Yeah, billions of people worldwide are active on social media but not many people really get to make money on social media. Even though millions of people merely use social media to socialize and make fun, if you have the right business ideas, there is a lot of money to be made on social media. Out there on social media, many people are making money even without having to directly sell any product/service. That is possible because social media users who have a large following can use their profiles to get paid by brands, sell their knowledge, offer consultations, and much more. Below are some tested, tried and proven ways you too can use to make money on social media if you wish.
1. Promote Your Own Products/Services
If you are a small business owner, you can promote your own products/services to make money on social media. With social media accounts you can easily interact with others by sharing and creating content through communities. Promoting your own products/services through social media platforms is cost-effective. At little or no costs at all, you can effectively promote and drive traffic to your online store, get leads and make sales to augment your sales volume. Social media is quite an ideal place for small business owners to effectively promote their brand and business. Therein, it is easy to tell customers about your products and services; find out what they think of your business; attract new customers, and build stronger relationships with existing customers.
2. Promote Affiliate Products
You can join credible and reputable affiliate networks, promote affiliate products and earn commissions for your efforts. By joining these networks you can expand your reach to potential customers and make money through affiliate marketing in an easy and straightforward manner. Thus, you can earn money by just adding tracked affiliate links into the text of your social media content. Any sale made by way of a click-through in any of these links entitles you to a commission from such sale.
3. Sell Digital Products
You can create and sell digital products through your social media channels. Quite unlike business websites, social media platforms have in-house capabilities to help you sell digital products real time. On social media, it is easy to reproduce and recreate digital products that can be easily shared very widely and save costs associated with inventory, warehousing and shipping. Some of such digital products marketers like to share on social media, are eBooks, software, templates, photography, music and how-to lessons. These are typical e-products you can create and sell in an unlimited number of times and numbers with little additional efforts to make money.
4. Collaborate with Brands
In digital marketing, it now appears more and more consumers trust influencers more than paid advertisements. They tend to obtain better social proof from these influencers to help them make buy decisions. For this reason, if you are a blogger and your blog has huge following, you can directly influence this audience to look towards a product/service. Characteristically, from posting product reviews, hosting video tutorials, bloggers have the power to influence large segments of consumers in favour of a product/service. So, if you blog in a unique niche related to a brand and your blog has huge following, you can collaborate with the brands in that niche to market their products to your audience. Brands will benefit from these efforts by getting more customers and you will benefit by earning more commissions and endorsement fees from such brands.
5. Sell Your Music
If you have a good musical talent and you are creative you can make money on social media. If for instance you are able to create very good music which appeals to people, you can sell the music through SoundCloud. If you sign up on the platform’s SoundCloud Pro or Pro Unlimited subscriptions, it is possible for you to sell the original music and make money. Through this platform, you can get unlimited upload time; get paid for your plays, access to advanced audience insights, and much more.
6. Get Paid for Sponsored Posts
Many brands are always looking for social proof to market their goods and services. Bloggers and influencers always come in handy to help provide this social proof. As a small business owner, you can earn money by helping these brands to produce sponsored content. This you can do by way of product reviews, promotions and backlinks to a sponsor’s website. However, if you are blogger, it is an ethical requirement to let your audience know that you are offering them paid content. The amount of money you earn from sponsored posts depends on several factors, some of which include your reach, your niche, and whether or not your posts include images, graphics, videos, and audio.
7. Become an Influencer
In digital marketing terminology, an influencer is a person who has the skillset to influence people’s purchasing decisions through his or her authority, knowledge, or relationship with his or her audience. Social media influencers are people who have built a reputation for their knowledge and expertise on a specific topic and offer regular posts on that topic on social media and in the process build a huge following. If you become an influencer, many brands will readily pay you to help them create trends and encourage your followers to buy their products.
8. Do Coaching Services
Yeah you can earn money online by selling coaching services. If you have a unique set of skills or are passionate about something, you can choose to offer coaching services on that unique skill/knowledge. Many people are out there looking for self-development or learning new skills in singing, dancing, playing a musical instrument, learning a foreign language etc. etc. The demand can be really huge. You can make money by latching on to this demand if you have the knowledge and skills in a specific niche that is of value to other people. You are at liberty to set your fees and rates and you earn accordingly.
9. Earn with YouTube Partner Program, YPP
Many social media users don’t really see YouTube as a social media platform but it is. If you are a good blogger, you can unlock YouTube channel’s earning potential and make money. For instance, if you join YouTube Partner Program (YPP) you not only get a strong platform but also access very valuable YouTube’s in-house resources and features. These resources and features allow you to get access to ads being served on your content and you earn money as a publisher. However, to get worthwhile benefits from this, you will need to get lots of views and clicks on your YouTube content.
10. Sell Rights to Photographs/Images
If you are a good photographer, you can sell Rights to the Images on your social media accounts. If you have some great creations in terms of pictures or digital artwork that people are interested in purchasing then you can use your social media account to connect with the people and sell to them. You earn money from this effort as well.
11. Run a Facebook Group
Facebook has many valuable in-house tools that help marketers to make money. In addition, the platform offers marketers a huge reach complements to its over 2 billion active users worldwide. If you can create a Facebook Group to tally with your niche/interest, it can really be an inexpensive but hugely effective way to reach your target audience. With it, you can easily build a great community around common interests/goals with hundreds of thousands of like-minded people. Now that’s one huge audience out there that can help drive good traffic to your website/blog.
12. Join Influencer Networks
Sponsored posts remain one great way bloggers can earn an income on social media. It takes a great influencer blogger to earn good money from their blogs. Many brands are always looking for influencers to market their products to their followers in a genuine and authentic way. If however you are a blogger who does not command much influence yet, you can latch on to influencer networks which are third-party agencies that are designed to do the hard work for you. So, Influencer networks can be a great way to start in sponsored posts and paid social sharing opportunities that less influential bloggers can take good advantage of to make money. These networks will help connect you to brands and act as middle men. That way, you don’t have to be in direct contact with brands yourself. If you sign up with influencer networks like CreatorIQ, Upfluence and AspireIQ, they’ll provide you the valuable intro and give you the much needed sponsored post experience that you can include in your blogger resume. However, only brands who sign up to work with a particular network have access to analytics regarding campaigns run within that single network of influencers. By way of some restrictions, some networks may require you to only work with them exclusively. You can make your choices depending on what you want. The bottom line is how you can make money from sponsored posts.
