5 Ways to Make Money With Memes – It Pays to Be Funny

Meme Overview

So before we dive into this any further, let's talk about what exactly a meme is in the first place.

We aren't talking about the old definition here. We are talking about the new internet meme, which is described on Wikipedia as:

"An Internet meme, commonly known as just a meme, is an activity, concept, catchphrase, or piece of media that spreads, often as mimicry or for humorous purposes, from person to person via the Internet. An Internet meme usually takes the form of an image, GIF or video."

The most common type of meme you will find consists of an image with some text and is supposed to be funny--but there are different kinds.

Making Money With Memes

There are a variety of different ways that you can make money with memes, but unfortunately there is no way to make a lot of money quickly.

Yes,  you might have heard stories about people who have gotten lucky and struck it rich from memes, but this isn't a realistic outcome.

In the following section I'll be going over ways that you can make money with memes that...

• Take a while to get going but have high earning potential
• You could potentially make money with quite early, and earnings could be stable
• And ways you can start earning pretty much right away but that don't have much earning potential overall

Which do you choose?

I don't expect you to answer this yet. We'll be going over the different ways that fall under each of these categories and then you can decide which direction is right for your new meme-making business.

5 Ways to Make $$$ With Memes

1) Create Your Own Meme-Focused Social Media Account

One thing you can do to make money with memes is post them on social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. If you include the right hashtags and such--and keep your meme-content relevant to your audience, there is no reason you can't develop a good following that you can monetize by selling products, selling advertising to other companies/brands/people, and more.

This is easily one of the best ways to make money with a meme business--but the downside is that making money is not something that is going to happen overnight, or even within the next week or probably even month for that matter--BUT, income potential is high.

*I'll be diving deeper into this route in a bit

Some sell pretty darn well. For example, this simple meme button sells for $5 and there are over 1,000 reviews from buyers--meaning that probably well over 1,000 have been sold...

4) Upload Your Memes to Sites Where You Can Make Money

Did you know that there are sites out there were you can make money just by uploading memes?

PicturePunches.com (for example) is a website dedicated to funny memes. Anyone can join and post memes about anything. These memes will then be able to be seen by others and can earn you money the more impressions you get, because the website will be making money from ads--the more views your memes get, the more ad views they get and this means more money.

The earning potential is low, but some memes I've seen have earned people up to $1 and slightly more.

5) Meme-Creation Gigs

Places like Fiverr are freelance marketplaces where people can sell online services to clients--and as we know with the meme-craze going on, there are plenty of people looking for high quality memes for their businesses.

You could post your meme-creation service and sit back and wait for clients to come your way (which won't lead to a very reliable income by the way).

As you can see, there are others already selling these services...

A different route you could take would be to build your own brand for creating memes outside of any sort of freelance platform, such as how this professional meme-maker did...

But as far as the approach goes that the man in the video above took--there is no 'blueprint' or step-by-step guide on doing it this way. He sort of just went at it, put his name out there and kind-of got lucky.

Using Social Media to Make Money With Memes Cont..

Above I mentioned creating meme-focused social media accounts and growing a following simply by posting memes (listed as #1 above). This is easily one of the best ways to make money with memes so let's talk more on it.

How It Works

The idea is that you post funny memes, people follow you more and more as you continue to post and these memes get shared, and once you have a good-sized following you will be able to monetize it in various ways--as I'll go over.

And the memes you post don't have to be all your own. You can also share other funny memes that are relevant to what you post. As long as it is good relevant content that your followers will like, then it's okay to post.

Monetizing Your Social Media

Once you get a good following there are so many ways you can monetize it. Getting the following in the first place is the hard part--monetizing it is much easier.

Some ways you can do so include...

1) Sell Advertising - You see this all the time and often don't realize it. What I'm talking about is when you see large social media accounts posting subtle promotions for other brands, companies, etc.--or even something as simple as sharing a post from someone else's social media account.

There is big money to be made in this. Once you have a following you are naturally going to get contacted by other people in your niche asking if you can share their content, promote their brand, etc. to help them grow--and you can set your own price here.

Large social media accounts can easily make well over $1k just for sharing a post for someone.

Example: NBA Memes is a brand that heavily relies on memes to get followers (duh). On their Facebook account you can often see posts that they very well might be getting paid for. For example in this post they ask people to like a similar FB page called NFL Memes...

*By the way, their FB account has over 4 million followers--big money there!

2) Sell T-Shirts - Having a meme-based social media account and selling t-shirts work great together. Why? Well, because memes go great on a t-shirt!

