Last Updated 7 months by Emily Standley-Allard
Leveraging the power of social media and using it to scale your business is a hugely powerful opportunity you need to take advantage of. More and more people are finding that social media is able to offer them incredible earning opportunities as well as full time and flexible careers. Here are 25 easy ways to make money on social media and the opportunities are only increasing. Read on to learn how you can make more money with your social media channels even with just a small following. Just remember, to gain all the monetary benefits of social media, quality rules over quantity.
Even if you haven’t had any experience of making money on social media platforms as of yet, that doesn’t mean you’re not capable of doing so. Using these proven methods can ensure that you’re using social media to the best of its capabilities and to reap all the benefits.
With so many opportunities out there, the chances are you’ll be able to find a way of making money on social media that plays to your strengths. We all have certain abilities and talents and by applying them to the social media landscape, you could make yourself a lot of money and maybe even make it the basis of a long-term career.
Below are 25 of the ways in which you can venture into making money on your social media networks.
Personally, we at SBH believe it’s best to focus on one or two methods that are ideal for your niche and where your target audience resides for the maximum monetary success.
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With social media networks there’s an option out there for just about everyone, and we’re going to explain why each of these options is appealing and what it takes to achieve success within each of the niches we’re about to discuss.
Read on and find out about 25 of the best techniques you can employ to make insane money on social media.
Your social media journey begins here.
Make money on Social Media with Niche Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is when you get paid for generating sales or sometimes traffic for another company from your website, blog or social media account. If you run a blog, affiliate marketing is one of the very best ways to make money from it.
And the same can be done to make money on social media even if you have a small following. Starting in a niche is the best bet. That way, you can build a trusting relationship with your audience first of all.
From there, you can use your authority on a particular subject to recommend products or services that you genuinely believe in and most importantly that your particular audience finds value in.
When it’s genuine, honest and authentic, niche affiliate marketing can be very successful indeed; you just need to know what you’re talking about and have the trust of your audience.
Posts without value will cause your audience to lose interest quickly.
For example, on social media your posts should be 80% entertaining or for education purposes only. 20% should be for promotion of your business or affiliate links.
No one wants to read something that’s says ‘buy me’ all the time. People want to be intrigued and entertained first!
The key to affiliate marketing is to be reliable and consistent. It’s been proven to certainly be a viable and realistic way to make money online.
Become an Amazon Affiliate
If you don’t want to take the niche approach, you can instead become an Amazon Affiliate and look for products to promote via Amazon’s affiliate program and see which ones will be most profitable for you.
A lot of the people who do this for a living and have had real success with it will tell you that the best way to make money as an Amazon Affiliate is to focus on the high-ticket items.
How to Find a Profitable Niche for Your Online Business
You can find out exactly how much of a percentage you get as an affiliate and then work out how many sales you have to facilitate in order to hit your targets.
Of course, you have to facilitate fewer sales if you’re focusing on higher-priced products, and that’s why many people decide to take that route.
Be sure to do your research because the percentage of the sale price you earn will differ depending on the product.
How To Start Selling On Amazon With Shopify
Become a Social Media Influencer and Collaborate with Brands
If you happen to have a larger following on social media and you want to earn money from that, one of the best ways to do it is to directly collaborate with brands.
Even if you have a small following you can be what’s called a ‘micro-influencer’ < Less than 10,000 followers.
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Companies of all kinds are always looking to team up with influential people in the social media space.
As an influencer, you have a captive audience that listens to your views and respects what you have to say about products; brands love that.
You can choose which ones you work with and you can set the terms of the working relationships you have with those brands. Some people like to be very selective, whereas others decide who they work with depending on how much they can earn from the opportunity.
As an influencer, retaining the respect and attention of your audience is vital though, so you need to balance those two interests.
Influence.co is one company that connects social influencers with brands. For a list of 16 other popular agencies click read this post.
The Secrets to Getting Sponsored Posts on Instagram
Set Up an Instagram Shop
Creating a shoppable Instagram feed is something that more and more people are now choosing to do.
