Before you run off and install a dozen affiliate WordPress Plugins, how about spending a minute to focus sharply on what you wish to achieve with your referral program. Why? It’s the only way to choose the perfect affiliate plugin for your needs.
Here’s an hypothetical scenario. You have a theme, plugin, hosting or something else to offer the world, but just can’t seem to find the perfect marketing strategy. Now, you have your eyes trained on affiliate marketing and your guts say it’s exactly what you need to push your product(s) forward.
Perhaps that isn’t the case. Maybe, you’re the designer tasked with building an affiliate management system. You’re in the market for an affiliate WordPress plugin you can customize to your needs. The reason why you’re here matters less; it’s an accepted fact that an affiliate program helps you to boost traffic and sales.
Pleasantries aside, here are 10+ beautiful affiliate WordPress plugins and referral managers to create an affiliate program and grow your business.
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1. AffiliateWP
AffiliateWP is a fully fledged affiliate managing system that’s incredibly easy to setup yet surprisingly agile. It makes the whole process of managing your referral program easy as it should be. Both the affiliate and admin areas are a joy to work with. Use the at a glance reporting, real time graphs and advanced affiliate dashboard to keep your program organize and profitable.
AffiliateWP seamlessly integrates with many popular e-commerce solutions including Easy Digital Downloads, WooCommerce and iThemes Exchange just to name a few. This means it’s easy for you track what affiliates are selling without having to change the store your have right now. And you can easily track who your top affiliates are, what your best sellers are and you can see your referrals over time as an easy to understand graph.
This awesome plugin does much more then that. AffiliateWP also includes options for manually adding affiliates and translations. If you spring for the premium add-on you can even add tiered affiliate referrals. You can setup commission percentages, cookie duration, affiliate pages and various other things easily. You can further integrate AffiliateWP with a horde of awesome plugins such as Contact Form 7, WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, MemberPress, PayPal Buttons, and so much more to push your affiliate program to greater heights.
King of Affiliate WordPress Plugins
Additionally, you can easily configure affiliate sign up forms as well as welcome emails to suit your needs. Other miscellaneous settings include reCAPTCHA to keep bots out and a host of automatic settings just for good measure. Your affiliates will have a great time with an affiliate program that runs on AffiliateWP.
People, including industry heavyweight Chris Lema, are saying great things about AffiliateWP:
Please use @affwp if you’re selling #WordPress products and aren’t using anything. Also, add Direct Link Tracking!
— Chris Lema (@chrislema) July 20, 2016
Really, of all affiliate WordPress plugins I came across, this is full of features, well coded and quite easy to install for a lightweight plugin that ships with all the great stuff you get. AffiliateWP is by renowned WordPress plugin developer Pippin Williamson, who brought us other great plugins such as the aforementioned Easy Digital Downloads and Restrict Content Pro among others.
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2. Post Affiliate Pro
When considering the affiliate system you want to use for your site you should look for something easy to implement with features for tracking commissions, managing campaigns, uploading banners and of course generating reports. Post Affiliate Pro just so happens to deliver on all these key points, plus offers tons more for your WordPress powered affiliate program.
So why Post Affiliate Pro? Well there are more than 170 CMS and payment gateways supported – including WordPress (of course) which has it’s own handy Post Affiliate Pro plugin that you can use to connect your affiliate system to your site. And it integrates with most popular e-commerce and membership plugins. This includes (but is not limited to) WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, MemberPress, S2Member, WP Simple Pay Pro and more. So however you choose to monetize your site you can easily setup an affiliate program to promote it!
And with Post Affiliate Pro you have a wealth of options available to tailor your affiliate program for your needs. You can can create your own link styles (choosing from anchor, url parameters, mod rewrites, direct or redirect), add custom affiliate tracking codes, enable force matrix (so affiliates make a percentage of sub-affiliates sales), create private campaigns, define your commission structure (including actions, lifetime or recurring commissions, performance rewards and more), create coupons, add all kinds of banners (image, flash, rotating, HTML, lightbox and more), set a language/currency and more. This is just part of what Post Affiliate Pro has to offer!
