Get Siren
Table of Contents

    How to Create a Udemy Clone Website with WordPress

    If you love the Udemy website then great news, you can create your very own version of this platform just using WordPress, LifterLMS and Siren. Sell courses you create yourself as well as from your chosen instructors. All coupled with a powerful affiliate program.

    Prerequisites for Creating the Udemy Clone Website

    • Hosting plan with free copy of WordPress installed
    • Domain name
    • Lifter LMS
    • Siren

    Installing Your Learning Management Solution, LifterLMS

    From the “Plugins” area of your website dashboard, click on the “Add New Plugin” button. In the “Search Plugins” box, type “LifterLMS”. Once you have finished typing this it should automatically search the WordPress Plugin Repository for the LifterLMS plugin and the results will be displayed below. You are looking for the plugin by Chris Badgett, called “LifterLMS – WP LMS for eLearning, Online Courses, & Quizes”. It will most likely be the first entry in the list of the results, with a rocket ship icon.

    Click the “Install Now” button and then, once it has finished installing, this button text should change to “Activate” – click it again at this point. Now the LifterLMS wizard will open automatically for you and guide you through setting up your required pages by opening the “Page Setup” tab to help you with your course catalog, membership catalog, checkout and student dashboard. Next, the wizard will open up the “Payments” tab “, here you can select your country and currency. The next tab to open is the “Coupon” tab, click the “Allow” button if you would like a welcome coupon from LifterLMS (click “No Thanks” if not). The final tab of the wizard will now open for you called “Finish”, which contains helpful links to the LifterLMS video tutorials and getting started guide. You will also see options here to import sample course to give you a head start on your new course. Well done! You’ve successfully installed and completed the LifterLMS wizard.

    Adding Your First Courses

    You’ve successfully installed LifterLMS and completed the setup, now the really fun bit, let’s build your first course!

    From the website dashboard click on the “Courses” option below the “LifterLMS” option. From the resulting screen, click on the “Add New Course” button. This will open the edit builder view for the course.

    1. The curser should be flashing in the very top box of the page, called “Add Title”, you can add your course title in here.
    2. The next box down allows you space to add a description of your course
    3. Scroll further down the page until you reach the “Access Plans” (pricing) section, and then click on “+ Add New Plan”.
    4. Enter a title for the plan in the “Plan Title” box.
    5. Further down the screen, in the “Plan Pricing” section, you can select the frequency of the payments needed for the course as well as payment amounts (Udemy imposes a max course price but with LifterLMS you are free to select your own prices).
    6. Towards the top right of the screen, in the settings panel, you will see the word “Course”. Click here to see the course settings.
    7. Click on the “Set Featured Image” button, which will open up your media library. Here you can select a featured image for the course from images already uploaded or upload a fresh one.
    8. Further down the right hand settings will be the word “Categories” with a chevron (down arrow) next to it. Click this to open up the category settings and then click the “Add New Course Category” link. Type the name of your course category in the “New Course Category Name” box and click the “Add New Course Category” button to finish adding the course category.
    9. Now click the “Publish” button in the top right of the edit screen to save and publish your course.

    Nice work, you’ve built the shell of your course, but now it’s time to populate it with some lessons. Click on the “Launch Course Builder” button towards the top left of the edit screen. This opens the course builder, which you can think of as the outline of the course, like a syllabus. It is made of sections that contain lessons. Your course could just have one section with many lessons, or perhaps multiple sections with lessons in each one. The sections titles are like chapters in a book.

    If you are building a course from scratch, it will most likely come populated with a single section containing 3 empty lessons. You change the title of the section by clicking in the “New Section” box and typing in your new title. You can do the same for the lessons, by clicking in the “New Lesson” boxes. You can drag and drop lessons around the course builder by clicking and holding down on the 6 dots to the left of the title. This is great if you need to move a lesson within a section or into a completely different section.

    To add a new lesson, click on the “Add New Lesson” button.

    1. In the settings panel that now appears your can type your lesson title in the “Title” box.
    2. For simple video lessons, you can take a YouTube or Vimeo link and paste it into the “Video Embed URL” box. (The cheapest option to store your videos is unlisted YouTube videos but the more expensive and professional way is using a service like Vimeo).
    3. Click the “Save Changes” button once done.

    When building your lessons, don’t forget that you can include quiz’s with a range of questions including multiple choice, picture choice and fill in the blanks. There are ten types of quiz so it is well worth considering incorporating one into your course. You can even include assignments for people to complete and set them to be graded manually by yourself or automatically by LifterLMS.

    Make your lessons more interesting and help to keep the student engaged by using mixed content, for example:

    • audio content
    • images and animated gifs
    • pdf downloads
    • powerpoint slideshows
    • tabbed content
    • interactive content (like the quiz’s mentioned above)
    • Ninja Forms, great for feedback from students at the end of your course

    There are also 4 useful plugins we would also recommend installing on your site:

    1. A forms plugin, something like “Ninja Forms“.
    2. The “View Admin As” plugin, very helpful for experiencing the site as an instructor or a student.
    3. “Basic User Avatars”, very helpful for incorporating accounts such as Gravitar
    4. “WP Mail Logging”, brilliant for checking the emails being sent from the website

    If you like, you can use one of the themes from LifterLMS, for example Sky Pilot., which comes with a beautiful customised user dashboard.

