Reimagining Affiliate Programs for Your WooCommerce Business

Robbie:
Hello and welcome to Do the Woo. We have Alex Stanford here with us today. Alex is working at GoDaddy currently, I believe, but boy, he’s done a lot of things, which we’re going to talk about several of his past experiences here because it really ties into the topic we’re going to talk about today, which is our affiliate programs the best that they could be, or is there something we could do better? So Alex, welcome to the show.

Alex:
Hey, thanks.

Robbie:
You have worked on a lot of WordPress websites, it sounds like over the years, both as before you were a developer. You worked with WordPress before you were a developer, correct? That’s right. And what did you do? Let’s kind get your, what’s your history coming into WordPress here?

Alex:
Sure. In 2009, 2010, I created a website that taught people how to use the photo editor gimp, the open source editor, and I was the one tutorials and things like that, and it kind of turned it into a course membership site, not really knowing that that’s what it was because there wasn’t plugins in place that made it really easy to do that at the time and ended up getting into development because I realized I wanted to work remotely. So I ended up changing my career over into programming and over the course of that time I was freelancing and I did since then, dozens of WordPress websites, custom themes, things like that, and literally hundreds of plugins that I’ve just built from scratch for clients and things. Everything from a single file that has a couple hooks to entire complicated systems. From there, I ended up actually getting hired at Sandhill Development back when Pippin was running it and I was working on the affiliate WP team. I spent some time on EDD and a couple other products for them, but it was pretty much almost always that affiliate WP that is. And I worked on that for a few years until they got sold to automotive and I ducked out at that point and ended up going over to GoDaddy where I’m working on their manage WooCommerce offerings as a developer there and helping them with all of that stuff.

Robbie:
Awesome. So the managed WooCommerce product that you’re working on there at GoDaddy, do they offer, I know a lot of the managed woos offer a lot of plugins with like packaged in with it. Is that something you guys are also doing there?

Alex:
Yeah, they do a lot of that. Another big initiative of theirs has been setting it up so that it can work with different payment platforms and things in a different e-commerce management. So you can actually pull it outside of WooCommerce, but it still uses WooCommerce. But if you wanted to have multiple platforms, maybe you’re selling on Amazon, maybe you’re selling on using a direct payout inside of a store, and you’re also using WooCommerce as well, it all integrates into this one comprehensive thing. So that’s been something I’ve been working helping them with. I’ve been on that specific piece of it.

Robbie:
Awesome. And now do they also give some sort of affiliate plugin with the Woo offering, or is that an extra?

Alex:
No, I don’t think That’s not one of their offerings. No. I think WooCommerce has something kind of like it. Obviously, affiliate WP is out there. There’s a few other ones, and then ones that also exist, there’s tons of them that are not even WooCommerce or WordPress specific.

Robert:
Do we need plugins to handle affiliates?

Alex:
Do we need plugins to handle affiliates? I think that we need plugins to help us maintain track and maintain how much we owe them for whenever a click comes in or something along those lines. So yeah, I think so. I, it doesn’t have to be a plugin necessarily. It could be a third party thing, but something has to keep track of what traffic has come in, who gets credit for this action, and how much do I owe that person.

Robert:
That’s fair. I like to ask the blatantly obvious questions.

Alex:
Yeah, yeah, please do. I love it.

Robbie:
I was going to say, and to our listeners, most of our listeners are going to be agencies, people who are working with WordPress and Woo already, and so they probably understand affiliate, but just so that we make sure everybody is understanding what we’re talking about here. Alex, how would you define an affiliate program?

Alex:
Well, I’ll tell you what other affiliate programs will define it as, and then I’ll define it in the way that I will because I think they’re two different things, and I think that’s kind of a key part of this conversation. So a typical affiliate program, whatever you think about it is there are people out there who are, they produce content, whether it’s a podcast or a blog, blog content or they’re influencers on social media or something like that. They are given a special link, like an affiliate link with a referral tag or something in it that they give to their audience. And whenever their audience clicks on that link, that tracking information inside of that link ensures that person, whoever that influencer or whatever it is, gets credit if that person that they directed to the site decides to make a purchase sometime in the not too distant future, and then they end up paying that person a percentage of that payout or something like that based on that.

