Looking to create an affiliate program for your product? An affiliate program is a referral system where you incentivize others to refer your product by offering them a commission for every sale they refer.
How do you create an affiliate system in WordPress? That’s what the AffiliateWP plugin was created for. It enables you to create a full-fledged affiliate system in WordPress with ease. If you want to know more about its features, functionalities, pricing, etc., continue reading our complete AffiliateWP review below.
About the AffiliateWP Plugin
AffiliateWP is the #1 affiliate management system plugin for WordPress. It allows you to build a complete affiliate system in WordPress and helps to manage affiliates, referrals, payments, etc. from your site. It comes with all the affiliate marketing tools you’ll need to grow your business and earn money.
It’s a plugin built for WordPress that looks and feels like WordPress itself. All of its features are carefully-designed to adapt with WordPress and to give you a familiar experience. Plus, it comes with advanced affiliate and referral tracking features that provide reliable, accurate data.
AffiliateWP was developed by the same team who created the Easy Digital Downloads eCoommerce plugin. Therefore, the plugin has seamless integration with Easy Digital Downloads. Not to mention, it also has full support for WooCommerce and other popular membership, form, and invoice plugins.
How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?
Affiliate marketing is one of the most popular ways to make money online. Affiliate marketing creates a win-win situation for the 2 parties involved; the business owners and the affiliates. It’s the collaboration in which affiliates help to sell more products and business owners offer a commission to affiliates for each sale they referred to.
For example, if you’re a business owner and trying to sell products, you can create an affiliate system on your site and appeal affiliates to join. When they become an affiliate of your website, they pick products from your store and promote them on their blog and various other platforms. Now if people come to your store via the affiliate links and buy a product, the affiliate who referred the customer gets a certain percent commission.
As a business owner, your store will get more visibility, more traffic, and more sales. On the other hand, affiliates will earn money for each sale they referred to your store. Therefore, it’s rewarding to both businesses and affiliate marketers.
So, if you’re running an online store but don’t have an affiliate program, you definitely need to consider having one.
AffiliateWP Review – Getting Started with AffiliateWP
AffiliateWP is a plugin exclusively designed for WordPress with an interface just like the native WordPress interface. It’s therefore easy to configure and use.
First, download the plugin file from the official AffiliateWP website and install it on your site. If you need detailed instructions, here’s our step-by-step guide on how to install a plugin.
1. General Settings
After the plugin is activated, navigate to Affiliates » Settings to activate your plugin license. You can find the license key in your account on the AffiliteWP website.
In addition to license activation, the General tab has a number of affiliate settings. You can select an affiliate page or affiliate agreement page; however, feel free to leave them as they are because these pages are automatically created by the plugin to meet affiliate-specific needs.
Next, you can configure referral settings. The referral variable by default is ref and the default referral format looks like this: https://yoursite.com/?ref=1.
If you want to change the referral variable, you can use aff, refer, partner, etc.
Next, you can enable Pretty Affiliate URLs which will replace the query strings (i.e. ?ref=) and change your URL format to https://yoursite.com/ref/1.
You can select a referral rate type from either a percentage or a flat amount. Then, you can add a referral rate. Also review Exclude Shipping and Exclude Tax options. Then, you can also add a cookie expiration duration; for example, 30 days (which means that a purchase within 30 days of user’s visit via a referral link will be valid for the commission).
Once you review all the options, don’t forget to click Save Changes.
2. Integrations
The plugin has inbuilt integration for a number of eCommerce, membership, form, and invoice plugins and systems. You can enable the ones you need easily from Affiliates » Settings » Integrations.
3. Email Settings
You can configure all the email settings from the Email tab in AffiliateWP settings.
You can upload a logo, choose an email template, from name and email, etc. Then, you can configure notification emails on new affiliate registrations, affiliate application accepted, referral awarded, affiliate application being reviewed, and application rejected.
4. Miscellaneous Settings
The Misc tab in AffiliateWP settings allow you to configure different options useful for your affiliate system.
You can enable or disable affiliate registration by the user themselves, affiliate approval required, reCAPTCHA, and much more.
Review all the settings, and then click Save Changes to save your settings.
Creating the Affiliate Area
Affiliate Area is where your users can see the affiliate registration and login form. Via this page, new affiliate marketers apply for your affiliate program whereas already signed-up affiliates can log into their accounts, generate referral links, view stats, and see their earnings.
