Being popular on social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook or Twitch can quickly become a source of income for content creators. TikTok in particular is a place where you can make serious money if you know how to engage your audience, provide value, and stay consistent. According to reports, the most prominent names out there are making seven-figure revenue per year!
With around 1 billion monthly active users, TikTok has established itself as the new big thing in social media marketing. So you might be asking yourself: how to make money on TikTok?
Once you connect with an audience and capture a decent following, there are several ways to monetize your account. Since TikTok is still relatively new, creators are still experimenting with what works best. Let’s look at the main options.
1. Make money with brand deals
The first and obvious way to make money on TikTok is to secure brand deals. If you have a stable and engaged follower base, and produce content that is relevant to a brand’s niche and target audience, you can easily take advantage of this.
Brand deals are a type of partnership between creators and brands. You can also call it brand sponsorship. The content that you’ll produce will typically feature the brand’s product or services; for example reviewing how to use a product and what benefit you got from it, how it makes you feel, etc.
If you are growing your account within a specific niche, you’ll easily find relevant brands to work with. Plenty of brands are constantly looking for talented creators whose content align with their products and values: the influencer marketing industry is now worth a staggering $16 billion globally (from $1.7 million in 2016).
Brands will provide you with a detailed creative brief that indicates what key messages you should convey to the audience, what tone of voice to use, and other relevant details. In some cases, you’ll need to share their link in your captions or bio to direct your followers to the brand’s website.
You can reach out to brands in several ways to get deals:
Registering on influencer platforms
You can sign up as an influencer on platforms that connect creators with brands. They will ask for relevant information about your social media profiles, follower base and more. Once you’re in, you can search for brands and be discovered by them too.
Some examples of top influencer platforms to consider are:
Applying to an influencer marketing agency
Influencer marketing agencies will easily find relevant brands deals for you – it’s their bread and butter! They’ll work with brands on their campaigns, matching them with the most suitable creators based on creative briefs, the target audience, and the type of content creators produce.
Most of these agencies also offer several additional services, such as tracking the performance of marketing campaigns for brands. This will facilitate partnerships with brands because they’ll be able to track results transparently, and assess the return on their investment from working with you.
There are tons of influencer marketing agencies out there; a few you might want to try are – besides TIKTAL of course – are:
Direct contact
You can also make a list of brands you think might be interested in collaborating with you. Find their contact details and try to reach out via email, social media, or personal contacts. Perhaps you know someone who works as a marketing or campaign manager for a brand you admire? Prepare your pitch carefully by sending the key information about yourself as well as your TikTok metrics. Your “media kit” is a useful tool most brands will want to see, so they can assess how suitable you might be for their upcoming campaigns.
2. Become a brand ambassador
Once you’ve had a couple of successful partnerships with a brand, you can go down the brand ambassador route. If the brand is satisfied with the performance of your joint marketing campaigns or targets were exceeded in terms of reach, engagement or conversions, they might offer you a more permanent deal.
Being a brand ambassador means that a company will hire you to represent them to increase their brand awareness and drive sales. The advantage of this is it provides you with a more stable and predictable income. However, the brand might want you to sign an exclusivity clause which would prevent you from representing other brands in a similar capacity, so make sure you understand what you’re agreeing to.
3. Link in bio for affiliate sales
Another way to make money on TikTok is by adding a link to a brand’s products in your bio, and directing your audience to it. This is a form of affiliate marketing, which can turn into a passive income source if you can generate enough traffic to the links, and a portion of users who land on the brand’s website end up purchasing from it. Depending on the agreement with the brand, you could receive a set share of revenue simply for clicks, and a higher share for actual conversions.
However, there are some limitations with this type of brand partnerships. Affiliate links will usually include the brand’s name, making your profile appear less organic and natural, and come across as overly promotional. This might turn people off, and you could even lose followers if you’re not careful.
Also, TikTok only allows you to add one link in your bio. You can easily get around this by adding a link in your bio that redirects to a page, where you can display as many links as you wish. This means your followers will need to be highly engaged and interested enough to want to click away from your TikTok page and into your separate landing page.
Several link-in-bio tools will let you create a short link that leads to a separate page with all your links displayed in no time.
The top tools in this space include:
Snipfeed
Snipfeed is a fantastic tool to easily create a storefront on top of your TikTok account. They offer fully customizable templates to monetize your social accounts more easily. You can promote multiple services all through one simple link in bio. Plus, the app gives you more ways to connect with your fans. For example, there is a feature for 1-on-1 calls with your followers, which you can charge for as a service. To discover other monetization features within the tool, check out our full review of Snipfeed.co.
