Seven Social Media Monetization Models You’ll Want to Try

“How do I make money on social media?” Let me tell you, that is a common question we get asked. Well… it’s your lucky day! There are so many ways to do this with your social media accounts, but it can be hard to figure out which ones will work for you and what is the best way to go about it. We’ve compiled seven tried and true models that have worked for us and our clients in the past. So let's get to it, here are seven social media monetization models you'll want to try.

 #1: Sell your Own Physical Products with a Live Sale

Most people do think of selling products in a QVC-style video, where they show a product, include a link, have a comment bot set up, etc. But if you are only doing live sales, there is a good chance people may tune out. If your products are changing frequently, that’s different. But if your products are staying the same, you start to become what I call a salesy weirdo. You want to mix in some free content so that you build a community who will show up for your livestreams because of the value you’re adding. 

#2: Create Free Content that Lead to Services, a Course, or Workshop/Event

You could do this with what you call a “mumble,” a term I borrowed from my good friend Liz Medley. Rather than giving a really strong call to action, we like to utilize this strategy, “If you want to accelerate your revenue, visibility, systems, and really make an impact, give me the word CALL below, and I will reach out to you about your GLAM program and share more information.” Super simple, and it can be hidden within content you are already delivering. 

The mumble sometimes catches me off guard. One time, I was doing a video right before Social Media Marketing World in my hotel room with a pop-up background. I had to wrap up the video because I was about to leave to speak at the event. I was discussing organic retargeting, how to optimize your personal profile so you show up more frequently. Someone said in the chat, “If you did this as a workshop, I would totally pay you for it for X amount.” I asked if anybody else would want to buy it for that amount.

A bunch of people said yes. Very casual, not fully planned out, and it totally took me by surprise. Right there on the fly, I created a link for the sales page and people actually purchased. By the end of that video, I had $3,000 in sales, which paid for our entire hotel stay. Listen to your community! 

• That sales page was created through a PayPal personal link, which I highly recommend doing. 

Another way we do this is once a month or so, we do a masterclass. At the end of that masterclass, we present an opportunity to join Camera Confidence. We do it all with BeLive, super easy. We can screen share, bring comments up, drop a link in the chat, include different bonuses. 

#3: Sell the Replay Access to Your Content

This doesn’t take a lot of prep time ahead of time. When people sell courses, they will create the course content ahead of time. What I realized is I don’t learn from you what you actually need when I do this. So I like to sell content before I actually create it. 

What you do is do some sort of promo for a free training. Once we’re here, you can say, “I’m going to give you all this value, but this video will expire in three days. If you want access to the replay of this video, I will sell it to you for $27.” (Not doing that, just to be clear). It allows me to do a three-day challenge, and then I sell the replay of the challenge as a product. Your free content then becomes the product.

This can be done with show notes, too. My good friends Matt Wolfe and Joe Fier at the Hustle and Flowchart Podcast do a podcast episode, and they create show notes for the podcast. The show notes are available for two weeks. Then the show notes come down, and they go into a vault that you can subscribe to for $15 a month. Sometimes they send a physical copy of the show notes in the mail, like a magazine. It’s so good. ( You should check out our masterclass blog post with them about how to book more podcasts!)

This is a way to bring in great qualified leads because they are paying you for information they want to be able to watch again and again. Then you can include upsells on the back end that lead to more higher-level, higher-investment products and services that you offer.

My friend Nikki does this on Instagram Live. She goes live on Instagram, and she either leaves it up for 24 hours or deletes it right away. If you want the replay, you have to join a membership in order to gain access. 

 #4: Become a Partner/Affiliate and Earn a Commission

We prefer the term “partner” over “affiliate.” If there is a product/service that you love and you would genuinely share it with your community, you should take an affiliate commission for it. I am also super stoked to pay people who want to become an affiliate for my programs. 

It’s great on the monetization side, but also on the connections that I have made. Promoting Ryan Levesque’s stuff have allowed me to connect with other members of his team as well as members of his community. When you join in on someone’s launch, you are also connecting to the other partners of that launch. 

The other cool thing is if you become a partner with a tool, it can potentially allow you to gain access to things you might not have been able to have access to otherwise. I have been quite loud in my love of  ManyChat, which has allowed me to build relationships with the team and get a sneak peek to new features of the tool.