AffiliateWP plugin automatically creates an Affiliate Area page right when you install the plugin into WordPress. If you don’t find this page, you can create a new page yourself and add the shortcode [affiliate_area] in the main content area, then it’ll create the affiliate area page for you.
Take a look at the screenshot below to see how your Affiliate Area will look:
When a user logs into their account, they’ll see a different Affiliate Area. The Affiliate Area for logged-in users looks like the screenshot below:
Affiliates can generate affiliate URLs by entering a page URL in the field there and clicking on the Generate URL button.
Next, the Statistics option shows a summary of paid and unpaid referrals, visits, conversion rate, earnings, and commission rates.
Upon clicking on the next option, Graphs, affiliates can see a graphical presentation of the affiliate statistics.
Referrals provides a glimpse of the affiliate’s referrals with the amount earned, product description, and status as paid or unpaid.
The Visits option shows the pages visited by their affiliate links.
The Creatives option includes promotional banners which affiliates can use on their blogs and multiple other platforms to promote your products.
And, finally, the Settings tab lets your affiliates add their payment email where you can send the commissions they earn.
The Affiliate Area looks very clean and simple. Affiliate marketers will love your affiliate program interface.
Managing Your Affiliate Program
AffiliateWP provides you with simple-yet-powerful options to manage your affiliate program. You can add, edit, and review affiliates; view individual and total affiliate reports; manage referrals, visits, and creative aspects; and view full reports on everything.
Configuring and managing the admin options is easy with AffiliateWP. To get started, you can take a look at the overview of your affiliate system by going to Affiliates » Overview.
You can see the totals for paid earnings, unpaid referrals, most valuable affiliates, latest affiliate registrations, recent referrals, etc. in the Overview.
Next, you can go to Affiliates » Affiliate to view your list of all affiliates, add new affiliates, edit, etc.
The entire affiliate management works just like standard posts in WordPress.
AffiliateWP Addons
AffiliateWP plugin comes with powerful free and premium addons which you can use to make your affiliate program more effective. In addition, it also supports a number of third-party addons.
There’re 15 official free addons and 14 pro addons. The pro addons include PayPal Payouts, Recurring Referrals, Lifetime Commissions, Affiliate Landing Pages, etc. The free addons allow you to add features like display a leaderboard, showing attributed affiliate coupons, pay affiliates with store credit, etc.
You can access the addons from your WordPress dashboard by visiting Affiliates » Addons.
AffiliateWP Plugin: Pricing and Support
AffiliateWP is a premium plugin that offers 4 pricing plans.
1. Personal: It costs $99 per year. You can use it on 1 website only. Includes 15 official free addons and all AffiliateWP’s core features.
2. Plus: It costs $149 per year. It provides 3 site licenses. It also includes all free addons and core features of the plugin.
3. Professional: It costs $249 per year. You can use AffiliateWP on unlimited sites with this plan. It includes all 15 pro addons along with all the free official addons.
4. Ultimate: It’s priced at $499 and it’s a one-time payment plan. With this plan, you can use AffiliateWP on unlimited sites. It also includes all pro and free addons and also future addons.
With the 3 yearly subscription plans, you’ll get email support and updates for the duration of your current subscription whereas you’ll get lifetime support and updates with the Ultimate plan.
If you have any questions, you can use their live chat for instant replies. You can also submit a ticket for support queries but you may not need to contact support because they have detailed documentation with really comprehensive articles to guide you.
Our Verdict on Using AffiliateWP for Creating a Affiliate System in WordPress
AffiliateWP is undoubtedly the number 1 best affiliate management system plugin for WordPress. It has a complete set of features and functionalities to allow you to create a powerful affiliate system in WordPress. Its integration with eCommerce, membership, forms, and invoice plugins make it the all-in-one solution for affiliate programs.
The plugin was created just for WordPress which makes it a very special product. Its interface is very similar to the WordPress interface so anyone using WordPress will recognize the familiar feel of it and configure everything very easily. It’s a simple plugin that you can use without touching any code.
We believe that AffiliateWP is the best affiliate management plugin for creating and running an affiliate program on WordPress sites. It’s a great tool you can use to boost your sales, improve SEO, and grow your business.
We give it 4.5 out of 5 stars. Here’s the breakdown of our review score:
4.0 / 5.0 5.0 / 5.0 5.0 / 5.0 5.0 / 5.0 5.0 / 5.0 4.0 / 5.0
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