To the uninitiated, social media is nothing more than a fun way to waste time. But as more Filipinos are starting to realize, social media platforms offer a great way to reach out to customers while diversifying one’s income at the same time.
What’s even more interesting is that there is now a growing number of people that derive most of their income from social media alone, rather than merely using it as a way to promote offers on other platforms.
If you’re interested in making money from your social media presence, here are a few tips that will make it much easier:
1.) Make It Easy for Your Audience to Buy from You
Nothing is more frustrating than wanting to buy something only to find that the seller seemingly has no interest in making their offers available to you. You want to avoid being that kind of seller at any cost.
Regardless of whether you primarily make money from just your social media pages, a physical store, or on your website, you want to make sure that all the customers and patrons who want to buy from you can do so. A Maya account can make it simple for anyone to buy from you. If you’ve got more serious needs, be sure to check out Maya Business solutions as well.
2.) Create and Share Useful and Entertaining Content
People go on social media to be better connected to the world and the people around them. Useful and entertaining content is why they stay.
You should be regularly creating and sharing content that appeals to your audience and makes them interested in what you have to offer. If you have resources to do it, the smart move would likely be to focus on creating video content as this is the “stickiest” and most popular kind of content at the moment.
3.) Find a Suitable Affiliate Marketing Program
Affiliate marketing is the process of earning money by promoting someone else’s offers. If you regularly follow top social media personalities, you’ll often see them do this in subtle (or not so subtle) ways.
The key to successful and sustainable affiliate marketing is ensure that you are only choosing partners that are suited for your specific style and brand. This will help keep your brand focused and your own marketing on point.
4.) Find Sponsors
Sponsors can be from your audience or from organizations that want to reach your audience. In either case, as with affiliate marketing, it’s important to find sponsors that reflect positively on your brand.
Sponsorships can be an extremely lucrative source of income. According to Adweek, sponsored posts on Instagram earn an average of $300, while top personalities can get as much as $25,000 per post. This can be a lot of money in the local context, which makes it worth considering courting an international audience.
Make sure to take steps to be easily found on the social media platform of your choice by tagging potential sponsors, using hashtags, applying good SEO techniques, and cross-promoting your content on different platforms. Make sure you use Maya so that you can easily get secure payments from your various sponsors as well.
5.) Understand the Marketing Funnel
The marketing funnel — also known as the sales funnel, purchase funnel, conversion funnel, or decision funnel — is a classic model for understanding the different types of customers and the approaches you should take for each.
While there are countless competing takes on the marketing funnel, they can all be boiled down to three basic parts — top, middle, and bottom. The top is the widest part and is primarily concerned with building awareness, especially of your brand and the consumer problems you solve. Next is the middle, which is about educating interested people about your solutions. Lastly is the bottom, which involves converting your audience to a paying customer — ideally a regular one.
For someone that wants to monetize their social media following, what this means is that you need to execute multiple strategies at each part of the funnel. At the very least, you should be creating awareness, educating or entertaining your audience, and convincing the ones who are actually interested to take some kind of action. By doing so, you can effectively market your social media presence in a focused way, even with limited resources.
6.) Think of Long-term Growth
Going off the previous point, It’s important to understand that monetizing your social media takes more than just shooting off one viral post. Most of the time, it takes a lot of hard work and preparation.
Simply put, you can’t expect to become a social media sensation overnight. The fact is, the vast majority of your attempts to go viral will not be successful. In most cases, viral notoriety is unsustainable. And that’s OK.
What you are looking for in most cases is a quality audience that can generate steady revenue. The key is to build a strong base of advocates that actively support your brand. This is usually more sustainable over time and gets better returns than repeated attempts to be viral.
7.) Write a Book or Sell E-Learning Courses and Other Exclusive Content
If you do have something to offer that your audience finds valuable, consider writing a book or creating exclusive content. Having a book out will lend an incredible amount of legitimacy to your brand, which in turn can drive more people to your social media page. This can get more people interested in your book as well as anything else you might have on offer. Don’t forget to use Maya to make it simple for your followers to buy your product.
Making a steady income from your social media presence takes time, money, and a certain amount of luck. With these tips, we hope that luck becomes much less of a factor on your way to social media stardom.
