Hey guys welcome back to WP school Nathan here and today we’re gonna be talking about adding an affiliate program to your website. Most of you will probably know about participating in affiliate programs, but you might not have thought about until now.
Actually, starting your own affiliate program for your own products, this is a fantastic way to drive extra traffic to your product, no matter what it is, because you’ll, have other people pushing your products for you, it is a wonderful, wonderful setup before you Actually, dive in and actually start your affiliate program.
You really want to make sure that you understand some of the basics of how it works kind of what will be expected of you as the owner and kind of the manager of the affiliate program. So when you start an affiliate program, the first thing that you need to understand is that obviously people sign up for your program to promote your products to get a percentage or a flat rate cut of the sales that they refer to you.
And so the refers will be reliant on you for that cut. You can track sales. So when someone I refer makes a sale, you’ll track that sale, probably through a link, a specialized link for that specific person or through some sort of coupon.
That you’ve given out, which would have code in it. That will let you know, whoever use that coupon, that coupon was given to them by a specific affiliate and that’s all built in to the affiliate programs, but just understanding that that’s, how the tracking portion works is pretty important.
So that you can know where the links are going and how the customers are finding you, all of that tracking is done by the system. So you don’t have to worry about honor system or anything like that. They have some good technology in place that will help.
You know that people are actually adding value to your product and to your business. So when someone refers another person to your product, what will happen is once that a user clicks on the link or uses the or looks into the coupon.
There will be what what’s called a cookie, and what that means is that, after that, person clicks the link that link tracking will be good for a certain amount of. So maybe you could set the cookie for 24 hours, which means after that person clicks the link they would need to purchase within 24 hours.
In order for the member of your affiliate program to get the actual Commission, if they clicked after 24 hours, then they wouldn’t get the Commission, but you get to choose how long the cookie period is.
You could set the cookie for five years if you wanted to, but that means if that person clicked the link and then they bought your product within five years, you will be paying out a percentage to the affiliate with that link, and so you can set your Cookie period, depending on how long you want it to be, some people set it.
For short, some people send it for a longer period of time. It sort of depends on the pricing of your product and then just how often or how soon a customer generally tends to buy it, which you should know as a business owner.
Alright, the next step that you really need to know about is, after you choose a member after you choose an affiliate program plugins, and there are a few things that you ‘ Ll need to do now. As far as choosing a plugin, we’ll jump into that a little bit later.
But the first thing that you’ll, do after you choose your plugin, is you’ll have to either create or edit some of the pages that come with the plug-in? Sometimes, when you upload or download the plug-in to your site, whatever there will be pages automatically created with short codes on the pages that will create things like a member area for your affiliate, so they’ll, be able to see the sales that they Made they’ll, be able to access their links.
They can change the settings on their account there, so that will all be in a shortcode created on a page for you, but you can go in and edit that so that’s. The first thing that you’ll, do: is you & # 39? Ll have to make sure that all those pages are in place so that, once you actually start getting people to be affiliates for your program that they can actually sign up, there will be a registration page, maybe a page, with a form on it for them to Fill out the affiliate area and then some account pages, so that’s.
The first thing you’ll need to do. The second thing that you ‘ Ll really want to make sure you can do is make sure you have the ability to filter the applications of people who are signing up to be your affiliate.
We’ll talk about it a little bit later, but you don’t want to let everybody into your affiliate program, and so there will be certain plugins, some paid, the one specifically I use is paid, but it has the ability.
For me to create a custom form so that I can have people who want to be an affiliate, they can file a form and then, once I look through the form I can manually go and either accept them into the program or reject them.
And that can be done fairly easily. But if you don’t have that in place, then you might get thousands of people signing up for your program who won ‘ T really add value to your business on the third most important thing.
To understand is knowing that you will have to pay your affiliates if they give you commissions or if they give you sales, then you ‘ Ll have to pay out their commissions, and so there are integrations that go with various plugins.
Usually can get. Paypal integrations and it makes it very easy to pay out. You can usually pay out individually manually. If you want to go through every transaction to make sure everything looks right, or sometimes you can even do mass payments just for ease and simplicity, but just make sure that you understand that going into purchasing or using an affiliate plugin another page that is really nice To have that probably won’t come custom with the plug-in is having a page just explaining your affiliate program.
This could be a page just on the front of your site where people can come and kind of see what your affiliate program looks like. Let’s. Go here. I’m. Just gonna go to Bluehost comm, we recommend Bluehost for hosting they do a great job with beginners, and so we are in a Blue Host Affiliate, and so this is their page where they are telling me as a prospective affiliate.
If I’m, just letting me know about their program to see if it’s, something that’d, be interested in. So you can see. I have the sign up or login a customer or a few people who are affiliates, letting us know how happy they are as an affiliate.
Now they let us know how many Commission ‘ S are paid out, which is a lot how the program works. If we want to promote having questions so having a page like this, just answers, a few questions that people might have about your program that, instead of giving getting a service email about it, you can have all the information laid out.
It might also be smart to say what you do want in an affiliate and what you don’t want sort of a terms and conditions may be informal alongside later a formal terms than come in terms and conditions. This will just help make sure that you get the right type of affiliates in your program and not people who are just there to try to skim and span the internet with your links.
