How to Make Money on Social Media 2021

Monetize your audience!

Paid social media campaigns where you promote another brand or service to your audience is just one of many ways you can earn real money online as a content creator.

I started my Instagram page with zero followers in 2014… Now over a million and can make a six figure salary under good economic conditions. There are a ton of ways to make money online, but in this article I’ll break down how the most current popular methods work for social media and for me.
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Here’s what I did…

My Top Earner: Brand Sponsored Social Posts

Recently, it was found that Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the world’s current highest earn and greatest footballers, made about 48 million dollars on the year from social media endorsements compared to about 34 million from his salary package at his club, Juventus…

The number one source of income for me has become paid social campaigns with major brands. Think of Verizon wanting to use their budget for wide-sweeping television advertisements, but all the people who used to be watching TV are now spending more time on Instagram…

That’s where influencers/public figures/’content’ creators come in.

Verizon will hire someone like me when I uniquely fit the demographic they are trying to reach. The amount I earn is then based on how many people will likely see it. Because I don’t yet cost as much as an average large scale television ad, they can more effectively spend their money to reach a more targeted audience who is seeing information from someone they trust.

On average, you can charge roughly $100 for every 10,000 REAL followers that you have.
For example, if you have 50,000 followers, you can charge about $500/post. However, the higher your following gets the more this number skews lower. At the same time you’ll need to ensure you have your engagement rate over 1% at minimum, where over 3% is optimal. This means if you have 50,000 followers, your average post should receive at least 500 engagements.
An engagement is the total number of likes, comments, shares, and saves.

Today, brands to well to vet creators to ensure their audiences are real and optimal for the campaign they want. A number of third party sites allow them to scan your account for public information like who follows you, where most are from (countries), and breakdowns of your engagement data and growth chart.

So before you think, “Oh, $500 per post… I’ll just buy 50,000 followers…”
Won’t work. And if you succeed in booking campaigns, it’s actually fraud, and illegal…

Option 2: Sell Your Content

This option works for anyone. You don’t have to have any followers! You do need to be good at creating content though ;)

Instead of trying so hard to get likes and views, you can opt to upload your images and videos to different hosting websites that allows people and even major brands to find and buy your content.

Some sites allow you to set prices, for example, if you’re selling your own Nat Geo level landscape photos, while some sites will negotiate for you when a company is interested.

For example, take a closer look when ads come up on your streaming service. If you’re paying attention you’ll notice many major brands utilizing ‘viral videos’ in their advertisements. How do they get the rights to use these videos? They buy them.

After my first viral video ( https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10155679329281006 ) I had ESPN contacting me asking if they could show it on television… After doing some research, I found you can upload and protect your ‘viral videos’ to sites that allow brands to pay a licensing fee in order to use it. You would then split that fee with the website and make a couple bucks. Often, it’s pages like Unilad or BroBible that want to use it on Facebook and you’ll usually walk away with $50-250 per video that sells. If you get lucky, a lot of companies may buy the license for the same video and you could make a lot. Most of these sites also copyright the video file for YouTube, meaning if someone steals and posts the video, the Ad dollars from their views will go back to you.

I wasn’t able to do any of this with the treadmill video because I didn’t have exclusive rights to it, but if I had, the website estimated I would have made over $30,000 from YouTube copyrighting alone…

Option 3: Combine Options 1 & 2

If you have over a healthy 10,000 followers or more on Instagram (other platforms can work too but IG is still the #1 for brands and influencers) then this option is best for you!

Not only should you try to get booked by a brand to endorse their products and services, but you should sell the rights to the content you create to them, because frankly, they are going to try and use it commercially anyway even without your permission or something in writing. (speaking from experience)

If you have 50,000 followers you can charge about $500 for a campaign plus you should charge an additional amount to sell them 1 year non-exclusive rights to all the content you create. The price on this can range widely and mostly depends on how much money the brand could expect to make by utilizing your content as their own. You could do something like an additional $25-100 per content piece or higher to thousands of dollars if you’re a public figure or create viral content.

