Ethan Barber didn’t set out to become an influencer when he started sharing his photographs of New York City, a place he calls his “creative muse,” on Instagram back in 2011. But the positive feedback he found online encouraged him to keep posting, and Ethan eventually amassed more than one million followers on the platform.
Today, Ethan works full time as a content creator and photographer, having monetized his following with an ecommerce site that sells calendars, photo editing toolkits, and merch like keychains and sweatshirts.
Ahead, learn how to become an Instagram influencer with practical tips from Ethan.
What is an Instagram influencer?
An Instagram influencer is someone with an engaged social media following whom they can guide toward purchasing products or taking other actions (like signing up for a newsletter or enrolling in a course).
Influencers are often grouped into categories based on follower count:
- Nano-influencers: 1,000 to 10,000 followers
- Micro-influencers: 10,000 to 100,000 followers
- Mid-tier influencers: 100,000 to 500,000 followers
- Macro-influencers: 500,000 to 1 million followers
- Mega-influencers: More than 1 million followers
Follower count can impact influencers’ opportunities, earnings, and brand deals. However, an influencer’s power to affect consumer behavior is better determined by their engagement rates.
How to become an Instagram influencer
- Find your niche
- Establish a personal brand
- Post consistently
- Understand your audience
- Post Reels
- Stay aware of the larger climate
- Tap into trends
- Engage with your audience
- Make a media kit
- Review analytics and improve
There are around 50 million social media influencers, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s no single path to becoming one. However, there are a few steps you can take to set yourself up for success and start building your career as a content creator on Instagram:
1. Find your niche
By honing in on a specific niche—whether it’s food or personal style or knitting—you can position yourself as a go-to resource on a specific topic. Focusing can also help you develop the expertise necessary to produce excellent content.
You can intentionally search for a niche with monetization in mind (for example, maybe you look for content pillars with lucrative brand partnership opportunities, like fashion or makeup). But the best way to produce the authentic content audiences crave is to post about something you feel passionate about.
“I didn’t really start out saying, ’I want to be a New York content creator,’” says Ethan. “That was secondary to just sharing photos that I had captured of a street corner in SoHo, or a snowy day—just going out and taking the photo because that’s what inspired me.”
This authenticity helped Ethan find a dedicated audience: “That’s what connected with people,” he says.
Once you’ve pinpointed your area of expertise, find your unique point of view within it. For example, Ethan’s niche is New York City photography, but he also has a specific take on it: “My unique point of view, I think at its core, is that I really try to remind people of the beauty of life,” says Ethan. “I think a lot of people call it the art of noticing, or romanticizing.”
This translates to untouched photographs—complete with dirty streets and people going about their daily lives. Once you’ve found your topic and your angle, stick with them to ensure brand consistency.
“I’ve had countless people tell me their thoughts on what I should be doing. I would post a series of photos, and people would say, ’Why didn’t you retouch out the trash? Or, ’You need to get out of New York more, you always post New York, post something else,’” says Ethan. Ethan didn’t listen, and his consistency paid off. He’s grown his followers exponentially, and users today share their appreciation for both new photos and old ones Ethan reshares.
2. Establish a personal brand
Next, you need to develop a unique aesthetic for your content. This is important on Instagram, since it’s a highly visual platform. Just as good branding helps customers recognize a brand, a consistent Instagram aesthetic will help users recognize your posts.
Be sure to incorporate your personal brand’s visual identity in each post, your profile picture, and across every social platform you use. You can also consider personal style as an element of your visual identity.
Ethan’s Instagram profile, for example, showcases a cohesive set of photographs with similarly muted color palettes. Here’s a close look at Ethan’s grid:
3. Post consistently
Posting regularly ensures your content feels fresh.
“Find a good rhythm that you can maintain,” says Ethan. “Figure out what that is, and then stay consistent—the best thing you can do is stay consistent.” For Ethan, that means posting daily in the morning, then sometimes again in the afternoon.
