Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular strategies to turn your WordPress website from just the face of your brand into something that generates leads and money.
Although affiliate marketing has been around for a while, and there are other more recent strategies like SMM and digital marketing, affiliate marketing is still a highly credible strategy to promote your WordPress website.
Here’s what the stats say:
- Affiliate programs are quite profitable. It is reported that affiliate programs generate up to 30% of all advertisement sales
- 84% of publishers benefit from affiliate marketing, making it one of the popular marketing strategies for website promotion
- Driving conversions is one of the goals 79% of marketers claim they want to reach with the help of affiliate marketing
Numbers sound appealing, don’t they?
Although affiliate marketing is a good way to promote a website, generate more traffic and leads, it’s an intricate strategy, and you need to possess good knowledge of what it is to launch a successful affiliate campaign.
What is Behind an Affiliate Campaign?
Essentially, as a creator of an affiliate program, you allow partners, or affiliates, to sell their products or services for a commission.
In other words, you can offer your WordPress website as a platform to help others sell their products in exchange for a commission if people buy these products thanks to your website.
Your WordPress website becomes an affiliate platform, which brings you the following benefits:
– more traffic
– more leads
– revenues from receiving commission
Affiliate marketing is how many websites get started. This is also a form of getting a passive income while growing traffic to your website.
While many websites have to use different platforms to set up affiliate campaigns, WordPress gives its users all the tools to launch such campaigns, allowing you to control everything yourself.
Setting Up the WP Affiliate Campaign
Let’s go practical.
What does it require to set up an affiliate campaign on WordPress?
Here’s a brief step-by-step guide.
Step #1: Choosing a plugin
The launch of a successful WordPress affiliate campaign requires thorough preparation. We already mentioned that WordPress offers a variety of tools or plugins that offer a functional approach to holding an affiliate campaign on your WordPress website.
WordPress plugins are constantly updated. Currently, the best-performing WordPress plugins for affiliate campaigns are the following:
- Affiliates Manager: this plugin facilitates the collaboration with affiliates, makes it easy for them to register and log in. The plugin tracks the referrals to your website, helping you count the commission appropriately. It Comes in 12 languages, including Spanish, Hebrew and even Icelandic.
- Thirsty Affiliates: as website admin, you get the toolkit to manage all affiliate links, referrals and receive statistics and reports on how your affiliate campaign is performing.
- Affiliates: a plugin with a responsive, intuitive dashboard with real-time reporting, traffic statistics, unlimited number of affiliates, and easy affiliate recruitment.
WordPress plugins allow a functional approach to launching an affiliate campaign, storing all the campaign data in one place.
Step #2: Setting Up Campaign Details
All WordPress plugins work the same when it comes to setting up the affiliate campaign. To launch a campaign, you need to define the following settings:
- Determine the minimum payment that your affiliates will receive
- Set up cookie duration (longer or shorter sessions for affiliate payouts
- Set up the commission and currency
- Switch on payout notifications
You can also personalize affiliate registration forms, create a custom greeting for affiliates, and set up a messaging tool.
Step #3: Finishing Touches
You can integrate your affiliate marketing plugins with other WordPress plugins. For instance, you can connect them to the reCaptcha plugin to check the identity of your affiliates. There are also WordPress forum plugins that you can use to create a community space for your affiliates.
The last step would be creating your affiliate links (affiliate campaign ads).
WordPress plugins do not create affiliate links, although they have a form for you to fill out. All you have to mention is:
- Name of the campaign
- Landing page
- Type
You can also create a custom button for your affiliate links or move forward with a simple text link.
Note! The name of an affiliate link should be clear to the affiliates and people, who they will send this link to.
After you create affiliate links, let the affiliates know where these links can be found on the dashboard of a plugin, so they could easily retrieve them.
How to Launch a Successful Affiliate Campaign?
Setting up an affiliate campaign for a WordPress website is an easy job, thanks to the functionality of plugins, provided by the platform.
But what is the foundation of a successful affiliate campaign for a WordPress website?
Here are some guidelines to follow:
1. Decide What Payment Terms Work Best for You
When considering to launch an affiliate marketing campaign for your WordPress website, you need to understand that there are several ways of earning money from these campaigns.
Different affiliate campaigns can utilize different terms of payment:
Pay per sale:
You turn your website into a platform for selling products from your affiliates. This is not a very popular strategy for an affiliate campaign for a website, but it is certainly a good way of earning a sizeable commission to support your website.
Pay per click: this is an optimal strategy for an affiliate campaign that is set to promote a WordPress website. With this method, you get paid for the number of visitors that are redirected via your website to the website of a merchant, doesn’t matter if the sale went through or not.
Pay per lead:
you receive a payment each time a referred visitor left their contact information via a simple contact form.
The last two strategies are the best for affiliate campaigns that are set to promote a website. You don’t have to make significant changes to your website to launch affiliate campaigns with these payment methods.
2. Choose Products Carefully
Launching an affiliate campaign means that you need to set up contacts with the merchants. No matter which payment method you decide to choose for your affiliate campaign, it’s always better to choose a smaller amount of good quality products.
When researching merchants, make sure that you choose the products that fit the profile of your website. “It is important to keep affiliate merchandise in line with the intent behind your website to save the image of your brand,” says Christopher McConnell, the marketing executive at Flatfy.
There’s another side to this. It is important that you research the demand for the products you’re interested in, otherwise, you risk losing a potentially successful affiliate campaign. The best way to look for on-demand products right now is Amazon’s trending items:
You can search by sections to determine, which products and merchants suit best for your WordPress website’s profile. The better these product will suit your brand; the more successful and profitable your affiliate campaign will be.
3. Don’t Underestimate the Content on Your Website
Another component of a successful affiliate marketing campaign that will promote your WordPress website is attracting the right affiliates. And, the best way to do it is by creating high-quality content.
Affiliate marketing is very competitive. Thus, to stand out and attract the best affiliates, you need to create engaging, eye-catching content. Whether it’s a blog, a video, or other visual content, this content should show obvious value to your potential affiliates.
When creating an affiliate marketing campaign, it’s important to keep in touch with the current trends in content creation.
Affiliate banners are among the types of content that you can use for your WordPress website. WordPress plugins, such as Thirsty Affiliates, allows WP users to create affiliate banners that you can place on your website and share with your affiliates as well. These banners function as ads on your website, linking potential affiliates to the details of your affiliate campaign.
In Conclusion
Setting up an affiliate marketing campaign is a fairly easy job to do since there are many versatile plugins on WordPress.
However, your affiliate campaign won’t work unless you
- Choose a niche carefully pick affiliates (merchants) scrupulously track the results of your affiliate campaign.
- Launching an affiliate campaign for your WordPress website is quick, but its success depends on how well you prepare for this campaign
- How you track the results.
In general, however, affiliate campaigns work well for promoting WordPress websites since the platform offers its users all the tools with great functionality. Hopefully, this brief guide will help you set up a successful affiliate marketing campaign for your WordPress website.
This post is written by Ryan is a passionate writer who likes sharing his thoughts and experience with the readers. Currently, he works as a digital marketing specialist. You can check his website here. He likes everything related to traveling and new countries.
