How nano and micro influencers can earn money by placing ads in Instagram stories?

Storiesgain is a service which helps to make automated Instagram stories campaigns with mirco-influencers. This is the first service of this kind that I know.

Using Storiesgain advertisers and influencers don’t need to correspond, solve financial issues and argue about a creative.

All an advertiser needs to do is to create a campaign, upload a promo, select influencers (manually or automatically), and launch the ad campaign. And influencer only needs to accept requests using the Storiesgain mobile app and post a promotional story to earn money.

Despite the fact that the service first appeared in Russia, there are more and more international advertisers and influencers from all over the world. Today, the service is used by more than 160,000 influencers and 10,000 advertisers and more than 300 campaigns are conducted every day.

In this article you will learn:

• How nano- and micro-influencers can earn money by placing ads in Instagram stories
• How can an agency or advertiser can use Storiesgain for automatic advertising in micro-influencers’ stories

How nano- and micro-influencers can make money on stories using Storiesgain?

It’s no secret that brands are moving away from working with large influencers and start choosing micro- and even nano-influencers with several hundred followers for collaborations.

And an interesting feature of the Storiesgain is the ability for nano-influnecers with 100+ followers (or, in other words, ordinary Instagram users), to start earning money right away.

So, to sign up for the service, follow this link.

If you click Sign Up you can choose between advertiser account and blogger (aka influencer) account. As you can see on the screenshot, to sign up as a blogger you should first download the app.

But I recommend you to sign up as an advertiser using the website first (don’t worry, you can always switch between these two types of accounts inside the user panel).

Registration using website allows you to use Storiesgain as an advertiser, which means you can spend money that you’ve earned to promote and grow your own Instagram profile. Why? To make even more money as an influencer!

To add a new account, go to My Accounts section and click Add account, then enter your username and select the relevant category.

After that, you will see verification code and link to the Instagram bot. You need to copy the code and send it in a direct message to the bot and go back to this page. After a few seconds, your account should be added.

In Storiesgain you earn money by placing promotional stories on Instagram. You have two options to get requests from advertisers:

• wait for advertisers to find your profile inside Storiesgain and send your order for the price that you’ve specified
• or take already placed orders for the price that advertiser has specified

Let’s consider the first option.

So, you received a request. Open it and carefully study the advertiser’s requirements by clicking on the phrase “Instructions for placing ads”. To accept an order, click “Accept order”.

There are two types of publication — improvisation and customer, or advertiser’s promo:

1. Improvisation. If the advertiser asks you to make an improvisation, carefully review the publication requirements again and perform all of them.

Example: the advertiser asks you to take a screenshot of their account, insert a profile mark, and call to follow its account.

You go to the advertiser’s account and take a screenshot. Then open Instagram, tap on “Add a story”, add a screenshot to the story, mark the advertiser’s Instagram profile and add text recommending to follow this profil. Check the task and publish the story. So in this case, the process is identical to publishing your personal story.

2. Customer. If the advertiser asks you to publish his promo, go to the task and read the requirements and check the example of a story. It may look something like this:

Open the promo and click Publish. The promo will be uploaded to your Instagram. Now take your time, go back to the task. Specify what elements should be added to the story: marks (@), hashtags, etc. Look at the preview — all elements should be located as in the image. Add the mentions, stickers, hashtags, and geo that the advertiser asks. If you are sure that the ad is identical to the preview, publish your story.

Please, note: mentions (@) and hashtags (#) in stories must be clickable. How do I do this? At the top of your story there is an icon for adding stickers, tap on it. You will open the items, select a mention or hashtag. If you add a mention, write the account name and select the one you want.

If you add a hashtag, you can simply write the one you want or choose it from Instagram’s suggestions.

Great! You’ve published your first promo story.

Now you need to go back to the task and click “I published“. This action is mandatory, otherwise the service will not receive a notification about the publication, and you will not receive money for advertising. After you click “I published”, your story will go to moderation.

If there are errors in the story, the moderator will not accept the task and will send it to you for revision. You will receive a push notification. Read the reason for the moderator’s refusal in your personal account and correct the story.

When the story is corrected, go back to your personal account and click “I published” again. If you have fulfilled the order conditions correctly, the advertiser’s money will be frozen in your account. You will receive them 24 hours after the correct publication of stories and you’ll be able to withdraw them to your debit card.

Or, as an alternative, you can go back to Storiesgain website and switch to advertiser account and spend this money to promote you Instagram profile.

How to place ads using Storiesgain?

As I’ve already mentioned, the most interesting feature of the Storiesgain is the ability to buy stories ads from nano-bloggers, that is, from ordinary people with 100+ followers.

Of course, you can contact nano- and micro-influencers directly, but it will take a long time to negotiate and manage a bigger campaign with dozens of small influencers. Storiesgain allows you to automate this process and minimize communication with performers.

Micro-influencers have loyal audience and the low price per placement allows you to experiment and find the ideal options for your business.

In Storiesgain you can use a single account for advertisers and bloggers. To switch to advertiser mode, just set the switcher to the desired position:

The minimum deposit amount is 1000 rubles ($15). Since the service is originally Russian, all amounts inside are specified in rubles.

After adding funds, go to the task constructor in the menu section called Buy advertisment:

This section allows you to:

1. Select a campaign name and start date
2. Select the type of publication: customer or improvisation. As I’ve described earlier, the first type allows you to upload your own creative, and the second means that you trust bloggers to create it. By the way, you can order the a creative from the Storiesgain designers, a static image will cost you 3K rubles, and video or animation 10K rubles.
3. Add a link to the site, if needed. Then only accounts with more than 10k followers will participate in this campaign. Instead of a link, you can add an active account tag (@), which is usually done in campaigns aimed to gain more followers.
4. Set geolocation or hashtag.
5. At the end, you need to describe a task in the textbox, which is especially important if you choose improvisation and don’t attach your own creative. The quality of the content that the influencer will create in this case depends on the correct task.

After you have created a campaign, move next to the influencers selection. Storiesgain offers four ways to select influencers for you campaign:

Manual search — you can choose every influencer yourself using various filters.
Auto search — set the key indicatiors and service will help you to find relevant bloggers:
Bloggers compilations — StoriesGain already has compilations of relevant and effective bloggers depending on the topic.
Advertisments — just create an ad with description of the product, and bloggers will choose it and publish it themselves.

When you select bloggers, you can view the some indicators in the preview or the full statistics of bloggers.

Clicking on the account name opens a section with detailed statistics consisting of the following data:

• the number of followers, the size of the engaged audience, and the current cost of advertising;
• distribution of profile followers by geo;
• dynamics of views and followings over the past month and distribution of followers by gender.

If needed, you can even view the influencer’s latest promo publications along with screenshots of statistics:

When you finished, you can launch the campaign by clicking Launch or through the campaign management table. And all data on current or past campaigns can be found in the Statistic section in the menu on the left.