AffiliateWP Review: AffiliateWP Plugin + Best MLM Plugin For WordPress

AffiliateWP Reviews: AffiliateWP Plugin + Best MLM Plugin For WordPress

AffiliateWP Reviews. AffiliateWP + Best MLM plugin for WordPress. AffiliateWP is one of the best WordPress affiliate plugins offered. They have 25+ add-ons, 3rd party MLM plugins, and half are free to use.

It integrates with a lot of popular plugins like WooCommerce, MemberMouse, MemberPress, Ninja Forms, Gravity Forms, and more. I use AffiliateWP for my own affiliate program because it’s easy to use.

AffiliateWP Review: What is Affiliate Marketing?

What is an affiliate program?  Referral partners (i.e., affiliates) signup with your affiliate program and they are paid commission for referring any completed sales to your online business.  It’s still one of the best ways to gain brand recognition, generate revenue and traffic for your online business.

It’s the perfect marketing solution for any size business; it’s perfect for small businesses who don’t have massive marketing budgets.  In addition, an affiliate program helps businesses focus their marketing dollars on results because it’s a performance based compensation program.

In other words, affiliates don’t get paid unless they make a sale.

It’s entirely different than paying a social media influencer for a sponsored post.  With an affiliate program, you’re able to track a blogger’s, or influencer’s, real influence via sales and traffic they refer.

It’s the safest way to ensuring your advertising dollars provide a direct ROI (i.e., Return on Investment). In addition, an affiliate program can eliminate “fake” influencers who purchase likes, comments, followers, and participate in engagement groups.

In other words, an affiliate program makes sure you’re not getting ripped off because they only get paid for real influence. It’s one of the reason why we use an affiliate program for our business and why we highly recommend implementing it for your business.  AffiliateWP Plugin + Best MLM Plugin For WordPress + AffiliateWP Reviews

Easy Installing & Setup

AffiliateWP is easy to install.  It’s like installing any other WordPress plugin. All you have to do is go to the “Add Plugin” then upload AffiliateWP and then hit activate.  It doesn’t get any easier than that.

After activation, you will have to add your register your Affiliate copy by adding the provided license.  It’ll validate and you’re all set to go!  AffiliateWP setup is easy.

After validation, you would designate your affiliate area where your affiliates can monitor their traffic, sales, grab banners, links, and etc.  In addition, you can change your referral code to anything you want.

You can pick to use your affiliate’s username or affiliate ID.  I would personally go with affiliate ID.  You don’t want your affiliate’s username known.

The next step would be to figure out how to compensate your affiliates.  Are you going to pay a percentage or flat fee?  Did you want to include tax and shipping in the commission calculation?  I don’t.

The final step would be to assign your affiliate registration page and pick the required registration fields.  The whole process took me less than 5  minutes.   AffiliateWP Plugin + Best MLM Plugin For WordPress + AffiliateWP Reviews

Affiliate Registration

AffiliateWP affiliate registration is easy.  All you have to do is setup a registration form with Contact Form 7, Ninja Forms, or Gravity Forms.  The AffiliateWP required registration fields with automatically popup since AffiliateWP seamlessly integrates with them.

I like using Ninja Forms because they make it extremely easy to setup forms.  All I have to do is drag-and-drop the fields I want to include in my registration forms then setup my notification emails.  It’s really easy.

Once that’s completed, I’m ready to send out my affiliate registration page to potential affiliates and add a link on my website for easy access.  The affiliate would fill out the form and get a confirmation notice.  They will receive an automated email stating their application is accepted or under review.  It’ll depend on how you want to approve your affiliates.

Furthermore, with Ninja Forms, there’s a reCaptcha option to stop bot registration and spam.  Lastly, Ninja Forms has an extension where you can break out your long registration forms into Multiple Pages here and a Save Progress extension here.   AffiliateWP Plugin + Best MLM Plugin For WordPress + AffiliateWP Reviews

Automated Emails

AffiliateWP comes with automated email features.  It’s easy to setup. You can setup automated email notifications to be sent to your affiliates for a number of occasions.  It could be setup to send Affiliate Application Confirmation, Affiliate Acceptance Emails, Affiliate Referrals, Referrals Earned, and Affiliate Rejection Emails.

In addition, you can add your own logo to the templates, so every outgoing email has your branding on it.  Furthermore, you can use AffiliateWP shortcodes to customize your emails with the relevant fields like first names, emails, and more.

In addition, you can integrate MailChimp with AffiliateWP.  With MailChimp, you can keep your affiliate newsletter separate from your customer’s newsletter.  This way you can automate tailored affiliate newsletter informing them about new products, affiliate rate changes, and anything relevant to your affiliate program.