To prevent burnout, schedule posts in advance. “Don’t be afraid to take breaks,” says Ethan. “You might get out of your rhythm, but you can always go back into it. You can always schedule content for a week and take a week off.”
If you’re short on time or don’t have a great post idea, consider repurposing old posts. “Don’t be afraid to reuse old content,” Ethan says. He explains how you can post an old video with a new video edit.
“We consume so much content a day, no one is going to remember what you posted two days ago,” says Ethan. “Post it again.”
You can also cut down on prep time by using a social media content calendar to plot posts in advance and a social media scheduling tool to autopost them. A social media management tool like Buffer or Later can help you do both. As you begin posting regularly, experiment with the best times to post on Instagram, as they can differ across audiences.
4. Understand your audience
To become an Instagram influencer, you need to develop a deep understanding of your target audience. Knowing why they watch your content will help you create posts that resonate with them and encourage them to engage with your account.
Don’t worry if you don’t fully understand your audience at first. Ethan explains that he built his following by posting what inspired him: “I didn’t seek out an audience. I think my audience found me, and I still feel that way,” he says. This kind of authenticity can actually help you build stronger connections with your followers.
While Ethan primarily posts the things that inspire him, he keeps an audience in mind now. “I always think of the person who lives in another part of the world, or even in just a different state, and can’t necessarily afford to book a trip to come to New York,” he says, noting that many people have told him he’s the reason they booked a trip to the city.
“I do create content for that person,” says Ethan. “If you saw this video, what would I want you to experience with this video and get out of it that makes you feel like you’re here? How can I give you, basically, a free trip to the city without bringing you in?”
In addition to these audience members, Ethan has a second set of viewers—people who actually live in New York City and want a reminder of why they do. “Why do they have the shoebox apartment that costs thousands of dollars a month to rent? It’s because of the beauty of life here,” Ethan says.
5. Post Reels
As you keep posting, step back and consider how the Instagram algorithm prioritizes certain content formats. Adapting to it will help you grow your audience. Right now, that likely means posting Reels, Instagram’s short-form video format.
“The algorithm happens to really like Reels,” says social media consultant Rachel Karten, who runs the newsletter Link in Bio. Reels reach up to 2.25 times more viewers than single-image posts and 1.36 times more than carousel posts, according to a 2025 CreatorsJet report. The same analysis found that Reels of less than 90 seconds performed particularly well, demonstrating Instagram’s algorithmic bias toward short-form video content.
After Instagram launched Reels in 2020, Ethan adapted by posting cinematic short-form videos alongside his usual photographs. “I knew I had to post Reels, or else Instagram just wasn’t showing my photos to people,” says Ethan. His pivot to video content paid off.
Ethan’s first few videos went viral in 2022, and his follower count went from 25,000 to 50,000 over a single weekend. Then his following doubled again: “My fiancé bought me a bouquet of flowers when I hit 50,000 [followers], and those flowers were still alive when I hit 100,000,” he says.
6. Stay aware of the larger climate
While staying abreast of platform-driven changes is vital, so is paying attention to what’s going on in pop culture and the news, since these topics often dominate conversations on Instagram and can affect your reach.
Ethan uses the Oscars as an example. “If you’re not posting about the Oscars the night of the Oscars—positive or negative—whatever you’re sharing is just going to get buried,” he says. “It’s good to always pay attention to what’s trending and what’s happening in the moment, and decide whether it makes sense for you to participate in it, or sit it out and wait for that initial surge to sort of die out, and then capitalize on the post-event lull.”
Regardless of whether you participate in trending conversations, be sure to factor them into your content calendar scheduling. Ethan, for example, moved the launch of his calendar, which he sells on his ecommerce website, a week before a buzzy Taylor Swift album release. This prevented his product pre-release from being subsumed by posts about Taylor Swift.
7. Tap into trends
Instagram trends, particularly Instagram Reel trends, can help you expand your reach and showcase your personality. Ethan uses the platform’s trending audio feature to add songs to his content. He has both started audio trends and participated in existing ones.
