CentrioHost Blog

The affiliate marketing space is booming, and has grown into a very important and effective channel for driving sales. Thanks in a big part to WordPress, many internet marketers are now working from home and making a living from their websites. It is typical for a consumer nowadays to look up reviews online when they are contemplating a new purchasing. And while this might be seen as a good or bad, internet marketers are right there, waiting to capitalize on this traffic. Besides working full-time here at Host SEO, I also develop and support a premium WordPress coupon plugin, specifically targeted towards affiliate marketers. Today I am going to take you on a little behind the scenes look at how it came about and some of the challenges faced when launching a plugin for the first time.

• Affiliate Marketing Growth
• Building a WordPress Coupon Plugin

Affiliate Marketing Growth

According to a 2016 Rakuten Affiliate Network study, the US affiliate marketing spend will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 10.1% percent between 2015 and 2020, to an estimated $6.8 billion industry. And to put this into perspective, in 2016 the New York Time’s print advertising fell 16%. As the world wide web continues to grow, a lot of advertising is now shifting into the affiliate space. Word of mouth is still one of the best ways for companies to generate sales, and affiliate marketing can be seen as a type of word of mouth marketing that simply happens online.

Due to the massive growth of this market, it can be tricky nowadays to tell who is telling the truth online. For example, if you Google “Best WordPress Hosting,” you are suddenly bombarded with hundreds of bloggers all claiming to know who the best host is. You will typically have two different crowds. Those who generally enjoy helping others by sharing solutions that they personally use, and those that help market products and or services simply for the commission. Unfortunately, a large portion of the crowd is in that latter group. So we always advise being careful when doing research online.

Affiliate marketing is a high-value, low-risk strategy proven to drive sales and awareness for brands and revenue for publishers… When done right, it cultivates mutually beneficial and authentic relationships between brands and publishers, and those publishers and their audience. – Adam Weiss, General Manager and Senior Vice President of Rakuten Affiliate Network.

With that being said, there are a lot of honest affiliate marketers still out there and sometimes they might need a little help or boost to get their recommendations seen.

Building a WordPress Coupon Plugin

I spend most of my free time (if only that was a real thing) on my marketing blog woorkup, and have been an affiliate marketer since the early 2000’s, as well as a heavy WordPress user. I would like to think I am in the former of those groups mentioned earlier. Just like we do here at Host SEO, I try to only review quality services and products that I personally use on a daily basis, that will actually provide value to the visitor. Unfortunately providing real value means I have to work harder than the average affiliate marketer. So in early 2015, I started experimenting with additional ways to increase conversions on woorkup, and that is where the WP Coupons plugin was born.

Before launching it, I looked around for different current solutions that would provide me with what I needed to do. Below is a list of what I was originally trying to accomplish:

• Display coupons on my WordPress sidebar (both randomly and specific coupons based on the post)
• Display a nice grid view listing of coupons on their own page
• Have a shortcode to insert coupons on pages, posts, wherever I needed them
• Look current and modern, or at least provide an easy way to modify design with CSS
• Load fast, not relying on a bunch of 3rd party scripts or heavy JavaScript usage

I thought this shouldn’t be too complicated right? Well, there were a few plugins out there that did some of what I needed, but most of them were dated and didn’t have everything. So I decided to build it myself, and here are some valuable lessons I learned along the way. A lot of people don’t realize all the little details that go into actually building, developing, and selling a WordPress plugin. It doesn’t just happen overnight.

1. I Needed to Build a WordPress Plugin But I’m Not a Developer

While some people actually think I am a WordPress developer, I’m not. And I am far from it. I know my way around PHP and CSS, but when it comes to actually building my own functions and loops, my brain just isn’t wired that way. So the very first problem I had to overcome was, how do I get this plugin developed?

Fortunately, this turned out to be a little easier than it might be for others. It turns out my brother is a full-time WordPress developer. So I asked if he would code everything. By the next week, we had something put together and running on woorkup. Now, obviously, not everyone has a family member who is a WP developer. I lucked out there. So if you are needing to find a reputable WordPress developer, reach out to the community first and ask before simply outsourcing things. Finding a partner, not just a developer could be one of your greatest assets later down the road.

There are a lot of great resources out there. First, you might want to check out our blog post on where to find and hire WordPress developers. David also has a great post on 7 ways to find the best WordPress developers. And don’t forget the WordPress Facebook groups where you could ask for some quick recommendations, or even find a potential partner.

2. Demand Turned into a Product

About 6 months went by where we were running our homegrown plugin on woorkup. We instantly saw increases in clicks, signups, and affiliate sales across the board. The ability to target a coupon to a specific post and then have it scroll with the user, was something that increased affiliate sales overnight. During those 6 months, I noticed that I kept getting inquiries from people asking about the plugin I was using to display coupons on my site, and where they could purchase it. For quite a while I simply responded saying it was something we had custom built and it wasn’t available for sale.

We never had intentions to sell the plugin when we first built it. But we finally realized we were missing out on an opportunity as emails from bloggers kept flowing in. So I ended up partnering up with my brother 50/50 to actually turn our homegrown project into a premium WordPress plugin. This is another reason why before I mentioned you should find a developer who could be a trustworthy and reliable partner. If you want to ever take things to the next level, you already have some of the hard work done.

Another word of warning is to also play it safe. Even though you might be getting lots of emails about something still doesn’t necessarily