You’ve seen the ads. You’ve watched the vids telling you how to make 6 figures a month with your social media following.
And if you’ve tried it, you’ve realized that 1. Everyone is doing the same stuff, and 2. The people making the most money seem to be the ones telling people how to make money. In fact, a recent study found that only 12% of full-time creators make more than $50,000/year.
If you want to monetize social media, you'll need to rise above the noise and shiny objects to build a real, sustainable digital business.
This article is a no-nonsense guide to monetizing your social media following.
Whether you're a part-time creator looking for side-hustle money or you're ready to grow your digital empire, these options will help you think differently about earning.
We'll cover:
- How to choose a monetization model
- 15 realistic ways to monetize your social media
For each of the monetization methods, we'll show you what you'll need to become a six-figure creator.
In other words, We'll talk about how to earn $100,000/yr from your social media following. And, of course, most of these monetization methods aren't mutually exclusive. You can try more than one.
Try the platform with the most $1 million communities.
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What makes content monetization work?
Monetization is really pretty simple. Earning money from a social media following is always done because of the attention you generate from followers or readers.
Then, social media monetization works based on who pays you for your audience's attention.
- Advertisers pay to piggyback on your audience and reputation to sell their products (e.g. sponsorships, display ads).
- Brands give you a cut of revenue you generate for them (e.g. affiliate model).
- Your followers pay you directly for learning or access (e.g. memberships, online courses, premium content).
Each of these has pros and cons, but to monetize a social media following effectively, you have to understand who is willing to pay for the work you're doing and why.
A few years back, we did the largest study ever commissioned of creators. Here's how they were making money.
For each of these, you can see that the money is coming from different directions. But those who are creating and earning from it are benefitting from various monetization strategies.
Does audience size matter?
When people choose to monetize a social media following, there's always the same question: "Do I have enough followers?"
The answer to this depends on how you choose to monetize.
But here's something wild. An audience of 1 million and 1,000 could both earn the same amount of money, depending on the monetization strategy.
Would you believe that a 26-member community can earn the same as a YouTube channel with 2,000,000 views?
Most people are shocked by this.
But it really just speaks to different monetization strategies.
- Focused, specific attention can be monetized at a higher value (a community membership, a course, a mastermind, etc.).
- Broad attention can be monetized for less money at scale (e.g. YouTube ads, the TikTok creator fund, etc.).
In other words,
If you have a huge, general audience you can earn less money from higher numbers. This is the idea behind YouTube monetization. For big creators, a few pennies for every 1,000 views can add up. Here’s more information on how much money you can make per view on YouTube.
For smaller audiences, the riches are in niches. Small, niched audiences aren't lucrative for ads (not enough scale), but often are perfect for digital products, affiliate marketing, micro-influencer deals, and memberships.
If you want to go deeper on this principle, check out this video by the founder of Mighty Networks, Gina Bianchini.
The dark side of social media monetization
Most creators aren't earning much from their work. That's a sad but true fact. The New Yorker has called the creator economy "the new gig economy".
The statistics are sobering:
- 46% of full-time creators earn less than $1,000 (Linktr.ee).
- 68% of part-time creators make less than $1,000 (Linktr.ee).
- 65% of creators feel overworked and underpaid (NewCreatorManifesto).
Choosing the right method to monetize social media doesn't fix everything, but it does increase the odds of you being successful.
Which sounds more doable, getting 1,000,000 YouTube subscribers, or getting 12 people into a coaching program?
Would you believe the coaching program could actually earn you more?
Creators are being duped all the time, pouring their energy into social media monetization strategies that don't work or that are ridiculously difficult to pull off.
That's why we've called this article "realistic" ways to monetize your social media following, because we want to focus on what actually has the highest chance of working for you.
So, let's get into the best options.
15 options for social media monetization
1. Online Community
$100,000/yr = 173 members @ $48/mo
Online communities and memberships have one of the highest revenue per follower numbers--it only takes 173 members to make $100,000yr. That's because our latest data shows that the average membership site and community on Mighty charges $48/mo.