    LifterLMS is a super powerful solution that handles all the course creation and learning management system of a project like this, but what about creating royalty and incentive programs, like those used on Udemy? This is where Siren comes in, allowing you create powerful incentives for course owners and affiliates alike.

    Installing Siren

    Having affiliates is like having your very own contract based sales team. A super cost effective way of building your course website, inline with your sales. The Siren plugin is the key to adding affiliate functionality to your site.

    The Siren plugin, like a lot of other paid or Pro plugins, is not available from the WordPress plugin repository on your website. Instead, you ned to download it from your account at Siren. Once logged in, click on “Purchase” then “Account”, then “Download”. Now you can download a copy of the Siren plugin onto your computer.

    To install the Siren plugin you have just downloaded, click on the “Plugins” menu on your WordPress site dashboard then “Add New Plugin”. Next, click the “Upload Plugin” button and navigate to the Siren file saved on your computer using the file manager window that pops up. Select the installer file and click the “Install Now” button. That’s it, Siren is now installed on your computer! The next step it to connect up your licence.

    Head back over to the the Siren website and go to your “Account” page. From here click on “Keys” then copy your licence key. Head back over to your WordPress website and paste the key into the “Licence Key” box for Siren, then click Activate.

    For this website we will be creating 3 programs in Siren.

    1. Traditional affiliate program for everyone, not just course creators
    2. Royalty program for course creators selling their own courses on our site
    3. Affiliate program just for course creators to promote their own courses

    Program 1: Traditional Affiliate Program (10%)

    Let’s start with the traditional affiliate program, suitable for everyone.

    From your WordPress dashboard, click on “Siren” then click on the “Programs” item that appears underneath. This opens up the Programs screen for you. Click on the “Add New” button to display the information we need to set for this new program.

    1. In the “Name” box type a suitable name for your program, in this case we are typing “Affiliate Program – 10%”. (NOTE: you don’t have to include the % in the title but it can be helpful for finding programs when looking through the list of your saved programs later on)
    2. In the “Description” box, write a short sentence about the program. For example “Traditional affiliate program open to all”. (NOTE: the program title and description will be seen by your collaborators so please be mindful of the words and language used)
    3. Set the “Status” drop down to “Active”.
    4. Select your currency from the “Currency” dropdown.
    5. The “Expiration Time” is like a cookie window, if you are familiar with how those work. In this box you can type the number of days you want the sale to take place in following the affiliate referral. So how much time the affiliate has to make their sale following their initial work. As long as not too much time has passed the affiliate will get credit for the sale as the person that drove the traffic to the site. We recommend a figure of 30 days but have seen other Siren members use figures ranging from 7 – 60 days. Price point will also play a part here. For example, for very high ticket items, you might want to give affiliates more time to nurture the leads because of the financial commitment involved.
    6. Please check out our other documentation for detailed examples of which “Program Structure” to use but normally you can choose “Newest engagement wins” (the last person who referred the lead). If for example instead you wanted it to be the person who first referred the lead, then you would select “Oldest engagement wins”.
    7. The “Engagement Tracking Events” are actions that need to take place for the affiliate to earn the reward. The most common used are “Site Visited” and “Coupon code used”. Ticking these boxes will reveal another box below called “Value”, you can leave these as “0”, again we discuss this field in more detail in the documentation area.
    8. The “Incentive Structure” is how much you would like to pay your affiliates. If you are not sure, we would recommend going with the “Percentage of Transaction” option. This scales really well with your business. Selecting this option will open up the “Percent” box, type your percentage in here, for example “10”. Then for “Credit Conversions For…” tick the box for “Sales” and then also the box for “Renewals” if you would like affiliates paid on recurring payments as well as initial sales. This is useful for cases where you need affiliates to nurture and maintain relationships, but in this case we would just select “Sales”. To save yourself a step you can also tick the “Auto Approve Completed Transactions” box. We will talk more about approving transactions later in this guide.
    9. The final “Include in Commission Calculations” box lets you select what parts of the sale you want to use to calculate the percentage reward. We would normally recommend ticking “Discounts”, “Fees” and “Line Items”. This will mean the price of items sold after discounts and fees have been removed is the price that will be used to calculate the reward. We normally don’t select “Shipping” or “Taxes”.
    10. Click the “Create” button and there you have it, you have created your very first reward program with Siren. Easy, right!

    Build the Affiliate Signup Landing Page

    Now it’s time to build the page that will allow prospective affiliates to sign up on our website. From the website dashboard click on “Pages” then “Add New Page”.

