Mastering TikTok Affiliate Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide for Success in 2025

Many paid marketing strategies require businesses to pay upfront for an advertising plan in hopes of generating a return. Even cost-per-click advertising isn’t foolproof; you could end up paying for clicks that don’t lead to sales.

Affiliate marketing, however, is a rare exception. Since payouts are tied to sales, well-run affiliate programs usually don’t lose money. Programs that don’t result in sales end up being free or close to it.

Affiliate programs allow brands to benefit from the relationship-building and niche targeting power of influencer marketing strategies with minimal financial risk. They also enable creators to monetize their followings and add a relatively passive revenue stream.

Here is how TikTok affiliate marketing works and how both brands and creators can make use of this strategy.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a partnership model between a brand and a creator that can benefit both parties. In an affiliate marketing program, a creator promotes a brand’s products or services to their own following through social media, blogging, email, etc. The brand pays the creator a predetermined commission each time someone makes a purchase through the creator’s promotional links.

Here are more details about how the affiliate marketing model works:

1. Brands distribute custom affiliate links to creators

Each creator (or affiliate) receives a custom affiliate link or dedicated affiliate URL that identifies them as the creator. Sometimes, brands attach a coupon code or discount code to the affiliate link.

2. Creators promote brands via product affiliate link

Creators include affiliate links in their social media accounts, personal websites, or other marketing channels and encourage their audiences to make purchases through their links. Some creators also use paid advertising tactics to expand reach and encourage engagement with affiliate offers.

3. Brands pay creators for purchases

When a customer uses the creator’s link to make a purchase, the brand pays the creator a commission. In some cases, an affiliate network acts as the intermediary between the brand and the creator, helping both parties find each other and streamline the commission payout process.

How does TikTok affiliate marketing work?

Similar to other affiliate marketing programs, TikTok affiliate marketing helps retailers increase brand awareness and reach specific target audiences. It is a crucial component of many brands’ TikTok marketing strategies.

While TikTok users cannot add clickable links to videos, those with a TikTok business account can link directly to an affiliate offer or redirect traffic to profiles on more link-friendly social media platforms through their TikTok profile pages.

Creators can also create TikTok videos that direct viewers to dedicated URLs, promote discount codes in video captions, or use paid TikTok advertising to expand reach, encourage click-throughs, and boost commission income.

Users with over 10,000 followers can add clickable links to TikTok Stories, short videos on an account’s profile page that disappear after 24 hours.

Ways to make money with affiliate marketing on TikTok

With TikTok’s massive user base and a median engagement rate of 2.63% in 2024, there is a significant opportunity for creators and brands interested in affiliate marketing on the platform. The right mix of content creation, audience targeting, and performance tracking can generate revenue for your brand, whether you’re selling handbags or headphones.

With TikTok’s algorithm-driven content discovery, affiliate marketers have a unique chance to reach new audiences organically. On the paid side, TikTok offers a growing advertising infrastructure that brands and creators can experiment with. Understanding TikTok’s ecosystem and keeping an eye on user behavior patterns and current trends can lead to low risks and substantial rewards.

Utilizing organic traffic

With over 1.58 billion monthly active users and an average daily time spent of 58.4 minutes per user, your affiliate products can reach a wide and highly engaged TikTok audience. Unlike other platforms that rely on surfacing content related to a user’s network of connections, TikTok’s For You page shows targeted and entertaining content to users based on their interactions with content.

This unique TikTok algorithm means users are likely to encounter compelling content from major TikTok influencers as well as smaller accounts. This democratized content distribution levels the playing field for creators and brands of all sizes.

Pairing the potential of TikTok with practical execution is crucial. Your vertical videos need to grab attention quickly and provide value to prevent users from scrolling past. Using popular sounds, hashtags, and challenges can boost organic reach.

Once you capture attention and traffic, here’s how to leverage it to drive affiliate purchases:

• Use strategic affiliate link placement on TikTok. Add affiliate links to the video description, the first comment of a video, and the link in your TikTok profile. You can track click-through rates and conversions from specific TikTok videos using link-shortening services like Bitly or TinyURL.
• Use a link-in-bio tool. Link-in-bio tools like Linktree and Linkpop allow TikTok creators to consolidate multiple affiliate links in one accessible location, overcoming the platform’s single bio link limitation.
• Share promo codes with your audience. Brands provide unique coupon codes to creators, who then share them with their audience in TikTok videos. When viewers use these codes to make purchases, brands can track sales attributed to each creator and compensate them based on commissions.
• Create a multiplatform funnel. Drive traffic from TikTok to your website or other platforms like Instagram or YouTube, where you can provide more product information and multiple affiliate link touchpoints.