Ultimate Guide to Monetizing on TikTok

Introduction

You’ve probably seen somebody making money on TikTok earning thousands of dollars off of short five to ten-second clips, and you’re wondering how you can do the same.

I wanted to go over an ultimate guide on all the different ways that you can get paid on TikTok as a creator and how you can use the platform to eventually scale your business to multiple seven figures per year in income.

Charlie’s Success Story

Charlie has been on TikTok for the past few years and he’s grown his TikTok following to over 380,000 people with his personal brand, bringing in over two million dollars per year.

And now that I’m starting to get into the industry as well, I wanted to share some of the things that we’ve learned along the way about how to make the most amount of money possible from the platform.

Monetization Method #1: TikTok Creator Fund

Starting off with number one is the TikTok Creator Fund. This is going to be the lowest paying monetization method out there. Even though there are a lot of creators trying to get on the Creator Fund, we’ve heard of creators making anywhere from two cents to five cents per 1,000 views, which is basically nothing for all the hard work that you’re putting into your videos. It’s super hard to make a living just off of the Creator Fund alone because you need to be getting millions of views every single video, and that’s pretty hard for most people out there.

Qualifications

In order to qualify for the Creator Fund, you need 10,000 followers and a hundred thousand views in the last 30 days. You also have to be 18 years old and located in the US, UK, France, Germany, Spain, or Italy.

Application Process

From there, you can apply through the Creator Tools in your settings, input your information, and get accepted into the Creator Fund.

Monetization Method #2: TikTok Live Streams

The second monetization method that I want to talk about is TikTok live streams. For this, you only need a thousand followers to go live, and once you’re live, you can go ahead and enable donations during your live stream that allows viewers to give money directly to you. Now, I want to say this is very hard to get people to just donate on live, and it’s not a big return on investment at all because you’re going to be spending a lot of time on the live, and the live disappears anyways. So the views don’t compound, and you don’t get anything over time. Instead, you just do it once, and it disappears.

Comparison with TikTok Creator Fund

I would go so far as to even put this underneath the TikTok Creator Fund because with the TikTok Creator Fund, your videos don’t disappear, which means you could still get those views over time.

Monetization Method #3: Sponsorships

The third monetization method on this list is sponsorships, and for this, you can earn anywhere between $200 to even $20,000 for promotional videos. This is basically where brands will pay you to mention or promote their products in your videos. And contrary to popular belief, you don’t actually have to have a huge following in order to do this. Brands actually prefer smaller creators because they’re more specialized and they have a specific audience.

Getting Brand Deals

In terms of how you can get brand deals, yes, you can approach brands and businesses about sponsoring your content. You can also create pitch decks and all that kind of stuff, but it’s honestly not worth your time in our opinion. It’s much better to just focus on what you can control, which is the quality of your content and how consistent you are on the platform. The quality and consistency of your content is going to be building that trust with you and your audience, which is ultimately what’s going to be able to pay you a lot more.

Approaching Brands

Consistency and Quality

If you’re constantly putting out good content, brands will eventually reach out to you anyways, and you won’t have to waste time or mental energy trying to reach out to them first. Plus, if you’re the one reaching out to brands, then you’re kind of already starting off on the defensive. But if a brand comes to you first as a creator, you can play on the offensive and propose rates that you actually think you deserve and that’s your worth.

Challenges

Relying on Brand Deals

Like I said in the beginning, this can be a pretty lucrative source of income. I know one time Charlie got a sponsorship that I won’t name, and they basically paid him eighteen thousand dollars for two 30-second TikToks that were unbelievably easy to make. And Charlie’s not even like a big TikTok creator, right? Like there are so many TikTok creators out there with millions of followers, and so just imagine what kind of brand deals that they’re getting. The only bad thing about this is that it’s hard to consistently get brand deals. It’s also not a good business model to focus all of your effort into brand deals because if you’re relying on another company in order to make money and pay your bills, then you can easily find yourself in financial trouble when there’s a recession and there aren’t as many brand deals going out.

Monetization Method #4: Selling Products

Going to be selling products. Now with TikTok, everybody knows that you can reach a large audience, and as a creator, you’re developing trust and rapport with your audience every time that you create a video. Now with TikTok, you can’t actually link any products in the description of your videos, but instead what you can do is you can send them to your Linkin.bio, and this is where you can sell all of your digital or physical products.

Providing Value

What we recommend is actually just giving away something super valuable for free at first in order to get people to sign up, give you their email, and become a consumer. Once you develop that trust and rapport, then you can give away something even more valuable for a cost.

Examples of Products

Digital Products And Physical Products

For example, for your Linkin.bio, you can have a PDF on, you know, teaching people how to get more fit. This is something that you’re going to use to just get their email, get them to say yes, and give them as much value as you can for free. Once they go through that PDF and they start getting all the value from it, that’s when you can start giving them the opportunity to consume something else of yours that’s a lot more in-depth, a lot more valuable, and something that will be able to give them as much value as possible while also supporting your business.

So this could be something like a one-on-one coaching for fitness or maybe even an in-depth course that you spend a lot of time making that can teach them everything they need to know about fitness.