They see that Instagram is growing hugely in popularity and is arguably the most vibrant and interesting social media platform out there right now.
Selling to the billions are people that are present on the platform most definitely makes sense and if you’re looking for ecommerce opportunities, this one can’t be ignored.
There are tons of opportunities on Instagram for people who want to sell and because the whole shopping experience on Instagram is relatively new, you can get in on the ground floor.
Now is the perfect time to start; there are resources out there that will help you understand more about how it works and how to succeed, but there are still plenty of opportunities and gaps to fill too.
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Sell Your Photographs
If you’re a keen photographer but you’ve struggled to monetize that talent in the past, you need to head to social media.
There are lots of platforms that celebrate great photography. Rather than just displaying them on an Instagram page or on Pinterest, you should use those platforms as a base from which you can sell your photos.
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People, companies, entrepreneurs and bloggers are always looking for great prints that they can frame and use for their businesses or homes. You can even sell greetings cards with your photos on them.
Other people decide to go down the stock photography path. Ivory Mix is one company that’s done this very successfully. Creative Market is another that sells thousands of affordable digital assets under one platform.
You can sell your stock photos on stock photo websites or create your own.
It can be a fantastic way to make money if you have the right kinds of photos and you know which markets you’re targeting.
Check out these examples of companies that have targeted the ‘feminine’ niche market for photographs.
10 FREE Feminine Styled Stock Photo Sites
There’s never been a better time to make money from your photos, even if you’re just starting out as an amateur, so give it a try.
Sell on Etsy and Promote on Social Media
It’s not just photos that you can sell online either. There are so many fantastic and talented people using sites like Etsy to sell their creations.
Whether you want to make party decorations, jewelry or anything in between, Etsy is a platform that you should head to. And you can market your creations and link to your Etsy store on just about any social media platform. It’s a great way to make money doing things you love.
Setting up an Etsy store is pretty easy. Of course, you’ll have to fulfil the orders and make sure that your customers get exactly what they paid for.
But the platform makes it all very easy for you to achieve success; the rest is down to you. Of course, promoting your store and making sure that your crafts are not only of a high standard but also presented well in the images used on your Etsy site is key.
How to Use Etsy to Sell Printables Online
Become a Paid Pinner on Pinterest
If you love using Pinterest, maybe you should look into the possibility of becoming a paid pinner on the platform.
There are sites like Loop88 that make it possible for you to team up with brands that are positioned in the same niche that you’re interested in.
From there, you can work together to further the interests of the brand via your pinning skills. It’s certainly a fun way to earn.
It’s about creating branded content that’s specific to Pinterest and that lands with the right audience. It takes skill and hard work to get good at it and there’s a real strategy to it which I go into much more detail into in this post:
How to Earn Money and Traffic From Pinterest
But if you’re truly passionate about Pinterest and want to really focus on it as a full time career, it’s something that you should definitely look into and consider.
Or, you become a Pinterest VA! Plenty of bloggers seeking online help with their Pinterest accounts. And Pinterest VAs charge upwards of $25-$50 per hour for their services.
Offer Social Media Consulting Services
If you’re experienced as a social media professional or you think you have some kind of understanding of social media and how it works that makes you stand out from the crowd, why not look into offering consulting services?
Businesses of all kinds want to find success for themselves on a whole host of social media platforms, and they want people who know what they’re doing to help them.
It’s something that brands are increasingly willing to pay people for and there’s no reason why this shouldn’t be something you decide to make the most of.
With so many companies vying for attention in the social media landscape, it really does pay off to get your face out there and prove that you have skills and knowledge that are worth paying for.
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Prove Yourself on Social Media and Then Become a Social Media Manager
If you want to go beyond consulting work but still want to work with companies, you could look to develop a career as a social media manager.
How to Become a Social Media Manager in a Month
Again, if you have experience, knowledge and expertise in the social media landscape, you shouldn’t have much trouble finding paid work. You’ll then be in control of a brand’s social media presence and come up with strategies to help them grow online.
