Creator Tips for Growing Your Affiliate Revenue in 2024

And some of the top items on ShopMy this year!

Jan 05, 2024

As we’ve been building ShopMy over the past four years and working with creators across different categories and channels, we’ve learned a lot about how to succeed and grow affiliate earnings. If you’re a creator thinking about how to grow your affiliate earnings in 2024, I wanted to share some tips!

Your Revenue Mix: Why the Affiliate Channel is worth investing in

Before diving into tips, I wanted to set the stage by encouraging you to think about where your affiliate revenue sits within your overall revenue mix as a creator. Of course it makes up some fraction of the money you make alongside your sponsored content and any other additional revenue streams you have (subscription earnings, merch sales, speaking fees, etc.). We work with creators on ShopMy who have six and seven figure businesses and make between 90% to 100% of their revenue from the affiliate channel as well as creators who only make a few dollars a month and mostly make their money through sponsored content.

Personally, I think investing more in this channel is the way to go for so many reasons:

It’s something you have more control over and way more creative freedom. You don’t have to wait for deals or opportunities to come along — you can just create! I’ve talked to so many creators who get burned out from having to create a lot of sponsored content. If you can grow your affiliate revenue and rely less on having to create sponsored content, I think it’s really smart for reducing burnout and feeling excited.
The content you create using affiliate links is more authentic and engaging for your audience. Most of the time sharing affiliate links can just be sharing things you genuinely like and making shopping those products easier for your community.
Using affiliate links and having the data from it can help you negotiate better partnerships. You can go to a brand and say how much you’ve already organically driven via affiliate links to their site or brand as well as use your order volume stats overall to show your overall power to drive purchases.

Tips for Growing Your Affiliate Revenue in 2024

Now, let’s get to tips for how to do this!

#1 Consistency is Key: Regularly link the products your talking about

This one is easy. Make sure to link everything you’re featuring and talking about. People are going to ask anyway! At minimum, link the things you’re wearing or discussing and always make it easy for your audience to shop your content.

#2 Get custom commissionable discount codes with brands

If you’re a creator or brand who has talked to me in the past three years, you know I won’t shut up about this. Custom commissionable discount codes are a game changer for increasing your affiliate revenue, and if you’re not tapping into this, you’re missing out! For some context on why codes are so huge: basically, the affiliate channel is a bit of a leaky bucket for a number of different reasons including just how tracking works as well as the fact that people often discover something on one device and purchase on another without there being a technical link (and therefore commission).

Codes are a key way to make that bucket less leaky. When creators are sharing commissionable links alongside a commissionable discount code on ShopMy, we see about 40% of the purchases come in without any tie to the commissionable link. That’s a lot!

When we first launched the ability for brands to assign commissionable discount codes to users on ShopMy, I had so many influencers calling me and texting me saying things like “omg I am making so much money from codes, how do I get more.”

So I highly recommend picking a few brands you love and working to get commissionable codes with brands. If you’re a creator on ShopMy you can reach out to our creator success team for help with this.

Also, codes can be huge for creators on TikTok — if you make a post that goes viral and you have a commissionable discount code within the TikTok or caption, you can earn wayyyyyy more from code redemptions than you can from people going to your bio, finding the post, and clicking through to the retailer site.

#3 Build a base of 5-10 brands you love that offer really strong commission

Most creators are talking about hundreds if not thousands of brands, and I think the most important guidance I can give on what you feature is to stay true to what you genuinely love and regularly feature things that offer competitive commission rates, low commission rates, as well as things that offer no commission at all.

That being said, I think it’s worth focusing on a set of 5-10 brands you really love that also offer really competitive commission rates. The goal is to build up your affiliate business so that on quarterly basis you have 5-10 brands that you are making a few thousand dollars from. Here’s what a sample mix could look like:

1-2 major apparel retailers where you are regularly curating picks from and highlighting items that are on sale. Some great retailers on ShopMy include Mytheresa, Shopbop, and NET-A-PORTER.
2-3 clothing brands that you love and that you’ll regularly want to talk about their new launches and sales. Some of my favorites on ShopMy include Alex Mill, La Ligne, Jenni Kayne, and many more!
1-2 jewelry brands you regularly wear that offer great commission and maybe you have a custom commissionable discount code for one of those brands as well. Side note: one of my favorite jewelry brands on ShopMy is Dorsey. I highly recommend giving their founder Meg a follow on IG as she is always sharing incredibly helpful tips and insights on the affiliate channel.
1-2 beauty brands that are staples in your routine. Beauty brands also tend to be generous with commission (since they have higher product margins) as well as giving custom commissionable discount codes.

By focusing on a few brands, you’re also providing focus to your audience! And the 5-10 is just your focus. You should always be testing new brands, putting them into the mix and seeing how your audience responds.

This is one of the reasons I always tell our creators to regularly check your gifting requests on ShopMy — the brands gifting via our platform are the brands giving generous commission and oftentimes setting up custom commissionable discount codes, so if you like the product they gift to you, it could easily be one of your 5-10 focus brands.

#4 Buy things with your own money!

This might sound weird, but I think it’s really important. Many creators are lucky enough to get gifted an incredible amount of product from great brands. It’s important to remember that most of your audience is not getting gifted product, and they’re purchasing it with their own paychecks. In addition to featuring gifted products that you genuinely love, remember to also think about purchasing and showcasing things you actually bought at a variety of different price points — these are things your audience is more likely to click through and buy.

10 Popular Items on ShopMy in 2023

Just so I could have a nice cover photo for this post, I thought it would be fun to share some popular items on ShopMy in 2023. Every week in our weekly newsletter that goes out to our creator base, we share a set of items that our community is talking about a lot or selling a lot of. I thought it would be fun to share some of my favorites that rose to the top this year!

I hope this was helpful! In future substacks I’m planning to dive more into specific channels (e.g. Substack, TikTok, YouTube, Reels, etc.) and tips relevant to each of those channels.