TikTok For Bloggers: How To Grow Your TikTok Account & Make Money [Ep. 48]
Interested in learning how to grow your TikTok account and make money?
Well, you’re in luck, as in this episode of The Profitable Travel Blogger Podcast, we’ll be focusing on all things TikTok for bloggers, from increasing your following to monetization and more.
By the end of this episode, you’ll understand:
- How to get more views on TikTok
- Tips for creating engaging TikTok videos
- Common mistakes that hurt TikTok growth
- How to get more followers on TikTok
- Ways TikTok can help you monetize your blog
- And more!
Our special guest for this episode is Jen Ruiz of Jen on a Jet Plane, who will be sharing all of the above and more.
Note: This episode on how to grow your TikTok account fast contains affiliate links to trusted partners!
How To Grow Your TikTok Account [Podcast Episode Audio]
Click here to listen on Apple Podcasts/iTunes
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Free Travel Blogger Resource Library
To help you really jumpstart your blogging success, I’ve added 55+ blogging resources like printables, video tutorials, and workbooks into a FREE resource library for travel bloggers.
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I’m all about implementation and I really want to make sure you don’t just listen to the episode and forget about it, but that you actually use what I share to make your blogging life easier.
Get More Views On TikTok With These Helpful Tools
InShot. One of the many tools you can use to create and edit viral TikTok videos.
Later. One of many tools you can use to pre-schedule your TikTok content.
TikTok For Bloggers Guide [Episode Transcript]
*Note: This is the edited down and paraphrased version of the episode. For the full episode, listen to the audio version linked above.
Are you looking for ways to monetize your travel blog — or increase your current revenue — as well as grow your traffic and engage your target audience?
Then one social media platform to get on your radar is TikTok, a social media network focused on short form videos.
Now, if you’re unsure of how to utilize the powers of TikTok, don’t worry, as our special guest, Jen Ruiz from Jen on a Jet Plane – who has seen major success on the platform – is here with us today sharing tips for seeing TikTok success, how to use it to grow your revenue, mistakes to avoid, and more.
In short, if you’re wondering how to grow on TikTok from 0, this episode can help.
1. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your TikTok for bloggers tips! To start, can you tell us more about yourself, your blog, and how you got into TikTok?
TikTok is something that completely took me off guard.
I’d heard about it and I knew it was a new platform on the rise, but I didn’t pay much attention to it until quarantine came around and we were all at home and I thought “Why not? I may as well try this.”
I took a risk and, low and behold, it ended up becoming my biggest social media platform. I was able to grow my TikTok account quickly because the algorithm on TikTok is so generous. It allows your content to be seen by a large amount of people.
Even if you don’t have very many followers, going viral is still possible.
This is what happened to me and I was able to leverage TikTok to grow my blog, meet celebrities, confidently pitch brands to collaborate, and to just have all around great experiences in terms of increasing traffic to my blog and others channels from TikTok and monetizing. It’s a great way to get to a point of full-time blogging if you’re not there yet, too!
2. Okay so let’s start with the basics. Why should a travel blogger get on TikTok? What are the benefits?
I think it is a platform that has proven it is here to stay. Not just that, but it’s also influencing trends on other platforms.
Other platforms are trying their best to integrate the secret sauce that TikTok is utilizing that has helped them cross that billion user threshold mark and then some.
Additionally, they’re really the only top app that isn’t owned by Facebook.
There is also content on TikTok to appeal to everyone. So maybe you think that it is just dancing teenagers; but, the truth is that in that large number of TikTok users everyone is included.
It’s people that like fitness. It’s people over 50 years old. It’s people talking about gardening. Basically, whatever it is you like to do, your crowd is on TikTok.
That means that you’re missing out if you’re not on TikTok connecting with your crowd and appealing to them.
And you have nothing to lose because so many platforms are cutting back on what they’re offering.
They’re cutting back on your reach. Your stories are getting less views. Pinterest is changing how they’re doing things and they’re prioritizing new pins that are now not including the link to your bio.
In my opinion, the way to combat these issues is to stay ahead of the trends and embrace new platforms instead of hoping that they’ll go away. Be adaptable and just have fun on TikTok, which is actually a fun app to begin with.
Basically, if you’re not on the platform yet, now is the right time to get on TikTok.
3. Now, of course, bloggers are always trying to figure out how to actually monetize their brands. How can TikTok help bloggers grow their revenue?
First and foremost, if you can have a video that goes viral you’ll likely see a quick boost in followers — which means you can charge more and get paid for blogger brand collaborations.
