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A lot of TikToks will tell you to create planners to sell. Is this really a good way to make money online?
If you scroll through TikToks about making money and budgeting, you’ll find a lot of people sharing their “super easy side hustles.” One of them is to make money by creating planners.
The TikTokers even show you how to do it. Go to Canva, create a pretty cover, add 100 pages or more, and then download as a PDF. You can then upload to KDP (Amazon’s place to sell books), and you’re good to go.
The truth is, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. This is one of those cases. Yes, planner creation is a way to make money online, but you’re not going to make the millions instantly that these TikTokers keep telling you that you will. When you look at the links they’re pushing, their “super easy side hustles” end up being a trick to pull you in to pay them to tell you more, and that’s how they’re really making money.
The truth behind planners to make money online
I want to start with the fact that you can make some money creating planners and selling them on Amazon. However, the math doesn’t math when you look at what the TikTokers tell you.
You’ll see them tell you that someone is selling a planner for $5 and they’ve sold 10,000 of them. That means you get $50,000.
That’s WRONG.
What the TikTokers aren’t telling you is that you’re paying Amazon some money just for creating the planner. Let’s say the amount is $2, just for easy math.
So, really, you’re making $3 per planner, right? You can make $30,000 instead.
Still WRONG.
Amazon takes a percentage. The last time I looked, it was 40%. So, that’s 40% of the $3, so you’re getting $1.80 of that initial $5 the TikTokers told you that you’d get. So, you’re getting $18,000 from the 10,000 planners that you sell.
It’s not quite as much as the TikTokers want you to believe, is it? That’s why it’s so important to look into the details of the “opportunity” people are promoting for you. I don’t want to see people duped into spending their money on courses that end up not working from people who aren’t willing to tell the truth about how to make money online from the start.
Selling the planners isn’t that easy
Something that the TikTokers don’t tell you is how long it took for that one seller to sell their 10,000 planners. That’s a total since the planner has been up, which could have been for the last 10 years. So, really, they’re only selling 1000 per year, and that means they’re only making $1,800 per year.
You see, there’s a lot of work that goes into selling the planners. You need a great description that is full of keywords, and you need to make sure the title is catchy. There are going to be so many other people selling planners, that you need to find a way to stand out. The market is saturated. Find something else to do.
MORE: Can you make money writing online at Wizzley?
What are you doing to make money online? Share your ideas in the comments below.