Monetization Method #5: Affiliate Marketing

The next monetization method on this list is affiliate marketing, and with this business model, you can easily scale to over seven figures just by promoting other businesses’ products and services. Basically, by promoting other products and services, you can earn a small commission every time someone clicks on your unique link and decides to buy. This is super easy to get into because you don’t have to actually build out something yourself. Instead, you could just find a good product or service that fits with your audience and make engaging content with it that can go viral while also giving people as much value as possible.

Earning Commissions

Commission Rates

Heart Defensor, you can see that all she does is just make really aesthetic videos showcasing a bunch of different products.

Affiliate Links in Bio

Earning Potential

So if I go ahead and click on her link page, you guys are going to see that the pillow mug is right there. And if I go ahead and click on that, it’s going to go ahead and send me to the Amazon store. Now from here, I can see that the price of a pillow mug is going to be thirty dollars, and typically for the Amazon affiliate program, they normally give you about two to three percent on every sale.

So it’s not a lot of money, but if you take into account how many views she’s getting per video, this can definitely add up to a lot of money. Especially if you take into account how many other products and videos she has, and you know if you take a look at some of these videos, some are getting 6 million views, 2 million views.

This is just one example of somebody who’s definitely killing it in the affiliate marketing game. The best thing about this is that you don’t actually need a crazy amount of followers in order to achieve success. You just have to give enough value to the point where your followers trust you and want to actually click on the affiliate links and buy the product.

Some really good affiliate networks for you guys to check out are going to be ShareASale, Impact Radius, ClickBank, CJ Affiliate, and more.

Affiliate Networks

Direct Brand Affiliations

• You can make Money on TikTok through affiliate marketing, not just by doing unboxings or showing aesthetic products.
• For example, if you create gaming videos, you can earn Money on TikTok by adding affiliate links for your keyboard, mouse, or PC.
• Even with a small channel, it’s possible to make Money on TikTok by promoting products people already want to buy.
• If Amazon sells your keyboard for $100 and offers a 3% commission, you make $3 per sale — that’s real Money on TikTok.
• With targeted TikToks and 100 affiliate sales, you can make $300 — a smart way to earn Money on TikTok consistently.
• Your videos don’t disappear; they continue to get views, which means long-term potential to make Money on TikTok passively.
• Viewers may buy products weeks or months later, helping you earn more Money on TikTok without needing to repost content.
• You can also search for brand affiliate programs (e.g., “Nike affiliate program”) to expand your options and make even more Money on TikTok.

Monetization Method #6: Teaching TikTok Skills

The next way that you can monetize on TikTok is to actually just teach others how to make good TikToks. This can scale to a business making over seven figures per year because once you’ve created a ton of TikToks and you’ve learned the algorithm, you’re good at making engaging videos that get tons of views. You could teach others how to use the platform, and because that knowledge and experience is so useful, you could charge a ton of money for it.

And there’s tons of ways that you can go about this, right? Don’t just have to, you know, offer your service. You can also just create tutorials online for like YouTube. You can go ahead and write blog articles, and yeah, this can be a super lucrative business model because you know there are tons of businesses out there that don’t have the time and knowledge to do TikTok marketing. And this is where you can come in and offer your services.

Offering Services

Focusing on Specific Industries

We recommend niching down and doing specific services for businesses and industries that you’re an expert in. That way you can charge more for your specialized services. But we actually recommend offering your services for free for the first one or two clients.

This way you can use them as testimonials and ask them for referrals, and from there, your business will pretty much be spread through word of mouth. And you can even create TikToks in order to market your services.

Free Initial Services

Monetization Method #7: Growing Other Social Media Platforms

Okay, the last way that you can monetize on TikTok is to actually just use it to grow your other social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube.

These two platforms are ultimately going to be where the money is, and if your goal is to scale your social media business or personal brand to over seven figures per year, then these two platforms, especially YouTube, is going to be the one that you want to focus on. Right now, TikTok is one of the best platforms out there for organic outreach. So easy to make a five to ten-second TikTok that has the potential to reach millions.

But in order to maximize the outreach, you’re going to want to try to convert these views into Instagram followers and YouTube subscribers.

Benefits of Instagram and YouTube

Building Trust

It’s simply because of the fact that for everything these platforms pay way more than TikTok, right? Like Instagram sponsorships pay way more than TikTok, YouTube sponsorships pay even more than Instagram and TikTok, and YouTube also has a ton of other opportunities like making money through YouTube AdSense, affiliate marketing, and all the things that you can do with TikTok except for the fact that you can also link stuff in the description of your videos. Plus, affiliate marketing is a lot stronger for long-form content because if somebody watches a 10-minute video, they’re much more likely to trust you compared to the average TikToker that scrolls onto your video.

Conclusion

In conclusion, all the stuff mentioned on this list requires hard work, and it takes know-how. It’s not gonna all come right away, and you need to be able to put in the reps and learn over time from your mistakes and the feedback that your audience gives you. Social media is all about just finding a way to make yourself unique and also just giving value. So like we talked about, it’s good to niche down, and if you can solve a problem and give value to a specific industry, you’ll see a lot more growth and monetization opportunities compared to somebody else who’s starting out way too broad.