Top 12 Ways to Make Money on Social Media

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.

How to Get More Social Media Followers and Drive Sales

With now an estimated 4.2 billion active users on social media worldwide, the quest for followers can be quite challenging since it depends on many factors. The benefits are enormous as well if you can have a large number of followers on any of the social media platforms. Even though it can be pretty difficult to gather a huge following, the techniques and tactics you deploy in your social media activities play a very significant role in that quest. If for instance you are an active blogger, it is only when you have a huge following that you can profitably monetize your blog. Same thing applies if you want to become a social media influencer and join the league of good money-makers on social media. If you are able to deploy the right techniques and tactics you can easily generate a good following, build a great reputation from a loyal audience and drive sales for your business. Find below some tested and reliable techniques you can use to get more social media followers and drive sales for your business.

Have a Social Media Strategy

It is true that haphazard marketing on social media hardly ever yields good results. Therefore, you need to have a strategy that works well to help get the best results. This strategy must be such that can effectively help to drive more traffic to your website or blog. If your social media strategy is right and effective, a huge bulk of your readers can come from social media networks. You must therefore endeavor to formulate a social media strategy that helps boost traffic to your business website or blog.

Create Valuable Content

In social media marketing, content is king. Good content is what helps to attract readers to your page. The reason readers come to your page is because you are offering them something that they need. Therefore, you must endeavor to create content that is of value to your readers. One very easy and effective way to get that done is to think from your readers’ perspective and create content along that perspective.

Offer Free Stuff

Yeah, everyone likes free stuff. Nothing attracts people more than free stuff. You can offer up promotional coupons, eBooks, free templates, how-to guides, and other useful stuff to ingratiate yourself with your audience. They respond accordingly and that helps to attract traffic to your website/blog.

Choose a Specific Niche

A specific niche allows you to target a specific audience interested in that niche. The success of your blog depends on you finding your passion and your ability to create compelling content. Expert marketers advise that your niche should not have too much competition as your blog will need to compete against highly rated sites. If it does, the content can easily be stifled out and unnoticed by readers. That scenario cannot help your traffic. Be sure to choose a subject matter that you are very knowledgeable about and one that people can take insights from and with a demand that will impact your potential following. That means you will also need to get an accurate picture of your target audience in terms of age, level of knowledge of the subject matter, and other factors to make a meaningful impact on the audience.

Focus on a Few Social Media Platforms

It is quite impactful to focus your content on a few or even a single social media channel. If you don’t, you risk not capturing the right amount of followers to make your blog worth looking into. Carefully identify your target readers’ demographics and then identify the social networks that they prefer. If for instance your blog post is geared more towards professionals and businesses you might want to consider using LinkedIn. If however your target followers are younger and more visual, you may tilt towards Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest for best results.

Build Trust Diligently

In any human endeavor, trust building takes time and efforts. This is even more delicate when you factor in that you are dealing with all kinds of people with various backgrounds on social media. For most readers, it could take some very little things to get them to trust you or distrust you. All of it depends on the content they read from you and expect from you. If you manage to build a track record of creating useful content that serves them well, and you are diligent, consistent and reliable about it, it helps you to build trust.

Create Quality Content Regularly

This helps to establish and build your social media presence. If your content does not attract readers, it is not worth the while. Therefore, you must regularly churn out quality content that readers need. To sustain the interest of your readers, it helps to set out a calendar for your content creation and posting. Doing so helps to guarantee regularity and consistency in your quality content production.

Increase Engagement Rates

How people engage your content is directly related to the relevance and quality of the content. Therefore, one credible way to increase your fan base is to get more engaged followers. You can only get more engaged followers if your content is important enough or interesting enough that people share, link to, like, and even make comments on. To sustain this engagement, make sure to reply to comments as well as collaborate with other content creators for mutual benefits.

Use Analytics to Understand Your Audience

Social media analytics is all about feedback data. You can rely on this data to better understand your audience. Social media analytics data allows you to get the right insights about who your followers are. With that vital information, you can regularly tweak your content to align with their needs. If your content aligns well with their needs, it is better engaging and good for traffic. If you back that up with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, you can maximize your audience and income with ad sales.

Use the Right Hashtags

Many social media users tend to ignore hashtags. Hashtags are hugely important to help direct more followers to your website/blog. This is because posts with hashtags have higher rates of engagement than posts without hashtags. To take advantage of this, you must make sure that the hashtags you use are relevant, funny, interesting, easily recalled, and in good taste. It is such hashtags that are really great for engagement.