We also host more $1 million communities than any other platform. If you're doing the math, a community with 1,736 members is making $1 million/year.
Paid communities are great because they monetize work you’re already doing (creating content), give people something it’s in their nature to want (human connection and belonging), and turn it into the ultimate business model (recurring revenue).
But it's even better than this. Because paid communities generate the same growth principle that drives social media: the network effect. Basically, members of paid communities create their own conversations and content, while making friends.
While communities often work on membership models, they can also be monetized and bundled with selling courses, charging for sub-groups, or upselling into a service like coaching.
How to monetize with community
We have another article a free training video on monetizing your social media audience with community! Here's the first video in the series.
And here's a quick rundown:
- Find an Ideal Member. This is the person who needs what you have right now. Usually an Ideal Member is a person in transition.
- Plan their Best Year Ever. If your Ideal Member gets the transformation they want, where will they be a year from now?
- Build a Big Purpose. This is the formula of how you'll actually get your Ideal Member their best year ever, and it serves as a founding call for your community.
- Plan Monthly Themes. You know where you want your Ideal Member to be a year from now. Plan monthly themes to help them get there and let them feel the progress of the journey.
- Weekly Calendar. Regular, weekly community activities (e.g. posts, questions, livestreams, drop-ins, etc.) establish a habit and help you show up consistently.
You’ll need a great community platform – and no, a Facebook group doesn’t cut it. A REAL community platform lets you charge for memberships (or other things like courses), and gives you the power to create amazing experiences.
Try Mighty Networks.
It's G2's top-rated community platform. And it's designed to let you create any kind of community content and experiences you want AND to introduce members to each other.
This gives you the kind of growth you won't find anywhere else.
And if you're an established creator looking for a community or membership on a branded app, check out Mighty Pro.
2. Selling services
$100,000/yr = 32 hrs/week @ $60/hr
It's trickier to estimate this, because it depends on your rate. But a service sold at $60/hr could earn you six figures with 32 hours of work per week.
If community gives you recurring revenue and paid membership at scale, social media monetization through selling services lets you create income from a few people.
This can be a GREAT way to monetize your social media following.
Forget trying to build an income from all of your followers, and forget selling other people’s products and earning a few bucks a sale. You can use your own following to sell services. This lets you charge a premium for your work. It also helps you stand out from your competitors, and you get the fun of both building a following and also earning a great living.
We should probably point out something obvious here. Just because you sell services doesn’t mean you can’t also mix this with other things on this list.
For example, a career coach might sell a mixture of coaching, pre-made courses, and membership in a community. There are coaches making $500k a year using exactly this model.
Here are some examples of services that can be monetized from a social media following and sold to individuals:
- Consulting
- Digital Marketing Strategy
- Facebook Ad Creation
- Content Writing
- Search Engine Optimization Consulting
- Graphic Design
- Lettering
- Web Design
- App Development
- Financial Advising
The sky's the limit here. If you have a service-based business and you build a following around it, you can use that following to earn a great living.
How to monetize with services
You’ll need a way to get your offerings out to your existing audience, as well as a point of sale. This might mean using something like Stripe mixed with Calendly to create a sales process for – say – a coaching product.
Or, you might be chasing bigger fish, working as a consultant and invoicing your business clients for thousands at a time.
This is the roadmap to building a real business around your social media following, and it works!
3. Courses
$100,000/yr = 55 courses/mo @ $150
Building an online course is an awesome way to get paid to share your knowledge with the world. And, just in case you’re worried that there’s no room for you… never fear. E-learning is estimated to keep growing and hit $1 trillion in value by 2030.
One thing has changed about online courses though: delivery options. Ten years ago, people were adding an asynchronous course to a WordPress website – throwing it up and forgetting it, hoping to “earn money sleeping.”
While there’s NOTHING wrong with passive income, the world of online courses is changing. We’re seeing more and more cohort and live courses, as well as courses built in vibrant communities that give course members a big bear-hug of support for their journey.
As we said above, courses go great with some of the other options on this list (especially community) to round out your business model.
How to monetize with courses
Choose an awesome course platform (like Mighty Networks) that gives you courses and community together – trust us, there’s a powerful business here.
