Selecting Affiliates For Your WooCommerce Affiliate Program. (SliceWP Tutorial)

Affiliates are funny beasts; some are masters of their craft; others are wastes of space and can do more harm than good.

Careful selection of affiliates is needed, you want to drive sales, so choosing the right affiliate members will make all the difference.

Yes, it’s another SliceWP guide, no point in me telling you how to set up an affiliate program for WooCommerce, if I don’t share some useful tips to keep you going, right?

Affiliate Program A Go Go

Once you’ve decided to offer your WooCommerce affiliate program to the world, and let potentially interested parties register, you’re going to have to do some work.

The above (if you’ve read my guide for SliceWP) is the page settings for your affiliate program, the last three entries, Payment Email, Website, and “How will you promote us” options, are critical.

These settings are used on the affiliate registration page, and we NEED this information; it’s how we can separate the wheat from the chaff.

An Example Of Choosing The Right Affiliate

The time has come for you to launch your affiliate program after you’ve successfully added affiliates manually in SliceWP and tested everything out, and you’re ready to rock and roll.

Could you give me a second?

I need to come up with a scenario. Cough, OK, here goes.

In this example, I’ve pictured you running a sweet store, old fashioned sweets, that you send out to customers via your online store.

You launch your affiliate program and push it out to people, either by enticing existing customers to become affiliated or running an advert on Facebook, etc.

Suddenly you get your first affiliate registration through happy days.

Remember the required affiliate fields I mentioned earlier? Good. This is our first affiliate:

Name: Joe Smith
Website: iselltractors.com
How will you promote us: I don’t know paste links or something!?!

*Trust me, you will get some weird affiliate applications!

Right off the bat, we don’t even need to visit his/her website, what the hell has I Sell Tractors got to do with our old fashioned, traditional sweets?

Plus, I’m not being funny, Joe, your promotion method sucks the big one. Next.

This is our second affiliate:

Name: Carmen Opera
Website: sweetulike.com
How will you promote us: Hi, I run a curated collection of sweets from around the world, showcasing the tastiest sweets to my visitors. 

Carmen has my interest, the domain name is incredibly relevant, she’s pitched me, and this could be of benefit. I’d visit the website in a heartbeat.

I’d email Carmen after I’ve assessed her website. Don’t forget just because it’s relevant; her website could be a dog eared mess.

If the website looks crap or challenging to navigate, you might want to er on the side of caution, sure you can allow them to sign up and approve them, I’d monitor their progress.

If they don’t convert any sales or send zero visitors, I’d probably revert them to being a customer and cancel their affiliate account.

Don’t Discount Someone Right Away

In truth, you’ll need to visit each site that applies to become an affiliate. Joe Smith, might sell tractors, what if he has an old fashioned sweet blog post, that weirdly is doing very well indeed?

What if Carmen’s website is on point, but her site is full of typos and other errors?

You need to attack an affiliate application like you would having a conversation in the pub. Sounds weird, I know.

Imagine being across the table from them and having a conversation about what they do for a living, keep it friendly, ask questions.

Send the new affiliate sign-ups an email asking them more, if needs be, show an interest in their site/blog; after all, they’ve shown an interest in yours. 

They could have a huge social following, so take a look at their social media links (if they have any) see how many followers they have, what promotion methods they have on social media.

It could be that their website might not be right for your business, but social could be something of interest to you to help promote your products. 

If they’re local (or even if they’re not), why not schedule a call? Have a Zoom chat, find out more about them and what they offer, discounting someone purely on a website basis could be your undoing.

They could have multiple affiliate websites or blogs (I’ve mentioned this elsewhere); burning your bridges with these affiliates could harm you.

What if they launch a new website with everything they’ve learned and IS relevant to your business, if you’ve been rude or dismissive, you’ve got no chance of them ever working with you. 

I guess what I’m trying to say is be friendly, do thorough research, and don’t forget to write clear terms for your affiliates; it will make your life easier if you need to reject them.