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Ivan
Welcome to TikTok Shop Insiders podcast, your source for actionable news, trends and strategies. If you want to build a thriving brand or Creator presence on TikTok shop, this is your essential listen. Let's get started. All right. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the TikTok Shop Insiders podcast, your source for the latest news and strategies for TikTok shop. Been a long time. Hi, everyone, my name is Ivan. Welcome to the show. Thank you for joining in. It means a lot reading some of the comments and the feedback, getting a ton. I was on a call last week where a seller was just listening to the podcast and made a lot of sales through what he learned from the podcast. So that's always kind of super assuring and kind of a proof of concept that, like, my content that I'm putting out is affecting people and, you know, making them better sellers. So again, thank you for joining in. I greatly appreciate it. Leave a review if I've been somewhat helpful. Always helps me to kind of look at what those look like. Any ways for me to improve and then kind of, you know, great feedback and kind of getting the, the word out there. So appreciate all the listeners and, you know, thank you for all that. Some latest for me. Let's see. So I got back from Hawaii last week, a trip with the family. It was our spring break and that was a good little reset. So that was pretty fun. Kids had fun. We visited my wife's family's from Hawaii, so we visited her family and he had the, the grandpa has a farm over there. So it was real cool seeing the kids kind of like pick the, the peanuts. He's, he's planting peanuts, so picking peanuts, messing with the ducks, all that good stuff. So that was fun. So, yeah, I think another thing is I kind of unplugged during my time there and you know, the, the team on this side did a fantastic job. You know, all the clients are, you know, well taken care of. No fires. You know, I was always available, but, you know, very limited kind of communication from them. So, so awesome to see, you know, once you step away that the, you know, the show goes on. So greatly appreciative of the team. I think you're listening. I think you guys listen to the podcast, so appreciate you guys. Came back this week and signed two new clients, eight figure brands, doing their thing on, on Amazon and DTC and want to take a stab at TikTok shop. So a lot of good news all the way around and, you know, I love that. Another update is Affiliate Academy hq. The other podcast and community that I have going on doing pretty awesome as well. Onboarding hundreds of affiliates each week, you know, it's, it's great. Right. And so the idea behind that one is okay, well let's get, instead of every new client trying to find affiliates for them, let's create a community of existing affiliates and then as new brands come along it's easier for us to kind of onboard affiliates. So that's been working great and you know, building a community, I think it's where it's all at at this point in TikTok Shop. Taking them from, you know, on the brand side, taking them from, you know, arm's reach creator all the way to kind of like bringing them in the fold and giving them more information about the brand deals, etc. So creating a community around your brand on TikTok shop is definitely a key. Another kind of exciting announcement that I have. I don't know how much I can kind of relay here, but it's something I've been the most excited about ever since finding out about TikTok shop I think. Right. So that's kind of in, in the works and super excited about it. And then I'll let you guys know, I'll kind of throw items here and there. You'll be the first ones to know when it launches. But I'm working on something pretty cool and yeah, that's kind of like the latest and greatest for me. We always like to start the show with news and updates around TikTok Shop. It's been quite a minute since we came back but you know, since we talked last but you know, you know, hopefully you kind of get these news bits and you know, in a quickly fashion. The latest piece of news which is kind of expected but kind of sucks is Tick Tock Shop is deprecating their co funded free shipping on May 29th. So before if your orders are over $30, TikTok would co fund free shipping. But it's not free anymore. Right. So May 29th, they gotta go away with that. So keep an eye out for that kind of sucks. Yeah, I kind of knew that. Right. They're not gonna find free shipping forever. But yeah, I think just you know, I think next step is they're gonna increase their, their, their, their commission. TikTok's commission from 8%, upwards of you know, 10%, 15% so. But yeah, it's just kind of TikTok showing that it's, you know, proven itself attracting sellers and kind of going away with those, those items as time goes on. Small Update here. But refundable samples. Before you could have a sample that's sent out to an affiliate and some of the criteria that the affiliate would have to do is GMV generated or number of pieces of content created. And so you can choose either or you can either make one piece of content or $1 GMV. But they're doing away with, with, with content based refunds, right? So, you know, before post three pieces of content and you get, you