Within the last few years, the concept of social media influencers – those who create blogs and posts on social media platforms and influence others to make purchasing decisions – has blown up. In the late 2000s, when the social media boom truly began, platforms like Instagram and WordPress made it easier for bloggers to make themselves heard and publicise themselves, which in turn gave birth to the idea of “influencing” as a career path. It’s fair to say that within just over a decade, social media has gone from an innocent curio to a legitimate source of income for many people around the world.
One of the social media platforms that’s taken the world by storm in recent years is the Chinese-owned TikTok. The app is the property of ByteDance, a startup founded by software engineer Zhang Yiming back in 2012. It’s no understatement to say that TikTok has absolutely exploded in popularity; it enjoys 800 million active users and generated around $5.6 billion in revenue for ByteDance within the first quarter of 2020 alone. Gaining followers on TikTok is a crucial step for influencers; sites like https://tiktokfollowing.com/ provide ways for new influencers to get a foothold in a competitive market, and they’re ever more essential as the platform grows in size.
With that in mind, then, is it possible to make money from TikTok like it is for other social media platforms? The short answer is yes, but it’s going to take time. Becoming a lucrative, profitable social media influencer is never easy no matter what platform you’re on. Being a relatively new app, TikTok brings its own advantages and challenges when it comes to pursuing this particular career path. If you’re willing to put the work in, there are definitely ways to make money on TikTok that are perhaps even easier and require less effort than established apps like Facebook or Instagram. However, TikTok also has drawbacks that those platforms don’t necessarily have.
It’s worth noting that TikTok doesn’t actually offer any concrete financial incentives. You can’t directly get paid for your work on TikTok as you would a regular job. That means that if you’re looking for consistent, reliable income, you’d probably do well to look elsewhere. Of course, that’s always the case when it comes to social media. It doesn’t mean that you can’t draw a reliable salary by implementing social media influencer work into your strategy, but it means that TikTok itself won’t actually pay you a consistent wage. Instead, you’ll need to get your money from sponsorship deals and brand partnerships as an influencer.
If you want to start making money on TikTok, it’s essential to first build yourself a presence. This is a necessary step, but it won’t immediately start turning a profit for you. Just like blogging, if you do want to become a profitable entity on TikTok, there’s going to be quite a lot of time during which you’re making content on the platform without seeing a financial return for your efforts. With that in mind, if you’re not willing to put in some work without recompense, this might not be the career for you. Before embarking on a career as an influencer, be sure that you’re dedicated enough to create TikTok content and not see any return for your work.
In order to build up a following, you’ll need to consistently hit content that’s trending on TikTok. That means paying very close attention to the hashtags and content types that are popular at any given time. Usually, you can’t go wrong with lip-sync challenges, dance content, and comedy videos, but you never know what flash-in-the-pan concept is going to be fleetingly popular on TikTok during certain periods of time. By paying attention to trending topics and tailoring your content to match, you’ll quickly attract audiences to the content you’re creating and thus build a following much more quickly. You can’t make money on TikTok without consistent and regular content views!
Once you’ve built up a following, you’ll be able to start reaching out to brands and other influencers for potentially lucrative partnerships and sponsorship deals. Of course, if you’re big enough on TikTok, you’ll likely get brands and influencers coming to you and asking you if you’d like to collaborate. This will be your principal source of income on TikTok; you’ll need to rely on brands to partner with you and sponsor your videos in order for your content to be monetised. TikTok isn’t like YouTube; you don’t get paid directly for advertising revenue like you would for content on that channel. Instead, you’re exclusively being paid for work you’re doing with brands.
One of the most effective ways to monetise your TikTok content is to spread it to other platforms. Once you’ve got a successful following on TikTok itself, you can then migrate your content and followers to other platforms like Instagram and YouTube and make more money that way. Integrating social media networks makes sense; you’ll get cross-sections between demographics you wouldn’t be able to appeal to on single platforms and thus increase the potential visibility of your content to brands and other influencers. Collaboration is key when it comes to making money as an influencer, and you can facilitate that collaboration by increasing your presence and establishing yourself on as many platforms as you possibly can.
To get featured on TikTok’s For You Page, read this guide: How To Feature On TikTok’s For You Page | TokUpgrade