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Hey there everyone. Welcome to another episode of Call Her Creator Powered by Stan. I am your host, Kaitlyn Rhodes, and I'm here today to talk to you about monetizing your Instagram page. Because at the end of the day, that's what we're here to do. We're here to make some money, honey. So in today's episode, we're going to be talking about monetizing your social media accounts. I have a specific focus on Instagram, but this honestly can go for any social media channel out there. I'm going to walk you through different services and products that you could offer online. I'm going to give you real life examples and then we will also go over the potential revenue that you could be bringing in. So make sure you grab your notes, pull up a chair and stay tuned. Hey friend. Welcome back to Call Her Creator Powered by your all in one Creator Store. Stan. Stan is the easiest way for you to make money online. All of your courses, digital products and bookings are hosted within your link in bio. If you're ready to start your free trial, the visit my show notes and click my affiliate link to get started today. All right, now before we get in today's episode, of course I have to give you your social media update of the week. And this week your update is about YouTube. So in case you're new here, YouTube, TikTok and Instagram are like these three rivals that are basically fighting over who has the best, you know, video editor or who can keep people on the longest. So it comes to no surprise to me that that YouTube has just announced a range of new music remix options for shorts, which comes just as TikTok loses access to its music from Universal Music. I guess there was some payment disputes going on. So if you go over to TikTok right now, there's not a lot of music options. I've seen some creators actually making fun of TikToks like they're showing like, you know, the dancing creators and then they put in like royalty free music and it's just, it's hilarious. But YouTube users can now remix your music if you press the remix button. Basically you can remix any music on any video clip in the app. It will then take you to the shorts composer after you click on remix. And then from there you can choose from four different options for creating your own rendition of the accompanying clip. So there's four remix options right now on YouTube shorts. So there's the sound which can just take the sound from the video and use it in your short or, or you can do the collab, which is you create a short right alongside the video so you and your friends can do the choreography side by side with the artist. Kind of like what you're seeing on TikTok and Instagram right now. Then there's the green screen option. So that allows you to use the video as your background and maybe talk about it. Or there's the cut, which is you basically like take a specific scene from the short and then you can relive it as often as you like. So you could just cut a piece of that video out and keep replaying that. So. So there's a couple different remix options there that YouTube is giving. But again, we've already seen this on Instagram Reels and TikTok videos. So this isn't really a new update, but it's a new update for YouTube to stay competitive, you know, with Meta and TikTok. So good for YouTube. I like YouTube. Fun. Little pro tip here too. If you're not reposting your reels and TikToks over to YouTube shorts, you're missing out on a lot of opportunity right now. I have just started reposting all of my reels over to YouTube Shorts and we're getting pretty, pretty good feedback. We're getting decent views. I'm seeing that my YouTube channel is growing. So if you want to add something else to your plate for marketing, go start reposting your TikToks and reels over to YouTube shorts. Now, before we get into the nitty gritty of today's episode, I gotta shout out one of my loyal followers and listeners, Lynn Khan M. She says as a review on Call her creator. Okay, this is an amazing podcast to gain knowledge about social media. Love, love, love. Thanks for all of the incredible information. Love that. I love you, Lynn. So if you've had a similar experience to what Lynn is talking about, I would love for you to head over to Apple Podcasts or Spotify, wherever you listen to this podcast and leave me a five star review. Your reviews are what helped me to continue this podcast. So let's keep em up. All right, so let's talk about monetizing your social media channels. That's. I know that's what you guys are here for. We're here to make money. Money. We're here to turn our profits into passions. So I've got a few different ways for you to make money on the gram. We're going to walk through all of them. But in case you are new to the creator world, to social media, Social media monetization is the process of generating revenue from your social media audience. I have notes here today because I want to make sure I give you all the best information possible and explain this as easy as I can because I want you guys to take some from this and go make money. So. So there's a number of different ways that you can actually make money from social media, which we're, we're going to get into. But ultimately this all depends on your industry, your service or product, and the social media channels that you choose. So as I am walking you guys through these potential ways to make money, you know, kind of have in the back of your head, what is it that I do? Would that make sense for my industry? Because some