 Welcome to another episode of started time. Today we are going to talk about a very interesting business opportunity which is easy on the pocket and a lot of fun as a business. It is an opportunity to become an Instagram influencer and is actually a marketing business. So let me tell you who is an Instagram influencer. Instagram influencer is essentially a social media marketer who has amassed a large and a very engaged audience and therefore can build a business around it. Influencers play today a vital role as an intermediary connecting consumers and brands with each other on social media through an authentic and tactical manner. So let's understand how large is the market of Instagram influencers today. Today how people are buying is vastly different from what the way they used to buy. About 49% of the consumers before they would likely to purchase anything like a mobile phone or a product or a food product which is new or probably something that they are experimenting with would like that it should be endorsed by a real individual. Consumers they ranked influencers as probably the sixth most effective influencing their purchases on Instagram. Therefore Instagram has become a gold standard in influencer marketing. The overall influencer marketing industry is about 10 million dollars. Instagram itself as a platform has about 1 million active users. 2019 alone saw about 5 million sponsored post views on Instagram. Nearly 80% of the accounts on Instagram are followed by one or the other business brand and in some cases quite a few. More than 200 million Instagramers visit business profiles every day. Now if these numbers are to be seen in totality there is a huge market that exists for influencer marketing today. First thing that you need to do is really to understand the niche that you want to be an influencer in. It could be your blogging niche could be anything across categories between right from beauty to food to health to wellness to travel stand-up comedy or any other category that you would have good insights about or you're able to blend your strengths and passion together. The next thing you have to do is make an Instagram account. You have to ideally make a business account on Instagram page if you already have an existing Instagram account convert it into a business account. To be an influencer one needs to post regularly and the content has to be highly engaging. First thing you should do is write an interesting bio which is cool and describe your Instagram page about what you're going to offer to your followers. Make sure that you invest or if you don't already know the art of good photography. Visuals are a very important part of Instagram so therefore the aesthetics of your photos will make or break your post. Though photos alone are not really enough you need to accompany this with a lot of interesting captions relevant hashtags. You will need to use a lot of relevant hashtags with each of your posts along with social posting on your other social medias like Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr or any other such account. To drive better engagement to your posts you can ask questions from your followers, you can do polls or you can just do some giveaways for your followers to keep them engaged. Once your follower base has become significantly large or it increases then you can talk to brands about how you can monetize your page with a lot of other branding engagement for your followers. The initial investment while starting a career as an Instagram influencer is almost negligible. All you need to do to get started is really have a high quality phone which will have also a good camera. Any phone between 25 to 30 thousand rupees is good enough to start with. You can also join some platforms like Buffer, Planetary, Preview or Ripple to schedule your Instagram posts. Paid promotions on Instagram are commonly used to build a community fast while getting good engagement will rest upon your content. Instagram has a promotion feature which operates on cost per thousand impressions which is CPM basis. This means that you will pay a specified paid amount on your post for every thousand people that see it. Of course you will have to collaborate with other influencers and other key people on Instagram to make sure that you are able to gain or your profile is able to gain more traction. Brands approach influencers for advertisements, promotions and paid partnerships. Influencers also get paid on the basis of per post on Instagram handles. If you're a nano influencer meaning that you have about four thousand to five thousand followers on your Instagram account and you have an engaged audience you could get up to rupees three thousand four thousand per post that you do. As a micro influencer with the following of more than five thousand but less than thirty thousand followers you can get somewhere between seven to ten thousand rupees per post. Influencers who have over five hundred thousand followers are paid anywhere between rupees one point five lakh to two lakh rupees per post. And if you have more than a million followers on your account who and a very active and engaged audience you can pretty much command any price that you want. So there is a lot of money to be made as an Instagram influencer provided you know how to get your act right. That's all from us today at Start It Up. Hope you enjoyed the episode. Look forward to more such videos on Start It Up.