Your Guide To Building An Income Using Social Media
By Michael Gary Wirth
2021-08-17T04:00:00Z
With all of the time people spend on social media, it seems strange that so few are using it as a stream of income. There are numerous ways to leverage social media so that it becomes an asset instead of a timesink. All it takes is a couple of hours every day to lay the basic groundwork, and in a matter of weeks you can have a social media account that generates money for you.
Choose Your Account
The best way to build your social status is to choose a category that you want to fit in. From sports, to celebrity talk, to humor, there are an almost infinite amount of topics on which to relate to others. Finding one that works best for you, and more importantly, one that youâre most interested in, is the first step.
Build Your Brand
Now that youâve chosen your category, itâs time to focus on your brand. Do you want to fit a broad niche, such as @itsbaefeelings has done on Instagram, where they post images of cute couples and ârelationship goalsâ memes? Or would you rather focus on a specific celebrity, like the countless fanpages, like this one for Dwayne Johnson? Though it may seem silly, those accounts have over three million followers combined and get tons of engagement on their posts. And engagement is the name of the game when it comes to being successful on social media.
Another way to build a brand is to find a word or phrase that isnât in use that would work as an app. Take something like âSplazzyâ for example. According to Urban Dictionary, âsplazzyâ means âsomething that looks nice.â This would make it a great word to use for a photo-editing app along the lines of Facetune or Snapseed. So securing the social media accounts for âspazzyâ could be a lucrative opportunity for a company who wants to own it down the line. (Unfortunately, @splazzy is taken on both Twitter and Instagram, but given the low metrics, they could offer great ROI if the owner is willing to sell cheaply.)
Grow The Account
The next aspect to making money through these accounts is to build a following. I discussed ways to build an organic and engaged following in a previous article, so be sure to look over that for some helpful tips, but building your social following is a crucial step for a variety of reasons. The most important reason you want your account to have a following is because it increases the return on the investment, or ROI. Whether the social account is meant to be flipped, or sold to another party, or you decide to keep it and monetize it, the amount of followers, especially engaged followers, is vitally important.
Take That To The Bank
Now that weâve done all the hard work, the next step is to decide just how you want to monetize the account. Luckily, there are a few different methods to choose from, or you can work all three together. Itâs your choice.
Affiliate Coming On
One of the most prevalent is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is an easy way to make money as it doesnât require the user to have any products or services to sell, and it even becomes a passive income stream after a certain time. Many big companies, like Amazon and eBay, offer affiliate programs and becoming a partner is as simple as signing up. After being accepted into the affiliate program, simply post links to products and services to your audience and collect a commission whenever someone makes a purchase.
As with anything, having a larger audience makes affiliate marketing much easier. For example, with affiliate marketing, the average conversion rate is about 1%, so if your social account only has an audience of 100, that 1% would work out to be a single sale. However, if your social account has over 10,000 followers, a conversion rate of 1% would equal 100 sales, which would mean considerably more money.
Drop(ship) It Like Itâs Hot
Another way to monetize your social account is by using it for dropshipping. Similar to affiliate marketing, dropshipping is another method to sell products without having to deal with inventory storage. Unlike affiliate marketing however, dropshipping allows you to set all of the prices and keep all of the profits.
Dropshipping is easy; you promote a product, then when that product is ordered, you place an order with the fulfillment center and have the product shipped directly to the customer. There are a number of dropshipping marketplaces online now, such as Shopify, where you can create a marketplace and curate the types of products you want to sell. After doing that, it simply becomes a matter of promoting your product links through your social accounts and following through with the orders as they are placed. There are hundreds of success stories in the dropshipping industry, such as this one from someone who made almost $7,000 in eight weeks.
Shout It Out Loud
Another popular way to monetize a social account, especially an account with hundreds of thousands of followers, is to sell shoutouts. Many people on social media are looking for ways to promote their own pages, and they are willing to pay money to be shouted out on a larger account. A shoutout is what it sounds like; a social blast to all of your followers promoting a certain page. Thatâs why having a larger following is so important; the more followers you have, the more youâre able to charge per shoutout.
One Time Sale
Of course, if all of these methods of monetization are too much to deal with, simply selling the account is always an option. There are a number of sites that allow people to buy and sell social media accounts, with Swapd.co being one of them. And account selling can be big business, such as the story of this man who made six figures selling Instagram accounts. And though the prices on the accounts can vary wildly, wavering between $500 to $2000 for accounts with 50k+ followers, it can mean some quick income for someone who is willing to put the work in to gain followers. Of course, as with anything, there is a downside to selling an account outright, and that is losing the ability to leverage it in the future as another stream of income.
Though the idea of making money through social media is not new, it is sadly underutilized. With all of the tools out there to help you get set up, you can easily be making hundreds or even thousands every week with only a few weeksâ worth of set up. Not to mention that once all of the groundwork has been laid, it simply becomes a matter of maintaining the process and cashing the checks. And best of all, the processes I outlined above can be applied to multiple social media accounts at a time, creating a network of income streams with just a few clicks of your mouse.