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3. Affiliate Manager
For a free affiliate management system, this plugin packs quite a punch. I mean, it rivals premium affiliate WordPress plugins, what with a suite of features that will drive you crazy. Installing and using this baby is straightforward as everything is laid out clearly.
Managing your affiliates and referrals is as easy as A, B, C since you have complete control of everything from affiliate registration to payments and individual commissions just to mention a few. You can easily track clicks and make mass payments via PayPal, which is a life saver.
The settings screen in WordPress admin is laden with all the features you need to run a successful affiliate system. That, plus the plugin plays well with WordPress plugins such as WooCommerce, iThemes Exchange, S2Member, and JigoShop among others. Further, you can track an unlimited number of affiliates in real time!
On top of that, you can create banner ads and creatives for your affiliates, integrate the plugin to MailChimp, track ad impressions, and customize affiliate messages among other things. Affiliates Manager is translation ready, meaning your affiliate program is open to the whole world.
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4. Affiliates
Brought to you by itthinx and Kento, Affiliates is a full-featured affiliate WordPress plugin that’s ideal if you’re looking for an affiliate management system that works right out of the box. It gives many other affiliate WordPress plugins a run for their money, what with tools that are great for sellers, online stores and membership sites.
Let’s discover what the Affiliates WordPress plugin has to offer. To begin with, adding new affiliates is so easy, your affiliate program should make money in no time. And thanks to a million and one integrations, you can hook this plugin to any e-commerce or membership platform you have.
You’re free to track an unlimited number of affiliates, and traffic statistics allow you to put a finger on what’s working and what’s not. Just like the affiliate WordPress plugins in this list, Affiliates is easy to setup and use. After all, over 7k active users can’t be wrong.
Seeing as Affiliates is easy to customize and comes with an API, developers can bank on this plugin to build customized affiliate management programs, without all the heavy-lifting. I mean, everything you need to run an affiliate program is already available in the plugin. And you get all this free.
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5. Ultimate Affiliate Pro
Of the premium affiliate WordPress plugins I came across, Ultimate Affiliate Pro wins big with an awesome list of features pointing to a complete affiliate management solution that’s both cheap and flexible. Phew, that’s a long one ?
Brought to us by elite author, azzaroco, the Ultimate Affiliate Pro plugin boasts of the best of affiliate features such as affiliate ranking, unlimited number of affiliates, custom commissions, special performance bonuses and offers, Stripe and PayPal payouts and lifetime commissions.
Other notable features include banners, tiered commissions, signup referrals, social sharing, multiple integrations, shortcodes, custom form fields, reports, notifications, coupons, landing page commissions, a wallet, multi-lingual support, QR codes and friendly affiliate links among others.
Ideally, this is a leading choice among the affiliate WordPress plugins in the market (plus the plugin has a pretty impressive buyer rating).
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6. WordPress Affiliate & Referral
While out searching for the greatest affiliate WordPress plugins of all time, we chanced upon the WordPress Affiliate & Referral plugin and were we impressed or what? I’m particularly sold just easy it is to manage your affiliate program using this plugin.
It’s beautiful and clean, meaning everything you need to make your affiliate program a success is right there in the open. Adding and tracking affiliates is as easy as pie, and thanks to PayPal Mass payments, you can pay all your affiliates without breaking a sweat.
This plugin is cheap, costing just $20 bucks, but don’t let the price tag mislead you. This affiliate WordPress plugin delivers quite a punch. You enjoy features such as real time reporting, unlimited referrals, awesome shortcodes, an Android app to track your program on the go, social sharing buttons, notification and cookies among others.
Get WordPress Affiliate & Referral
7. YITH WooCommerce Affiliates
If you work exclusively with WooCommerce, here’s a 100% free affiliate plugin just for you. YITH WooCommerce Affiliates does one job and does it incredibly well. The plugin extends WooCommerce allowing you to create affiliate profiles and setup commissions.
