How to Make Money on TikTok

Has Gary V. ever influenced you?

More and more he’s talking about TikTok, and it sure is perking up the ears of entrepreneurs and marketers like myself…

Why is that?

Well, TikTok has a lot of interest right now and not a lot of content.

So those who are creating content are seeing crazy views and some people are going viral literally overnight.

Here’s the thing… the same thing happened with Instagram just a few years ago. 

People got interested in this app that was normally just for teenagers, but they thought the way to make money through Instagram was to get a lot of followers…

But now that we see Instagram as a full blown marketing tool for business where you don’t actually need a lot of followers, I can see that more and more people are looking to TikTok – and they don’t want to wait years to figure out the platform and how to monetize it.

People want to jump on TikTok early so they can capitalize on all the interest today and start to make money from TikTok. 

If this sounds like you and you’re interested in jumping on a platform early to figure out how to actually monetize your following, that’s what I’m covering today:

Six ways that I’m seeing people actually make money today from TikTok. 

AND I’m going to share with you why TikTok might be more powerful than even Instagram…

6 Ways to Make Money on TikTok

#1: Growing accounts and selling them

The first way people are making money from Tik Tok is growing accounts and then selling them.

This is becoming more and more popular in the eCommerce or product space.

Similar to Instagram, you’re going to choose a niche and then go ahead and create entertaining content, ideally content that goes viral to attract that person who would be the ideal customer for your product.

There are already people in this space today who are growing TikTok profiles around a certain interest. Usually it’s a niche topic and they might not have anything to sell, but they’re going to reach out to brands in that industry and sell their TikTok profile to them and people are legit making money this way.

The good news for product brands is once they have that account in their hands, it’s actually fairly easy to sell products.

One way that people are selling products is through TikTok Live. They are launching products while livestreaming or they’re actually holding auctions while live streaming.

And, of course, there is the link in the bio where you can always drive your followers to purchase your product.

So if you’re the type of person to love TikTok, and you just want to grow a following around a certain topic and build that community around a certain topic, go for it and then reach out to those brands who would love to have access to those followers and sell them your account. 

#2: Donations

The second way people are making money from TikTok is going Live and collecting donations from viewers (just like you can do on other platforms, like Twitch).

I find this feature of TikTok fascinating.

It’s really a built in monetization platform, literally from day one.

From what I’ve seen, here’s how it works:

When you’re a TikTok user, you can go into your profile and purchase something called coins.

For a hundred coins it will cost you $1.39.

Now what do you do with these coins?

When one of your favorite creators is going Live, you can actually send them coins as a way of giving thanks for all of their effort in creating the content they do.

What does the creator do with this coin?

The creator turns the coins into diamonds and those diamonds can be converted into cash via PayPal.

Cool, right?

On the Chinese version of TikTok – an app called Douyin – there is a next-level feature similar to this. When creators are Live, they can actually attach a shopping cart to a product they sell. So it’s kinda like QVC or the shopping channel. You can go Live, hold an auction, and people can buy your product while you’re Live through the shopping cart feature.

My guess is this feature is going to come to accounts worldwide sooner rather than later. 

#3: Manage influencer campaigns

The third way to make money from TikTok is to manage influencer campaigns.

This isn’t a new idea. There are straight up influencer agencies to serve Instagram influencers already.

The same concept applies to TikTok. You can be the middleman or the broker between a creator on TikTok and a brand who wants to work with that influencer.

From creating the agreement, managing both parties, making sure the deliverables are all met – just being a coordinator – you can charge a service fee to manage campaigns like that.

TikTok as a platform is smart; they actually have an internal influencer program already built in. So if I’m a big brand and I want to reach out to TikTok and say, Hey, this is the space I’m in, what influencers should I work with? I can do that.

The only thing is, I’m going to pay a percentage to TikTok for brokering that agreement.

That’s where you can come in as a service or agency to make that agreement outside of TikTok and help brands save a little bit of money. 

#4: Tiktok ads platform

The fourth way you can make money from TikTok is by using their ads platform.

Just like Facebook and Instagram ads, you can Google right now, “TikTok ads” and sign up for access to their ads platform.

It is pretty self-explanatory if you’ve ever run paid traffic before, so if your market’s on TikTok, it might be worth you creating a few ads, putting some budget toward experimenting there and seeing what happens.

Maybe you can sell more of your products through TikTok!

#5: Management services

The fifth way you can make money from TikTok is by offering management services for creators on the app.

Some creators on TikTok have millions of followers and sometimes this happens really fast and overnight for that creator. It’s like having a business land in their lap.

You could step in and offer services to help them with their content strategy, their creative strategy, maybe managing offers and deals that come their way.

So if you have that background in production or storytelling, you could definitely apply that to offering management services to TikTok creators. 

#6: Consulting

Last but not least, once you become a pro on TikTok, and maybe you really understand how someone could take a video that maybe gets a hundred views and help them get 100,000 views, well, you can simply offer consulting services.

This is a really great way to leverage your expertise from the platform and help people who want to be TikTok famous or they want to be creators, actually boost their strategy so their videos get seen by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.

Of course, you need to have the background and the experience in this first to offer this as a service. But once you’re there, people will pay to have your experience and your brain on their account.

And if you help them get any deals or influencer agreements, you can even negotiate a percentage or a cut of that deal simply because you are their consultant and you have helped them go viral on TikTok. 

So there you have it. Six ways that I see people making money from TikTok today, even while it’s still really, really early on. 

Let’s go back to my first point at the beginning of this video.

Why do I, an Instagram marketer, think that TikTok might be more powerful than Instagram?

The way I see it, Instagram stories are kind of similar to TikTok videos, but they expire after 24 hours. This is where TikTok is powerful. TikTok is actually similar to YouTube, meaning you can publish a video today, but maybe the algorithm picks it up months later and starts pushing that video into the feed of people who would like it.

The fact that your videos don’t disappear has a lot of power to it because it can drive a lot of traffic and eyeballs to you months after the fact.

That reason alone is why people are getting sometimes millions of views to their TikTok videos with very few followers. It’s because the algorithm is picking up your video, and pushing it out. 

Again, there’s a lot of interest and not a lot of content. So the algorithm is pushing it out to the people who it thinks are going to be receptive to that content. And – hello – waking up to millions of views with very few followers. 

I mean, in today’s day and age, I don’t think there’s any other app or platform that can give you those kinds of results right now. 

I am on TikTok, so go ahead and find me. I’m over @EliseDarma and hopefully by the time we connect, I’ll have played around with a few more videos and maybe even one of them has gone viral. That would be pretty awesome.

Are you on Tiktok yet? Drop your Tiktok handle in the comments below 👇

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