Sammie Ellard-King’s Guide to Monetizing Instagram

Introduction and Background

Sammie introduces himself as the founder of Up the Gains, a personal finance business aimed at helping people in the UK get financially fit. He shares his background, including overcoming £25,000 of debt in his mid-20s and his experience in the hospitality industry. He explains his pivot to Instagram due to the challenges faced by small websites in November 2022.

Rapid Growth on Instagram

Sammie discusses his rapid growth on Instagram, going from 5,500 followers on December 1st to 110,000 followers by April 6th. He attributes this success to tapping into viral content, with some of his posts being seen by millions of people, primarily in the UK. He emphasizes the power of the Instagram algorithm in finding his target audience.

Creating Viral Content

Sammie shares his strategies for creating viral content, including attention-grabbing hooks (text and visual), understanding the target audience’s psyche, invoking emotions through storytelling, and providing value and solutions. He stresses the importance of creating content that resonates with a specific avatar or target audience.

Monetization Strategies

Sammie discusses various monetization strategies on Instagram, such as selling digital products, affiliate marketing, sponsorships, and coaching. He highlights the use of ManyChat for automated marketing funnels, sending users to landing pages or affiliate links after commenting on viral posts. He shares revenue figures from digital products, courses, coaching, and affiliates, emphasizing the high profit margins of digital products.

Driving Traffic to Websites

Sammie explains how Instagram can help drive traffic to websites by repurposing popular content into short-form videos, increasing branded traffic searches, and growing communities across channels. He shares examples of being invited to speak at events and by the government due to his Instagram presence.

Content Creation Flexibility

Sammie addresses the flexibility of content creation, stating that it’s not necessary to show one’s face in videos. He suggests options like voiceovers, shooting over the shoulder, or hiring someone else to front the content. The focus is on delivering the message and evoking emotions rather than being on camera.

Course Offering

Sammie promotes his 25-module course, which covers topics such as his viral real formula, creating digital products, setting up online stores, successful product launches, and more. The course includes lifetime access, a premium community, monthly mastermind calls, and additional bonuses like copywriting masterclasses.

My Take: What This Means for Solo Publishers

Sammie’s presentation was recorded when he had 110K followers. He’s now at 237K. The strategy works — and the mechanics have only gotten stronger since he first shared this. In 2025, Instagram’s algorithm explicitly rewards conversational actions: DMs, story replies, and comment threads carry more weight than likes. ManyChat’s comment-to-DM automation is essentially an algorithm cheat code right now, and it’s one of the few distribution tactics that’s gotten more effective over time, not less.

For solo publishers who’ve been hammered by Google’s HCU updates, Instagram represents something genuinely different: a traffic diversification play that doesn’t depend on Google’s goodwill. The comment funnel mechanics Sammie describes — post viral content, trigger DMs, send to affiliate link or landing page — bypass search entirely. That’s the part worth paying attention to if you’re an affiliate site operator.

Here’s what I’d actually implement, and what I’d skip:

Do this first: Set up ManyChat on the free plan (covers up to 1,000 contacts). Build one comment-to-DM flow targeting your strongest affiliate offer. Pick a niche topic where you already have content authority — don’t start from scratch. The flow should be: viral hook post → comment trigger word → DM with link → affiliate offer. The Amazon Influencer Program is worth stacking here too; Spencer Haws has covered how that complements a social-first approach.

Skip for now: Courses and coaching. Those are Sammie’s primary revenue driver, but they require brand trust that takes time to build. For affiliate publishers, the better angle is using Instagram as a traffic source feeding existing affiliate content — not building a new product business from scratch. The playbook for building and selling digital assets applies once you have an audience, not before.

The face-optional point is underrated. Sammie mentions you don’t need to be on camera — voiceovers and over-the-shoulder shots work fine. This is critical for content-site operators who’ve never built a personal brand. The same principle applied to Andy Skraga’s Facebook traffic playbook: you don’t need to be a personality, you need to be useful at scale. Instagram’s ManyChat funnel rewards the same thing — consistent niche content with a clear action trigger.

One honest caveat: Sammie’s growth rate (5.5K to 110K in 81 days) was partly timing and partly niche. Personal finance in the UK was underserved on Instagram at that point. If you’re entering a more saturated niche, expect a slower ramp. The monetization mechanics still work at smaller follower counts — especially with a tight affiliate strategy behind the funnel — but don’t expect 10x growth in three months unless you’re genuinely filling a gap.

Action Items

• Learn how to create content in a couple of weeks by utilizing free YouTube courses and resources like DaVinci Resolve
• Dive into understanding the target audience’s psyche and creating avatars to tailor content
• Implement attention-grabbing hooks, both text-based and visual, to capture the audience’s interest
• Explore monetization strategies such as selling digital products, affiliate marketing, sponsorships, and coaching
• Utilize tools like ManyChat for automated marketing funnels and high-converting landing pages
• Repurpose existing content into short-form videos to drive traffic to websites and increase branded searches
• Consider Sammie’s course offering for a comprehensive guide on growing an Instagram following, creating digital products, and monetizing content.