YITH WooCommerce Affiliates is all about ease of use right from installation to bagging your first referral. It’s full of all the features you need to run a successful affiliate program for your WooCommerce-based store.
For starters, you can set cookies to expire whenever, meaning you can track referral for many days to come. Secondly, you can enable affiliate registration easily using shortcodes, create affiliates from your existing users and approve/ban any affiliate whenever you fancy.
On top of that, you can set varying commission amounts and automatically calculate refunds. Affiliates have an intuitive dashboard from where they can track their progress. All in all, YITH WooCommerce Affiliates reinforces your WooCommerce store as far as generating traffic and sales go.
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8. Affiliate Royale
Last but definitely not least is Affiliate Royale, a true contender where affiliate WordPress plugins are concerned. It integrates with WordPress offering you an affiliate management systems that contributes directly to your bottom line.
With Affiliate Royale, you can launch a fully functional affiliate program in a matter of minutes. Your program will feature the usual stuff and then some. Without losing your brand appeal, your affiliates can easily monitor clicks, sales and payments from a central personalized dashboard.
You can easily integrate Affiliate Royale with the likes of MemberPress, WooCommerce, PayPal, Authorize.net, Shopp and so much more. To sum it up, Affiliate Royale is an affiliate management solution that works as advertised. Don’t take my words for it, you really have to check it out to believe.
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9. Refer-A-Friend for WooCommerce by WPGens
Some affiliate programs offer incentives that aren’t strictly cash. An example is offering current customers rewards for referring their friends and family to you website. With Refer-A-Friend by WPGens you can rewards your active customers with exclusive coupons.
Simply install and activate the free Refer-A-Friend plugin and configure your rewards. The plugin automatically generates custom links for registered customers. Your customers can then share that link with friends, email it to family, post it on social media or something else. Then when someone makes a purchase they’ll get a coupon.
There are easy to manage options for setting a coupon value, type and minimum order. And if you upgrade to premium you’ll also be able to add an expiration date, share with a friend (the customer and their friend both get a coupon), and more.
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10. ReferralCandy for WooCommerce
ReferralCandy for WooCommerce is another rewards type affiliation plugin. You’re targeting interested customers (or even potential customers) to share your WooCommerce store with people in their network. The only caveat is that this free plugin operates in conjunction with a ReferralCandy plan, so you will need to signup at their site (there is a free trial, but monthly memberships start at about $4/mo).
However, ReferralCandy is an awesome and powerful service. First you create a promotion then you can add it to your website with a newsletter signup. When a new person signs up they receive an email with your promotion (ex: $10 off your purchase), as well as the incentive to share the promo with their friends. For each friend that uses their link they get another promo added to their account (ex: get rewarded with an addition $10 for each friend).
Get ReferralCandy for WooCommerce
11. Viral Sign Ups by iRefer
The Viral Sign Ups plugin is a one time referral program manager for WordPress. When you install the plugin just follow along with the setup wizard to create your referral promotion. You’ll also create a signup form for your website which can be inserted anywhere with the easy to use shortcode.
With your Viral Sign Ups form on your website you just have to wait for new users to subscribe. When a person submits the form they’ll receive an email notifying them that they can receive a special reward, discount, free product, or whatever it is you want to offer if they refer so many friends (ex: refer 5 friends to unlock a 25% off discount).
You will need to signup for an iRefer account, which starts at $19/mo. But they do have a 14 day free trial, so you can give it a try and see if it’s a good fir for your business.
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Final Words
Whether you choose an affiliate WordPress plugin or to start a program via a network like ShareASale, affiliation is big as a traffic and lead generation strategy. Just focus on your product as your users market the hell out of it. At the end of the day, your user earns a commission and you make sales. Everybody wins.
Do you run or plan to run an affiliate program on your WordPress website? Which are your favorite affiliate WordPress plugins? Have a question or suggestion regarding this post? Please feel free to let us know in the comment section below. Thanks in advance, and cheers to your success!
Keep reading the article at WPExplorer. The article was originally written by Freddy on 2020-03-27 13:30:33.
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