Of course, this is a full-time job for lots of people who make upwards of 6 figures a year, but if you’re working for small companies, it’s also something that can be done on the side and even from your own home.
#1 Tool to Grow Your Own White Label Social Media Agency
It could allow you to earn some excellent extra money without you having to quit your day job if that’s something that you don’t really want to do.
When I first started as a social media manager, I was making $55 per hour from my house.
That’s how lots of people make money as social media managers nowadays.
If you’re not seeing the engagement you need on social media you can book a social media digital audit of your accounts with me>>>HERE.
Sell Virtual Products on Instagram
People don’t just buy and sell physical products on social media. There’s a whole market out there for virtual products that you might want to try and sell.
These can include lots of things, including images, videos, animations, digital drawings and plenty more.
If you have a talent for digital creation and you’re looking to make some money from it, taking to Instagram might be the best thing you can do.
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A lot of people don’t quite realize how big the market is for this kind of thing, but it’s pretty huge. In the billions!
You should do some research and find out whether this is something that you should explore in more depth too.
Lots of people are already making money selling virtual and digital products on Instagram and other social media platforms too.
Sell on Social Media Via Dropshipping
Dropshipping is a great way to sell if you want to simply make money fast but you don’t want to take the time to design and make your own products.
Dropshipping is about selling products that you buy cheaply from other markets.
You never even see the products because it’s all taken care of for you.
All you have to do is generate sales by creating funnels and online buying opportunities.
Part of this involves advertising the products you want to sell and many people find great success using the targeting options afforded by Facebooks ads.
You can choose exactly which demographics you want to target and ensure that ads for your products are put in front of exactly the kind of people who are most likely to want to buy them.
It’s an efficient advertising strategy.
How to Monetize Facebook For Your Business
If you run a blog but you haven’t yet started to monetize it, you might want to start with ads. There are lots of ways to approach this.
You might choose to simply use Google Adsense if you want a quick and easy way to start earning some money from your blog and the content you’re putting on it.
Banner ads are very commonly used but you should be careful not to weigh your blog down with ads.
There are pros and cons of using ads on your website. And most people believe that other long-term strategies, such as selling courses and ebooks or using affiliate marketing techniques are better.
However, when your blog is growing and you’re looking for ways to immediately monetize it, adding adverts to it is definitely a good place to start.
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Create Premium Content Alongside Your Free Content
Another way to make money from a blog or even on YouTube is to create premium content. Of course, you have to have a loyal and enthusiastic audience for this to work for you.
Creating premium content is always risky because people are not used to paying for the content they consume online; it’s something that’s unusual and unfamiliar.
That’s why it has to be done alongside your regular free content.
The content has to have real value and it has to stand out. But at the same time, you have to be careful not to alienate the segment of your audience that is unwilling or unable to pay for that premium content.
You don’t want to make people turn away from you as a content creator entirely because that will cost you money not help you make more of it.
Use Patreon if You Have a Large Following on Social Media
This is not recommended for beginners, but if you do have a large following on a social media platform and that audience loves what you do and wants to contribute towards your success, you should consider Patreon.
Patreon is a crowdfunding membership platform that basically provides business tools for creators and artists of all kinds to allow fans to support their favorite creators through subscription services.
This is another way of gating off certain perks and premium content, so it can be used as part of the strategy we just discussed above. But that’s not mandatory. You can use it as a way for people to contribute towards what you do online.
You need to have a reasonably sized following to make this work and you need to be consistent in the content you put out.
People aren’t going to simply throw money at you if you’re posting average content and it only arrives on an inconsistent schedule. That’s not the kind of thing anyone’s going to be willing to pay for and you’re just going to have to accept that.
People will only pay for top quality and value.
Drive Traffic to Your Profitable Website Via Pinterest
Maybe you already have a profitable website or a website that you hope to make profitable via ecommerce or affiliate marketing. If that’s the case, you really need to be using Pinterest.