of these won't make sense for you, but most of them probably will. So just make sure you pay attention there. But the most vital ingredient here is knowing exactly who you are speaking to and what their pain points are so that you can serve them the best offer ever. So make sure you know who your audience is. Okay, so let's just dive into it. The first offer we're going to be talking about today is one of my favorites because you can make money basically while you're sleeping, and that is digital products. Digital products are my fave. They're actually the way that I made my first dollar from Instagram. So when it comes to digital products, there's one thing you need to remember. Share what you know. Okay, you're going to lean into. What are you passionate about? What are you good at? What do you already know? Don't try to come up with content that you've never heard of or you saw Joe Schmo over there doing the same thing and you want to do it too. No, lean into what you are good at and what you know. You can always start small with like an ebook or a masterclass, templates just to get your feet wet in digital products. And then you could always, you know, start focusing on bigger and better things. My first ebook was on reels because that's what I love to do. And I made my first $10,000 from, you know, putting this reels ebook together. And it continues to make me money almost three years later, that digital product. Now, keep in mind, I do update that digital product. I did not make it three years ago and just let it go. I'm there to update it with new information, new trends. The thing with my specific offer is that reels are always changing. If you're in a different industry and whatever your ebook is like if that just stays evergreen and you don't have to update it. You don't have to update it. But I like to keep all of my stuff updated because I'll. I'll be honest with you guys. My team and I, we bought a Facebook ads refresher class not too long ago, and I was highly disappointed in this class because it was so outdated. For the price point that I paid, I think I might have paid like a hundred bucks. I expect to have relevant information. And the person that made this Facebook Ads course, I don't know. I could just tell that she made it like two years ago. Facebook ads managers changes and updates, honestly, constantly. But I think as a creator and as someone who genuinely wants to grow their business and help people, it's your responsibility to keep these things updated. So just keep that in mind like it is something that you can create and sleep on, but make sure you update it with relevant information if it's needed. And the Facebook course was needed. But it's okay. We still learn some things from it. Luckily, we are the Facebook ads pros, so we understood what was going on anyways. But I just wish that she could have put more relevant, updated information in there. But anyways, that's just. That's a consumer's point of view, so keep that in mind when you're making your own product. So digital products are my favorite way of selling because I basically, again, you can create it once and then sell it over and over and over again. Now, a couple things for you to note when creating and selling digital products. The first one is one, you want to leverage your expertise, not somebody else's. Yours. You want to come up with a digital product that is super easy to speak on. Okay. It's not something that. God, I want to create this ebook, but I don't really know too much about it. I better go research everything I can. Like, that's okay. If you want to do that, cool. But why not just lean into something that you already know a ton of crap about that you could easily just start writing up? And don't sleep on ChatGPT when it comes to these digital offers, because ChatGPT could definitely be your starting point for this. I'm not gonna say let ChatGPT write your whole offer because if you do that, you are not gonna stand out from others. But you could totally go in there and talk to ChatGPT about what your idea is and kind of give you like a base point, the bones of it, and then you go in there and meet it up with your own intelligence and expertise. I'm just really big on not putting crap offers out there. Obviously. My little tangent earlier about the Facebook ads course, the other cool with digital products is that they're pretty easy to promote since they're already done. You can make a graphic in Canva, some stories, some carousels, some static images, and just keep reposting that. I want y' all to know too. I think I've talked about this in earlier episodes, but people only, only a small percentage of your followers will see your content. So you have to keep talking about your offer over and over again. So when you make a digital product, there's a ton of templates and Canva, I think you could search something like it's called an ebook mockup. So it will come up with sales graphics, salesy graphics for you. And it looks like your freebie or not your freebie. Your digital product is a real life book. If you, you know, make it into this template, I hope that makes sense to you guys. I'm kind of like talking about it out loud and it sounds a little weird, but let me just go over. I'm going to pull up Canva real quick. When I search Canva and I type in ebook mockup. Let's just see what pops up real quick. Yeah, when I pull that up, there's a ton of different mock ups, basically like selling whatever the ebook is and then you have a place to pull in a picture of it. So don't sleep on