AffiliateWP Review: A WordPress Plugin to Create a Functional Affiliate Program

One of the easiest and popular ways of earning online is through affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is simply defined as the act of promoting products or services (mostly online) through a unique affiliate link. You are paid a certain commission when people make a purchase through your affiliate link.

The commission could either be a one-time payment or a recurring commission. This is usually based on the terms and conditions of the brand you are promoting and the type of affiliate program you chose.

In today’s article, we are going to make a review of AffiliateWP. Let’s go properly into the review.

The Beginners Guide to Affiliate Marketing

As a business owner, if it’s your earnest desire to change the status quo of your online business to a greater height, then, AffiliateWP could be just what you need to achieve this goal.

It is highly recommended to promote good and reliable affiliate programs. What if instead of searching for an affiliate program to sign up for, you choose to create and design your own affiliate program for your online business?

Are you surprised? Okay, let me quickly explain what I meant. We have a plug-in that makes it super easy to effortlessly create an affiliate program suitable for WordPress sites. So, my review will focus solely on AffiliateWP.

What’s AffiliateWP?

AffiliateWP is known as a leading network that supports the creation of a full and functional affiliate marketing program on WordPress.

AffiliateWP was established in 2014, with the sole aim of providing a self-hosted, intuitive, and top-notch affiliate marketing solution for all WordPress sites.

One fun thing about AffiliateWP is that it is pretty easy to use and the setup process is also a breeze. You will love its simplicity. If you want a reliable plugin in WordPress to create an affiliate program, AffiliateWP will do the magic.

The plugin has great features and tools that you will need to create a functional affiliate program for your WordPress sites. Let’s check out some of these features.

Features of AffiliateWP

AffiliateWP has some interesting features that make it one of the best plugins among others.

Easy to set up: AffiliateWP is so easy to set up. You don’t even need any special training or skills to use it. You only need to install and activate it and your affiliate program will start running almost immediately.

Accurate Affiliate Tracking Tool: AffiliateWP has a powerful tool that effectively tracks all affiliate referrals. This tool also works well on servers with hostile caching.

Integration with Other Plugins: AffiliateWP supports full integration with other popular plugins. With this, you are constantly updated with important actions from other popular WordPress, membership Plugins and e-commerce.

Real-Time Reporting: This tool is used to track all referrals, affiliate-referred visitors, affiliate registration, and earnings in a real-time manner.

Highly Flexible: AffiliateWP is very fast and flexible and it guarantees your site of being promoted through your affiliate. Your affiliates will be equipped with unlimited texts and resources.

Coupon Code Tracking: This tool is used to connect and trace coupon codes to any affiliate account.

Easy Affiliate Management: With this feature, you can perform some tasks like viewing your affiliate reports, your top affiliate earners, affiliate regulations and can as well edit an affiliate account.

Automatic Affiliate Creation: This feature enables an affiliate account to be automatically created for users that register their accounts on your WordPress site.

Manual Affiliate Approval: As a user (admin) on AffiliateWP, you have full control to moderate the affiliate registrations. You can also manually create an account or automatically accept an account.

Referral Link Generator: This tool is mainly used by an affiliate to generate his/her unique referral link. This is done at the affiliate area otherwise known as the dashboard.

In addition to all these features, you can perform many other features on AffiliateWP. For example; you can set a cookie expiration date by choosing how long a referral tracking link should be valid.

On AffiliateWP, you can also add some shortcodes that are usually WordPress- friendly. These shortcodes are important for different forms such as the; affiliate login form, registration form, URL, etc.

Premium Add-ons on AffiliateWP

1. REST API Extended

AffiliateWP has a REST API that is used by external applications and developers to work with various data in the databases of AffiliateWP.

It enhances the REST API update, adds the Create, Delete, and Add-in operations in the combination. This makes both the external application and developer have full control of all the data in the AffiliateWP.

There are lots of possibilities that come with this API and are almost unlimited. Below are some examples of its possible applications:

• It tracks references in a personalized e-commerce system
• Synchronization of partners’ accounts across different servers and databases
• A partner account gets an automatic update when changes occur in external applications
• Partner reference records are created when an order is being processed in a different payment service provider

2. Zapier For AffiliateWP

On the AffiliateWP pro, the Zapier add-on is used to connect affiliates to other web services. The Zapier account connects affiliates to over 700 web services. All available applications in Zapier can be easily connected to AffiliateWP.

Zapier pro plugin can be authenticated with a Zapier account with the aid of an API feature that is available in AffiliateWP. Let’s see some of the functions and features of Zapier:

• It helps to activate your desired notification
• You can enable Zapier notification for referrals, partners, visits, payments, and creatives.
• It authenticates to your site in a secure manner which uses the Affiliate WP REST API
• Zapier.com usually pops up a notification for you to authenticate your Affiliate WP on your WordPress site.

3. Affiliate Landing Pages

You can create a dedicated landing page from the partners’ landing pages. With this, you can easily design a landing page for any of your partners.

With the landing page, you can have more insight into the partner. You literally have access to detailed information about the partner. For instance, you can easily view specific content posted by that partner.