Additionally, you can get on people’s radar and attract more deals. I get contacted all the time because people find me through TikTok, which allows me to land 5-figure brand partnerships on TikTok alone.
Many brands are looking for content on TikTok specifically, so it’s a great way to stay ahead of the curve and offer more variety in the packages of deliverables that you offer the brands you work with.
Moreover, you can use TikTok to sell digital products and do affiliate marketing. In fact, your TikTok videos offer a really smart place to promote affiliate links.
You can also monetize content directly through TikTok.
TikTok has a program where, once you reach a certain threshold, they start paying you based on how many views your videos get. It’s a lower RPM than YouTube (so you’ll still want to work on growing on YouTube), but it’s still money that’s coming in.
4. Let’s backtrack for a bit. What are some best practices for setting up your TikTok profile and account?
The first thing that you should do is log on and try to claim your username before someone else does. You really want to have a username that’s congruent with your other channels whenever possible.
From there, carefully curate what it is that you see on your TikTok feed. On TikTok, you have an option to long press a video to let TikTok know if you’re interested in it or not.
You want to be able to filter out content you’re not interested in. Ideally, the content you interact with should be the content that you’re posting if you’re looking to do this for business purposes. This will help TikTok know what kind of content creator you are and who it can kind of compare you to.
Next, I would look for two or three really great TikTok creators in your space and analyze their top performing videos — ideally with 1 million views or more. Consider:
- What were people interested in?
- What were the comments saying? Comments in themselves can lead to content ideas.
- What was it about that video that was so catchy? Was it a trending song, interesting transitions, really helpful information, or something else?
Then you can try to do your own spin on one of these videos that you already know people are wanting to see.
It’s smart to try to be informative and create something people will really want to share — like what can you get for $100 in Bali or where is the hotel with the best view that you never heard of?
I’ve seen a lot of luxury travel bloggers do really well marketing these overwater villas that are right in the USA. People love it because they see they don’t need to travel all the way to the Maldives to experience these.
Sharing how to find the absolute cheapest airfare or deals you find is another smart content idea.
I always think it helps to be entertaining, but it can be tough to be entertaining all the time, especially if that doesn’t come naturally to you.
But, I also think as creatives it’s fun to experiment and do skits and things of the sort.
However, you also won’t ever lose out by being valuable and sharing information in a valuable way. Even if you’re entertaining, try to focus on that.
So, in short:
- Identify people in your niche
- Identify their viral videos
- Identify a way that you can replicate these videos in your own way and in a way that’s helpful to people
- Be on your way to becoming a TikTok star!
5. Now let’s move into how to grow your account on TikTok through what you post. How do you come up with your content ideas and do you have a set TikTok content plan?
I try to stay on top of trends, which I research on the Discover page and my For You page. You can also look at viral challenges.
I then save videos that I like to my favorites, and then I go back and look them over and consider which ones I can put my own spin on, putting time-sensitive content — like giveaways and current flight deals — at the top of my content calendar.
And if there’s something really quick that can be done, I try not to overthink it.
And that’s also the beauty of being somebody that’s starting out. I encourage you to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. Because you don’t know what it is that’s going to resonate with people — so try everything.
Also note that shorter clips — as in, something that replays — is going to get more views and is going to get shown to more people than a longer 60-second video that people only watch half of.
Therefore, if you have a 9-second video and people watch it all the way through — or even replay it a second time — then you’ve got the makings of a viral video.
With that in mind, while you’re experimenting try to stay shorter wherever possible and aim to have about 80% of your videos be 15 seconds or less.
6. Okay, so you have your idea for a new TikTok video. What does your workflow look like for actually taking that idea and turning it into a finished video?
Once I have the idea, I think about what I want the video to actually be. It can be something simple where it’s just a 9-second trending sound or effect and you’re just lip syncing to it. These are easy to crank out.
Then I think about what it is I want to add to the video later — because you first have the recording, then you have the adding of text, music, captions, stickers, effects, etc.
From there, I also do hashtag research.
Tip: Make sure that you’re capitalizing on at least one trending hashtag — even if it’s unrelated to the video, which is why you can see so many random obscure hashtags on people’s videos. It’s hopefully to get that boost in exposure, especially if you catch the hashtag early in popularity.
And so that’s something that I try to have often with at least four hashtags or so per video.
Then I put a cover on my video, upload it, and promote it on other channels.
So there’s a whole process to making a TikTok video. And it can go quickly if it’s something where you don’t need a lot of editing.
If it’s something where I do need editing, then in between that process of identifying what I want to do, recording it, and putting in the text and hashtags, I’ll actually take the content off of TikTok and go to an app like InShot where I can edit my video with the right timing, speed, cropping, etc.
