Are people making money on TikTok?
Yes!
Some people are making large amounts of it. So many bucks, that for some, it’s enough to make a living out of it! People are getting rich by monetizing TikTok and in this lesson you’ll learn how you can do it too.
Also, the platform is improving its monetizing system by the day! What does this mean?
More people will make more money!
Why not be among them?
So, what are the Monetization Options currently available on TikTok?
Let’s discuss the different ways to make money on TikTok:
1. Sell other people’s products
…and there are 2 ways to go about it:
- influencer marketing
- affiliate marketing
You can leverage your TikTok audience and sell other people’s products. What this means is that you become an influencer in a specific niche, find relevant products that your audience will appreciate, and then simply promote them.
This is often referred to as influencer marketing. The common misconception is that you need to have a large account to get such gigs (from well-known companies). The truth is that companies often search for smaller accounts – they’re better connected to their audience! And they can contract more people for the same sum of money.
So, to reach more (potential) clients and leverage the more-personal connection smaller influencers have, big brands actually target (and prefer) smaller accounts… To sum it up: don’t worry if you don’t have a huge following just yet, a brand deal could be just around the corner!
The second way of selling other people’s products is by running affiliate marketing campaigns. You’ll have to search for companies that have affiliate or partnership options on their website and then apply to their program.
As an affiliate marketer, you get a percentage of each sell. Let’s say you have an account that promotes books, then you could easily become an Amazon associate, and promote books that people may buy from Amazon. You’ll get a special link that records each of the visits you send to Amazon, and for each sell, you get a cut! People have been doing this with blogs/websites for more than a decade now. It’s very lucrative and we’re finding that more and more TikTok accounts monetize their audience by engaging in such practices.
Want to see others do it?
To see which people run influencer campaigns on TikTok you need to do a quick search. Go to the Discovery tab and then search the word “ad”. By TikTok policy, every account must write “#Ad” hashtag in a clip’s description if the clip includes promotion (or sells a product, or runs any type of commercial campaigns). You’ll see that there are currently more than 7 billion such clips. This sheds some light into how lucrative this practice is, based on how many people do it…
Again, there are a lot of brands searching for marketing opportunities, and there are a lot of creators making big money out of it.
2. Market your own products
The 2nd most popular way to make some money on TikTok is to start marketing your own products.
This could range anywhere from physical goods to digital assets. Upon a quick search, you’ll find a lot of people sell their merch (like clothing ware).
3. Promote/sell your music
Another way to make money with TikTok is by promoting your own songs. If you’re a musician, or producer, you can promote your music via the TikTok platform. This is how “Old town road” blew off and became one of the most popular songs ever. It was a complete breakthrough and changed everything for how the music industry works.
To get started with it you can reach out to other TikTokers and influencers and ask them to use your song in their clips. At the other end of the spectrum, creators may contact you to ask you to use your song, and then you can charge them for using it. So either way as a musician there’s huge potential to earn some cash on TikTok.
4. Live sessions
Another great way to make money on TikTok is to go Live and use the platform’s integrated coins system. Many people started doing it and it works well. If you have a large (and very loyal) following, during your live session you can receive gifts and donations in the form of coins. Coins will be converted into diamonds, and then diamonds will be converted into real cash by Tiktok.
There’s a limit of $50 you need to reach to withdraw your first earnings. Initially, this was intended as a way for musicians to have live concerts and receive feedback from their fans. Later on, this gifting system transformed into a form of receiving donations and monetize Tiktok audiences. Please note it’s not the best way to make money, as you’d need a rather large audience. It’s just something to keep in mind as an option you may try at some point.
5. Grow and sell accounts
Growing and selling your TikTok account (or multiple accounts) is another way to get some money off of TikTok. This is an old strategy that people deployed on Facebook and Instagram (and even YouTube). The good thing about this strategy is that it’s scalable. You could grow a dozen accounts in parallel and then sell them, to turn in a profit.
These accounts are very important for companies (or people selling services or products), so even though it may seem that they’re empty, pointless accounts they’re actually a gold mine! The only thing is that these accounts need to be grown to hundreds of thousands of followers to worth something for a company or brand. Also, they need to be laser-targeted on a specific (and commercially-viable) niche. Make sure you have the theme and demographics in-line with the needs of the brand you’re selling to!
6. Consulting services
Providing consulting services on TikTok is yet another way to make good money. While you grow your account, you get insight into what works and how you can grow your account faster. This is very valuable information that people will pay a lot of money to get.
So, you can reach out to people to offer your consulting services and help them grow their audience or even help with content ideas and structure. It’s still a new thing, but it’s something that blew up on Instagram a couple of years ago, so we’re expecting to see more and more consulting services offered for TikTok accounts as well.
The first step to getting such business is to have a big account yourself (as proof of knowledge and growth). Let’s say you manage to grow your account to 500k, then you can offer your help to others, as you’ll have your account as a standard (and proof of work).
This works for both personal accounts and businesses. Both types of clients will need information and help with growth hacking. You can try reaching out to companies that have a large following on other social platforms and offer them the service of growing a new TikTok account in their name. Try it!
Bonus – Getting paid for views
You may know that on YouTube (and Twitch) people get paid for the views they gain to their clips. On YouTube, there’s an average earning of $700-$2K for every million views you get on your channel.
TikTok didn’t implement this yet, but it seems that it’s just a matter of time until they do. There’s a lot of talk on it online – this feature is asked for by many people. Keep a close watch and grow your account as large as possible to get in early on the possibility of getting paid for views.
To conclude
Want to make money on TikTok? Then you need to do one of the following things:
- Sell other people’s products
- Sell your products
- Promote your songs
- Go live and get donations
- Sell accounts
- Offer consulting services
What’s your preferred method?
Get started, don’t delay!
