How to Make Money on Snapchat (Proven Method)

When you think of Snapchat, what is the first thing that comes to your mind?

1. A place where people share photos and videos with friends
2. An app that Instagram stole the Stories feature from
3. An app with a boatload of lenses and filters to play with
4. Your own personal photo-editing app

Well, to be honest, Snapchat is all of these things. It is renowned for its amazing filters and unmatched lenses—the animal ears and glasses filters are everybody’s favorite.

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Instagram legit stole Stories from Snapchat (oops). And even now, almost everyone uses Snapchat as their own personal photo-editing app.

But in addition to all these, people earn money on Snapchat too.

I know you may not have heard this before now, but Snapchat is actually a money-making app. In fact, I might go as far as to say Snapchat is the easiest place anyone can make money online.

And I mean literally the easiest!

As you’ll soon discover, making money on Snapchat is easier than on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Katie Feeney is no influencer; she wasn’t even selling anything; she didn’t make one single sponsored post, yet she made $1,000,000 on Snapchat!

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Like everybody else, Katie Feeney tapped into Snapchat’s newly-introduced Spotlight feature—one of the many means of making money on Snapchat (more on this later). After one week of posting on Snapchat’s Spotlight feature, Katie received a notification from Snapchat informing her that she’d made seven figures.

“I didn’t believe it was real at first,” the high school senior, 18, told PEOPLE.

“I started posting a ton of stories about my daily life, funny videos with my friends or boyfriend, unboxing new beauty or kitchen products I wanted to try.

“It’s so surreal, it’s hard for me to even process the information because I’m 18 years old and getting notifications that I’ve made $1,000,000,” Feeney said. “My mom and I screamed once we realized this was actually happening, and I cried.”

Interestingly, a spokesperson for Snapchat claims Katie Feeney is just one of many.

Since launching at the end of November 2020, Snapchat has paid approximately $42 million to more than 2,000 creators through the Spotlight feature, a Snapchat representative told PEOPLE.

Having read all these, I’m sure you’re already itching to ask: How do I make money on Snapchat?

Keep reading to find out!

The only thing you need to make money on Snapchat is an active audience base.

Like on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and the rest, the bigger your audience base, the greater your chances of making money on Snapchat.

Tips for getting Snapchat followers and building an audience base

Make your account more discoverable

The first step to gain friends on Snapchat is to let more people know about your presence on the platform.

The way people do this is by adding their Snapchat handle (which is planted alongside the Snapchat icon) or Snapcode into other content they’re publishing online, in the hopes that someone might see it and follow them through that.

Where to promote your Snapchat Snapcode or handle-bearing icon:

• Website. Many a time, we see people place their Snapchat icon along with other social network icons in their website header, sidebar, footer, or contact page.
• Blog post. It’s not uncommon to see folk integrating lines like “Follow me on Snapchat to learn more, follow me on Snapchat if you like the post, etc.” into blog posts.
• Email signature. Along with other social network icons, you can add your Snapchat icon in the footer of any email you send to people, to encourage them to link up with you on social media.
• Newsletter. If you’re a brand and you run newsletters, it makes sense to include call-outs for Snapchat follows in your newsletters.
• Business cards. If you use business cards, you want to add your Snapchat handle somewhere on the card.
• Be creative. Snapcodes and handle-bearing Snapchat icons can be placed anywhere, so think of other places you can incorporate them. For example, on gifts, flower bouquets, merchandise, event banners, adverts, etc.

Promote your account on other social networks

You can outright ask your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, YouTube, and other social media friends for follows on Snapchat.

To encourage people to check you out on Snapchat, you can create awesome content there and then upload the teaser on other social channels, asking fans to visit Snapchat to see the fully exclusive content.

Make sure your Stories are catchy

Good content travels fast. Make sure your stories are compelling so that they’ll end up in the “For You” tab or be shared by your followers.

You can try these ideas to create catchy Snapchat Stories:

• Music. Add music or sounds to make your Stories alluring.
• Caption videos. Use captions to captivate viewers.
• Lingo. Use the latest slang and phrases in your content to draw users.

• Quiz or Poll. Apps like Breeze and PollsGo can be used to create engaging quizzes and polls.

