How I Generate Income as an Advocate

There are different avenues to generate extra money through patient and healthcare advocacy. Here are some ways I generated income as a patient & advocate.

1) Build relationships with health specific organizations and companies. Social media and LinkedIn is a great way to connect with a variety of health entities to build relationships. While this avenue takes longer to generate relationships that lead to paid opportunities, from my own personal experience, it has led to paid speaking opportunities, paid insight reviews of informational health materials, and paid work writing articles and blogs.

Social Media

2) From Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, if you create a public profile of your advocacy and awareness work, as a blogger public figure etc, you can, depending on engagement of your posts, earn rewards or bonuses, through your platforms. Please note: you are NOT charging your followers, rather social media platforms identify pages/public figures who have high engagement on posts. Then, if your page is set to a public figure, blogger etc., that social media platform can place an ad or link on your post. These platforms pay you for allowing their as link on your social media platform post. Example: on Facebook my posts and reels at times have a link for an ad. The more views or engagement on those particular posts, I receive a bonus. Your friends/followers do Not have to purchase anything for you to generate bonus income. I’ve received as little as $40 per month to upwards of $120 per month.

3.) If you have a website or blog, you can allow advertisers to share their products/services on your website or blog. If your website visitors/readers click on that advertisement link, it helps you generate some money.

4) Indeed.com is a source advocates and patients can find contract work. Example: through indeed.com, I’ve been contracted to moderate health or patient centric platforms, websites or social media patient/health groups. Through Indeed.com, I’ve been contracted for paid speaking engagements, as a motivational speaker and sharing my personal health journey.

Yes, even Amazon can be an option!

5) Amazon Influencer Program: Amazon has a program which you can be a product ambassador. You can sign up for their program, if selected, you can share the products of your choosing and liking on your social media sites and website. If people buy the products you share, you receive a small monetary payment. You can share products specific to your personal chronic illness self care, overall wellness, and management of your symptoms such as all natural self care hygiene products that help you relax, or products you use to help with your symptoms, and products you used to make your life easier living with a chronic illness. Example: I shared my favorite “Chronic Illness Cleaning Hacks” I purchased to accommodate my illness and still keep a clean home such as an inexpensive robot vacuum and electric cleaning brush wand I use to clean my tub/shower walls and floor.

6) There are many patient specific companies/organizations who are focused on contracting advocates, caregivers, patients etc for paid insights and health related projects. Our very own Social Health Network is an excellent example of this. A few others programs focused on contracting patients, caregivers and advocates, for both short term and long term paid gigs, are Savvy Cooperative and Patients Getting Paid.

Last but not least

7) When looking for paid patient contract work, don’t just focus on disease specific gig work. Also look for contract work that is symptom specific as well. Example: I have fibromyalgia, arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, IBS, anxiety etc. I will look for paid opportunities that are symptom specific to my diagnoses, such as chronic pain, brain fog, Insomnia, chronic fatigue etc. Focusing on both disease, and its’ related symptoms, can provide more options for paid opportunities.

I hope my personal tips are helpful and I’m wishing you all the best of luck finding paid patient opportunities.