How To Make Money With TikTok 2022 (8 Ways To Make $100/Day)

TikTok has 47,000 followers on Alston’s account and pulls in commissions on security cameras, sound bars, and stand mixers every single month. That is a small account by TikTok standards. And that is exactly the point. You do not need a massive following to make money on this platform. You need the right method matched to where you are right now.

This post breaks down all eight ways Alston covers in the video above, including the one tip that most TikTok money videos skip entirely: the reason most people fail has nothing to do with the algorithm and everything to do with the content strategy they chose. Stick through all eight methods and pay special attention to way eight, which tells you how to start earning before you even hit 1,000 followers.

What You’ll Walk Out With

The single mindset shift that separates TikTok earners from people who just post and hope
A step-by-step breakdown of all eight monetization methods, from digital products to brand deals
Real commission math on a Canon M50 camera affiliate sale using Amazon Associates
How to use Teespring to sell merch without ever touching inventory or shipping
How Fiverr fits into TikTok monetization in two completely different ways
The exact call-to-action trick that drove Alston’s first affiliate commissions before he had 1,000 followers
A coaching pricing range you can use right now, from $200 to $3,000 per client depending on your niche
Ready to figure out which of these eight methods fits your exact skills and situation? Take the quiz at finder.platformproof.com

The One Rule That Separates TikTok Earners From Everyone Else

Before getting into the eight methods, Alston lays out the single most important principle for making money on TikTok: promote your own brand, not a fake persona. His words in the video are direct. Talk about what you know. Share your real successes and your real failures. Do not pretend to be something you are not.

The reason this matters is simple. There are millions of people on TikTok looking for someone exactly like you. Not an influencer. Not a celebrity. Someone who is one or two steps ahead of them in a subject they care about. That could be cooking, parenting, data analytics, photography, personal finance, or dog training. Whatever you know deeply, there is an audience for it. When you show up as yourself and talk about your real experience, you attract people who want to follow your path. That following becomes the foundation for every single one of the eight methods below.

Way 1: Sell Digital Products

Digital products are Alston’s first recommendation because of one specific quality: you create them once and sell them forever. No inventory. No shipping. No restocking. His own example from the video is the 60 Second Business Blueprint, a 43-page guide that teaches people how to go viral with vertical video on social media platforms. He built it once and it keeps selling.

Your digital product does not have to be complicated. It can be an ebook, a course, an audiobook, a podcast bundle, or a set of templates. If you work a nine-to-five as a data analyst and have built Excel spreadsheets with macros that save you hours each week, that is a sellable product. Someone somewhere is doing the same job and would pay for your shortcut. The key is to package knowledge you already have, not knowledge you think you are supposed to have.

Platforms like Etsy are explicitly mentioned in the video as a place to sell digital products. You can also sell directly from a landing page, which connects back to the domain name strategy covered in way eight. The point is that your TikTok content becomes a free promotional channel for a paid product you already own.

Way 2: Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing means you recommend other people’s products and earn a commission when someone buys through your link. Alston walks through two specific examples in the video. The first is Brain Training for Dogs on ClickBank, a product with a dedicated affiliate program that creators in the pet niche can promote. The second is the Canon M50 camera on Amazon Associates.

Here is the math Alston runs in the video on the Canon M50. The camera sells for $899. Amazon pays a 3% commission on cameras. That is $26.97 per sale. Now factor in that buyers often add accessories to the same cart: extra batteries, larger memory cards, maybe a tripod. A cart that starts at $899 can easily push past $300 in additional items, and your 3% applies to all of it. A handful of sales per week at those numbers adds up fast.

The channel example in the video is also worth noting. He types the word “dog” into TikTok and shows how many creators are already building audiences around pet content and weaving affiliate links into their recommendations. Whatever niche you are in, there is almost certainly an affiliate program that fits. Photography, cooking, fitness, home improvement, personal finance: the products exist and the affiliate programs are open to anyone.