So that’s fundamentally, that’s the basic, that’s what most affiliate programs are today. There’s other ones that you’ll see that are based on the number of visits and other things that are a little less popular because they’re so easy to do in a fraudulent manner. But to me, the definition of an affiliate program is really, it’s just a partnership. You’re just creating a partnership between a company and a person, and you are giving them a way to be able to get paid for their performance. So you give them specific things that you can measure and specific things that you can track and you pay them based on how those numbers all work out.

Robbie:
So we also could just give someone a coupon code and tell your people to use this coupon code, but I feel like the more traditional is what you mentioned where we give them an affiliate link because then there’s no resistance, there’s no drag in that no one had to enter in a coupon code, things like that. Correct.

Alex:
Right, exactly. And at the end of the day, it’s still the same idea though, right? It’s something is tracking this action. In that case it’s the coupon code instead of the link.

Robbie:
Yes, absolutely. So now how do you think that we could improve upon this process that we’ve been using out there? And by the way, this is used by, I mean, Amazon, everybody can get an affiliate code, and so this has been around for a very long time, so how can we make it better, Alex?

Robert:
Well, sorry, Alex. And even just to jump in there, with third party cookies getting smashed out of the universe, I think this is more timely than ever to see what your alternatives and mind are.

Alex:
Yeah, so the first thing that comes to mind is, like I said before, I want to challenge the notion that an affiliate program does not have to be built in the way it is. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be between a salesperson and a company. It doesn’t have to be about sales. It could be about driving traffic with a blog content program. Maybe you have a bunch of writers that you hire to write content on your site and maybe you pay them a fixed amount of money for writing the content. But then on top of that, you offer them a bonus every month based on how much of the traffic their content drives to your site. So maybe you pay them a percentage of the viewership share, maybe you give them a bonus on top of that, more credit even for if they are driving more comments on your site or something like that.

It could even be a customer satisfaction program. Maybe you have a support team who’s managing tickets and writing tickets, and maybe you’re paying them a bonus based on the number of tickets they resolve along with maybe something like the number of times that they successfully get feedback or the times they get good feedback or whenever they are able to close a cross sell or something like that. There’s so many different things throughout our businesses from the top to bottom where you can create a pay for performance platform, a pay for performance program that an affiliate program is just one of many opportunities. And I think that this is kind of a big thing where affiliate programs are failing right now is that they’re so on the sale and the affiliate link and there’s this one very hyper-specific path and this very specific kind of relationship that people create. And that’s really the big thing I want to challenge.

Robbie:
And so do you think that the way that we are tracking currently could handle all the different methods you’re talking about paying affiliates for? I feel like there’s got to be better metrics that we capture to be able to do what you’re talking about.

Alex:
Yeah, I think that a lot of plugins are already kind of doing the tracking in that way. And to the point about things like GDPR and the concerns about third party cookies and things like that, we need to start thinking about how affiliate programs are tracking. So say for example, let’s go back to that course example. So maybe you’ve got a multicourse, multiple course creators, and you’re managing a course site and there’s a whole bunch of course creators and they’re all creating content on your site and maybe you’re paying them based on how much traffic, how many minutes their videos bring in from premium subscribers, and you pay them a percentage of a specific amount of money each month based on how many minutes of content the subscribers view that belongs to them or something like that. There’s so many ways you can approach this, but that kind of tracking doesn’t need to be user specific tracking. I don’t really need to know that, which user watched which video to be able to figure out that information. All I need to know is that that person was logged in and that they were watching this specific video or that they completed this course or this course was completed this number of times. So there’s different ways that we can remix how these programs work that can adapt to how the ever-changing landscape of privacy is just naturally laying out.

Robert:
Is there a new kind of business model we should be looking at, or are these things we can just solve technically? Because there’s a couple of things in play if what I’m hearing is right.

Alex:
I think the business model already exists. I think if you look at companies like Uber, they’re a pretty good example of this pay for performance model. I know there’s a lot of infamy around them, and I don’t even necessarily agree with how they approach everything that they’ve done, but they do this. I mean, they are fundamentally a pay for performance business in such a large respect because all the people who drive their cars or not their cars, but drive their own cars and do this service that Uber is offering, they’re getting paid based on the amount of time and the amount of drives and trips that they complete. They’re being paid for performance. So the model already exists. It’s just a matter of creating a system that enables us to be able to do that a little more effectively.

