How to Get Rich with 1 Million Followers
Horizontally monetizing individual brands online
“The single most valuable asset in business— your attention.” — Gary Vaynerchuk
This week, I had the chance to spend time with someone who has over a million followers on TikTok and 25k followers on Instagram.
The TikToker, first and foremost, is an entertainer whose expertise is capturing and retaining people’s attention.
They’re sitting on an asset — their audience — but not monetizing it; at least not to its fullest extent. They’re only getting paid ad revenue from other brands because those companies recognize the value of a captive audience.
Creators are getting ripped off by brands because they don’t recognize the value of the attention they have. They’re getting ripped off because they operate like an individual and not a business.
Businesses look at creators and see someone that’s doing all of the hard work — creating daily content to build and capture the attention of an audience. They also see someone that is willing to be paid an under-market rate (when compared to other ad channels) to promote the brand’s product or service.
What most creators don’t recognize, is that it’s now easier than ever to build their own businesses alongside the brand and audience that they have grown.
What does this look like?
Most commonly, you see creators making the vast majority of their money from merchandise, which can be streamlined through a couple of key tools like Shopify and Printify, or other on-demand fulfillment tools (there are plenty). If you’re not able to setup these systems yourself (as a creator), you can use turn-key solutions like Merchline — used by the likes of Foster the People, MrBeast, Dude Perfect, and others.
There two main benefits to an on-demand printing service:
- The upfront investment is less than $100 per month
- You, as the owner, don’t need to pick, pack, and ship anything — it’s all handled by the print on-demand service
A setup like this, whether it’s clothing, coffee, or burgers, allows a creator to continue spending most of their time creating content and not operating the back-end of a business.
For the TikToker with 1M followers, how much can they expect to earn?
Some napkin math for a rough idea…
Assumptions:
- 1 million followers
- Average of 500k views per video (conservative estimate)
- 1% of viewers click through to the e-commerce site
- 2% conversion rate on e-comm site
- $50 average sale price
- 8 merchandise promotions per month via TikTok
- 40% average gross profit margin on Printify products
- They sell merchandise that resonates with their audience
= 500,000 * .01 * .02 * $50 * 8
= $40,000 in gross revenue
= $40,000 * .4
= $16,000 per month in net revenue
So you might not ‘get rich’ from selling t-shirts as a creator with 1 mil followers, but it’s money that a lot of creators are leaving on the table. Not to mention, this is one of multiple revenue streams that could be activated.
Even the biggest celebrities aren’t monetizing properly.
Joe Rogan could have sold to Spotify for far more than $100 million had he converted his listeners into paid subscribers, which, effectively, is what Spotify did.
Rogan had an audience of 11 million listeners at the time of sale. Had he converted 5% of his followers to a paid membership at $5/mo, his annual recurring revenue would have been $33 million before merchandise and advertising. This revenue stream alone, at a 3 x multiple, is worth $100 million. (Read more about this here)
Getting rich with 1 million followers, from an outsiders perspective, is done by treating your brand like a business and by pulling people away from social media channels, and into your own ecosystem(s) — e-commerce, mailing lists, and paid subscriptions — so that you can better understand who your followers (customers) are and how you can sell to them.
