The 4-Step TikTok Shops Playbook: Affiliates, Ads, and Going Live

This Is the Moment to Ride the TikTok Shops Opportunity

Let me show you a stat that matters more than almost anything else in my business: first-time customers. The amount of people buying my products for the very first time. In this article, I'm going to show you in four simple steps what's working today in 2025 to get a stat like that for yourself.

Right now there's something called TikTok Shops. If you're living on this planet like me, you've heard about it. Over the last year and a half, TikTok has been creating a trend where everybody else is trying to catch up. Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, all of them are trying to do the same thing. Well, that's an opportunity. And if you've seen my past episodes, you know my philosophy: you have to be willing to look for opportunities, jump all over them, figure them out, and master them. That's exactly what I'm doing right now with TikTok Shops, and it's pretty exciting.

One important thing before we start. If you have a physical product business, you are right now perfectly positioned to ride this. A pet supplement, a health supplement, electronics, whatever it is, if it's a physical product you're going to do just great on TikTok Shops right now. If you have a service business, TikTok Shop will be there for you in the future, but it's not there yet. This platform is set up for physical products.

Step One: Set Up Your Shop (Your Friend Is ChatGPT)

The first step is simple: set up your TikTok Shop. And if you don't know how, you've got a friend for that. Friend number one is ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a very good coach. Whatever you don't know, ChatGPT does know.

So if you want to understand how to set up a TikTok Shop, go to ChatGPT and ask: how do I set up a TikTok Shop in 2025? It's going to show you the step by step on how to get it done. I'm not going to walk you through every screen here, because the tool that lives in your pocket already does that beautifully. Use it. It's the era of AI. Might as well take advantage of it.

Step Two: Recruit Affiliates, the Win-Win Army

Once your shop is set up, number two is you've got to create an affiliate recruitment campaign. If you don't know what an affiliate is: an affiliate is somebody who's going to be out there promoting your products in exchange for a commission. They make a percentage of whatever you sell. If they sell, they make money. If they don't sell, they don't make money.

That is a great relationship to have. Because when you pay for advertising, you're not getting that money back whether you sell or you don't sell. But with affiliates, you can go into agreements where they only get your money if they sell something. It's a win-win across the board. They get to promote your products and make a commission, and you get content being promoted about your products. It's a beautiful thing.

Sometimes we don't get how big this opportunity is. We have one product in our brand, NaturalSlim, a nine-figure-a-year international brand, that sells 3,000 units per day in one country. 3,000 units every single day. That's 3,000 human beings. Basically, you can fill up an auditorium every single day with people buying the same product. That's how big the market is, and we don't always realize it. And right now there are somewhere around 400,000 affiliates actively on TikTok promoting products every single day that you can have promoting yours.

So if you're a brand new business, a startup with no sales but a great quality product you want to put out there, there is no easier path than affiliate recruitment. It doesn't require you to spend your hard-earned dollars to get these people promoting your products. TikTok has an affiliate management portal that lets you reach out and say: would you like to sell my beauty cream? My electronic devices? Whatever your product is, you tell them the commission you're willing to give, and you have them posting on social media all day long.

Step Three: Turn Affiliate Content Into Shoppable Ads

Number three is TikTok ads, or what they call shoppable video ads. Here's the leverage: once you have affiliates making content for your brand, that content can be used over and over again, especially the content that works.

And by the way, affiliates are also known as influencers. Influencers, creators, affiliates, it's all the same person. It's a person who has the ability to communicate, but maybe doesn't have the ability you have to create a brand. That's why they build this beautiful relationship with brands like us: it gives them a way to make money with their ability to communicate. You want to leverage the hundreds of thousands of these people out there willing to promote your products to the world.

Just like Facebook has its Business Manager, TikTok has a business manager for brands. You take the content your affiliates are creating and you run shoppable video ads with it. Why are they called shoppable? Because somebody can check out in three, four, five clicks in the middle of watching a video and have that product shipped to their door in the next two days or so. And here's the bonus: whatever works on TikTok, take those same videos and run them on Instagram, on Facebook, on YouTube, and so on.

Step Four: Go Live, for Hours a Day

Last but not least: TikTok Live. This is something we're doing with our own brand right now and it's working really well. We've had five-digit days, we've done six-digit days, and it's very exciting. We go live six hours a day, eight hours a day, with people representing our brand, wearing a polo with our brand name on it, talking about the brand and explaining the products for several hours a day.

This is additional to affiliates. These are your own people, live, representing your brand. And if you do this in this sequence, the live content gets better and better along the way. It picks up more and more organic attention and it grows in time.

TikTok Is Just the Starting Point

One more thing while we're at it. This world of TikTok Shops, at some point over the next year or two, is going to become the shops opportunity, period. TikTok is just the starting point. Eventually it's all going to be widespread. We're going to have Facebook and Instagram shops that are just as effective, YouTube Shorts and YouTube shops just as effective, and so on. TikTok is just getting started, and you should be jumping all over it now.

These are the four elements of success as a TikTok Shop brand: set up your shop, recruit affiliates, run shoppable video ads with their content, and go live. You do these four, you're going to win.

This is one of the opportunities of 2025. There will be many more in the years ahead. But the one thing I will always emphasize is this: there are always opportunities out there. All you got to do is look for them. And I promise you, if you look, you will find them. If you ride the TikTok Shops opportunity and you don't give up, you're going to take advantage of it and build a great brand.