Affiliate Marketing is one of the best ways to build your own sales army and increase your brand awareness online. With the immense development of WordPress-powered eCommerce sites, the demand for affiliate management and tracking solutions is growing rapidly. So I thought of writing a post which could give you a quick knowledge about running and managing an affiliate program with your WordPress site. In this post, I’ve covered:
- What is Affiliate Marketing?
- Terms That Are Used In Affiliate Marketing
- Why Should You Add an Affiliate Program to Your Business?
- Top Affiliate Tracking and Management Solutions for WordPress
Hopefully, this post will help you understand everything about Affiliate Marketing and make you expose to different solutions for tracking and managing your affiliates directly from your WordPress dashboard.
Let’s start!
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Basically, Affiliate Marketing is a partnership between an advertiser and publishers in which one or more publishers are rewarded for helping an advertiser by promoting their products or services. To identify each visitor/customer brought by the marketing efforts of a publisher, the advertiser uses a unique link called affiliate tracking link.
Most of the people get confused in making a precise distinction between affiliate and referral marketing, as both types of marketing make use of third parties to generate sales. But, both are distinct forms of marketing with the only difference that the sales driven by affiliate marketing are based on financial motivations, while referral marketing relies on personal relationships for sales generation.
Terms That Are Used In Affiliate Marketing
Publisher:
A publisher can be a company or individual, who is responsible for the promotion of products or services of the advertiser in exchange for getting rewarded.
Advertiser:
An advertiser is an individual or company that sells products – like clothes, electronics, car parts etc. – and pays a commission to publishers to help promote and sell his product and services.
Consumer:
The consumer is the one the publishers want to reach through their reviews or ads or any other method and the advertiser are intended to sell their services or products to.
Affiliate Link:
As we mentioned above, an affiliate link is a unique link used by advertisers for identifying consumers. When a consumer clicks on an affiliate link, the system stores the data for a limited period. If a purchase is made by a consumer in this period, the credit of that sale goes to the publisher.
Conversion:
This is when the consumer makes an action, for example, clicks a link or subscribes to a service, which takes him from the publisher’s website to the advertiser’s website.
Commission:
This is the amount of money the advertiser pays to the publisher for referring a consumer. Mostly, commissions are calculated by percentage. For instance: 20% on every referral.
Why Should You Add an Affiliate Program to Your Business?
Nowadays, affiliate marketing becomes an integral part of most of the businesses’ online marketing strategy. Even, reputed brands like eBay, Amazon etc run affiliate programs to promote their products and increase their online exposure. The reason why affiliate marketing is getting so popular is that it is the most cost-effective direct marketing scheme. Other direct marketing options such as PPC advertising, billboards, and multimedia are comparatively expensive. The best thing about affiliate marketing is that has better ROI, as merchants only pay affiliates when they drive a sale. In fact, affiliates are salesmen with no base salary and only get paid when they generate a sale.
Top Affiliate Tracking and Management Solutions for WordPress
If you’re planning to add an affiliate program to your WordPress eCommerce store, here I’m sharing you five best affiliate management solutions for WordPress with their pros and cons.
ShareASale:
ShareASale is one of the most popular and highly-seasoned affiliate marketing networks on the web. It offers a wide range of easy-to-implement services to help you set up and grow your own affiliate program. They have facilitated more than 8 million merchant-affiliate relationships for the past 14 years. ShareASale is known as a fair and honest affiliate network and its matchless technology receives accolades for speed, accuracy, and efficiency.
Pros:
- Get started with one-time network access fee.
- Access to a large network of affiliate marketers.
- Connect multiple sites into one account.
- Real-time tracking and reporting.
- Automatic send payments to each affiliate.
Cons:
- Poorly designed user interface.
- One-time set-up fee of $550.
- Your account must generate a minimum of $25 in the grace period of 120 days.
ShareASale integration is available for WooCommerce.
Impact Radius:
Impact Radius, started by the co-founders of the CJ Network, is an easy-to-use and cost-effective affiliate marketing solution where you don’t require paying sky-high network fees. This significantly slashes the cost as you need to pay only for the number of affiliates you’re working with. From management to payment, this innovative tool fully automates all aspects of your affiliate programs.