Way 3: Offer Services on Fiverr

Fiverr shows up in this video in two different and very distinct ways. The first is TikTok shoutouts. If you have a substantial following on TikTok, you can list a shoutout service on Fiverr and charge smaller accounts $10 to $50 for a 60-second mention. It is a short video, and you are essentially monetizing the reach you already built.

The second way to use Fiverr is as a creator for hire. If you are good at making TikTok videos, you can list that as a service. Businesses and individual creators are paying between $10 and $20 per video for someone to make TikTok content for them. The tools to do this are completely free: Canva for building the video, Pexels or Unsplash for royalty-free footage and images. You are essentially getting paid to do something you would be doing anyway to build your own account.

There is also an arbitrage angle in the video. You can hire Fiverr designers to create t-shirt graphics (around $30 per design), upload them to Teespring, and then use your TikTok presence to drive traffic to the store. That arbitrage loop connects back to way five below.

Way 4: Coaching

Coaching is one of the most direct paths from TikTok content to income. The model is simple: you create free content that demonstrates your knowledge, and a small percentage of your viewers decide they want to go deeper with you one-on-one or in a group setting. Alston references a woman on TikTok who teaches people how to use TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest to make money. Her content is free. Her engagement leads to an application to work with her directly, where she limits herself to three to five clients per month.

That scarcity is intentional. By capping her client roster, she signals premium value and commands a premium price. In the video, Alston puts the coaching price range at $200 to $3,000 per client depending on your knowledge and skills in the industry. A coach charging $1,000 per month and working with five clients earns $5,000 monthly from coaching alone, and TikTok is the free lead-generation engine that fills those slots.

The content strategy for coaching is the same as the general principle above: be yourself, share what you actually know, and let the results speak. The people who watch consistently and comment regularly are your warmest coaching leads. When you eventually add a call to action pointing to an application or a consultation link, the conversion rate on that warm audience is much higher than a cold offer to strangers.

Way 5: Sell Merch With Teespring

Teespring, now rebranded as Spring, is a print-on-demand platform that handles payment processing, printing, and shipping automatically. You submit a design, set a price, and link your store. When someone orders, Spring fulfills the entire transaction. Your job is to come up with the idea and drive traffic to the store from TikTok.

The strategy Alston outlines in the video is to watch TikTok for trending sounds, trending memes, and viral phrases, and then build merch around whatever is gaining traction. If a sound is being used in 50,000 videos, there is probably a phrase or visual associated with that sound that people would put on a t-shirt. Move quickly, get the design up, and push it through your TikTok content before the trend fades.

For the design itself, you can either create it yourself in Canva or outsource it on Fiverr for around $30. If the design sells well, that $30 is recovered quickly. If it does not, you learned something about your audience at a low cost. The iteration speed is fast enough that you can test multiple designs in a short period.

Way 6: Run Paid Ads

Paid ads on TikTok are included as a method in this video, though Alston is straightforward about the reality: TikTok can be finicky when it comes to running paid ads. That is worth taking seriously before putting money into the platform. Paid ads require a testing budget, tolerance for losses during the learning phase, and a product with a solid enough margin to absorb ad spend and still come out profitable.

The two use cases Alston mentions are dropshipping and merch stores. In both cases, the math needs to work before you scale. If you are dropshipping a product with a $30 margin and your cost per acquisition on TikTok ads is $40, you are losing money no matter how much volume you drive. Paid ads reward people who have already validated their offer organically, not people who are using ad spend to find out if anyone wants what they are selling.

That said, there are creators making very good money with TikTok paid ads, and there is a large library of step-by-step tutorials on the platform itself showing exactly how to set up campaigns. If this is the method you want to pursue, start with a small daily budget, test one product and one ad creative at a time, and be willing to cut what does not work quickly.

Way 7: Land Brand Deals and Sponsorships

Brand deals are in-video promotions where a company pays you to mention their product or service in your content. Alston describes two ways this happens: you either reach out to brands directly once your account has meaningful reach, or brands start reaching out to you as your following grows. The video mentions an example of promoting a soda brand or another creator’s t-shirt line as illustrations of what sponsorships look like in practice.

