The Secrets Behind The Andrew Tate Affiliate Approach

Whether you love or hate Andrew Tate, 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.

Alright’s, let’s dive into it..

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:

1. Search “UGC Creator” on Twitter or TikTok.
2. Review creators, and find someone who looks like they would be a reasonable creator/brand fit.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. Allow these affiliates to create and post content to those accounts independently, and they can add their affiliate links to their bio.
7. Watch the performance in Social Snowball and keep spending with the top creators and affiliates who are driving the best results for your brand.
8. 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.

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 a significant chunk of money to make it work, at least $25-50K/month.

There are a few ways to structure it:

1. 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.
2. Commissions: The next lever is commissions. The standard here is typically offering a 10-20% commission per sale with no retainer.
3. 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?

Social Snowball is great for this, and to reach out to these folks at scale, highly recommend SARAL. They will help you with creator contracts, issuing unique trackable URLs and discount codes, 1 click payments to your affiliates, and a lot more.

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.

Highly recommend 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

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, 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.