Robbie:
And what about fraud, Alex? I mean, like you said, well, I don’t have to know which user logged in and watch that course eight times, but at the same token, I know that there are a lot of people who talk about getting their indie films on Netflix and then they put it on continuous loop for their cat to watch while they’re at work because it does drive up their numbers on their content. So how do we also account for the people who are going to try and abuse it?

Alex:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s going to be an ever continuing war. I don’t think there’s really a single solution to that problem. Any suggestion I make today is not going to be true tomorrow. You know what I mean?

Robbie:
I think you’re right.

Alex:
In the case of the course example, maybe you have to manually track it, worst case scenario, or maybe it’s based on the number of minutes, maybe you only give them credit for watching the video once and maybe it’s bound to the user in some way that doesn’t identify that user specifically. Do you know what I mean? So you can decouple what this user’s watched with that or something along those lines. But honestly, most of the time with an LMS platform or even e-commerce, oftentimes once you create an account, I mean the rules kind of change a little bit. So like a tracking cookie, I didn’t give you my consent to track me, whereas with an e-commerce site where I’ve created an account and I’m doing these actions, it’s a little different because at least to some degree, you’ve probably agreed to some kind of privacy policy or something along those lines. When you’ve signed up LMS courses or LMS platforms and things like that, they already are tracking all of these analytics. I’m just proposing that we utilize those in a way that goes beyond just trying to understand and market something. I’m suggesting that we can use those to directly determine how well the specific aspects of our business is performing and associate that with our partnerships directly.

Robbie:
Absolutely. Now you mentioned earlier paying someone to write the content, then giving them affiliate referral fees on top of that. Now I know that a lot of affiliate programs out there are just one or the other, right? I mean, well, it’s not affiliate if they just pay you for it. Either they pay you for the content and own it, and then there’s no residuals after that that have to happen, or they don’t pay you and you are on a wing and a prayer that it’s going to bring in enough residuals that it made it worth your time to do. I do like that you proposed the opposite or the blend of that rather where they’re going to get something that is paid for, so some of their time was compensated for because you never know. I mean, we had this with some of our books with our authors that it was before I bought OS trainings, they would just do a split on profits.

The problem was is that those authors depends on the topic. So some topics are very popular and that means author will do fine, but especially when you start, the more and more niche technical you get, the less popular is going to be when you’re just looking at quantity. And so then we found that it felt not fair to them because they weren’t making enough with the residuals, and so it had to be that they were compensated for their time at the beginning. So I do think a blend is not a bad idea, but there are times when affiliate referral, I’ll call it both affiliate referral doesn’t work just because the numbers aren’t there. I mean, almost when you’re paying someone little bits off of something, there has to be large numbers for it to make sense, correct.

Alex:
Yeah, the profit margin has to be there.

Robbie:
Exactly. Is there some sort of a metric out there you think that people look for on what makes sense?

Alex:
Actually, I don’t have it in front of me. Maybe I’ll share it with you afterwards so you can put it in the notes or something. But I actually just wrote, I have an email series that I’ve done for this about that exact topic, and one of the things that I covered is basing your payout percentage on your profit. So if you’ve got a 30% profit or a 50% profit, this is the max that you should probably be able to realistically expect that you can pay out, and that just fundamentally changes the people you’re looking for. So if your profit margins are really low, it probably doesn’t even make sense to do this unless you can find somebody who can sell at a crazy high volume, but even if they’re selling at a really high volume, they probably have people who have better affiliate programs than what you have with a higher percentage.

So they’re going to focus on those anyway. So there’s definitely some trickiness there, but I don’t think that means that those people can’t use a partnership program. Maybe an affiliate program doesn’t work for them, but there might be other platforms or other programs that do make a lot of sense. I’ll give you another example of another place where this is kind of tricky and it’s ironic, but the WordPress plugin space is kind of tricky with this because even though our profit margins are typically very good and we can create really good competitive affiliate programs, there’s usually a significant commitment whenever you’re using a plugin depending on the complexity. So take for example, WooCommerce or something like that. When you say that you’re going to use WooCommerce, you’re probably never going to stop using WooCommerce. It’s going to be a while before you ever get out of that ecosystem because it is so ingrained in your business.

