Building your own lead generation affiliate programme using Wordpress

Introduction

If you are using WordPress to power your website did you know you can use two plugins to effectively manage your own lead generation affiliate programme?

For most businesses it might difficult to work with network affiliate programmes due to the tracking code that is needed to be installed to track online quote and buy sales, but with lead enquiries this difficulty has been removed.

By combining Gravity Forms and AffiliateWP you can easily create landing pages, forms and tracking to allow anyone to send you leads and pay them on a per valid lead basis.

Tools you will need:

A WordPress powered site
Gravity Forms – the form builder we recommend and use on all our client sites
AffiliateWP – the affiliate tracking solution we recommend WordPress

We only work with WordPress sites so all of this is written around the WordPress content management system (CMS). There could be other options for other CMS but this is purely written for WordPress users.

Forms

The first thing to do is use Gravity Forms to build out your lead enquiry forms. We use Gravity Forms as it allows you to store records in the backend of WordPress, send autoresponders back to the user, email the lead you in real-time, and much, much more.

Set up a different landing page and form per product enquiry. In this way, you can build specific question sets per product – this will generate you a much more valuable lead. It will also help generate a valid lead as simple name and email leads can be hard to validate.

As a guide and from our experience, the more info you ask, the more you should pay for the lead but they better quality it will be. It is a fine line between quality and quantity. We always suggest quality!

Tracking

Once your forms are set up and you have dedicated thank you pages – i.e. the pages users land on once they have completed a form – we will be able to add the AffiliateWP tracking to ensure that leads coming from registered affiliates will show up correctly.

Setup your commission structure

One of the key things is to work out how much you are willing to pay for a valid lead. If you are doing other forms of online marketing you will get an idea of how much it costs you to generate a lead or you will see other lead generation businesses and how much they are charging.

The key is to stick to a commission structure. So take some time to figure out what you can afford to pay. Remember, having different forms means you can pay different amounts depending on the product. Affiliates hate having commissions being reduced after a few weeks because you got your sums wrong.

Technical help

Both Gravity Forms and AffiliateWP have great support, which is why we recommend them – or if you want the hands free approach why not get in touch and we can give you a quote to build it for you?

Now it is built and live. What is next?

You will now need to promote your programme and there are a wide range of options you can use to get the message out there. Here are some of our favourites:

PR activity

You might want to send out a press release to say your programme is live. You can use services such as Vuelio (Cision), 247 Press Release or PR Newswire.

Reach out to your contacts

Once your programme is live, share an update with your contacts, post it on your social media channels, add a site blog post, share on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Affiliate page

Add an affiliate page to your website with details on your commission structure and how to apply to the programme. I would suggest not auto approving every one and to take your time selecting affiliates. To get some ideas of what to include on your affiliate page – here are some various insurance sample pages:

http://www.comparethemarket.com/affiliates/

http://www.morethan.com/affiliates

http://www.staysure.co.uk/affiliates

Recruiting affiliates

You can also reach out to potential affiliates directly. Use Google to search your major product areas and see if there are affiliates in the rankings showing up. Then reach out to them to share your programme and invite them to join. Don’t just use Google though, also use Bing and Yahoo – you will find slightly different results.

Keep on top of your programme and build it over time. You will find that you could have teething issues with quality leads but keeping on top of it and removing affiliates that generate poor quality is the best way to ensure your programme becomes an asset to your business.

Welcome to the world of affiliate marketing!

Building your own lead generation affiliate programme using WordPress