Carrie Bankston did not know she was one of Aritzia’s top four LTK sellers until the brand’s team told her. She had been posting the brand organically because she liked it, without paying much attention to her performance data. Aritzia was paying very close attention.

Carrie, 28, is based in Indianapolis, Indiana, a city she notes is “not like a big thing” for creators. Before social media became her full-time work, she was a licensed esthetician running her own studio. She found LTK not through research or strategy but because followers started asking for links to outfits she was already posting on TikTok. Two years of full-time content creation later, she has built a fashion and lifestyle business centered heavily on affiliate commerce, and her LTK earnings grew 115% year over year without a new platform, a new niche, or a major content reinvention.

“I never set out to do this full time,” she says. “Lucky timing showed me what all there was to be had out here.”

The growth came from posting more on LTK while leveraging her existing content.

Why LTK Carries All the Weight

Carrie describes her platform split with unusual clarity. Instagram remains photo-heavy and curated. TikTok handles longer, more casual content; anything over a minute stays off Instagram. LTK functions as something different: a permanent, searchable archive where her most engaged followers know to go when they want to find anything she has ever posted.

“LTK carries all the weight for me,” she says. “Way more than anyone realizes.”

Her audience knows to find links there; they do not need to understand the business architecture behind it. LTK allows her to post at volume without the frequency anxiety she feels on Instagram and TikTok, where overposting reads as spam.

Her commitment to that hierarchy runs deep. She would keep LTK above any other platform if forced to choose. During the brief TikTok interruption in 2025, she was not worried. “Everybody’s here still,” she says of her LTK audience. “The people who are engaged, they’re not going anywhere.”

The Content Supply Chain Behind the Growth

The 115% year-over-year earnings increase did not come from a new content format or a platform experiment. It came from treating existing content more deliberately: identifying what performed and keeping it visible.

“Everything gets buried and lost,” Carrie says. “I’ve started to make it a habit to check what performed really well, what people liked, and just bump it back up to the top every couple of weeks.”

LTK’s pinning feature became a core part of that approach. She pins her best-performing posts and lets them run until something else pulls ahead. Good content does not expire, but it disappears if no one surfaces it. On a platform where a post from two years ago can generate a sale today, the work is less about constant creation and more about consistent curation.

The other notable shift was editorial. She moved from showcasing multiple new outfits to styling a single piece several different ways, from “here are five new outfits” to “here’s one piece five ways.” The approach performs better, she argues, because it is more realistic for her audience and does not require constantly buying and linking new product. “That’s when I saw the biggest change in just my whole everything online across all platforms,” she says.

When the Brand Already Has the Data

The Aritzia story is the clearest illustration of how Carrie thinks about brand partnerships. She was posting the brand organically because she genuinely liked it, selling well, and not closely monitoring the numbers. Aritzia was.

“They came back and said, ‘You’re one of our top four LTK people for sales,’” she recalls. “I had no idea. This is great.”

What followed was a longer-term contract, and Aritzia now gives her near-total creative control. She films what she would film anyway, and the brand rarely requests adjustments. “They give me total creative freedom,” she says. “They know that my true voice is gonna be the best received, and it is.”

For Carrie, the data dimension is worth pressing on. Brands using LTK’s platform tools can track which creators are generating sales, at what volume, and on which products. That visibility means a brand like Aritzia does not need her to pitch to them. “If they’re using the tools the way they should, then they’re keeping a really close eye on who’s doing what,” she says.

The Brief That Makes Everyone Lose

The most common mistake Carrie sees from brands is also the one she finds hardest to fix from inside a deal. Brands arrive with briefs that leave no room for creative interpretation. A creator accepts the work, follows the instructions, and the post underperforms. Both sides know it.

“You love the brand, you accept the deal, you’re excited to work with them, and they just have no wiggle room creatively,” she says. “You throw your hands up and say, ‘Okay, I’ll do it how you want,’ and it does not perform well.”

“I always wonder what the brand thinks when that happens,” she says, “especially if they’ve gotten pushback from the creator.”

The Aritzia case runs in the opposite direction: trust produces better content, better content produces stronger sales data, and stronger sales data validates the brand’s approach. For Carrie, the cycle requires a brand willing to trust the creator’s instincts. “Hopefully, that’s something that changes soon,” she says. “And I think it is.”

Why Living Off Brand Deals Alone Is ‘Scary’

Carrie has a consistent reaction when she compares notes with creator peers who are not using affiliate platforms: disbelief. She has friends she considers to be in her tier who have never seriously thought about affiliate income.

“You have no idea what you’re missing,” she says, “and this is your job, and you don’t know what you don’t know.”

Most creators without an affiliate foundation build their income exclusively on brand deals, a revenue stream that is, by nature, project-based and irregular. Carrie’s view is direct: “For most creators that aren’t using an affiliate platform like LTK, they’re only making money from brand deals. And that is really scary to me. It’s inconsistent and ever-changing.”

The cushion that affiliate income provides has changed how she runs her business, including what she declines. Over the past year, she has set a goal to say no to any deal she is not genuinely excited about. She has held to it. “I don’t even think twice about declining something that I’m not excited about,” she says.

That selectivity is only possible because LTK revenue is always running in the background, converting content she has already created, sometimes from two years ago. The business continues whether she is filming or not.

What Five Years Looks Like

Carrie’s ambitions for the next five years are notable for what they do not include: no new platforms to master and no dramatic pivot in content. She wants the business to look roughly as it does now, just larger.

“I always say I want to be where I am in five years,” she says. “Doing exactly what I’m doing, just at a larger scale, whatever that looks like.”

The Creator Economy, in her view, will keep changing in ways that are genuinely difficult to predict. Editing styles shift month to month. Platform priorities change.

The creators who fall behind are the ones who do not adapt quickly enough. But the core obligation, being a useful resource to an audience that has a reason to keep coming back, is less likely to shift.

“We’re all selfish when we consume content,” she says. “We’re watching for some benefit. I want it to be helpful to people, or they’re not going to keep coming back.”

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