The Chinese corporation ByteDance owns the short-form video hosting service TikTok, also known as Douyin in China. It features a wide range of short-form user videos, with lengths ranging from 15 seconds to ten minutes, in genres such pranks, stunts, tricks, jokes, dancing, and entertainment.
TikTok has given consumers a place to produce video for both profit and enjoyment.
With the platform’s recent tremendous growth, it has become possible for businesses to promote and quickly reach their target demographic through influencer marketing.
Below are some of the ways users can make money on the platform in Ghana and in general.
Becoming a Tiktok influencer
As with other well-known social media platforms, becoming an influencer on TikTok is one option to monetize your account.
Although becoming an influencer is not simple, the effort is well worth it. Forbes states that the most well-known TikTok performers made millions of dollars in the previous year. The TikTok star who made the most money was Addison Rae, who had close to 54 million followers.
Over the course of a year, she made $5 million in revenue. With an estimated $4 million, Charli D’Amelio (77 million followers) is in second place. With an estimated $2.9 million in earnings over the same period, Charli’s sister comes in third.
The question, now, is – do you need millions of followers before you can become a TikTok influencer?
The number of followers does matter, but it’s not the main factor brands look at when selecting influencers to partner with. Most businesses consider their followers’ engagement levels. It’s possible that an influencer with 20,000 followers has a more attentive audience than one with 100,000.
Another intriguing finding is that the majority of brands like collaborating with micro-influencers (influencers with a few hundred to 20,000 followers). A broader audience can be reached by influencers with millions of followers, but they can also be highly expensive.
In conclusion, all it takes to become an influencer is a small number of thousand active followers.
How Can I Be An Influencer On Tiktok?
Choose A Niche
It’s crucial that you select a niche that appeals to you. You must pick a niche in which you can reliably provide quality material if you want to succeed as an influencer. If you select a niche that doesn’t interest you or in which you lack knowledge, this will be challenging.
Discover your passion and build exceptional content around it. You can only gain followers and an audience by producing excellent content.
Get A Pro account
TikTok offers the option of a pro account for both creators and businesses. The Creators account is best for public figures, artists, and influencers.
Set Up Your Profile
When setting up your profile, the two main areas to concentrate on are your profile picture and bio. These are the first things a user will see when deciding whether to follow you.
Your bio and profile picture should make a good first impression. If you feel like a picture is too bland, you can use a six-second video as your profile picture. This will add some personality to your profile.
Understand Your Audience
Before you start creating videos for TikTok, try and understand your audience. To become an influencer, it’s important that you create content that your target audience will love. Analyze the content that receives the most engagement. This will give you an idea of the kind of videos to create. You can also mirror the content strategy of other influencers in your niche.
Create Amazing Content
The next step to becoming a TikTok influencer is creating amazing content. Quality content on TikTok sees a lot of engagement. The more creative and entertaining your videos are, the more likely they are to go viral. Viral videos tend to translate into new followers.
The following steps can help you create great TikTok content:
- Check out what your competitors are doing
- Take inspiration from the current trends
- Perform hashtag research to see what’s trending in your niche
- Have some fun
Be consistent
For increased visibility on TikTok, you need to post regularly and consistently. If you want to become an influencer, you need to upload quality content regularly. It’s up to you to choose the frequency of your posts. Based on my personal research of popular TikTok influencers, 1 to 2 videos per day is great.
Engage your audience
Once you start building a following, it’s important that you engage with your audience. Interacting with your audience will help you reach influencer status faster. You can engage your audience by replying to their comments or asking them questions through your video captions.
Declare that you are interested in brand collaborations
To start making money as an influencer on TikTok, you need to let brands know that you are interested in collaborating. You can let brands know this via your bio. You can also start an outreach campaign or join an influencer marketing agency to reach potential clients.
Grow and sell TikTok accounts
Another way to make money on TikTok is by growing and selling TikTok accounts.
This is already popular on Instagram. Instagram users like 23-year-old Ramy Halloun makes $30,000 annually from flipping Instagram accounts.
This strategy can be replicated on TikTok.
