How do brands get 25,000+ affiliates posting every month?

Why the old way of influencer marketing wastes the budget

• If you used to be able to find creators, send them products, offer commission links, and generate sales, that nowadays mostly goes nowhere.
• A telehealth brand put four grand into one video and did not get a single sale.

What the few brands that win do differently

Ridge got about 7,000 videos in the month of May, from close to a thousand creators.

• Neuro built an army of more than 25,000 affiliates.
• RYSE did about 11 million on TikTok Shop in one week.
• They've done this by not just acquiring influencers but, more importantly, learning how to retain them and build communities.

Next comes how to scale your affiliates and keep them posting month after month.

How to scale to 25,000+ affiliates and keep them posting month after month

What will you learn in this guide?

For brands who want to scale their influencer programs, I'm going to show you how to go beyond a 10% commission program and actually use real incentives to bring influencers in, to get influencers posting aggressively and keep posting.

What this playbook covers

• Though this is named affiliates, it actually covers paid creators and whitelisting as well, because we see that all as one system, working with creators in mass.
• We have separate articles on celebrity endorsement and on PR boxes.

TikTok Shop problems you are running into

• You're finding that TikTok Shop attribution is messy. You don't know if sales are landing in TikTok Shop, Amazon Brand, REIT site, or retail.
• You're not sure about the TikTok Shop PNL, affiliate PNL.
• You're finding that a few creators are carrying your entire campaign, and the rest are just pure underperformers.
  • At one big TikTok Shop brand, six creators produce sixty percent of the revenue.

Common problems when scaling influencer campaigns

• Cold outreach alone is not the most effective system. A creator with 5,000 followers already gets a hundred brand requests a day.
  • Cold outreach has to be paired with gifting, communities, rewards, contests and community events.

Times have changed, so the old way doesn’t work anymore

• You're reaching out to a lot of influencers and asking them for commission or to join the affiliate program. However, you find that most of them are just ghosting you.
• So what we did is find a new model focused on retaining, the ABC system, which in sum allows you to build relationships at scale, nurture those relationships at scale, and then keep growing them all in a scalable manner.

Next comes who we are and where this playbook comes from.

Who we are and where this playbook comes from

Who we are

I'm Dennis, partnerships and operations at Influencer Advisory. We are a hyper-specialized team in Canada and the United States.

• We built our own database of 160,000+ YouTubers and millions of data points, so every number comes from our own tables.
• We have helped 55+ brands, enterprises and public companies among them, source better influencers and run campaigns.

Why we make this, and how we work with brands

• I make this content because we are an agency.
  • So if you want to save time, money, and reduce the risk of implementing it, you can actually work with our agency.
• We work with teams who are already doing influencer marketing.
  • After 6 to 18 months, your team runs it without us.

We went through 6,468+ recorded interviews and talked with AG1, Onnit and Feastables

Next come the common misconceptions.

What do brands get wrong about affiliates?

Is a commission link enough to get creators posting?

• One brand never starts a relationship with a creator as an affiliate, because an affiliate code is not as tempting as it was five years ago.
  • Get to know 25 to 200 people before launch, then go back three to six months later with an affiliate link. Far more say yes than to a cold ask.
• 3 ways for compensating creators. Commission for everyone, contest prizes, and a retainer for the best.

Does TikTok Shop have to make a profit on its own?

• I expect TikTok Shop PNL to be terrible. However, you're going to have uplift in everything else.
  • TikTok Shop P&L (profit and loss) looked terrible once seeding (free product), commission, contests, retainers and GMV Max ads were counted.
• Count the videos reused as Meta ads and the sales on other channels. A lift test found 88% of the extra sales from GMV Max ads came outside TikTok.

Next come the nine steps, starting with which products to sell on TikTok Shop.

The nine steps

1. Which products sell on TikTok Shop, at what price?
2. Who should run the shop?
3. How do you get creators to say yes?
4. What do you pay on top of commission?
5. How do you keep creators posting?
6. What should creators make?
7. When do you put ad money behind a video?
8. Should you sell on live streams?
9. What is the shop really worth?

The full playbooks behind the steps

• The full playbook for seeding, gifting and PR boxes
• The full playbook for building a creator community
• The full playbook for whitelisting, usage rights and ad money behind creator videos

How do you use this playbook for your goal?

