Tax Season Made Do It

Congrats, we made it. Tax Day is behind us and I think we all deserve a collective exhale!

But before I close my 2025 spreadsheets for good, I’ve been doing what nobody wants to do: actually looking at my numbers. And I want to talk about what I found.

I didn’t start Just a Splash to make money. I started it because I had things to say and wanted a place to say them. And week to week, that's still why I do it. The best part of showing up here has nothing to do with money — it's having something that's mine. The outlet, the community, the friends I've made along the way.

But let’s be real, it does take real time and real energy, and I have a family to help support (plus expensive taste lol). So when I sat down with my numbers earlier this year, I realized that while I certainly can’t quit my day job, I have managed to make some money by writing on here, without a huge following. And predominantly, that’s been through ShopMy.

We’re not talking life-changing money, but we are talking fun money (essentially, my shopping budget). And you know what, yeah that does make it a little more fun!

I've been inspired lately by women who have built something very real for themselves from their platforms and have been generous enough to talk about what's possible, what's working, and what's not. Being around that energy makes me want to talk about it too.

So that’s what we’re talking about today over on the paid side of things: what I’ve learned from a year on ShopMy. Not from someone who's made it, but from someone who's enjoying the process of building it.

I feel like sometimes affiliate links get a bad rap, so let me pull back the curtain for you a bit. ShopMy is an affiliate platform that lets creators1 like me turn product links into commissionable ones. Say I’m writing a shopping post or sharing a product I love on Instagram. Before I post the link, I run it through my account on ShopMy and it creates a trackable version of that same link that’s tied to me. If you click my link and make any purchase on that site within a certain window (and without clicking on anyone else’s link to that site after the fact), I get a small kickback, at no extra cost to you. Over time, those small kickbacks can add up, and for those with large audiences, that’s where real money is.

Brands pay to be on ShopMy, so not every product online is commissionable through the platform — but a lot are. It’s a line item in their marketing budget, the same way an Instagram ad would be. So to be clear: when you shop through my links, you’re not paying more. You’re just directing a small piece of the brand’s marketing spend toward a real person (like me!) rather than say, Meta’s bottom line. If I think about myself as a consumer, I know which one I’d rather support. :)

Of course, there are incentives to sharing certain brands over others, as the commission can vary depending on brand. But that’s where following creators you trust (and on the creator side, creating authentic content to you) comes into play. You’ll never see me sharing things I don’t love or aren’t genuinely curious about on here, and I think the same goes for the people I like to follow too.

So if you’ve been thinking about starting your own ShopMy, do it! It takes time to pull together recommendations, and you should be paid for your time. Here’s my referral link, which should help you speed up the process of getting accepted (and if you have a Substack newsletter yourself, I think that helps too). Full disclosure: I get a small bonus if you get accepted and start earning. But I’d be recommending it either way.