An affiliate program is a great way to start growing your business from sales and revenue. You can create an affiliate program around your products and services that allow people to promote them for you. For every sale one of your affiliates make, you would pay them a portion of the sale or a commission.
Affiliate programs are useful to businesses because they can help you increase sales and leads, drive targeted traffic to your website, and increase brand recognition. When affiliates start promoting your products and services, your website can also gain more search engine rankings. Having other people promote your website creates more exposure and buzz.
What are affiliate programs?
Affiliate programs are agreements between businesses and online marketers like influencers where a commission is received for sales. Online marketers mention the products or services of the business in their online content and social media.
The process is simple. When users click on the affiliate link and either sign up for the offer or purchase the product or service, the affiliate receives a commission from the business. Basically, the more purchases you refer, the more you earn.
How do they work?
Affiliate programs are performance-based programs where online marketers get paid to refer customers to businesses using their own online marketing strategies. For instance, affiliates can blog about your products, create videos or posts on social media. There are numerous ways for affiliates to generate sales.
Benefits of creating an affiliate program for your business
Creating an affiliate program for your business can give your brand a stronger online presence. Aligning your products and services with affiliates can introduce your brand to a wider audience. Moreover, partnering with affiliate marketers with reputable websites and bloggers can expand the reach of your products, services, and brand.
Having an affiliate marketing program for your business can also be a cost-effective form of marketing compared with other methods like paid advertising.
Affiliates can potentially increase traffic and sales for your products and services faster. Established websites, video channels, and social media accounts can be used by affiliates to give your products and services more exposure. As a result, you can get more traffic, leads, and sales.
The downsides of running an affiliate program
While there are many advantages to running an affiliate program, there are some disadvantages as well. If you are used to having a lot of sales for your products and sales, you will have to pay out commissions to your affiliates once you create your affiliate program and initially this may affect revenue.
Additionally, some affiliates may not respect your brand and it’s important to check to make sure that your brand is being promoted in accordance with the rules of your affiliate program.
The 5 best affiliate WordPress plugins
Setting up your own affiliate program can be as easy as using a WordPress plugin. Here are five of the best affiliate WordPress plugins:
Affiliate WP
It is a complete affiliate managing system that is seamless and simple to setup. The interface has an advanced affiliate dashboard, comprehensive reporting, and real-time graphs.
This affiliate program plugin is compatible with popular features like WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and iThemes Exchange. It has an integrated payout system so you can easily pay affiliates.
It tracks affiliate referrals accurately, and it features real-time reporting. You can also have unlimited affiliates actively promoting your brand, products, and services.
Additionally, you can offer affiliates unlimited creatives, visual resources, coupon codes, and text links to promote your website.
The plugin creators also offer full support for their products.
WP Affiliate Manager
This plugin helps you to manage your affiliate marketing program driving more traffic and sales to your business. It’s easy to use, and you can manage, track and pay your affiliates right from your website.
Furthermore, the plugin is compatible with WooCommerce, WP eCommerce, Simple WP Shopping Cart, WP eStore and others.
Affiliates
It is a useful WordPress plugin for managing your affiliate program. It features a lot of grow-oriented tools to scale your business. The plugin is designed to manage affiliates, create referrals and track visitors to your website from the referral affiliate links. It is also compatible with WooCommerce.
Ultimate Affiliate Pro
This is an all-in-one affiliate program platform, and it has a lot of features. Some of the features include the ability to rank your affiliates by sales, you can add unlimited affiliates, make payments to affiliates, arrange performance bonuses, and manage content like banners and links to promote your products and services.
There are all kinds of promotional tools and reporting features. This plugin is also compatible with WooCommerce and PayPal.
Refer A Friend for WooCommerce
This plugin is a simple clean plugin for creating a powerful referral system on your website. Also, it is easy to install and use. This plugin allows you to reward your referrals with coupons instead of giving money to them.
There are two versions of this plugin. Free version comes packed with lots of features, premium version has shortcodes, coupons for friends and a couple more options.
Affiliate program at Themes Harbor
In case you’re wondering, we are not offering an affiliate program on our website at the moment. Although, we are planning to incorporate it into our system. Before doing so, we would like to see how many people are interested in it.
This is the reason why we have created a newsletter to find out a demand for our affiliate program. So, if you are interested in it, please sign up for an affiliate program newsletter and we will notify you once it is launched on the site.
Conclusion
To sum up, affiliate marketing can be a very profitable and useful marketing strategy for your business. If you are considering an affiliate program for your business then it is a great way to build your brand and increase traffic, leads, and sales. Moreover, with the ease of WordPress plugins designed to manage affiliate programs, you can get started right away.
Were you able to increase a revenue of your business with an affiliate program? Or, have you used an affiliate program? Please share your experience in the comments below.
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