How To Make Money Online as a Social Media Influencer

Table of Contents

Introduction.

Trust is not something people easily give out, this is why politicians and governments of nations work hard to earn the trust of citizens in their respective nations.

The same applies to the digital economy, not everyone is willing to give you their trust, till you are deemed worthy to earn it.

This has given birth to a new wave of internet influencers. The global influencer marketing market size has more than doubled since 2019.

In 2021, the market was valued at a record 13.8 billion USD. On a global level. When it comes to internet marketing, brands willingly go for a more predictive form of marketing such as, paid searches, email marketing, and search engine optimization.

But, there’s an even better way to help grow a client’s customer base. And that’s through social media influencing.

Social media influencers are people who have large audiences as their followers on social media channels and have built a reputation for their knowledge and expertise on a particular topic.

They can reach large audiences on social media platforms which become loyal followers of these influencers and are more willing to follow through when these influencers put something out.

I wrote a comprehensive guide on how you can become a successful social media influencer. Check out the link to the article to learn more.

How To Become a Social Media Influencer and Make Money

Who is a Social Media Influencer?

A social media influencer is someone or a group of people who have established credibility in a specific niche or industry have access to a huge audience and can persuade others to act based on their recommendations.

Why Should I Become a Social Media Influencer?

Influencer marketing is one of the best ways for brands and businesses to raise awareness. In a rowdy digital world, trust needs to be built and becoming a social media influencer is a way to build an audience while establishing trust also.

According to Forbes, influencer marketing is growing faster than digital ads, with emphasis placed on leveraging industry leaders’ followers to foster growth in your own business. If you seek out means of making money online, becoming an influencer is one way to go about it.

The beauty of influencer marketing is that the audience is already there, all you need to do is establish credibility with your audience. Here is why you should become a social media influencer.

1. Becoming a social media influencer helps you build trust.

Becoming a social media influencer means you know about a particular topic which will automatically translate into trust.

Influencers have built relationships, trust, and credibility with their fans. People respect their content and recommendations. This is why brands tend to trust them and prefer to do business with them.

2. Social Media influencing Helps you Improve Brand Awareness for businesses.

Brands constantly seek out avenues to reach out to their audience, and one avenue in which this can be done is via influencer marketing.

As an Influencer marketer, brands reach out to you to help them expand their reach and positioning online.

The key to maximizing influencer strategy is ensuring that you’re providing valuable content that adds to their social media presence also, ensuring value on both sides.

3. Becoming a social media Influencer Enriches Your Content Strategy.

Sharing helpful content helps fill in the gaps in your content schedule. This works well in situations where you’ve run out of content ideas or simply need some quality content to publish on your social pages.

4. Becoming a social media Influencer helps you Reach Your Target Audience.

Building an audience is a important as social media influencer because it helps you reach out to a target audience, via regular content creation.

5. Becoming a social media influencer allows you to be Flexible.

When becoming an influencer, enables you not to be bound by a full-time job or a fixed location.

The flexibility also lies in the topics that you can explore be it travel, fashion, or even beauty. You get to decide your working hours and how much you work as well.

The job also gives you the flexibility to travel as you just need a smartphone, laptop, and a good internet connection.

6. Becoming a social media influencer allows you to build an online community.

When you become an influencer, you create a community of like-minded people. All of your followers usually have a common interest in the niche in which you create content.

You not only create this community but even engage with it regularly. This can further help you monetize your community using ads, paid partnerships and affiliate marketing.

7. Receive free products and get invited to events for free.

When you become a well-known influencer, dozens of brands will want you to experience their product before telling your audience about it.

No one can deny that being sent products from companies and being invited to exclusive events is cool.

Many brands send influencers products hoping that they will like them and promote them to their followers.

Brands will also invite influencers to different events so that they can post about them and help them reach their target audience that way. An influencer can find themselves at some pretty amazing and unique events as they grow.

How Do I Make Money Online as a Social Media Influencer?

Since its inception of social media influencing, the number of brand-sponsored influencer posts on Instagram has grown considerably from 1.26 million in 2016 to a whopping 6.12 million in 2020.

Instagram influencers can have a significant impact on brand outreach considering influencers garner more social engagement than the advertising brand’s account.

Influencers aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Influencer marketing continues to grow in its popularity.

Being an influencer is not all just a glamorous lifestyle and posting a picture to Instagram now and then. It takes hard work, dedication, and some thick skin. Do you want to make money online as an influencer? Here is how it can be done.

1. Build an audience.

Followers aside, social media influencers are valuable to brands because they are authoritative in their niche and they have built trust with their respective audiences.

Hence, to become a successful influencer and stand out from the crowd, you have to establish yourself in a specific niche or industry.

Building an audience is one thing that everyone should take note of and picking a niche is just the right way to start.