There’s still a lot of people out there who don’t quite understand or appreciate the power of Pinterest for driving traffic to websites.
Those pins you see that link to websites are there for a reason. Those users understand the power of the platform. Over 250 million users frequent Pinterest monthly.
More people actually purchase from Pinterest than any other ‘social’ site even though it’s really considered a visual search engine and not so much a social network.
How to Market on Pinterest – The Ultimate Guide
As long as you’re creating pins that are interesting, relevant and visually appealing to the audience that you’re trying to target, it’s actually relatively easy to direct traffic to your blog from Pinterest.
If you’re already using the platform in a casual sense, you simply need to make that professional transition. And if you’re new to it entirely, work on getting to grips with it right away to drive mega traffic to your website!
Sell Access to Your Pinterest Boards
If you have boards with lots of followers, you might be able to sell access to them. This means that you essentially hand over control of your boards to someone else who can use them how they like. If they’re going to be paying to use them on a limited basis, you might need to set some rules though. It’s actually a very profitable way to use the platform and it should be considered.
If you have the right kinds of boards and a considerable following, people will definitely consider giving you substantial sums of money for access to them.
It’s not usual for people to pay hundreds of dollars for access to good Pinterest boards, even on a short-term basis. The hard work is creating the kinds of boards that people will actually want to pay to access.
Offer Pin Design Services and Templates
Many people have a genuine talent for creating pin designs, and if you’re one of those people, you should leverage that talent and start making money from it. Pin design is essential and anyone who wants to find success on Pinterest needs to have good designs.
Selling these services is commonplace because of just how important design is. Business owners and bloggers will be more than happy to pay for your design skills.
Another thing you can do is sell pin templates. There are marketplaces out there that allow you to sell your templates and then people can then download and use them once they’ve paid you to do so.
Of course, this has the benefit of not having to work on commissions and not having to work directly with clients, which is something that’s preferable to some people.
I know of several freelancers on Fiverr who sell their Pinterest templates and design services and make a 6 figure salary.
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Sell Software That People Can Use on Social Media
Lots of people have made a lot of money by creating software that makes using and succeeding on social media much easier than it would otherwise be.
If you’re a software developer by trade and you want to make money from social media, this could be a way for you to do it.
Of course, you have to be willing to innovate and address a problem that exists for social media users.
Some examples are superior social media scheduling tools like Promo Republic, Tailwind, Buffer, SEMrush, Social Warfare, Social Pug, or Hootsuite. Granted there are a number of them and they all have their own benefits and they’re not all perfect.
Maybe you’ll be the next to come up with the next best tool!
If the software you create really lands and succeeds with users, there’s potentially millions of dollars to be made.
Teach People How to Get More Out of Social Media
Running courses for people who want to learn more about social media is a great idea. As people look for ways to monetize their blogs, one of the things that many people are doing is running courses and selling ebooks.
Well, why not make social media your focus? If you feel that you have insights to offer and knowledge that’s worth passing on to people who are just learning the ropes, creating a course could be the way to go.
It’s much easier to do this and find people willing to enroll in and pay for such a course if you have a blog relating to social media that has a sizable audience.
Our Mastering the Art of Social Media 7 module course teaches you even more about how to earn money and leverage social media for your business even with a small following.
Another thing that can help is having an email list that you send out regular newsletters to.
15 Ways to Grow Your Email Marketing List
But if you have something important to say and people find value in it, you’ll find a way to monetize it in no time.
Make Money on Facebook Marketplace
If you’re looking to make money by selling on social media, one quick and easy way to do it is by using Facebook Marketplace.
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It’s an increasingly popular way to get rid of the things that you no longer need and there’s good money to be made on it if you know how to sell the right way.
Some people go further and make this a full-time buying and selling career for themselves.
The great thing about Facebook Marketplace is that there are so many great deals and bargains to be found there.
