Happy Sunday!
I hope you had an amazing week. If you’re new here, you know the deal → you should be relaxed, feet up, beverage in your hand, and I hope you’re ready to dive into something fun: The Andrew Tate affiliate marketing strategy.
Before we get into that, do you remember a few weeks ago when I said Sharma Brands has been doing more of the visual identity + website upgrade scopes? The first one has gone live! Use the right arrow key to see the before & afters of The Skinny Confidential’s store on this Figma Prototype link. The Sharma Brands team absolutely killed this one, and the next 3 are almost ready, just in time for the holidays! If you’re interested, fill out this form.
If you’re in New York and want to hang with myself and other eCommerce nerds, come meet me this coming Wednesday morning at Kolkata Chai! I invested in this company a few years ago because they make the world’s greatest chai, and I convinced them to open cafe 2 hours early so we can try a new concept: Commerce & Chai! If you’re around, RSVP here and come through!
I’ve also gotten tons of requests to do live landing page and product page teardowns, so on August 11th (next Friday), I am going to do a live teardown of landing pages. To make sure I can get through as many as possible, I am going to cap the list at 150 people. Sign up here to reserve your spot on the list.
Yesterday, Moiz and I also filmed the first 2 episodes of Limited Supply’s 5th season. Thanks to the feedback you filled out a few weeks ago, we’ve completely changed how we’re dropping episodes. Instead of episodes that feel like a potluck of topics, we’re going to theme episodes. In the first episode, we talked about operations, logistics, hidden 3PL fees, which 3PLs accidentally shipped 200 Long Wknd deodorants, and how you should pay for components when you start versus when you scale. The second episode is a golden nugget farm with probably 70 different Black Friday Cyber Monday actionable tips.
If you’re not in our Limited Supply Slack group, I highly recommend getting in there, too — our community manager, Eugenio, has it in full swing, and Moiz and I will both be more active there. Please continue to report anyone pitching or pestering you as a vendor.
Today is also the last day to book a call and claim the July Prime Day offer with HOOX! 2 Landing pages + 1 full round of CRO for just $10k. Book a call or buy the package on this landing page, and see why brands like Dr. Squatch, CatBird, Glamnetic, and Eight Sleep love their HOOX pages.
Now, let’s talk about what today’s newsletter is about.
If you haven’t heard, a new affiliate software called Social Snowball has been slowly overtaking the market. Their founder, Noah, is like you or me… just a hustler looking to build something amazing. When we were catching up about what is working and what the underground brands are doing well, it occurred to me that it’s basically the same strategy Andrew Tate used to grow his personal brand and subscriptions to whatever his paid community is.
Alright, let’s dive in.
What is The Andrew Tate Affiliate Strategy?
Whether you love or hate Andrew, the man understands marketing. In 2021, he briefly became the most Googled person on earth, garnering billions of impressions per week during the height of his social media rise to fame.
That said, Tate posted very little original content of his own. His videos organically dominated the For You Page on TikTok, IG, and YouTube Shorts due to one thing and one thing only. Affiliates.
Obviously, Tate is a controversial figure and has probably done some sketchy stuff. I’m not commenting on his character or anything else in his life. I’m only talking about his marketing strategy and the frameworks and takeaways we can take from it. My mom always told me to look at situations and extract the positive part of it; that’s what I’m going to do here.
Here’s what it is…
In short, Andrew created some original content and appeared on many bigger podcasts where he often promoted his private paid community called “Hustler’s University.”
Inside “Hustler’s University” (which was basically a private Discord), he would reward members for clipping up his original content and then posting it on their own fan accounts, which would, in turn, go viral and get tons of views. In most cases, Andrew didn’t even have to pay for this. His followers were so devoted to helping him that they would do it for free.
If you are a DTC brand trying to replicate this strategy, you can’t expect this on day 1. You will need to pay your affiliates a fair price (and often a trackable commission on sales) for them to do this work. I’ll talk about this later.
Over time, Andrew Tate literally had thousands of “fan” and “tribute” accounts on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube that were independently editing, remixing, and reposting content about the Tate brothers on his behalf.
This led to Andrew gaining popularity faster than anyone in history as he amassed 10s billions of impressions across platforms in a very short period (think 3-4 months).
And he did all this without spending a single dollar on paid ads. Pretty wild stuff!
So…How Can You Apply This to DTC?
This is clearly the million-dollar question.
Today, just a few brands are starting to catch on and experiment with Andrew Tate’s model. One example is a brand called Tabs which bootstrapped their business to $11M+ in revenue without spending much on paid media.
Tabs followed Andrew’s playbook by incentivizing hundreds of affiliates to create their own content about the brand, posting natively to “Tabs branded” affiliate accounts on TikTok, garnering hundreds of millions of impressions and millions of dollars in sales over the last year.