Beacons
Another powerful tool you should consider is Beacons.ai. It lets create a slick link-in-bio landing page that matches your branding and will help you engage with your audience. Add affiliate links, sell your merch, give brands a way to get in touch and capture email addresses to build your own mailing list. Easy as cake!
4. Go live and collect donations
As an influencer, you have many ways to connect with followers. Going live is a great option to get more personal. TikTok provides a monetization option for live videos whereby you can collect tips and donations. Every TikTok user can purchase coins in their accounts, and when their favorite creator goes live, they can use those coins as gifts. Creators can then convert those coins to diamonds and then into cash via PayPal, once they have reached over $100 (circa 10,000 coins at time of writing). The maximum amount that can be withdrawn on a daily basis is $1,000.
Going live creates a stronger bond with followers because it gives them a glimpse of your life and you as a person. And also you can make a profit out of it. What’s not to like?
However, there’s a small catch – you need at least 1,000 followers to be able to go live from your account.
If you’re not there on TikTok yet but have a larger following on other platforms, you can go live using link-in-bio tools that offer a livestream feature, like Snipfeed.
5. Earn through the TikTok Creator Fund
The TikTok Creator Fund is a $200 million pot that was launched to reward creators who put out engaging content, with plans to expand it further. To be eligible and join the fund, you’ll need a minimum of 10,000 followers, 100,000 video views in the last 30 days, and switch to a Pro account. As always, you’ll need to remain compliant with TikTok’s Community Guidelines and Terms of Service.
The fund has had mixed reviews, and how much you’ll earn is fairly limited. It’s estimated the fund pays out from 2 to 4 cents per 1,000 views. So you could expect to receive from $20 to $40 once you reach a million views. Whilst this doesn’t seem like much, once you’ve become a seasoned creator who pushing out quality content consistently, you could hit those numbers on a regular basis.
6. Sell your merchandize
Another way to make money on TikTok is to sell your own branded items. Depending on your niche, you can easily launch a line of related products and display them in your content.
For instance, you could sell clothes with your unique design, theme or logo; or even collaborate with an existing apparel brand for a mutually beneficial partnership.
You can also use link in bio tools to sell your products or even create a separate shopfront with your merch, and add it in your TikTok bio.
If you’re planning to create your own customized merch, check out Bonfire. This service lets you create a T-shirt that represents your personal brand and sell it anywhere only. If you want to expand into other types of clothing and various items, then head over to Printful, the print-on-demand service. You’ll find anything from bags, hats and socks to mugs and eco-friendly items.
7. Claim your intellectual property with TIKTAL
As a content creator, you’re likely to have your content used and re-hashed by anyone online. For instance, someone could repost a video of yours on YouTube and earn from the views it receives – without your permission. You could monetize that.
A legal representative can make a legal claim on your behalf to share profits made in such scenarios. Once a claim is placed on the videos used without permission, you start drawing revenue from it.
However, unless you have the right contacts or are a legal expert yourself with enough time on your hands to manage this process across the web, this won’t be easily done.
At TIKTAL, we’ve partnered up with a legal company that specializes in intellectual property and digital rights – we can handle all this for you. No hassle!
8. Sell your skills and services
If you have specific knowledge in an area that would be useful to others, you might want to share your skills. Inside you link in bio, add a way for visitors to book an appointment with you. You can specify your rates and become a consultant who provides valuable advice on your given niche.
You can also sell various online courses or e-books that will help your followers grow and develop as content creators. Sharing your experience and tips is another great way to generate income. Aside from bringing you revenue, it could raise your profile and credibility amongst your viewers.
Snipfeed lets you create bundles of digital products for sale alongside 1-on-1 calls. Beacons can also help you with selling your e-books, courses and other digital content. If you want some more ideas, check out our post on 16 link in bio alternatives to Linktree.
Summing up
There are so many ways to make money on TikTok, and no doubt new ones will keep being invented. Try your hand at the most common options, and keep an eye out for the latest trends so you can be one of the first to monetize them! Lastly, whilst monetization is important to grow your career as a content creator, your first priority should always be to nurture an engaged follower based, via quality content that adds value. The more engaged your audience is and as your reach expands, the more you’re likely to turn your online presence into a viable revenue stream.
If you’re looking for guidance on how to make money on TikTok, and work with brands to monetize your social media accounts, reach out to us at TIKTAL today!