Wondering how to set up an affiliate program in WordPress?
One of the easiest ways to encourage people to promote your products is to set up an affiliate program. People can promote your products on their website, and when someone buys the product through their recommendation, the promoter can earn a commission.
What affiliate programs do is track referral sales and commissions.
Why add an affiliate program to promote your products
No matter what you sell online, setting up an affiliate program is one of the easiest ways to promote your products. By adding an affiliate program, you have the opportunity to promote your business through referrals and reach thousands of people without putting in much effort.
For example, if a blogger with 10,000 subscribers signs up for your plan, it means that by allowing them to promote your business on their website and social accounts, you can actually reach 10,000 people at the same time. The best part is, you only pay if their users purchase something on your website.
So the more members you attract, the more people you reach without actually having to spend a ton of extra money on advertising and marketing your business.
This is essentially a revenue sharing model that is a win-win for both you and the users who sign up for your affiliate program. Now that you understand what affiliate programs actually are, let’s look at how to add an affiliate program to your WooCommerce website.
How to Add an Affiliate Program to Your WordPress Site
Adding an affiliate program to your WordPress website is easy if you use the right plugin. AffiliateWP is one such plugin that we recommend to all our users.
AffiliateWP is one of the best plugins for creating a full-featured affiliate program in WordPress. Its setup is very simple. Simply install and activate the plugin to start using it.
With AffiliateWP, you can easily manage your affiliate program right from your WordPress dashboard. The user-friendly interface lets you view real-time reports such as affiliate-referred visits, referrals, earnings, affiliate signups, and more.
Additionally, the affiliate area allows your affiliates to track their performance, view earnings, find creative ideas, and even generate referral links using the built-in referral link generator.
With this plugin, launching your affiliate program becomes very simple without any complicated and time-consuming processes. It is a complete solution for anyone who wants to start an affiliate program to promote their business.
Check out our detailed AffiliateWP review to learn more.
Another plugin we recommend is Easy Affiliate .
Easy Affiliate is an all-in-one affiliate marketing program plugin that allows you to monitor and track all affiliate clicks, sales, and payments directly from your website. It has a built-in affiliate application process that you can use to approve or reject users from your program.
There is also a professional affiliate dashboard where your affiliates can easily edit their account information, download their links and banners, view payment history, and more.
The best part? With Easy Affiliate, you save on fees you would otherwise pay to third-party affiliate networks.
To learn more, you can check out our Easy Affiliate review .
Both plugins are solid choices for creating an affiliate program in WordPress, so we’ll cover both methods in this article.
Method 1: How to Add an Affiliate Program Using AffiliateWP
The first step is to install AffiliateWP on your WordPress site.
Installing AffiliateWP is just like installing any other plugin . You first have to visit its official website and then download the plugin after signing up for a plan.
After downloading the software, go to your website’s WordPress dashboard and click on Plugins » Add New » Upload . Now upload the software you just downloaded and click on the Activate button to make it start working.
Once the plugin is activated, go to Affiliate » Settings to enter your license key. You can find your license key in your email receipt or in your AffiliateWP account area.
After activating your license key, you can start setting up your affiliate program on the same page.
AffiliateWP automatically creates a page for your Affiliate Area. However, if you want to change it, you can select a different page from the drop-down menu. You can also create a Terms of Use page and select it here.
Next, you can scroll down the page to set your referral rate type. You can choose a percentage or a fixed rate, and set the amount. You can also configure other settings here, such as the cookie expiration period.
Click Save Changes when you are finished .
On the Integrations tab, you can connect AffiliateWP to other popular plugins like WooCommerce , Easy Digital Downloads , MemberPress , WPForms , and more.
Place a check next to any plugin and click Save Changes to enable the connection.
In the Email tab, you can customize the emails sent to your affiliates. You can upload a logo, select an email template, enter the name and email address of the email sender, and more.
Once you are done, don’t forget to save your changes.
Next, in the "Other" tab, you can choose whether users need to be approved to become affiliates or whether new users are automatically registered as affiliates. You can add a logout link in the affiliate area, enable reCAPTCHA, and configure other settings.
Finally, on the Payment Services tab, you can connect a payment service so that you can pay directly into your affiliates’ bank accounts.
You’re all set! You have now added an affiliate program to your WordPress site using AffiliateWP.
Now let’s look at a few different ways to manage an affiliate program.
Manage your affiliate program with AffiliateWP
AffiliateWP offers a ton of features that make it easy to manage your affiliate program.
You can view all the affiliate partners that have joined your program by going to Affiliates » Affiliates page. You can also view their earnings, rates, paid and unpaid referrals, and visits at a glance.
In the Overview tab, you can also track the performance of your affiliate program in real time. This includes important statistics such as recent referrals, most valuable affiliates, latest affiliate signups, and paid and unpaid revenue.