The price of a brand deal depends on three things: your follower count, your engagement rate, and how well your audience matches the brand’s target customer. A creator with 50,000 highly engaged followers in a specific niche often commands more money per deal than a creator with 500,000 followers and a diffuse, general audience. Brands care about whether their target customer is watching, not just how many people are watching.

For creators just building their accounts, brand deals are a later-stage strategy. But it is worth noting even at the beginning, because the content decisions you make today affect how desirable your account looks to potential sponsors later. An account that has a clear, specific audience and a consistent niche is far easier for a brand to evaluate than an account that posts about everything.

Way 8: Make Money Before You Hit 1,000 Followers

This is the tip Alston circles back to add at the end of the video because he almost forgot it, and it is arguably the most important one for someone just starting out. TikTok requires 1,000 followers before you can add a clickable link to your bio. But you do not need to wait for that milestone to start driving traffic to an offer.

The method: put a call to action in your video content itself and in the comments. Alston says this is how he earned his first commissions with affiliate marketing and TikTok. He had a link to a landing page typed out in the comments of his videos, something like “visit austingodbolt.com/tiktok to learn more,” and people left the app and went to it. He is direct about this: if you are creating genuinely helpful and engaging content, people will leave the app and go wherever you tell them to go.

One practical detail he adds: set up multiple URL redirects on your domain to catch spelling variations. He noticed people were typing his URL with different spellings of TikTok, including “tick-talk,” “tick talk” with a space, and other variations. By setting up redirects for each common misspelling, he captured traffic that would otherwise have gone nowhere. If you are going to send people to a custom URL from your TikTok content, own the most common ways people will mistype it.

This method requires that you have a domain name and a landing page. The landing page does not need to be complicated. It can be a simple list of the five or six best products you recommend in your niche, each one linked to your affiliate offer. When someone clicks any of them, you earn the commission. The page exists to bridge TikTok (which does not allow affiliate links directly) and the purchase.

Not sure which of these eight TikTok money methods fits your actual situation?

Take the two-minute quiz at finder.platformproof.com and get a specific recommendation based on your skills, schedule, and starting point.

Honest Drawbacks to Each Method

Every one of these eight methods has a real cost, and it is worth naming them plainly so you can pick the one that fits your actual situation rather than the one that sounds easiest.

Digital products require upfront time to create something worth buying. A 43-page blueprint does not write itself. You need to know the subject well enough to teach it and organize it clearly enough that someone who buys it feels they got more than they paid for.

Affiliate marketing has a lag between content creation and income. The Amazon Associates commission on a camera is 3%. That means on an $899 sale, you earn $26.97. To hit $100 per day, you need roughly four sales per day at that price point, or a mix of products and add-ons that bring the per-session commission higher. That takes consistent traffic, which takes consistent content.

Fiverr services trade time for money. At $20 per TikTok video created, you need five videos to hit $100. That is a real hourly rate for a beginner, but it does not scale unless you raise your prices as your portfolio grows or productize the service into a template-based workflow.

Coaching is high income per client but low volume by design. At $500 per month and five clients, you earn $2,500. Adding a sixth client means more hours of your week. The ceiling is real unless you shift to group formats or productized deliverables.

Merch is trend-dependent. A design that captures a viral sound can sell hundreds of units. A design that misses the trend or arrives too late earns nothing. The iteration speed is your main advantage, so success here requires paying close attention to the platform constantly.

Paid ads have the highest barrier to entry and the fastest path to losing money. Only pursue this if you have already validated your offer organically and have a budget you are genuinely prepared to lose while learning.

Brand deals are entirely dependent on your follower count and niche specificity in the early stages. You cannot manufacture them. They come after you have done the work to build a real audience.

The without-1,000-followers method requires a domain name and a landing page. That is a small recurring cost but it is a real one. You also have to do the work of getting people to take an extra step out of the TikTok app, which requires more compelling content than just posting and hoping.