To get started, find a niche and start creating interesting content around it. After growing the account to a certain level of followers and engagement, you can reach out to the brands in that industry and sell the TikTok profile to them.
The easiest kinds of accounts to sell are themed accounts. It’s harder to sell personal accounts because they cannot be easily replicated by the new owners. With a themed account, you can easily find buyers. The followers of the profile are engaging with the account because of its theme. They might not even notice the change in ownership.
For example, if you create a TikTok account around videos of popular travel destinations and adventures, you can easily sell the profile to any business that offers travel services. You can also do this for other industries like fashion, food, fitness, beauty, etc.
The key is to create an account that has quality content. The more followers and better engagement rate the TikTok account has, the higher the price you can sell it for.
Run an influencer agency
You can make money on TikTok by managing influencers and influencer campaigns.
There are already a ton of influencer agencies for Instagram. You can do the same for TikTok.
Your influencer agency will help brands strategize, execute, and manage campaigns with TikTok influencers. Your agency will serve as a middle man between the influencers and brands looking for their services. You will help brands determine the best influencers to work with. You can take it a step further by creating a social marketing strategy to meet the brand’s goals.
If you want to run an influencer agency, you should be able to do the following:
- Identify high performing TikTok influencers with a good track record
- You must be able to develop a relationship with top TikTok influencers
- You must have expertise in running successful social media and influencer marketing campaigns
- You must be able to create successful influencer campaigns for different advertising categories. This will help you diversify your income stream.
Note that TikTok already has its in-built internal influencer program. But it is a bit expensive. Smaller brands would probably prefer to work with influencer agencies because it would help them save money.
Starting a reputable influencer agency takes time and effort. To get ahead of the curve, it’s important that you start your agency immediately. The best part is that you don’t have to limit your services to just TikTok. You can also run influencer campaigns for other social media platforms.
Become a TikTok consultant
If you are an expert on TikTok, there are a ton of brands and even individuals that would pay for your services.
If you know how to get thousands, even millions of views on your videos, you can teach others how to do the same for a consulting fee. Influencers can also offer consulting services. It’s a good way to leverage your expertise and also diversify your income.
A good example of a TikTok consultant is Sean Young. He calls himself a professional TikTok consultant. He makes $10,000 a month advising celebrities and businesses on the best kind of content for their brands.
There’s money to be made. So, if you really understand the platform and have a track record for creating viral videos with high engagement rates, you should start teaching others how to do so.
Publish Sponsored posts
You can make money on TikTok by publishing sponsored posts. According to business insider, you can make an average of $0.01 to $0.02 for each sponsored view on TikTok. So if you have a video with 100,000 views, you can make 1000 dollars in sponsorships.
After you have built a following on the app, you can reach out to brands and offer your services. The best part is that you don’t need to have millions of followers before you can pitch to brands. All you need are a few thousand engaged followers and you are good to go.
Look for brands that are interested in building their TikTok presence and reach out to them. You can also analyze the influencers in your industry to see the sponsors they work with. This will give you a good idea of brands to reach out to.
Once you have your list of target sponsors, send them a brief pitch in the form of an email. Here are the things to include in your pitch:
- Who you are
- What you do
- Important metrics like follower count and engagement rate
- What makes you an expert in that industry or niche
Your achievements. You can share success stories from your previous sponsorship campaigns.
Tip: When you are just starting out, it’s a good idea to work with smaller brands first. This will help you build your portfolio.
Sell your own merchandise
You can make money selling your own merchandise on TikTok. The best part is that you don’t need thousands of followers before you can sell your own products or services.
Similar to other social media platforms, you can use TikTok to promote your business or store. The secret is creating engaging content that will attract the attention of your target customers. So even with 100 followers, you can start making sales via the platform.
For example, you may have a business selling beauty products. You can create creative 15-second makeup tutorial videos and post on TikTok. In the last 3 seconds of the video, you can add a promotional frame advertising your own products and how customers can reach you.
By putting up interesting and creative videos, you would attract attention to your TikTok profile and also generate leads for your business.