This guide is made for people who are looking to make a profitable business on social media platforms.

The guidelines detailed in here are based on the best practices to create and consistently grow on any online business. We frequently update this article in order to give you the latest information on how to achieve a profitable social media brand.

There are an almost unlimited amount of topics you can monetize on social platforms from quality pictures and amazing video content to sales websites, podcasts, articles, online shops and referral sales, among many others.

In this guide we give you proven ways to get started on a successful and profitable social profile that does not depend on blind luck or overnight success.

Sounds amazing? It is, lets get started!

1. Creating your brand

Get serious about your personal brand.

It will help your followers identify you among hundreds of followed content creators.

• Use a really good picture of yourself or of the topic you are creating content on. You can also design a nice logo that will look good in the small space you get among channel listing menus.
• Invest on a good camera. Surprisingly some smartphones come with killer cameras to get started. The clue on taking a good picture is in great part the lightning you use and the general setup. No super powerful mirror-less or DSLR will do the trick if you take a selfie in your closet.
• Almost all channel profile pages have a wallpaper. Try rather a larger version of your logo, a nice scenario of where you record stuff, a simple abstract pattern wallpaper or something that will not take too much attention from your content.

2. Share quality content

Any kind of content can result in a successful monetization channel. The details on how to monetize each kind varies on the target audience but the methods are the same, here we cover the most popular ones.

The key to create a profitable account on social media depends on attracting the right audience.

There are a few proven ways to achieve this:

• Posting content that people genuinely likes staring at for more than a second.
• Using post descriptions that are actually engaging, thus increasing the chances on people clicking on links.
• Interacting with the people that comment and like your content.
• Being natural on your comments and general posting vibe. No one likes talking to a bot.

On the other side of the coin, there are proven ways to lose audience or have a dead audience (lots of followers, but close to no interaction with your content):

• Posting content just to keep your account active and asking for stuff on your descriptions.
• Engage your audience in a negative way (arguing about something on comments or direct messages, remember that screenshots are a thing).
• Comment and like positive comments the first hour or two after you post. This boosts positive behavior from your audience and they feel you actually care instead of post and forget.
• Do your best to not engage on direct messaging. More often than not people will want your full attention and get angry when they don’t, slowly killing your general audience vibe.

Following this guidelines you will be on your way on creating a qualified audience for monetization on content that they do like and might be willing to spend on for special/private versions of it.

3. Monetize your followers

So now that we have a qualified and engaging audience, we can think about monetizing content and make a living out of it.

There are some ways to monetize your followers:

• Directly selling them exclusive content that you know they love.
• Asking for donations and giving exclusive content to your donors in a pretty constant rhythm.
• Directing your audience to click on referral links which earn you a commission on successful sales.
• Sponsorship for product placement and mentions that must merge seamlessly with your content without disrupting your audience.
• A traditional online store with physical and digital goods.

All these methods depend completely on your effort to constantly improving quality and engagement.

However, quality and engagement can only get you so far. For constant, predictable and increasing profit margins you need data and guidelines to know what is consumed where, when does your audience check on your content and what countries like different things, among many other data bits that you need to have in order to be demonstrably successful.

Why all this? Because success is a constant ladder, without guidelines based on valid data you are betting on blind luck.

4. Increase your profit margins

You will need a combination of tools and techniques that will yield invaluable insights on the experience your audience performs on your content.

This tools can be easily categorized as the following:

Link shortening, to get link activity data

• Bitly
• Tageri
• TinyURL
• Bl.ink
• Zapier

Website activity tracking, to get visitor feedback

• Google Analytics
• Tageri
• CrazyEgg

Platform specifics

• Each platform features a limited set of data you can also use, this is ideal for fine tuning your content on those specific accounts.

Once you have this tools set up and make use of them, you will see a lot of data that will solve the key aspects that define current and possible monetization patterns for your content:

• The best time to post and interact with your audience.
• What countries consume your content the most.
• What platforms yield the best results with the same effort and content.
• The amount of activity your content has overall. This is specially useful for measuring how well your business model works when you are hands off and works on its own.