Also, you should decide on a primary social media channel to focus on to concentrate your content creation efforts. You can decide to choose from YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or even TikTok.

I wrote a comprehensive guide on how to choose the best digital marketing strategy for your business. Check out the link to the article to learn more.

2. Affiliate Marketing.

Affiliate marketing is one business that can give you financial independence; you don’t need startup capital to start an affiliate marketing business.

All you will ever need is an audience, a smartphone, Laptop, and an internet connection; most people already have this.

Affiliate marketing helps you build a relationship with both known and unknown audiences.

To get started with affiliate marketing, you need to find the right affiliate programs, set up a webpage, and figure out how to get traffic and sell that service.

I always say to my audience, “everyone is a salesman, but most don’t know about this reality”.

I wrote a comprehensive guide on how to get started with affiliate marketing; I also recommend you read it.

How To Start an Affiliate Marketing Business And Make Money

3. Start Freelancing.

Freelancers are individuals hired by other companies or individuals who work to use their skills on a short-term basis. Still, they do not have the same level of commitment or receive equal pay to any particular company, though they also get paid.

Freelancing gives you freedom from working under conditions that do not suit you.

It provides a lot of flexibility and control to the individual. You get to choose your hours, who you work with and what kind of work you intend.

Freelancing can also be called entrepreneurship, which means freelancer has total control of their earning potential.

They are not locked to a salary and have the power to earn as much as they possibly can.

However, you do not need startup capital to kickstart a career as a freelance; all you need is well-sharpened skills in a well-targeted industry.

I wrote a comprehensive guide on getting started as a freelancer without any hassle.

How To Become A Freelancer And Make Money

4. Start your Podcast.

Do you want to inspire people with your voice? Then, you can start your podcasts for free and reach out to millions of listeners worldwide.

Like blogs and social media, podcasts are becoming the norm for how people share their thoughts with the world, with the episodic audio series continuing to gain traction with listeners seeking both entertainment value and educational dialogue.

One good thing about starting your podcast is that you get to feature on any platform such as Spotify, Google Podcasts and many more, which increases your reach. As a result, a podcast can be grown to a vast listening audience and be monetized at no cost to you.

All that is required to start your podcast is an interest in an inspiring topic that an audience would love to listen to, a smartphone, Laptop, Mic and ready-made cloud-hosting podcast platforms such as Podbean and many others.

I wrote a comprehensive guide on this blog on becoming a profitable podcaster; click the link below to get started.

How To Start a Podcast and Make Money

5. Offer Online consultations.

Starting an online consultation business is becoming attractive. It’s quick and requires little resources, so many people do it as a side hustle or a full-time job.

Many people need help in one area or the other in their lives and constantly seek out experts to help them do so. These areas include; dating, health, real estate, marketing, legal and many others.

You don’t need an office space to start consulting; once you can prove that you know your guns so well, you can get yourself out there using various digital media such as social media, Youtube, Blogging, and clients will come looking for you.

Building a clientele will not happen overnight but will start to come alive as soon as your audience sees value in your content. Most people even grow an audience and become social media influencers.

6. Create and sell E-Book.

The Internet has revolutionised the printing press into softcopies that can only be read by people with smart devices such as computers and smartphones; this led to the birth of what we now call eBooks.

Everyone has areas of knowledge that can help you create eBooks. In addition, there are people out there who adore your expertise and want to learn more.

One way to reach out to them is by putting out your knowledge in an eBook that can be distributed.

To begin with, you need to create your eBook on a topic that would help your target audience. That way, you have a ready-market waiting before you start to form. This is where research is paramount.

It would also help to keep in mind that prospective buyers will judge your eBook by its cover. So make sure to create an eye-captivating book cover that suggests professionalism and gives customers a sense that work has gone into the product.

To the very last, correctly formatting your digital product is vital for selling eBooks online. For Amazon Kindle, the file format is MOBI. For other readers, the universal eBook format is ePub.

Finally, you have crafted that amazing eBook, and it’s time to tell the world about your new eBook. You have to have a mind-grabbing marketing strategy to attract buyers from all over the world.

I wrote a comprehensive guide on creating your eBook and making money; click the link below to get started.

How To Write an E-Book and Make Money

7. Create and sell your course.

We live in a knowledge-driven economy worldwide; tertiary education is no longer enough to drive the growth of the global economy anymore.

To become a global attraction, you need to learn and unlearn as quickly as possible, which is only possible with e-learning.

E-learning has aided skills transfer in most third-world countries with weak educational infrastructure.

To boost your morale as to how viable this market is, do you know that The e-learning market is expected to be worth $325 billion by 2025 and Digital education had more than $46 billion in sales in 2018?

I wrote a comprehensive guide on how to get started with creating your online course; click the link below to get started.