Why Social Media?
Almost everyone uses social media, many for hours daily, but almost nobody makes money from it.
This is strange, since social media is one of the best money-making tools available today:
- Free to use
- Almost everyone is addicted to it
- Billions of users/potential customers
- Global reach
- Fun!
In this guide I'll take you through a basic method of monetising social media that anyone can do.
What You Will Need
To make money on social media, you need just two things:
- A social media following
- A product or service to sell.
Note that the product or service doesn't need to be your own. You can sell someone else's product and take a commission.
This is known as "affiliate marketing" and is extremely common on social media.
In this guide, I will give you examples of both.
Selling Other People's Products
Affiliate marketing works like this:
Someone out there has a product or service for sale.
Take my course Simple Bets as an example.
Let's say you enrol in the course and you think it's great.
I tell you, if you want to promote my course for me, I'll give you 50% of every sale.
To track this, I'll give you a special "affiliate" link that has a unique code in it just for you.
Every referral that comes from that link will be recorded as one of your referrals (the sales software will track everything for me).
At the end of the month, if you made $1,000 in sales, you'll get sent a commission of $500.
There are people all over the internet with blogs and social media pages that make millions per year just from affiliate commissions.
It's one of the most common ways to make money online.
Affiliate Marketing On Social Media
To successfully do affiliate marketing on social media, you need to build a following.
How do you build a following?
By making an awesome page!
Look at this page for example:
It's a page that just posts slam dunk highlights from NBA games.
It has over 100k followers.
Some people might think, who would spend so much time collecting all these clips and posting them on Instagram? It must take hours every day! What a waste of time!
But what if I told you, the owner of this page is making bank?
Probably over $10k/month.
Just from this page.
Got your attention yet?
Let me show you how.
If you click into the posts, the captions are all the same.
They tell you they have a dunk training program that can teach you to increase your vertical jump and get you dunking within 8 weeks.
Then they tell you to click the link in their bio to find out more.
So you go to the link in the bio and ... what a surprise!
It's an affiliate link.
This means the owner of the page is promoting someone else's product and taking a commission.
Click the link and you'll see the product - it's a dunk training course:
The price is $67.
The commission rate is 50%, so for each sale he will get $33.50.
You can see the Instagram page has over 100k followers.
Let's assume his link gets 500 clicks per day.
At a 2% conversion rate, that would equal 10 sales per day.
$33.50 per sale = $335 per day.
$10,050 per month.
And here's the best part:
He probably has more than one page.
Meaning it's likely he's making multiple times that.
Just from posting basketball clips on Instagram?
Yes, just from posting basketball clips on Instagram.
Like I said, social media is one of the most powerful ways to make money, if you know how.
Selling Your Own Product
Let's take the @moneybren Instagram page as an example.
I started this page in 2020 as a way to keep me occupied during lockdown.
I wanted to post about side hustles and investing.
As a former Chartered Accountant, I had a lot of experience in the finance space and thought I could create a page that people would find helpful.
The goal was to try a bunch of different side hustles and invest the profits, while sharing the results along the way.
One of the side hustles I first started experimenting with was matched betting.
I had never heard of it before, but I read about it on a Mommy blog and it sounded interesting.
I made several thousand dollars in my first month, and quickly became obsessed and spent hundreds of hours studying and learning all the different strategies.
I started posting about it on the @moneybren page and wrote a few free guides.
After going through my free guides, many people started sending me questions, and I figured there was demand for something more in-depth so people could learn the more advanced strategies.
That's when I got the idea to create a course.
I created the course Simple Bets and started selling it for $20 USD.
I didn't expect much, but people started buying!
I sold about 10 courses in my first week.
I ended up creating three courses and did about $7,000 of sales just through my Instagram page (before I started this website).
There was no fancy sales strategy. I simply posted about matched betting every few days and told people to check out the link in my profile for the course:
You can also see I didn't need a huge following.
Back then I actually had less than 500 followers. However, because I was offering a lot of value to those subscribers they were interested to purchase my product.
This is the standard process for monetising your social media with your own product or service.
If you're a personal trainer, you could post fitness tips and sell an e-book or private training.
If you're a chef, you could post cooking tips and sell a cookbook or cooking course.
The goal is to create a social media space where people find value and want to follow you. You then create a product or service that offers even more value and offer it for sale.
And again, if you don't have the time or expertise to create your own product, you can sell someone elses.
How To Make Your First $100
1. Start a social media page around one of your interests. It could be on Facebook, Tik Tok, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram - all of them work great!
2. Create a page that's fun, entertaining, educational or inspirational. Preferably all four.
3. Find an affiliate offer related to your page. Clickbank and Shareasale are good places to start.
4. If you would prefer to create your own product, that's great too. Sendowl is a good free tool for selling ebooks. Thinkific is a good free tool for selling courses.
5. Start referring people to your link.
6. Get paid!