Recently I made a post about making money on TikTok vs. YouTube, and I got quite a few emails wanting to know more information. So let’s talk facts and figures.
MoneyToMiles on TikTok has 162,500 followers – that is, at the time of this post.
She gets about 455 new followers a day. She’s not by any means what someone would call a major influencer.
Now people love to say, “my account has 1 million likes,” or whatever. But the truth is, when it comes to ad revenue, that doesn’t matter. That is what we call a vanity number. TikTok puts the total number of likes you have on your page to make you feel better.
Advertisers care about the total number of followers you have first, then the amount of engagement you have compared to the number of followers you have.
So if you have 4 million followers, that sounds great, but if your engagement is under 1%, then those 4 million followers don’t mean as much.
The high the engagement, the more valuable your followers are. So while likes matter somewhat, it’s more about your follower number and how engaged those followers are.
Let’s do this with celebrities and Instagram since those numbers are public, making it easier.
- Kendall Jenner has 249 million Instagram followers.
- Justin Bieber has 249 million Instagram followers as well.
So the money someone would pay them to advertise would be the same, right?
Wrong! And here’s why.
Justin Bieber’s engagement rate is only 0.66%, while Kendall Jenner’s engagement rate is 2.19%.
This means that out of her 249 million followers, 2.19% engage with her content. An engagement is a like, a comment, a reshare. or a bookmark. That means they “engage” with the post.
The more engaged you are with a person’s content, the more you like the content.
If nobody engaged with your content, then advertisers aren’t interested in giving you their money to promote their product. Because if nobody engages with the post, what’s the point?
You want a person to engage with the post – like it, and above all, click that link.
- Kendall Jenner gets an average of 5,442,280 likes for every post she makes, and about 15,492 people comment on every post she makes.
- That’s not the case with Justin Bieber. He only gets an average of 1,617,790 likes per post he makes and an average of 33,254 comments for each post he makes.
So this means Kendall Jenner’s posts are more “engaging” on Instagram. This means to ad buyers, her account is more valuable than his. This means even though they have the exact same # of followers, they would pay Kendall Jenner quite a bit more to advertise on her page than they would Justin Bieber.
It’s all just a numbers game. Nothing more. Nothing less.
It works the same exact way for regular people too.
They don’t really care as much about you or what your page is about. They want to know your numbers.
So now let’s talk about TikTok. It works the same way.
MoneyToMiles posted a video on TikTok recently that told us exactly how much she makes. With that information, we can see how many followers she has, 162,500. These are her numbers for June 2022.
MilesToMoney (Erin) is a Gen Z personal finance guru. She talks about all things money-related. She doesn’t post trending videos or dances. She talks about personal finance from the viewpoint of a person from Gen Z (the younger generation just entering adulthood).
She tells us that she makes almost nothing from the creator fund. In fact, she said over the entire lifetime of her account, she has only ever made $490.38 (6 months total). So she didn’t even bother including that figure in her total June earnings. She made a total of $7,841.
- Sponsored Posts: $4,500 (from 3 campaigns)
- UGC $2,155
- Affiliate links: $1,186
Sponsored posts are where a company pays you to make a video or post promoting their product or service.
UGC is user-generated content where she creates content for other people to use on their pages.
Affiliate links are sort of like sponsored posts where you promote something specific, and if someone goes and buys it using your affiliate link, you get a commission. How much you earn depends on the affiliate program you sign up for. Airabela.com, for example, pays 10%, whereas Amazon Wal-mart pays like 2-3%.
Here is how it works. You go to the website (in this example, say airabela.com) scroll down to the very bottom, and find their affiliate link. Now you sign up for an account.
Now say you find this t-shirt from their store that you like. Let’s pretend it’s this particular t-shirt.
You make a video promoting it and use your affiliate link. Now, everyone someone who watches your video buys one, and you get a commission of 10%.
You can be an “influencer” today. You don’t need someone to pay you for a sponsored post to start making money with your TikTok account. Find a product you like, sign up for their affiliate program and start influencing people to buy whatever it is you want.
Now you are making money influence people buy things on social media.
Now let’s go back to UGC (user-generated content). How is this done? Some platforms specialize in it, but you can also do it on Upwork and Fiverr.
There are a zillion people who sell TikTok videos. They say things like, “I will create a TikTok video ad for your product or brand.” On the low end, you can make a 15-second video for anywhere from $20 to $50. You can go up to 30 seconds on the high end for double the price.
Yes, I realize some people are charging way more, but if you are new and just starting out, you probably don’t have fancy equipment to charge the big bucks. Start small with simple videos, and then work your way up to doing higher quality for more money.
“UGC” or User-Generated Content is you making a video for them to post on THEIR social media, not you posting it on yours. If you make a video to post on YOUR page, then that’s a sponsored post.
Another thing to keep in mind is ethics.
You want to say up front that you aren’t willing to do certain things that you aren’t comfortable with. I have a friend who does these videos all the time, and her rules are this … “No adult content, nothing political or religious. She will not say she works for a company or give a fake review for a product she’s never tried.
In her case, she’ll talk about a website or a product. She won’t say OMG, I LOVED IT, but she will talk about what it is.
Some people will even pay her extra to mail her a sample product so she can have it in the video and say she’s actually tried and liked it.
My friend uses her iPhone to film the videos and a ring light which she got on Amazon. She told me that she would never film a video without her ring light. “Lighting is everything,” she said, and it’s true. Invest in a ring light! She spent like $30 for hers.
You don’t have to, but if you want to get really fancy, you can spend another $15 and get some backdrops.
Quite a few people make a living making videos for other people and never post anything on their own social media. They make a living making videos for others.
If you don’t want to use Fiverr, another platform I like to hire people from is Upwork.com. In fact, I prefer to hire from Upwork more than Fiverr lately, just because the pricing is more reasonable.
But anyway, you can try out either platform or both, and that way, you can make money from social media before you even have a ton of followers on your own profiles.
So now you know how much money you can make on TikTok and how it’s done.
Good luck, and keep your questions coming in!
Be sure and check out “How to be a Social Media Influencer,” which is now available at Amazon!
