The dizzying rise of social media has divided society into two camps. The first camp are the consumers. Consumers gobble up content, flipping through one post to the next. They’re informed and entertained by others who spend countless hours shooting videos and making content. Consumers hop from one social media app to the next, obsessing over the latest posts by popular influencers on various platforms.
The other camp are the creators. They’re obsessed with creating content to extreme degrees. And why not? It’s now their livelihood. Because they’ve discovered ways to make money on social media that have transformed their businesses and their lives forever. Ask any established creator about how much money they’re making on various social media platforms and the amounts will startle you.
Most creators on social media are raking it in. They can make more money in their sleep in a single night than most can make in months or years working a full-time job. That can seem discouraging to some. But there are ways you can leverage the power of social media to make money from your phone no matter where you’re from. And it doesn’t matter if you’re working a full-time job, you’re self-employed or you’re simply interested in starting a new business.
How to Make Money on Social Media
You’ve seen others doing it. Why can’t you? Why are you struggling to make money on social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram? It feels hard to post, right? People will judge you and make negative comments you don’t like. They’ll cast hate or shade your way. And you just don’t want that attention. Not now at least.
The truth? It’s hard to make money on social media without showing your face. The entire basis of social media relies on your personality and your appearance in front of the camera. But it’s not about how you look or how you think you look. It’s more about what you say, the stories you tell, and the way that you document your journey.
If you’re a business owner and you’re not leveraging social media to grow your business, you should. If you haven’t launched a business yet, social media can help you grow your small business and take it to the next level. But it’s not just about being a business owner. There are so many other ways to make money on social media.
How to Create a Money-Making Machine
It doesn’t matter if social media is just a side hustle to start, or if it becomes your main source of income. Either way you look at it, you must transform your social media profile into a money-making machine. How do you do that? Simple. You connect the link in your profile to a hero funnel. What’s a hero funnel? It’s a destination that people can visit to learn more about you.
A hero funnel is the way you connect with your audience and bring them into your world. This turns them into traffic you own instead of traffic you don’t control. What does that mean? Think about it this way. When you run ads you control that traffic, right? Meaning that you get to direct where it goes. But you don’t own that traffic.
When someone discovers a blog post or a video you posted and they click on a link that’s traffic you don’t control. Why? Because you didn’t command that traffic with paid ads. However, traffic you control and don’t control is mostly meaningless. What matters is the traffic that you own. And the best way to convert traffic you don’t control (aka people who click on your social media profile link) into traffic you own is through a hero funnel.
The biggest difference between those who make a lot of money on social media and those who don’t is their ability to create a money-making machine. But it’s not a complicated process. It’s actually quite simple when you create a hero funnel. And you can create a hero funnel using premade templates and a drag-and-drop editor. You don’t need any fancy technical skills. It’s simple and straightforward.
Build Your Hero Funnel
The hero funnel is sometimes called the link-in-bio funnel. That’s because people discover your hero funnel when they click the link in your bio. This is how smaller creators can make more money than larger creators. Because they understand the mechanics of how to make money online rather than relying solely on the algorithm for ad revenue.
The hero funnel is a way for people to connect deeper with you. Think about it like a lead generation funnel because you’re using social media to generate leads. Without a hero funnel they will always remain as obscure people in your audience. They’re somewhere out there. And without a hero funnel to reel them in, they’ll always remain to be fish in the sea.
To make this very effective, you should offer something in exchange for the prospect’s contact details. This can be a lead magnet like a cheat sheet, a checklist, a video series, a free course, or anything else. Once they provide contact details, your hero funnel automatically sends them the lead magnet and should start sending them email communications to build rapport. You can do all of this simply through ClickFunnels by using the premade templates you see above.
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1. Affiliate Marketing
When you use a hero funnel and bring people into your world, you can sell them anything. Any product or service you offer can be marketed to your audience. However, an easy way to make money on social media without owning a business is affiliate marketing. With affiliate marketing you’re just promoting affiliate links to your audience. That’s it.
This is challenging to do on some platforms. They just won’t allow certain affiliate links. To avoid that you have to use a hero funnel to bring people into your world first. Then, once that audience is part of your email list they are traffic you own and you can promote your affiliate offers easily through emails. This helps you avoid potentially getting your account locked or banned on popular social media platforms.
You can also build a simple bridge funnel to make money as an affiliate on social media. A bridge funnel could replace your hero funnel in your profile link. Or, it could be a link you add to YouTube video descriptions or Facebook posts. A bridge funnel provides some value in exchange for contact details before pushing the person off to an affiliate offer. You can build a simple bridge funnel using premade templates and a drag-and-drop editor with ease.
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2. Document Your Business Journey
Another way to make money from social media is to just document your business journey. That means making content about your business. The good and the bad. The struggles and the wins. It’s not only about showing the upside to business. Talk about the hard parts of business and the problems you face but overcome.
Think about it like Superman. Superman is a great superhero. One of the original. But if Superman was always able to defeat the enemies and he was all mighty and all-powerful would you care much about him? No, you wouldn’t. You care because Superman has a flaw that makes him more human. Kryptonite disables Superman’s powers. And it makes him more relatable because we all have flaws.
The point is this. Talk about the problems. Discuss your flaws. Mention the sleepless nights. The failures. Upsets. Why? Because it makes you more human. It’s not just about winning. Winning is great but it’s not as relatable as when you talk about the painful moments. Documenting your journey lets you do all of that and more.
3. Become a Micro-Influencer
A micro-influencer is someone with between 10,000 and 100,000 followers on social media. Micro-influencers can make money by doing single posts or multiple posts for brands. To do this you must have an authentic follower base who are engaged. And you’re more likely to succeed when you focus on a specific niche.