Pros:
- Great user-interface.
- Better analytics and deeper insights.
- Can be integrated with Salesforce.com and other popular CRM platforms.
- You can track conversions on all types of devices.
- 100% tracking accuracy with multi-layered tracking technology.
Cons:
- A small network of affiliate marketers.
- Monthly recurring fee.
The Datafeedr WooCommerce Importer WordPress plugin supports Impact Radius.
Magic Affiliate:
Magic Affiliate is a WordPress plugin that can bring a huge amount of online income to your ecommerce store. With this powerful plug-in, you’ll have the ability to build your affiliate program within a few minutes. Just unzip, upload and activate the plug-in and you’re good to go. Best of all, this powerful plug-in has the capability of handling unlimited numbers of affiliates.
Pros:
- Intuitive user interface.
- Easy installation and integration.
- Serves all the data (clicks, sales, and commissions) in real time.
- Seamless integration with MailChimp, AWeber, Constant Contact, iContact and GetResponse.
- One-time fee, no monthly recurring payment.
Cons:
- No network of affiliates.
- One year support and updates.
Magic Affiliate can be easily integrated with WP-eCommerce, WooCommerce, and Magic Members shopping carts.
AffiliateWP:
AffiliateWP, developed by the folks behind Easy Digital Downloads, is a user-friendly and feature-rich affiliate solution for WordPress. It is built as a WordPress plug-in, and is better than any other affiliate system in terms of cost-effectiveness. It comes with an intuitive dashboard through which you can see how much you’ve earned, how much is awaiting payment, and much more.
Pros:
- One-time purchase.
- Easy to install, activate and use.
- Real-time reporting through graphs.
- Automatic affiliate accounts for users.
- Extensive documentation to help you get up and running in minutes.
Cons:
- No access to any existing network of affiliate marketers.
- No mass pay option. Means, you’ll be required to manually handle payouts every month.
- You have to manage everything including plug-in updates by yourself.
AffiliateWP seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce, Jigoshop, Easy Digital Downloads, WP e-Commerce, and other major WordPress ecommerce plugins.
Post Affiliate Pro:
Post Affiliate Pro is effective, intuitive and expandable affiliate software that is designed to efficiently manage your campaigns and track your affiliate’s referrals, clicks, commissions, sales, and much more. It offers real-time reports of your affiliate program, allowing you see how your affiliates are performing. Moreover, using their free mobile applications, you can get notified about new sales on your Android, iPad or iPhone devices in real-time.
Pros:
- Web 2.0 (Ajax) based client-server architecture.
- Customizable affiliate interface.
- Mass payout of affiliates.
- Multilingual support.
- Fantastic customer support.
Cons:
- Lacks affiliate network.
- You’ve to pay a one-time fee to get some extra features.
Post Affiliate Pro has complete integration with WooCommerce, Cart66, Easy Digital Downloads, and other popular WordPress eCommerce plugins. A WordPress plugin is also available to integrate this award-winning affiliate software into any WordPress installation.
WP Affiliate Manager:
WP Affiliate Manager is another WordPress plugin that enables you to manage an affiliate marketing program for driving more traffic and sales to your WordPress-enabled online store. With WP Affiliate Manager, you’ll be able to track affiliate sales and pay your affiliates directly right from your WordPress dashboard.
Pros:
- Free to use.
- Real-time reporting.
- Percentage based or flat rate payouts.
- Set payout rates for the individual affiliate.
- PayPal mass pay integration.
Cons:
- Doesn’t have so many features.
- Lacks affiliate network.
WP Affiliate Manager has complete integration with WP eCommerce, WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Simple WP Shopping Cart, iThemes Exchange, and WP eStore.
Summing Up
You see how many opportunities WordPress gives to its users for making an additional profit! Not yet with WordPress? Hurry up to change this and move your website to this super user-friendly CMS platform with the automated service CMS2CSM. Btw, they also manage an affiliate program and give you an opportunity to earn.
If you enjoyed this article, share your views about WordPress affiliate management in the comment section.
Do you know any other affiliate management solution for WordPress?
Is WordPress a perfect platform for eCommerce?
Which one WordPress shopping cart plugin you prefer to use?