In Episode 60, we start our series on Affiliate Marketing and Affiliate Programs, sponsored by Bluehost. In this show, I’m flying solo and sharing my own experience of using WooCommerce as part of my affiliate marketing. WooCommerce gives you the ability to easily create affiliates as products, but there is so much more that goes into planning, organizing and making those affiliates work. Listen as I tell you how we did it.

I talked about:

* What affiliate marketing is

* How to set up your affiliates using WooCommerce

* How to manage your affiliates effectively

* What has worked best for us in placing and using our affiliate links

* How we are using WooCommerce to sell some of our affiliate products

Thanks to Our Podcast Sponsor: Bluehost

Transcript

You can also download a pdf of the full transcript here: WordPress eCommerce Show Episode 60 March 20 2017

Hey everyone and welcome back to the WP eCommerce Show. Bob Dunn here, also known as BobWP on the web. Today is a bit different from most of our shows as I am going to be flying solo on this one. Yes, I’m grabbing the mic for the entire podcast and I’ll be sharing my own thoughts on today’s topic. Which speaking of, this is the first of our 4-part series on both Affiliate Marketing and running an Affiliate program. Two of the four shows will be more focused on running an affiliate program. The other two shows, including today’s, is more on the affiliate marketing side of things. Two very different topics under one umbrella.

For those of you who are not familiar with what an affiliate is, well, let’s do this using an example. Let’s say I become an affiliate for Joe’s WordPress themes. Because of my relationship with Joe and his products, I am confident I can help him sell his themes. So I write a post about his theme. In it is a link to purchase the theme. If you decide to click through and buy it, I make a commission. It costs you no more to follow my link to purchase it. And that is that. Now I used a WordPress theme as an example, but there are affiliates in all industries. Heck, even in the credit card industry. And a lot of people make a very good living as affiliate marketers.

How to set up your affiliate products with WooCommerce

What I want to chat with you about today is how you can use WooCommerce as an affiliate marketer. In other words, how to make money from affiliates. First off, there are several things to think through on this. As you may know WooCommerce, technically, makes this very easy. When you create a product, you simply choose the Product Data that is labeled, External/Affiliate product. Once you have done that, you can create it like any other product, except that you will be putting in your affiliate link so when people go to the original site to purchase it it is tracked to make sure you get the commission on it. The other unique feature to this product type in WooCommerce is the ease of changing the button text. So instead of having it say “buy now” you might want to say, “buy on Joesthemes.com” or something like that. As you can see, the product creation in WooCommerce is pretty straightforward.

Install a good affiliate manager plugin

The second piece you will want to get in place is some kind of affiliate manager plugin. I use one called Thirsty Affiliates and actually have a post on how to use it with WooCommerce. The real benefit here is that it allows you to do a couple of things. One, to cloak your links, which means that instead of the extremely large link you might get from an affi...