After she earned £9,000 in one month on TikTok, Claire Watson knew she had to quit her job.

‘I remember looking at that pay packet and thinking: “I need to do this full-time,”’ the 38-year-old says.

Until then, Essex-based Claire had been juggling life with four children – now aged 19, 17, 13 and 10 – while working in a marketing job.

‘I loved my job, but I found a new love in TikTok. And I just didn’t have the time any more.’

You might assume Claire had reinvented herself as a social media influencer. No, what she’s doing is something far less demanding, less known and, at times, much more lucrative: in May, she joined the fast-growing world of TikTok affiliates.

In simple terms, an affiliate is a salesperson for TikTok’s retail arm: TikTok Shop.

Introduced in 2021 – with the UK as its first market outside Asia – TikTok Shop is a hyperactive bazaar of often cheap, Chinese-made goods which lets users buy products without ever leaving the app. And for those who haven’t seen it in action, it’s remarkably slick.

When I visited the app this week, a video of a woman applying a £7 lipstick popped up, a little basket icon appeared and with one tap I could buy the exact product she was using – without any clunky redirection to other websites.

After setting up the address and payment details for my account, I can buy any product that appears on my feed within just four taps on my iPhone (naturally, the app saves your credit card details).

And, of course, given that I’d lingered long enough on the lipstick video, TikTok’s infamous algorithm – designed to suck as much money and time out of users as possible – continued to bombard me with videos featuring the product for days.

Jo Mills, from West Sussex, was earning almost £13,000 a month on TikTok, all while holding down a full-time job

Jo , 52, sells heated brushes on the platform and made £117 within her first few days of making affiliate videos

Claire Watson,38, had no experience of making videos, but she now makes £9,000 a month

Despite the many controversies that continue to swirl around TikTok – from concerns about its Chinese ownership to issues around data privacy and product safety – its shopping feature is booming. In the UK, sales through the app are projected to more than double from £7.4billion in 2024 to almost £16billion by 2028, and TikTok Shop now accounts for about 4 per cent of the UK e-commerce market by sales value.

Although TikTok shop has a reputation for selling, well, plastic tat, it’s this explosive growth that is prompting many big brands to join in: Marks & Spencer launched a TikTok shopfront earlier this month and long-established names like Clarks shoes and cosmetics firm Nivea have recently joined the platform.

Anyone on the app can sign up as a TikTok Shop ‘affiliate’ and earn a commission (usually 5–20 per cent of the price of an item). To do so, you put up a video on the app of yourself using or singing the joys of a product that is for sale on the platform. Then, if someone sees it and clicks through from the video to buy that product, you get your money.

In the UK, you must be over 18 and have at least 500 followers but otherwise there’s no stock to buy and no investment or no business plan required.

Being an affiliate is also a different ballgame from a career as an influencer, with videos requiring far less effort and followers less invested in the creator’s day-to-day life. That’s why it’s quickly becoming the ideal ‘side hustle’ for many looking to supplement their meagre salaries in a depressing employment landscape.

It’s the perfect recipe: TikTok is supplied with endless streams of sales content created for free by enthusiastic users, while at the same time quietly taking its own slice – about 9 per cent – of every transaction.

Brands, in turn, find their products advertised for no upfront cost and minimal effort on their part.

It’s a marketing strategy so successful that many brands now ship out free samples to affiliates, in return for coverage.

Which brings us back to Claire. She started her page @TikTokFindsWithClaire after seeing a friend in the US using the program.

Claire had no experience of making videos before. But after she posted one, advertising a towel designed for sunbeds – ‘one of those with pockets for all your things’ – it went viral. ‘It’s on about four million views now. It just went nuts. I couldn’t believe it.’

Claire embarked on a stream of slightly pushy, sometimes funny – but admittedly convincing – sales pitches for products from carpet cleaners from homeware brand Shark, teeth whitening strips, hairbands, make-up, children’s pyjamas and everything in between.