See a catchy quiz example from National Geographic:

Make high-quality content

Your Story may be great and alluring, but if it looks like a scene from a 1987 series or movie, Snappers will turn away.

Even if you don’t have a videography or photography background, take these Snapchat specification tips and apply them to all your Snapchat Stories:

• File size. Maximum 5 MB image and 32 MB video.
• File format. For images use .jpg or .png. For video use .mp4, .mov, and H.264 encoded.
• Full screen canvas. 1080 x 1920 px. 9:16 aspect ratio.

Use lesser-known features on all your content

Snapchat is crawling with tons of Stories every day. To make yours catchy and alluring, you need to think outside the box.

Don’t worry if you can’t come up with new Snapchat tricks. Here are some ideas for you:

• Apply up to three filters on a single Snap

• Use characters to frame your Snaps
• Change the colors of words and letters
• Pin an emoji on a moving target
• Switch between front and rear camera while recording
• Give your Snap a soundtrack

Create new lenses and filters

If you have the time and can hone the skills, you could learn to design branded lenses and filters on Snapchat.

The more exciting and captivating your filters and lenses, the more likely your followers will be to use and share them with their Snapchat friends.

Run contests

You can also use contests to gain new followers on Snapchat.

The most commonly used contest format is the “follow-to-enter” contest. Provided the prize is enticing, you can bet that followers will tell others about it, and your account will start brewing with new follower alerts as a result.

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Don’t be discouraged if you don’t have big money to give out. A free product or modest monetary prizes can sometimes do the trick.

Leverage trending topics

Every month, Snapchat publishes the things that are trending on its blog. This usually features entertainment gossip, popular emojis, top celebrities, and frequently used slang.

Tap into any trending subject, and use it to create fascinating content to share with your community. Oftentimes, this kind of content goes viral.

Now that you know what to do to gain Snapchat followers, let’s talk about how you can leverage those followers to earn money on Snapchat.

1. Submit your best Snaps to Spotlight

The first and most popular means people are using to make money on Snapchat nowadays is the newly released Spotlight feature.

Designed to encourage more people to use the app, Spotlight has served as a wonderful passive income stream for so many users in the last few months.

At its core, Spotlight gives out $1m per day to all creators whose content is perceived as being entertaining by Snapchat.

As of now, the feature has paid out approximately $42 million to more than 2,000 creators.

Word has spread fast about the new feature, which is now seeing more than 175,000 submissions for a limited number of spots per day.

But don’t get it twisted. The Spotlight feature is still fairly new, meaning it’s still there for the taking—you just have to be amongst the early birds.

What is Snapchat Spotlight?

As defined by Snapchat, “Spotlight is the easiest way to discover the world of Snapchat in one place and see perspectives from across our community. It shines a light on the most entertaining Snaps, no matter who created them.”

We want you to take note of two important points from that definition above.

1.) The Snapchat Spotlight feature is designed to expose the most entertaining Snaps to the Snapchat community.

2.) It doesn’t matter what influence or number of followers someone has; they can still enjoy the full benefits of Spotlight.

What kind of content do people use to make money on Spotlight?

Almost any kind of content works—be it science experiments, comedy, dance, music, physical activities, skits, flips/tumbles, nature, scenery, animals, babies, etc. As long as it is exciting, fun-filled, and entertaining, you’re good to go.

Don’t know how to come up with entertaining content ideas for Spotlight? Snapchat has a whole article dedicated to you. Click the link to check it out!

Note: Users are allowed to create videos up to 60 seconds in length on Spotlight.

Once you create some entertaining content, submit it to Spotlight, and they accept it, you’ll enjoy a share of the $1 million Snapchat is giving out every day.

According to the network’s terms, users can make a minimum of $250 per Snap, and the money is typically paid out within a week of a video posting.

How to submit your content on Spotlight

• Create a Snap the usual way.
  
• At the top of the “Send To” screen, you’ll find a new option labeled “Spotlight”.
  
• From there, hit the Send button in the bottom right-hand corner and your content will be submitted.

Note: Ensure that you add topics to your Snaps before submitting to Spotlight so that Snapchat can easily show your content to the right audience.

