It’s an interesting way of earning money, but not an easy one. Onlyfans is a subscription-based service with in-built paid features like Pay-per-view, though not many performers use this option. There are different people registered on this platform, such as musicians, fitness coaches, and other celebrities but most of the performers are girls who sell nude photos and videos.
Nevertheless, its founders don’t pitch it as a porn site of sorts. One of them is Timothy Stokely, who says that influencer culture is over there, webcamming is there, and OnlyFans is right smack in the middle.
As of last May, the site was gathering 7,000 — 8,000 new users daily. Now, these figures are probably even higher.
You can calculate how much money you can make with a little help from Onlyfans earning calculator. This stats is based on the follower statistics on social media.
The Latest Stats: Over 60 Million Users
Onlyfans has over 60 million users, according to the latest research. And just like almost any other service, this platform attracted the lion's share of its user base during the pandemic, when a free movement wasn’t an option and many people had to stay confined in their homes.
Some reports estimate that the website gets 500,000 new users a day and about 15 million new users monthly.
Its monetization model is a no-brainer. They hide the content behind the paywall and offer exclusive access to it for subscribers only. The platform owners get 20% of the content price. The major part of all the content on Onlyfans is a paid one, even non-adult videos/pictures.
Some observers estimate OnlyFans' business model as even more profitable than that of Airbnb, Uber, and the like. A vehicle or a property owner only caters to one customer at a time, whereas there can be hundreds or even thousands of people scrolling the same nude pic.
The average performer revenue is estimated at around $180 a month.
1% of all the profiles account for around 30% of the total platform revenue, and 10% of the performers earn over 70%. And yes, celebs get an organic edge on others, because they can move their audience to a new platform when they register there. For example, Bella Thorne made over a million dollars on the first day on Onlyfans after she told her subscribers on Instagram that she would move there. She set the subscription fee at $20 a month and offered a discount of up to $15 when purchasing a half-year subscription. Although she said that her pictures were "naked" but her images weren’t actually nude.
Many fans asked for refunds after that, which caused the company to make changes in its policy regarding the prices the content makers can set for their content.
News agencies wrote about other success stories like the story of Belle Delphine who made $140,000 a month but most of the accounts earn a bit over $140 a month, since, it must be said, those accounts literally have no fans. It’s not a quick buck scheme unless you already have a decent fan base. These things take time, you have to grow your social presence, and only after a while, you’ll be able to attract people to your account on OnlyFans.
Why Are Most of the OnlyFans Accounts Not Popular
Adult content users are not eager to pay beforehand, since they don’t know what to expect from a performer in question. They haven’t seen any of the content as yet, and they assume that sites like this also attract scammers, and there are plenty of them on OnlyFans. So, it’s highly unlikely that an average user would subscribe to the page of a random person unless she is a kind of celebrity from Insta or other kinds.
Use several pages on OnlyFans, a paid and a free one. It’s allowed. On your free page, you can post PPV (pay per view) messages, and other people would pay your price for viewing a photo/video.
There’s no PPV feature in a paid account feed.
So, Five Days, and I’m Already at the Top 29% of Creators...
Rapper Rubi Rose made $100,000 on OnlyFans in two days.
However, you don’t have to necessarily be a celeb of sorts to gain traction on OnlyFans. Just a regular content creator named Roula — she goes by the name of Roulamindbodylife on the platform — says that just for 5 days she managed to get in the top 29% of OnlyFans creators. She posts every day — either pictures or small video clips or something.
According to her, she’s super active on there. For 5 days she’s made close to $300. For some people that might not be a lot, and for others, it might. Roula explains that given the amount that she’s been promoting her page and how much time she can devote to promote her page she’s super grateful and happy with the fanbase that she does have.
She says that you just have to promote your own channels or your own page. She answers all the comments and all the DMs. For each subscription, she charges $20. But since OnlyFans does take a percentage, Roula inevitably gets like $16. She notices that content creators should be very aware because the amount they make is still tax deducted, and they still should be putting something to the side at the end of the year.
So, she’s made close to $300 for 5 days, then how many subs did she have for that time? She charged $20 a sub, if we divide $300 into 20 it will give us 15 subs.
