In 2023, it’s estimated that Charli D’Amelio earned $23.5 million on TikTok, showcasing campaigns with Garnier and starting her own shoe line. As the highest earner, D’Amelio is one of the millions of people earning money from a TikTok following.
But you don’t need millions of followers to earn money from TikTok. In fact, even creators with thousands and even hundreds of followers can earn on TikTok.
In this article, we’ll tell you how. We’ll guide you through 14 proven strategies and teach you how to make money on TikTok. Several of these are built into the TikTok platform and TikTok LIVE. But most of them require thinking more holistically about your digital business and mixing TikTok with other platforms.
Here’s our guide.
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How to monetize TikTok
How many followers do you need to make money on TikTok?
For TikTok’s LIVE subscription and gifts programs, you’ll need 1,000 followers to start making money. For TikTok’s creator fund, you need 10,000 followers–however, the fund is currently suspended.
You can always sell things in a TikTok shop, regardless of followers. And there are lots of ways to make money from TikTok without huge numbers of followers, we’ll cover these below.
How to make money on TikTok (native methods)
Methods that use TikTok’s built-in monetization
We’ll start with the few options that TikTok has built in. But we need to say upfront, these are limited. And most of them require some SERIOUS traffic to have a hope of earning anything from them. Let’s look at them in order.
1. Shop
TikTok Shop is a cool way for people with products and services to earn directly on the platform. It offers a direct e-commerce platform built into TikTok, with social selling. With this feature, TikTok is matching Facebook’s ability to add a Shop to a page. If you have a brand already or you’re open to starting one, this is probably the best way to make money directly from TikTok’s monetization features.
TikTok reports that.
- 3 in 4 users will consider buying things they see on TikTok, while 83% say TikTok influences their purchasing decisions.
- 70% of TikTok users discover new brands on the platform.
By building in live shopping features, TikTok takes advantage of this direct line it has to consumers.
You can use TikTok for:
- Going live to promote products with real-time sales, demos, and instant purchases.
- Create product links directly from videos.
- Build a shop page with a product catalogue and a storefront on your profile.
- Connecting to affiliates, other creators who can sell your stuff for a commission.
- Link to third-party sales platforms and services.
TikTok has a bunch of success stories on its website, like Soo Slick, which generated over $1 million in creator affiliate sales and $50,000 from a single video.
If you have your own products, TikTok Shop is a great place to sell. And even if you don’t, you can still monetize with TikTok Shop.
If you don’t already have a product, here are a two ideas to get started that are pretty simple:
- Build a physical product using a white-label or instant print solution. For example, a website like Printify will help you dropship merch, while it handles the shipping and fulfillment. They also make it piecemeal–no need to bulk order.
- Use your shop for affiliate selling. Even if you don’t make things, can you find products to showcase that other people make? (Make sure to check the fine print of your affiliate contract closely to ensure that this is allowed).
2. LIVE Gifts
TikTok’s LIVE gifts is a monetization method that comes from real-time viewer appreciation. Gifts come in the form of Diamonds, which can be turned into cash. Okay so far?
To use the Diamonds program, creators must be 18 years or older (in most countries), have at least 1,000 followers, be in good standing, and live in a country where LIVE gifts are available.
Basically, when someone is doing a TikTok live stream viewers can send gifts–which pop up on screen during the stream. These gifts go into your Diamond earnings, which are direct reward currency. These diamonds are convertible to cash in your home currency.
Let’s be honest here, unless you have monster Diamonds, we’re talking about pennies here. The average Diamond is worth $0 .005, or half a cent. 1,000 diamonds is worth about $5.
3. LIVE Subscriptions
TikTok also offers a LIVE subscription program that works a bit like a Twitch subscription. You can attach charges for subscribers and offer them livestreams, dedicated chats, subscriber badges, and premium emojis and content. The subscription experience is also gamified: subscribers can evolve badges over time with milestones and support count.
To earn from live subscriptions, you need to have at least 1,000 subscribers, be 18 or older, have at least 30 minutes of live time in the past 28 days, be in good standing, and have LIVE enabled. And for a time it was invite only, meaning most people didn’t qualify.
The payout is based on a revenue-share model. As of Sep 2024, TikTok announced that they would be rolling out the LIVE subscription program to a broader range of users, including non-streaming users.
We’ll see how this shakes out in the year to come.
4. Creator Rewards Program
CURRENTLY SUSPENDED
TikTok had started a $2 billion creator fund to help content creators make money, which was a big part of how they claimed they were giving back to creators.
Key requirements included:
- Being based in the UK, US, Germany, France, Spain, or Italy
- Being at least 18 years old
- Having 10,000+ followers
- Having 100,000+ video views in the last 30 days
- Follow TikTok community guidelines
Unfortunately, this program is suspended as of writing. It’s not clear why it was suspended, but there was serious concern about how badly the program was compensating brands. Major creators complained about their earnings–including Hank Green, who reported earning 2.5 cents per 1,000 views.