It only takes a simple copying and pasting MailChimp’s API then selecting the mailing list. AffiliateWP does make it really simple to get your affiliate program up-and-running in minutes.  AffiliateWP Plugin + Best MLM Plugin For WordPress + AffiliateWP Reviews

Tracking & Coupons

AffiliateWP can track affiliate referrals two ways, which are cookie tracking and coupons.  The coupons are easily created with WooCommerce.  In addition, you can assigned affiliates their own promotional coupon to help with boost sales.

In addition, it gives your affiliate a sense of validation because they have their own coupon code to promote.

The tracking cookies are automatically stored in every referrals’ browser.  In addition, you can set who gets the referral if two affiliates referred the same customer.  It could be the first or last affiliate who referred the customer.

All it takes is a simple click of an option.  In addition, there’s a simple dashboard for all your analytics like visits, clicks, recent referrals, and more.   AffiliateWP Plugin + Best MLM Plugin For WordPress + AffiliateWP Reviews

MLA (i.e., MLM) Add-On

AffiliateWP has a long list of 3rd party extensions (i.e., add-ons).  The best add-on is the Click Studio MLA (i.e., Multi-Level Affiliates).  It’s also known as MLM (i.e., Multi-Level Marketing).  With Click Studio’s MLA, you can create multi-level affiliates program where your affiliates can be paid for direct and indirect referrals.

Direct referrals are referrals made by the affiliates themselves.  Indirect referrals are referrals made by their sub-affiliates referrals.

For example, in scenario 1, Affiliate A refers Customer X and Customer X makes a purchase.  This would be considered a “Direct” referral.  In scenario 2, Affiliate A refers Affiliate B (i.e., sub-affiliate) to your affiliate program.  Affiliate B refers Customer Z and Customer Z makes a purchase.

This will be an “Indirect” referral.  With a MLA affiliate program, your affiliates can make more money by referring affiliates and customers.  It gives them an incentive to promote your products and affiliate program, so they can earn more money.  Click Studio’s Multi-Level Affiliates plugin adds the mentioned functionality to AffiliateWP.

In addition, it integrates easily with WooCommerce, so you can set different commission rates. Plus, you can set different commission rates (e.g., flat rate or percentage) for each sub-affiliate level.   It’s a great add-on to help grow your affiliate program.

Learn more about Click Studio’s Multi-Level Affiliate plugin here.   AffiliateWP Plugin + Best MLM Plugin For WordPress + AffiliateWP Reviews

Group Switcher Add-on

Also, Click Studio offers a Group Switcher Plugin.  With Group Switcher, you can automatically move affiliates between Groups.  Why would you want to do this?  You can set higher commission rates for different affiliate groups to reward your high-performing affiliates.

For example, you can setup two groups, which are VIP and Standard.  The Standard groups’ commission is 10% and the VIP commission is 25%.

With Group Switcher, you can automatically move affiliates from the Standard Group to the VIP group when they achieve a certain sales threshold.  This will help boost your sales and your affiliates will be happy with the higher payouts.

Lastly, it eliminates manually monitoring your affiliates sales then moving them yourself.  The Group Switcher plugin does it for you.  You can check it out here.  AffiliateWP Plugin + Best MLM Plugin For WordPress + AffiliateWP Reviews

Notable Integrations For Our AffiliateWP Reviews

AffiliateWP comes with a long list of integrations.  They integrate with all the major plugin players in the WordPress world, so it makes it simple for their users to start an affiliate program.  Here’s a quick list:  AffiliateWP Plugin + Best MLM Plugin For WordPress + AffiliateWP Reviews

• WooCommerce
• MailChimp
• MemberMouse
• MemberPress
• Gravity Forms
• Ninja Forms
• and more.  See full list here.

Notable Add-Ons & Extensions For Our AffiliateWP Reviews

• Multi-Level Affiliates
• Affiliate Groups
• Group Switcher
• Pay as Points
• Click Studio Bundle
• Recurring Referrals
• WP Download
• Payout Statements
• PayPal Payouts
• Landing Pages
• Force Pending Referrals
• Allowed Products

See full extensions list here.  AffiliateWP Plugin + Best MLM Plugin For WordPress + AffiliateWP Reviews

AffiliateWP Reviews: Conclusion

AffiliateWP is a great choice for anyone looking to start a simple WordPress affiliate program or scale with a Multi-Level Marketing program.  They have a long list of add-ons to optimize your affiliate program.

In addition, with Click Studio, you can create a MLM (i.e., Multi-Level Marketing) program and automate Group Switcher for automated commission increases when affiliates reach sales thresholds.

Furthermore, they have 14 pro add-on and 15 free add-ons to help your affiliate program.  Plus, I really like that AffiliateWP offers a one-time payment option with lifetime updates and unlimited sites.  It definitely saved me a lot of money in the long run.

Lastly, I would totally recommend AffiliateWP for your WordPress affiliate program because I used it myself.  Learn more about Click Studio here.

Read about other recommended WordPress affiliate plugins here.

Read our itThinx Affiliate Pro review here.