Also, I have stepped up in my standing with BeLive! In addition to my being a brand ambassador and creating videos for the company, I have taken over as Head of Content and Partnerships. What I want to share is that we have an awesome partner program at BeLive that you can apply to be a part of. We are working on some super cool things for our partners, beyond just the commission and the private partner Facebook group.

I don’t ever recommend a tool or product that I don’t use and love. When it comes to content scheduling, there are two tools I love for two different reasons, so I recommend both of them. So I may not be dedicated solely to one tool, and that’s okay! 

 #5: Create Content for Someone Else as an Influencer or Expert

I see so many people missing this one as an opportunity. You can get paid for creating a video or a blog post for someone else’s business, either through money or through being given free product, which is also super cool. They could also pay you with reach. You put a lead magnet on the piece of content that you share, and they send it to their list. You could also take some sort of affiliate commission. And the final way is there is a combination of a standard fee, and anything we do above that fee in commission that comes in, there is an extra commission percentage. You get paid for the standard piece of content no matter how well it does in that kind of deal. 

 #6: Sell Access to a Membership

I almost included this in tip #2, but this is a very different model. We did this two years ago in a program called MollStars Marketing, which we have since cancelled (see why below). What we did is create an empty Facebook group that you could join at a founding member rate, $27 a month, and by the time we closed it, we had raised the price to $47 a month. It was recurring revenue as part of the opportunity to stay in the group. I did one training a month on some sort of strategy hack, and then I would do a social media round-up once a month.

I curated the top changes in the world of social media and shared those changes once a month. It gave people a reason to keep their membership because otherwise they had a chance of falling behind. 

• I cancelled this membership because what I found is that people were so committed to consuming the content in this membership that they did not actually put things into action. They spent so much time watching and learning that they weren’t implementing. So I cancelled it and encouraged them to join our programs where we included this content but also forced them to take action on those lessons. These programs are more support-heavy. But it is a really easy way to monetize access to you and your social media.

 #7: Sell Ad Space via Ad Platforms or Get Sponsorships for Your Shows or Blog Posts

When you have someone who pays to be a sponsor for your show, it means you have a section of the show where you shout them out and talk about them. Stephanie Liu sells a package of four shows where you can sponsor that series, which I love. You could also do it as a summit, using that content to bring in leads for her community but also shout out a sponsor. You could also have someone sponsor your blog posts, where you include a link to them on your post (Hustle and Flowchart is a great model for this as well! They do this in their podcasts and their printed show notes). 

Or you could also use a tool like YouTube or Facebook monetization where you can add ads to your stuff. The qualifications for YouTube are easier to meet than the ones on Facebook. I get hesitant about this because I am very protective of you, my community, and I want to make sure that it’s not some random tool I wouldn’t actually recommend showing up as an ad on my videos. So I personally do not do this. My friend Rachel Miller is killing it using this tactic on her blogs though, so there are ways to do this that serve both you and your community, depending on your comfortability level and your community.

We hope that these seven social media monetization models will help you bring in more money just by doing things you are already doing or making a few more connections! 

BONUS: New BeLive Features:

Show Cards

Before I went live today, before my computer malfunctioned on me, I created some show cards. In the Live Sales section, I have checked a box that indicates to send a link in the comments when I bring an image up from staging into the livestream. But the show cards, I want to highlight that you can upload photos and gifs here. So when I bring a show card with a photo or a gif into the stream, I can send certain links into the chat. But there is a file size limit, so be careful on what you are trying to upload. 

In addition to the Agenda feature, which helps me stay on track, I can input text boxes that I can show in the stream. I can also create show cards that communicate that message as well. Each time you change which show card you are trying to display, you can change which link you are sending into the chat.  

Offline Recordings

If you are interested in using BeLive to record sessions for a course, if you go into your Broadcasts section, you can do things live and download them in either a video or audio format. You can also do offline recordings, recording without actually going live. From there, it will allow you to edit the broadcast inside BeLive. Bananapants! I’ve done this, creating videos for my new program Sales Stars and editing them within BeLive. You can also create posts using clips from the video and sharing them across multiple social media platforms.

Additional Resources

• BeLive (sponsor)
  • Use code MOLLY for 30% off!
  • Become a BeLive Partner here: www.Molly.live/belivepartner
• X-Stand
• Hustle and Flowchart Podcast
• ManyChat
• Repurpose.io