If the program comes back, it would have to be a better payout model to be a viable way to earn much from TikTok.
How to make money on TikTok (non-native methods)
TikTok’s native monetization options leave a lot of creators out in the cold. Between low payouts, high restrictions, and constantly changing programs and requirements, monetizing TikTok using its built-in monetization seems like a struggle.
But you don’t need TikTok’s approval to build a digital business off of your following. Here are some of the ways you can monetize TikTok on your own.
5. Brand Collabs
Average earning potential: $25-$125 per post
69% of people trust a recommendation from a friend, family, or… an influencer. Influencers are in high-demand for the trust and authenticity they’ve built with their audience.
So if you have a TikTok following, building some influencer brand collabs might make sense. Remember, the key word here is trust: you want to find brands you actually believe in and that will actually help your audience.
Here are two easy ways to get started building brand collabs:
- Approach brands: You can create a media kit with your engagement rates, demographics, content style and niche, as well as some typical posts. You can even approach brands directly if you like. Most major brands have influencer guides and sometimes even direct influencer managers. Search for [BRAND + Influencer Program] in Google. But smaller brands can work too! Even without a program, you can negotiate your own influencer fee with anyone who’s interested.
- Wait for them to come to you: As you grow, there’s a good chance brands in your niche will approach you too (make sure they have a clear way to contact you!).
- Join an influencer platform: This makes becoming an influencer a bit easier, since these platforms navigate the brand/influencer relationship for you. IZEA, Aspire, or CreatorIQ are all examples of platforms that do this.
How much TikTok influencers earn (by follower count)
Here are some general guidelines for how much you can earn on TikTok as an influencer (data from Shopify).
6. Memberships
Average earning potential: 1,000 members x $48/mo = $48,000/mo
TikTok’s built-in subscription and membership options are pretty weak. Even if you qualify, you have to do a rev share with TikTok. But you don’t need to build your subscription or membership on TikTok. It’s actually really easy to use a third-party platform for memberships.
There are some huge advantages to building an off-TikTok membership:
- More flexibility in what you actually offer, with better perks like full member platform, conversations, gamification, live events, and easy to build premium content.
- Build multiple membership tiers and groups.
- You own your member base (especially if you connect it to email). This reduces your reliance on TikTok for your business. If something were to happen to your channel, you wouldn’t lose the membership.
- You can streamline members from other platforms. If you’re active on YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, etc., your members can all come to one place that you own–instead of a social media platform.
Here are some of the things you can build into your subscription or membership to create a great experience for your members:
- Premium content: like fresh takes, bonus cuts, outtakes, behind the scenes footage.
- Educational opportunities: We’ll go deeper below, but you can add courses and live teaching.
- Virtual events: This could be simple things like hangouts or drop-ins, or you might go further and host a mastermind group. We also love conferences or workshops. We’ll cover this in more detail below too.
The price a member pays in a Mighty Network is $48/mo, so it’s an awesome way to earn from your TikTok following.
7. Virtual Events
Average earning potential: 100 members x $44/mo = $4,400/mo
You can easily spin a TikTok following into a premium event. This could be a paid livestream–it’s easy to charge for a livestream on a dedicated platform. But you can also create different kinds of events: conferences, panels, workshops, etc.
Eventbrite reports that the average price of a virtual event is about $44. With those kinds of ticket prices, even getting 20 people into a virtual workshop could be a great side hustle.
Here are some virtual events you can try.
- Livestreams: Obviously TikTok followers my already be used to a paid livestream, so hosting one in your own ecosystem can make sense. You can charge for an individual livestream if you like. But we more often see people building memberships and livestreaming to their members.
- A workshop or mastermind: If you have something to teach or share with your audience, a workshop or mastermind can be a really natural flow for monetizing an event. A workshop might be a 1-time or recurring event that walks people through learning something. A mastermind group, by contrast, builds relationships between members as they work through something together over time. You’re the facilitator in this model, not the teacher.
- A virtual conference: Virtual conferences take a lot of work, but they are really cool. And if you can offer a ton of value with guest speakers, panels, etc., you can raise the price well beyond $44. In fact, most people will pay hundreds of dollars for a good virtual conference.
You can run an event as a stand-alone thing, or else mix it with memberships, courses, etc.
8. Live Conferences
Average earning potential: 50 members x $1,000/ticket = $50,000
A live conference can be a seriously big undertaking, costing anywhere from $15,000 to $500,000 to host. But with that comes an enormous upside–the Global Conference Alliance estimates that the average business conference costs between $500 and $2,000 per ticket.
If you’ve got a big enough following to justify a live conference or high-ticket event, the numbers might be pretty tempting. And you could also collab with other creators in your niche to make this happen.
