If you’ve heard that super-addictive and equally catchy “Into The Thick Of It" song, then you have got the infamous app TikTok to thank (or maybe, blame?). Though the song has been around since 2005 now, TikTok, formerly known as Musical.ly, brought this catchy childish tune to the forefront of pop culture once again. And now you can hear this song in every other video.
Today, TikTok is not just for the cool kids and edgy teens. It has quickly become everyone's favorite app. As a matter of fact, it was the second most downloaded application in the United States of America; the first one was Disney+ and TikTok had 4 million downloads. Plus, with one billion people using the application each month, it has quickly become one of the most viral and fastest-growing apps and social media platforms currently out there. And those one billion people like to use it a lot! TikTok users spend 52 minutes on average on the app every single day.
Moreover, what is even more surprising is the diversity of age groups on TikTok. You can find people ranging from 10 years old to people above 50 on the app. So, imagine what wonders you can do as a marketer, more specifically, an affiliate marketer with an app that is used by people of all ages for nearly an hour every day.
What Is TikTok Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing on TikTok is as simple as uploading content on TikTok but with the intention of making money by monetizing your audience through affiliate links. Sounds pretty similar to other social networks, right
Well, what makes TikTok different is that it launched in 2016 while Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat have been around for 17 years, 14 years, and almost a decade, respectively.
In other words, TikTok is a Gen Z platform, while others are Boomer platforms.
Pros & Cons of TikTok Affiliate Marketing
Let’s see if TikTok Affiliate Marketing is a good idea or not.
Pros:
- It offers huge levels of engagement even if you post a few videos.
- You don’t need video editing experience.
- TikTok’s growth is exponential at the moment.
- Organic traffic is endless.
- You can grow traffic on other platforms via TikTok.
Cons:
- TikTok’s future is uncertain in the Western markets.
- Levels of commercial intent for affiliate marketers are questionable.
Are you an avid TikTok user?
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Examples of Affiliate Marketing on TikTok
Let’s see real-life examples of affiliate marketers on TikTok:
GraceakaLittleMama uses her 439k followers to earn. She monetizes her traffic by using different offers like affiliate marketing products and Amazon. However, she directs her TikTok traffic to YouTube to boost her traffic there.
Rachel monetizes her 2 million followers via the Amazon Associates program. She has an aesthetic of making the famous short videos, “Things you didn’t know you needed off Amazon.” She uses LinkTr.ee to give her users the links.
Now, this account, even though small in size, features a ClickBank product. With only 50k followers, this account focuses on the narrow niche of woodworking. They have a bit.ly link in their profile that redirects people to a ClickBank product. Now, the product has an average commission of $62 per sale that offers a tremendous conversion rate, thus making them an excellent recurring income.
How to Use TikTok for Affiliate Marketing — a Step by Step Guide
Now that we are caught up on Affiliate marketing on TikTok, let’s see how actually to do it successfully:
Choose Your Affiliate Niche
To start with, you need to decide the niche and offers you are going to work in. This includes choosing a niche and topic to focus on and the kind of products or services to advertise. Here’s what you need to consider when choosing a niche for your affiliate marketing business:
Focus on one niche if you want to be successful as an affiliate marketer on TikTok. People love content that focuses on one thing instead of being an all-rounder. Plus, this also increases targeted followers who actually buy what you promote.
Choose a niche that you genuinely enjoy and are knowledgeable about. You must be consistent, so you may have to post at least once every day. This is only possible when you have a genuine interest in your niche.
Some good niches are cooking, fitness, comedy, and dance. However, you don’t have to go for them if you want to be successful. Do a quick search of keywords related to your niche and look for successful accounts. This can tell you if there is an audience for your niche that you can monetize.
Once you have your niche, choose good affiliate offers. Here’s what you should consider when selecting affiliate offers:
- Commissions: Why choose something that pays only in cents when you can promote something that can pay you $1,000? Choose an affiliate offer that can pay you around $40 on every purchase. An exception to this rule is if you are going to advertise products that are a favorite of a huge audience, such as Amazon’s products.
- Reputation and Quality: People on TikTok feel empowered by the anonymity the app offers them. So, before you promote something, ensure that it is something that you would be happy to buy yourself. Make sure that your followers have a good experience with the products you advertise so they can trust you and buy products just because you promote them.
Set Up Your TikTok Profile
Choose the type of account you want:
- Personal Account: You get a personal account by default when you first sign up on TikTok. It does not have any features that you can use for affiliate marketing.
- Creator Account: Creator accounts cater to content creators and influencers, but you can use them for affiliate marketing. They give you access to all the cool sounds and statistics of TikTok. However, you do not get a clickable link in your bio until you get 1,000 followers.
- Business Account: Business accounts let you have a clickable link in your bio without any requirements. However, they don’t have access to the cool sounds, so you miss out on the trends.
Once you choose a profile, optimize it by adding relevant keywords in your name, username, and bio, add a clickable link in your bio and a CTA, add a picture of yourself, and link your Instagram account and YouTube channel.
Set Up An Affiliate Marketing Funnel
Before you start posting, you should know where to direct potential customers for affiliate offers. Instead of just adding your affiliate link in your bio, create a sales funnel that lets you collect emails and follow up with people to boost conversion rates (aka commissions). Here’s how to build a sales funnel quickly:
- Opt-In Page: The Opt-In Page of a sales funnel is where people will go after clicking on the link in your profile. This page captures their emails by offering a freebie or lead magnet so you can then follow up with them.