Some of the same principles for a great community apply to being successful with courses. Decide on your Ideal Student and your Big Purpose, identify the transformation you want to take students through, and start selling and building!
We put the guide price at $150 for the calculation above, but course prices can vary. There's a guide here on pricing an online course.
4. Mastermind Groups
$100,000/yr = 3 mastermind groups of 8 people @ $347/person/mo
Mastermind groups are a fantastic way to monetize your social media following. Unlike traditional coaching, mastermind groups are a meeting of equal-ish minds to support each other, learn, and get accountability.
Top mastermind groups charge a lot for a cultivated experience, and business owners swear by them. And they can work perfectly as a high-ticket product.
How to monetize with a mastermind group
While you should read our guide to starting a mastermind group for more details, you basically need a group of Ideal Members, maybe a mastermind platform to bring them together on and charge membership fees, and you’re ready to rock!
5. Get a job
$100,000/yr = Salary
Here’s a piece of unconventional advice. You can use your social media following to get a job. If you’re known as an expert in something and have a following, it’s possible that building your brand has made you more attractive to a future employer. Why not leverage that into a paycheck!?
The same is true if building a following is something you can do for other people. You could consider getting paid to create content and put your social media chops to work.
Not every job in marketing pays $100,000, but many do. And as you grow in your abilities and move up the career ladder, you can earn more. (And you can keep growing your channels on the side.)
6. Physical products
$100,000/yr = 2,000 products @ $50 each
Depending on what you do and what your following is about, you might have a market for physical products. Let’s imagine you’re a painter or photographer who has a following on Instagram. It stands to reason that you could create products from your work and sell them!
Heck, people are probably already asking you, “Where can I get a print?”
While there’s some overhead to get a physical product business off the ground – say getting prints made and buying shipping material, there’s no reason the cost has to be prohibitive.
Since you don’t need to pay for a storefront, any income you make after manufacturing and shipping will probably be profit. And if you have a following already, you can probably charge a premium for your work!
How to monetize with physical products
You might opt to build your own Shopify store or build a website with an e-store plugin built on. Or, you might use a pre-existing product marketplace like Etsy. Figure out how to collect from them, and then start selling!
7. Group coaching
$100,000/yr = 40 clients @ $208/mo
We touched on coaching above, but another model that works great for social media monetization is group coaching. UNLIKE a mastermind group, group coaching brings people together to learn from… YOU. And if you have a decent-sized social media following that wants to learn from you, group coaching can work really well to monetize.
You get the benefit of working with multiple members at once – that gives you scale. And your coaching clients get the benefit of working directly with you – often at a lower cost than 1:1.
Group coaching is also just a lot of fun, and unlocks the benefits of community we talked about above.
How to monetize with group coaching
Mighty Networks gives you all you need for a great group coaching platform. It lets you bring a community together and charge for it or for subgroups – that’s your group coaching fee.
Once you’ve got your group coaching program set up, you can create events (coaching sessions), live stream, and keep the conversation going with forum discussions and direct messaging.
8. Sell merch
$100,000/yr = 3,333 products @ $30 each
Merch is technically a type of physical product, but it deserves a mention here. That’s because merch is not so much about building a special product, and more about monetizing your brand.
So whether it’s a cute pair of novelty slippers with your logo on them or a coffee mug or t-shirt, finding and selling merch that fits your brand can be a great way to monetize.
How to monetize with merch
There are a couple of platforms that have merch capability built-in.
- The first is Patreon. Although it has some limitations for monetizing your audience–not least the cut they take– its merch function is pretty cool! You can add a shop with both physical products and digital bonuses to your site.
- YouTube also deserves a mention here, since they’ve created the capability to add merch to your channel.
9. Build an app
If you want to grow your ability to engage AND earn, try building an app! If you have a huge following and are known for expertise in a certain area, you might be a good person to build a software company around your following.
How to monetize with a branded app
When it comes to app monetization, some of the principles we've already covered apply. Most creators with apps monetize with community, memberships, subscriptions, courses, or events. These things add up to an awesome business model for monetizing a social media following.