A video in which she showed off a set of novelty speakers shaped like Apple AirPods while sitting in her car also ‘went mad’. And clothes videos consistently do well, Claire says. ‘People want to see someone wearing the clothes before they buy. They’ll message me “What size are you wearing?”, “Should I size up or down?”’

When choosing what to advertise, Claire says: ‘I just look at the product and think: Would I actually use this at home?’ But she prides herself on honesty – even when the brand won’t like it.

‘I got sent a sample for a beard-dye powder for my husband,’ Claire says. ‘It didn’t cover the grey or the ginger. So we did a jokey video and I just said, “Do not buy this, it doesn’t work.” I still sold about ten of them!’

She films wherever she can – ‘usually just standing in my living room or bedroom’ – using a £5 phone stand. ‘I don’t have a proper set-up,’ she laughs. ‘I mainly just use a sticky thing on the back of my phone to attach it to the window.’

Now she makes around ten videos a day. Clothes try-ons might take half an hour, but others can take two hours to shoot and edit.

Of course, more views mean more people likely to buy a product. And that’s where the money is made.

Jo Mills (@glowwithjojo), 52, made £117 within her first few days of creating affiliate videos. That was the end of March this year. By April she was earning four figures. And by autumn, the mother-of-one from West Sussex was earning almost £13,000 a month, all while holding down a full-time job. Two weeks ago, she finally quit.

‘So many people have no idea what they can do on there,’ Jo says. ‘Especially women over 40. There is massive scope for us. It can literally change your life. I was working full-time and a mum. I was juggling everything.’

Jo’s best-selling product by far is a £13 heated brush for styling hair. Since June, she has sold more than 15,000 of them through making videos showing herself using the brushes to style her platinum blonde locks.

Her success, she says, comes from folding her videos into her daily routine.

‘I don’t go out of my way to make content,’ she explains. ‘When I was working, I made it part of my day. I’d get up, wash my hair, show the tool I was using. If I used a face cream, I’d explain what it did. I’d explain my make-up products. Anything I used, I’d talk about.’

Analytics show that her audience is made up of women like her – who want honest reviews, without the gloss of traditional advertising.

‘People don’t want to be sold things by unrelatable influencers. People like Kylie Jenner aren’t real to them. They relate to women like themselves.’

Now she films ‘a couple of hours maximum’ each day. The rest is light admin – replying to comments, checking guidelines, researching what’s trending on the app. ‘I don’t watch telly. This is my outlet,’ she says.

For Emily (@carnage_of_motherhood), from North Wales, the TikTok affiliate program has become an unexpected second salary.

I only started at the end of August,’ the 33-year-old teacher says. ‘And I’m already making the same as my teaching wage every month – around two grand – just from TikTok.’

By day, mother-of-two Emily teaches in a private school. ‘I thought I’d make a TikTok about parenting hacks – potty training, sleep tips, how to teach a child to read. I didn’t know anything about TikTok Shop. I wasn’t on there to make big money.’

But her followers kept asking about the products she used in her videos. ‘So I thought, I’ll just put the link to the books my daughter uses every day. I wasn’t selling them as something I’d been sent. I was genuinely saying, this helps me. My daughter loves them.’

The video shot to two and a half million views. ‘I’d only just started, and suddenly I was selling a hundred pounds’ worth of that one product every day.’

Realising her new gig was becoming lucrative, Emily set herself a goal. ‘We’d always wanted to take our children to Disneyland. So I told my followers that I’d put any money I made towards booking.’

They cheered her on. ‘People were commenting, “I’ve just bought something through your page, we’re getting you to Disneyland!” Total strangers telling me they were proud of me. It was mental.’

Recently, she hit her target. ‘We’re going in February for my daughter’s birthday. We haven’t told the kids – it’s a surprise,’ she says.

Despite Emily’s 16,000 followers, none of her friends know any of this. ‘Not one,’ she says. ‘My mum knows, but that’s it. I think a lot of my friends see TikTok as a bit naff. Like girls doing silly dances. So I just haven’t said anything.’

Her school doesn’t know either. Teachers having social media, she says, is ‘massively frowned upon’.