The difficult part about this option is that you will need to educate yourself on legalities relating to advertising and ownership rights as well as learn to read and write simple contracts so that you do not get taken advantage of (speaking from experience again)

Option 4: The ‘Premium’ Model

My goal is to make this option my number one earner in the future.

The premise is simple, continue to offer captivating content on your socials, but offer premium content to paying customers in some way. This method is less talked about, but has been around for a long time. For small accounts, you can get away with doing this informally, asking patrons to pay some small fee to be added to your ‘private profile’, ‘private snapchat’, password protected website, etc. The issue becomes scaling. If you want to make real money, ie. 100k+, and not get audited by the IRS and lose everything, you’ll need to have a real business, most commonly a sole proprietorship or LLC. Then create a more formal place and way for your fans/followers to sign up that is more secure and trustworthy than your Venmo account… As it’s working, ensure you have everything properly documented when tax time comes ;)

Option 5: AdSense and Streaming

Update:
You can now earn direct income through TikTok’s ‘creators fund’ - you can apply if you have a TikTok eligible account with over 10,000 followers, over 18 years old, and over 100,000 views during the last 30 days. Users can expect to earn about $0.00001 - $0.00004 per view: So if you can get 10 million views per month on TikTok videos, you will earn about $100-$400 per month directly from TikTok.

This is a good option for you, especially if you offer longer form, informative, or otherwise useful content. AdSense means you will monetize your videos on Facebook watch, YouTube, Spotify, etc which will allow advertisements to be shown before/during your video/audio. You get paid a fractional amount based on the total watch time and clicks on the ad placements. In general, approximately 1,000 minutes of watch time equals $3-5 earned. So, if you post a 1 minute video that gets 1 million views and every view was the full clip, then you can expect to earn about $4,000. The difficult part is obviously it is very hard to get that many views let alone consistently. In addition, YouTube now requires creators to have over 4,000 hours of watch time within the last 365 days… That’s a lot of views…

The nice part is that if you have a video happen to go extremely viral for some reason like 100 million views, then you’re looking at a nice paycheck. The other nice thing is that these video placements can continue to receive views and ad dollars far into the future meaning you could generate some residual passive income.

Streaming became popular on YouTube with high profile video games and since has navigated to Twitch, a streaming platform that allows users to earn money through subscribers and donations. Some of the top streamers earn millions of dollars per year… I’m no expert in this territory, but if you like video games at all (or even if you don’t and want to earn more income from home) research and start building your twitch profile.

Other Methods: Appearances, Selling, Flipping

If you have some talent that is driving your social growth, then you should aim to be hired for event demonstrations as well. I started earning money with my talent (freestyle football) well before I earned anything online. Now I can convert trifectas… Get booked for appearances, create and post content on site, sell the rights to the client. This is by far how I make the most income and can result in salary size bookings earned over the course of a few amazing eventful days.

Whether you build your personal brand or are developing a company, you can sell products. Any easy thing to do once you’ve started your platform is begin converting your followers into customers to buy anything from your branded t-shirts to niche specific products. Tread carefully though, it’s dangerous to start something like apparel that you may not be ready for and that may flop. You don’t want to go broke sitting in your apartment with 800 t-shirts you can’t sell…

When your getting stuck… FLIP
This is a tricky one, but simply put, it is VERY easy to get free products from brands even if you only have a few thousand followers. It is much more difficult to get brands to pay even if your account is supposed to be worth $1000 per post.
If you get stuck here, find a safe way to flip products for cash. I’m not sure about the legalities here, but if you end up promoting brands on social in exchange for free product, especially when the products are gifted and no contract is written, you should negotiate for as much product as possible then sell the products at a reduced cost to friends, family, people, etc.
For example, if I were at 10K and had a company willing to give me free cleats every month for free but no cash, I would ask for at least two. Then sell the cleats after content is created each month. If the shoes are $200 each you could easily flip for $250 total.

For more information and specific advice on what websites to sell on and step by steps on how to do these things like approach a brand and negotiate a deal click contact me directly