This Mom Made $500 Just by Texting Her Friends Shopping Links — Here’s How to Turn Your Group Chat Into a Paycheck
Affiliate marketing used to be for influencers. Now regular people are cashing in just by sharing links with friends and family.
Tracy Green was on a trip with seven friends, all turning 40 this year, swapping recommendations for concealer and creatine supplements. The information was so useful she figured other people in her life might want the same thing. So, she signed up for ShopMy, an affiliate marketing platform and started posting commission-earning links to her roughly 1,900 Instagram followers. “Within a couple weeks, I made over $500,” said Green, a freelance publicist and mom of three in Scottsdale, Arizona, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.
Affiliate marketing used to be the domain of influencers with big followings, but platforms like ShopMy have made it accessible to regular people sharing links in their own group chats and Instagram Stories. They can earn commissions in the 10% to 30% range. Stephanie Dresher, a New York publicist, started doing the same thing after realizing friends were already texting her for outfit recommendations. “I was already curating products and making recommendations every day, so using affiliate links just made sense to me,” she said.
The category is booming. Affiliate marketing drove about $216 billion in US e-commerce sales in 2025, more than double what it generated in 2020. ShopMy alone is valued at $1.5 billion, with roughly 329,000 creators and 40,000 brands on the platform.
Tracy Green was on a trip with seven friends, all turning 40 this year, swapping recommendations for concealer and creatine supplements. The information was so useful she figured other people in her life might want the same thing. So, she signed up for ShopMy, an affiliate marketing platform and started posting commission-earning links to her roughly 1,900 Instagram followers. “Within a couple weeks, I made over $500,” said Green, a freelance publicist and mom of three in Scottsdale, Arizona, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.
Affiliate marketing used to be the domain of influencers with big followings, but platforms like ShopMy have made it accessible to regular people sharing links in their own group chats and Instagram Stories. They can earn commissions in the 10% to 30% range. Stephanie Dresher, a New York publicist, started doing the same thing after realizing friends were already texting her for outfit recommendations. “I was already curating products and making recommendations every day, so using affiliate links just made sense to me,” she said.
The category is booming. Affiliate marketing drove about $216 billion in US e-commerce sales in 2025, more than double what it generated in 2020. ShopMy alone is valued at $1.5 billion, with roughly 329,000 creators and 40,000 brands on the platform.