So, she gathered 15 paid subs just for 5 days. Not bad.
Here’s the proof of Roula’s earnings:
The most important you need to implement is your marketing funnel.
Your goal is to get people to the funnel and nurture them further down the funnel till the very end. And then start all overreaching the number of clients.
The free page is the sort of preview of your profile that nudges people down the funnel.
The funnel itself consists of four stages:
● Free OnlyFans.
● PPV-content.
● Paid OnlyFans.
● Customized OnlyFans.
The top of the funnel includes the traffic from social media, OnlyFans website, and dating apps.
The girl was smart enough to create a free page and post the link to it in both her Instagram and Twitter bios. And the free page had the link in bio to her paid page. She promoted her profile only on Instagram and Twitter and wasn’t extremely active in her SMM efforts.
After analyzing her social media profiles it turned out that about 300 new users had visited her Twitter and Instagram, from 30 to 50 users visited her free OnlyFans page, and on average 1 person a week subscribed to her paid page. It seemed to be all right but the girl wanted to earn $10,000 instead of $1,500.
So, the first thing we had to do was to increase the inbound traffic to the top of her funnel.
We used several dating apps like Tinder and some pornotube platforms like Pornhub.
After a while, these changes helped to generate subsequently more traffic. The subscription stats started to grow exponentially, with many new users following her main page. And in six months her monthly revenue grew up to $10 grand, with about 12 hundred new users a week visiting her free profile. So, this kind of omnichannel marketing proved to be efficient. The more subs for the free page the more PPV-content purchases and the main page subs and customized orders.
The Direct Outreach Method
So, to earn on Onlyfans you should be a girl or find a girl who would agree to offer nude photos/videos regularly. Finding a girl who would agree to work in the long run is the most difficult part here.
By sending messages to girls you can find a good candidate for this role. There could be hundreds if not thousands of verified accounts of girls with little to no subscribers.
A possible scenario. A girl has registered an account on Onlyfans, verified it, made some posts but due to the fact that she simply didn’t know how to promote herself a couple of weeks later, she lost the motivation. She didn’t receive a good amount of feedback from the audience and all these efforts eventually ground to a halt. Then our girl abandoned her account probably for good.
And at this exact moment, it could be your message offering a promotion that would change her mind and get her back to the initial idea of earning through Onlyfans. It wouldn’t be difficult to find such abandoned accounts, since most of the girls try to promote themselves by posting links on Twitter, Reddit, Tumbler, and any other platforms that tolerate 18+ or semi 18+ content. By searching via hashtags or via other appropriate channels you can find lots of girls. And since it’s a win-win partnership you can easily find the one you need. She’s got nothing to lose and in case of successful promotion you can get a good share of her revenue. You could post your offers on appropriate forums and in groups. You can offer her 50% as for the account that doesn’t have a lot of subscribers.
To outreach your potential performer you can send her an offer, a message like that:
Hello, I’ll tell you this.
I’ve had a successful experience of Onlyfans account promotion when the account had neither a fan base nor external traffic. I think it is the case of yours. I can offer you 50% of the revenue.
So, my task is to come up with ideas and publish posts on external platforms like Twitter, Reddit, etc. as well as direct messages to the prospects and strategy development, meaning I’m gonna be finding working methods of promotion including paid ones to maximize your revenues. And on your part, is going online more often and sending the content for your account and direct messages according to our plan. Let’s make a deal?
This kind of direct invitation, where a girl writes her name and gives a link to the profile, generates most of the conversions.
You shouldn’t just copy this message, write your own. In this message, we offered services we knew a thing or two about. If you offer too much and don’t deliver on your promises, the girl might notice that and refuse to cooperate further on. She can simply change the password and wave you goodbye. The guarantee of successful long-term cooperation is signing an agreement. Sooner or later it occurs to a girl you work with that she could do without your services and not share revenue.
Now, after you’ve got a password and access to a girl’s profile, you should follow some rules.
For starters, you won’t need another paid account, since you don’t have a huge fan base. You’ll be earning on paid posts and messages. After you’ve created a welcoming message and the account header, make a few free posts and at least one paid for.