Good luck transitioning all of those, especially if you have recurring payments. Good luck transitioning, good luck, good luck transitioning out of that. Good luck transitioning out of your payment process or any of that. Nobody’s going to want to touch that because if you mess it up, you’re just gutting your business. So it’s a significant commitment. So you have something like that. There’s research and there’s steps that go into that. So it’s usually not just a, oh, I’m just scrolling Facebook and I get an ad from an influencer who said, WooCommerce is super cool, so I’m going to go and buy it and then change my entire business paradigm on that one touch point. So in cases like that, it’s several touch points, several different recommendations from several different affiliates over time, and something that’s kind of unfortunate about the way affiliate programs work right now, it’s almost always whichever affiliate referred them last, it’s all the credit, all of it. There can only be one winner. You know what I mean? So that’s another thing that I’m challenging a little bit is why can’t we have several winners? Why can’t it be every one of those affiliates who ever referred that person and recommended your product and drove traffic to your site? Why can’t every one of those get some of the credit? Now, maybe the last one gets a little more credit and it decreases as you go through, but why is it always just that one person?

Robert:
Sounds like we need one of those highfalutin Bitcoin contract systems.

Alex:
Yeah, right. Yeah, no kidding. I’m going to stay very far away from Web3, but yeah, I hear you.

Robbie:
I was going to say, now we need multilevel marketing tracked with blockchain. There we go. Multilevel, multilevel affiliate marketing with blockchain. There we go.

Alex:
Boy, that is the heading I’m going to use on April 1st.

Robert:
It’ll totally work if we all actually start using Web3 in any way, shape, or form in five years. Yeah,

Alex:
I agree wholeheartedly.

Robert:
Yeah,

Alex:
I dunno. That’s a whole can of worms. Yeah, whole can of worms.

Robbie:
Exactly. So there are a lot of people who literally all they do is affiliate marketing, meaning they sign up and they become affiliate marketers for several companie. We’ll just start with the big guys, like I said, like Amazon, right? I mean, mommy bloggers have been doing this forever. They write their little blog and they’re like, you need this bottle with this top and you need this diaper bag, and everything is 100% linked to Amazon. Now, I always appreciate when affiliate marketers are upfront and say it, I always feel like it’s a little deceptive when they don’t. What do you think about that?

Alex:
Yeah, I mean, of course, I think that Amazon is a really great case study on how not to run an affiliate program.

Robbie:
Really? What did they get wrong?

Alex:
Oh, they didn’t get anything wrong in regard to the timing and everything. It’s just so very clear that the fundamental format, it’s worked great for them. Do you know what I mean? But I don’t think that that’s something that would fly today is for one, because of everything you just said. But I think that now a successful affiliate, I think that they’re smaller, way smaller. So instead of trying to focus on getting hundreds or thousands of different affiliates, you focus on getting maybe 10 that are really in it with you that you’re working with, because that’s what you’re going to get anyway. You have a hundred affiliates, 10 of them are actually going to ever make a conversion. It’s the same idea as what we were talking about, about with the writing, where if you’re only paying people based on that performance and you’re not paying them something else, what you’re going to end up with is just the same kind of content written by the same people about the same topics, because it’s the only thing that’s making them any money. You have to be thoughtful on how these programs are built, and I think that going smaller is going to yield much better results. Like I said, to me, this is a partnership not just a whole bunch of just randos that you don’t really know and you’re just trying to get them to sell your product. Do you know what I mean?

Robert:
But if we pick on Amazon, I mean, the barrier to entry to have your blog or whatnot filled with 10,000 affiliates is zero and zero. The benefit may be that there’s a long tail on some of that kind of stuff. No,

Alex:
Yeah, I agree with that. I was doing a lot of that whenever I started. That was actually how I got into WordPress in the first place, was being a blogger doing affiliate marketing. A lot of stuff I was selling through Amazon was camera, equipment, photography equipment and stuff like that. And it wasn’t making me, Jack, I was not making nearly enough money, and I had a good email list, a healthy email list of people that were responding to my emails regularly, talking to me regularly. I was getting 10 people signing up to my email list daily, 15,000 views a day and or a month, and I was getting lots of traffic, and I was not making any significant money. Very little money from Amazon. Most of my money came from whenever I wrote a couple of eBooks on the topic on, and also from Cyber Monday.

