There are a multitude of ways to make money on social media limited only by your imagination and sense of innovation. Never has there been an easier way to connect with potential buyers of your products and services than there is today and the trend is going nowhere but north.
One of my other businesses I own Is a digital marketing agency that runs Facebook & Instagram Ads, but if you don’t want to or think you don’t know how to offer services like that don’t think you can’t make money from social media. Here are the best strategies to get going with no real startup costs.
First we’re going to go deeper & talk specifically about Instagram, Pinterest and You Tube and then give you some tips that can apply to making money on other social media platforms like Facebook. With all social media sites, the more followers you have the more you can make.
Why? Because these people are your target market and you should be looking to add friends, followers, connections etc of people who might buy something from you – what a concept.
In the words of Barron de Rothschild “make no useless acquaintances.”
Pinterest Marketing – Make Money Online From Pinterest
(1) You can make money by using Pinterest to generate traffic to your products and services.
Pinterest is a search engine as well as a social media platform. If you have another site like a blog that you want to drive traffic to Pinterest is a reliable way to do so. Pins are like image ads that link back to your product page or article you want to drive traffic to.
Make them visually appealing so people want to click on them. You can create them yourself using a service like Canva or outsource their creation on a service like fiverr.com. You want to be pinning often.
How often?
Some people do so 10 times per day. I don’t think you need to do that, but Pinning as frequently as you can would be best. The easiest way to do this is to automate the process by using a service like Tailwind. You can also make 3 different versions of your pins. Pinterest knows it’s easier to make pin images than new content. Just save them to different boards.
In order to promote content on Pinterest you need to be able to use Rich Pins. To do this you will need to validate your site with Pinterest.
This may sound annoying, but you only need to do this once and then you’re good. Follow these instructions: https://yoast.com/help/how-to-get-pinterest-rich-pins/
You also need to make sure you are using the correct size of image – we use 735 X 1500. This makes it big enough to get noticed more.
Once you have a couple of hundred followers on Pinterest you should look to join some group boards related to your niche.
This is a great way for others to share your pins which will result in more traffic. And if you are looking for more followers, one way to do this is put a button on your website for people to follow you on Pinterest. As you pin more you should build up a following there. I would follow people back as you would on Instagram
Keywords. With Google, you don’t want to be too on the nose with adding “Exact match keywords” everywhere i.e. you wouldn’t want to add “lose weight fast” everywhere in your article etc, but with Pinterest you want to be more direct.
Pinterest allows you to create descriptions for your Pins and the “boards” you create that have Pins in them. Anytime you make a pin you need to tell Pinterest what board it’s part of. You can add in your keywords in the pin description and the board description.
To figure out which keywords to use you can do a Pinterest search and see what the first results are that come up. Look around on the site at what others are doing and make your keywords obvious. So, for example, don’t call your board something obscure call it something like “Travel Adventures” if it’s about travel not something people won’t search for. You can also use a cheap chrome extension “keywords everywhere” to find more keywords from Google.
How To Make Money On Social Media Using Instagram
Instagram is very popular these days. 86% of all social influencers are on Instagram.
(2) One way to make money on Instagram specifically is to run an online Instagram shop that sells your products. You can get started with a service like Inselly. You can learn more about this process here – https://inselly.com/.
If you are using Instagram for business you want to make sure that you have a business account and that you have a call to action on your profile along with a link to your website that sells your products or services.
(3)If you have a large following you can join a network like Brandwatch for influencers and companies will pay you to promote their brands to your followers. Not there yet? Here’s some of the best ways to grow your Instagram following
Building an Instagram following
One strategy to build your following is to use other social platforms like Facebook and You Tube to increase your following – just do a call to action with any videos or content you put out and a link to follow you wherever you can including a button on your website if you have one.
Post content constantly to generate more engagement and awareness. Link up your Instagram account to Facebook and twitter with a service like IFTT (If This Then That) which will let you post to multiple sites
==>Interact with brands and influencers and share their content
==>Use relevant hashtags to generate more engagement and visibility. You can use a service like hashtag.me for ideas
==>Use Instagram analytics and monitor your activity particularly if you are using a business account.
==>Use Instagram stories and post content to both Instagram and Facebook
==>Get more reach from using paid posts on occasion so more people see your content
Make sure you use quality personalized content. If you u are selling any product or service you want to know who your target customer is. You can make posts that would be specifically interesting to them. Add captions asking a question that only your ideal client / customer would care about and they will respond.
How To Make Money On Social Media Using You Tube
(4) One way to make money on You Tube is to get monetized. This will require 1k subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time within a 12 month period. At this point people can run their ads overtop of your videos and you get paid for it.
(5) This is not the only way to go. You can also rank videos on you tube so they show up on the first page of search results which will get you more views. Why would you want to do this? Because you’re going to put links in your description back to your email opt-in form or your webinar registration etc so you can promote your products and services.
How to rank on You Tube:
==>Change the file name of your video upload so it contains your keyword
==>Make sure your title has the keyword you want to rank for in it and a variation of that as well if possible
==>Add your keyword to the first two sentences of your description as well as a link to the site or page you want them to go to
==>Your description should be a mini article that includes your keyword several times along with variations of the keyword. Don’t overdo it though – it should read as natural.
