While most people know that OnlyFans can be an incredible way to make a living, with some creators doing more than some CEOs, the reality is a lot grimmer than you’d might expect.
Only about 1% of creators on the platform can make a half-decent income out of it ( up to 50,000$ per year ), and the stories you hear about creators making tens to hundreds of thousands per month only account for about 0.1% of creators.
The sad reality is that most average creators have about 20 fans total at all times and make under 200$ monthly. 0.1% of creators are actually making 76% of all revenue on the platform!
But the real difference between creators who make it big and those who don’t really is all about strategy & planning, NOT hotness & popularity.
So if you’re looking for a plan on how to make money on OnlyFans, this is where we come in!
And it doesn’t matter how you look or in what niche you might fall in. The good news is that if it exists, it’s most likely someone’s fetish! So put your ideas of “traditional” beauty aside and let’s jump in!
Contents
How to start an OnlyFans
After heading to OnlyFans and creating your creator account, entering all your required legal documents, you might wonder: ” What now? ” and I don’t blame you.
The road to success might seem like a pretty obtuse one. But this is why you’re here!
But before we get truly started with all the juicy intel that pretty much will guarantee your success, you will need to figure out a KEY thing:
To show Face or Not to Show Face?
This is a huge decision to make.
Showing or not showing face is basically a level of risk-to-success ratio, and both options come with their own list of upsides and downsides.
Showing your face
Pros: You might have already come face-to-face with that reality on other forms of online content: Relatability is a now a huge factor to success.
People being able to see your face can directly correlate with higher revenue, as it can make viewers feel like they know you. Things like the “girlfriend/boyfriend experience” are huge factors as to why some users turn to Onlyfans. And girlfriends & boyfriends tend to have faces!
Cons: Pretty much all the downsides that people cite as issues with joining such a platform come from content where the creator shows their face.
People you know will be able to better find and identify you. This might affect your work, family, and life in general.
Not showing your face
Pros: Many famous rich people have said it in the past: Better to be just rich than famous, as anonymity is everything. It’s the best of both worlds. You get to live your life, and ALSO have the resources to do whatever you want.
This method dramatically reduces the risks associated with online sex work: If you’re smart about it, people won’t out you, family won’t know, jobs won’t fire you for conflict of interest, etc, etc.
Cons: You will miss out on some revenue. The internet content world is a cult of personality, and many consumers are looking for both face and body.
But as an entrepreneur myself, I can tell you that sacrificing cash for happiness is often the best move you can make! How much money do you need really. It’s harder to get started but there are way less eventual consequences related to this method.
How to Make Money on OnlyFans Without Showing Your Face
Not all is lost because there are actually tons of very successful faceless content creators ( on and off OnlyFans! ). Why do you think “face reveal” is such a common online term now?
Faceless content doesn’t mean headless content
You see, a big reason why face-forward content is so popular is that we get to see your lips, your smile, your eyes ( they’re the window to your soul afterall ).
But these features can easily be included without revealing your identity!
Here are a few methods to help you capitalize on this:
- Cutting photos midface: This will allow to show off your smile/lips/tongue without revealing too much. Don’t bother shooting that way as it can be a little tricky cropping photos as you shoot ( especially if you self-shoot). But while editing it’s easy enough to crop after the fact.
- Using face masks: Lots of creators are using the types of masks you use when you’re sick ( or dealing with a wordwide pandemic ), this allows to show your eyes without revealing your identity. No need to go full medical here either, there are plenty of fashionable options out there ( in japan, it’s often just used a fashion statement piece! ).
- Using ballroom and lingerie masks: These are really the best of all worlds as they not only show off your eyes AND mouth, but also keep things sexy as you do it.
- Pixelating and blurring: This is another method that might require more editing on your end, but this way you won’t have to worry about creative crops or facial accessories as you shoot.
The hybrid method
Now, there’s another way to have your cake and eat it too. I call this the hybrid method, which comes in 2 varieties tailored to your needs!
A) Keeping nudes and face pics separate.
This is a fun way to give viewers what they want while giving a fair amount of deniability if your identity is ever outed.
How this works it that all nude/revealing content is posted faceless, and when you do show your face, you keep it to non-nude content.
For this method to work, you cannot take these photos in the same room as it would be easy to link you from one to another. So either reserve a space in your house for those face pics, or have them taken outside, and so on.
B) Keeping face pics behind paywalls.
Another way to do this is to keep all your promotional content, display pictures, and banners faceless, and keep the face pics for the people who actually subscribe to your OnlyFans.
