Affiliate WP – Affiliate Marketing Plugin for WordPress

Affiliate WP is a brand new affiliate marketing plugin that will help you increase traffic and generate more sales from your website. The plugin was developed by Pippin Williamson from Pippins Plugins and Andrew Munro from Sumobi. Pippin is known for his hugely popular plugin Easy Digital Downloads, a plugin that Andrew develops Add Ons for as well.

In this article, I would like to show you how Affiliate WP works and what it can do for you and your website.

Using Affiliate WP

Affiliate WP was designed to work with popular membership and eCommerce WordPress plugins. The following membership and eCommerce plugins are or have been supported by Affiliate WP:

• MemberMouse
• JigoShop
• Easy Digital Downloads
• WooCommerce
• WP e-Commerce
• Shopp
• Restrict Content Pro
• Wishlist Member
• Gravity Forms
• Paid Memberships Pro

You need to open the integrations area in the plugin settings page and enable the appropriate plugin that you want to integrate.

There are a total of seven pages in the settings area: Overview, Affiliates, Referrals, Visits, Reports, Tools, and Settings.

The overview page displays a summary of paid and unpaid referrals and earnings. It also displays recent referrals, recent referral visits, and the latest affiliates to sign up.

Adding new affiliates is straight forward. You can do it manually through the admin area. All you need to do is define the user, their rate of commission, and their payment email address. The user has to already exist in your database for you to add them as an affiliate in this way. If they do not already have an account on your website, you will need to do this manually through the Users section in WordPress.

When Affiliate WP is activated, it creates a new page on your website entitled “Affiliate Area” and populates the page with the shortcode [affiliate_area]. If affiliate registration is enabled, the affiliate area will display a registration page for new affiliates. As you can see, it asks for the same information that a standard WordPress registration form would request.

Affiliate registrations can be enabled in the Affiliate WP miscellaneous settings area. The plugin allows you to be notified of all new applications by email and hold back applications until you manually approve them. Additional settings relating to referrals are also located on this page.

The affiliate area lists all paid and unpaid referrals and earnings, visits, and conversions. The affiliate’s conversion rate is listed too.

Affiliates can be notified whenever they make a new referral. Affiliate WP allows affiliates to earn a commission by referring visitors to any part of your website. All they have to do is enter the URL and then click the “Generate URL” button. This should encourage affiliates to link to more areas of your website.

In the admin area, you can see a list of all affiliates. It lists their earnings, their commission rate, their number of referrals, and the visits they have generated. The data can be sorted by any column, which makes it easy to quickly view the best performing and worst performing affiliates.

All referrals are displayed in a list on the referrals page. You can filter results to show paid, unpaid, pending, and rejected referrals. Data can be filtered by date too. Referrals can be moderated via the action column. You can reject referrals, mark them as paid, and accept the payment.

The visits page is a practical way of seeing where your traffic is coming from. It shows the page the visitor arrived on and the referring URL. It also shows the affiliate who referred the visitor. The time and date, referral ID, and IP, are displayed. There is also a column that highlights whether the visit generated a referral (i.e. a sale).

The reports page can generate reports of referrals and visits. Important data is displayed at the top of the report with a graph displayed underneath. Data can be filtered for a range of timelines such as today, yesterday, this month, last month, and this year. You can also define a custom timeline.

All referral information can be exported to a CSV file. The data can be filtered for specific affiliates and specific dates. You can also restrict data to referrals that are paid, unpaid, pending, or rejected. Plugin settings can be imported and exported through this area too. The next tab allows you to recount stats for a particular affiliate, while the last tab allows you to migrate data from the Affiliates Pro WordPress plugin.

I mentioned the integrations and miscellaneous tab earlier. The one settings area I have not discussed as yet is General Settings. This page allows you to specify your license number. Your license number is not necessary for the plugin to function, though it is necessary to receive automatic plugin updates and integrated support.

The pages that are used for your affiliate area and terms and conditions can be defined in General Settings as well. You can also define the variable that is used for referral URLs and the default commission rate. Currency settings are also defined in this area.

Add Ons

Developer license holders have access to all Affiliate WP Add Ons. The Add Ons PayPal Adaptive Payments and Visitor Country Logs are in the pipeline, however at the moment, the only Add On available is Tiered Affiliate Rates.

As the name suggests, Tiered Affiliate Rates allows you to automatically increase the commission rates that affiliates receive as they generate more sales for you. For example, you could increase commission rates from 20% to 25% when they have generated fifty sales and increase it to 30% once they have generated one hundred sales.

This kind of system is frequently used by companies to award top earning affiliates.

Pricing

Affiliate WP has a fair pricing structure that is very competitive. A personal license retails at $49 and allows you to use Affiliate WP on one website. The business license costs $99 and allows the plugin to be used on three websites. The developer license retails at $199 and allows you to use the plugin on an unlimited number of websites. This license also grants you use of all Affiliate WP Add Ons.

All licenses come with one year of updates and support. Licenses can be renewed at a 40% discount off the original price and their refund policy allows you to claim a full refund within 30 days of purchase if you are not happy with what the plugin can do.

Overview

Affiliate WP is a great way of integrating affiliate functionality into your website if you make money through an online store or membership website. The plugin works natively with all WordPress caching plugins and is translation ready, so I do not foresee any plugin or theme conflicting with it. It also supports an unlimited number of affiliates and there is extensive documentation available to help you use the plugin.

Once the plugin has been installed, you can start promoting your affiliate program and build an army of affiliates that will promote your products and services for you.

I tested the plugin for an hour or so and was impressed with what it can do. Pippin has a genuine passionate for WordPress and works hard to develop practical WordPress solutions such as Easy Digital Downloads, Better Recent Posts Widget Pro, and Easy Content Types. The dedication he has shown to his other plugins is a good indication that Pippin and Andrew are going to add more features to Affiliate WP over the next year.

To find out more about the plugin, please visit Affiliate WP.

Thanks,
Kevin