Sharing Creatives with Your Collaborators

Siren doesn’t include a built-in creatives library. There’s no upload-banners-and-swipe-copy screen, no “pick a creative” dropdown on the collaborator dashboard, no asset-hosting CDN. If you’ve come from AffiliateWP, Tapfiliate, or a similar platform, this is going to look like a missing feature.

It’s deliberate. WordPress already has the tools to host downloadable assets and publish marketing copy, and the result is more flexible than most built-in creatives libraries because you control every aspect of how the assets are presented. This page walks through the pattern.

The pattern

Create a WordPress page (or a private page restricted to logged-in collaborators) that hosts your creatives. Each creative is a section on the page with the asset, suggested usage notes, and a copy-to-clipboard button if the asset is text.

Assets can be images uploaded to WordPress media, downloadable files, or text snippets. The page is a normal WordPress page, so you can use the block editor, any page builder, or custom HTML. Whatever your theme supports, your creatives page can use.

That’s the whole pattern. The rest of this page is how to make that pattern useful.

A starting template

A basic creatives page typically has these sections:

• Brand assets (logo files in PNG and SVG, color palette, brand voice notes)
• Banners (728x90, 300x250, 160x600, mobile sizes, each displayed with a download link)
• Email swipe copy (2-3 example email templates collaborators can adapt)
• Social media copy (short captions for Twitter/X, longer ones for LinkedIn, hashtag suggestions)
• Product screenshots (marketing-quality screenshots of your product or service)
• Approved messaging (things you DO want collaborators to say, and things you DON’T)

You don’t need all of these. A scrappy affiliate program can ship with just logos and a paragraph of swipe copy. An enterprise partner program might have separate pages for each partner tier with pre-approved, legal-reviewed assets. The structure scales with what you need.

One thing worth including that most built-in creatives libraries miss: a section explaining what NOT to say. If your product has FTC disclosure requirements, trademark restrictions, or claims your legal team won’t approve, spell them out on the page. Built-in creatives libraries usually just give affiliates assets without context. A WordPress page lets you wrap every asset in as much guidance as you want, which prevents the “an affiliate made wildly inaccurate claims about our product and we only found out in a customer service email” scenario.

A note on copy-to-clipboard

For text assets (swipe copy, social captions, affiliate links), a copy-to-clipboard button is the difference between “collaborator uses the text you gave them” and “collaborator retypes something similar and introduces errors.” Any decent page builder has a copy-to-clipboard block. If yours doesn’t, a five-line vanilla JavaScript snippet will get you there.

Put the text in a styled code block, add the button, done. Collaborators click, paste, and the exact wording you approved ends up in whatever they’re posting. This single detail prevents about 80% of “why did an affiliate use the wrong phrase?” problems.

Restricting access

If you want only your collaborators to see the creatives page, you’ve got two options.

The more secure route uses a membership plugin. Set the page’s visibility to private and use MemberPress, Paid Memberships Pro, Restrict Content Pro, or a similar plugin to grant access to users in a “collaborators” role. This scales cleanly to many collaborators and prevents unauthorized access even if someone shares the URL. The trade-off is more setup time and another plugin to maintain.

The lighter route uses a hidden page with an obscure URL. Create a public page with a hard-to-guess slug (something like /partners/creatives-x7q/) and share the link in your collaborator welcome email. This isn’t truly private because anyone with the URL can view it, but it’s fine for most non-sensitive brand assets. It requires no plugin, no membership infrastructure, and no role-based access control. You can always upgrade to the membership plugin approach later if your threat model changes.

The membership plugin approach is what you want if the assets are confidential or legally sensitive, or if you want per-tier creative pages where premium partners see assets standard partners don’t. The hidden URL approach is fine for everything else.

Linking from the collaborator dashboard

Add a link to your creatives page from the welcome email collaborators receive when they sign up. (If you haven’t gotten as far as filling out that welcome email because you’re still looking for collaborators to send it to, how to find your first affiliates is worth a detour.) This is the single most important place to mention it, because collaborators read the welcome email carefully when they’re getting set up and ignore it later. If the link isn’t in the welcome email, half your collaborators will never find the creatives page and will end up making their own banners from screenshots. The other half will email you asking where the assets are.

You can also customize the collaborator dashboard view to include a “Creative assets” link. In the next version of Siren this will be more configurable. Today, the cleanest path is the welcome email link and a mention in whatever documentation you give new collaborators. A followup email sent a week after signup (“Did you see our creatives page?”) catches the collaborators who missed it the first time and gently nudges the ones who’ve forgotten.

Keeping creatives up to date

The biggest failure mode for creatives pages is that they go stale. A banner that references last year’s branding, an email template that mentions a discontinued feature, a product screenshot showing a five-version-old UI. Collaborators use whatever you give them, so stale assets make their way into the wild and stay there.

The fix is to put a “last updated” date at the top of the creatives page and treat it as a quarterly review item. Every three months, walk through each asset and confirm it’s still current. Replace anything that references old pricing, old features, or old branding. This is a 20-minute task four times a year and saves you from the situation where an affiliate is running a year-old promotional campaign that contradicts your current messaging.

If you ship a major product change (a rebrand, a new feature launch, a pricing update), update the creatives page the same week. Send a followup email to collaborators pointing at the new assets so they know to swap out their existing promotional material.

For agencies running this for clients

If you’re an agency running affiliate programs on behalf of multiple clients, build a single template page once and save it as a reusable block or pattern in WordPress. Stamp it onto each new client site, then customize the brand assets for that client. The structure stays the same across clients: same sections, same layout, same restricted-access setup. Only the actual assets change.

This turns a creatives page from “build from scratch for every client” into “fill in the blanks for every client,” which is usually what you want when you’re running five or ten programs at once. You can also build a shared “agency standards” document that tells your team which sections to include for which kinds of clients (a B2B SaaS client probably doesn’t need 728x90 banners, a consumer product client almost certainly does).

Why Siren doesn’t have a built-in creatives library

Most affiliate plugins ship a creatives system because they’re trying to be a complete affiliate management product. They want to be the single place you manage everything: programs, creatives, payouts, reporting, communication, all in one admin screen. That’s a defensible product decision, and for some teams it’s the right one.

Siren’s design is different. It’s the commission engine, and it leaves anything WordPress already handles well to WordPress. Hosting downloadable assets and writing marketing copy is squarely in WordPress’s wheelhouse, so adding a creatives feature would mean rebuilding what WordPress already does, plus maintaining it forever.

The trade-off is that the setup is slightly more manual the first time. You’ll spend an hour building a creatives page that a built-in library would give you in ten minutes. The upside is that you have complete control over how your creatives page looks and works, and you’re not locked into a pre-built layout someone else designed. You also get WordPress’s full ecosystem: page builders, block editors, media management, user roles, membership plugins, all the things you already use for the rest of your site.

Closing note

This might change in a future version if customer feedback signals that the manual approach isn’t working. For now, the WordPress page pattern is the recommended path, and most operators find it takes about an hour to set up and doesn’t come up again after that.

If you try the pattern and find a gap that the WordPress-native approach doesn’t cover, let us know. The design choice to lean on WordPress is based on the assumption that the existing tools are sufficient. If that assumption is wrong in your situation, that’s valuable feedback and it’s the kind of thing that could shift what Siren builds next.