Here’s an example of Ethan using the trending Cranberries song “Dreams.” If you click on the song name, you’ll see how many Reels it’s been featured in.
Social media consultant Rachel Karten explains that participating in trending audio—as well as larger trends—can increase your chances of being featured on the Explore page.
Finding trending sounds is easy: “If you just go to the Reels tab and scroll there for five minutes, you’ll hear the same five sounds over and over, and you’ll understand these must be trending right now,” Rachel says.
8. Engage with your audience
Aspiring influencers should remember that building an Instagram community means regularly interacting with followers who comment on posts and responding to direct messages whenever possible. Responding to your followers helps them feel seen and valued.
“With comments, I always try to respond when people have a question,” says Ethan. “If someone took the time out of their day to watch or engage with something I shared and then they comment, I always try to get back to them.” These responses can be as simple as an emoji or a “Thank you.”
Ethan shares another tip for engaging with your followers: speaking to them like the individuals they are. In captions, Ethan uses “you” and “us” rather than “you guys” or “all of you.”
“It’s a little touch where I want you, the viewer, to always feel like you are the person I’m talking to,” Ethan says. “You’re not one of many—it’s just me and you in this moment.”
Here’s an example in a caption advertising Ethan’s ecommerce calendars. Rather than addressing his followers as a group—and thanking everyone at once for their purchases—Ethan speaks directly to followers who both have and haven’t purchased a calendar.
9. Make a media kit
If you want to partner with brands, create an influencer media kit to send to prospective collaborators. Sometimes called a press kit, this is a web page or PDF that includes information about you, your account, your audience, your engagement metrics, and data on past successful brand collaborations (if you’ve done them).
To create a compelling press kit, consider adding testimonials from past brand partners. You can also proactively pitch content ideas for how you plan to showcase the brand’s products.
10. Review analytics and improve
Monitoring the performance of your posts can help you replicate your successes. Instagram Insights, Instagram’s in-app analytics tool, provides the number of likes, shares, and comments on individual posts, as well as engagement data over time.
“If a post is performing well, I’m going to take notes of what I did, whether that was the way that I wrote the caption, or the concept of the video, or the song that I chose,” says Ethan. He will then take those observations—whether they relate to the pacing, captions, or something else—and apply them to his next videos.
Ways to monetize your Instagram following
Famous influencers can earn money—lots of it. The top 50 creators on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube earned a combined $853 million in 2025, according to Forbes. But you don’t need a massive following on Instagram to start cashing in. Here are some ways to make money as an Instagram influencer:
Selling your own products
Your audience is a valuable asset, and the best way to make money as an Instagram influencer is to start your own business and sell products directly to them. A successful Instagram influencer can launch merchandise or relevant products and sell directly on Instagram.
This is what Ethan did. On his ecommerce site, Ethan sells an annual calendar featuring his photography. He also sells Lightroom Presets for other photographers, and NYC-branded merchandise like t-shirts and key chains.”
Ethan encourages influencers branching into ecommerce to brainstorm original products. “Don’t ask AI, because it will give you the exact same answer it gives everyone else,” says Ethan.
While originality is vital, so is staying true to your niche. “Figure out what type of content or what niche you’ve created for yourself, and go from there,” says Ethan. If you’re a cooking creator, you might make recipe cards; if you’re a fitness creator, you might sell water bottles or exercise bands.
Once you’ve decided what to sell, Ethan suggests organically incorporating your products into your posts. “If your entire content is around coffee, design your own mug and use that mug in your content,” he says. This can draw attention to your products while showing viewers what it’s like to own and use your items. It will also help your advertising feel more natural and less salesy.
It’s easy to start an online store with a platform like Shopify. You can even use Shopify’s AI website builder to set up a site in minutes. Shopify also connects with several print-on-demand companies, so it’s easy to sell without worrying about product development, inventory storage, or shipping.
