5 Tested Ways to Make Money on TikTok (And Grow Your Following)

By Rita Cunha

TikTok is famous for being a fun and addicting social media platform, but did you know it can also be lucrative? In this article, we guide you through the top five ways to make money on TikTok. If you play your cards right and don’t miss this opportunity, you could earn quite a bit of cash.

How Can You Make Money on TikTok?

Not many TikTok users know how to make money from the videos posted on their profiles. Sure enough, TikTok is very different from other platforms like Instagram and YouTube, but there’s always a way—five ways, in fact.

Influencer Marketing

If you have a successful TikTok account, you can do sponsored posts and brand partnerships. This type of marketing isn’t just for Instagram influencers and creators with a YouTube channel.

Companies will pay you to promote their products on your page. It is up to you to set your own price, but $0.01 to $0.02 per video view seems to be common. This is how a lot of the top TikTok influencers make their income.

You might have seen successful influencer campaigns on your “For You” page before. In 2019 and 2020, two major influencer agency campaigns were for a cold medicine around flu season and an energy drink. You can imagine just how much the brands paid influencers.

Referral and Affiliate Marketing

You can be more than a TikTok influencer. Referral and affiliate marketing is another good way of making money.

Choose a product you love, talk about it, and record a video. Put your own spin on it. Then, join an affiliate network to create your very own unique, personalized links. Add links to the product in the TikTok video description or on your bio. When a TikTok user clicks that link and buys the item you make money.

Swagbucks is an app that lets you save money and earn money from your phone. It has a great referral policy, so whenever someone joins the app, you both get some cash. Why not get started monetizing your work with this opportunity?

Sell Your Own Products

Promoting other people’s products isn’t the only way to get paid on this social platform. Since you already create content, why not create your own line of merch? There are plenty of merch companies out there who can help you set everything up for a small fee.

A lot of TikTok creators do this once their TikTok accounts blow up. If you have an engaged following, you don’t even need to pay for TikTok ads.

Donations and Gifts from Fans

A more roundabout way to get paid is to rely on follower donations and virtual gifts. This is a feature other social media platforms don’t offer.

When you host live videos, people can send you in-app coins they bought with real money. Then, you can exchange those coins and gifts for in-app diamonds, which can be converted into money sent to your PayPal account.

Marketing Consulting

Once you become TikTok famous, you can become a professional TikTok consultant. Brands want to use the momentum from TikTok’s meteoric rise to promote their products. Thus, they’re willing to pay people like you to teach them.

You can either sell your consulting services or work as a freelancer for a brand’s marketing department. You would be in charge of growing the brand’s TikTok profile and managing campaigns. In a way, this is what marketing and influencer agencies do.

How Much Money Can You Make on TikTok?

If you use all these ways to make money, you can earn anywhere from a few thousand to a couple of million dollars. That’s not bad for making videos.

How much you end up earning depends on you. More video views and followers mean more money. Then, once you get a high enough follower count, you need to be selective about what sponsored content to do and how you negotiate your rates.

What Do You Need to Earn Money on TikTok?

There are a few requirements for making cash on TikTok.

Engaged Followers

For starters, you must have an engaged audience who regularly watches your videos.

How many followers you need doesn’t have a straight answer. There is no minimum number. Yet, brands typically work with content creators with anywhere from a hundred thousand to a million followers. Referral marketing and selling products work best with a similar follower range.

Fresh, Original Content

You can create whatever content you like, from personal finance and financial education to singing and dancing videos. What is important is that you post quality content.

Recognizable Brand

Creating content is obviously important, but so is coming up with a recognizable brand. How will your followers recognize your TikTok videos without first looking at your username? You should start working on this when you’re joining TikTok. Then, perfect your brand strategy until you’re happy with it.

3 Tips to Grow Your TikTok Following

If you want to start earning money on TikTok, you first need to get more followers and grow your TikTok account. Here is how in just a few sentences.

Know Your Audience

You can better land brand deals and sell products if you know who your audience is. Are your followers mostly millennial women or generation Zers? Where are they based? What is your content’s engagement rate, and how can you improve it?

You can find all this out on the Followers Insights page and then tailor your marketing and content strategy accordingly.

Start and Jump On Trends

The best way for TikTok creators to stand out is to make viral videos. Why not recreate a viral challenge and tag the creators? Your video may get boosted to the “For You” page and bring you a lot of new viewers. Especially if you create something fun and fresh.

Use Relevant Tags

Hashtags also help you tell the world “Hey, I’m here!” Look at what hashtags the top TikTok creators are using and create related content with those tags.

It’s also a good idea to incorporate popular sounds and songs in your TikTok videos. This way, if someone is browsing the sound’s page, they can come across your video and check out your TikTok channel.

All in all, TikTok is a fun app to use that could bring you some cash once you put in some work. It’s worth trying to monetize your videos if you have fun recording them!