Do you want to create a referral program in WordPress? Referral programs are a great way to get more people to promote your products to a wider audience. In this article, we'll show you how to easily create a referral program on WordPress and get more customers.
Why create a referral program in WordPress?
Referral program or affiliate program allows you to get more people to help you sell your products and services. In return, you pay them a small commission on every sale they make.
Simply put, it's like building your own sales army without paying them a salary.
These affiliate marketers use tools and plugins to create marketing content. They make money online by referring their users to the right products and services.
To run a referral or affiliate program, you will need a tool that can manage your affiliate program. It will allow affiliate marketers to join your referral program. It will also help you track the sales and traffic sent by each affiliate partner.
Why use AffiliateWP to create a referral program in WordPress?
For this tutorial, we will be using the plugin AffiliateWP to create a referral program in WordPress. It is one of the best affiliate management plugins for WordPress.
Like everything else in life, AffiliateWP has its own advantages and disadvantages that you should consider.
Benefits of using AffiliateWP
Here are some of the benefits of using AffiliateWP to manage your referral program in WordPress.
- Very easy to use and blends into your WordPress site as a native application.
- Very profitable with plans ranging from 99 $ / year to 499 $ for a lifetime license.
- Integrates with stores WooCommerce , Easy Digital Downloads , PayPal, Stripe and more
- A large number of extensions including free, paid and third party extensions to extend AffiliateWP
- Real-time tracking of affiliates with detailed reports for you and your affiliate partners
Disadvantages of AffiliateWP
Here are some of the downsides of AffiliateWP to running your affiliate program.
- It has limited reach compared to affiliate networks which already have thousands of affiliate marketers actively looking for products to promote
- It does not come with the advanced fraud detection features that are offered by popular affiliate networks.
- There is no automatic payment system, and you will have to send payments manually each month
- Does not calculate taxes for payments. As a business owner, you will have to manage it yourself.
- It's less convenient for affiliate partners. They will need to create an account and log in to view their reports, versus affiliate networks where they can see all of their earnings in one place.
A good alternative to AffiliateWP would be Shareasale, which is a large affiliate network with thousands of qualified affiliate marketers actively looking for new products to recommend.
That being said, let's take a look at how to create an affiliate program on WordPress using AffiliateWP.
Creation of a referral program on WordPress
The first thing to do is to install and activate the plugin AffiliateWP . For more details, see our step-by-step guide to way to install a WordPress plugin .
After activation, you must visit the page Affiliates »Settings to enter your license key. You can find this information in your account on the AffiliateWP website.
After activating your license, you must select a page to use for the affiliate area. AffiliateWP automatically creates one for you, but if you want to use a different page, you can select that from that page.
Then you need to choose the Terms of Service page. You can look at the Affiliate Program Terms pages on other sites to create one for your own site. After creating the page, you can select it here.
After that, you must review the other settings on the page and configure them according to your own policies.
Remember to click on the “Save Changes” button to save your settings.
Next, you need to switch to the Integrations tab. From there, you need to select the integrations you want to enable. AffiliateWP supports e-commerce, member area, Contact form and the most popular LMS plugins.
Click the Save Changes button, then click the “E-mails” tab of the Settings page.
AffiliateWP allows you to edit the emails sent to your affiliates. You can also upload your company logo, create your own email templates, and choose the email address you want to use for sending affiliate emails.
Finally, go to the Miscellaneous tab on the settings page to configure advanced settings for your affiliate program. The first option on the page is to allow affiliates to register themselves. You can check this if you want affiliates to be able to sign up for your referral program.
Then you also want to enable reCAPTCHA to prevent bots from signing up as affiliates.
You will need to carefully review each setting and change them as needed. Don't forget to click the Save Changes button to save your settings.
Add links to your referral program
Now that you've set up your referral program, the next step is to add links. For example, if you have enabled affiliate registration, you can add a link to the Affiliate Zone so that interested marketers can register.
By clicking on the link, users will go to the Affiliate Area where they can register as new affiliates or log into their account to view their reports.
Managing your sponsorship program with AffiliateWP
AffiliateWP comes with powerful tools to manage your affiliates, view reports, and efficiently run your affiliate program without leaving WordPress.
To see the affiliates who have joined your referral program, simply go to the page Affilates »Affilates .
On this page, you can see the list of all your affiliate partners, their income, unpaid income, referral visits and more. You can edit an affiliate account individually.
To see each sale made through a referral partner, you must visit the page Affiliates »Referrals . Here, you'll see all referral sales, affiliate partner, amount, and more. You can also click on the 'Reject' link if you suspect a fraudulent affiliation.
View your referral program reports in AffiliateWP
Reporting is critical to a successful referral program, and AffiliateWP comes with powerful reporting capabilities. Go to the page Affiliates »Affiliates for a complete overview.
You can filter the reporting period by time and by specific affiliate partner name. You can also view reports for affiliates, referral visits, and campaigns.
Sending payments to your affiliates
Unfortunately, AffiliateWP does not come with automatic payments, which means you will have to send payments manually. AffiliateWP makes it easy to manage your payments.
Depending on when and how often you want to pay your referral partners, you can go to the Affiliates »Sponsorships page and click on the "Generate Payout File" button.
This will generate a payment file compatible with PayPal's mass payment system. The file also works with Skrill and other payment services that support mass payment functionality. It contains the payment amount and email addresses for all your unpaid referrals.
We hope this article has helped you learn how to create a referral program in WordPress.