The last thing that can be really helpful is to provide your affiliate with an assets folder on your website, where they can go and find a logo that you have made specifically for affiliates to use. You have to be careful with trademark issues, as people might be using your logo and other things like that.
So if you have a specific assets, folder for your affiliates that they have been given specific permission to use, it will help them be able to promote your product and then know that they are staying within the boundaries as far as them.
Using kind of terms from your brand and then also images or letters or fonts, that kind of thing they’ll, just make sure that the affiliates have what they need to be able to do a good job, promoting your product all right.
The third thing that you need to be aware of this is a beware, a caution portion of the video. You need to be careful because a lot of people go around looking for affiliate programs where they can just sign up really easily and then just spam.
Your links all over the internet, maybe upload them to coupon sites just so that they can do anything possible to try and get a commission out of you. This does not have any valuable any value at all to your company, and so you want to make sure that there is a process in place where they need to apply and they can be rejected if they don’t meet the standard or the Quality for your program, so just watch out for those people scammers and spammers.
Sometimes they’ll, even just try to sign up to be an affiliate so that they can actually get a discount off their own purchase of your product. That has happened to us multiple times, and so by having that application process, you will be able to stay away from those people and keep them away from your program all right.
So now the for the actual plugin that we use, we use the plugin called affiliate. Wp now there is one a free one called, I believe, is called affiliate manager. You can look it up and it’s free. There are add-ons that you can pay for to make it more full-featured, but I think a lot of those add-ins are like between 50 and $ 100, and so it can become expensive.
It might be worth it just to go with the paid version unless, in the beginning you just don’t want to put money out and you can deal with the lite version but, like I said, we use affiliate WP. So let’s just jump over here to my computer and we’re gonna look at the affiliate WP we’ve, been pretty happy with it.
We moved off of a different platform on to affiliate WP because we needed a little more reporting. We needed a little more strength and functionality. So, first of all, of course, let’s. Look at the pricing because, as we know, that is what we are all interested in, so they have a personal plan $ 99 a year.
It comes with 17 of their official free add-ons, which is great, updated, email support. It is good for one site, and so if you have multiple sites or multiple businesses, this is not the plan for you.
But if you’re just getting started, one site will be perfect, they do have a plus and professional. These are all per year, but then here over they have the ultimate it’s $ 500, but its lifetime, and so you only have to pay for it once so.
If you’re planning on having an affiliate program for multiple years, I mean, if you’re gonna go personal, you could go ultimate and then, within five years it’s, paid itself off and then even faster.
If you have multiple web sites, so it’s, not super unaffordable, especially since this really has the potential to move the needle in your business. If you get affiliates affiliates can end up being 20 30 40 percent of the revenue in your company.
If you have good solid affiliates, and so it might be an investment that’s well worth it, especially since there’s, a direct ROI. The next thing that I’d, like to look at is some of their pages, and so here they have screenshots of their different pages.
Login information, affiliate area, but one of the things I’d, like to show you can see some of their reporting. This is actually for what the affiliate area looks like: they have a few, their URL statistics, graphs referrals payouts, that sort of thing.
But if we go down here, we can see a back look at things and this is the overview. So if you go into the back end, this is what their menu looks like and then here they have an overview: total paid earnings, unpaid referrals, unpaid earnings.
It shows you your most valuable affiliates, which is really nice. There’s, just some good data here, just in the overview section here, we’re looking at affiliates. So this is what each affiliate on the back end will look like.
You have their name ID username when they registered all that sort of information. That will just be nice for you to have, especially as you identify the most valuable affiliates that will give you the ability to work with them more often, which will help you and your business grow all right.
Let’s. Go down to settings alright! So let’s. Look at the settings page here! This is an important page. These are just your general settings. You’ll, put in a license key you’ll, decide which pages are the affiliate area etc? And those pages are, they do come with the plug-in and they will have the shortcode already there you just have to choose which page it is.
You can change your affiliate URL, which is really nice. You can customize it to whatever you want. You can change the format of the URL as well other things that you can do. You can choose whether you want your Ferol type to be a percentage or flat rate, which is great.
You can choose to credit. The last refer versus the first refer. So if someone ended up clicking to affiliate links, you could choose who actually gets the Commission. You can set your cookie just lots of different things currency, so it’s.
Just there are so many settings that make it really nice and then the last page that we’d, like that, I’d, really like to show you is the integrations page. Affiliate WP integrates with a lot of different plugins and lots of different systems so for, if you anything that you want to integrate with, if you wanted to integrate with ninja forms, then you can integrate with them by just clicking here.
Save Changes and you’re good to go. It makes it really easy for setup. Overall, a Philly WP is great. Like you said, since there’s such a direct ROI, it really makes a lot of sense anyway, guys. I hope this has been a helpful video kind of go actually thinking a little bit about what you could do for an affiliate program.
An affiliate program is a great way to boost your business. If you’re, really looking to kick-start your business and get things really going, we have a fantastic course called project 24, where we share everything about creating a really successful website.
Putting up helpful content anyway go check that out there’s. A link in the description below thanks guys for watching, if you learned anything, please leave us a like and subscribe. We’re working, really hard to get a lot of videos out for you guys, because we know that it can be tough.
When you’re first getting started with your online business. We want you guys to have the success that you hope for all right guys thanks for watching, and we will see you guys in the next video