Earn from social media

How to Make Money From Social Media

Social Media Usage is at the all time high right now in World and still growing. India just became the number one country for Facebook in the world in terms of monthly active users! You can see from this slide from 2017 Digital Yearbook by ‘We Are Social’ that the active social media users worldwide are already about to touch 3 billion users! Just imagine how big the market is out there. All you need to do is to effectively tap this market.

Remember one thing, the primary purpose of Social Media is to build social connections but that does not mean that you cannot use it to earn money. In fact, the social media ads like Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads or LinkedIn Ads are meant for leads/sales generation only. So it makes sense to not spam your users with promotional offers.

Mixing informational posts along with promotional posts is the right way to build audience and business together on social media.

So, how to earn money by social media? Here are 5 ways to earn money through social media:

How To Earn On Social Media Via Your Own Products

You can also create your own products with digital and physical. Though I would recommend to begin with Digital products (like eBooks, courses etc.) because they are easier to create and promote and take less amount of money in the beginning to develop the products. For instance, you can list your eBook on Amazon Kindle or ClickBank and then promote the link of your eBook on different social media channels. And once the sales start rolling, you have to do nothing but collect the payment (being a digital product, you can sell it N number of times!).

Physical products, on the other hand, require larger capital in the development stage and one should go for them only once you have validated the product idea and have sufficient capital to invest in its development. That said, physical products like designer jewelry, crafts, and other home/living products are relatively easier to develop and sell online (for such product categories you can visit Etsy.com).

So, once you have decided on your product (digital or physical), you can sell it directly on different social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram etc., or you can sell it through websites like Etsy or any other e-commerce stores which allow such selling.

If you decided to sell directly on social media on your own, then you will have to take care of shipping, customer care, logistics etc., while with other e-commerce stores, they take care of these aspects.

Earning Money On Social Media By Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is one of the best ways to make money online. Affiliate marketing, in a nutshell, is a way to make money by promoting products of other companies (like Amazon.com etc.) using your unique affiliate links, which you get after signing up with them.

Apart from Amazon (which doles out 4% to 10% of commission per sale), there are many other networks like ClickBank (for Digital Products), Rakuten, CJ Affiliate, Booking.com (for Travel) etc., which offer lucrative affiliate commissions.

Amazon Associates Affiliate Program

If you are good at building social media communities and can promote affiliate products using social media ads (just remember to keep your ad costs less than the money you earn) then you can earn a handsome amount of money.

Just remember that it is always a good practice to add a disclosure about your affiliate links to your social media audience. This builds up a trust with them. Secondly, don’t spam your social media communities with affiliate links as this puts off the people. Always have a healthy ratio of generic informational posts (which are of interest to your audience) to the promotional posts (with your affiliate links).

How To Earn Money From Social Media Using YouTube

Building a successful YouTube channel is not a cakewalk, in fact, nothing on social media or digital media marketing is a cakewalk anymore. It requires a lot of planning, persistence, hard work and creativity to build a successful YouTube channel.

Once you have at least 10,000 public views of your channel videos, you are deemed eligible to apply for YouTube Partner program. You can visit  youtube.com/account_monetization to check your channel’s total view count. Apart from this, your channel should adhere to YouTube’s Partner Program Policies to get approved.

Here are the steps listed by Google to apply for YouTube Partner Program:

• Sign in to your YouTube account.
• In the top right, select your account icon > Creator Studio.
• In the left menu, select Channel > Status and features.
• Under “Monetization,” click Enable.
• Follow the on-screen steps to accept the YouTube Partner Program Terms.

Join the YouTube Partner Program

Building a popular YouTube channel can be a lot of work. But if you already have a following, or you're determined to build your audience, joining the YouTube Partner Program to make money on advertising might be a path worth exploring.
There are prominent YouTube content creators who have made substantial amounts of money with this program, but they are the exception rather than the rule. It would take a lot of time, strategy and sheer luck to make money on YouTube. However, this is a good thing to keep in mind with advertising in general. Unless you're already getting a lot of views and clicks, you're not going to make a lot of money on them.

Earning Money On Social Media By Providing Freelance SMM Services

You can also provide freelance social media marketing services to your potential clients. You can provide services like social media auditing, Facebook page management, social media content creation, social media advertisements (PPC Ads on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.), running social media contests etc.

You can start your freelance social media marketing business by creating your own personal brand on social media to attract the leads and inquiries. You can do that by writing guest blog posts on social media marketing on popular digital marketing related blogs. You can also create your own website or blog to create your own brand and share your blog posts on different social media channels to bring in traffic.

If you can create and share quality content (which is actually helpful to your target audience) on a regular basis, you will soon start getting inquiries from potential clients to handle their social media marketing. And once you do a quality work, you will start getting word-of-mouth references too.

You can also ask your friends or others acquaintances in your professional circles for any social media relating projects in case they are looking for someone to handle the same.

Another way to search Freelance social media marketing jobs is via Freelance sites like Freelancer.com, Upwork.com, Guru.com, PeoplePerHour.com etc. Just create an account on any of these sites. Add your complete professional details and work samples and you are good to go.

Use visual media to promote your crafts.

If you tend to create handmade crafts, art pieces, or even articles of clothing and knitting, there may be an opportunity to showcase your products on social media. Instagram and Pinterest may seem like obvious places to hit, but Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are also great channels for sharing visual media.
If you have an Etsy account, you can direct your followers to check out your products there, and between the different channels, you have the potential to make a good living.

Create and promote your own information products.

If you already have a blog, and you've demonstrated your expertise on a specific subject over a period of time, there may be an opportunity to create an ebook, audio program or video course and sell it to your audience. Social media is the perfect place to promote such a product.
Platforms like Gumroad, Sellfy and Amazon's KDP program make it easy for you to publish and sell your PDF, MP3 or video file at a price of your choosing -- keeping in mind that all platforms do take a cut, even if it's small.
As with anything, quality is key to creating something people not only want to read, but will pay to read. If you take extra care in creating great information, designing and promoting it well, you will definitely see more sales.