Golf is one of the hardest and most frustrating sports out there. If you can get it right, you can earn millions of pounds or dollars by sinking that little white ball in the hole. Is there a way to earn a living from golf if you are bad though? Let’s find out.
Can clothes or equipment launches help you to earn a living from golf?
Unless you have millions of dollars in the bank to get a business off the ground, launching a new golf brand could be a stretch. That being said, option 1, launching a new golf clothing or equipment range could be an option. Look at the likes of BunkerMentality. They are relatively new golf clothing brand with a moderate launch budget, and they are storming it.
On the equipment side, you only have to look at Nike as a reason to not even try. Nike pulled out of the golf club making business in 2016. The Swish company launched its first golf club range in 2002. That means that despite its global appeal and having ambassadors such as Tiger Woods, it still could not make it work.
It is hard for any new brand of golf club to break into the market. Many brands have tried such as Walmart and even the likes of Sports Direct, via its many sub-brands, but none have cracked it. Best to leave that to the likes of Ping, Taylor Made and Calloway.
How can you earn a living from golf if you are rubbish at playing the game? The answer is social media!
No matter how high your handicap, or how many balls you knock into the club lake, social media could make you money! Influencer marketing is not just the niche of the fitness and pouty fashion brigade. If you are charismatic and can build a strong following, you can earn money from this.
This is not to say you should head over the Fiverr.com and buy 100k of followers from TikTok, you need to build an engaged audience. If you have built up an engaged audience on followers on social media, then you could start earning big money. How much is big money? Well, that depends on your follower numbers and your engagement rate.
Just to explain, your engagement rate is normally measured in percentages. The higher the engagement rate, the more you can get paid. A word of warning though, the higher your number of followers, the more chance is that your engagement rate will drop.
Most of the social platforms themselves will tell you your engagement rate in the admin or settings sections. As a general rule of thumb, anything about 4-5% engagement rate is classed as good. 1% is the average so you ideally need to out perform this.
What social media channels do I need?
If you are serious about trying to earn money from your golf based social media channels, you pretty much need to be on all the main ones. YouTube is the channel where you can potentially earn the most money. Then Instagram, then TikTok with Facebook and Twitter coming in last place, earnings wise.
Most influencers, across the majority of niches will focus on two main social channels. They will also typically have a website or a strong web domain where they also centralise and host their content. In the modern social media era, I would probably pick YouTube and TikTok as the two core platforms to concentrate on.
At this point it is worth mentioning Meta’s new toy, Threads. Threads is essentially a rip off of Twitter. We should leave the why and how of that to social media experts. When it launched in July 2023 it did so to great fanfare. Fast forward two weeks though and its use is on the wane.
Despite its toxic nature, there is no hiding from the fact that it is the platform that everyone, media included, turns to when a major story or scandal breaks. Threads has the feel of a carefree hippy. Funny to look at and play with for a while, but quickly becomes irritating.
How many followers do I need on social media to earn money from my golf content?
When most people talk about influencer marketing they think of Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Kim Kardashian or on a more local level, the likes of Mrs Hinch. These all have millions of followers, but you don’t need quite so many to still earn good money from your content.
Influencer audiences and groupings are broken do to this level. 0-2500 followers, well, who even are you? This with 2000-50,000 followers would typically be classed as micro-influencers. 50,000 to 100,000+ are seen as mid level influencers. 100,000 – 1m followers are big ticket influencers. 1m+ followers and you a big time influencer marketing celebrity and this is where you can earn the crazy money.
How much can you earn on social media from your golf “talent”?
This is where it starts to get a bit flakey. There are no hard and fast “rules” when it comes to how much you can get paid for your content. Here is a rough pricing list based on your scale of “influence” and follower numbers, and for one post. You never want to sell just one post though. In short you want to try and secure longer, multi-post campaigns.
2k on TikTok, £100
2k on Instagram, £50-75
2k on YouTube £200
Then
10k on TikTok £350
10k on Instagram £250
10k on YoutTube £800-1000
Then
100k on TikTok £2,000
100k on Instagram £800-1000
100k on Youtube £5k-£8k
One you get more than 100k of followers, it puts you in a bespoke and next level earning opportunity. This should always be the goal! A word of caution if you a micro influencer. You will probably get offered free gifts instead of payment to start with. This is still worth doing, not least because you can sell the free gift. Don’t expect the big bucks straight from the off, is what I am trying to say.
How do I find brands to work with?
Once you get to be a big name with a big following, brands will come to you. Until that point though there are lots of apps and social media agencies that can match your influencer account to brands looking to pay for mentions and alike. The apps that the social media agencies that we spoke to, like 10 Yetis Digital, use most frequently to find influencers for their client campaigns include the likes of Tribe.
Agencies like 10 Yetis put influencer marketing campaign briefs for their clients on the likes of Tribe. If you are an influencer in one of the sectors that is being targeted, you can pitch your creative content idea and if the brand likes it, they will pay you to use it. The app also manages the payment side as well, so you are not having to do any of the financial chasing.
How to earn money from golf using affiliate links
If you have built up a large social media following but can’t secure any brand deals, fear not, all is not lost. There are brands out there that pay you when someone buys something from their website after you have referred them via your social media content. This is called Affiliate Marketing.
So, you talk about the newest Callaway golf ball launch on one of your TikTok videos. You link to the new balls that are being sold on Amazon, using a special affiliate link. If someone watches your video, clicks the link and buys the balls, you get a percentage of that sale.
The biggest affiliate channel in the world is probably Amazon’s own one that is called Amazon Site Stripe. You need to register for it and then you can create affiliate links so you can get paid. The second biggest affiliate network is AWIN. AWIN has lots of golf brands on its books, so you can talk about pretty much any golf brand in your content and AWIN can monetise the links through to these companies from your content.
There we have it. You may have a handicap of 50 and shank three out of every four balls. However, if you are funny and have a big social media following, you could earn just as much as the golf pro’s via social media influencer marketing and affiliate links! Thank us later.