You can also use it as an incentive for people to subscribe to you. With a “I only show my face to subscribers! wink wink” type deal.
You can push this even further and keep it behind a pay-per-view model. Keeping your OnlyFans faceless, but people who pay more for your pay-per-view content can get to see your face.
This is a touch riskier than complete faceless content, but will definitely reduce the risk of being found out by A LOT!
Consider other identifying features
Now, hiding your face is one thing but do think about other things that might give away your identity.
With the aid of coverings, smart blurring/pixelating, and so on, do try to hide these identifying features:
- Tattoos
- Birth marks
- Scars
- Jerseys or merch from school, work, sport teams, etc
- The outside of your windows
- Landmarks from your neighborhood
How to Promote OnlyFans Content
Now this is where most OnlyFans models fail.
But this doesn’t have to be you!
Now the platform itself doesn’t offer any promotion tools or even a search engine for people to find models, but there are two distinct ways to get a following.
There’s the hard way, which is really a gamble but still worth exploring, and then there’s the easy way, which almost guarantees a following if you’re smart about it!
I DO NOT suggest converting your current following into your OnlyFans following.
This is because your current following will most likely also include friends and family, and you don’t want to out yourself the moment you start this venture ( or at all ).
Start new social media accounts that match your Onlyfans name, so it’s easier to cross-market everything. That’s right, we’re starting from scratch here.
Hard mode: Chasing Trends or Viral Content + Spice
This is probably the only way most people think about marketing ( if they think about it at all! ), which is why it’s so difficult to make a name from it.
We’re mostly looking at Instagram Reels and TikTok here as these bring the most views.
Also know that this method only really works for creators who show their face.
Social media is all about personality and relatability, which is hard to do as a headless entity!
Now, these platforms don’t allow for nudity so here’s your tactic:
Aim for trends, and viral content, but with some extra spice on the side. Think doing those trends in revealing clothing or bikinis, tight yoga clothes, without bras under loose clothing, or with obvious imprints of your most intimate parts!
Extra points for aiming for specific, unrelated niches while doing this.
A lot of the most successful people doing this are actually doing things like comedic content, yoga videos, art content, dancing, rollerblading, and so on.
There are actually ton of content on how to go viral on the internet, so do study that stuff if you feel like doing this promo stuff on hard mode!
You cannot mention OF anywhere in your descriptions and so on, so just leave a linktree with your OF profile inside!
Easy Mode: How to Use Reddit to Promote your OnlyFans
Now here’s the real juicy, easy, moneymaking stuff almost anyone can make a living off of!
You see, Reddit as communities for almost anything imaginable, and chances are there are communities that are waiting for exactly what you have to offer!
No matter what your body looks like, chances are there’s a community for it:
Male, female, skinny to fat, young to old, flat to big breasts, perky to saggy, long to inverted nipples, small to big areolas, skinny to big butts, hairy to fully shaved bodies and bits, small to big dicks, outie to innie vaginas, every skin or hair color & ethnicity imaginable, and every fetish the world has to offer!!
If it exists, someone has a fetish for it, and they’re patiently waiting for your content!
Research & Figuring Out Your Niche
There are millions of subreddits ( that’s what their communities are called ) out there.
So how does one figure out where they should focus their efforts?
Thankfully, some pretty dedicated Redditors built a huge list a while back that might help you figure out which niches you may land in: The NSFW411 Index list.
How I would first start this research is jump right to the “body parts”, “ethnicity”, and “age” section and identify the subreddits that match your body parts, race, and age best. These tend to be the main things people look for when searching for models.
Then I would do a thorough read of the whole thing for more content ideas that might match your style.
Once you have a nice list of subreddits where to promote, pick the ones that best match you and this will be where we will focus out promotion efforts.
Know that this list isn’t exactly complete or 100% up to date as there are a lot of communities out there.
To extend research, keep an eye out for similar models and look in which communities they are posting as well.
Commenters might even suggest some good communities for you to look at!
Reddit 101
- Try to have the same name on both Onlyfans and Reddit as this makes cross marketing easier.
- Most communities require some kind of verification with moderators before you can post. So make sure to read community guidelines and such before posting in one. Usually verification just requires your username ( and sometimes community name ) written on a piece of paper with you in the picture sent to a moderator to get verified.
- The majority of communities don’t allow for marketting in your posts. So any marketting should be reserved to your profile description. Something like “For videos and even kinkier photos, visit my Onlyfans!” should do the trick.
