3 Ways to Make Money with a Small Following

Today I’m coming to you live from the ol’ desk chair. I’ve had a lot of desk work recently, including group coaching calls. We’ve got a few groups going right now, one for our Growth Collective students and one for our recent round of Influence students. Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of the same question: “Can I make money with a small following?!” My immediate answer? YES. OK, so cool got it. But how?! Here’s 3 ways to make money with a small following:

1. User Generated Content 📱

User Generated Content, or UGC, has become all the rage in social media. It basically involves being hired by companies for your content creation skills, independent of your social following.

Think of it this way: sometimes companies want to work with larger influencers to help spread the word about their product/service, and other times those companies just need content themselves for their pages. And as you probably know, creating content is a lot of work, so many companies don’t have the resources to create all that content themselves. Enter: the UGC creator! They act as a freelance content creator for companies, making Reels, TikToks, photographing scenes with their product, etc.

UGC is a phenomenal way to sell yourself as a “smaller” creator because rather than pitching your smaller following, you’re pitching your content creation skills themselves. Keep in mind, though, that to do this successfully, you have to focus on creating stand-out content. This means getting really good at photography, videography, editing, and styling. If you’re looking to improve your content creation skills I highly recommend checking out my Influence course.

2. Blogging 👩‍💻

If you’re looking to have stable income month after month, you might want to consider blogging, aka creating blog posts and posting them on your own blog.

Blogging can be incredibly lucrative. Every single pageview you get on your blog means a fraction of a cent in potential revenue from hosting ads. And when your pageviews start to get into the 100,000+ range, that means thousands in income every month for you.

Blogging is a great way to make money completely independently from social media. In order to truly succeed at blogging, you’ll need to educate yourself on SEO, or search engine optimization, which is basically how to show up on the front page of Google so that you get traffic to your blog.

3. Restaurant Photography 📸

Restaurants are always looking to stand out from their competition and get new customers, and one of the best ways they can do that is by hiring photographers and content creators to take photos and videos of their restaurants.

In the last few years, restaurants have seen first-hand how much standing out on social media can make a difference between a packed house and an empty restaurant. As a result, they look to photographers and content creators to help market and advertise their restaurants. This could be more UGC-style, where you’re hired to take photos/videos for their website and social media pages, or traditional influencer-style where you’re hired both to take those photos/videos and then advertise for them on your page.

To get started with restaurant photography, go onto Yelp and write down a list of 20 restaurants in your area. Then spend the day reaching out to them via their contact forms on their site. If you’re just starting out, offer to shoot 2-3 dishes for free as a way to build up your own portfolio. You should have a few get back to you, and you can decide who you want to work with from there. Then, take those photos to other restaurants to show them the amazing work you can do, but that time, ask to be paid. Obviously, this is a super high-level overview, so if you’re interested in learning more about restaurant photography, check out Restaurant FS.

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So the next time the little voice in your head tells you you don’t have enough followers to create a lucrative business remember: followers ≠ income. Now, get out there and make some money, honey!