What happens if your content is accepted?

If your video is accepted, you’ll find it in the “Spotlight Videos” section. The criteria Snapchat uses to curate videos in this section are based on each individual viewer’s preference, as well as other factors like:

• Watch time: How long people spend watching it
• Likes: How many users like it
• Shares: How many people are sharing it with their friends
• Bounce rate: How many people bounce out without watching until the end

How does Snapchat determine what portion of the $1m payment pie each Spotlight creator gets per day?

How much your video fetches you is determined using a proprietary formula, based on how many unique views it receives compared to other content submitted that day.

Furthermore, don’t go thinking you can inflate view counts to fool the Snapchat algorithm, because Snapchat has a way of spotting frauds.

2. Promote your own products and services

If you have a product or service you believe people might be interested in buying, bringing it onto Snapchat might be a good way to monetize the platform.

Right now, loads of small-scale business owners and service providers are on Snapchat promoting their offerings. If you too have something unique that you think people want to buy, you can leverage Snapchat to promote it.

Popular things that people promote on Snapchat include physical products such as clothing, outdoor gear, electronics, fashion accessories, tech tools, home décor items, etc., or digital products like skill training, online courses, personal coaching, etc.

The idea here is not to ask people to buy the products or order the service directly on Snapchat, but rather to come to a secondary place where the offerings are waiting for them. This other place could be a blog page, a website, another social media site, or what have you.

The only challenge you’ll have with promoting products or services to make money on Snapchat is that your video promotional content can only last for 10 seconds.

As a result, you’ll have to get extremely creative with your videos to achieve the best customer conversion.

The technique most people use to give their promotions high conversion rates is publishing how-to and behind-the-scenes videos.

Behind-the-scenes videos are always engaging for viewers. They could be something that shows the effort you put into creating a product, or the work that goes on behind the scenes while delivering a service.

How-to videos show Snappers how to use your products or how to do something relating to the service you offer. To fascinate Snappers with your how-to videos, ensure that the content is funny or unique in some way.

Inside these how-to and behind-the-scenes videos, creators occasionally offer a discount or promo code to their followers, to encourage them to click on the promotional content and move up the sales funnel.

3. Sell things directly through Snapchat

While the last part was talking about product and service promotion, this part actually entails how you can make money on Snapchat by selling actual products or digital services.

As it is, you can sell things on Snapchat just like Facebook and Instagram. When you do that, it is said that you’re using your Stories like a mini online marketplace.

For example, let’s say you have some handmade jewelry, a pair of sneakers, artwork, home décor items, a digital handbook, or even an online course you’d like to sell. You can easily come to Snapchat to sell all of these for quick cash.

All you have to do to make your money is to feature the product in your Stories and include the price you want to sell them for.

If someone is interested, they can respond by swiping up and you’ll complete the sale using CashApp, Payform, Venmo, or other major credit/debit cards. Once the order processing is completed, you can send the item to the buyer online if it’s a digital product, or ship it to them if it’s a physical one, per the provided shipping details.

A great way to lure people into buying your products is to tell them that you will post exclusive 24h offers only for Snapchat followers. With this kind of time-limited offer, users will be better motivated to patronize your offerings.

4. Promote other people’s products or services: affiliate marketing

Not everyone has a product website to promote or a skill they can monetize, and definitely, not everyone will enjoy Snapchat’s $1,000,000 daily Spotlight jackpot.

If you belong to this set of people, there’s still hope.

You can sell other people’s products or services on Snapchat and get paid for it through a system called affiliate marketing. You’ve probably heard about it before.

In not too many words, what it entails is that you promote someone’s products or services on your Snapchat account, encourage users to patronize the business, and once they do, you get paid a commission by the business owner.

In some rare cases, you might be lucky enough to find a business owner who isn’t really interested in direct purchase, but just the promotion. In this case, the business owner will pay you a certain sum anytime somebody comes onto their website from your Snap.

How do you promote someone else’s products/services?

One way to promote affiliate products is to simply talk about them to your followers in your Snaps.

Show followers how you personally use the product or service, why you love it, what the product/service can do for them, what they risk losing if they don’t buy or take action at that moment, etc.

