Investment! The magic word everyone throws around all the time. When you have access to a lot of money your only worry is finding a suitable investment. For example, if you have a couple of million ready, even an investment that pays a 10% return yearly is okay but the same is not even close for someone who has a couple of thousands – with 100,000 to invest, a 10% return on investment is just 10000 – which is less than 1k a month!
That’s certainly not profitable enough for you to brag about your investment exploits.
Loans? Surprisingly, the loan option does not make anything easier for someone with little money. There’s even an old joke that “A bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you do not need it”
So What Is the Best Way Forward?
When money is in short supply you can bank on social capital and invest in people instead. Unlike money, there is no limit to social capital – you can interact as much as you want, whenever you want and however, you want. You are fully in control of setting your social capital! But what is social capital and where can you use that social capital to make real money?
You have heard of social media influencers who are paid millions by companies and brands. However, this is not about you being an influencer or celebrity. There are straightforward ways to invest your social capital without changing your lifestyle. One of these involves helping people in need of money get it from philanthropists. It’s called crowdfunding promotion and many people you have never heard of have been doing it successfully, making lots of money in the process. There is a worldwide demand for promoters since global crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and many others are crowded with projects seeking to be heard. If you have social capital like a good number of followers on social media or maybe you manage several groups where people really interact, this is an opportunity ripe for you to harvest.
One simple place where you can get a glimpse of how people are investing their social capital is the Fiverr Marketplace where people list themselves as crowdfunding promoters and many customers buy their services. It takes less than 5 minutes to list yourself as a seller on Fiverr and with thousands of crowdfunding projects out there, you have a real chance of bagging customers
Notable Examples
Scrolling through Fiverr, you can see several crowdfunding promoters charging from as little as $5 to as much as $170 or even more. If you take time to read any of the descriptions, one thing that stands out is the word “social media” where you will see different variations of offers to make sure those with crowdfunding campaigns can reach thousands of people through social media.
Tong has been paid 24,100 times for promotion by the time of writing this. If you multiply that by the $20 cost of his cheapest service, that’s $482,000 earned. He has 924 mostly positive reviews.
$482,000 Earned!
Rexxy is still new to the promotion being paid for just 27 at the time of writing. However, at a cost of $10 per promotion, that is still $270
$270 Earned!
Alan has 44,300 completed promotion tasks. At $50 a piece, the total return is a whooping $2,215,000 from social capital.
$2.2M Earned!
What Does This Tell You?
If you can engage people on social media in any way, there is a ripe market for you to make a profit from your social capital instead of trying too hard to get money to invest in traditional monetary terms.
A simpler alternative
There is an old proverb that says “Those who can’t do, teach!” You can use this age old wisdom as your social capital investment strategy.
Instead of trying to help people who have posted projects on crowdfunding platforms to reach people who can back their projects with money, you can use your social capital to reach those who have not yet heard of or attempted crowdfunding. Your job will be easier since people always have ideas, it’s just that they lack avenues to exploit them fully. On a platform such as MavenCORE Crowdfunding, you only need to invite people to post projects. Our platform helps project creators connect with philanthropists, donors, and strategic investors to support their projects. Every time a project you help direct to the platform is funded, you also get a 5% commission on the total amount the project gets. In simpler terms, 5% means if someone with a project gets 1 million, you are paid 50,000.