Once you’ve launched your website, you can install the Facebook & Instagram app to start selling with Instagram Shopping, which lets you create an in-app storefront and tag products in your posts. When customers place an order, they’re redirected to your ecommerce site to complete the checkout. Consider getting verified on Instagram to establish trust, especially if you want to sell to a new audience.
Brand partnerships
One great way to make money on Instagram is to find brands that will sponsor your posts. Essentially, companies pay you to feature their products to your followers as part of their Instagram marketing strategy.
For authenticity’s sake, seek partner brands and products you actually like and that your followers will be interested in. Branded content doesn’t need to be boring, so go ahead and make it engaging, and you may be rewarded. Instagram shares increased by 10% each quarter from the beginning of 2024 to 2025, according to a Dash Social report that encourages brands to publish shareable posts.
To increase your chances of securing brand partnerships, start commenting on other creators’ sponsored content. This is a good way to build a rapport with your fellow creators and get on brands’ radar. “I’ve had countless brands reach out to me saying, ‘I saw you commented on this person’s ad, we would love to work with you. We had no idea that you were a fan of the brand,” Ethan says.
You can also talk about the brands you want to work with when you create content. Mauricio Abascal, the managing director of social media agency Untitled Secret, says his team looks for organic interactions when scouting creators for brand clients.
“If you’re an influencer and you want to work with fashion brand X, are you using them in your everyday life? Are you tagging them? Are you posting them?” Mauricio asks. “As the brand partner or the agency representing the brand, we look for that authentic, organic engagement.”
Here’s an example from fashion influencer Sofia Linares (@whatsofiawear_). Sofia tagged several brands in this carousel post of outfits, including Lisa Says Gah and Tony Bianco.
Sofia posts this favorite outfit slideshow every month. Posting recurring content like this can establish a dedicated audience for certain posts, making you more attractive to brand partners, and so it’s easier to land brand deals.
Affiliate marketing
Affiliate marketing is a common form of influencer marketing in which you recommend products and earn a commission whenever the affiliate links you share produce a sale or another agreed-upon metric (for instance, if one of your followers signs up for a free trial).
Note that you can’t post affiliate links in captions (although you can include them in Stories). To make them accessible to your audience, consolidate them into a single link in your bio using a link-in-bio tool. Just make sure you include a call to action in your post that directs your followers to the links.
Here’s an example from makeup influencer Katie Jane Hughes. Katie assembles her affiliate links into an easy-to-shop interface within the link-in-bio tool Shop My. In this example, Katie grouped the makeup products she used in a specific post, so it’s easy for her followers to find them.
You can proactively seek affiliate opportunities by reaching out to small or medium-sized brands directly. Alternatively, large companies like Amazon and Shopify have established affiliate networks that you can simply apply to join.
In-app monetization
There are a few different ways to get paid on the Instagram platform:
- Instagram Live badges. Each of your followers can give up to $250 in badges per livestream.
- Instagram gifts. Viewers can give you stars on your Reels. You’ll receive 1¢ for each one.
- Instagram subscriptions. You can sell Instagram subscriptions if you have more than 10,000 Instagram followers. You can set your own rate, then share exclusive content with followers who’ve subscribed.
- Instagram bonuses. Instagram pays creators for high-performing content in its invitation-only Instagram bonus program. There’s a seasonal bonus program and a breakthrough bonus program, which pays up to $5,000 for creators new to Instagram.
How to become an Instagram influencer FAQ
How can I start as an Instagram influencer?
There’s not one single way to become Instagram famous, but to start building an audience, identify a niche, understand your target audience, create content your audience likes, and establish a consistent content creation strategy.
How many followers do you need to be an Instagram influencer?
There’s no set number of followers you need to be an Instagram influencer. By definition, an Instagram influencer is someone who builds a loyal community of followers that they can sway to take specific actions.
How do Instagram influencers make money?
As an Instagram influencer, you can make money in a few different ways: through brand partnerships (companies pay you for sponsored posts about their brand) or affiliate marketing (you earn commission on referrals that lead to sales), or by selling your own products online.
