A month or so ago I started an Instagram account called "The Bucketless Family." Essentially it's just a fun creative writing and photography outlet, with the potential to become something bigger and produce a good side income for our family and help us pay off the med school loans. I'll give a little crash course on making money on Instagram for Grandma:
If you create an Instagram account that is interesting enough that lots of people, say 10k or more, want to follow it to see what you post, then you can make money on Instagram as a marketer (sometimes called "influencer"). Brands and companies will work with you to talk about their product in one of your pictures or stories. It's kind of like commercials on a television show: your account is the main show, but every once in a while there will be a commercial for a product, and these commercials are what fund the show so they can keep putting in the time/effort/money to create it.
The general rule is that you can make $10 per 1,000 followers you have if you create a sponsored post. So if you have 10,000 followers, you can find brands who will pay you $100 to do a sponsored post. If you have 100,000 followers, brands will pay $1000 for one post. And if you are a really big deal and have a million followers, then you can make $10,000 to publish a single sponsored post. I think lots of people are shocked to hear that. I know I was the first time I heard about it, but those rates are the industry standard. There are many people out there who have grown huge instagram followings and are able to make an excellent full-time salary through instagram alone.
Most Instagram "influencers" who do this create beautiful pictures daily about their lives, outfits, hairstyles, or travels and post them with captions. They'll throw in a sponsored post every week or so--maybe a hotel is paying them to stay and post a picture with a caption about their experience. The biggest traveling influencer family on Instagram is The Bucketlist Family. They are a nice little LDS family who met at BYU and now have 3 young kids. Soon after graduating, they sold their cars and belongings so they could travel the world for several months (sounds risky, but they did have a large nest egg to fall back on from selling a phone app). During these months, they built up a large instagram following and started to make good money from hotels who would pay them to stay there and post a picture about their stay. They were one of the first families to ever portray this full-time travel lifestyle on instagram, and they have done very well. They have a following of nearly 2 million viewers. They traveled the world full-time for 2 years and eventually bought a bungalow on a beach in Hawaii.
This is all well and good, but I started to think how novel it might be to start an instagram account that would be more relatable to the general masses, with a humorous twist. The new account I started is a visual story about a family (us) who would love to be able to travel to exotic places, but is unable to do so because they are "tied down" and in a heap of student debt. So they start up an instagram account in hopes that it will eventually allow them to travel occasionally, but because they don't have money to start out with, they travel to humorous places around town like some dumpsters, a parking lot, and a thrift store. I called it The Bucketless Family because we are "too poor to afford even a lowly bucket." Like I said, it started out as a creative writing hobby for me, but only a month or so in, people started to notice and eat the account up. It's something that's never been done before and is a refreshing laugh in an Instagram world full of model influencers with glamorous lives. Others with student debt or who would love to travel but are unable to are the main fans. Over the weekend many people started to share our account with their friends and next thing we knew, we had 3,000 new followers enjoying our fun little project within the span of 24 hours.
I like to keep my expectations low but my aims high. So while this project is still in the early stages and may never become a huge sensation, I am having a lot of fun creating new posts a few times a week and thinking about ways I could use this platform to help our family even if I never publish a single sponsored post. The most appealing thing about having a large platform to me is that if I ever wanted to start a business (which is something I would love to do someday), there will already be thousands of eyes of our fans on whatever product or service we create.
This is getting to be a much longer post than I anticipated, but it's a fun part of my life I wanted to share with anyone who may not understand this particular aspect of social media. We've got a good week ahead of us! Nothing too crazy, but Jack is acting more happy these days than he has in weeks, and we're enjoying our yard now that the mosquitos have subsided. Jared is enjoying being a second-year resident with more responsibilities, and Jack is enjoying pushing his new favorite toy (an empty diaper box) down his slide. It's a good life.