If you’re an affiliate of another big-name e-commerce website and you’re trying to boost your earning potential, then WooCommerce could certainly be the break you need. A WooCommerce affiliate has access to tools to build a shop of his or her choosing and earn more than he or she ever thought possible.
What Is a WooCommerce Affiliate?
A WooCommerce affiliate is someone who helps a company sell its products using WooCommerce as a platform. For example, one of the most common affiliate programs in the country right now is the Amazon Affiliates program. With it, absolutely anyone can sell products they see on Amazon to anyone who’s willing to buy, and every time someone buys a product from that affiliate, the affiliate earns a commission. In short, it’s much like Amazon is paying everyday people to help them sell more products, and the more those people sell, the more they can earn in the end.
How to Set Up WooCommerce for Affiliates
If you want to use WooCommerce affiliate strategies, then all you need to do is create a WooCommerce shop through WordPress. From here, you can hand-select products from Amazon or eBay (or other merchants and networks), display them in your shop, and earn a commission every time someone purchases something using your affiliate links. In fact, WooCommerce makes this easy. When you upload your products to your shop, you’re given a few different Product Data options. One of these is called “External/Affiliate” product, and that is the one you will select. Then, you create it just as you would any other product, but you will put in your affiliate link, instead.
There’s another option to consider, too. Remember that when someone clicks your affiliate link for, say, a product on Amazon, they will be redirected to Amazon to complete that purchase. Most visitors will not mind, but in order to be completely transparent, you may want to tell people they’ll be redirected ahead of time. Changing the text on the “Buy Now” button is the best way to do this. Instead of “Buy Now,” it could say, “Buy Now on Amazon”. It’s a simple and straightforward process and will improve your conversions.
Install Your Add-Ons and Extensions
Though it’s relatively easy to set up affiliate links through WooCommerce without the need for add-ons and extensions, managing things can get a bit tricky. For this, you will need a WooCommerce Affiliate Manager extension. There are lots of different extensions and add-ons out there, so be sure to do your research and choose the ones that will work best for your needs. Some of the benefits associated with using these include:
Shorter links – Some of the links associated with certain websites can be pretty lengthy, and this can make your shop look cluttered. WooCommerce affiliate extensions allow you to shorten these links to create a neater shop.
No-follow links – A no-follow link is simply a link that does not influence a search engine’s ranking of the link’s host. As it takes time, money and a whole lot of effort to build enough page rank or trust flow, you don’t want to give this away cheaply.
Broken links – Broken links are always problematic for WooCommerce affiliates. When your visitors click broken or dead links, it affects your shop’s reputation. WooCommerce affiliate extensions allow you to automatically fix these broken links, whether you have a broken link in one random post or 100. When you create your link through the right extensions, though, all you have to do is fix the link through that extension, and the extension fixes it everywhere else.
Marketing WooCommerce Affiliate Products Effectively
Now that you understand how to set up your WooCommerce affiliate shop and the add-on features you should really look for, you might be curious about how to get people to actually find your shop so you can start earning your commissions. You can’t just decide to sell a few products, put them up on your shop, and wait for a miracle to happen. Try actually using some of your products, then writing up blog posts or complete product reviews about your experiences, creating powerful calls-to-action, and then linking to that product in your shop. Try to give your website a boost by writing helpful guest blogs on top tier websites and getting links back to the products you are promoting, or to the blog on your website, which then links to the product.
These days a lot of people also create their own PBN (private blog network) which is to say they create or buy several small websites with respectable trust flow. They then create helpful articles which contain do-follow links back to their main WooCommerce site. This will help to boost search engine rankings although it can take quite a lot of time. Other people prefer to leverage social media or experiment with PPC marketing.
Setting up a WooCommerce affiliate shop can take time, but with a little bit of knowledge and the right add-ons, you can really make it work for you. WooCommerce powers nearly half of all online shops today – including affiliate shops – and there’s a reason for that. It’s one of the most robust open source platforms in the world, and as long as you can market yourself, you’ll see your earnings skyrocket.
