What Is an AMA & How to Get Paid For It
AMA, a term popularized by the famous Reddit page, stands for “Ask Me Anything.” As the phrase suggests, an AMA is an event where someone opens the floor for questions. Because the event is usually hosted over the Internet, anyone can ask anything from anywhere.
Free AMAs
Many websites let people do free AMAs. The most popular one is Reddit, within the subreddit r/ama. At the time of writing, the community has over 400,000 subscribers, which makes it a great place for people to get random questions from curious people. Apart from sharing knowledge, it is also an opportunity to expose a brand to a wide audience. That being said, it comes with a few limitations that you should consider:
- If you are trying to use the AMA as an opportunity to grow your brand, you should be willing to accept the risk of losing control over your audience’s perception of the brand. Audiences may come with their own opinions, and those opinions can develop into something you didn’t intend.
- The more popular your AMA is, the more time you will need to spend managing it and filtering through questions. Sometimes, audience members will ask questions in an AMA just to spark controversy. Other times, people may ask silly questions with good, humorous intention, but by answering those questions, you are taking away the time you could be spending to answer more serious questions.
- Finally, you can only give so much time to your audience. They may continue to ask questions, but unfortunately, you will not be able to get to all of them.
The Advantage of Paid AMAs
If you have your own loyal audience, you may want to consider doing a paid AMA. Maybe you’re a YouTuber with a large, inquisitive following. Or perhaps you’re a blogger that frequently receives questions on the comments section of your articles. In both cases and others, doing a paid AMA could be a good way for you to interact with your audience in a rewarding manner.
Chances are, a loyal audience wants to support its creators. Businesses like Patreon are built on this philosophy. Doing a paid AMA lets you also open the door for earning support in a manner that also benefits your audience in return.
Furthermore, by setting your own price on a paid AMA, you are able to control for the quality of questions. As a result, you spend less time managing and filtering audience questions, and more time delivering thoughtful responses. After all, an audience member is less likely to troll or try to spark a reaction if he or she is required to pay in order to do so.
How to Do a Paid AMA on Worthyt
Worthyt is a platform where you can do paid AMAs. You can get started by creating a free account.
1. Create Your Profile & Get Your Custom Link
After entering your email, you’ll be led to a page where you can set up your account as a Creator. At the very top of the page, next to your name, you can see a temporary profile picture assigned to you. You can change it by clicking on it and uploading your own image.
Below that, you are able to create your profile link. The format is worth.yt/__________ (see below). Once you have that link set up, you can paste it anywhere (e.g., in the description of your videos or in the signature of your blog posts), and direct your audience to click on it when they want to ask you anything.
Finally, in the About Me section, you can describe yourself to your audience so they know it’s you.
2. Set Your Question Options (Price & Timing)
As a creator, we enable you to answer questions by default. At any time, if you want to stop receiving questions, you can always return to your Account Page and disable the option “Allow users to ask me questions.”
First, you want to set the price of your questions. It’s up to you to decide what your answer is worth, and you can even set it to free by disabling the “Charge money for asking me a question” option. For full transparency, Worthyt takes 20% to help us keep our servers up and pay for transaction fees. We explain the exact amount you’ll make in the line underneath the price you set, which reads “After answering a question you will earn ______.”
Next, you can set your Question Duration. Because audiences are paying to ask a question, we do want to give them some type of guarantee of a response. Doing this also helps with maintaining your reputation as a trusted creator. You can set your question duration between 1 to 5 days. If you do not answer a question within that time frame for whatever reason, Worthyt will automatically refund the asker.
Finally, you can add custom text in the question box to specify any directions you may want to give to the people asking you a question. For example, they are asking about a specific video, you may want them to provide a link of the video.
3. Connect Your Social Media
As a final step, you do want to prove the authenticity of your account. That way, people will believe you are who you say you are, and impersonators cannot pretend to be you. In the Social Profiles section on the right side of the Account Page, you can connect various social media to verify your identity.
Connecting your identity is entirely optional and does not limit your access on Worthyt. We respect your privacy, and do not collect any data other than verifying your identity on different social media platforms.
Want to Give It a Test Run?
If you have any questions for us, you can also message our founder on Worthyt through his profile link: worth.yt/Kenny
AMAs are a great way to spread valuable knowledge and information on the Internet. Doing free AMAs on places like Reddit can help you build a brand. On the other hand, for those who already have that brand and audience, doing a paid AMA is a really fun way to interact with your audience in a way that is rewarding for both sides. If you are a content creator and want to get started with paid AMAs, you can sign up on Worthyt to start receiving questions.