For example, you could get a deal with a green drink company when you’re in the health niche and you constantly post content about health and wellness. You won’t get a deal with a green drink company as a micro-influencer if your niche is in exotic cars or streaming games. That makes sense, right? And your following must be engaged with you to do this.
Make sure that people have a way of contacting you. In the description on your social media platforms, put an email address they can use to get in touch. Don’t use your primary email address for this. Use an alternate email address. And respond quickly to offers if you’re serious about making money by promoting another company’s brand or products.
4. Taking Brand Sponsorships
One level up are brand sponsorships. Can you get brand sponsorships? It depends. It’s harder for micro-influencers. But when you cross 100,000 followers, your chances for brand sponsorship deals increase. This is not just about doing a single post. This is about taking on full-blown sponsorships where you’re paid to constantly promote a brand.
The best brand sponsorships have a revenue percentage attached to them. This won’t be the case unless you have millions of followers. However, it doesn’t hurt to try to negotiate for a small percentage of sales. This way, when your posts go viral and the company makes a lot of money, you can participate in that success even more.
Some social media platforms like TikTok have a Creator Marketplace where you can sign up and get offers for potential brand deals. The Creator Marketplace applies to everyone on TikTok but you must have at least 10,000 followers for people to take you seriously. How much money can you make through brand deals on social media? Well, the sky is the limit on that one.
5. Sell Online Courses
Some of the top social media personalities sell online courses. It’s just what they do. You can love it or you can hate it. The point is that it’s a great way to make money from your social media following. Especially when you’re a successful creator who makes money outside of social media and documents their journey on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and others.
However, selling online courses isn’t complicated. Especially when you’re an expert in a field. All you need to do is connect your social media profile to a course. You can do that by creating a hero funnel to first bring people into your world. You can also do it by building a lead generation funnel that focuses on the problem your online course solves. Or, you can go straight to the online course.
As long as your online course solves a problem for people that you’ve already solved, you can make money with it. If you’re worried about the technical aspects of building an online course, then don’t. You can use premade templates and a drag-and-drop editor to do this. All of this is simple to do and doesn’t require any technical skills or coding when you use our platform.
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6. Offer Memberships
Memberships are an ideal way to tap into your social media audience. That’s because a membership offers recurring revenue. And all you need are a few hundred people paying you every single month to make enough money to cover your basic expenses. So what kinds of memberships can you offer? There are many types. And you can sell memberships with a membership funnel.
Membership funnels make the entire process simple to build out and maintain. You can use premade templates, a drag-and-drop editor, connect your payment gateway, drip out content and so on. Your membership funnel can be connected directly from your social media profile link. But better yet, you can use the hero funnel to bring your leads in and then push them over to your membership funnel.
7. Do Shoutouts
People have been doing shoutouts on social media for ages now. And you can make money doing it as long as you have an established following. That doesn’t mean you need millions of followers. It just means that you need a decent amount somewhere over 10,000. You can also use shoutouts with other creators to grow your audiences together.
Shoutouts have been used on Instagram as a way to make money on social media since almost as early as Instagram got its start. You can charge hundreds of dollars for a simple shoutout. The amount you can make will vary based on the number of followers you have. And as your follower count grows, you can make more and more money doing this.
8. Use Native Commerce
Native Commerce platforms like TikTok Shop, Instagram Shop, Facebook Shop and others allow you to make money on social media directly from your posts. You can easily push people into your TikTok Shop and link the product directly from your posts. This allows you to make money even with a smaller following. This can either be done as an affiliate or by selling your products directly.
You can also create a TikTok Shop and set an affiliate commission. This way, other creators can promote your products and make money. This helps you make money by leveraging the audience of others. Since there are so many creators out there, setting a solid affiliate commission directly in TikTok Shop or another native commerce platform can really increase sales substantially.
9. Livestream for Gifts
Livestreaming for gifts has risen in popularity. Especially with the recent NPC trend. NPC stands for non-player character. In a video game, these are characters that exist inside the game with limited function. That’s where the term NPC comes into play. However, some popular streamers have been using the NPC trend to livestream and make thousands per hour from gifts.
For example, TikTok allows you to accept gifts while livestreaming. Gifts equate to money. They can be cashed in. Is it simple to get gifts from livestreams? Maybe not when you have a small following. But this is certainly a way you can build a substantial following over time. You have to be comfortable with livestreaming. If you are, consider doing this.
10. Make Money From Subscriptions
Recently, X (formerly known as Twitter) has introduced subscriptions. Meaning that you can subscribe to your favorite creator to receive gated content that others don’t have access to. For example, Mr. Beast shares insights into his revenue numbers on his videos on the main channel with his subscribers. This doesn’t get shared with anyone else.
You can create subscriptions on X and other platforms easily and start making money from subscribers. This is a good way to tap into your audience by sharing deeper insights about things. Sure, it helps if you’re already established in an industry and are successful. But you can take other approaches. If you’re talented as a writer or in some area, you can share stories, images, or even document your work with subscribers that you don’t share with the general public.
11. Run In-Stream Ads
In-stream ads on platforms like X and YouTube can generate cashflow even with a small following. It’s simple to run in-stream ads if you’re monetized on certain platforms. This incentivizes people to upload great content to the most popular platforms. In-stream ads have long been a thing on YouTube, which is the world’s most popular video platform. Now it’s made its way to X.
Mr. Beast tested this theory by posting his first ever Mr. Beast video on X. The video initially made $250,000, which he donated to 10 people in $25,000 chunks. But it has since gone on to make well over $500,000. That doesn’t mean your in-stream ads will perform well. But if you have great content, this is certainly another way to tap into social media for cashflow.
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Ready to start making money on social media? Set up your ClickFunnels free trial by clicking the button below to get started. Build your hero funnel, or any other funnel, and connect it to all of your social media profiles today to start generating income from your audience.