If you're looking for help building your app, come build with us!
We've built branded apps for creators like Tony Robbins, Jim Kwik, Drew Binsky, and Sadie Robertson Huff.
Let us show you what we could build together!
10. Patronage
As we get to the bottom of this list, we’re hitting things that are well known – but potentially not as lucrative. This is the case with the patronage model, best known through a little site called Patreon.
Basically, Patreon gives people who believe in you the chance to support you, although it’s evolved its model to also include “perks” that you can offer to your audience… (When you’re selling perks and merch, Patreon looks a bit more like a traditional service or product business. But we digress.)
The top Patreon earners make bank. For example, the podcast True Crime Express notoriously makes around $240k monthly. But the bottom earners make pennies, or nothing, every month from their efforts. There are a lot of starving artists who joined Patreon, and are still starving.
This means that your odds of replacing your income with a Patreon account aren’t huge, and that pushes it down this list a bit.
How to monetize with patronage
We’ve got a guide for how to be successful on Patreon, which you can read.
There are also other Patreon alternatives with similar goals. But to get started, you basically choose your platform, get your account up and running, set your support levels, and tell all your followers about it! You’re off to the races.
11. Sponsored posts
Sponsored posts are one of those ways to monetize your social media followers that probably needs a large following – although even micro-influencers can earn some pocket money and free samples off of them.
Like it sounds, a sponsored post is when someone pays you to post. This might feel pretty dang good if you’ve worked hard to build a following and you’ve got a product you love and want to recommend. On the flipside, if you’re trying to push a product you don’t know or like to your audience in a desperate bid to make a few bucks, it will feel pretty gross.
Sponsored posts can net you anywhere from a few dollars to $1 million – if you have a Kardashian-level following.
How to get started with sponsored posts
There are a few different ways to approach sponsored posts. You can reach out directly to marketing departments at companies you like, some even have staff dedicated to influencer marketing.
The bigger your following gets, the higher chance these types of people will start to hit you up offering sponsored posts (but be careful, there are a lot of scammers and spammers that will reach out when you have a big following too).
There are more and more platforms popping up that help influencers and companies connect, and G2 has a list of these influencer marketing platforms.
But for beginners, sites like Creator IQ, Aspire, and IZEA are good places to start.
12. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is another way of monetizing content, but unlike sponsored posts you’re not paid for posting – you get paid when someone buys a product.
Usually, affiliate agreements will set an amount that you make per sale.
You’ll share a tracking link that tells the company who referred the sale, and you get paid!
Cha-ching!
There are a couple of downsides to monetizing with affiliate marketing.
- You need a niche that makes sense. Sharing links to “low-interest credit cards” to your audience who follows you for pet care advice is a surefire way to lose followers.
- The payout usually tracks with the value of the product. There’s a huge difference between someone buying a book with a 10% payout and someone buying a high-ticket, $3,500 course with a 10% payout. You need to figure out which products are worth your time.
But if you have an audience that fits the product and you have products that pay well and that you believe in promoting, why not!?
How to get started with affiliate marketing
Pick any brand you love and google “THAT BRAND affiliate program.” You’ll see if they have one.
You usually need to sign up for an affiliate program and get approved, probably adding some personal and tax info for the payouts.
In the past, a lot of affiliate programs were run directly by brands, but more and more are being run by centralized platforms like impact.io. This means you can sign up for multiple affiliate programs in one place, and they handle the payouts too. This is what Impact's marketplace of brands looks like.
A few affiliate platforms to get you started:
- Amazon Associates is one of the world's largest affiliate programs, and you can earn from almost anything sold on Amazon.
- Rakuten is a huge affiliate program for all sorts of products and home goods.
- Impact.io is an affiliate marketplace for a lot of digital products and brands.
By the way, if you love Mighty Networks and want to share it, we have an affiliate program too! You can find it here.
13. Premium content subscriptions
One of the ways to monetize your social media followers with content is through the use of premium or gated content. In the past, a lot of bloggers would create “members only” areas that gave people access to premium blogs. We're now seeing this more with paid newsletters, as people pay for premium subscriptions on a monthly basis.