know, your refund, you know, refundable sample kind of price back. But they're doing away with that. They're making it only sales performance now, right. So you know, you have to have sales attributed to it. I imagine it's because people are just posting videos and not caring what the content is. And now, you know, that's kind of abused, right? You post three pieces of nothing content, you get a product for free. So I think I love the sales performance and we were utilizing sales performance as well in our refundable samples, right, because it doesn't really matter how many pieces of content you post if they're not great, right? You want to have high quality content. Up next, kind of another quick one is TikTok Shop is launching all over the globe, right. A couple months ago it was expanding throughout Europe and then recently it's expanding to Japan. So, you know, as it's proving itself in all these marketplaces, you know, it's kind of getting bigger and bigger, right? So definitely excited for that. And what's on the horizon. I've actually had a couple people from Spain reach out to me and say, hey, you know, I just want to tap your shoulder on TikTok Shop Spain and you know, figure out what's good for us and you know, if there's something here. So it's exciting to hear it kind of TikTok Shop wave taking over the world. So yeah, up to the main part of this podcast, I wanted to talk about, you know, affiliates and how to find affiliates, right. And a little story here is I had a conversation with a, with a seller and it's becoming clear to me that a lot of the people that listen to this are, you know, newer sellers, right. They're obviously not all big brands, but like, you know, how can newer sellers make an impact and sell well on TikTok Shop? Right? And you know, a problem that they're having is like, okay, well if they have products that they want to have affiliates promote versus like a product coming from, you know, Johnson and Johnson brands and big huge brands, like they're obviously they're going to promote those bigger brands. But you know, what are some other ways other than bots and automation that these smaller brands can find affiliates. Right? And so you know there's, I have here eight different ways of finding affiliates outside from bots and automation. Right. All of them have their kind of pros and cons of you know, how hard it is, how easy it is, how impactful it is and I'll be going through that so I'll run through the list real quick. But number one is paid UGC communities. Number two is Twitter and X3 is affiliate communities like brands meets creators, creators corners and other discord groups. Number four is using callo data and sniping competitors affiliates. And then number five is your own brand's social media posts and six is Facebook groups of affiliates. And number seven is TikTok comments. Number eight is AI tools. So I don't know how many I said before, but these are the eight things that you can do other than bots and automation to find affiliates for their brand. And I will say I've tried majority of these and I have, I have kind of gotten affiliates through each one of these. Right. And so they do work. But I'll go into kind of what's some pros and cons behind them. Right. And so number one is a paid UGC community. I have a friend, owner of Incense. Incense is I N S e N S e pro. He's a great guy and his website basically connects brands with GGC creators. Right. And so he, you know, people needed, our brands, needed influencers to create videos for Instagram and you know, high quality videos and this is like a marketplace between the two. Well, he added a TikTok Shop, you know, feature to their affiliates. Right. Like of your affiliates in my network, which ones are TikTok shop affiliates? Okay, let's connect them now. Right. So the, the pros for these are like, okay, there's, these are creators, they already know how to sell. They already have a profile. You can look and you know, they're vetted and they, they, they, you know, affiliate mindset already. Right. But like what, what I don't like about this, this platform is it's pretty expensive, right? And so you need a monthly fee. I think it's a couple hundred dollars, you know, two to $400, whatever the monthly fee is. And then you have to pay the affiliate per video. And traditional UGC creators are going to charge relatively higher than to, to for a video. Right. I've seen, I've seen affiliate UGC affiliate charge $10,000 for one video and then, you know, most of them on the platforms, like $100 or $25, I think just a lot of money per video, right? Whereas you do bots and automation, you're only charging, you're only getting, you're only charging for commissions, right? And so there's no flat fee, but this is a way of like kind of paying your way to get these affiliate videos, right? If you can't get them through bots and automation, you can pay your way to get it. But still relatively expensive, right? And we all know like if you pay a hundred dollars per video, TikTok Shop is a numbers game, right? You want to have as many pieces of video and if you pay 100 for video, that's pretty expensive, right? So that's like a pro and con there to, to find affiliates. Up next is Twitter and X. So I've definitely gone to Twitter. I think there's a hashtag of like TikTok