Twitter and Reddit will do as far as the promotion goes since you can find tons of pages about Onlyfans on these platforms. Put on your creative cap, create the funnel that will get people to the page you’re promoting. Via direct messages tell the people that they can find you on Onlyfans more often and if they would like to continue the conversation they should go there. You have to chat with every follower because this communication is the main source of revenue at the beginning.
- Don’t post everything you have right off the bat, put something off for further texting.
Here’s an example of the user who sent us $10.
That’s how we’ve managed to get going and start earning some bucks. Don’t forget that you can spend this money on paid ads as well. Later on, you will be able to set the paywall with a 10 dollars subscription fee and make a monthly revenue of about $500, but there’s no capping on earnings.
However, recently OnlyFans changed its monetizing policy regarding tips and paid posts — from $200 to $100 per one piece of content. Before, performers could ask for any price they wanted to. According to the website representatives, these limits will protect the site's audience.
Irina, an online model from Belarus, says that at the time of the pandemic OnlyFans brought her 90% of her overall revenue. Irina got about 40K subscribers on the site. For her lingerie pics and videos, she sets a fee of $40 each, her topless pictures cost $165, she also sells materials including video content for $200. But after OnlyFans made the restrictions limiting the price its performers can set, Irina felt that the website owners ripped her off. According to her, she could lose about $2,000 a month because of that. This thing won’t allow her to make money on custom requests, for which she used to charge higher prices and which brought her the lion's share of her total income.
But there are no limits in terms of finding new girls who would agree to work with you as their promoter. In this way, your revenue will grow exponentially and the girls will eagerly accept your offer.
The Ways of Promotion on Social Media
Promote your OnlyFans profile on other social media platforms. Just post your link there. In this way, you will be able to bring home the bacon. Some websites such as Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, and the like, could ban the promotion of adult materials out of hand, but there's always a way out, there are some loopholes in place.
Reddit is likely the best site to pitch links to your profile on OnlyFans through the right subreddits. As far as TikTok goes, you can share short videos getting inspired by other people's content, and replicating their content on this platform. To promote your links via Instagram use link shorteners like Linkin.bio. When it comes to Twitter, you have to make your post as sensitive in settings to not be banned. Speaking of Tinder, you need to link the Instagram account to it, but don’t copy the link to OnlyFans to your bio, for otherwise you will be banned. Snapchat might bring some users over to your OnlyFans too, you can do it by adding random users and posting stories regularly. If it comes to Tumblr, a lesser effective platform for this purpose, here you need to follow random users in the hope to get the following back.
To drive more subscribers you’ll need to constantly post new posts on social media sites linking your OnlyFans profile wherever possible, be it stories, short-format videos, or regular posts. Reddit, Instagram, Twitter are the three pillars of your marketing efforts that boils down to nudging users to the link in bio. You should mind the differences and nuances of each website to adhere to the existing policies. By doing so you could put it to good use avoiding suspension at the same time.
TikTok Is a Powerhouse for Marketing OnlyFans
This is a popular app that uses a secret algorithm to give companies and regular users all over the world a massive amount of attention.
OnlyFans and TikTok can work in pairs, though TikTok is a hard nut to crack in terms of marketing OnlyFans profile. Its owners say they are "committed to a safe and positive environment” taking down any materials that violate the existing rules, including profiles that redirect traffic.
But anyway, some girls that perform on OnlyFans have managed to get an impressive fan base when their videos became viral on TikTok.
Lee was a 20-year-old girl who worked some retail jobs in one of the American East Coast cities. She shared her apartment with other people. When the pandemic hit last March she, like many other young people, joined TikTok. Like others, she posted some random videos of dancing and putting on her makeup. But her visitors in comments insistently asked her whether she was registered on OnlyFans. She hesitated but after a while decided to join this nude video/photo platform and after posting some viral video on TikTok her monthly income skyrocketed up to about $100 or $200 grand. The more followers she gathered on TikTok, the more revenue she made on OnlyFans.
Just like a lot of other performers, Lee has come to the admission that TikTok, with its tendency for making influencers out of regular people, has the key to building a huge OnlyFans user base. TikTIk is a sort of advertising platform that gives them an edge for OnlyFans. This is a sort of symbiosis that could deliver an impressive reach. The first week on OnlyFans brought Lee the first 100 subs.