Canva because Canva can definitely help you sell these digital products. When it comes to promoting your digital products, you want to sell the pain point of your audience and then your product is going to be the holy grail for them to buy, to get, to get better at whatever that pain point was or to fix that pain point. Now utilizing a platform like Stan, I'm going to plug Stan in here is the best way that you could sell these digital products right now is because everything is already kind of set up for you in Stan. It's almost like a template. You just go in and you fill out what your ebook is, how much it costs, you upload your ebook, and then people can buy that ebook or template, whatever it is, doesn't have to be ebook, but they can easily purchase it. And Stan does all the heavy lifting as far as collecting payment and sending it to your customer. So digital products are probably one of my favorites. So let's explore five different real life examples of what you could be selling as a digital product. The first one I have is Ebooks. Ebooks are a really great way to make fast money. This is how I made my first 10k. I did the reels ebook. Now let's just pretend that you are a fitness influencer. An example ebook for you could be workout routines. Maybe a nutrition ebook. Remember where I was talking about Keto Friendly nutrition or something like that? A 30 day challenge. Pick something very specific and then lean into that as your ebook. Another digital product you could sell is like an online course. So let's say maybe you're a marketing expert and you develop this online course that teaches them how to schedule social media in five minutes and then you just go in and show them your scheduling tool and what you do, yada yada, that's gonna be your course for them. Another one, maybe you are a photographer and you sell presets. Those are easy to do. Maybe you sell templates. Templates is my favorite. We have a monthly membership where we offer trendy reels every week. Canva Templates, Canva Reels, templates, captions. They're kind of all templates in there, but templates are my favorite thing to sell. I don't know why. I guess it's because I'm a creator and I like to create designs for other people that I know are going to work. But I've seen other industries do really well at selling templates too. Like for example, there's a lawyer that sells her contract templates. Love that. I think that's a genius. Maybe you're a social media agency owner and you sell your pricing and services guide as a template. Maybe you're a graphic designer and you just sell Canva templates. There are really so many things that you could sell in there as templates. It's honestly one of the easiest way to monetize. But think of something that you already have that someone else would find helpful if they were just starting out in your industry or business that's going to help you to decide what you want to sell. So that's my spiel on digital products. I think if you are just starting out, digital products is going to be your best friend for making money. The next one I'm going to get into is also a good one for beginners that are just getting ready to monetize their social media accounts. And that is coaching and services. So personal coaching and services, while it can be very time consuming, it is a great starting path for people making an easy 5 to 10k a month. Truly the cool thing about coaching is that it is very personalized and customizable. So you can kind of charge a little bit more. I'm going to walk you guys through what those benefits of coaching and then we'll deep dive into some real life examples for you. So first let's talk about the benefits of coaching. Offering one on one coaching can be super powerful way to make money because it's personalized and customized. So this allows you to tailor your services to that specific need and goal of your customer. Deeper connection. You get this one on one time with this person. Honestly, a lot of my reviews in the beginning of my creator journey were from my coaching calls because I got to spend an hour with this person. They got to really pick my brain and see that I wasn't full of crap. I really did know what I was talking about and it was set me up as an industry expert. I also like one on one coaching because you get immediate feedback and adjustments. And the thing with real life feedback, customers love that if you can get on a call with them and like as soon as y' all start talking, you already have a tip for them or you do like a live audit on whatever it is they need help with, they get that instant gratification which totally just makes it all good that they just paid you 500 bucks for the hour because you just did gave them so much value. So immediate feedback is a really big selling point when it comes to coaching. Now another reason I love coaching is the price point. Obviously you can charge premium pricing. I'm currently offering one on one coaching I think for like 500 bucks for the hour. But I just saw another social media manager that charges $3,000 just for an hour of her time and I think she's genius. I wish I could charge that much, but I'm just not there yet. But, but the cool thing with one on one is that you can charge based on your expertise. So maybe you are a newbie and selling your coaching, but you've actually been in the industry for 15 years. You take that into account when you are charging your people charge your worth. Now I know one on one can be rewarding and I've talked about the benefits and it's super profitable. But