8 Cool and Creative Ways to Make Money on TikTok

With now over one billion monthly active users, TikTok has become a social media platform of choice for youths and young adults to make money. They are capitalizing on its fame as the home of short-form video content for entertainment and gaming. In the US, many of these young people are reported to be earning $100,000 or more yearly all from their activities on TikTok. This is why many businesses/brands are now exploring creative and authentic ways to position and sell their products/services directly on TikTok and mostly to TikTok audiences. Anyone can make money on TikTok if they are capable of creating/making engaging and useful short videos that appeal directly to the interests of young people. If you do, you too can make money on TikTok if you deploy the following strategies.

1. Sell your Products and Services

Selling your own products and services on TikTik is one direct way to make money on the platform. Just try what sells well through direct appeal to the interests of young people and you’ll make money. If however you are unsure of what to sell, try listening to your audience. You can do this by creating polls or asking them directly to learn what they might be interested in buying. You can open a personal account on TikTok then create an e-commerce website to process sales transactions and promote it on your TikTok account. You can then add the store to your videos, and encourage your followers to check out the products you are marketing. Sales are generated that way and you start making money.

2. Publish Sponsored Posts

You can publish sponsored posts on your TikTok account and get paid by the content creator. Brands can either sponsor content directly or pay content creators to promote their products in organic posts. It is possible to sponsor just a single post or you create a series of posts. If such posts start trending, they can be boosted to expand their reach even further. The more people see and react to such posts, the more the commission earnings on the sponsored posts.

3. Run Ads on TikTok

TikTok is a very strong advertising platform for brands wanting to market their products to young people. If you are a marketer wanting to take advantage of TikTok ads, there are several types of TikTok ads you can experiment with to compare results. Note however that some types of ads are only available to certain types of accounts. TikTok ads come with simple, in-house powerful tools to help you advertise to millions of users. Ad formats may vary by region, but all ad formats allow you to personalize your targeting by age, location, interest and other factors. That gives you the flexibility to select one or more formats that work best for your brand.

4. Set Up a TikTok Shop

You can set up your own shop on TikTok and sell out of it. This is because TikTok has a partnership with Shopify that allows it use TikTok Shopping feature on its app.  Brands and content creators can thus take advantage of this arrangement by becoming official TikTok merchants and selling directly on this app. Through this TikTok Shop, you can showcase products on in-feed videos, lives and product showcase tabs. You must however check well to be sure your region is included in areas that can use this feature for now, because it is only available in select regions.

5. Collaborate with a Creator

Marketers who market out of TikTok seem to believe that young people really value brand/creator content collaborations and TikTok has a thriving community of such content creators. That makes the platform an excellent channel for collaborating with influencers who already have highly engaged audience/communities. So, if you collaborate with the right creators on TikTok who can authentically position your brand to their audience, it increases your engagement rates significantly. You can therefore take advantage of TikTok’s in-house Creator Marketplace to connect with content creators on the network. That is where you can find the right influencers based on their comprehensive performance and audience metrics to run your campaigns with. The right influencers and creators are also those who have met the eligibility requirements to join Creator Marketplace. This helps to give the assurance to marketers that the creators they partner with in the Creator Marketplace are some of TikTok’s top influencers and hence really great to work with.

6. Use Affiliate Marketing

By way affiliate marketing programs, creators and influencers can promote and sell products/services for third party products/services merchants and they earn commissions for their efforts. This arrangement is a performance-based business model. The more sales an affiliate generates on TikTok, the more commissions they earn. So when content creators create high quality and engaging videos that present affiliate products/services, they can showcase them, endorse, promote and recommend them to others for purchase. This is made credible by the use of unique affiliate links/codes to track purchases influenced by the content creator’s account. That enables the affiliate to receive the right commissions for the sales they generate. But, because TikTok doesn’t allow personal accounts to place clickable links within video descriptions, you can consider opening a TikTok Business account and add an affiliate link in your bio. You can then connect your account to popular e-commerce platforms like Strong Future International, SFI, Shopify and BigCommerce and encourage your followers on TikTok to check out the store.

7. Create, Grow and Sell TikTok Accounts

You can also make money selling TikTok accounts. Such accounts must already be up and running and with a focus on popular niche topics that the buyer is capable of sustaining through consistent quality content. Only such an account makes it possible and easier for a buyer to continue posting similar content and maintaining follower engagement as quickly as possible. People usually look out for TikTok accounts to buy because organically growing a TikTok account could take several months. To save time and efforts, many people prefer buying an already established account to get an instant boost of followers.

8. Collect Tips or Donations

Presently, TikTok has an in-house tipping feature that allows select creators to earn money from tips and donations. Even Fans and Followers can use this feature to show gratitude to the creators they love. High quality video content gifts feature allows viewers send creators virtual gifts and coins. By this process, it is possible for some creators to collect gifts during a live video stream. If you collect such gifts, you can redeem them for Diamonds which are TikTok’s digital in-house currency.