shop affiliates and derivations of that. But you actually just follow Interact DM these affiliates, right? And, and say, hey, I have this brand, would you be interested? And it's obviously time consuming and can't do it at scale. But you know, if you're thinking about like a small brand that's not getting a lot of traction on TikTok, you know, the platform, then you might want to look at Twitter and see what, what pops out from there. So we have, you know, have relationships with affiliates on Twitter. We've started relationships and it's been okay, but again, like not scalable, right? It's very time consuming. You know, you kind of have to, it's more a longer road. You have to find their, find them on seller center, then connect with them there, et cetera. Right? So it's a great, you know, it's free, it's simple, it's quick, but you know, the, it's not necessarily scalable per se. Right. Up next is affiliate communities, like Brands meets Creators and Creators Corner, right? So if you're on TikTok at all, you know that there's a bunch of creator communities out there, right? So it's like they're an affiliate and they say, hey, I learned how to be an affiliate through this program. And this program teaches a whole bunch of affiliates on how to sell, right? And so if they have hundreds of members, thousands of members, tens of thousands of members, right? And they're all learning how to sell on TikTok shop, well, you as a brand can now reach out to the community and say, hey, brand. Or, hey, hey, brands meets creators. Let me, you know, can you promote my product? Well, they charge for that connection, right? So brands meets creators will say, hey, I'll do it for, I think, you know, a couple thousand dollars, whatever it may be. You know, I think it's. Last I heard was like $4,000 for a brand to feature their product over there. Right. And so that's great. And. All right, so you're getting. You as a brand are paying $4,000, or don't quote me on that, but a high amount to get your product in front of their affiliate community, which is great. That's, you know, that's. They're teaching them how to make videos and sell your product. Right. But that money is kind of. That's a lot of money. And that's only for the affiliate videos. But what is wrong here is that you. They're not taking care of the shop. Right? There's promotions that need to be had, that need to be made. There's, you know, optimizations on the listings and, and, and all that. Right. And so, you know, for that amount of money, you can essentially be a client for us. Right. You could, you could get the affiliate outreach videos made and get the shop management and get the ads management. Right. So, you know, kind of it's. It's rather expensive. I mean, I guess if you're a brand, you're doing all that, then that's a good option. But, you know, I think, yeah, trying to make it, you know, it's kind of a expensive route. It's only for affiliates. Right. It doesn't have, like, the marketplace in mind. Right. Optimizations and kind of ads. Right. Those are huge pieces. Right. They're more focused. They're only focused on the affiliates. Right. There's not a lot of, like, marketplace management that happens here. So affiliate communities are great. They do teach a lot. Maybe consider it like phase two of, you know, if you need more affiliates, but actually not. Not even because if it's. If. When we're successful in phase one, it's easy to get phase two kind of more affiliates. So, yeah, I mean, it's definitely worth a try to see if it works for your brand. But, you know, again, if you're looking for complete channel management, it's like you could probably pay an agency to do that. Competitive sniping through callow data. So number four. So what I did before was like, okay, let me go, go to Caladata. Let me look at my competitors on there and let me look at their top Affiliates get their information, their DM, their TikTok, their Instagram, their, their, their email, compile that list and reach out to each of these people. Because the theory is if they make videos, high selling videos of other product in your category, well they can make high selling videos of your product, right? And so that's a way of reaching out to them. Obviously not super scalable, but when you're at a point where you don't have any or you don't have high quality, that's some place to look, right? Using Kalidata as a tool, find high quality affiliates and then reach out to them, right? So number five is your own brand's social media posts, right? So your Instagram, your TikTok, right? And so one way to do this is go to your Instagram and say hey, do we have any followers that are TikTok shop affiliates or do we have like any TikTok shop affiliates? And that'd be great because who better than someone who follows your brand to be a TikTok shop affiliate? So a brand that we onboarded, we use a social media post and we got some affiliates, right? And they're really die hard fans of the brand. They use it all the time. Well great, let's have you be an affiliate. It's like a no brainer. So yeah, go into your own brand, social media posts and, or going to your brand posting on social media saying hey, do we have any affiliates fans of our product? You know, super loyal, obviously not as scalable but you know that one affiliate is