readers are more engaged and loyal than Instagram followers, so it’s reasonable to expect a higher figure for revenue per subscriber. 

However, many of these subscribers are also followers, so we’ll keep the figures the same. 

With 80k followers generating $1.25 on average, the newsletter could generate $100,000 a year.

Now we’ll add a few more revenue streams. To keep it simple, we’ll assume Dog Juice is not selling any of its own products, and that every revenue stream generates $0.63 per subscriber on average. 

This table shows the possible results:

With our creator calculator, you can see the possible results for your own Instagram and newsletter audience.

The one thing we didn’t include was acquisition, which would give you a one-time jackpot. 

Acquisition is a real possibility. In fact, over the past year, four beehiiv newsletters were acquired. None of them had been in existence for a full year.

Among other factors, we suspect that beehiiv’s detailed analytics make it easier to quantify the value of a newsletter. This and other features can make your newsletter highly attractive to investors.

We’ve talked about the many revenue streams you can create with a beehiiv newsletter and mentioned the analytics. But there’s a lot more.

Every beehiiv newsletter comes with its own website, optimized for SEO. Your emails are automatically added to the site as blog posts.

Our no-code editor lets you customize every detail of your newsletter and signup pages, often with just a few simple clicks. 

Many newsletter creators come to us for ease of use, but still more are attracted to our pricing structure. We don’t penalize you for growing your audience. You choose a plan based on your goal: Launch, Grow, or Scale.

The point is, a beehiiv newsletter can become an enviable source of revenue, and the many tools we offer are just icing on the cake.    

Ironically, one of the best ways to make money from Instagram is by leveraging your followers to start a beehiiv newsletter.