‘But what I’m doing isn’t unprofessional at all. And anything I post, I always think: if a student saw this, would I be embarrassed? And I wouldn’t be,’ she says.

Emily used the money she made to take the family on a holiday to Disneyland

Janson Smith runs an agency creating an army of TikTok affliates

Free samples arrive daily – five to ten parcels at a time. But she promotes only ‘about five per cent’ of what she receives. ‘A lot of stuff is tacky – cheap plastic or bad clothes. I just send it back. If someone buys something awful because I showed it, they won’t trust me again.’

Her husband, once sceptical, is now fully on board. ‘At first, he thought it was funny. Now he’s proud and helps me film things.’

The money has transformed their family life: ‘We’re not on massive wages. We have a mortgage and two kids and no childcare help – my teaching wage goes on childcare. So TikTok pays for anything extra we need.’

Emily has no plans to stop. ‘I’ve joined an agency now,’ she says.

The owner of that agency, Honest Creators, is Janson Smith, a 36-year-old entrepreneur from Sheffield who spotted early on that a TikTok affiliate could be a serious money-maker.

Over recent years, Janson has been building an army of more than a thousand creators – 75 per cent of whom are women.

‘Most of them are working mums,’ he says. ‘It’s not by design that it’s mostly females, but they are the biggest demographic of shoppers on TikTok, and women like buying from other women.’

His Honest Creators community has become a kind of finishing school for this new workforce, which offers coaching calls to members as well as helping them build relationships with brands.

‘Their TikTok videos aren’t polished like on Instagram,’ he says. ‘It’s not Hollywood production. It’s Sandra from Bolton going, “Oh my God guys, look at this,” and that’s what works – it’s almost like a friend recommending a product to you.’

The opportunities are endless, he claims. ‘On average, a TikTok user watches a feature film’s worth of content every single day. And if the average video is 30 seconds, that’s a lot of content – and a lot of chances to buy.’

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Janson is helped by a team of coaches – including Isobel Seymour, 32 (@isobeltts) – herself a successful affiliate and school teacher who knows exactly how to make videos go viral. ‘First, you’ve only got one to two seconds to really grab a viewer’s attention to stop them from scrolling’, she says. ‘Two – videos can’t be static. You need to be constantly moving the camera angle to keep people entertained. And three, to put it subtly, saying things that are controversial usually makes people more likely to engage with a video.’

Although Honest Creators doesn’t take a cut of a creators’ wages, Janson has forged links with brands who pay him to get his team to sell their products.

‘We’ve got women doing twenty grand, nearly thirty grand a month’ he says, scrolling through screenshots of commission dashboards. ‘They’re generating an absolute s***-ton of cash.’

Not everyone earns that, he caveats, ‘it depends how sensational you want to be.’

It all sounds almost too good to be true. So, are there any downsides to a career as a TikTok affiliate?

For Claire, the main one is the constant deliveries to her house. She calls it ‘sample hell’.

‘There are parcels arriving daily. Half the time I(itals) don’t even know what’s coming,’ she says. ‘You have to store it all somewhere. It gets on top of you.’

There’s also the trolling. ‘You do get a lot of stick on TikTok,’ she admits. ‘I’m a friendly person – I don’t think I give anyone a reason to be nasty. But if you post something people have strong opinions on, the hate is unreal.’

Then there’s the raging controversy over the app – and the ever-present threat of a ban. In the US, TikTok was temporarily banned by former President Joe Biden over concerns about its links to the Chinese government, until incoming President Donald Trump granted a reprieve, on the condition that its Chinese parent company ByteDance sold the app to an American company.

‘TikTok could get taken away at any time’, Claire tells me. ‘They can also ban your account for nothing. But I can’t control it — so I may as well make the most of it now.’

The way she sees it, she may earn in the next year what used to take her three or four. ‘Why not give it a go?’

It’s certainly not the worthiest of professions. But as ever more brands flock to TikTok, it is fast becoming one of the few careers where the opportunities only seem to be growing.