The good thing is that t-shirts are very easy to get custom designed nowadays. Sites like Teespring.com make the process painless. You can do everything online and simply direct social media followers to your online shop on sites like this.

3) Sell Mugs - Mugs are another type of item that could potentially sell good with funny meme prints--and are another item that you can easily create custom designs for and sell online.

Printify deals with customized mugs (and t-shirts too), which they can dropship out to your customers.

4) Affiliate Marketing - Affiliate marketing is when you promote other people's products and earn commissions. Now with this method you probably aren't going to be able to find products to promote that have your funniest memes, but what you can do is promote relevant products to your audience.

So for example if you have a Facebook page that is all about pug memes (funny type of dog) you could promote pug products.

5) Sell Your Accounts - One thing that some people do regularly is build up social media accounts with large followings and then sell them. This is absolutely something that you could make good money with--although there is no telling how much because of the different variables at play. In order to do this you are going to need to have an established Facebook account (for example) with a good following.

There is good money to potentially be made selling your own products and promoting other people's, but when you give shoutouts, sell shares and such, this is where the big money is made--and of course if you decide to sell your brand once it is established.

Best Way to Start Out

It is more than likely going to seem darn-near impossible to start out. Brands like Men's Humor, College Humor, NBA Memes and others have millions of followers on social media--and you have to start from scratch.

The best advice is to start small. Start with a targeted niche and you can always branch out later if you decide that is best.

Example: Instead of targeting a large audience of 'dog lovers' with a Facebook account that posts funny dog memes, you could go the more targeted route (as just mentioned) of posting pug memes and gaining a following of 'pug lovers'.

Things will start off slow but that is just the way it is. If you create just 1-2 memes a day and post them on your social media, which takes less than 20 minutes, in 6 months from now you could have a decent following--assuming you use the right hashtags and what not.

How long will it take?

There is no good answer to this question. This depends on your niche, competition, how good your memes are of course, whether any memes go viral or not, etc.

It could take 6 months to a year to be able to monetize your meme-filled social media accounts with advertising if you go about it slowly--or it could take not even half that time if you get a meme to go viral and gain a bunch of followers from it.

Quick Step-by-Step Guide to Starting Out

1. Create your social media account
2. Post a few memes and set your account up so that it looks like something you would want to follow
3. Follow a bunch of other accounts that post relevant memes (this way you stay up-to-date on memes in your niche and have plenty of new memes to share--and get plenty of inspiration for your own memes)
4. Follow people who comment on the memes of the accounts you just followed (these people obviously like memes and if you follow them there is a good chance they will follow back--because you post awesome memes)

How to Create a Meme

Memes are super easy to create. Most of the time they consist of nothing more than an image with some text overlay.

There are lots of websites where you can create your memes for free. Some good ones that you can check out include:

1. imgflip
2. Kapwing - Here you can make memes with images, GIF's and videos.
3. quick meme
4. MemeCenter

Or if you wanted to you could use simple software like Microsoft Paint even.

What to Create

For some people creating memes is going to be much more easy than others. Coming up with ideas of what to create can be a challenge and a creative mind is pretty much a must.

So if you are an out-of-the-box creative thinker then this is good.

If not it's not the end of the world. You can look at other memes for inspiration. Of course you don't want to just copy memes, but you can use others to inspire your own creations. This is something that I would highly suggest early on--unless you just have some amazing natural knack for meme creation.

Finding inspirational memes in your niche can be as simple as Googling...

• "dog memes" if your niche is dogs
• "funny baseball memes" if your niche is baseball

... and so on. 

It's always better if you can find an authority brand or figure in your niche that posts memes regularly, because not all memes are that great but if you find an authority figure that is posting memes regularly then they probably know what works--but Googling for memes is always an option when starting out.

Important: Not only do you not want to steal other people's memes, but you also don't want yours stolen. The best way to keep this from happening is by simply using watermarks on your memes. This way if people do copy it, your watermark will still be there and it might actually help you out--kind-of like free advertising for your brand.

The Unfortunate Side of Meme Creation

Unfortunately making money with memes is likely much more difficult than it once was.

Why is this?

Well, because the internet is becoming saturation with memes. Everywhere you go you see memes and because of the increased supply the demand isn't as great.

That said, there is still plenty of room for money to be made.

The best advice I can give is to start out with low expectations--if you are going to go the route of creating your own meme social media accounts--and go from there. Don't expect a certain amount of money in a certain amount of time because this will likely lead to disappointment. If you post memes regularly, put out good relevant meme-content to your target audience and are consistent with it, there is no good reason you can't grow a good sized social media account and potentially make good money from it.