Found a product or service that you love, and want to make some money from it? Well, then you might want to consider adding affiliate products to your WordPress site. Affiliate referrals are a great, effortless way to bring in passive income.
To start earning affiliate income from third-party businesses, you’ll first be required to join their respective affiliate programs, or at the very least get a unique referral link from them. You can then insert the aforementioned link on your website and receive a share of the resulting sale, from the business, for each customer you successfully refer over to them.
To find affiliates to work with you’ll want to Google “[business name] affiliate program”, which is usually the quickest method. As an alternative you can check out the footer of the particular business’ website, where they usually include a link for their affiliate program (if they have one). Finally, if you fail to see any mention of the word ‘affiliate’, you can contact the business directly and inquire about any possibility to get a referral link for their products & services.
Adding referral links
The simplest way to earn affiliate income on any website is to use the referral link provided by the third-party business. The way that it works is that you will place the referral link on your website, more than likely accompanied with an explanation as to why you recommend this product, and the reader might click on the link.
Once the reader clicks on the referral link, they will be taken to the website of the business that runs the affiliate program, for this example let’s say that the affiliate is Amazon. So, the reader is taken to the Amazon website after they’ve clicked on a referral link for Mike’s Book. If they purchase said book after clicking on your unique referral link, Amazon will recognise that you have sent them that custom & reward you with what is effectively a ‘finders fee’.
Throughout my website, you might find links to third-party products as part of the Amazon Affiliates Program. Here’s an example of an affiliate link on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2HNfl3R
This particular link can be found on the Amazon Affiliates Program, and is unique to my reference code. The link itself is for David Goggins’ latest book, Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind And Defy The Odds.
Although it goes against my earlier rule of only recommending products or services that you’ve personally benefited from prior, as I’m not much of a reader, a link to David Goggins’ book can be found on my huge post on the 50 Best Entrepreneurs To Follow On Social Media. Given the size & purpose of that post, I felt it warranted the inclusion of affiliated books.
Using WooCommerce
Although referral links are enough to start making money from affiliate income, you may decide to take your product partnerships to the next level. If you’ve been using WordPress for long enough, you’ll be well aware of the popular eCommerce plugin; WooCommerce.
WooCommerce allows you to seamlessly create an online store on your WordPress site, including the setup of products, discounts, delivery options & payment gateways. By adding affiliate products to your WordPress store, you’ll have more control over how to present the product, with the biggest advantage being the ease of adding product images & descriptions.
The reason why I bring up WooCommerce, is because they also have an option to ‘sell’ affiliate products on your store. If you’ve already got an eCommerce store and you sell physical products or online courses, you can integrate external/affiliate products easily without any coding.
Adding affiliate products to WordPress is as easy as going to your Dashboard, clicking on Products, then Add New. From there you’ll want to scroll down to “Product Data” where you’ll see a dropdown, which should be set to “Simple Product” by default. Click on the dropdown and then select “External/Affiliate Product”.
Now that you’ve setup an affiliate product, you’ll want to insert the referral link into the ‘Product URL’ input field. Following that you’ll want to fill out the rest of the details as you would with a regular product, including the description & pricing, as well as adding images.
There you have it, now you’ve got an affiliate product in your store. You’ll notice now that instead of adding the product to the cart, it will now take the user to the third-party website instead. Now your readers can easily find your affiliate products without having to dive deep into your blogs.
How to add affiliate banners to WordPress
Perhaps your affiliate partner would prefer that you use their promotional material on your website, in that case they might provide you with a HTML code that you should be pasted into the ‘back-end’ or your website, which to viewers will more-than-likely be seen as a visual banner.
If you’re looking to post the banner into a blog post for instance, it can be as easy as copying the HTML code provided and pasting it straight into one of the Gutenberg blocks. You’ll probably find that WordPress will automatically change said block to a Custom HTML field. From there it will tell you whether the code has been accepted or not – usually it’s the former.
This HTML code isn’t just for blog posts though, you can also use it on single pages, headers, footers and even sidebars. Be careful not to go overboard though, as you always want to be considerate of the user’s experience. If the user is struggling to navigate through the site, then it will seriously affect your search engine ranking & earning potential.
How much can you earn from Affiliate Income?
Affiliate income does vary from each partner program, and even then it might vary further depending on the product that you’re trying to promote. For instance, Amazon offer 4.5% for the sale of physical books, whereas they only offer 2% for the sale of televisions.
It is worth shopping around and finding an affiliate program that offers a larger percentage, however it’s worth taking into consideration that business’ reputation for customer service, after all you don’t want to recommend a business that has a history of poor service.
I’m not for one second suggesting that you ditch your full-time job and go all-in on affiliate income, as I see it more as a long-term strategy, however if you commit yourself to your website and build up a big, almost fanatical following, then there’s no reason why you can’t make a decent income from affiliate sales.
Conclusion
Adding affiliate products to your WordPress site, whether it be via link or WooCommerce, is really easy & a great way to make passive income. If you’re interested in working with a particular business, you can search for their affiliate program or contact them directly about getting a unique referral code from them.
Found any affiliates you like working with? Feel free to share them in the comments below!
2 Responses
Thank you for the information on this page. It has been more helpful and has cleared up a few things for me, as I am just starting out.
No problem Jayde, more than happy to help. Let me know if you need have any other questions or need any help 🙂