you have to consider the following what I'm about to tell you. First, make sure you have the capacity to handle coaching. Or when I first got started with my social media management and freelancing, I got burned out very, very fast because I was offering coaching and I was booking like three to five calls a week. So the thing with one on one coaching is that it takes a Lot of your brain juice. You're sitting there with a person. You're live it. It took a lot out of me and maybe that could be because I'm more of an introvert and I don't like talking to people. So you have to kind of lean into your strengths here. And if you're a good people person and you like talking to, then coaching is going to be your best friend. But if you are someone that gets drained very easily from talking to other people, then you're going to want to limit, you know, your time and your schedule for booking these coaching calls. Now I'm going to plug in Stan here for a minute because what I love about Stan is that one, I can limit the hours that people book a coaching call with me. So if I only want to do coaching calls midday, Monday through Friday, I can totally put that in my calendar. And either they pick that day time or they don't. You can also limit your coaching calls through Stan. So I typically now that I'm kind of over my burnout phase, I'll offer like three coaching calls a month just, just because. But if you are someone that you just want to make as much money as possible for the month, don't limit it. You know, take one coaching call a day, take two a day. You definitely take two a day. But you can make fast money real quick from coaching. Another pro tip here is if you have not listened to episode number one, you can use your Instagram story highlights to sell your coaching calls. So if you've ever had a really good coaching call coaching session, one on one session, reach out to that person, send them an email and ask them if they could give you a short little review of how it went. Maybe they go leave it on your Google, maybe they go leave it on your Facebook page, or maybe they just simply reply back to your email. You can always screenshot that and then post it to your Instagram stories and then you'll save it as an Instagram highlight story so that people can read your reviews and like trust you more so that they will book that coaching call with you. Now, before I go into the next way to make money with coaching, I just want to give y' all a few examples of what you could coach. So maybe you're a social media manager and you own an agency so you are going to start mentoring new social media managers. That could be your coaching. Maybe you are a baby sleep coach. You could have a one on one with a mama that wants to pick your brain. Maybe they're not ready to pay for you to coach their baby. But they just want to get some tips from you, you know, do a little half hour session with them. You don't even have to do the full hour. Maybe you're a graphic designer, you want to talk about your skills with another graphic designer. Maybe you own a retail store and you want to help other people open a retail store. Maybe you're a hair specialist that does hair extensions and you want to teach someone else what you do to get your hair extension clients. There's so many things that you can do when you're the expert in your field. So again, that's why I started this episode saying lean into what you know and what you're passionate about. When you do that, it's less opportunity for you to become burnt out and more of opportunity for you to make as much money as possible and help as many people as possible. The next way to make money online is affiliate marketing. And affiliate marketing is another really good income producing activity that doesn't take a lot out of you. This is kind of comparable to digital products, except you don't have to make anything. You just promote something that you believe in, that you love, that you already use and push that link onto people. I've made some good money from affiliate marketing. In the beginning I was very skeptical. I was like, why would I promote your services to my people? But then I was like, oh crap, I can make all kinds of money from this and not have to do anything, not have to do any heavy lifting. So if you're new to affiliate marketing, that is another great way to monetize your social media channels. So I'm going to kind of define what it is for you first. Affiliate marketing is a performance based marketing strategy where businesses or product creators reward affiliates for driving traffic to sales or for driving just driving people to their website. Maybe you don't even have to make a sale, you just push people to their website. It involves a partnership between the product or service owner and then an individual or entity, the affiliate, who will then promote the product and earn a commission for each customer or sale generated through their unique affiliate link. This is great for people who maybe you don't have time to make your own digital product, right? You could do affiliate marketing. You can also become an affiliate and earn commissions by promoting products or courses that you actually believe in. So let's see what was my first, I think my first affiliate program was with Flick and Flick is one of my favorite social media tools. So it was so easy for me to promote them because I already use it and I already believe in it. So what happens? I kind of want to walk y' all through how easy it actually is. What happens is you sign up