Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest, you're probably on most of them, if not all, and you probably want to monetize your activity on those platforms. But most people are probably telling you that to make money on social media you need a product.
And that isn’t entirely true.
In this article, we are going to share with you 5 ways you can monetize your social media audience without having a product.
Hi there, and welcome back to Serendipity Marketing. We're a digital marketing agency with a mission to help small businesses grow by applying psychology to their marketing strategies.
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So, let’s dive straight into it.
1. Affiliate Marketing
The first strategy on how to make money on social media, which is really simple but really effective, is just to go and promote someone else's product.
Whether it's from affiliate rake or they're paying you a specific cost per promotion, or whatever it may be wanted to promote someone else's product.
For example, we have a good social media following or at least we believe it's a decent size for anything marketing-related.
So, we could go to our audience and say that they should talk about or use Buzzsumo or SEM rush, we've mentioned these tools so many times over our articles, and no. we don't have a deal with them or anything like that, but if we wanted to, we probably could get one.
We would be driving our audience to sign up and we would be driving revenue for them and for us as well.
And it's really easy to hit them up and tell them that we want a commission for any new subscriber you bring in for them.
Most of these guys have already affiliate programs at the bottom of their websites.
All you have to do is sign up and use that link whenever you're talking about them on the social web.
And here's what's cool about it; you can even go to sites like Amazon and Best Buy, they all have affiliate offerings and pages. Even the largest companies that you can think of are doing affiliate marketing.
So, it's really easy for you to pick any type of product out there that's related to your audience and promote it getting a percentage out of it.
2. Partnerships
The second strategy we have for you is to partner with someone who has a product but doesn't have an audience.
What we mean by that is that these days influencer marketing is huge and when you put a personal brand behind a product, you can crush it.
Just look at the Kardashians. We don't know all of their names but we think one of the youngest is known for selling hair extensions, makeup, and lipstick. And when she sells those items, what happens when she puts them on Instagram or social media, she sells out instantly.
Now, these days, she's probably creating her own product, but when she first started you could see that they were doing deals with other companies.
And they're like “Oh wait, you have a product, I have a brand, let's partner up and I'll be the face of your product, and let's make this thing big”.
Murder Beats by dr. Dre made a killing with Jimmy Iovine and then they sold it to Apple for over a billion dollars.
They used a really simple model and they blew that thing up so much so that any time you watch a basketball game or NFL game, everyone's like walking to the game sporting their like beats by Dre headphones and it really blows up even the celebrities like the Kardashians were running on.
So, if he finds them with an amazing product but no personal brand behind it, you could be that personal brand. Think about how cool that is.
You can promote it, do really well, and you can take a cut of the business. And not just a cut of whatever sales you drive but you can get a fraction of that business that could be to 3%, 5%, or 10% whatever it may be.
3. Place ads in your video content
The third strategy about how to make money on social media we have for you is that you can just place ads within your videos.
If you're on social media, create videos and put them on sites like YouTube. They'll automatically put ads for you.
And if you want to monetize it, you're not going to be the richest person on earth, but you can easily make 2, 3 grand a month, that may not seem like a lot but it could give you enough flexibility and freedom where you don't have to work for someone else.
It's kind of awesome and amazing.
Money isn't everything in this world. Making enough to be happy and having that financial freedom in many cases is better than making 10, 20, 50, or 100 grand a month. So, don't always shoot for making the most amount of money, also aim for financial freedom.
And by just putting ads on your videos, it's an amazing way to end up making free and easy money.
Alright, now before we move on with the next strategy on how to make money online, have you ever thought about how much you should invest in marketing to generate constant business growth? Click the button below to calculate the ideal marketing budget you should allocate for higher visibility, engagement, and profit.
How much should you invest in Digital Marketing?
4. Influencer marketing
The fourth strategy we have for you is influencer marketing. And not the same influencer marketing we talked about above.
It’s plenty of people on Instagram and other social media promoting other people's products and taking pictures and they're not getting paid by spur sale they're usually not getting paid on a quote-unquote ad basis, they're getting paid to be like an influencer and they're getting paid for let's say three months, six months, or a year to be the influencer of that brand or product.
They have a contract and they post typically one picture a month or once a week and they get paid a monthly salary.
That's amazing.
An easy awesome way to make money if you have a social following number.
5. Premium content
Last but not least, to make money on social media you can use premium content.
On Instagram, you see a lot of these models taking pictures of themselves and then they use something called patron where you can subscribe with a monthly fee and they'll show you premium content.
You can do the same thing.
You don't have to take half-naked pictures. You can create exclusive and more detailed articles or exclusive videos for example.
You can shoot valuable short videos to share on social media and then you can shoot 30-minute or longer videos that break down step-by-step how to do everything from A to Z and charge for that.
That's a good idea of creating premium content and charging for it.
Bonus Tip
We know we said we had 5 tips on how to make money on social media, but we really wanted to share this last one.
You could just go find someone else's product and white label it. In essence, you're creating your own business, they can dropship it for you and do a deal where every time you sell a product, you send them the information, they'll ship it out, and you give them the money and you keep the difference.
For example, let's say you're into fitness and you want to sell protein powder but you don't know how to create it.
So you can sell someone else’s protein powder, white-label it, and what you’re going you do is that every time you get an order you'll send it to them, charge people £50 for protein powder, pay them £25 because you made a special deal so that you can just keep the difference.
And you can do that all day long again.
You're not going to make a killing from doing this versus buying your own products, but it's easier and you don't have to worry about inventory.
If you need help with your social media marketing to grow your business in terms of visibility, engagement, and profit, contact us today and speak with one of our digital marketing experts to see how we can build the bridge between the point you’re standing at right now and your goals.
