My Instagram and TikTok side hustle books up to $16,000 in monthly revenue. It's my third business and I finally learned how to find success.

• Chase Coleman experimented with two side hustles before finding his niche in content creation.
• Today, his TikTok and Instagram accounts book up to $16,000 a month in revenue.
• Here's how he found the right side hustle and scaled it into a thriving business.

This is an as-told-to story based on an interview with Chase Coleman, who runs The Corporate Chase on TikTok and Instagram as a side hustle to his full-time job at Amazon.

When he entered the corporate workforce in 2016 as a brand specialist at Starbucks, he observed that the skills needed in corporate America, like networking or building a résumé, weren't taught in college.

To fill this void, he launched a blog called It's Millennial Talk as a side hustle in 2017. The following year, he pivoted that into a podcast, but it still wasn't the money-generating business Coleman hoped to run. He tried one more adjustment earlier in the pandemic and experimented with creating TikTok and Instagram content about the corporate world, finally finding his audience. Today, he's booking up to $16,000 a month in side-hustle revenue, which Insider verified with documentation. 

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

In-depth research helped me find my niche

I was always passionate about helping young professionals. But initially, I was more focused on my own interests than what other people wanted.

After months of struggling to reach engaged readers with my blog, I started asking college students which type of content they consumed. Almost all of them said podcasts, which became my next side hustle.

But I was not consistent, and I quickly burned out. Then, when TikTok started growing in popularity earlier in the pandemic, a friend encouraged me to start creating content for that platform instead.

I knew I had to be more intentional this time around. For months, I spent multiple hours every night watching TikTok videos in the corporate-humor niche. I took note of trending sounds, followed other corporate-content creators, and learned what was and wasn't working for them.

Two weeks into posting, my videos were going viral.

My 9-to-5 informed my side-hustle strategy

I didn't see any other Black men sharing corporate-humor content, so I wanted to claim that space with a twist of my own. I started sharing humor mixed with career advice and added posts about workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion.

I posted three times a day for eight months, throwing anything at the wall to see what stuck. Recently, I pulled back to one or two times a day, but I'm more strategic about my content.

I've ensured content creation doesn't interfere with my full-time job by waking up early and filming all my content before I log on each morning. But working as a sales-account manager at Amazon has also helped my content career.

Having worked on the corporate side of large companies, I knew social-media-influencer budgets fluctuated based on the time of year and events. That knowledge informs how I schedule and pitch my brand partnerships as a creator. For example, I reach out to brands a few months before the holidays because that's what their budgets are saved for.

Additionally, my Excel skills help me understand and implement my data analytics, while my negotiation skills allow me to feel confident in setting rates. 

With these tactics, I've landed more brand deals for larger sums of money. I worked on a three-video campaign with Slack directed at bringing TikTok users to the platform for work proposes, which paid me $12,000. I also created three videos for a campaign with TikTok to be used on the @TikTok_Small_Business channel, which paid me $10,000.

While I'm excited about this success, I'm most excited about what the future holds. Building an online community is allowing me to launch the Young Professionals Conference in May, which will bring together recruiters, college students, and mentors to help students establish themselves in industries they hope to work in.

It's all about giving more people access to career-development opportunities. And my social-media side hustle is just the first step in that.