Once I have that, I’ll reupload the video to TikTok before adding the sounds, effects, caption, and hashtags.
7. Amazing. So once you have that finished video, do you have any tips for uploading, such as best practices for choosing effects, creating captions, and adding hashtags?
It depends on you. The grid is not that strict on TikTok — like it is on Instagram where you feel a need to make it cohesive.
On TikTok, you can add a cover or choose to just pause on a moment in the video you like to have it replay in Boomerang form on your feed.
Honestly, I wouldn’t worry too much about this unless you’re doing a series with multiple parts, as the covers can help people search your content quickly.
Some accounts also have the ability to create playlists, which can help you organize videos.
I do recommend that everyone add a caption; either something witty or something descriptive with keywords so that TikTok knows what your video is about.
Again, make sure to include at least three related hashtags and one trending hashtag with 100 million views or less so you can catch it when it’s really trending.
Sometimes you’ll also see songs that are trending. TikTok often does promotions with certain artists, so you’ll see, for instance, a Miley Cyrus song that’s trending. So maybe you want to use that song in the background because you know it’s a trending song.
8. Aside from using hashtags, are there other things creators can do to help their TikTok videos get seen by more people?
Unlike Instagram, you don’t need to be on TikTok interacting the hour after you post for an exposure boost.
Either way, your video is going to get shown to people and then TikTok is going to rank that video depending on how people interact with it.
If people are sharing the video — or watching and then re-watching it — that’s going to help you go viral.
So don’t worry so much about having to be attached to your phone once you finish posting like you would if you’re on other platforms.
Additionally, you can repost your TikTok videos to other social media platforms. For instance, you might repost it as an Instagram Reel, turn it into a Pinterest pin and link it back to a relevant blog post, turn it into a YouTube Short, repost it to Facebook, or reshare it as part of a Twitter for bloggers strategy.
Resharing videos is a great way to grow your TikTok account for free, too.
I’ve gotten great organic reach doing this. In fact, I had one video get over 150,000 views just by reposting it from TikTok to Facebook.
9. What are some of the biggest mistakes you see new creators on TikTok make?
There are some simple ones — like having your text in a place where it can’t be seen. TikTok is strange in that there’s really only a small portion of the screen that’s unobstructed by buttons or captions.
Now, having a little text obstructed could technically force people to rewatch your video, which could be a TikTok strategy in itself for helping you to go viral. But, this can also really annoy people.
One way to avoid running into this issue is having your text automatically generated by TikTok. This way, the text is auto-adjusted based on the height of your caption, so you don’t really have to place the captions anywhere.
Another mistake I’ve seen new TikTok creators make it overthinking things. On TikTok, you really never know what will do well.
And so, maybe a video that you’ve had sitting in drafts would have done really well, but you worried about getting it perfect and didn’t post it.
TikTok is not about perfection, especially in the beginning. Just start posting and you’d be surprised with what does well.
Also, I’ve seen many TikTok creators get offended by TikTok trolls — which is a mistake.
Keep in mind, if people are trolling you that is actually a good sign, because it means you’re reaching more people than your mom and your best friend.
You really have to get to the point where you decide that you are a content creator and that you’re putting your work out there and that, by nature of the internet and human beings, they are going to criticize you.
And that’s okay! You aren’t putting your work out there for those people. Instead, focus on creating TikTok content for your true target audience.
10. What are some of the top strategies you’ve used to grow on TikTok?
I think posting consistently definitely helps when you’re starting out.
I’d recommend aiming for one video per day — or two videos per day if you can swing it. This will allow you to test what video formats people really like.
Remember, it doesn’t have to be anything crazy. It can just be a 9-second video you recorded on the spot of you doing a voiceover with some witty text or a stunning view you add some music and text to.
Or if there’s a tending sound — like right now, Owen Wilson saying “Wow wow wow” — you can put that to some scenic clips.
It can be super easy and it can work with content that you already have in your library.
Also, you can repost your top-performing videos. This is a good way to get some traction on things that have already done well.
Don’t think you can only post a video once. Instead, take that video and add a new song, caption, and hashtags and see how it does another time around.
11. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom! Before we sign off, can you let everyone know where they can find you?
Alright, now I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you feel inspired and empowered to create, grow & monetize a TikTok account.
Don’t forget to grab access to my free resource library for bloggers. There are a ton of social media resources in there.
And of course, make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes sharing these bite-sized strategies for bloggers who want to turn their blogs into profitable full-time businesses.
Happy blogging!
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