Hey Guys,
Creators need diversified revenue streams. A subscription from a Newsletter is great, but Sponsored Ads and collabs with brands is also really a good supplement for this niche-centric audience based income.
What is Shopify Collabs?
As you may have heard, Shopify announced today that it’s launching a new “Shopify Collabs” offering to connect creators with merchants on its platform and give them a new way to make money. With this new product, Shopify says creators will be able to easily discover and partner with independent businesses.
Shopify prioritizes of course Creators with mainstream followers on platforms like:
TikTok
Instagram
YouTube
You can apply for Early access, since when you pitch yourself to E-commerce stores and brands, you’ll know if your audience intersects with theirs, that is, it doesn’t seem like Shopify is helping you connect with the right brands themselves.

I've been actually pitching the idea of a Creator to Brands database and matching system to LinkedIn’s product people for years. Substack itself seems allergic to the idea, but any platform that’s creator-centric has to look at it from the Creator’s perspective.
Ad-sponsored deals (brand mentions)
Educational courses (e.g. LinkedIn Learning)
Social commerce mentions (e.g. E-commerce store deals)
For a Substack Creator, it’s not just paid subscriptions they should be looking into, but how to compound the diversified revenue from their work. Although we might write in a micro-niche, we don’t actually live in isolated islands with our audiences in the real world as the internet keeps evolving.
Note that brands and creators can sign up for Collabs. Shopify is of course a leading platform for E-commerce small businesses retailers. Social commerce and live-streaming of influencers selling actual products is becoming more popular globally and is yet another way some creators can partner with brands.
For Substack’s various micro-niche creators, this is pretty interesting. Let’s say my Newsletter relates to being a digital nomad and traveling, well there are going to be Shopify stores that relate to that audience directly with their products, for example.
Ultimately any way that enables creators to work with brands in a more seamless way, is a win-win. Instead of spending my time on social media marketing or doing sales pitching myself to brands, companies and E-commerce partners, in theory they should be coming to me.
As Web3 and the ownership economy evolves, this is what will happen. This is already what happens when you are able to scale your Newsletter to a mainstream larger audience where there’s demand for the topic you cover.
You will notice increasingly Creators on Substack have a YouTube. This is important if you are serious and want to scale your Newsletter and traffic over time in your niche and grow your reputation. Anywhere serious mobile discovery takes place is also where you want to be, and this includes places like TikTok (video) and Pinterest (images), if either feature in your work or topic.
You also want to be registered in third party Creator ecosystems that work with brands where offers can more easily pop-up. Do your homework on which apply to you.
Now obviously Shopify Collabs might not apply to most of us on Substack, it’s just an example.
How Shopify Collabs will Work
Creators can get started by applying for a Shopify Collabs account, after which they will be able to browse for Shopify merchants that align with their audience.
Once creators find brands they like, they can partner with them and curate a list of their products to share on social media using Linkpop, Shopify’s link in bio tool.
When someone purchases a product using the link a creator has shared, the creator will receive a payment.
Social commerce does take place on TikTok, Douyin (TikTok in China) and places like Instagram to some degree, but for Creators all of this compounds over-time as you gain traction on all these various channels. Now for us, Substack is just another channel. It’s a stack of tools that can augment our paid Newsletter audience.
Can “Indie Writers” Work with ‘Indie Stores’?
So what I like about Collabs is you are often partnering with an SMB, that is a small independent “Mom and Pops” store, that may not even have a physical location. On Substack we are mostly “indie writers”, and so why not support each other?
Shopify says Collabs makes it easier for creators to monetize while also giving independent businesses a new sales and marketing channel. This can relate to themselves of community, advocacy, supporting local businesses and so forth. This might feel less “commercial” than some random Instagram partnership.
As so many Substack Creators become topic experts, community builders, podcasters and thread managers, with Discords and so forth, that community can relate to E-commerce brands that also have intersecting “communities”, and this means the collaboration can be less commercial and more ideologically sound and less like an influencer-scheme of social selling.
What Social Media Creators does Collabs Prioritize?
In the Early Access form, it seems Shopify prioritizes your following on:
Instagram
TikTok
YouTube
Facebook
Twitter
And Twitch.
Shopify Collabs has their own app too.

So brands can discover the right Creators as well. This is yet another reason to sign-up, especially if you have a presence on Instagram or TikTok, even if you are the most specialized writer, you might be surprised there’s an E-commerce store somewhere in the world as charming and particular!
For some reason Pinterest, LinkedIn, Substack and others are not mentioned. This is of course a pity. The main reason being social commerce generally relates best to live-streams and video, although in theory it could relate to long-form content, written blogs, posts and even Newsletter content - any engaged audience.
I would personally interview Shopify store owners on their brand, I think it would be fun. But I’m sort of out of publication room.
Why Shopify Stores Should make Substacks
While social commerce has struggled to take off in the West, in Asia it’s already very popular to get influencers to support sales of E-commerce products. You could argue that Shopify indie brands and SMBs should make Substacks to build their community, engagement and the ethos and insights around their topic category.
Again Substack seems leary to form partnerships of this nature, instead seeming to think that writers are a breed apart in their own wonderland. I have to disagree, that’s imply not how the Creator Economy is evolving nor how creators approach monetization to make ends meet.
I personally respect a small-business owner as much as I do a crusading writer or Newsletter Creator. They are cut from the same cloth, they are entpreneurs, crafters, builders and artists. They are “our people”. We are not so different after all.
In reality many SMBs are much more scalable than the micro-niche Newsletters we tend to run on Substack. That we would not team up is sort of mystifying. That we would not want to support each other somehow, is totally weird. In reality, the Creator economy is all about collaboration.
While ideologically I agree that Substack stays clear from advertising and algorithms and the toxic trends they create, there’s a place for ethical partnerships that help creators pay the bills while tastefully adding value to others. If the synergy is high between a creator and a brand (really an SMB in this case), our audience might even appreciate it - that we would think of collaborating is beautiful!
Would love to hear your opinions on this?
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