If you are over the age of 30, then you’ve probably never heard of TikTok. However, if you are a teenager, particularly if you are a girl, then you’re probably on TikTok, all the time and use it every day. Just like other social networks out there, TikTok is well-designed for influencer marketing, and there are a lot of well-established TikTok influencers that have been able to earn a lot of money from their profiles.
TikTok isn’t as well-established as other social networking sites out there like You Tube, which means that it doesn’t have an efficient, effective way for TikTok influencers to earn money. With YouTubers, they can put ads on their videos, and earn a lot of money this way.
However, TikTok is becoming more user-friendly in this way, and as a result there is an entirely new generation of TikTok influencers that have figured out how to monetize their content and do really well for themselves.
What’s crazy about it is that these influencers are young, yet they’re making a really good living from their TikTok profiles. Just keep in mind though that if you want to get on the same level as them, you will need thousands, if not millions of TikTok followers to be able to quit your day job.
So, the million-dollar question is: How much could an influencer make from growing their TikTok profile? Of course, just like with all other influencer and marketing activities, this is a pretty tough question to answer, because influencers get their income from multiple sources.
However, we are going to try, and we have included every aspect of being a TikTok influencer, so you can get a rough idea of how much you could potentially earn.
Main Ways of Making Money on TikTok
Remember, you need to be over the age of 16 before you can start making money on TikTok with your parent’s consent. You need to be 18 to deal directly with brands, but there are some younger TikTok influencers that are making money by selling merchandise alongside their parents.
Gifting
One popular feature on TikTok these days is live streaming. You need more than 1000 followers to be able to live stream on your TikTok profile, but for some it’s ended up being really lucrative. This is because your followers can give you coins while you live stream. Once you have accumulated enough of these coins to make it worth your time, you can trade them in for real money.
You can think of these coins as TikTok’s virtual currency. TikTok users buy coins and can purchase 100 coins or even 10,000 coins. The price for each pack is going to vary depending on how many you purchase, and the currency.
When we wrote this, users could buy 100 TikTok coins for 99 US cents. You keep your coins in your online wallet, and then you give them to TikTok influencers out there that you love when they perform on their live streams. Depending on the platform that you are live streaming on, the owner of the platform will keep half of the amount you receive.
The idea is that when a user appreciates your live stream, they can use their coins to buy a diamond, or a special emoji that they put into the performance chat. Different emojis are worth different values, and leaving a diamond in a chat is the highest value. If you are on the performing end of the live stream, you can redeem your gift points at any time, and receive up to $1000 in a day.
Brand Partnerships
At its core, TikTok is no different from most other popular social platforms out there. If you are producing popular and relevant content, brands will begin to notice you, and they will most likely approach you, asking if you want to partner with them and influence their promotions.
Instead of liking someone’s content on TikTok, you leave a heart. If you are getting a lot of hearts on your posts as well as regular comments on your videos, then it is highly likely that brands will start to follow and be interested in what you’re putting out there.
Most of the time, other brands that reach out to you for brand are going to be selling a product that they think is going to appeal to your target audience. For example, if your content is appealing to girls age 13 to 18 years, then you can expect brands to reach out to you that sell products that they think girls aged 13 to 18 years are going to be interested in.
Top TikTok influencers can earn anywhere between $50,000 and $150,000 for a successful brand collaboration. For TikTok influencer marketing to do really well, it’s really important that the brand and the influencer talk with the same voice. The influencer must be a natural fit with the kind of people that are highly likely to buy the brand’s product. With this in mind, you need to watch out for brands that try to make people change their voice for their products.
The bottom line is that people watch your videos because they like what you do and what you say. They don’t watch your videos to hear a brand’s message. This means that you need to be able to find a brand to work with where you can naturally include and talk about their product in your video without it feeling forced.
If the product sticks out awkwardly in your video, then your viewers are going to be disappointed, and they are going to question your authenticity. The last thing that you want when partnering with a brand is to be given a script that you have to say in your video.
Guidelines around brand collaborations apply just as much to TikTok profiles as they do to influencer marketing on any other social network. If you have accepted money to promote something, then this needs to be disclosed to your audience.
Brand-Sponsored Events
There are some types of influencers out there that can earn money off the platform because of the reputation that they have gained through it. Brands all the time will approach them to appear at events such as BeautyCon or ComicCon. A lot of the time, the brand will pay you to represent them at an event.
Selling Merchandise
If you have worked your way up in the world of TikTok, and you have established a big support base on it, then you might want to think about selling merchandise to your audience. This is where clever influencers can turn their TikTok imagery into a successful brand and sell that brand in the form of apparel.
This creates a feeling of exclusivity among your target audience, because they can only buy that apparel through your Shopify store and through your TikTok profile. They can wear that apparel and feel special because they know that other people out there won’t be able to purchase it.
So, as you are probably able to guess already, the first step to selling your own merchandise is to build up a community around your brand. You can easily do this on TikTok, by engaging with your fans. It’s also helpful to live stream, because this can encourage intimacy between you and your community.
The good thing about TikTok is that it’s not just limited to selling merchandise through. In fact, if you have an Etsy store, and you sell arts and crafts on it, you can make videos on TikTok showing your products, and encouraging people to visit your Etsy page.
Just remember that people don’t visit your TikTok profile to see ads. This means that if you upload a video promoting merchandise, you need to tie it in in a way that’s entertaining and appealing to your audience. This is going to be a lot easier to do in some niches than others. If you fall into a specific craft niche, then you can make a video demonstrating how someone might use your product.
If you don’t want to come up with your own merchandise ideas, then you can always participate in affiliate marketing. This way, you can recommend particular products to your fans, and include a link where they will be taken directly to the store where they can purchase them.
You will have already agreed upon a percentage of the sales that you get for everyone who follows the link and purchases a product, and a lot of the time you can offer a discount coupon to your fans as well.
Cross Promote Your Content
The majority of influencers that have done really well on one social network have probably done well on the rest of their social channels as well. This means that a lot of successful TikTok users out there also have really popular YouTube and Instagram platforms.
This means that you’ve got an incredible opportunity to cross-promote your content. This means that you can build up a successful audience on your live stream, and then you can promote the live stream on all your social networks. You can also create a highlight of your TikTok content, which you can upload to your YouTube channel and get the revenue that you would earn on your YouTube channel from ads.
On average, we use three or four social media apps each. There is a good chance that one of these is TikTok. However, there are also a lot of people out there that don’t use TikTok. If you choose to cross-promote your merchandise across all of your platforms out there, then you give it a good chance to do really well.
Final Thoughts
So, there you have it; everything you need to know about how TikTok influencers make money, and how you can potentially make money on TikTok as well. Remember, it’s not easy and there will be a lot of times where you struggle to attract the right audience to your content so that you can begin to grow a real community around your profile.
Just remember that those TikTok influencers that you look up to who make a lot of money have been at it for a while now, and have put a lot of work into getting to where they are. This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, it is just going to take a little while. Good luck!
