Making money on TikTok in 2026 doesn’t require millions of followers or subscribers. These aren’t get rich quick schemes, they’re real methods for making real money on TikTok.
Quick note: this post may include affiliate links, meaning I could earn a small commission if you buy something through one of them, at no extra cost to you.
The TikTok Creator Fund
This is probably one of the most popular ways that people think about, and that is the TikTok Creator Fund. That’s pretty much like YouTube’s AdSense, where ads play and you earn money from the impressions and clicks on your videos. That is probably one of the lowest ways to make money on TikTok. It takes a while to first get up to the point where you can qualify for it. You reportedly need 10,000 followers and at least 100,000 views within 30 days to qualify for the Creator Fund, and this shouldn’t really be your main income strategy, because the pay per view is really not that great.
How Much the Ads Actually Pay
I have a video here on my channel that lays out how much money I made on TikTok through ads, and it’s not a lot. It’s somewhere between 15 cents and $0.40 per thousand views, which is basically nothing. But you can use this as gas money, just not what you’d want for rent money, unless your videos are consistently going viral and you’re getting millions upon millions of views. Then you can make a decent income from the ads.
Brand Deals and Sponsored Content
The next strategy is where people make some of the real money, and that’s with brand deals and sponsored content. You don’t even need a mega huge channel. I have 76,000 followers on TikTok, and I’ve had brand deals where I talked to companies and got anywhere from $200 to $500 just to post a video on TikTok. I also posted the same videos here on YouTube, so it was kind of a no brainer to do both. You can have a smaller channel, 5,000 to 50,000 followers, and still make a pretty good income through brand deals.
What Brands Are Looking For
What brands care about is the niche you’re in and the engagement you have, not just your follower count. So if you have a smaller channel but you get a lot of engagement, that’s what they’re looking for. One good video could actually earn you quite a bit of money, especially if you have some kind of commission arrangement with that company too. Maybe they pay you a flat fee upfront and then you also get something on the back end. That tends to work out really well.
Getting Started With Brand Deals
To get started, just start posting video reviews on your TikTok, and eventually you can start reaching out to brands and telling them about your following. Usually they’ll have some kind of program you can join. A lot of times it might be an affiliate program or something like that, and you can work out a deal that way. After a while, they’ll just start approaching you too, which is pretty fun.
Affiliate Marketing
Number three is affiliate marketing. This one is probably one of the easiest ways to get started, because you don’t even have to be monetized with the Creator Fund. You don’t even have to have a TikTok Shop. From day one, you can start posting affiliate links. It could just be a product you start off with from Amazon, and there’s a link you can put in your profile bio, maybe pointing to a Linktree. Then you can list your different products there, which is awesome.
TikTok Shop
Once you qualify for TikTok Shop, which takes 1,000 followers, you can start selling products through the platform directly. That’s a really good way to make quite a bit of money. I’ve heard of some creators on TikTok who reportedly made several thousand dollars in one month just selling products through TikTok Shop’s affiliate program, which is pretty awesome.
Amazon Associates and Digital Products
You can also do Amazon Associate links, like I mentioned, or sell your own digital products. Maybe you have some courses or apps you want to sell. With your TikTok videos, the goal is to drive traffic to where those are hosted. So it might be as simple as talking about a certain product or course and saying to check the link in your bio if you want to learn more, or if you have TikTok Shop, pointing people to the link below the video to buy it there.
A Real Example: The Cheese Grater
One viral video can make you quite a bit of money. One of the first products I promoted that went pretty viral on TikTok was a small hand-cranked cheese grater. It was about a $15 product, and I made around $2 per sale, which added up to somewhere around $2,000 to $2,500 in one month from that one product, which is pretty awesome. That doesn’t mean every single video I post does that well, but as you stay consistent with these product videos, every so often one of them is going to pop, or two of them are going to pop, and next thing you know you’re getting a lot of sales, which means money.
Selling Your Own Products
One of the best profit margins is when, instead of doing affiliate marketing, you sell your own products. Maybe you have a Shopify store and want to use TikTok to send traffic there, selling t-shirts or other print on demand items. You could also have your own digital products, like guides or templates. Maybe you want to sell coaching or consulting services, or maybe you’re a video editor looking for clients. You could use TikTok to drive people to a website where you offer your services and connect with them that way. TikTok is really good at building trust, and people find creators they feel connected to. Think of TikTok as a funnel that drives traffic to different places.
Driving Traffic to YouTube, Websites, and Email Lists
Number five is driving traffic to YouTube, to your website like a blog, or to an email list. For example, I have a cooking channel, which is my main thing on TikTok, and I drive traffic from there to my website where people can find the written recipes. I run a bunch of ads on that website, so I make money from that too. So it’s not just the video making money on TikTok, it’s also driving traffic to my website, which is pretty cool. It kind of kills two birds with one stone.
Linking to YouTube and Linktree
If you do a short 15 to 30 second video on TikTok that’s just a snippet of one of your long form YouTube videos, you can drive traffic there as well. Maybe at the end you say to check out the full video on your YouTube channel, and the link in your TikTok bio points there. Or most likely you’ll want to use a Linktree link, where you can include your website, your YouTube channel, maybe a Shopify store, or your Amazon affiliate page. The main thing is to drive traffic to that bio so people click on those links.
TikTok Live Gifts
Number six is doing TikTok Live gifts, and it’s somewhat underrated. When you go live, people interact with you and can send gifts using coins, which you can then turn into cash. Some creators reportedly make a good chunk of income just from doing live streams.
What Really Matters
What really matters for making money on TikTok isn’t really about trends or dancing videos. The main thing is having a clear niche, solving a problem, posting consistently, and including a call to action. That could be visiting your website for the recipe, checking the link in your bio to see the full video on YouTube, clicking the link in the bio to find a product, or clicking down to the TikTok Shop link. There are multiple ways you can do it.
Closing
That covers some of the most common ways to earn money on TikTok. Let me know what your niche is and what you’re trying to do. If TikTok is something you’re trying to build.
