Hi, this is Amanda Perelli and welcome back to Insider Influencers, our weekly rundown on the business of influencers, creators, and social-media platforms. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Swipe ups, stickers, links in bio. We've all seen affiliate marketing at work.
The commission-based model is one of the most straightforward and accessible ways that influencers can start earning money: share a trackable link to a product or service, and make a percentage of sales.
Sydney Bradley and I highlighted the top affiliate-marketing networks used by influencers in 2021.
Here's a look at a few of the programs that made the cut thanks to high commission rates, access to top brands, and robust interfaces and tools:
The Amazon Influencer Program stands out for allowing creators to partner with the world's largest retailer and access a wide suite of tools.
LTK (previously LIKEtoKNOW.it and rewardStyle) gives influencers a customized URL and an in-app page called an "LTK Shop," where they can compile a shopping list of their affiliate links for followers.
MagicLinks offers the ability to conduct affiliate marketing through text message.
Every tech startup has its own culture, and we got an inside look at TikTok's. Employees at the video app must abide by a set of six workplace principles - dubbed "ByteStyles" - written by its parent company ByteDance.
The company rules are often fairly broad, like "be grounded and courageous" and "be open and humble."
Internally, staffers use ByteStyles as a way to call out what the company deems good or bad performance during employee evaluations, my colleague Dan Whateley wrote.
While adhering to ByteStyles can lead to gifts or awards, not following the cultural tenets can lead to discipline.
Their open-ended nature can be frustrating when applied to specific work situations, according to four current and former TikTok employees. Sometimes ByteStyles are used as catch-all warnings to employees about behavior that the company didn't like.
"'That's not ByteStyles!' is like so general, but thrown around [when] anyone kind of does stuff the other person doesn't like," a current TikTok employee told Insider.
Personal-finance influencer Tori Dunlap has 1.7 million TikTok followers and earns thousands of dollars promoting companies like Credit Karma and Four Seasons.
Her tip for scoring those brand deals? Slide into the DMs. She landed her first paid deal last year after reaching out to Personal Capital, a personal wealth management company, over Instagram DM.
I spoke with Dunlap who shared templates for other influencers to use and said not to fear rejection.
"Just because they said no now, doesn't mean that's no forever. I have 2 million followers and I still get 'no' a lot," Dunlap, who is 26, told Insider.
For Insider's as-told-to essay series, 27-year-old Michelin-trained chef Poppy O'Toole shared how she became a social-media creator.
She started filming TikToks of easy-to-follow recipes during the first UK lockdown in March 2020, after she'd been let go from her job as a chef in London.
Now, she says she's surpassed her old salary and has a cookbook in the works.
The Influencer Marketing Factory released a creator economy report, with insights from executives at Patreon, Koji, and Jellysmack. In the chart above, influencers share which platform is the most lucrative.
The latest viral hashtag is centered around popular plant-based recipes, like a recreation of Gordon Ramsay's vegan bacon recipe, which is made with tofu and has 1.2 million views.
And before you go, check out the top trending songs on TikTok this week to add to your playlist. The data was collected by UTA IQ, the research, analytics, and digital strategy division of United Talent Agency.