But there’s one catch of marketing OnlyFans page through TikTok. Its owners don’t like these profiles with many of them being deleted on a regular basis, since the app doesn’t allow to post nudity or any sexual content. The video-hosting also deletes direct links to OnlyFans. So, to succeed you need the right balance between sexy videos – to bring over your fans to OnlyFans – and at the same time adhere to TikTok’s strict policies, because it can delete videos even for zooming some body parts.
Content creators say that users understand that any half-naked female dancing in tight clothing on TikTok might have an OnlyFans account. So, they point visitors to the link in their TikTok bios that lead them to all other pages on social media websites, including OnlyFans. It’s a tricky situation, and because of that some girls post the link in their bio to Patreon, others say in their bio something like “Top 5/ Top 0.01% rank if you know what I mean,” a reference to the well-known ranking system of OnlyFans.
Some subreddits publish posts about women who post sexy content on TikTok and who could have OnlyFans pages. R/TikTokThots, for example, gathers such content. And according to some of the OnlyFans performers, these communities helped them grow their fan bases.
Jenna Phillips, an OnlyFans content creator, says that she hasn’t collected much of a huge fan base after her first year as a model unless she rose to fame on TokTok. She roleplays as a dog, publishes videos of herself waging and whimpering and being yelled at as at a puppy. In one of her videos she drank water out of a bowl, this one became viral and gained more than 1M views, but then TikTok deleted it. Roleplaying as a puppy helped her find success both on TikTok and OnlyFans. According to her, now she earns six figures every month and this kind of activity became her full-time job. Her first TikTok account had a quarter of million subs, but it was eventually deleted for not adhering to the platform guidelines. Phillips points her fans to her Instagram page and there she redirects them to the OnlyFans page.
So, even though TikTok doesn’t want to allow advertise affiliate links, but it cannot stop sex workers from doing so and finding new ways of promotion and cloaking.
Advertising OnlyFans Profile on Instagram
To successfully promote your page on this video/phone hosting platform, paste the link in your bio and then regularly update your feed and reply to the comments.
Nevertheless, Instagram has guidelines and policies you have to adhere to in order to avoid your account suspension. Carefully select hashtags, because Instagram bans some of them and those accounts that use them.
- Read the Instagram guidelines first.
Before posting photos read Instagram guidelines so you won’t be posting anything that violates them. Avoid any graphic materials and nudity.
- Post OnlyFans link in the Instagram bio.
To do this use tools such as Linktr.ee or Allmylinks, because posting a direct link to OnlyFans may be too risky since this app is getting tougher on affiliate marketing and all that jazz. These tools will cloak your direct link.
You need to get more and more people that follow you on Instagram.
Choose the appropriate hashtags, timing is also extremely important, so publish posts at the right times and regularly. There are lots of promotion methods of which the lesser-known is “follow for follow” groups. To attract more followers you’ll have to follow other people in return.
You can get your Instagram account popular on Reddit Follow for follow groups. If you haven’t registered on Reddit yet do it, enter your email address and verify it via the confirmation email. There’s a long list of users who would like to promote their Instagram profiles. Just post your own Instagram link there and create the description, write something like ’Hello, please like this pic and follow me, I’ll do the same. And the link below. The right description will help you to connect with the right people.
After doing so you’ll see new followers pretty quickly. This approach will bring you about twenty followers on an everyday basis.
However, don’t forget to follow other people in return when they ask about it.
Then, post regularly on your Instagram. Using Stories format will help you to drive more engagement. Add posts to your stories. Captions should tell the followers about discounts available, 50% off, and so forth. This will increase the clickthrough and retention rate dramatically.
Add hashtags from your particular niche, this will bring over more people to your page. The caption can contain up to 30 tags.
Try to avoid banned hashtags, search for a hashtag, and if the message informs you that it’s banned just don’t use it. You can get around the banns by choosing a synonymic hashtag for your valuable keywords and avoiding shadowbans.