with whoever you want to work with. Maybe no one's reaching out to you to become an affiliate with them, but maybe you already have some people in mind that you really like and admire. Make a little list of those people and then you can reach out to them through email or DM them, whatever it is, whatever preferred contact method. And you can just tell them, hey, you know, I've got this following of X amount of followers. I'm really big into the blank industry. I'd love to promote your product or your service. Do you offer affiliate marketing? And then from there they'll tell you yes or no. You can walk through if it's like a percentage of sales you drive or maybe it's a one time fee. But I've made, I've made thousands off of affiliate marketing. And again, I don't do much, I just promote them and talk about. I have a blog that's living on my website right now that kind of walks through my top seven tools for social media and those are all of my affiliate links. So anyone that I've ever worked with that I really love, I link them in that blog. And then when people ask me, hey Caitlin, who do you use for hashtags? Or hey Caitlin, who do you use for to write your blogs? I'll push them to that blog and then they will be able to click on my link. Now there's some key elements of affiliate marketing. One is first you get an affiliate link. This is a unique tracking link that they give you and it basically identifies you as the source of traffic or sales. This link is used in the affiliate's promotional content in any activities. Maybe it's clicks, leads, sales that are generated through that link. It's then tracked for commission purposes and you get money based off of what you push. Then there's the commissions. Affiliates earn a commission for each successful action, which could be a sale, a lead, a click, depending on the merchant's affiliate program. That's why I said in the beginning when you start to reach out to do this, ask them how their affiliate program works, what's included, how much you're going to make. Commissions are typically a percentage of the sale value, but they can also be fixed amounts or other structures. And then there's the payment models. There's different payment models in affiliate marketing, such as pay per sale, that's commission based on actual sales Pay per click, which is commission based on the number of clicks, and then pay per lead, which is commission based on acquiring that potential customer. Again, I'm going to plug in Stan again because they have an amazing affiliate feature that allows you to create affiliate links for each of your digital products and then you can give them to other Stan users to share on their own stand store. You have the freedom to choose what commission percentage you'd like to give each affiliate you choose. And then it also gives you the ability to market your product to other Stan users or with little effort on your part. You're just sharing a link and then you get rewarded for it. So I love affiliate marketing. Just to give you guys some real life examples, I've done affiliate marketing for phone cases. So product. I've done affiliate marketing for services such as, well, I guess Flick is kind of product and services, but I don't know, I push them to the product which is the hashtag tool. So I would say product. I've also done affiliate with services such as someone who writes blogs, and then I've also done affiliates with things that I don't want to do. So maybe you're a social media agency and people want a website and you don't make websites. You can always have an affiliate person who makes websites for you and you push someone to them and you get paid if they sign up for them. It's nothing really. Like they don't give me a link. We basically just kind of do it by like email. So I track every month if I send anybody, if they signed up with this person, then I get the affiliate for it. The next kind of way to monetize your Instagram or any social media channel is sponsorships and promos. You can basically get paid just to promote someone's content on your Instagram page. It's similar to affiliate marketing, but it's different. So making money on Instagram through sponsorships, promos, shout outs, involves collaborating with a brand or a business to promote their products or their services to your followers. They so what is a sponsorship? A sponsorship is a partnership first between you, the creator, and then the brand or the company. The brand pays you to create and share content that they then feature for their product or their services. Think about like a UGC creator, user Generated content. What you could do there is you send your product to this creator and you ask them to highlight your product on a, like a featured reel or something like that, and then you pay them to do that. So for example, maybe you are a clothing store and you Just got started. No one really knows too much about what you have to offer. But you offer really amazing baby clothes and they are high quality, they look cute, but just not. It hasn't gotten the right person's lap yet. So you just, you're still very small. Go look up some bigger influencers that are mamas that have new babies, that their audience aligns with your audience. Go, go look them up on Instagram, go look them up on TikTok and find their contact, which is typically under like, you'll see something that says collab or promos and reach out to them and just say, you know, hey, I'm so and so I have this specific product. My target audience is this. And I think you would be a really