Here’s how you can do the same:
- Search “UGC Creator” on Twitter or TikTok.
- Review creators, and find someone who looks like they would be a reasonable creator/brand fit.
- DM them and ask if they’d like to create content for your brand on a monthly retainer or a commission. Monthly retainers typically cost anywhere from $500/month to 3K per month per creator, depending on the number of clips/videos you need. If you want to offer a commission (or a combination of retainer + commission), a competitive rate is typically 5-20% on sales the affiliate drives.
- Then, onboard each creator as an affiliate using Social Snowball. Within Social Snowball, they can generate their own unique affiliate links, track their performance, and receive payments directly from you as a brand. I recommend SS because their platform is designed for modern-day affiliate marketing like this.
- Tell each creator to make a custom “branded” TikTok or IG account like “TabsLovers” or “Tabs4Life” etc. This could be anything as long as it relates to your brand (i.e. SuperCoffee, Super.Coffee Super__Coffee, etc). Brands like Tabs have dozens of these.
- Allow these affiliates to create and post content to those accounts independently, and they can add their affiliate links to their bio.
- Watch the performance in Social Snowball and keep spending with the top creators and affiliates who are driving the best results for your brand.
- Gather insights about what content is working and what’s not, communicate that to new and existing affiliates, and then scale up the strategy as far as you want.
For the Tate strategy to work (and even if it’s just a test for your brand) you really need to do this at scale. You can’t have 3 affiliates creating 10 videos for you. You need 30-50+ affiliates and 300-500+ videos to really start seeing big results.
When talking to Noah, he mentioned that the affiliates would take it upon themselves to buy the product, research it, storyboard content, test hooks, and upload the final videos on their own.
The Cost
Even though this strategy doesn’t use paid media, it’s still not free.
To run a large-scale affiliate program like Tabs is doing, you are still going to be spending 100K+/month to make it work.
From my conversation with Noah, there are a few ways to structure it.
- Retainers: If you are a newer brand bootstrapping this strategy, you likely need to offer a base retainer to your affiliates for a number of clips each month. This could be anywhere from $500/month to $3K/month as a base retainer per creator, depending on the quality of the UGC editors and creators overall.
- Commissions: The next lever is commissions. The standard here is typically offering a 10-20% commission per sale with no retainer.
- A Mix of Both: The final structure is to do a mix of both. I.e., a $1K/month base retainer + 5% commission. This blended strategy also works great.
The Goal and Getting a Viral Hit
Okay, so you know the strategy, but what’s the goal?
In short, the goal is to use volume to increase the odds of getting an organic viral hit. With enough shots on goal (i.e., affiliates creating hundreds or thousands of posts per month for your brand), you are bound to have a few clips and accounts that take off.
With affiliates, you take a portfolio approach to virality and decentralize the effort across dozens, if not hundreds, of creators and accounts.
If a few clips hit the algorithm and go mega viral, you can generate a huge amount of brand awareness and sales, that would be difficult to recreate with paid ads.
Or, if you’re running paid ads in conjunction, your customer acquisition cost will drop due to the awareness created organically. It’s like having Kim Kardashian post about your product while you’re running ads… the CAC drops!
Tracking
Okay, so you want to test this affiliate strategy, and you’re willing to put up some cash, go find some creators, make some content, and see how it performs.
The biggest question is, how do you manage and track this entire campaign?
Well… That’s exactly where Social Snowball comes in.
Social Snowball is the best creator, influencer, and affiliate management software I've seen. They will help you with creator contracts, issuing unique trackable URLs and discount codes, 1 click payments to your affiliates, and a lot more. I also love that Social Snowball has taken no investment, is fully run by Noah, and has no outside influence on how they build their product other than from their customers.
From my time using it with my clients at Sharma Brands, they have a few things that really stood out to me and my team.
- Their Dashboard: Social Snowball has the best dashboard for brands and creators. Checking on my campaigns takes about ~30 seconds or less. As a brand, you can quickly see who your top-performing affiliates are, exactly how much revenue they are driving, what their affiliate payout is, and more. As a creator, you can see a lot of the same things. How much total revenue you’ve driven, how much is owed to you in affiliate payouts, what your top performing posts and everything else that’s relevant to your campaign.
- The Payment System & Tracking: Before Social Snowball existed, my team and I (and many other marketers) used to have to track influencer, creator, and affiliate campaigns, relationships, and payouts in Google spreadsheets! Social Snowball has completely solved that. You can onboard affiliates through a branded landing page where they can create an account, connect their payment information, generate unique links, and track their performance. As a brand, I can see the commission payments I owe across my entire campaign and then pay all my affiliates at once in a single click.
