Overview
WordPress is not just for your personal diary anymore, as more and more people are using it create affiliate programs and develop their brand’s reach. To get into affiliate marketing, you’ll need to follow our four steps, and familiarize yourself with affiliate programs and plugins.
For quite some time now, WordPress has been renowned as one of the best site platforms around. Many people have enjoyed the profits that come with it, but only after diligent work and faithfully putting action into the best practices. Here, we take you on a basic walkthrough on how to use WordPress for affiliate marketing.
Create or Choose Great Products
At the end of the day, only a great product will make your marketing efforts on WordPress worth it. You would not want to advocate for something that doesn’t work, would you? Backing a crummy product is detrimental to your success, so before any real hardcore affiliate marketing strategies come into play, ensure that you have 100% confidence in your product.
Select the Most Appropriate Platform or Plugin
If you are going to use a platform, it will mean housing your affiliate program outside WordPress while your products are inside it. If you are going to use a plugin, then both things will be managed from within the WordPress admin page. A quick browse through the WordPress page will give you an idea of each plugin or program’s features so you can decide which one is the best to use for your purpose.
Enlist Your Affiliates and Brand/Product Representatives
Some of the WordPress platforms available already offer a pre-built affiliate marketer network that lets you look up marketers and invite them for a possible product promotion. This is definitely a huge advantage because it saves time and you can be assured that they are chosen from a pool of proven assets. Use these assets in the same way you’d run product or content promotion. Some of the usual methods of going about it are by sending emails, featuring guest posts, investing in blogger outreach, and more. What all of these have in common is that they should be directing your chosen affiliates straight to an active landing page.
Monitor, Manage, and Boost
Make sure that you use different tools that will help you monitor, manage, and boost your affiliate program. There are costs to these (including your time), and an understanding of just how efficient each one is becomes highly important in knowing how helpful they are in growing and maintaining your burgeoning affiliate program.
First, you need to have an affiliate platform with which to operate and boost your program. It will cost you a bit, but there are many benefits such as access to the affiliate network and even the ability to automate the process of maintaining the program for you. One example is ShareASale, which is one of the larger networks— they offer continuous training programs to help you stay on top of your partner game. They also have cool features such as the ability to sort your partners into different groups by way of segmentation tags. There’s also ImpactRadius, another network whose unique feature is allowing you to own partnerships instead of just “renting” them out from the network. These are just some examples, and there are more to check out when you start exploring what’s there to see.
Next, there’s the affiliate plugin. These make WordPress a well-oiled affiliate marketing platform, with all the tools needed for growing and managing it right on the backend. The benefit of affiliate plugins is you have both total control and ownership of your network. On the other hand, there is a lot of time spent on management tasks to ensure that everything runs smoothly. An example of an affiliate plugin is AffiliateWP, which is one of the best options out today. It has reliable tracking of partners, easy registrations for partners, coupon codes, and more.
In summary, there’s a lot to do before you become super savvy at affiliate marketing on WordPress, however, it can be done. As long as you know WordPress affiliate marketing strategies and you’re willing to put in the necessary work and investment, you’ll be on your way towards enjoying your profits! Before you go, you might want to read up on
mastering affiliate variables (with LimeLight CRM), and
how to set good KPIs for affiliate marketing.