It was one day out of the air where all of a sudden I just made a bunch of money, but it wasn’t even on the products I was recommending. It was just because those people happened to visit my site within 24 hours of Cyber Monday, and it’s just like, this doesn’t feel right. I’m making money on this affiliate program on products that I didn’t even refer this person for. And it’s just got so muddy and it just doesn’t make sense. And to me, if you’re going to make a lot of money as an affiliate today, it’s going to be where you’re in an affiliate program that’s offering you a good amount of money and is giving you all of the tools you need to be able to succeed. And when I say that, I don’t just mean an affiliate link and a couple of images to slap on your website.

I mean, they have personally done a sale. They have a workflow in place, they understand the educational process, and they will sit with you in a one-on-one meeting and be like, this is what I did. These are the things that work. These are the resources I have to offer you. Let’s spitball and figure out a way to use your audience to be able to actually convert these people. And that’s what I mean whenever I say it’s a lot smaller. Yes, the barrier to entry is definitely easier with Amazon, but it’s not easy money by any means compared with what I just suggested. That’s where that’s more like they call it a super affiliate, or I think in the book launch, he talks about this a little bit where he says a venture partner.

But it’s the same idea where you’re like in with this person, you’re in the thick of it. You’re really talking to them on this one-on-one level. That’s not scalable, but it doesn’t matter because if you’re only doing that with 10 people and those 10 people are getting conversion rates that are significant, and when you launch something with them, they make enough money to cover them for several months, and they do that with you, they’re going to come back and you’re going to be able to work with them a couple other times to do things like that. That’s what I mean whenever I say an affiliate program needs to be smaller. And that’s what I mean whenever I say it’s a case study that Amazon’s done it all wrong because the only person that’s ever won with the affiliate program with Amazon is Amazon. There’s definitely some affiliate marketers who’ve made some pretty good money doing it and things like that, but nine times out of 10, if you talk to somebody about it, those mommy bloggers, if any of them have made it and any of them have made money, I guarantee you that they’re not saying, yeah, I’m making bank from Amazon.

No, they started with Amazon and then they turned around, wrote a book, or they turned around and wrote a product, or they found an affiliate program and became a super affiliate and started making good money selling something way more niche and way more specific in a focused way.

Robert:
Is it possible to completely generate something internally as opposed to signing up to some affiliate program third party wise? I’m trying to think of, and maybe I’m just kind of going around in circles about the same thing, but so many folks want to sign up with other because it’s quicker, sign up with an affiliate program, fill out the categories that they’re interested in, yada, yada, yada. But is there a way to even have more super admin control over something like that? And is there anything out there that’s open?

Alex:
You mean, are you talking about an affiliate, almost like an affiliate program registry where you can search for affiliate programs based on what you write about.

Robert:
Exactly.

Alex:
Yeah, they kind of exist. There’s one out there called ClickBank that comes to mind immediately. Commission Junction, some of those they work. I had one that I was able to find programs, but I had a lot of trouble finding people who did approach affiliate marketing in the way that I’ve described. And I think that doesn’t really answer your question that great, honestly, but that’s as close as I’ve come. It is something that I’ve considered building in the future. I mean, maybe once siren’s moving and plugging along, I have considered the idea of doing something along those lines and integrating Siren directly with that so that there’s a registry. But I mean, something like that doesn’t exist today. No, not ordPress specifically. I

Robert:
I like that. Robbie and I can help you kick that off here.

Alex:
Yeah, I’m here for this.

Robbie:
Exactly. And like Robert said, Amazon has a very easy point of entry, and there’s a lot of others you could sign up. I’m on Host Gator, I’ve got a hosting account on there, and all of a sudden they’re like, Hey, would you like to be an affiliate? Here’s you a link. So there are a lot of places where there’s, and by the way, I don’t know if they have that. That was just, I just pulled a name out of the hat there. I actually don’t know if they have one, so I shouldn’t say that. But you know what I’m saying that a lot of places where you have accounts you’ll see where they’re like, Hey, here’s your affiliate link. And you’re like, well, I didn’t even necessarily sign up for an affiliate account, but they’ve made it very easy for you.