How to get started with content subscriptions
You’ve got two options. First, if you’re on a platform that has subscriptions built-in, you can turn it on and have your subscription business up and running in no time. For example, Twitter recently launched its “Super Follow” button which lets creators with more than 10,000 subscribers sell premium subscriptions.
The other way to do it, especially if you’re on a platform that doesn’t have it built in, is to choose a software solution for your premium content subscription. Something like Substack does this for newsletters, giving you the tools you need to build a newsletter business.
We also love ConvertKit as a more powerful alternative to Substack, that gives you more flexibility and control over email subscribers, automations, and email capture.
ConvertKit also mixes with Mighty, making it easy to run an email subscription business and community together.
14. Ads
Way down here at the bottom is the social media monetization method that most people thought would be at the top: ads.
Monetizing with advertising is hit and miss, although it’s the thing most YouTube creators dream of. In reality, there are strict rules about who can monetize and you need enormous watch time to make any real money off of YouTube ads.
For example, to be approved to monetize on YouTube you need 1,000 subs, plus either 4,000 hours of watch time in the past 12 months OR 10 million Shorts views in the last 90 days.
The same thing would be true of display ads if you were directing your followers to a website that you owned. The low premium on ad time makes it unlikely to pay your bills anytime soon. But if you qualify for ads already, say on YouTube, and you’re using the monetization methods we’ve talked about above, it sure as heck doesn’t hurt to turn on the ads!
15. Mix and Match
We’ve been touching on this all the way through, but let’s be straight. You can mix and match lots of these options to create a viable business from your following!
For example, mixing courses and community are a really great way to benefit from both strategies!
This combination creates a framework that allows your members to build relationships with each other and help each other stay true to the new habits they’re developing.
These connections they make around the topics that are most important to them are what gives them the incentive to come back, and renew their subscription year after year.
Direct Monetization vs. Third-Party
The final question in all this is whether to monetize directly on a social media channel or to take your audience somewhere else. If you look at successful creators, you’ll see that they’re often doing a mix of both.
It comes down to this: if you can offer your most engaged and motivated followers the opportunity to master a topic together and to achieve results around that topic together, you can monetize your social media.
What does mastering a topic together look like? Here’s an example:
Imagine your Instagram account follows your adventures in homesteading, or living off the land growing your own food, raising your own livestock, and making your own clothes (remember, we said “imagine” here!).
You could monetize your Pinterest followers by creating a paid annual membership site where community members join and learn about sustainable living through collaborating both with you and with each other.
In the end, it’s not so much about the methods – it’s about what’s going to get your followers the transformation they want and need.
2 questions every creator needs to ask
If you’re trying to decide whether you too can monetize your social media following, ask yourself these two simple questions.
#1. Who are my most passionate followers?
Monetizing your social media followers isn’t about all of your social media followers. It’s about identifying and connecting the ones that are the most motivated today to go deeper with you and your niche.
Who are your followers who would want a deeper program you create beyond what you offer in social media for free? Furthermore, who are your followers who are most likely to want to meet each other?
Start by looking to monetize these social media followers first. They will be the easiest to reach initially and benefit the most from a paid membership or online course.
#2. What kind of results and transformation could I offer my most passionate followers with a program, online course, or annual membership?
What do your most passionate followers want to create in their own lives and how could you help them get there faster with better structure and a supportive community? For example, could you help your followers grow in their career? Get an inside track on the best beauty practices? Train for a 5K run?
Once you’ve sorted out what your most passionate followers have in common, and what kind of results they are the most motivated to get today, you can take the next step toward social media monetization.
Ready to start earning?
Here’s the thing about monetizing your social media: people will pay a premium price for results and transformation. And when you’re ready to monetize your social media followers, a Mighty Network will help you get there.
Mighty brings together community, content, courses, and commerce. And Mighty's flexible Spaces let you mix and match from a ton of the features we talked about above: live stream, host events, create courses, lead community forum discussions, message members, and more!
You can try it free for 14 days, no credit card required.