Want to Make Money On Social Media? Here are 8 Tips

Have you ever seen influencers online living lavish lifestyles without “real jobs?” How do they do it? They’re making money with their social media profiles.

Making money on social media isn’t as effortless as some people make it look. It takes time, effort, and a lot of luck. We’re here to help you get started. Read on to learn a few quick tips for making money on social media.

1. Choose the Right Platforms

Not all social media platforms are equally valuable if you’re trying to use them to make money. While they’re all useful for promotional purposes, you want to spend your time and energy wisely.

So which ones should you choose? Evaluate the top social media platforms to gauge which ones are the easiest to gain a following on and which ones actually have decent on-site payouts. A quick tip: it’s rare for a site to be both good for payouts and good for finding new followers, so you’re going to have to do some cross-promotion (more on that later).

Note that sometimes the profitability of a site will change. Also, it is possible to make plenty of money even on sites with poor payouts if you play your cards right.

2. Pick the Right Theme

What type of account will you have?

You could just run a personal lifestyle account. You can make vlogs and post daily photos of your day-to-day life, but this isn’t typically profitable. You have to be incredibly lucky and, likely, have a pretty interesting life to start with. There are so many vloggers to compete with!

It’s helpful to have some type of niche. You can get by without a strict niche, but it’s more difficult. Perhaps you’ll have a travel account, a fashion account, or a cooking account. You need something that makes brands more likely to partner with you or something that clearly provides value or entertainment to viewers.

Your theme can change over time, but remember that you may lose some of your viewers in the process.

3. Start Small

It can be tempting to start several profiles or channels at the same time and start posting every day right away, but this isn’t a good move. This is how you burn out. Your growth will likely be slow, and doing all of that work for so little feedback can be demotivating.

Focus on one or two platforms at a time and make sure you can re-use content on both. For example, you may post short-form videos on both Instagram and TikTok. That way, you only have to do the work once, but you get to post twice.

Start by posting one to three times per week. This may even be enough in the future. Don’t assume that you have to burn yourself out by posting daily just to gain followers and make money online.

We get it. It can be embarrassing to start posting content online. You don’t want your friends to see you fail or “cringe” at what you’re doing.

Self-promotion is crucial if you’re trying to make it big on social media. After all, “social” is right in the name. You want your friends and loved ones to see your posts.

If it makes you feel better, don’t include your face in your posts. You can do travel content or unboxings (two popular categories of content) without ever having your face on-screen. This may make you feel better about promoting yourself both to your friends and to strangers.

Don’t try to self-promote on other people’s channels or pages, however. You should interact with other pages or channels in your niche, but direct self-promotion is not a good look and can do serious damage to your online reputation.

5. Interact With Your Followers

If you want to gain more traction, you have to put the “social” in “social media.” Interact with your followers! Ask questions in your posts to encourage interaction!

When you have good engagement on your posts (meaning a lot of likes and comments) more people will see them. Engagement is good for the algorithm. The more people see your posts, the more followers you will get.

The more followers you have, the more money you can make from your account. It also looks good to brands who may want to advertise with you, so even if you aren’t making a lot of money directly from the social media platforms, you’ll then have the opportunity to make money in a whole new way.

6. Keep Up With Trends

Social media is all about trends. If you’re trying to gain traction, keeping up with trending hashtags, songs, and themes will help!

When something new is trending, try to figure out if you can organically use it on your platform. Even if it’s slightly off-brand, as long as it’s not too different from your normal content, you can use it to expand your reach.

When you get successful enough, brands will start reaching out to you. Some of them may offer you products in exchange for reviews. Some will pay you a flat rate and some will offer a percentage of sales. When you get your first brand offer, you’ll be so excited!

Make sure it’s a legitimate offer. There are scam companies who will send you items for “free” but make you pay for shipping. They may promote your post on their page, but they often have more fake followers than real ones, so the promotions aren’t worthwhile.

You also want to choose brands that actually align with you and your audience. You don’t want people to think you’re being disingenuous or you may start losing their trust. For example, if you’re a sustainability channel, it wouldn’t be fitting to allow a brand like Amazon to sponsor you or people may see that as an odd match.

8. Consider Selling a Product

You can also use your social media fame to sell products. Once you have a following, you can sell merch or even digital products if you have a skill that you think could help people.

For example, let’s say your social media page is all about cooking. You could sell a digital cookbook and make plenty of money by helping your followers. This way, you don’t have to rely on money from sponsorships.

Making money on social media isn’t as easy as influencers make it look. These tips won’t guarantee your success, but they will set you on the right path. Make 2023 your year to start making money with your content!