Should you launch a new product on TikTok Shop first?

• TikTok suggested Jones Road launch a product on the shop two weeks before its own website.
• Taste Salud seeds product, sending it free to creators, well ahead of a launch. The earlier it goes out, the more creator posts land on launch day.

How do you turn winning shop videos into Meta ads?

• The workflow has creators post on the shop, then GMV Max ads promote those posts, then the winning videos get run as Meta ads.

How does your own community keep creators posting?

• The move he rates most is taking those affiliates out of TikTok's back end and into something you own.

What do you do first when starting from zero?

What do you sell and who runs the program?

Before any creator hears from you, settle the price of what you sell, the first products and the one person who runs the work.

• TikTok Shop suits things people buy on impulse, under a hundred dollars and really under fifty.
• Launch with a small set. One brand's plan is a hero product, a second tier product and a bundle.

Heard on Marketing Operators at 25:28.

Where do you find your first twenty creators?

Next comes the first group of creators. These lines cover what to show them, where to look and how many to start with.

• Comfrt's advice is to go scroll Instagram and TikTok yourself, and find creators that align with where you want to take your brand.

Heard on Marketing Operators at 36:32 and 59:56.

What do you pay in the first deal and for how long?

Then agree the terms. Decide the pay, keep the first deal short, and get the usage rights signed when a creator joins.

• Nutrabolt takes creators on for one to three videos. The ones whose videos work get longer contracts, and the rest are cut.

How do you brief creators and count the results?

Once creators are signed, they need a brief. After that you count the results and wait long enough to judge them.

How do you grow an affiliate program you already run?

Which products do you open up and who recruits?

More creators starts with more products for them to sell, and with staff whose job is to recruit and manage them.

• One big shop brand splits the work between two people. One recruits affiliates inside the shop affiliate platform, and one manages the affiliate Discord.

Heard on BevNET at 22:27.

Where do you find new creators and how do you train them?

Neuro and HexClad show where new creators come from, and Neuro shows how it trains every one of them.

Click to enlarge

Heard on Open Residency at 13:50, and on Marketing Operators at 54:11.

How does a bigger program pay its creators?

A bigger program pays creators in more than one way. These lines cover commission rates, contest prizes, a retainer and longer deals.

Heard on Marketing Operators at 16:27.

How do you get more out of each creator video?

The last part is getting more from what creators already post, through copies, ads and lives, and then testing what the ads are really worth.

• HexClad ran forty or fifty lives in six months, and they made about a quarter of its TikTok Shop sales.
• Ridge ran a four week test, holding the ads back in some places to see what they were really worth.

Why might TikTok Shop not work for your brand?

What do brands say went wrong on TikTok Shop?

Kept in because every one of these is somebody saying it out loud about their own programme.

How much work is it to set up the shop?

Opening a shop is not a quick Shopify plug in. Here is what setup cost two brands and why shops got switched off.

• Jones Road thought launching TikTok Shop meant you just integrate with Shopify and it is done. It was not that simple, and at the time Jones Road was still waiting on its shipping partners (3PLs) to get integrated and set up the right labels.
• Ridge could not keep its shop switched on for more than two weeks at a time, for six months.
• One brand's shop kept getting turned off over negative reviews, while its Shopify had over 100,000 five-star reviews. Its operator thinks that, like Yelp, only the negative experiences get reviewed.

Heard on Marketing Operators at 35:04, 35:25, 38:13, 38:37 and 25:47.

Will free samples come back as videos worth using?

Ridge found few seeded products became ads, and other brands found most people only wanted the free product.

• Ridge seeded thousands of products this past year and had an extremely low hit rate from seeded product to ad. There were small examples that made it into the ad account, like creators shopping the product in Best Buy, and Ridge thinks better briefs for the people it sends product to could fix it.

Heard on Marketing Operators at 57:41, and on The Anatomy of a Dream at 27:56.

Will sales spread thin and creators keep the value?

Jones Road's best creator brought a small share of its sales, and when every brand chases affiliates the creators keep the value.

• Jones Road did $350,000 in two months, and its single best creator accounted for only $15,000 of it. A large TikTok Shop brand told its operator that six creators bring in 60% of that brand's revenue, and Jones Road has a long tail instead.
• Once everyone hears affiliates are the thing and piles in, the value gets competed away and ends up with the creators.