Promoting your OnlyFans account on Reddit
Reddit is a platform of choice for some marketers bringing them the lion's share of the subscribers. Reddit tolerates NSFW content, which stands for “not safe for work,” that other social media websites block right away. More of that, you can find some specific subreddits for the particular niche. Again, just like on any other website, you should post regularly on the niche communities on Reddit. This site allows active users to stand alone and get more visibility.
- Edit your Reddit account.
That’s the first thing to do. Don’t use real names, so as not to allow people you know to find you there.
- Attach your OnlyFans to the profile.
Find some specific niche subreddits to promote your OnlyFans. Search on Google to find the right subreddit, use quote marks to make your search more specific. Before posting read the subreddit rules.
Find out how many users are online at any given moment. And post when there are many users who could read your posts.
People browse the new post section.
- Develop your own community.
When you have a decent following you can create your community in addition to it. The level of engagement depends on your activity on Reddit. There’s a specific tab to do it.
All in all, Reddit is a website to promote your OnlyFans.
Promoting OnlyFans Profile on Twitter
This is another good way to bring subscribers over to your page. Compared to the other social media platforms, Twitter tolerates NSFW materials and doesn’t block them right away.
If you intend to make your Twitter profile more popular, take to follow for follow threads on Reddit. Ask users there to follow your account and say that you can follow them back. Also, attach your Twitter link to the post.
Marking your posts as sensitive will save you from account suspension. Go to the settings section and tick the box asking whether your tweets should be regarded as sensitive.
Select the “Settings” and privacy section. Then, click “Privacy and safety” under the “Account” option. After that, find the specific tab to mark your posts as sensitive. Choose the needed option. Then, you’ll have the opportunity to freely post sensitive tweets on this microblogging platform.
- Hide your location on Twitter.
In the 'Location' section hide your real location for other people not to see it.
Paste the OnlyFans link in your bio section for users who go to your account to notice the link.
Cam Site/Twitter Strategy
When done right, this approach can bring over lots of new fans. A girl starts off as a web model on a website like Chatubate or other, gathers some followers, and then redirects them to her Twitter since it's partly tolerant to sexual content. Twitter is an effective marketing tool. Moreover, OnlyFans was developed specifically as an integration with Twitter. There’s even an option to automatically post new tweets with the OnlyFans link added to them.
Chaturbate is a massive source of adult traffic. So, all you need to do is to amass a fan base there. Create your schedule to perform there. For example, you can webcam there for a few hours on an everyday basis. When visitors there see you every day they’ll be warmed up and you’ll have a good opportunity to convert them. Send DM messages to the people who tip you and be extra nice to them. So, via Chaturbate you can gather the Twitter following.
Post enough sexy materials on your Twitter profile to attract even more people.
A bonus tip: send a sexy video in Twitter DM. This is an effective approach towards pumping up new followers. Look at the notifications of new followers and send them a warm message alongside your video.
“Shout For Shout”
This method basically boils down to swapping fans with other models. You just promote other model pages on your timelines.
If you’ve done everything right, this approach might become extremely beneficial. But there’s a catch you have to find other models for that.
Type in Twitter search “sw retweet group” and other related queries like “sw sfs” or “sw rt”, or add "onlyfans" related words to the queries.
Do not only contact other models who are seeking this kind of thing as you, follow other adult models who might follow you back. But mind that your bio is described rightly, so other models can see that you are a model like them. For otherwise, they might think you’re not a human but a bot.
Offer other models S4S deals after joining the online groups.
Telegram is another messaging and blogging platform that you can use for your S4S deals because lots of girls use it. You need to find an appropriate group for that but some groups use moderation and invitation-only policy. You can find Telegram SFS groups on Twitter. Type the right queries on Twitter containing the words "sw telegram", "onlyfans promo", "telegram sfs" and so on and so forth. Telegram groups can do the trick in terms of OnlyFans promo.
Have you heard about this method?
1 vote
Steal Subscribers on Twitter
This method is an efficient way to find prospects who would likely buy your content.
- You should find popular models.
- Then search for their Twitter profiles.
- Scroll their follower lists.
- Follow them and send them a private message offering subscriptions to your OnlyFans with special offers.