Find Your X

Eight methods is a lot to sort through. The fastest way to pick the right one is to match the method to the assets you already have: your knowledge, your time, your starting budget, and your comfort on camera. Go to finder.platformproof.com and take the quiz. It asks a few targeted questions and gives you a specific recommendation so you are not stuck in analysis paralysis trying to decide which of eight options applies to your life.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you need 1,000 followers to make money on TikTok?

No. The 1,000-follower requirement applies to the clickable bio link, but you can drive traffic to any URL by including it as text in your video and in your comments. Alston’s first affiliate commissions came this way, before his account hit that threshold. The trade-off is that people have to type the URL manually rather than tapping a link, so a short, memorable domain helps significantly.

What is the easiest TikTok monetization method for a complete beginner?

Affiliate marketing through Amazon Associates is the most accessible starting point for most beginners. You can sign up for free, get approved relatively quickly, and start promoting products you already own or know well. The commissions are modest on their own, but they are real, they come in passively once the content is live, and the process of creating content teaches you what your audience actually responds to.

How much does a coaching business on TikTok actually pay?

Alston gives a specific range in the video: $200 to $3,000 per client depending on your industry and expertise level. A beginner coach in a popular niche might charge $200 to $500 per month. An experienced coach helping business owners solve a specific revenue problem might charge $3,000 or more. The audience you build on TikTok is what qualifies you in the eyes of potential clients, so the content and the coaching business are directly connected.

Is Teespring still a reliable merch platform in 2024?

Teespring rebranded to Spring and is still operational. The model remains the same: you upload designs, set prices, and Spring handles fulfillment entirely. The main risk of trend-based merch is timing. A design that arrives after a meme has peaked earns very little. If you are going to use the merch method, the speed of execution matters as much as the quality of the design.

Can you actually make $100 per day from TikTok affiliate marketing?

The math in the video shows it is possible. Four sales of a $899 camera at 3% commission equals roughly $107.88. But that assumes consistent traffic, an audience interested in camera gear, and content strong enough to move people from TikTok to your landing page and from your landing page to Amazon. Getting there takes time and consistent posting. The $100/day figure is a realistic ceiling for a productive affiliate account in a product-focused niche, not a day-one result.

Do you need to show your face on TikTok to make money?

No. The video covers face-optional strategies throughout. Canva, Pexels, and Unsplash are all mentioned as tools for building video content using stock footage and images, no camera required. That said, the core principle of the video, promoting your personal brand and authentic experience, is much easier to execute when people can see and hear you. Faceless accounts can work, but they tend to build audience more slowly and have a harder time converting viewers to coaching clients or digital product buyers.

How do brand deals work on TikTok and when can you expect them?

Brand deals typically begin coming in once you have a clear niche and a follower count in the tens of thousands, though there is no fixed threshold. Brands reach out based on audience fit, not just size. A 20,000-follower account in a specific cooking niche is more attractive to a kitchenware brand than a 200,000-follower account that covers everything. You can also proactively reach out to brands with a media kit showing your follower count, average views, and engagement rate once your account is established.

What is the difference between selling a digital product and running a coaching program on TikTok?

A digital product is asynchronous and scales without your time: someone buys a PDF or a course and goes through it on their own. You make the sale and move on. Coaching is synchronous and time-bound: you meet with clients, answer their specific questions, and adjust your advice to their situation. Digital products have higher margin once created but require a larger upfront time investment to build. Coaching has a lower ceiling per hour but can start generating revenue much faster because the product is simply your time and knowledge, which you already have.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “How To Make Money With TikTok 2022 (8 Ways To Make $100/Day)” YouTube, youtu.be/qP_pMGWLrHg
Amazon Associates, amazon.com/associates affiliate program referenced in video
ClickBank, clickbank.com marketplace for digital affiliate products, Brain Training for Dogs example cited in video
Spring (formerly Teespring), spri.ng print-on-demand merch platform cited in video
Fiverr, fiverr.com freelance marketplace for TikTok shoutouts and video creation services cited in video
Pexels, pexels.com royalty-free stock video and image platform cited in video
Unsplash, unsplash.com royalty-free image platform cited in video
Canva, canva.com design tool for creating TikTok video content cited in video