But I do feel like those easy ones are like Amazon, and you’re not going to get rich. You’re not going to pay your bills basically on doing that. And I don’t think people realize that. A lot of people think, oh, I’m going to start a YouTube channel and I’m going to make tons of money every month off of my YouTube channel. They don’t realize how hard that is and how many views you really have to get for it to be your job. I mean, it’s a lot as well as even the biggest influencers out there on YouTube are typically making more money off their sponsors than YouTube.

Alex:
Yeah, absolutely. And how committed you have to be if you’re doing it purely off of volume, off of traffic, whether it’s the number of hits you get on YouTube or it’s the number of affiliate clicks you get, because essentially that’s what happened with Amazon is what I was saying, I was getting referrals for clicks on products that had nothing to do with photography at that point. It’s just about volume. It doesn’t even matter what I’m talking about. All that matters is that you click on my affiliate link at some point that’s broken to me. That is, that’s not how this relationship is supposed to be. So that’s okay if you understand that and you’re fully committed to understanding how that game works. Cool. And it’s the same thing with YouTube where it’s like if you’re getting ad based traffic and that’s where you’re trying to make all your money, you just have to be committed to whatever content you write, no matter what that content is, it has to be all about making sure you get as many views as you can period. And that’s not necessarily good for the internet for one, and that’s not necessarily good for that platform. Even like YouTube’s platform or other platforms, look at Twitter, it’s a great case study in viral marketing and the dangers of that, you know what I mean? And how it got big and it got popular because it rewarded, it rewards, it continues to reward people for gaming that system in some way. So it’s just something you got to approach with some nuance. I think.

Robbie:
I like your idea of having a small group of affiliates that are partners, and I’ll almost call them your remote sales team is what I would call them. Yeah, hundred percent. But treating them not just an affiliate link, but actually as people that you know and can discuss things. You could almost look at it as a little bit of a business forum that you can use to discuss things too on how better to market your own product if you work with those people and actually know them. So I do like that idea of having this partnership with those super affiliates.

Alex:
I think another thing to even expand on that a little further is if you break away from the idea that one affiliate wins every sale, and instead you say multiple affiliates can win a sale, all of a sudden you can also, they can start working together. They’re no longer competing with each other. They can now be allies. They can help each other. So maybe one of them is really good at converting the actual conversion step. Maybe they’re really good at retargeting and things like that. And the other person is really good at pumping out content, really good content, and getting people on an email list. So now you’ve got two affiliates who can work together as a team and collaborate, and one person being the person who focuses on getting that traffic and getting that email list, and the other person focuses on getting the conversion. And if your program is set to support that, they both can win.

Robbie:
Well, Robert, do you have any other questions for Alex today?

Robert:
How do I make money off of being an affiliate of yours?

Alex:
Well, if you go to my site, I’ve got an email list you should probably sign up for. It

Robbie:
Sounds like it. What is that URL that people should visit Alex.

Alex:
That is SirenAffiliates.com.

Robbie:
Siren affiliates.com. All right.

Alex:
I have on that page, it describes the product that I’m building and things like that, and I’m launching it later this year, but basically the email list will allow people to be able to be notified when it happens. And obviously I’m going to be talking about this kind of stuff a lot more. So

Robbie:
Cool. Awesome. Well, we’re looking forward to it. And I will sign up for your email so I can see what’s going on with your build and when you’re ready to launch. How can people find you on social media? Alex,

Alex:
You can find me on X. You can also find me on Mastodon, and you could also just visit my site directly alexstandiford.com. My username on both of those profiles is at Alex Standiford. And then of course, if you’re on any Slack community that has the word WordPress in it, I’m probably in it. You can probably message me on there too.

Robbie:
Awesome. It’s great talking with

Alex:
You, Alex. Yeah, pleasure’s all mine. Thank you.

Robbie:
Alright, well everyone, thanks for joining us today. I hope you got something out of this conversation about affiliate marketing and maybe ways we could change this up and make it better. And don’t forget to catch the next episode of Do the Woo.