- Bridge Page: This page acts as a connector between your opt-in pages and sales page. It has a simple video in which a marketer introduces an offer to their audience. It also lets your build trust, so your reader opens your emails. You also get the chance to add a CTA and your affiliate link to direct the audience to the website.
- Email Campaign: This is an amazing way to follow up with people to convert them into buyers. This is done by creating a 5-day email campaign to build trust and credibility by providing value-added content and eliminating potential obstacles or confusions they may have in mind regarding a product.
Grow Your TikTok Audience
Once you have everything, start building your audience with a content strategy:
- Have a clear niche: It is crucial to stay focused on whatever niche you choose if you want TikTok to find people who might be interested in your content. This will gain you more followers and make it clear to people what they can expect from you.
- Use hashtags: Tiktok doesn’t know what niche you follow when you start posting on the app. So, use relevant hashtags in your post’s description to help TikTok understand who to show your content to.
- Follow trends: Keep an eye on trends because they are a huge part of TikTok and make them so addictive for users. Trends can get you more views since the app shows people similar videos to those they have interacted with. Plus, trends also keep things fun and entertaining.
- Follow trends via the ‘Discover’ section of TikTok. Another way to know about the latest trends is by staying up to date with your “For You Page” and seeing what kind of videos everyone else is making.
- Duration: TikTok videos can range anywhere from being as short as 5 seconds to as long as 3 minutes, but one of the main factors affecting your account’s visibility is your Watch Time. Watch Time means what percentage of your affiliate marketing videos people have watched. Therefore, shorter videos do better because people’s attention spans are getting shorter day by day. Try to keep your videos straightforward and include a catchy "hook" at the beginning to catch people’s attention.
- Respect community guidelines: TikTok may seem like a fun app that allows you to post whatever you want, but the story is totally the opposite. Tiktok is actually very strict about policies on what is allowed to be posted. Repeated violation of Community Guidelines will get you banned.
- Do not post any prohibited content such as anything that promotes or supports nudity, bullying, alcohol, or any form of sexual content. However, sometimes a video can still get flagged because there was either a mistake or someone reported your video. Just block the haters.
- Add a call to action: A Call To Action or a CTA is the final message that you add at the end of your videos, prompting people to perform a specific activity or action. People will click your account or go to the clickable link in your bio only if you ask them to do it and make them feel important.
- It is essential to have a clear CTA since it can make or break the deal. Ask people to follow you on TikTok first, so you can build your credibility, reputation, trust, and authority once you get 1,000 followers. From then onwards, you can just ask people to go to the link in your bio.
- Replicate what works: This is a famous strategy used by everyone no matter what they do. You can be a blogger, a content creator on Instagram, or an affiliate marketer on TikTok, and you can feel that finding out what type and kind of content work the best for your niche makes things easier. You can save yourself from doing extensive research by keeping an eye on other content creators in your niche or similar industry. See what kind of content they are posting and what is getting them good results to get inspired and do the same thing.
Plus, you do not have to copy all of their content. All you have to do is recreate what they are doing and add a unique touch of your own to it.
Case Study — Teresa Caruso: $972,000 Per Year
One of the biggest examples of making it big on TikTok via affiliate marketing is Teresa Caruso, a married woman from the city of dreams ‘New York’. She specializes in Amazon products. She has been running a blog ever since 2012. Teresa shares her favorite products from home décor and fashion on her Amazon shop; however, this is only possible if you have a good following. But don’t worry, you can do the same without setting up an Amazon shop.
Now, coming to her TikTok account, Teresa has more than 2.9 million followers and around 93 million likes, respectively. The most surprising part? She started using TikTok in January 2020 only!
So, what does Teresa do?
She shares videos in which she talks about her favorite products from Amazon and shares the Amazon Affiliate links to the mentioned items via her profile, blog, and Amazon shop page. Based on her 2.9 million subscribers and assuming that at least maybe 10 % of her subscribers click on her affiliate links and another 10% actually buy something she has recommended, the purchases can be estimated:
2.9 million ÷ 10 ÷ 10 = 29,000 purchases
And this estimate is just for one product, one video, or one link. Teresa shares multiple products in a video that increases the possibility of purchases, and she shares one video every day.
So, how much does Teresa earn from TikTok Affiliate Marketing? With an item retailing for $100 on Amazon and offering a 3% on affiliate, Teresa would make $3. Now, with the 29,000 purchases estimated above, she is making:
3 × 27,000 = $87,000
Or she can advertise a product retailing at $1, and she will only make 10 cents from it, but even with a 3-cent cut and 2.9 million followers, she will make:
0.10 × 29,000 = $2900
In terms of monthly income, let’s see what she is earning:
$2900 × 30 days = $87,000/month
In terms of yearly income:
$87,000 × 12 months = $1,044,000/year
Conclusion
So, can you use TikTok for affiliate marketing or not?
Well, you can and you cannot. If you want to give it a go, make sure that TikTok is one of the many channels you use to run your affiliate marketing business. Do not make it your only source of Affiliate marketing.
So, make sure to connect all your social media handles and Affiliate Programs to make the most out of your Affiliate Marketing business on TikTok and make it super straightforward for yourself. Use it to redirect your TikTok traffic to other platforms such as Instagram or Facebook. Use TikTok as a traffic source, and then watch it do magic for you.
Do you engage with sponsored content on TikTok regularly?
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