Use hashtags related to OnlyFans that would help you attract customers: #onlyfans, #onlyfansspotlight, #onlyfansgirl, #onlyfansbabe, #onlyfansmodel, #OnlyFansPromo, #Onlyfansnewby, #onlyfanspages, #onlyfanscreator, #egirl, #sellingcontent, #onlyfansgirls.
But don’t search using these hashtags on Instagram. To find out whether these hashtags are safe to use or not, just search for content by clicking these tags. Is there any recent content with tags? If Twitter hides the hashtags, don’t use them, because you might potentially be shadowbanned for this.
The things do:
- Offer users to send you a private message.
- Paste your OnlyFans link in bio.
- Write the word like "onlyfans" and similar hashtags.
- Use niche-specific hashtags.
- Message to other girls.
- Like, comment on the posts of other models from OnlyFans.
The things not to do:
- Don’t post your best content on Twitter. Your goal here on Twitter is to drive traffic to your free OnlyFans page.
- Avoid posting nudity (technically it is allowed, but not recommended).
Some Other Social Media Websites
Other websites might also be helpful for you to market your OnlyFans page.
Instagram has a much bigger audience than Snapchat’s, though the latter is not a bad place to get more fans for adult content as well. The way of promotion here is the QR code which you have to share on other socials like Insta, Twitter, and so forth. Many performers offer their content to random users by adding them. After that, they can see the stories.
Tumblr
Tumblr blocks NSFW right away, so don’t post such stuff there. If you’d like to pitch your links to adult content via Tumblr add it alongside other content. And also use lots of relevant hashtags for users to find your links. Tumblr also blocks hashtags, but it makes no difference when you’ve got synonyms.
YouTube
YouTube is a video-hosting site just like OnlyFans, but the latter outperformed YouTube as far as the adult content goes since YouTube doesn’t allow to promote nudity and stuff. When you’ve collected a decent following, promote your OnlyFans page offering your subs additional content like extra videos, PDF files, digital products, or merchandise.
There are descriptions under videos where you can paste your links and profile as well. CTA buttons that go after every video is another option in terms of marketing, add the classical “if you like the video, please subscribe”.
YouTube is a place for getting more viewers in the long run, since more people over time might see your videos.
Snapchat
Over the years Snapchat has gained more popularity with little help from some side tools like masks and effects. Some people on Snapchat sell their followers premium Snapchats. If you do so, you might have a solid following already, and that’s why you could offer them a subscription to your OnlyFans profile.
You have an opportunity to share the link with your premium Snapchat subscribers who might follow it. One of the crucial aspects is that you can post adult content on Snapchat and that won’t result in any implications because of doing so.
PornHub Community
This is one of the most effective ways to promote your OnlyFans page without social media involvement, especially if you post NSFW.
The PornHub community is a good way of promoting OnlyFans pages if you regularly create adult content, in this way your followers will get additional videos to watch. Content creators can upload some samples of their videos on PornHub and then point people to their links to the webpage needed. Followers on PornHub can be easily converted into OnlyFans visitors.
Adult webcamming
This is one option among many others to get your OnlyFans fan base to grow. Girls who oftentimes broadcast via webcams on some popular sites like Chaturbate can bring over more visitors to their OnlyFans. So, they can sell their recorded videos or pictures on another site and redirect some of the new followers in parallel. The latter is more important, remember that OnlyFans leaves 80% of the total revenue to its creator, so the margin will be all yours.
Conclusion
A solid number of girls took to OnlyFans through necessity after losing their income due to the pandemic. Some of them had no money to pay their bills. Lots of content creators explain that this site helped them pay for the necessities of living. Also, a number of sex workers performed a hasty U-turn towards digital. The thing is people will continue to pay for sexual content and nude images, you can tap into this industry as an affiliate promoting other people's profiles, or a content creator.
Either way, use several marketing channels to drive as much traffic as possible to your target page. Deploy your free page to activate PPV in the feed and direct messages (some people make more money through their free pages). Use your free page to engage with your subscribers in DM and convert them into paid users. Get on board with special offers such as free promo content to motivate people for subscribing. At the bottom of your funnel, there should be customized content that you sell via direct messages on your paid page.
