Ever fantasize about making money online without breaking a sweat? You may want to check out Koji. Koji is a simple tool to make money that works best for people who are active on social media. However like its namesake Koji — a mold used to make soy sauce and Saki — this tool is easier to use than it is to explain.
Kojis in both food preparation and electronics are catalysts, says Dmitry Shapiro, co-founder of GoMeta, the parent company of WithKoji.com. They don’t initiate the action, but their chemistry helps it along.
The digital Kojis available to use on Shapiro’s site serve as a programing base for almost anything else that you might want to do on social media, whether that’s playing games with friends or selling things to your friends and followers. You don’t have to be famous — or even almost famous — to use this tool to make money, of course. But, the more friends and followers you have on social media, the more likely you are to earn money with Koji.
Getting started
To get started, you simply go to Koji’s website and register. In that process, you’ll fill in a name to use on Koji, as well as your user names for all of your relevant social media accounts.
After that, you simply open a Koji from the website, customize it by filling in some information, and then share. Koji does the rest.
What are you sharing? That depends on the template that you use. When you go to the Koji website, you’ll see a bunch of different options on the home page and you can hit “explore templates” to find more.
There you’ll find nearly three dozen choices, including games and other ways to engage followers. Some reporters at the San Diego Union Tribune, for example, used Koji to create an interactive game posted on the newspaper’s website.
Using Koji as a tool to make money
However, some Kojis are designed as a tool to make money. They help you profit by making it simple for you to sell something to your followers and collect payment.
Let’s say, for instance, that you are an “influencer” in the Keto diet space and you have created a ebook with Keto meal plans, recipes and shopping tips. If you want to sell that ebook through your social media channels, you simply put it in a PDF file and click on Koji’s template that offers to “sell downloadable files.”
Up pops a prompt with two buttons: “preview” and “remix.”
When you’re ready to start, you hit “remix” and Koji will ask you to fill in several blocks of information, including one that describes what you’re selling and another to set the price. You’ll then upload images and videos that go with your ebook, as well as a PDF of the book itself.
The entire process is likely to take less than 10 minutes. After that, you simply choose where to share your Koji. You might share everywhere you have a social media account; share just to your Facebook or Instagram page; or, say, just to Reddit.
At that point, Koji takes over. When someone buys your product, you get a message alerting you to the sale and how much you’ve earned. If your Koji requires further interaction from you, you’re prompted to provide it.
Make money two ways
Naturally, you earn money on every sale, but you can potentially earn money if someone “remixes” your Koji, too. This happens when one of your followers sees what you’ve posted and wants to emulate the idea. If someone hits the “remix” button on your Koji, you’ll earn a few pennies every time they make a sale on the Koji they created through that remix.
Remixing your Koji does not give the remixer the ability to use your PDF. It simply brings up the same template that you started with. That individual will then create an original Koji to share to their social media accounts, just like you did. You get a tiny fraction of every sale for simply being the “inspiration” that they used to make and share a new Koji.
Site fees
When you sell something using a Koji program, you don’t collect 100% of the purchase price. With the sale of something like an ebook, photo or video, the site takes a 15% commission from your payment. If you priced your product at $10, for example, you’d take home $8.50 and the site would take $1.50.
However, the fees are different for different activities. If you were selling tickets to a physical event, the site takes $1 fee on each ticket. If you’re raising money for charity, the site takes a reduced fee of 2.9%, plus 30 cents per transaction.
Buyers also pay a fee to Koji if they use a credit card. These are processing fees paid to Stripe, Shapiro says.
A portion of the seller fees go to finance the site. However, a portion are paid to the developers who created the Kojis; and to the influencers — like you — who shared them and inspired others to remix them.
Best for influencers with digital products
Notably, this tool is best when you have a large social media following and a digital product — a photo, video, or PDF — for sale. In addition to simply sharing your photos, blog posts or thoughts, you can make and charge for customized digital products — a happy birthday video for a fan; a personalized photo album; a “post on my wall” option for your followers, too
Of course, nothing prohibits your run-of-the-mill individual from offering these products. It’s just less likely that people would pay for them. (No one has offered to pay $1 to “unlock” my beach photo on Facebook, for example. The only sale was my own, which I used to test the product.)
People with an avid fan base can also use Koji to grow their fan base with free interactive tools, including those that collect email addresses to participate.
Selling physical products
While you can theoretically sell anything here, including t-shirts and coffee mugs, Koji is not well set up to do that. A site spokesman says the platform can collect payment for your t-shirt sale, but it doesn’t currently have a way to collect the buyer’s address, nor provide any help with sending out the order.
Better places to sell physical products, such as artistic prints, greeting cards and personalized t-shirts and coffee mugs are print-on-demand sites such as FineArtAmerica, Society6 and Redbubble.
Selling classes
If your digital product is a how-to video or class, there are also better options. People who want to sell courses on anything from managing Facebook Advertising to learning to sew, are better off with dedicated teaching platforms, such as Thinkific and Teachable.
If you want to teach cooking, better sites include CozyMeal and Tastemade.
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