Heard on Marketing Operators at 58:15, and on Common Thread Collective at 1:04:49.

How fast do videos and creator pages go out of date?

TikTok needs new videos all the time, and the pages Ridge built for each creator went out of date as products and sales changed.

• TikTok gives a few days of crazy virality, then creators have to keep throwing content at it. One host calls it a monster guzzling content.
• Ridge built 40 or 50 creator pages, PewDiePie and MKBHD among them. It has since dropped the strategy, and the old page links would probably go to the homepage now. The pages were tough to keep updated, and each one went out of date as products and sales changed.

Heard on The BarberShop with Shantanu at 37:19, and on Marketing Operators at 50:30.

Can a $100 product sell at full price on the shop?

The shop suits impulse buys. Ridge needs far more touch points to sell a wallet, and very few higher priced brands have won without giving something up.

• Ridge sells $100 wallets at full price most of the year, which is not an impulse buy the way a hoodie at 60% off is, so the same model does not carry over. It takes far more touch points and far more time for someone to decide to buy a Ridge wallet.
• One operator has pushed TikTok to show him a higher priced brand that won on the shop without giving something up, whether heavy promotions or enormous affiliate commissions. He says there are very few.

Heard on Marketing Operators at 53:24 and 1:01:57.

Will the shop make a profit, or will discounts hurt?

One supplement brand is leaving over profit. A TikTok funded discount can break a Walmart deal, and ads to your own site almost never work.

• Force Factor, a supplement brand doing a few hundred million dollars a year, is moving off TikTok Shop completely because it cannot reach profitability there now. It was one of the fastest growing brands in January, and it said so publicly to its own creators.

Heard on The Anatomy of a Dream at 7:10, on Marketing Operators at 13:07, and on Open Residency at 50:22.

Is TikTok charging brands more and helping shoppers less?

TikTok has been paying toward orders to get people trying the shop. That help is being cut while what it charges merchants goes up.

• TikTok pays toward shoppers' orders to get people trying the shop, and brands get excited about the upside without weighing the risk.
• The platform is tightening. TikTok is raising the commissions it charges merchants and at the same time cutting subsidies to shoppers, after the app reportedly lost half a billion dollars in 2023. One analyst says that makes its 2024 target hard to hit, which was to grow the US shop tenfold to as much as 17.5 billion in gross merchandise value.

Heard on Joshua Schall at 48:37 and 8:44.

Can you tell which sales the shop really made?

Affiliates, organic posts, paid ads and GMV Max all touch the same sale, and some of those sales land on Amazon or Shopify.

• Nobody agrees on how to do this yet. Everyone quoted here is still working it out.
• Tracking breaks when a shop video's views turn into a sale on Amazon or Shopify.
• Bloom has never used an affiliate code or a coupon code in its influencer program at all. The reason is that it never optimizes for Shopify, because it sells across many channels, and it calls its own attribution a mess.

Click to enlarge

Heard on Marketing Operators at 57:15, 41:22 and 1:12:25, and on Open Residency at 7:27.

How does Ridge judge the shop without exact numbers?

Ridge would rather overpay and learn quicker than measure precisely. Its operator also says which parts of the shop he thinks are underrated.

• Ridge is a big, growing, profitable D2C brand, so it can afford not to measure its TikTok Shop program precisely. It would rather overpay at different points and learn quicker, turning what might have been a year of iteration into about 5 months.
• Ridge's operator rates the merchandising and the creator work as highly underrated right now, and TikTok Shop itself as maybe perfectly rated, almost slightly overrated. On merchandising, Ridge is seeing a $30 tracker card work and will probably need more small impulse buy products to be really big on the shop.

Heard on Marketing Operators at 46:01 and 58:35.

Are fake listings and health claims a risk on the shop?

One brand says every listing of its product on the shop is fake. Paying commission on supplements also pushes creators toward disease claims.

• Frownies does not sell wholesale, so every Frownies product listed on TikTok Shop is fake. It says the listings on the Walmart website are fake too, and tells buyers to stick to its own website and to Amazon, where the seller should read Frownies Beauty Products.

