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.
In this week’s edition:
The top affiliate-marketing programs for influencers
An inside look at TikTok’s six workplace principles
How sliding into DMs can lead to a sponsorship deal
Meet the chef who went from laid-off to TikTok star
And more, including a breakdown of how much YouTubers earn a month for their videos and how a TikTok creator made over six figures from her e-commerce shop
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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.
Here’s the full list of the top programs catering to influencers.
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.
Read more about the principles and how they impact TikTok’s culture.
What’s trending
We tried a personal training session at Dogpound LA – where TikTok stars Addison Rae, Josh Richards, and Bryce Hall sweat it out.
A 40-year-old lipstick is selling out after it became TikTok’s latest obsession.
Creator earnings
An inside look at the media kits of YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok stars.
YouTube stars break down how much they make per month on the platform.
How TikTok helped a cotton candy maker earn $165,000 in sales in six months.
Marketing moves
Influencer agency Digital Brand Architects hired Ernest B. James as SVP of special projects.
Snap has made three new hires on the talent partnerships team: Julie Bogaert, Racquel Douglas, and Emily McDonnell.
ICM agent Chris Sawtelle is leaving the firm to become co-president of TikTok star Josh Richards’ CrossCheck Holdings.
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.
Check out the exact DM templates Dunlap uses to score paid deals, here.
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.
Read her essay on how TikTok turned her career around.
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.
Check out the full report here.
Every week, we highlight a top trending hashtag on TikTok, according to data provided by Kyra IQ.
This week’s hashtag: #plantbased
Percentage uptick over the last 7 days: 8,520%
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.
Disney is looking to create breakout TikTok and Instagram stars (Garett Sloane, from Ad Age)
The Met Gala invited nearly double the amount of content creators this year (Alexa Tietjen, from WWD)
Creators Colin and Samir uploaded a 2-hour interview with YouTube star MrBeast. Watch here.
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.
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