How to Make Money on Social Media

Did you know that advertisers are actively looking for influential social media personalities to extend their online brands’ reach?
Did you know that the annual advertising spending on social media continues to grow by leaps and bounds?

Are you looking for a way to earn a decent monthly income without slaving away on your desk 40 hours a week and 4 weeks a month?

If you answered YES to the last question above, you definitely need to check out social media marketing. As Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest continue to grow and reach millions upon millions of consumers every single day, advertisers are scrambling to put together solid social media marketing campaigns in the Age of Mobile Media. As more and more and more consumers access Web content through smart phones and tablets, brands, both big and small, are shelling out the big bucks to get in on the action-before they are left behind.

The stakes are high and these advertisers know it.

They know that consumer tastes are changing and the old and tired ways of establishing brand credibility are on their way out.

Mobile is the way forward.

Social media is the way forward.

This is where you come into the picture. By becoming and established online ‘personality’ or ‘influence leader’ on social media platforms, you can leverage the few hours you spend online into cold hard cash in your pocket. Moreover, you don’t have to break your back just to make a few measly bucks here and there. Instead, you can have advertisers chasing you while only working a few hours daily.

In fact, if you automate your social media accounts, you can reduce your total work load to only a few hours every single week and still pull down serious cash. Here are the simple steps you need to follow to join the increasing numbers of social media influence leaders who have successfully turned their Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram accounts into bank accounts. Yes, really!

How to Make Money on Social Media – Step 1: Select your niche carefully

The first step in becoming a successful brand ambassador and influence leader on social media is niche selection. Simply put, your niche is the range of topics you talk about. All your content tend to fall within this tight range of topics.

Choose carefully because not all niches pay well. In fact, most suck.

Focus on niches that have a high cost per click rating on Google Adwords’ Keyword planner tool. Just log in to Google Adwords and look up topics you are personally interested in and excited about.

Pick the keywords with the most competition and decent cost per click pricing.

It is important that you pick topics that you’re interested in because you’ll fail if you promote niches you’re not all that excited about. Things will start to drag and your social media followers can tell. Focus on topics you’d talk about on and on-even if you weren’t getting paid to.

Filter those topics based on Cost Per Click demand and overall Adwords competition level. The higher the competition, the better.

How to Make Money on Social Media – Step 2: Specialize, specialize, specialize

At this stage, you probably have a short list of high-paying topics you’re passionate about. You must create a specific social media account for each cluster of topics.

This way, your accounts are specialized.

Why go through this hassle?

Well, if you have one account on each social media platform that tackles many different niches, your social media persona’s brand is ‘diluted.’ This means you don’t have a specific focus and you might attract a mixed crowd. Such a crowd is less attractive to potential advertisers than highly specialized and laser-targeted accounts.

Specialize by devoting one account for related clusters of topics. For example, don’t use the same Facebook fan page, Twitter account, or Pinboard for your interest in baby shoes, chihuahuas, and certain liver ailments. Create different accounts for each of these interests so your followers don’t get confused.

How to Make Money on Social Media – Step 3: Create highly personalized professional covers

Make sure your social media accounts have professional-looking covers. This signals to advertisers you are serious. This also signals to potential followers that you are serious about your interest in a particular niche. Thankfully, getting professional covers done don’t have to cost an arm and a leg. You only need to go to Fiverr to hook up with a great looking professional cover for the following social media platforms:  Google Plus, Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter, Pinterest, and Youtube.

How to Make Money on Social Media – Step 4: Follow the right people on Twitter

Using tools like Followerwonk.com’s free version, find influential people on Twitter in your niche and follow them. Make sure you use Followerwonk’s authority filter so you only filter truly influential and credible people. You’ll notice that they’ll start sending targeted content to your Twitter feed. Take note of these.

How to Make Money on Social Media – Step 5: Republish influential content

Now that you’re following influential people in the niche you’re specializing in, the next step is to NOT reinvent the wheel. What I mean is you only need to republish the stuff they are sharing. Since they are influential, the materials they share should be topnotch. When you share such materials, you also get to look like a genius in your niche. This is what I mean by not reinventing the wheel-you are simply reverse engineering the existing influential people in your niche.

Keep republishing high quality materials to fully stock your social media accounts. Get content suggestions from your Twitter feed and republish these on your FB page, Pinterest, Google Plus page, and Pinterest account.

How to Make Money on Social Media – Step 6: Jump start your appeal

Just as you probably wouldn’t want to eat at a restaurant that is empty, people who check out your accounts on the major social media platforms probably wouldn’t want to follow you. After all, who’d want to follow someone with no proven expertise or niche ‘pull.’

To solve this problem quickly instead of having to post quality content for several months, you only need to go back to Fiverr and buy social media followers. Find reliable vendors with a solid track record. Ask them to drip-feed the followers so your follower or fan growth looks natural.

How to Make Money on Social Media – Step 7: Engage influential people

Once you have decent organic and paid follower numbers, your next step is to engage influential people in your niche. Comment on their shares. Call them out. Ask questions. Get into respectful arguments. Regardless of what you do, get their attention.
Once they engage with you, share your own stuff. Maybe this is stuff posted on your FB Fan Page’s wall or a tweet. It doesn’t matter. The key is to get them to take notice and share your links on their accounts. The more you get them to share the wider your influence in your niche becomes.

Why does engagement work? They lend their credibility to your brand on the social media platforms you’re on. The more they retweet you or share your name, the more authoritative and respectable and familiar you become to people in your niche.

How to Make Money on Social Media – Step 8: Get interviewed

If you’ve been sharing niche content for a while, you’d notice that some of these content pieces are interviews of influential people in your niche. Contact the bloggers or site owners behind these interviews and ask to be interviewed. The more interviews you get, the more credible you become in your niche.

How to Make Money on Social Media – Step 9: Contribute authority or expert content

After a few weeks or months reading and sharing authoritative content in your niche, you should have enough information as to what the hot topics in your niche are. Contact the big blogs or sites in your niche which take guest posts. Ask them if they’d like to publish your article on the hottest topics in your niche.

The key here is not so much to build backlinks to your blog or site (although that would be nice!) Your focus should be to get as many sites to publish the unique articles you’re contributing because you’re an ‘expert.’ The name of the game is to get published…a lot!

How to Make Money on Social Media – Step 10: Grow your following organically

After the initial ‘jump start’ of the fake followers you bought, the next step is to grow your followers organically. These are real followers and they will only follow you if you share high quality original content in your niche. Keep producing high quality materials and you wouldn’t have to worry about growing your following.

The higher the quality of the materials you post and share, the more authority blogs will link to you and drive even more of their traffic to you. Your following should keep growing and growing.

How to Make Money on Social Media – Step 11: Get advertisers by producing a winning media kit

If you did all the steps above correctly and you have a decent amount of followers (maybe several dozen thousand-depending on your niche), the next step is to get advertisers.

Finding advertisers is easy. Look at blogs that focus on your niche and look at who advertises at these sites. Also, do a search on Google for your target terms and keywords and see which ads show up. Click through and get the contact information of these advertisers.

Notify them that you are one of the most well-known social media influence leaders in your niche. To back up your claims, you need to show a list of published guest blog posts, mentions from well-known social media personalities, and other indicators of influence.

If you play your cards right, you should get some premium advertisers signing on because you have credibility in your niche. They are more likely to pay more than if you were to simply join a social media advertising platform. This is because you are targeting and cherry picking niche advertisers who are very interested in the specific pool of traffic you have.

Follow the steps above to turn your spare time on social media into not just spare cash but a solid passive income!