Using Affiliate Marketing to Grow Your WordPress Plugin Sales

Here’s a familiar scenario: You’ve spent quite some time developing what you think is a phenomenal WordPress plugin. You were sure it’d become a hit, and you’ll gain massive profits from this project, but that’s not what’s happening. Now you’re looking for a marketing strategy in hopes of reviving your stagnant project.

The good news is that there’s a perfect strategy to promote WordPress plugins: affiliate marketing.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a marketing strategy that brands use to increase their sales. This strategy involves a relationship between an affiliate and you, the retailer. As the retailer, you provide a link to the affiliate that they’ll share with others. This link is where prospects can buy and download your product, which is a WordPress plugin.

The best part about this is that you’ll only need to pay them if they bring satisfying results. For instance, if they wrote an article about your plugin and no one clicks the link, you don’t have to pay them. Only when their visitors click the link will you be obliged to give the agreed amount.

A great example of such a platform is iAffiliate Management.

However, if you insist on finding out how to utilize affiliate marketing yourself, you should start by understanding the value of this strategy.

Why use affiliate marketing?

The partnership of a brand and an affiliate is nothing to scoff at. Affiliates can make a living from your products, while you can improve your sales with the help of these affiliates. In other words, it rewards both parties, but why is affiliate marketing better than different strategies?

• Low startup

When implementing a marketing plan, you need to have money for the startup. Brands usually need to allocate a budget for two things, a marketing team and a platform they’ll use. However, since affiliates will have to do the marketing themselves, you can combine these costs into one.

• Low maintenance

After your affiliates settle their platforms, you won’t have to spend anything aside from their commissions, and even then, you’ll only pay them if they prompt a customer to download your WordPress plugin.

• Automatic content creation

Affiliates often create posts that promote your plugin. Doing so will give prospects the final push to download your plugins.

• Scalability

To scale an affiliate marketing campaign, you simply have to add the number of affiliates. In other words, scaling your project is a lot easier than when you use different channels.

How do you use affiliate marketing to boost your plugin sales?

Despite having many benefits, experts don’t recommend diving into affiliate marketing without any prior knowledge. Below are the steps you need to follow when using affiliate marketing to drive more sales for your WordPress plugin:

1. Prepare a product page

Plugins, no matter how simple they are, can become a great help to WordPress users. However, they won’t see a plugin’s value unless you explain it to them. And for that, you’ll need a landing page for your plugin.

Here are some of the things you need to include to make a good landing page:

• Description: Before anything else, you need to create a description that includes everything you want to explain to the user. You can include how the plugin works, the reason why you developed it, and the likes. Make sure this isn’t too long.
• Visuals: You must also include images and videos that can describe how the plugin works, preferably screenshots of the plugin, highlighting its functions.
• Documentation: Documentation refers to a page on which users can go if they want to learn anything about the plugin. It includes things like how-to guides and relevant content. You can also add an FAQs section while you’re at it.
• Customer support: Adding a button that users can click to ask for support will also help greatly.

Consider this as the page where prospects can learn everything about your WordPress plugin. After all, even if your affiliates are the best in the world, you can’t convince customers if they know nothing about your plugins.

2. Create a commission system

After preparing the product page, you must also decide how you’d like to distribute the commissions among your affiliates. You can stick to the traditional commission system, but you can also improve your affiliates’ loyalty by adding a twist. Either way, here are two common types of commission systems:

• Revenue Shares: You can make it so that the affiliate will receive a percentage of the revenue you get from the WordPress plugin.
• Pay per Action: You can also provide commissions when the visitor of the affiliate’s website completes specific actions such as clicking the link, signing up for your newsletter, buying the product, or only viewing your advertisement.

Usually, giving out commissions for your product is simple, especially if it’s a physical product.

3. Pick suitable candidates

Since you’re going to trust everything into the affiliate, you have to pick those suitable for the job. Unfortunately, it’s going to be a bit difficult since you need to know the individual’s qualifications. Moreover, if you’re planning on hiring a lot of affiliates, it’ll be too time-consuming.

Here are some tips to make the job easier:

• Look for candidates in your existing customers
• Include a button that takes your visitors to an affiliate form
• Start a thread on forums that specialize in your industry
• Reach out to influencers or bloggers in your industry

Affiliate Marketing Made Easy

If you don’t have time for these steps, you can also make things a lot easier for you by using an affiliate marketing platform. Affiliate marketing platforms are websites where you can sign up as a merchant and post your product.

The main downside of using these platforms is that you can’t create your own commission system. Platforms like these usually have a set system that you should follow.

Additionally, you can’t pick your affiliates manually since the affiliates will be the ones to pick which products they want to market to their visitors. Still, it’s a convenient way to use affiliate marketing.

Wrapping Up

Affiliate marketing isn’t something you can underestimate. Many businesses achieved success with this strategy. Perhaps you’ll also reach your goal with affiliate marketing. But it goes without saying that effort is necessary to pull it off.

With this guide, utilizing affiliate marketing to drive more sales will become breezy, as long as your WordPress plugins are great. To keep track of these sales, you need a good too such as the one you can see here.