2 Free and 2 Paid Ways to Attract TikTok Followers from Scratch (2025)

TikTok in 2025 is no longer just a brilliant place to post funny clips and share memes with friends. Stars are born here. Video hosting has come a long way - from an app for teenagers and children to an adult and powerful marketing tool. 

A few years ago everyone came here, including entrepreneurs, celebrities and even politicians. People realized that on TikTok they’d significantly expand an audience and gain fame. 3-5 years ago, it was quite easy to achieve popularity and virality. But is it easy now?

Over the years, competition has grown noticeably - those who don't take the right actions and decisions are left behind and lost in the crowd. The platform's famous algorithms aren't something unknown and complicated. You can get ahead of them by creating a working reliable promotion strategy.

In today’s article, we have collected for you 2 free (participation in challenges, cross-promotion) and 2 paid (the opportunity to use additional incentives and internal advertising) ways to get your first subscribers. If you want to achieve a great result, you need to add them to the strategy, but first we'll tell you about the advantages of each and their features. Read on!

1. Paid: Investing in your account

It is known that users are much more likely to pay attention to those bloggers who have already achieved success on the web and have great stats. Fans are one of the indicators of how many users trust the creator and consider his content valuable. 

But what if you have just started your online journey and have a raw account? You'll need quite a lot of time and effort to make it thrive in free ways. Most newcomers spend about several months getting at least a few thousand subscribers. But this isn't necessarily for you - investing in the online future will speed up the promotion process and free up a lot of time for creativity.

You can really buy followers on resources like this one: https://viplikes.net/buy-tiktok-followers, any number at a good price. By delegating these responsibilities to real specialists, you can forget about the need to grow these metrics - real fans will be delivered to the page instantly. Moreover, not only interest in your content will increase, but also its visibility. Algorithms will deliver your clips to FYP more often; this way you can achieve virality. 

Choose only those services that offer to get authentic followers, that is, real people. In this case, subs will not harm the account’s statistics (it'll not be banned), but on the contrary, they'll improve. Don't want to waste time looking for a quality service? Well, just click on the link above.

2. Free: Leverage Challenges

Challenges are, of course, the heart of the platform. The Discover tab contains the most current trends, and if you want to become more famous in the online community and get millions of subs, your content should be here. Such activities bring fame not only to the creators (large brands and entrepreneurs - they use them to increase the awareness of the company), but also to the participants.

What do you need to do? Anyone can take part in the challenge and create trending content. All you have to do is choose an activity that may be of interest to the target audience, find a couple of successful stories and shoot similar clips. 

We would recommend you to include jokes and memes in the video; users here love humor, if you can make them laugh, you'll get a lot of interaction with the content and improve your account rating. Adding popular music, hashtags and effects will make your clips even more attractive and open up to a large audience.

But don't make a copy, put your own "highlight" - a bright image, an unusual treatment or a funny greeting, then users will distinguish you from the crowd.

3. Paid: Try Official TikTok Ads Wisely

It took the developers quite a long time to implement the official advertising program. This became available recently (about 3 years ago) , so influence marketing flourished on the platform earlier. Now the situation has changed a little, the creators have the opportunity to use official advertising tools. Native ads are placed in the user feed, artificial intelligence shows them only to your target audience. 

This system is still new, so the prices are quite high - for every thousand views you'll have to pay about $10. At the same time, the platform requires you to spend at least $500 on an advertising campaign - it's expensive, but effective. 

We wouldn't recommend using this method for fun viral advertising, but if you are an entrepreneur, it can be a great solution to build your customer base and generate new orders.

4. Free: Publish your Videos Everywhere

Your fans, no doubt, aren't only on one resource. They also visit other platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. What does this mean for you? You need to publish content everywhere! According to statistics, most users spend time on several social sites at once: watch videos, read news and follow their favorite creators. 

Make your visibility in the community better - post a couple of successful clips (the most viewed), add an attractive signature and a link to the original source. You'll be surprised, but that's how many popular creators made their videos viral - they just used all the possibilities.

Make it a habit; every time a clip gets a huge number of likes and views, upload it to other resources. If you already have an audience, you can ask them to support your endeavors. Whet their interest and offer some nice bonus for subscribing, liking and viewing. People like to receive gifts for simple actions. Try it!

Final Thoughts

Promotion on TikTok is not like reinventing a bicycle or designing a rocket. Everything is much simpler, but to make it work in your favor, be consistent and don't be afraid to invest by combining paid methods with other organic ones. Good luck!