==>Make sure your thumbnail is eye catching as this is one of the first things people see to draw them in
==>Add your keyword and variations of the key phrase to your tags
==>Add some backlinks including social bookmarks and a variety of others by using sites like fiverr or konker.io – look at the reviews and ratings for the sellers and pick 5 or 6 of them. In addition to your exact match keywords, for these services, use your brand name and urls as the keywords for these services and they will link to your video using those words as well – this is safer seo wise i.e. less likely to get you in trouble with Google / You Tube.
You are not going to rank for all of them, but you will rank for some. Typically the ones that are lower competition, but this can build a significant traffic source over time. Go for key phrases with 7 words in it and search volumes of between 100 – 1000. Use the keywords everywhere extension to determine this.
Other Cool Strategies to make money on social media
(6) Show off your writing skills. Are you a copywriter? (That’s someone who writes marketing pieces like sales pages, webinars, sales letters, video sales letters etc – we write the words to all of these). Or maybe you are an editor or creative writer. If so, you can show off your skills on social media sites like twitter and Facebook. Platforms like this are a great way to display your skills and remember your target market should be the same as your followers.
(7) Air BNB – want to earn rental income? Consider Air BNB which allows anyone to be a renter in 190 different countries. You can promote your listings on your social media accounts.
Check out this write up on fast company about how someone turned air BNB into a 6 figure income – check it out here
(8) Become an Amazon affiliate. Amazon will pay you a commission through their amazon affiliates program so that anytime someone click on a link to a product you are promoting and buys it you get paid. You can then put these links on your blog and drive traffic to your blog from your social media followers.
(9) Sell rights to your photos. Are you a photographer or at least interested in photography. You may be able to sell your photos on sites like flicker, shutterstock or istockphoto through a creative commons license to these sites. It is quite easy. just go to any of them or Google best sites to sell my photos and follow the instructions.
(10) Start a Group. This works very well on Facebook and can work on other platforms like LinkedIn as well. If you are in Coaching and consulting for example, start a group, build up your network and invite people to join your group. As the admin you make the rules and can promote your own products & services as well as offer free content to group members to build trust.
(11) Sell your art or music. If you are an artist or musician you can use a lot of the same techniques we’ve talked about to build a following on social media and show off your work much like with the copywriting / creative writing angle we discussed.
You can have links back to your site selling your work on social media. Tunbler is a great place to display your art and soundcloud is a fantastic place to get your music noticed.
(12) Manage social media. As you grow your skills at using social media consider offering to manage other people’s accounts. For example, local businesses are always busy and know they need to be doing more with social media, but don’t know how and don’t have time.
Offer to run their accounts, post content, boost posts, respond to comments. Show them how to use check Ins (put a sign in the shop and a post online so that people get a discount if they check in on Facebook etc). They will pay you a monthly retainer to handle this for them.
(13) How To Make Money On Social Media Using LinkedIn
LinkedIn is an awesome platform for promoting your business. It is relatively simple to connect with people on LinkedIn and there are a plethora of software’s that can make LinkedIn prospecting simpler. One good one is Dux Soup which allows you to connect with people and send messages to them automatically.
Don’t be a leg thumping spammer. Like all things try to add value to people first. Find out who they want to connect with and what they need. You can share the link to their profile with your audience and comment on it and encourage them to do so as well and it will give them exposure both from your share and again if they comment. Then approach them about whatever you are selling.
Unlike Facebook, you still get a good reach in terms of the number of people who will see your organic posts from just sharing. LinkedIn also has Ads and groups like other platforms. Make sure your profile is attractive and specific to who you help.
Make sure you state who you help and what you do in the Heading. And remember your LinkedIn profile is not a resume. You need to look at is as a landing page i.e. your sales page.
(14) Networking – LinkedIn is ideal for this in general. It is easy to engage with your audience as you make new connections and post new content.
Groups on LinkedIn and Facebook are ideal for this even if it isn’t your group you can friend or connect with different people in these groups with similar interests. These people can turn into people you invite to your new mastermind, group or whatever you’ve got going on.
You can forge some awesome business connections on these sites. If you are part of a course they usually have a Facebook group associated with it. Take advantage of them
(15) Coaching & Consulting – a lot of what we’ve discussed about selling your services relates to any kind of coaching and consulting. You want to make sure you have a link to your website on all your social media platforms and preferably linking to a landing page that collects them as a lead and then gives them an opportunity to book a call with you. Starting a group on Facebook and LinkedIn is great for this as we discussed earlier
(16) The Easy Button. The easy button in terms of making money on social media by gaining new followers and expanding your group is to run ads that promote your groups or for example adds likes to your page.
You can run like campaigns on Facebook or promote your group and then build a custom audience of people who like your page or are members of your group and advertise to these people. Ads to build followers work great on services like Twitter as well as Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. Paying a little bit of money in addition to everything else we’ve discussed can go a long way.
If you’d like more training on how to run ads on Facebook and build systems to promote your products and services, simply opt in for our free training here and we’ll send you our video series on Facebook ads, 7 figure online business blueprint webinar and the science of getting rich ebook.
Make it happen,
Liam