The 3 Basic Ways to Monetize Your Following as a Magician.
So you’ve got a following, maybe you’ve just hit 10k followers on TikTok (if so, congrats). I’m going to share the 3 basic ways that you can turn that following into income.
I get asked quite a lot by my ‘influencer’ friends:
“How can I make money?”
I’m going to share with you 3 basic methods to make money. I’ll cover how easy they are, how many followers you’ll need to accomplish them, and how much $ you can expect.
Monetization
This is, quite often, one of the only methods influencers I know use as a stream of income.
By monetizing your account, you’ll get paid a fee per view or by the watch time. Here are a few of the different platforms that you can be monetized on:
TikTok Creator Fund - 10k followers needed, pays around $40 per million views.
Youtube Partner Program - 1k subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time within 12 months needed, pays around $1.50 per thousand views depending on watch time.
Facebook Partner Monetization - 10k followers and 600,000 minutes of watch time needed, pays (the best) $1-3 per thousand views. It’s important to note that you would be posting 3-minute videos to Facebook rather than 15 seconds, as that is what’s prioritized. You can read more about their best practices here.
I have friends that have made hundreds of thousands of dollars from Facebook and know people that have made millions.
The TikTok creator fund is very viable, if you persevere you should be able to get 10k followers. I have had 2 videos hit over a million views on there (one before 10k and one after) and have made around $50 from the app. It’s obviously not enough to retire off of, I just wanted to test out the monetization feature. If you were posting every day, even at a small scale, I’m positive you could make enough to at least cover your rent.
Live Streams
TikTok has had this feature for a while now, and Instagram has just started adopting it (with very good rewards).
Forget about money for a second…
You should be going live on TikTok, and here’s why:
It creates a sense of connection between you and your followers.
The entry-level is low (only one thousand followers are needed).
You can collab with other creators, to mutually gain followers (Saav and I used to do this a lot).
I would suggest going live on TikTok for 10-15 minutes a day (maybe even a few times a day), make sure you keep it high energy and you should notice results.
“This is all great Luke, but you mentioned it could be a form of income?”
It can be! People can show their support to you by buying badges or giving you ‘gifts’. The only annoying part is that TikTok takes a sizeable %.
I’ve seen my friends make over a hundred dollars on 10-minute live streams. Because they said they’d shout people out or write their name on a playing card if they sent gifts. People want to be noticed and feel connected, depending on the scale of your followers, they may be willing to pay for that connection.
I’ll briefly talk about Instagram lives because I don’t know too much about it, but if you’re eligible (over 10k followers on a business account), you can make $250 a month guaranteed.
Instagram are offering rewards for the live streams you do, so you’d be making $250 plus any gifts you receive from followers.
Brand Deals
You knew it was going to come up at some point.
Brands will pay you to advertise their product. You can make a very decent amount. Even though I have just under 25k TikTok followers, I was recently offered a 3 video contract for $100 per video.
Charlie Davis (influencer and founder of The Jet House) and I recently had a chat about how to get brand deals.
The main takeaway from our chat was:
“For the most part, brands aren’t going to come to you.”
What Charlie meant was, you need to be DM’ing and emailing brands, and creating connections on LinkedIn to receive worthwhile brand deals.
We actually recorded a whole podcast talking about social media and monetization. If you are interested, it’s on the membership along with a few other podcasts and loads of other fun stuff and tricks.
I’ve only covered the tip of the iceberg here, with the basic ways of how you can monetize your following.
I didn’t want this blog to get too long but I have a whole bunch of other methods as to how you can create more income from your following (more specific to being a magician), if that sounds interesting please leave a comment on this blog post letting me know!