- Gifts & Incentives, and Rewards. Lastly, most affiliate programs offer 5-20% commissions to their affiliates in cash. BUT, you can also offer store credit or gifts as milestones/rewards as well. For example, let’s say an affiliate sells 50 products for you, and you want to offer them an in-store item as a gift/reward. With Social Snowball, you can have your affiliate automatically unlock that reward based on the milestone trigger to then claim a free product from your site.
Noah is also the reason I love the software. He used to have a brand that needed a great affiliate strategy for 2023, and he just built that. FanJoy, True Classic, Outway, Javy, and others use it today.
What Do Brands Get Wrong About Attempting To Copy Tate’s Affiliate Strategy?
So beyond everything you can get right, there are still a few big things you can potentially get wrong. So, if you test this strategy and it’s not working, here are a few pitfalls you will want to pay attention to.
Bad Incentives:
Like everything in life, actions are driven by incentives. If your incentives aren’t powerful enough, like your commission is too low or your retainer/commission doesn’t make sense, you won’t get enough high-quality affiliates to create content and drive traffic to your store.
Additionally, incentives typically aren’t “one and done”; they are dynamic and change over time.
Let’s say your top cohort of affiliates is driving 10’s of thousands or hundreds of thousands in revenue every month. In the beginning, a 5% commission was enough, but now, they want more… Just like dialing up your bids on other ad platforms, you may have to adjust your incentives to keep performance flowing over time.
Not Seeding or Giving Advice on The Content:
Having an army of affiliates sounds wonderful in theory, but if you don’t give enough proper guidance on the content, it can hurt your brand. Obviously, you don’t want a bunch of random people creating terrible content and then putting your logo at the end to see if it drives sales.
You need to give guidance.
Noah recommends creating a content bank of approved clips and styles that affiliates can use as a jumping-off point to either repurpose or create more. This gives folks a starting point for them to expand so that it’s not just a blank slate.
You Don't Have Enough Scale.
I mentioned this earlier, but it’s critical to understand. To make this work, you must have dozens of affiliates creating hundreds of clips each month. If you don’t have scale, having the random viral hits you need to make this work is hard. If you aren't taking enough organic shots on goal, one video that gets 20M views and drives 100K in sales that day is impossible.
Wrapping Up
Alright, my fingers are getting tired from typing out this 6-page, 2300-word masterclass on how to run the Andrew Tate affiliate strategy for your brand.
We covered what it is, how to do it, what it might cost, how to structure retainers and commissions, how to track and manage the entire thing in Social Snowball, and the pitfalls to avoid.
I hope this email taught you something new and gave you and your marketing team something to think about in the quarters ahead.
Okay, onto some fun stuff…
Vendor of the Week:
minisocial — The easiest place to source ad-ready content from micro-creators.
You’re probably skipping out on a HUGE opportunity to increase engagement on both organic social and paid. People follow influencers because they like their content and how it fits into their feeds. It's time to tap into that for your brand and allow your own branded content to feel native to the platform.
Micro-influencers create this content on a regular basis and know how to create the content that performs. You just need to utilize it for yourself! With minisocial, Corkcicle increased engagement on their Reels by 92% using creator-made content versus their in-house stuff.
Plant People and Imperfect Foods are also performing in the top 1% on TikTok.
You probably don’t even realize it, but minisocial creates a lot of content you see on paid social, organic social (Harry’s, Native, Ceremonia, Care/Of, Imperfect Foods, etc.), and even email or website PDPs. You own the content as the brand, so you can use it anywhere you want.
I met Kirsten over Zoom to learn about minisocial and couldn’t help but think, “How is everyone not using this yet?” The pricing is so affordable (and they’re giving 15% off their normal rate today), they do all the work to wrangle creators for your brand, and their content consistently outperforms on paid social.
Click here to schedule a call with Kristen for yourself and get 15% off!
LP of the Week:
Today’s landing page comes with raw data from the founder behind the brand. Last week Jack shared the A/B test results on Twitter with a PDP that was already converting at 7.75% CVR. Trying to beat a 7.75% CVR PDP isn’t easy…
CLICK HERE TO SEE THE LANDING PAGE!
After Jack ran tests, the HOOX page returned a 8.28% CVR, resulting in over $100k in additional revenue. Not a bad investment for a $5k landing page, huh?
If you’re ready to make an extra $100k off a landing page, while our team does the work around positioning, messaging, figuring out the best angle to sell your product, writing the copy, handling the wireframes, doing the UI design and developing the page… click here to book a call with us, or just buy a landing page and we’ll get your kick off set for this week.
That's all for this week
I hope today’s newsletter was valuable for you and helped you think slightly differently about your affiliate program. If you’re in New York City, or nearby, I hope to see you this coming Wednesday for Commerce & Chai!
Make sure you get outside this week, break a sweat, and get those 9 hours of sleep tonight. Have an amazing upcoming week, and I’ll see you next Sunday!