AffiliateWP Review – Create A High-Converting Affiliate Program in WordPress

Is This the Best WordPress Affiliate Plugin?

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Product Name: AffiliateWP

4.2

Summary

AffiliateWP is the most popular plugin for adding an affiliate program to a digital WordPress store. You can use it for Easy digital downloads, WooCommerce, Learndash and many similar plugins. It is the fastest way to get started by adding an affiliate program to your WordPress based digital store.

Pros

• Easy to use
• Fairly priced

Cons

• On-boarding affiliate is manual
• It relies on your hosting + WordPress security
• Could be challenging for high-traffic affiliate 

• Order AffiliateWP Plugin

Do you have a digital download or e-commerce site on WordPress? Do you want to increase your sales & profits?

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If so, you should consider adding an affiliate program for your WordPress store. Especially if you have a digital product, integrating an affiliate program can do wonders for your product’s marketing strategy.

In particular, on WordPress, it’s pretty easy to launch your own affiliate program. There are many affiliate marketing WordPress plugins out there which will integrate with all the popular WordPress e-commerce solutions (like Easy Digital Downloads, WooCommerce, MemberPress, MemberMouse, etc.).

AffiliateWP is the most popular plugin for adding an affiliate program to a digital WordPress store.

I tested this plugin by creating an affiliate program with Easy Digital Downloads & it worked (and continues to work) flawlessly.

In this tutorial, I will show you how you can use the AffiliateWP plugin to integrate an affiliate program into your WordPress store.

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There are a few more options other than AffiliateWP out there, but I like this one the best because of its features & how well it integrates with all popular (and upcoming) WordPress products.

Important Note:

• AffiliateWP & WPAffiliate are two different products. (Don’t buy the wrong one.)

Pricing:

Pricing was a major factor for me when deciding on an affiliate solution for my WordPress site.

AffiliateWP costs only $99 for one site (1-year license), and you can extend its features by using their free or paid add-ons.  I would recommend you make a list of desired add-ons and don’t buy anything you don’t need because the costs will add up quickly.

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To get started, you need to grab the AffiliateWP plugin from the official site.

Now that you have the plugin, follow all of the steps below to seamlessly integrate your new affiliate program.

How To Setup AffiliateWP Affiliate Marketing Plugin:

• Download the plugin from your membership dashboard and install it onto your WordPress site.
• Activate the plugin.
• On the left bar you will notice the menu option for “AffilateWP”.

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• Click on Affiliates > Settings and enter your license key.

(You can retrieve your license key from the AffiliateWP account dashboard.)

• After activating the license, configure the settings of your affiliate dashboard. You can customize these according to your needs.

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I would recommend you setup the cookie time for 30-45 days, as this is a standard practice & very friendly for affiliates.

• Now click on the “Integrations” tab at the top and select the plugin you are using for your WordPress store.

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• Click on “Save Changes”.
• Now, click on the “Emails” tab at the top. Here you can configure settings related to affiliates’ emails. Customize this portion to fit your brand and your needs (…start by adding a logo).

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Tip: Personalize your affiliate emails and let them know how much you value them. Build a relationship with your affiliates and in the future, you can run specific campaigns with each one of them indiviually.

• Click on the “Misc” tab at the top. Here you can configure important settings such as:
  • Allow automatic registration for affiliates
  • Auto-approval or manual approval
• Ensure you check the box for:
  • “Check this box if you would like AffiliateWP to completely ignore referrals for a zero total amount. This can be useful for multi-price products that start at zero, or if a discount was used, which resulted in a zero amount. Please note: if this setting is enabled and a visit results in a zero referral, then the visit would be considered not converted.”

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Once this is done, your affiliate program is almost ready to be launched…

Creatives:

One of the greatest features of the AffiliateWP plugin is “Creatives”.

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With the Creatives feature, you can offer graphics to your affiliates which they can use to promote your product via banner ads. This is a great feature because your affiliates won’t have to create their own graphics.

More ready-made Creatives make it easier for an affiliate to promote your product.

Admin View:

Here are a few screenshots of how the admin dashboard looks:

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Affiliate Dashboard:

The AffiliateWP plugin automatically creates a page called “Affiliate Area” & adds the shortcode to display the dashboard.

You can change the landing page by adding the default shortcode to any page.

• (Read more on the help page.)

The default admin dashboard area for your affiliate program is: http://www.domain.com/affiliate-area

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Enable Registration:

You need to enable user registration in WordPress, which you can do by going to:

• Settings > General and clicking on the “Enable User Registration” box.

This way, new affiliates can sign up for an account.

Other Useful Features:

• Universal or specific discount coupon-
  • You can create discount coupon codes and you can tie it to a specific affiliate or all affiliates.
• Product specific affiliate commission-
  • You can set custom commission rates for certain products.
• Custom commission for affiliates-
  •  You can offer higher commissions to super affiliates who bring in more sales.
• Export affiliate list to email-
  • You can send your affiliates’ contact info to CovertKit, or Aweber, or any other email marketing service. (Note: You may need to buy a paid add-on for specific mail services.)

Don’t forget to checkout the AffiliateWP add-ons to find some more juicy features to incorporate into your program.

Conclusion: Is AffiliateWP worth your money?

Most stores built on WordPress are currently using the AffiliateWP plugin, so recommending it hardly seems groundbreaking.

The only thing you need to decide is if you want to host your own affiliate program or you want to use a hosted solution like ShareASale or iDevAffiliate.

Here I have tested the AffilaiteWP plugin with Easy Digital Downloads & the integration was very smooth. This is likely due to the fact that both products come from the same developer.

Both the quality of the plugin & the quality of support are top-notch.

The low $99 price tag will help anyone to at least get started with building an affiliate program.

In short, as an “Affiliate Marketing Tracking Software” for WordPress, AffiliateWP is an ideal choice.

More AffiliateWP resources:

• List of free add-ons
• List of paid add-ons
• Free add-ons on official site
• Free add-ons by Andrew (Similar as above but fewer unique plugins)

Do share your review & experiences with AffiliateWP. If you are using it and have some suggestions or tips, do share them with us in the comments section.

If you find this tutorial useful, share it with your blogger & WordPress developer friends on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus!

• Also read: How to start an affiliate program using ShareASale

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