TikTok is different from all the other social media platforms in terms of content format, content type, and user engagement.
Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat are all photo-focused platforms, whereas YouTube is a long-form video platform. TikTok has been able to successfully create a space of its own.
Short-form videos are easy to create, fun to watch, and go perfectly with the short attention span of the viewers nowadays.
Many brands and businesses are looking towards TikTok because it is a relatively new platform with a high growth trajectory, and growing on it as an influencer is comparatively easy.
While TikTok won’t pay you to create content on their platform, just like any other social media, it gives you much more opportunities to grow and monetize.
If you’re a business and looking to grow on TikTok, then you must read our previous post on how to use TikTok as a business.
In this one, we’ll be discussing with Rachel Pederson, a social media strategist, how to make money on TikTok by monetizing your following. Let’s begin!
Why TikTok
If you look at the landscape of social media in the last few years, getting results on Facebook, Instagram, and other overly used platforms is getting harder and harder.
So as a social media influencer as well as a marketer or brand strategist, it’s important to always be in search of where there is still an opportunity.
While TikTok might look like it’s just a platform for dancing and lip-syncing, you’ll have to realize that brands are spending millions on TikTok marketing.
Tiktok is adding millions of active users every month, and not everyone is there for dancing and lip-syncing videos. Once you realizing this, the potential of TikTok becomes more and more evident.
TikTok is booming right now. It was the most downloaded app of 2020 on the app store, but it won’t stay that way forever.
The growth trajectory will bend as it happened with every other social media. So if you wanna go big, now is the time. Because six months from now, it is going to be much harder to gain as many followers this fast as you can do now.
Rachel, our social media strategist, started with TikTok and got 250k+ followers in just 11 months and now gets 10-20 million views per month.
How to Make Money on TikTok
Followers count and video views per month are just vanity metrics if you’re not able to monetize or make money with them.
TikTok is a very powerful platform for driving business growth once you crack the code of monetization. The key to making money on TikTok is how you monetize it.
Let’s learn how to make money on TikTok. But before that, we’ll learn what monetization through TikTok actually means.
Most people only see monetization as making a sale or making instant dollars, but that is only one way of monetization.
What you need to understand is that platforms like TikTok are not made to make a sale. So it will be much harder if you try to sell a product directly without nurturing the lead.
The best way to monetize TikTok or any other social media for that matter is to focus on generating leads rather than selling.
Because people are on TikTok for entertainment and generally try to avoid salesy stuff. But if promotional content is served in an entertaining way, it works.
One thing that you should note is if you can get in front of people, and you know how to nurture leads & build relationships, you can monetize anywhere.
How to Monetize TikTok the Right Way
As mentioned, the best way to monetize TikTok is by generating leads rather than trying to hard sell. But the question is, how to generate leads on TikTok?
The most general way of monetizing via lead generation is creating content in a particular niche for your target audience and adding a link to your website. So interested people can pay you a visit.
For example, a personal finance influencer using TikTok to put out content that resonates with their target audience and adding the link to their free personal finance masterclass.
It is one of the best ways to lead generation on TikTok because you can nurture the lead off the platform without any limitation.
However, adding a link is not important. There are multiple other ways to generate a lead such as asking people to comment or asking them to DM on Instagram.
For instance, Rachel did a TikTok video asking people to comment “training” below if they’d like to see a free training video on how to be a social media manager. The video ended up generating 500 leads organically without even going viral.
Asking people to DM on Instagram is also one great way to follow up, especially if the value of the customer or client is worth that nurturing process.
You’re also able to have your Instagram and your YouTube both connected to your TikTok profile so you can easily direct people to either one.
Rachel often likes to direct people to her YouTube, which is a huge front-end traffic driver for her business. Similarly, you can direct them to the channel that’s already working for you.
Your target with TikTok marketing should be to either make people attend your webinar or masterclass, sign up for a trial of your product, or join your email list.
You can try to directly sell them as well, but it is not Rachel’s favorite way of monetization on any platform so she doesn’t recommend it.
Does TikTok Pay Content Creators?
These were all the monetization methods for those who already have a business, or product, or service that they want to sell. But what about content creators who just want to create content.
Does TikTok pay its creators much like YouTube? Well, as it stands right now, there is no public mention of even influencers being paid by TikTok.
However, TikTok does create incentivization for influencers to consistently put out content in the form of boosted ad credits.
But they do not need to pay anyone right now because ads come up not on your channel but in between videos.
So if you want to make money from TikTok, then it works the best if you already have a business and you create the strategy to nurture the leads.
But even if you don’t have a business, you can start building your following if you have a general idea of who you want to serve in the future.
So, for example, if you wanna serve moms and that is the audience you love, then start creating content now because a few months from now, you’ll regret not starting sooner.
Also, if you get successful and really build a big following, then there are other ways of making money as well, like brand endorsements and affiliate marketing. So, by all means, start now!