In the dedicated affiliate marketing area, affiliates can log in and track their performance, view earnings, access creative assets, etc. They can even generate their own referral links using the built-in referral link generator.
AffiliateWP also offers a ton of free and paid add-ons to expand the functionality of your affiliate program. You can add leaderboards, affiliate QR codes, affiliate landing pages, lifetime commissions, and more.
Method 2: How to add affiliate programs using Easy Affiliate
To set up an affiliate program with Easy Affiliate, visit the official website, select a plan, and download the plugin. Then, install and activate the plugin .
Once the plugin is activated, you will be redirected to the Easy Affiliate tab in your WordPress dashboard. It will look like this:
Continue scrolling down the page and click on the “Start Wizard” button. This wizard makes it very easy to set up an affiliate program on your WordPress website.
The first step of the installation wizard is to enter your license key in the field provided. You can find this key in your Easy Affiliate account area and in your email receipt.
After verifying the license key, click on the ' Save and Continue' button.
Next, Easy Affiliate will check your existing affiliate program and provide migration options. If you don’t have an affiliate program yet, just click on the “ Save and Continue” button.
Next, you need to choose the eCommerce plugin you want to use with Easy Affiliate.
Easy Affiliate integrates with most major WordPress shopping carts, including WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads .
For this tutorial, we’ll just enable the WooCommerce option and click Save and Continue .
Then, add your business information, including company name, address, and more.
Once you have added these details, click Save and Continue to proceed to the next step.
You will now be prompted to set up the affiliate program signup process.
Easy Affiliate offers you three options:
- Application – Affiliates must apply to join your program, and you must approve their application.
- Public – Anyone can become a member instantly, no approval required.
- Private – Affiliates can only be added manually by you.
We recommend that you select the "Apply" option so that you can learn more about the affiliate before accepting them into your program.
After clicking the "Apply" option, you can also set other options for the affiliate application process. For example, you can collect affiliate address and tax information during registration or set it as required fields in the account.
You can also choose to display your affiliate agreement on the registration page. If you haven't created an affiliate agreement yet, Easy Affiliate can even automatically generate a default affiliate agreement.
After enabling the options you like, click the “ Save and Continue” button.
In the next step of the wizard, you can set your affiliate commission.
In Commission type , you can select Fixed amount or Percentage. In the field below, you can enter the percentage or amount of the commission.
You can also choose whether to pay commission on all sales or just the first sale, and select your payment method.
When all settings are as you wish, click Save and Continue .
Next, you can click on the "+Add" button to add creatives for your affiliate program. These creatives are marketing materials that you provide to your affiliates to promote your business. You can upload your website logo, product photos, banner ads, text documents, etc.
If you don’t have any ideas yet, you can click the “ Skip and Continue” button for now.
In the final step of the launch wizard, you can review the details of your new self-hosted affiliate program.
Finally, click Finish the installation and exit the wizard .
Create your affiliate program website page
Now you need to make sure you have the required affiliate program website pages, including the required affiliate application page, login, and affiliate dashboard pages.
These pages will help you automate most of your affiliate marketing programs.
Luckily, Easy Affiliate can automatically generate these pages for you in no time.
From your WordPress dashboard go to Go Easy Affiliate » Settings . At the bottom of the page, in the General tab, you can see the ready-made affiliate program page:
To preview any page, click on the eye icon. If you want to edit any page, click on the pencil icon. This will open the WordPress editor in a new tab.
Using the drop-down menu, you can also select an existing page on your website to replace the ready-made page in Easy Affiliate.
The automatically generated Easy Affiliate registration page is as follows:
It has fields where applicants can list their basic contact information as well as the website on which they will promote your business, how they plan to promote you, and their social media handles/links.
Simple member login page allows approved members to log into the member dashboard.
Finally, a pre-designed affiliate dashboard page lets affiliates track their payments, clicks, conversions, and more.
You can add links to these pages in your website's navigation menu or footer area.
Manage your affiliate program with Easy Affiliate
Easy Affiliate also allows you to easily track all affiliate activity on your website right from your WordPress dashboard.
You can go to Easy Affiliate » Reports to see a graphical overview of your affiliate statistics, such as clicks, unique visitors, and sales.
Below the chart, you can view the data for each day in the selected range in a table format. It also contains other data such as volume, commission, voided amount and total commission.
You can also go to the Clicks tab to see which affiliate link URLs are bringing you the most clicks.
This information includes the time and date of the click, the affiliate whose link was clicked, the affiliate link URL, and the IP address of the user who clicked the link.
That's it!
With AffiliateWP and Easy Affiliate, you can easily add an affiliate program to your WordPress website. Both options are beginner-friendly, yet powerful enough to create and manage a successful referral marketing strategy.
I hope this article was helpful to you. If you want to know more about making money as an affiliate, please click here .
Disclosure: Some of the links in this article contain affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you click through to visit us, at no extra cost to you. See how SidelinePlay is funded, why it’s important, and how you can support us.
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