Long gone are the days of relying on a college degree to provide income for your family! In fact, creators as young as 12 years old are earning $100k+ per year on TikTok – some of whom have less than 5000 or 10,000 followers! But how the heck do they do it? We had the same question so we curated a list of TikTok monetization strategies so you can earn a full time living from your content! Here’s a deep dive on how to make money on TikTok!

**First we need to preface this by saying that the TikTok terms of service are always changing, please refer to the TikTok terms of service before monetizing with any of these suggestions otherwise you might risk getting you account taken down! 

What is TikTok?

According to Wikipedia, “TikTok, known in China as Douyin, is a Chinese video-sharing focused social networking service owned by Chinese company ByteDance. The social media platform is used to make a variety of short-form videos, from genres like dance, comedy, and education, that have a duration from 15 seconds to one minute.”  

Why Should You Care About TikTok?

Business owners are keeping their eye on TikTok for good reason! TikTok gained it’s popularity quickly (over 650 million global active users in over 200 countries as over 2021) and is capturing the attention of humans of all walks of life! It used to be a common misconception that you had to be a young, hip dancing cutie to post on the app but now you can find content for ANYONE! For example, there even are TikTok creators making a living by sharing their RV adventures in their 70s! 

You should care about TikTok because you can get your business in front of a niche audience and monetize is multiple different ways! If you do not have a business, you can even turn your TikTok audience into a business and start learning how to make money on TikTok! 

How to Make Money on TikTok – 5 Ways to Monetize Your TikTok

1. Consulting
   Are you awesome at skateboarding? Or maybe your cupcake recipe is talk of the town? Even if you are a die-hard Pokemon card collector, you are an expert at SOMETHING that someone else would pay a consulting fee to learn more about! For example, we designed this website that you are scrolling through right now. We could have spent hundreds of hours learning how to code, but paid a design professional to consult us on tips and tricks to save time designing our Showit website templates!! This consulting was $175 for an hour, which may seem like a lot of money, but that felt more like investment to us because it taught us how to make Showit templates that sell for $300+!
   
   Maybe you don’t feel like you are an expert at anything and you don’t want to charge for consulting, that is totally okay! Did you know that you can legally profit from other people’s information? It’s called information curation! For example, you could write a guide on “How to grow your TikTok to 100k followers” and then interview your favorite creators on how they grew! You could then split the money with the creators and you all make money!

2) Brand Content Deals & Sponsored Posts
You don’t need 100k followers on TikTok to make a comfortable living doing brand deals! Creators with less than 5000 followers are getting gigs where they receive free products AND get paid $500+ for a TikTok video post! This is insane considering many YouTubers get paid a similar wage for videos that are often 10+ minutes long whereas TikTok videos are 2 minutes or less!

Brand content deals are exactly what they sound – a deal where a brand pays a content creator to post innovative media on their platform (TikTok in this case) that seamlessly integrates the creator’s unique product style with the brand’s complementary lifestyle benefits! The best way to book brand content deals is to be transparent about your services, offerings, and pricing packages via an instantly sharable Media Kit!

3) Connect a YouTube Channel
Did you just go through the whole creative process for your TikTok video? Why not leverage that hard work by batching your video production into a TikTok + YouTube content series?!You could even upload the exact same vertical format content in the form of YouTube shorts which is helping small creators grow their audience in no time!

Monetized YouTubers get paid when viewers spend time watching their channel because the advertisers pay a fee to advertise before, during, and after the YouTube video! To read more about getting monetized on YouTube, click here! It’s creative how users will leverage both platforms! They don’t just think of “how to make money on TikTok”, they’re thinking of how to use TikTok to push an audience over to another platform that monetizes in a similar way!

4) TikTok Live Donations
Do you enjoy having long conversations on live? Or maybe you need to fill time on your morning makeup routine? TikTok live creators can get paid via donations from other users and direct deposit a percentage of these tokens for real life money! One strategy is to turn your TikTok live into a gameshow that engages the audience into commenting, staying until the end, and competing for donations for entertainment, charity, or both!

Lifestyle creator Jo Johnson is a master at TikTok live donations – she has a casual conversation 4+ times per week while doing her makeup! Other makeup, photography, and mom life enthusiasts will pop in to say hi, catch up with Jo, and even tip her via the TikTok coins to pay for her next coffee, baby clothes, and experiences to show in her upcoming TikToks!

5) Send TikTok Traffic to the Blog Article Links in Your IG Bio!
It sounds like a mouth full, but blog articles can generate passive income and many creators would argue that their blog is the top money-maker in their content creation business model! TikTok videos might only have a shelf life of a few days, weeks, or months, whereas blog articles can stay on page one of Google for years or even DECADES which proves to be a better long-term investment!

Blogs don’t just automatically make money on their own, they need a monetization strategy! Beginner bloggers find most of their success with a handful of income streams including affiliate marketing, sponsored blog posts, and digital products curated or created by the blog owner! Affiliate marketing is defined as a marketing arrangement by which an online retailer pays commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated from its referrals.

Want to start making money from your blog but want realistic numbers? Here’s how much blogs can make!

These 5 TikTok monetization strategies are just the tip of the iceberg – there are countless more to explore! Are you monetizing your TikTok? Do you have questions on how to make money on TikTok? Share your experience in the comments so we can all grow together as creatives!

Studio La Terre is a design studio who believes that every business owner deserves to have the marketing tools and templates to help scale at an affordable price so they can start profiting quicker instead of being fooled into going into debt over their graphic design! Visit their Etsy shop for a list of the latest products like media kits for influencers, pricing guide templates for photographers, resume templates, and more!