How to Make $100 a Day on Onlyfans: A Weekly Plan!
So here’s the foolproof plan to making your first 100 bucks a day ( and more! ). Once you reach your goal it’s really a matter of replicating this method until you’re filthy rich!
This plan focuses mostly on Reddit marketing as it is the most fruitful for anyone who isn’t famous.
But once you start getting quite a bit of followers on your other social media through this method, do consider the viral approach outlined above, as it’s easier to do that method when you already have a healthy following.
The Pricing
First, you should choose how much to charge.
The sweet spot is a price from 5 to 15$ a month as most can afford this.
Anything 20 and up might result in more cash per user, but way less users signing up so the profit might actually cancel out.
If you’re looking to getting more money from followers, consider extra paid content.
Things like longer/kinkier content that’s paid per view ( PPV ), or other services like chatting, dick ratings, personalised videos, etc, etc. Are all popular options, but they are also more work!
The plan
Onlyfans is a job, and like any jobs, the most successful models have a pretty rigid schedule and posting plan.
Getting subscribers is the easy part, but if you want to keep them coming and also have them renew each month, you have to keep the content coming.
That’s where a good plan comes in!
So here’s what you need to do:
- 1 or 2 day per week, make as many photos/videos as possible for the upcoming week.
Try to do a few outfit changes. Vary the content as much as you can ( ie: a lingerie striptease, a sex toy/masturbation shoot, a fun TikTok-style video, some content with a partner, etc. ). I think the weekends are a great time to do this as most of you will have more time to make a dent into your content for the week.
How many images/videos will be up to you, I’d say do at least 3 to 4 series of photos and videos with escalating levels of lewdness. So you can pick at least one image/video clip per series to use as free marketing content.
- Choose what is free marketing content and what is paid content.
This is really up to you, free content could be content where you show less of yourself ( like some people keep genitals or sex videos for paid content ), or you could only share small clips from longer videos or one photo from a series of photos for the free marketing.
- Make your marketing posts on the right Reddit communities throughout the week.
This is where your curated list of subreddits comes in. It’s important not to spam all your content in one day in the same subreddit. But it is also important to keep your visibility up throughout the week.
So posting to the same communities should be done every day or every other day if you want to be optimal about it.
- Post on OnlyFans every other day or more to keep followers coming!
That’s 4 to 3 substantial posts a week, which is definitely manageable, especially if you bulk generate content at the beginning of your week.
- It’s a good idea to already have some content on OnlyFans before you start promoting it.
People looking at your profile won’t see your posts, but they will see how many posts you have already posted. So getting 10/15 posts already up before you start marketing is better.
For the same reason, when you’re starting, it’s better to do individual posts instead of single posts with a series of photos and videos to maximise this amount.
Alternative Ways to Make Money on OnlyFans
This might be the bulk of the work, but here are a few other ideas to generate extra OF money.
Join an affiliate program
While I don’t suggest getting an agency to do the work for you, as they usually take a nice chunk of your revenue, and most followers prefer a more hands-on approach from their OF creators… there’s also a nice middle ground option.
Affiliate programs will basically send followers your way through other creators ( Other OF models, bloggers, reviewers, search engines, etc ) that wouldn’t have found you otherwise.
Sure they will take a cut from the revenue you get from these specific followers, but it’s basically free followers you wouldn’t have found anyway through the method outlined above.
The best program I’ve found that represents the most models with a huge variety of supported niches is Onlytraffic.
Promote other models
Remember when I said other OF models could promote you and make a cut from the followers they send your way?
Well, you can do exactly that to get some extra money on the side!
This method works best when you’re promoting models that fall into similar niches as you since your followers are most likely looking for other models like you. So for example, if you’re a small-breasted blonde, look for small-breasted blondes on their platform to promote!
Just keep in mind that you don’t want your page to turn into a feed just FILLED with promo as audiences don’t love that kind of content. Try to keep it sparse and make it feel as organic as possible when you do. I’d say a 1 promo to 5 actual post ratio should be the max you push for. Refer to them as friends/or models you find super hot you want to promote for extra bonus points.
Again, I think the affiliate platform with the most variety of models to promote and nice payouts is Onlytraffic.
There are alternatives like CreatrCash as well, but there is way less model variety and lower payouts.
Another alternative is to ask other creators directly for a campaign link and ask for screenshots of said campaigns on a monthly basis to claim your cut directly from them.