• Brands will not rein in what affiliates claim until they are clearly liable for it.
• Pass a story and a link out to a thousand creators and you get a lot of misinformation, even when certain keywords are blocked. The lawyer who says this puts the job on the company, which has to give creators great messaging and guidelines on what to say about the product and what not to say.

Heard on Real Alex Clark at 58:06, and on Joshua Schall at 16:45, 19:40 and 20:36.

Can a brand last if it sells on TikTok Shop alone?

Buyers ask what happens if the platform goes away. One cofounder says a brand that goes all in on the shop runs a sales funnel and builds no brand.

• A business doing $200 million a year on TikTok is hard to sell, because buyers ask what happens if the platform goes away.
• Bloom's cofounder says a brand that goes all in on the shop is only running a sales funnel, not building a brand, so the sales will not come back next year. He still calls the shop a necessary piece of any business trying to scale quickly today, as long as it is paired with real brand building moments.
• Some nine figure brands thrive on the shop. Others pivoted to the shop and are struggling.

Heard on Open Residency at 42:43, on School of Hard Knocks Podcast at 43:16, on Marketing Operators at 12:05, and on Beyond Marketing, The Podcast at 24:48.

Should you spread your bets beyond TikTok Shop?

TikTok Shop carries risks beyond a ban. These lines cover what Meta and Amazon may do next, and which channels to add first.

• Jones Road's operator predicts that Meta will try to compete with TikTok on social commerce affiliates. He does not think Meta will do shops, because he does not think its shop efforts have worked, and expects it to weave affiliate tools into the app the way TikTok has.

Heard on Joshua Schall at 16:04 and 22:01, and on Marketing Operators at 31:47 and 52:28.

Is a business built on TikTok worth less to a buyer?

Buyers mark down revenue that depends on one platform, and the platform's own future keeps being argued in court.

• One operator would argue that when you sell a company doing 200 million a year on TikTok, private equity buyers still question that revenue.
• One operator says a buyer is paying for future earnings. If the influencer goes away and growth has to come from paid media, margin comes way down, so he would not model the future at 32% operating income.

Heard on Open Residency at 42:43, and on Common Thread Collective at 50:20.

How do you make the company worth more to buyers?

Buyers pay for earnings that will last. These lines cover moving off TikTok early and not building the brand around one creator.

• One operator would take a really strong TikTok brand off TikTok and into retail or Amazon as fast as possible, and says that view could be 100% wrong.
• RYSE is intentional about not building the brand around one of its big influencers, and 90% of its revenue comes from products that are not his. It says every private equity firm it talks to wants a brand that can stand on its own.
• One lawyer says that when the value is perceived in the creator, that is not going to translate to value for investors. If a creator only wants to be in for three, four years, work out how the company can stand on its own after that.

Heard on Open Residency at 42:54, and on Joshua Schall at 14:36 and 43:22.

Can growing fast on TikTok break support and supply?

The channel works, and then the parts of the business behind it do not.

• Comfrt says its customer support broke as the business scaled, and at one point it had too many content creators in house. It brought in agencies to help with customer support and took on 40 new customer support reps within a month.
• Neuro ran into supply problems because it was growing a little too fast on TikTok. Sometimes it would spend $20,000 and the video itself would go viral, so people kept buying off that video.

Heard on Hudson at 41:18, and on Open Residency at 17:45.

How do you keep orders shipping when a video takes off?

Hold stock back, time the ads around it, switch to pre-orders when orders pile up, and keep buyers told while you are out of stock.

• Do not sync all of your stock to TikTok. With 10,000 units in the warehouse, list 6,000 or 7,000 and release the next batch by hand, so your supply chain has a ceiling it can manage.
• HexClad does not launch creator ads with a short usage period on the day of launch. If the product sells out in two weeks, the usage on those ads is burned. For its egg pan and rice pot it launched to email and SMS first and held the ads back two, three months, because it had to restock.
• When a video is clearing more orders than your team can pack, turn on the pre-order setting. It can stretch the shipping window from 3 days to 7, 14 or 30 days. You will probably lose some customers, and that is better than being hit with a violation.
• One brand was out of stock for probably 6 months of its first year. It kept its customers by opening pre-orders for the next round of inventory and by being very persistent on TikTok with updates, ultra transparent about where things stood.

Heard on JayFlow at 31:11 and 34:37, on Marketing Operators at 59:13, and on Shelf Talks Podcast at 18:59.