Leveraging Affiliate Marketing for WordPress Plugin & Theme Sellers – Part 2
Hi everyone – Ben from Freemius here. When I was a theatre actor, I used to wonder: What’s the value of a stage play without
an audience? Does it have any significance? When it comes to marketing and affiliate
programs for your WordPress business, you might ask yourself a similar question, does it have any impact if I don’t have any marketers working to bring me new customers? The answer here is quite
obvious – of course, it does! Having efficient and productive
affiliates for your plugin or theme can make a big difference when it comes
to spreading the word about your product and giving that extra push to your bottom line. That’s why, in this second part of the
ultimate guide for affiliate programs in the WordPress space, we’re going to focus on
the best ways to attract affiliate marketers! Let’s plug-in! Before we get started, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for future videos. If you're watching this directly on YouTube, you can click the alert icon for notification about new releases. Like cooking a three Michelin star dish, you need to have the right recipe to
lure the best affiliate marketers.
Let’s take a look at the ingredients you’ll need: First, and this might seem obvious,
you must have a great product! Don’t count on affiliates to invest
their time and effort when the product is only half baked – no matter how
appealing your affiliate terms are. If you make your product as awesome as possible, it’ll be easier to eventually build
a strong network of affiliates. In short, if you build it well, they will come! Second, treat your affiliate program as a product
on its own – and don’t be afraid to market it. Make it easy for potential marketers to sign
up by preparing a friendly landing page, invest in promotional content, and
dig deep inside social networks to find the right affiliates for your product. Another high-converting technique is marketing your affiliate program directly
from within the WordPress admin dashboard. This way, you spread the word exactly where
there are eyes who want to see it, users of your product that probably like it already
– and it’ll be easy for them to recommend it on their blog, for example, which is
probably already built with WordPress.
There are great ways to include an
onboarding mechanism in the WordPress admin area, including a registration form, in
a way that’s not too intrusive. When selling through Freemius, you can
easily add that option out of the box, and start seeing those affiliate
applications coming in automatically! The third ingredient for the
perfect recipe to lure affiliates is to give them an offer they can’t refuse. For most products in the WordPress ecosystem,
affiliate commissions are usually between twenty and thirty percent – and if you choose to
offer more – you’ll definitely stand out. Another factor of a good affiliate deal
is extending your cookie expiration date – which means increasing the chances that
a purchase will be attributed to an affiliate.
If a user clicks an affiliate link and makes
a purchase 45 days later, but the cookie for that link expires after thirty days,
it means no commission for the affiliate. The longer the expiration date, the more
attractive the affiliate deal becomes. The fourth ingredient is rewarding affiliates
when users renew their subscriptions. This is a great incentive for any affiliate
because it means they’ll have recurring revenues, and it will create more
commitment to your product. With Freemius affiliate platform, you can easily
choose to reward all renewals to the affiliate or limit the renewals commission
based on a specified timeframe. The fifth ingredient for a successful
affiliate program is offering a “lifetime commission” which means linking customers
together with the affiliate who brought them on board, and awarding the affiliate a commission
for each of the users’ transactions – for life. This is a very powerful and attractive benefit for affiliates because it raises their loyalty to the max.
Ingredient number six: treat your
affiliate marketers as your employees, and award them according to their performance. Give them the incentives they need to
keep going strong for your business. For example – you can give them a $100 bonus when they reach $1000 in gross referral revenue or a 10% increase to their commission after referring more than 3000 new users. The options are endless, and remember to market
these incentives on your affiliate landing page to show that you want to build a
long-term relationship with affiliates.
The last ingredient for that perfect dish to
attract affiliate marketers to your business is to give them special discount
coupons to make it easier to find new customers for your plugin or theme. This is a win-win-win for the
affiliate, the customer, and for you. Bon appetit! Having the right affiliate program
for your product doesn’t necessarily mean that it’ll attract the best marketers. To make your affiliate recruiting efforts
matter and really boost those revenues, you’ll need to get out there
and actively search to find the right affiliates that will make an impact. One way to do that is to log
into your social networks and try to find community influencers
with large numbers of followers and ask them to post, tweet, and talk about your
product – for a special commission, of course. It won’t be easy, I’ll tell you that. Sometimes it’s a process that needs time, patience, and a good amount of persuasion, which usually
involves face to face mingling at conferences.
Another way of “recruiting” is by
finding a successful piece of content that is relevant to your product on search results. I’ll explain. Go to Google and type in relevant
keywords for your product. If your product is a security plugin, for example, searching for “best WordPress
security plugins” will do the trick. It makes sense that a good chunk of your potential audience is using similar keywords to find security plugins. It is also a fact that the top ten search results
get most of the traffic for this keyphrase. And most of the results will likely
be articles written by a combination of unbiased professionals, promotional
websites, or affiliate based sites.
So you “just” need to figure out how to
get your product listed on those pages. Simply reach out to the authors of those
pieces and ask them to put an affiliate link to your product in the article. Be sure to offer preferred terms, like a higher commission, sometimes even a monthly retainer if the
page is getting tons of relevant traffic. This is a definite win-win since you’ll be
surprised to hear that many of these authors don’t even plan to make money out of their content, but for those that do, you’ll be prepared with a good offer. This method allows you to capitalize
on existing traffic sources without investing a lot of time and effort in writing
content, promoting it, and working on SEO. It’s basically a marketing funnel shortcut. And although it involves reaching out to
people and asking them to piggyback on their content, the links you’ll get in these
articles will prove themselves to be priceless. That’s it for the second part of
our series on affiliate programs. I hope that you’re now aware of all
the ingredients to the perfect recipe for building and growing your affiliate network.
In the third and last part, we’ll go through
the hazards that you need to be aware of when setting up affiliate programs, and
how you can avoid affiliate fraud. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to
be the first to know when we release a new video. See you next time!.
