After years of running our affiliate program through iDevAffiliate it has come time to make a change and that change is to AffiliateWP!

Why the change?

We enjoyed working with iDevAffiliate and I don’t really have anything negative to say about the program except for it uses ionCube for encrypting it’s code.  As open-source house this has bothered me but not enough to make a change since I knew the iDevaffiliate program and it just worked.

However, after having to wait for ionCube loaders (these allow the servers to read the encrypted code) to be updated for PHP 7.0 so I could update MainWP.com without breaking the affiliate program I’m now in the position of having to wait again to update the server to PHP 7.1.

We did attempt to reach out to iDevAffiliate for a non-encrypted version but they understandably made the business decision not to offer one to us, so now it’s time to make a change.

Why AffiliateWP?

After researching a few different native WordPress affiliate plugins I decided to signup with AffiliateWP for a few reasons the most important ones for me were:

1. The team behind it includes Pippin Williamson (@pippinsplugins) creator of Easy Digital Downloads and a speaker at numerous WordCamps.  So you know it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
2. We lose none of the features that we used in iDevAffiliate.
3. It’s a native WordPress plugin that works with WooCommerce out of the box.
4. All the cool new options we can offer affiliates 🙂

Why does AffiliateWP allow you to re-open the affiliate program?

The short answer is less headaches.

1. AffiliateWP automatically blocks self-sales which is something we have never allowed in our affiliate program but it was a headache to track.
2. Affiliates don’t need to create a new account they can sign up directly from their existing MainWP account.
3. Thankfully we have very few refunds but with iDevaffiliate we needed to track the order and make sure that refunded orders did not come from a commissioned sale.  This is done automatically with AffliateWP.

MainWP Program Highlights

What’s New!?

Direct Link Tracking

I’ll start with my absolute favorite Direct Link Tracking.   With Direct Link Tracking you tell us the URL of sites you own and upon approval any link to MainWP coming from that site is automatically credited to you.

For Example, if your blog is myawesomeblog.com and you want to write a review about MainWP but you hate having affiliate links on your blog.  All you need to do is add your URL to your affiliate profile and once approved you can use any MainWP URL in your post and any clicks are automatically tracked as belonging to you.

To reiterate, if myawesomeblog.com is reviewing the Bulk Settings Manager the author can link directly to https://mainwp.com/extension/bulk-settings-manager/ and know that any clicks will be tracked.

Change your affiliate URL

Next up is the ability change your affiliate URL to something you like.  The default URL looks like https://mainwp.com/?ref=YourUserName but now you can change the “YourUserName” to anything you want be it your real name or your brand.

Push Notifications

Finally with the Pushover Extension you can be notified via your iOS or Android powered phone or tablet anytime a new referral is added to your account (Pushover account required).

MainWP Program Highlights

What about old affiliates?

We’ve emailed all our affiliates with a link to this post and we are requesting them to signup with the new program ASAP then to open a support ticket so we can move over any unpaid sales and match up usernames.   We’ll also keep the old affiliate system active until May 1st 2017 so we can capture any new sales coming through from the old affiliate link.

Once we close the old affiliate system we’ll 301 redirect their old affiliates URLs for members who have contacted us in support

If you are an existing affiliate and have any questions please open a support ticket

Happy Selling!