To further encourage action from followers, you can also run contests and offer promo codes, time-limited offers, or discounts. Put your unique affiliate link in the Snap so your followers can swipe and use it to make a purchase.

How much you can make as a Snapchat affiliate marketer will depend on the number of followers you have on your account. The higher your follower count, the more eyes will see your affiliate products, and the higher the sales you can make off them.

Source: International Monetary Fund

To find affiliate programs to join, check out this article:

Note: Affiliate programs are structured by business owners looking for people to help them market their products.

If you don’t find a program that suits you in the article above, follow these steps:

• Check affiliate networks: Some of the most popular affiliate networks to join include ShareASale, CJ Affiliate, Rakuten Advertising (also known as LinkShare), Pepperjam, AvantLink, Impact, and Link Connector.

• Check company websites: Search for popular company names in your preferred affiliate niche and check whether they offer affiliate programs. Note that your preferred affiliate niche can be sports, entertainment, science, health, comedy, romance, etc. It’s totally up to you.

• Check affiliate websites: There are tons of sites like RetailMeNot, Brad’s Deals, Ebates, and SlickDeals, which promote companies that offer affiliate programs.

• Check affiliate program directories: There are some sites on the internet like HighPayingAffiliatePrograms.com, which are dedicated to listing all the affiliate programs that are out there. Check them out to see which programs are available.

5. Design and sell Snapchat Geofilters or AR filters (lenses) online

This is Ana Casciello, and what you see on her face here is a self-designed AR filter (lens).

“I just wanted a [filter] that suited me more,” Casciello, a Tampa, Florida native, told CNN Business.

So she started playing with Snapchat’s free “Lens Studio” software and Adobe Photoshop to experiment with effects. In the end, she came up with these augmented reality filters—known as “lenses” on Snapchat—that add a star and flower-shaped freckles to photos and made them available to other users.

“It started to grow and become more popular,” she said.

After the success of her first filter, she started creating more and more, until she finally created a store on Etsy where she sells packages of filters for up to $49. Right now, it’s claimed that she’s made thousands of dollars from the sales of Snapchat filters.

You too can design and make money from Snapchat filters.

Some people are interested in buying Snapchat filters to use on other platforms like Instagram. Others want to use them for weddings, graduation parties, holiday events, birthdays, etc.

According to John Scott, founder of SnapThatFilter, a small business that designs bespoke geofilters for special occasions, “Snapchat geofilters are the millennial equivalent of a birthday card.”

If you can create unique, exciting, and beautiful Snapchat filters, you might find someone who’s interested in buying.

Commonly, Snappers who create customized filters sell them on platforms like Etsy, but you can also create your own online store to sell filters and lenses.

Per an Etsy search, here are examples of birthday-themed filters from a seller:

My Observation: Filters are selling for between $4 and $50 on Etsy!

Apart from the tools used by Ana, other filter designing tools include Canva and Adobe Spark.

6. Take advantage of sponsored content

Lots of brands adopt Snapchat marketing in their digital marketing campaigns. These brands recognize the love for and popularity of the app, and so they too are desperate to tap into it.

One of the methods brands use to leverage Snapchat marketing is through the creation of sponsored content.

That is, they look for someone who’s popular (has a large audience base) on Snapchat, and ask this person to create Snapchat posts around their products or services. This post is then published on the popular Snapper’s account.

In return, the brand pays this person a handsome sum.

If you’re willing to do all the leg work involved in building a solid audience base (gaining lots of Snapchat followers), this might be a really good way for you to make money on Snapchat.

In the event that you’ve built a strong enough audience base, and still have no brand knocking on your door for sponsored posts, you can enter their Snapchat DM and pitch them. Chances are that many of them may not even know about the opportunity. But by hearing about it, and the ROI it promises to return, they can be wooed into partnering with you.

So there you have it—everything you need to do to make money on Snapchat.

Bear in mind though that you’ll need to give Snapchat your all if you hope to earn money from it. As Theodore Roosevelt once said, “Nothing worth having comes easy.”

In order to earn money from Snapchat, you will need to put in some great effort to learn solid content creation strategy and build a strong audience base.