It doesn’t have to be a “serious” live event either. You could also consider fun excursions or meet-ups in cool places.
9. Courses
Average earning potential: 100 students x $270/course = $27,000
Online courses are projected to be a $69 billion market by 2028 with almost 1 billion people taking them. Online learning is here to stay. So offering a premium course to monetize your TikTok following makes a lot of sense.
And for some TikTokers, there’s a really natural progression between building trust and teaching.
You’ll need either a dedicated course platform or a membership platform with courses built in. Here are some of the things to think about.
- Will you teach live or pre-record your course? A live course gives you the advantage of pre-selling. This means you can sell tickets before you deliver. If there’s not enough interest, it’s easy to pivot to something else. However, a pre-recorded course does let you focus more on getting the material right. There are pros and cons to each, you need to figure out which is best for your style. Or, teach live and sell the recording after!
- What kind of transformation do you offer? People don’t take courses for info. They take courses for transformation. Figure out what your Ideal Student needs to get a transformation they care about, and give it to them.
- How much will you charge? The $270 mark is a good baseline for an online course, but this can depend on the course itself. And if you bundle courses with events, experiences, or coaching, you can charge more too.
10. Coaching
10 students x $7,100 = $7,100/mo
TikTok can be a great place to establish yourself as a coach. It builds your reputation and familiarity. And we often see coaches build a presence on social media, then monetize their coaching with direct services!
There are two standard approaches to structuring a coaching business:
- 1:1 coaching lets you work directly with clients. Because it’s a premium, high-ticket offer, 1:1 coaching lets you charge a lot–we built the estimate above off of an average 6-month coaching package. However, it’s not scalable. There are only so many hours in a day to coach 1:1.
- Group coaching lets you coach groups of clients. Each individual client gets less focused attention, but they can learn from each other. This makes the business more scalable. You may decide to charge less for group coaching, making it a more accessible price point.
11. Products
1,000 Products x $35 = $35,000
We sort of covered this above, but creating a product on TikTok can be bigger than just using TikTok’s store. You could build an entire brand off of a large social media following. And if you’re building your own brand, it’s not a good strategy to rely entirely on TikTok for it. You should think bigger, and plan to build an email list and storefront. That way, even if TikTok went away tomorrow, your business wouldn’t.
In this case, use your TikTok following to drive traffic to a brand website. For example, you could build a Shopify store and host your own products–building your own business around your following.
Of course, if you get big enough, you can also team up with existing brands to release your own products. This tried and true practice has been showcased by celebrities like Kylie Jenner and Paris Hilton–who teamed up with Absolute to create a cocktail in her name. While this is made popular by celebrities, there are a lot of branded products created by less-known creators who are rock stars in their niche. For example, the DIY brand Chris Loves Julia has partnered with Home Depot for products. So if you get big enough, it’s definitely worth exploring.
12. Affiliates
1,000 Sales x $19.80 = $19,800/mo
While affiliate sales are similar to influencer marketing, they’re not completely the same. Unlike sponsored posts and brand collabs which are usually negotiated beforehand, affiliates use a tracking link and pay you a set price or amount for each sale.
This makes affiliate programs a bit more “self-serve.” You don’t need to wait for a brand’s permission to get started (although you do have to join, and sometimes apply). Many affiliate programs are also run on a central network, meaning you can join an affiliate marketplace like impact.io and get access to thousands of brands at once. There’s also Amazon’s affiliate program, which gives you thousands of products with one affiliate program.
Before sharing affiliate content:
- Make sure you understand the rules around sharing the program and links–each program has its own.
- Make sure you understand the affiliate payout structure and what is actually compensated (e.g. clicks, purchases, etc.).
- Make sure the affiliate fits with your brand. Like influencer marketing, you hurt your following by trying to push programs that aren’t a fit.
13. Services
For service providers, TikTok offers a medium to grow your own service business. For example, if you talk about digital marketing, you could get digital marketing clients directly from TikTok. If you talk about branding, you could get branding clients. If you’re an accountant who talks about taxes, you might get tax clients.
It’s impossible to establish a pay range for service-based businesses on TikTok, but we’re betting the numbers can be huge.
14. Flipping Channels
A final way to earn money from TikTok is to build and flip channels, selling them to buyers. This requires building a channel, growing the subscriber base, then turning it over to someone else. Sites like Flippa and Fameswap specialize in selling established TikTok channels, and you can browse prices there.
Conclusion
Hopefully this guide has given you the know-how to monetize TikTok. Remember that many of these strategies can be mixed and matched, so find a combination that works for your brand.
If you want to monetize TikTok with a membership, courses, or events, come build on Mighty! Mighty is the platform with the most $1 million communities, and it’s trusted by brands and figures like Tony Robbins, Mel Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuck, Marie Forleo, and Matthew Hussey.
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