Affiliate income without selling out: a standard for what you refer
Recommending other people's work only feels awkward when you do not use the thing. Set a standard first, then learn what the commission ladder pays.
You have had the email. Lovely work, we would love you to promote our thing, here is your link and here is the commission. You read it twice, felt slightly grubby, and archived it. Then a month later you recommended a tool to a friend in a voice note for free, with real enthusiasm, because you use it every day. The difference between those two moments is the whole subject.
The awkwardness is information
The queasy feeling is not squeamishness about money. You charge for your own work without flinching. The feeling arrives when the recommendation would not exist without the payment, and some part of you knows it. That is a useful signal, and it is worth keeping rather than arguing yourself out of.
Here is what is genuinely hard about it. The offers with the biggest commissions are often the ones you know least about, because generous rates are a way of buying reach. Meanwhile the tools you rely on daily may pay nothing at all. So a purely commercial approach quietly reshapes what you talk about, one link at a time, and nobody sends you a memo about it happening.
The other hard part is scale. A single mention that makes you a little money is trivial. A habit of mentions that pay you is a second business you did not decide to start. It deserves a standard, the same way your own pricing does.
Two ways to decide what to recommend
The choice is not between purity and money. It is between deciding by commission rate and deciding by use. One of these produces a list of links you can defend in public five years later.
| Recommending by rate | Recommending by use |
|---|---|
| You sort inbound offers by percentage | You start from the four or five things already in your working week |
| You need a reason to believe after you have agreed | You already have the reason, and the link comes afterwards |
| The pitch is written for you | The pitch is the sentence you would say for free |
| A refund from your audience is someone else's problem | You would answer for it in your own inbox |
| The link is a one-off campaign | The referral earns for the first twelve months of that person's account |
| Payouts arrive on someone else's schedule | Commission transfers to your own Stripe account when their payment clears |
The standard, in five questions
Run any offer through this before you look at the rate. If it fails a question, decline politely and keep the relationship. Most offers fail on the first one.
Before you publish any referral link
0/6How the ladder actually behaves
The store.fan affiliate programme pays between 25% and 50%. Your rung is not a negotiation and it is not fixed at signup: it is set by how many of your referrals paid in the last thirty days, so it moves with your recent activity. Commission runs for each referral's first twelve months, and it transfers to your own Stripe account as soon as their payment clears rather than sitting in a pending balance until a monthly cycle closes.
In practice that changes the shape of the work. A single mention buried in a post you never revisit is worth very little. A page you actually maintain, where you explain what you use and why, keeps referring people for months, and each of those people carries twelve months of commission with them. Your share links look like join.store.fan/yourcode, older store.fan/a/ links still work, and adding ?ref= to any store.fan marketing page does the same job when you want to point at pricing or a feature page rather than the sign-up form.
Open a free store, and your referral code comes with it.
Get your linkThe mistake most people make
The usual error is treating affiliate income as a separate campaign with its own launch, its own countdown and its own tone of voice. Your audience hears the change immediately, because you never sound like that. The version that lasts is boring: one honest page listing what you use, updated when your tools change, mentioned in passing when it is genuinely relevant. If you want to see how a public list of your own tools sits next to your products, the link-in-bio page takes unlimited link cards on the Free plan, so the recommendation lives in the same place as your work instead of in a one-off post.
Yes, and rules vary by country, so check what applies where you live. Practically, one plain sentence does the job: this link pays me a commission, I use the tool myself. Readers mind the hiding far more than the earning.
Between 25% and 50%, on a ladder set by how many of your referrals paid in the last thirty days. It runs for each referral's first twelve months and transfers to your Stripe account when their payment clears.
It depends entirely on fit rather than size. A few hundred people who trust you and share your problem will act on a recommendation more often than a large audience with no shared context. Do not expect it to replace product income.
Say so and take the link down. An audit of your old links once or twice a year is unglamorous and keeps the whole thing honest, particularly for pages that have been sitting there for a year quietly earning.
Recommending other people's work is a normal part of being useful. It only turns into selling out when the money arrives before the conviction does. Keep the order the right way round and the awkwardness disappears on its own.
See the commission ladder and what a referral is worth over twelve months.
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