That means that you can find the cheap deals and flip them for more money on the platform if you play your cards right.
Some people have made literally 6 figures a year doing this and if you know the value of things you know what to charge and where to sell fastest!
Develop an Audience via a Meta (Facebook) Group and Then Sell
Another way to make money on Facebook is to create a specific Facebook group and build an audience in that group. To do this, you have to create content that’s entertaining and fun and that can draw people in.
When you do that, the group will grow and grow until it becomes a real hub for its particular niche. When you’ve done all that, you can start to look for selling opportunities.
This happens all the time because the people running these kinds of groups see that with an audience in place, they have a real opportunity to start selling to people.
As long as the products are good and relevant, it can work well. It could even be merchandise relating specifically to the Facebook group itself. That’s something that a lot of users like.
Advertise with Facebook Ads
If you have something to sell and you haven’t been having much success recently, it definitely pays off to turn to Facebook Ads. It’s a way of advertising that’s at the cutting edge.
Even people who don’t like Facebook have to admit how strong their advertising options are. It’s so easy to target people in very precise ways and retailers love that fact.
Facebook Ads is particularly good for anyone looking to sell products that are in a very specific niche.
If there’s only a limited number of people who are going to have any interest in your product rather than it having a much broader appeal, you can use Facebook to target specific people in particular groups so that you’re only spending money on ads that the right people will see.
Your ROI can be huge! Give it a go!
How to Monetize Facebook For Your Business
Monetize Your Video Content on Social Media
Creating video content can be so easy these days but depending on the content you need it can demand a variety of skills in order to get it right.
If you want to monetize your content on platforms like TikTokTikTok Marketing: Quick Guide for Marketers and Creators or YouTube, you first need to get the quality of your content right.
The Simple Way to Create Marketing Videos
The informative or entertaining aspects of your videos are things you should work on over time. But the things you can get right now include things like lighting, audio and editing.
From there, your audience will grow and you’ll be able to start placing adverts on your content.
With YouTube, you’ll earn more money when people are watching your content, so drawing people in with the right titles and the right thumbnail is a big part of what you need to do.
Don’t underestimate that if you want to make money from your videos.
Do the Same with Your Music on SoundCloud
SoundCloud is great for aspiring musicians. You can earn money from plays and you can start to experience, in small ways to begin with, what it’s like to earn money from the music you create.
It’s a fantastic platform with a great community that you shouldn’t hesitate to throw yourself into. It could be exactly what your musical career aspirations require.
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Along with allowing you to earn money, it also provides a platform for discovery. When more people are listening to your music, more live show opportunities will arise.
And let’s not forget that many artists have been picked up and signed to real record deals as a result of their success on SoundCloud, so it can be done.
Another hot platform now is TikTok! Hundreds of creators are monetizing their abilities on this channel.
Take Risks and Innovate
There are some things that can’t really be done by simply following instructions. The world of social media is young and it hasn’t reached its pinnacle.
There are lots of ways to earn money on social media platforms and if you feel like there’s an aspect of social media that hasn’t yet been monetized and hasn’t been mentioned in this article, you shouldn’t hesitate to get out there and innovate.
Of course, this means taking risks. But all of the great business innovations through the decades have been risky. If you have an idea and you believe it has a chance of finding real success in the social media landscape, you owe it to yourself to try it out and see where it takes you.
It could be the next big thing for all you know.
As you can see, there are so many ways to earn money on social media.
No matter where your skills lie or what you’re interested in doing, there’s a way for you to earn a lot of money on social media. You just need to find a strategy that works best for you and hopefully the information above will have provided you with some fresh ideas.
So all that’s left for you to do is start making money!
Looking for step by step ways to earn money even more money on social media?
Check out this 7 module (12 bonus) course which walks you through all the incredible ways how you can get started growing your business and monetizing SOCIAL MEDIA even if you don’t have a ton of followers.
This post was really helpful for I have tried something new in this quarantine period. You can check out some cool tech related stuff.
Thank you I will!
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