Probably, one of the most interesting facts about the affiliate homepage lies in their integration that is quite transparent to WordPress. All you have to do is simply create a landing page for the partner. That’s all.

4. Direct Link Tracking

With this feature, partners will be able to directly link to your site. Here, the partner doesn’t need any partner link to have access to your website. This alone motivates your partners and it could even lead to more sales.

Sometimes, when visitors spot out an affiliate link on a website, they might become a little bit skeptical since they understand that the affiliate gets paid a commission when he/she makes a purchase through the link. You might lose a potential customer due to this event and your affiliate too would have labored in vain.

But when you use a direct link tracking, your affiliate links remain unknown to your site visitors, making them open your site, see your brands and probably make a purchase. So it’s a win-win for you and your partners.

5. Custom Affiliate Slugs

AffiliateWP provides lots of partner URLs, for your partners. A slug forms the basis of a reference URL that contains the ID or username of the partner.

Your affiliates can also use the custom affiliate slug to create their custom slugs. Custom affiliate slug also is used to keep a username confidential.

For instance, a partner with an existing WordPress username can decide to keep it confidential by creating another custom slug for his affiliate links. Custom slug is usually personal, and relevant to an affiliate. It can also be random.

Why You Should Use AffiliateWP

There are loads of reasons for or benefits of using the service of AffiliateWP. However, we will discuss just 6 salient reasons you should go for AffiliateWP instead of another similar network.

1. Developer-Friendly Affiliate

AffiliateWP is user-friendly with tons of hooks and templates to choose from. You can also add custom features with just a few clicks of the mouse.

2. Higher Visibility

Overtime, AffiliateWP is proven to increase and enhance the visibility of a brand in search engines. As your brand products and services are continually promoted, it dramatically boosts the SEO of your website.

3. More Traffic

When your visibility increases on search engines, it has a direct impact on your website. This is simply because; more people will visit your site to see its content – in this case, your brand products and services!

4. Enhance More Sales

More traffic from higher visibility can translate to more sales because you have good chances of converting your site visitors into real customers.

5. Integration with Other Popular Plugins

As earlier stated, AffiliateWP can be incorporated with 28 popular e-commerce, membership, form and WordPress plugin such as the following;

• PayPal
• Woocommerce
• Contact form 7
• Restrict content pro
• Caldera form
• Zippy courses
• Stripe
• WP forms
• Gravity forms
• Paid membership pro and lots more.

6. Customer Support

AffiliateWp offers world-class support to all its users. It has an efficient and responsive customer support system that is available 24/7.

AffiliateWP Plans and Pricing

AffiliateWP has 4 different plans to choose from. These plans have different prices, which of course, is according to the features and services it offers. Let’s take a look at the plans, their features and plans.

The Personal Plan

This plan costs $99 per year. It has 15 official add-ons to choose from. The plan is included with all the extra features and support plugin updates and email updates. This plan works just on 1 site.

The Plus Plan

The plus plan goes for $149 per year. It also has 15 plugins that are free and it supports plugin updates. It works on 3 sites and has email support. All core features are included in this plan.

The Professional Plan

This plan costs $249 per year. It has 14 pro-add-ons worth $840. In addition, it also has 15 official add-ons that are free. This plan works on unlimited sites, supports email and plugin updates and it covers all core features

The Ultimate Plan

This is the last plan and has a one-time payment of $449. It also has 14 pro-add-ons worth $840 and the official add-ons.

The ultimate plan works on unlimited sites and has an unlimited plugin update as well as unlimited email support. All the core features are covered in this plan.

Note that the email support and plugin updates are only available during your current subscription. The pro-add-ons are provided for users that choose either the professional or ultimate license.

It is also worth noting that AffiliateWP backs up all its plans with a money-back guarantee of a 30-day period. Thus, you shouldn’t worry about losing resources.

If its service doesn’t meet your expectations, you get a refund with no questions asked. With that said, it is, however, important to carefully read the terms and conditions governing its refund policy.

Pros and Cons of AffiliateWP

Now, let’s see some of the pros and cons associated with Affiliate WP.

Pros:

• Accurate affiliate tracking
• Complete integration
• Unlimited affiliates
• Real-time reporting
• Developer-friendly
• Affiliate coupon tracking
• World-class customer support
• Automatic affiliate creation.

Cons:

• The pricing plans are quite expensive for a starter.

Conclusion

AffiliateWP is a great tool an online business owner should have. It offers full control of your site operations and also integrates with other popular WordPress plugins.

It has different plans to choose from which is backed up with a strong money-back guarantee for users who may not be satisfied with what they paid for.

We have already established that one of the easiest ways of making more sales is to have an affiliate program for your brands. This is because there are lots of affiliate marketers that are willing to promote any brand and get a commission for it.

You can’t go wrong with Affiliate WP, it has everything you need to create and run a successful affiliate program.

Do you want to start an affiliate marketing business? All you need to do is try out Wealthy Affiliate – an online business community that has grown at a faster pace than the entire industry! Check Wealthy Affiliate out now.