From here, the only way is up! With due diligence and dedication you can consistently increase your profit margins on monetized content in a predictable way.

A few tips on how to use this data

1. Check if your content is being consumed on countries that you didn’t expected. Maybe you can translate for their language and even create new content celebrating something specifically for them, like an independence day or any important date.
2. Get to know what devices people use most frequently. This helps you design your layouts and sizes that are tailored specially for their experience in those devices.
3. When working with a website, check out the screen widths that people have on your website, most often than not some elements might not render exactly as you expect on those particular screens and small adjustments can make the difference between a normal site and a great web experience that can create an income.
4. Take note of the times where your content is mostly accessed on. That is the key time where you should post updates and new content while also interacting with your audience. This gives you a good schedule that your audience gets used to and frees your time to work on the quality of your next release.
5. Use link shortening and website tracking in tandem to have a real insight on how identical content performs in different platforms, for this we created a tutorial here.

And that’s it! You don’t need luck, all you need is good data.

5. Get sponsored

The main aspect that serious brands look for in sponsoring influential social profiles is the commitment from the owner to its content delivery.

A brand needs to know how engaging your follower base is, how responsive they are to what you present on your channel and most importantly, how serious are you about creating a business around it.

For this, you need to have and use precise tracking data on your published resources on all of your corresponding channels and profiles, including how well you exploit your profile’s real estate.

If you followed the previous steps, you should already be at this point.

Getting sponsored comes in three ways

• Approaching the brands yourself. Creating an initial contact knowing that you have all the data that will back up a potential commercial relationship.
• Getting referred by other influential channels. Appearing on content from other successful social media profiles can hugely boost the chances of getting approached by sponsors.
• Have the brands approach you directly. On all your content, you need to specify a clear way to contact you for business inquiries only. This is traditionally done by posting an email address exclusively for this purpose.

Once you have successfully closed deals with sponsors, they will traditionally request you to advertise their products or services in a way that your followers will actually pay attention to it.

6. Merging sponsors with your content

Your followers will naturally reject any kind of sponsored content if its presented in an invasive way.

For this purpose, there are best practices on how to merge it with your content in a way that your audience will happily look at it while still enjoying the content quality they expect from you.

Content merging techniques for video & audio

• Sponsor isolation: Be clear about telling them who is sponsoring that video, be thankful to your sponsor and present the product or service in the best quality you can create. Future sponsors will judge this heavily for their next deal.
• Product placement: While designing and producing your content, think of clever ways to show sponsored products and services in a seamless way with your usual content structure and quality.

Content merging techniques for photography

• Product focus: Show clearly the product in your pictures while stating in the description the sponsor and the product itself. Traditionally you will post a link to the online store to get it (which you need to track to show the sponsor your effectiveness). Be sure it does not spoil your usual content in any way or take too much of your picture’s real estate.
• Product placement: While planning your usual setup for taking a nice picture, find a smart way to place the product that can seamlessly take the place of the things that form your usual content. The perfect placement is when no one can tell its a sponsored item unless you state so in your description.

The better you get at perfecting this skills, the more sponsors will find their way to you in order to have their products and services advertised on quality content.

7. Handle sponsored products professionally

For all of this to happen, you need a foolproof model on how to receive, manage and return all the sponsored products that you get a deal on.

Most companies will reuse a certain amount of their product stock for sponsored appearances across a limited time span.

Don’t ever take a given product to keep as part of the deal, unless stated otherwise by the corresponding company.

By default, handle all this products as if they would be sold to the general public afterwards.

A sponsor will hugely value someone that can present their product in a professional manner and return it in perfect conditions.

This will prompt them to send you brand new products instead of already-reviewed stock that might not look up to the quality of your content.

Wrapping it up

By now, you should be on your way to create a profitable business around your social media accounts as well as creating quality and engaging content that will prompt sponsors to approach you naturally.

Feel free to come back to this guide as many times as you want until you reach the success that you want.

Are you ready for the next step?

Have any comments or questions about this article?

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