probably worth, you know, a dozen kind of random affiliates, right? Some other way. This is the very, very beginning. But they're on Facebook. There are groups of TikTok Shop affiliates. There's dozens of groups with thousands of members in there, right? And they all are TikTok shop affiliates. Well you can post in there or reach out to the moderator and ask them to, you know, what's it going to take to promote my product? And then you know, they'll give you a fee. So similarly to the other creator groups, but something that you could also do, which I've done before, is message the people in the group individually. And that's obviously not super scalable but you know you could do that, right? If, if it's a group and you know they're pretty active, you can see their profile, you know, you can go to these Facebook groups, you can go DM these people that are in that group and kind of to ask them to work on your product, right? And I know that that happens A lot. So Facebook groups, go to Facebook, search for TikTok Shop affiliates, you know, be active in there, comment, you can figure out who's really, you know, moving the needle. I know they post their GMV generated so you can kind of take a look, oh this did, this guy did 100,000 last month. Let's reach out to them. Right. So kind of a gray hat way of finding them but I guess these like again this is not like a tried and true, you should definitely do all these but if you're kind of looking for these kind of extra ways to find affiliates, like this might be something to look for TikTok comments. Right. And so you as a user, as you're browsing TikTok and you see these affiliates that look really good, well message them on, on the comments. Right. Instead of using bots and automations and DMS and email comments are huge. Right. And so if you, and, and I know most affiliates do read all their comments. So if you like a video, if you like their style, just say hey, I love your style. Wear this brand. You know, would you like to be an affiliate for us? You know, I mean or, and that's a great way of finding these affiliates on TikTok and TikTok Shop. So yeah, next is eight AI tools. This is something we've toyed around with. Haven't had much success on it. I know it's probably like going to be what everyone's doing in you know, one, two, six months, whatever it may be or six months, one, two years. But yeah, using AI tools like make UGC AI basically. I don't know if you've seen this but using AI they can hold your product as if it was there. It's kind of like, yeah, it's just, it's like an avatar of someone holding your product and then you can write a script and have them speak accordingly. So yeah, AI tools like again we, we've tried it for sure but we haven't seen much success. But I know that this is, you know, actually there is an account out there that's killing it with AI. It's like I forgot it's a moringa. So their top like 10 products are all AI. I'm sorry, their top 10 videos are all AI. So there's definitely people out there that are utilizing AI to promote their, their products to the tunes of millions of dollars. So yeah, I take that back, I haven't had success but there are lots of brands out there that are seeing success with AI shoppable videos. So definitely take A look at that. Make ugc. Let me look it up. Yeah, make UGC let me. Sorry for the pause, but yeah, make ugc. AI is kind of the one I see all over the place. Take a look at that. And yeah, I would also say if you see a video that's popping and it's obviously AI, I would go to the profile and see what other videos they're making. Right. Someone's definitely taking advantage of that. As you know, TikTok shop is like a numbers game. I look at every video as like a lottery ticket. Right? Any one of those tickets, any one of those videos can hit that lottery. It can get millions of views, hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales. So the more you have out there, the better. And then obviously AI is a, you know, a catalyst to making more videos. So, you know, if you can master the creation of video making through AI, you can manufacture a lot of tickets essentially. Right. So AI tools is definitely a way to go. Requires a mastery. It's like a language of its own. So something to think about and test out for. Sure. I haven't figured it out yet. If you figure it out, let me know. Or if you figure it out and you want to be a guest on this show, we'd love to kind of get you on. So, yeah, that concludes it for today as far as like the 8 Ways to Find affiliates outside of bots and automation. Right. So again, number one, paid UGC communities like incense. Number two is search for them on Twitter and X using, you know, TikTok shop hashtags, etc. Or TikTok shop affiliate hashtags. Number three is affiliate communities. Number four is, you know, using callo data and sniping some of your competitors. Five is your own brand social media. Six is Facebook groups for affiliates. Number seven is TikTok shop or TikTok comments messaging, your, you know, ideal affiliates through them and AI tools kind of mastering that. So yeah, that concludes, you know, kind of this, this episode of, of TikTok shop insiders again, you know, appreciate everyone listening. Leave a review if you can and that's it. Catch you next time. Thanks, everyone.