good person to promote my new clothing brand. How much are your rates? And then that's when you can ask for a media kit. Now, if you are the brand, if you're the product, there's a couple of things I want you to look for before you work with somebody. One, you need to ask them for their media kit. If they don't have a media kit, it's kind of a red flag for me. Either A, they're brand new to this, so give them grace, or B, you don't want to work with them. But as for a media kit, look at their following. Check out their engagement. Just because someone has 100,000 followers, if they only have like reels with 3,000 views, something might be a little sketchy. So make sure that you look through their other videos. Of course, one might have just flopped. But if you're seeing a bunch of reels, views like in the hundreds and, but they have a hundred thousand followers, something is fishy. They probably brought their followers, so you probably don't want to work with them. So do your due diligence. That's why there's actually agencies out there that offer influencer management at this point, because brands don't even know how to look for an influencer that's in their industry. And two, they don't know what to look for. So that's something at the agency that we work with clients and what we do, just giving you a little background, on the other side of it is we basically make this Google spreadsheet and we write down like micro influencers, macro influencers, and then maybe something like top influencers. And we'll go in and we'll find influencers that are like under 10,000 followers and then we'll find some that have like 10,000 to 100,000 and then we'll have like 5, 500,000 and up. So that's like our three tiers. And then we'll go in and link the social media profile. We'll give the follower count, we'll give some opinion like this is a good person that would promote maybe X, Y, Z, like kind of give that client an idea of how they could work with them. And then we kind of let the client go through and decide who they want to work with. But at that point, once you have all of that information, that makes it easier for you to compare different creators and then collect their information, their pricing. And then if someone shoots you like a really high offer, but you have this person over here that has pretty decent amount of followers too, and they're a little bit lower, you're able to compare really. So that's why I'm telling you to write it out in a Google sheet. Now, when it comes to sponsoring post and you're on the creator side, there's three things I want you to keep in mind here. 1. Authenticity. Maintain your authenticity. Please don't work with brands that don't align with your followers or you or your content because you're going to come off salesy and slimy. That's the real true story. I had a toy, how do I say, intimate toy industry. I don't know if I can say the word on here. I don't know what's allowed. So I'll just say that it was this intimate toy store company reach out to me with a very amazing offer. Okay, they were going to pay me like $10,000 to share one reel about their product. But me, who's over here teaching about social media and trying to be the industry expert and working with small business owners, how do you think my followers would feel if I were to start promoting that on my page? They might be embarrassed or they might just say this does not align with what she teaches. So unfortunately I had to turn that partnership down because I want to stay true to who I am and I want to remain authentic to who I am and I want my followers to trust me. Once you start just promoting stuff for money, you really start to lose their trust. So just make sure you remain authentic to yourself and to your followers. The next thing is engagement. When you do these partnerships, make sure that you're focusing on creating engaging, visually appealing content. We want high quality photos, high quality reels. When you do high quality and you lean into your expertise, you are going to get the attention from both brands and your followers. And then lastly, audience alignment, which I kind of just talked about. But choose sponsorships and promos that align with your audience, your buyer's Persona. Go to episode number one if you don't know what that is, but this will ensure a more positive response and a more positive engagement response from your followers when you do that. All right, so as we wrap up this episode, I hope your mind is buzzing with some excitement over the wealth of ideas that I gave you guys and the opportunities that await you on social media, where Remember though, success begins with clarity. So start by defining who your niche is. Who are your perfect target audience? Pinpoint what their pain points are, what are their problems so that you can uniquely position yourself to solve that problem for them. Once you've laid out that groundwork, it's time to then harness the power of social and that's when you can sell your digital products or your coaching calls, or partner up with another brand for shout outs. Optimize your chosen platform though. At the end of the day, you want to make sure that your profile is dialed in again. You can go to episode number one if you need to audit your account. Make sure that you cultivate an audience that is going to like your content, engage with your content, and breathe loyalty throughout. Thanks for tuning in today. Until next time, keep innovating, keep inspiring, and keep chasing your dreams. This is Call Her Creator signing off.