    1. Add a page title, perhaps something like “Affiliate Sign-Up”.
    2. Add text and images here to explain more about the affiliate program. This page is in effect a sales page, so a great opportunity to share why affiliates should sign up and what the process involves.
    3. To add the sign-up form click the black + icon on the page and search for “Siren”. This should show you the “Siren Collaborator Registration Form” block, click to add it to the page.
    4. A form should appear on your page containing 3 fields, “Nickname”, “Name” and “Email”.
    5. Click on the block in the page and then over on the right hand side of the page click on the word “Block”, this will bring up the options to customise the collaborator application.
    6. The “Status” field can be left as “Active” if you want to let anyone become an affiliate, but we recommend setting this to “Pending”, meaning you will need to approve any applications. This is a great way of ensuring affiliates are a good fit and not low value, spammy affiliates that can actually really harm your business.
    7. You can tick the box that says “Approve Existing Collaborators” as this will automatically approve current collaborators and add them to the program. These should be people you already know and so are less of a risk to business reputation.
    8. In the “Programs” area you will see the programs you would like this form to register people to. It is possible to select multiple programs from the list here so you can click all that apply.
    9. The “Submit Message” option is the message that will appear to applicants after they have filled in the form. It is worth customising this so that applicants know what to expect as a next step. For example, “Thank you for registering your interest to be an affiliate. We will be in touch with you in the next 48 hours”.
    10. The final step is to click the “Publish” button in the top right hand corner then click “Publish” again if you are prompted to confirm.

    That’s it! Your shiny new affiliate form is live and ready for people to use. Anyone filling in the form will automatically be added to the “Collaborator” area of Siren. But in order for people to see it, we need to add it to the website. People expect to see affiliate links in the footer area of websites so that is where we are going to add ours (you are of course free to add it as a main menu header item if you really want to push signups).

    From the WordPress dashboard click on “Appearance” then “Editor” and scroll down to the footer area. Click within the footer area and this will open up the Edit view, then click the “Edit” button near the top left corner. Open the edit page navigator by clicking on the hamburger menu icon (the three horizontal dashes stacked on top of each other). This will show a list of all the items currently making up the page layout in a panel on the left hand side.

    Look for the block called “Navigation” and then click on the three dots to the right hand side of the last navigation item and click “Add after”. Search for the newly added affiliate signup page using the “Search or type URL” box then click on the page title that appears and click the blue “Save” button in the top right hand corner. If you return to the front end of the website you should see the new “Affiliate Sign-Up link in the footer navigation.

    We are using the LifterLMS Sky Pilot theme so these instructions are for this use case, but if you are using a different theme, check the theme documentation on how to access and adjust the footer.

    Turning on open registration

    We also need to make sure people are able to sign up to the site by adjusting a WordPress setting. From your WordPress dashboard go to “Settings” then “General” and make sure the box called “Anyone can register” is ticked (next to the word “Membership”).

    So a quick final summary of the affiliate sign up process:

    1. A potential affiliate views the affiliate sign-up page
    2. They fill in the form and click the submit button
    3. They should see a customised message on the site thanking them for signing up
    4. They should then receive an email saying someone has attempted to sign-up to this affiliate program using their email address
    5. Once they click the link in this email they should be all set

    Approving Affiliate Applications

    Now they have filled in the form, we need to approve their application. From the WordPress dashboard select “Siren” then “Collaborators”. This will open the list of Collaborators and you should see your newly registered affiliate as “Pending” in the list (remember, this is because in the form, we selected the option for the “Status” field to be pending rather than “Active”).

    At this point you can reach out to the potential affiliates using the information they entered into the form. For example, you might arrange a Zoom call to discuss how they plan to promote your products (and how you can help) as well as any other pre approval questions you might have.

    If the meeting goes well, now is the time to approve them as an affiliate. From the “Collaborators” screen in Siren, tick the box next to the affiliate you would like to approve and then from the drop down box called “Bulk Actions”, select “Activate” then click the “Apply” button. You should now see the word “Active” in the “Status” column for that particular Collaborator. In the “Programs” column you will also see the Programs that they are now added to.

    Creating the WordPress User account

    At this stage they are just a Siren collaborator, but they also need a website user account so that they can see all their sales and referral information. Still in the “Collaborators” screen in Siren, tick the box next to the Collaborator and then from the “Bulk Actions” dropdown select “Send Login Email” then click “Apply”. This will send an email to the Collaborator explaining they have a new user account and to finish the setup they need to click the enclosed link.

    When they click the link in the email they will be taken to the WordPress Registration screen. This is a plain screen by default, but it can be styled with a different image and colours to match your brand with plugins. The new Collaborator fills in the form boxes, including a “Username”, which can be a nickname and then the “Email Address”, which needs to be the same email address they uses to register as an affiliate with. The Aministrators on the website will receive an email explaining that a new user account has been created on the site.

    A final email will be sent to the new Collaborator with a further link that when clicked, will prompt them to set a password. WordPress will automatically generate a secure password in the “New Password” box. They can choose to use this or instead write their own in the box. Once they are ready they click the “Save Password” button and that’s it, they have registered on the site and have also set a password so they are able to login.

    Affiliate Sale Example

    If Brad (our newly authorised affiliate) logs into the website, in the dashboard they will see options for “Rewards”, “Engagements” and “Coupons”. In the dashboard there is also the “referral url generator”, which allows the creation of an affiliate link.

    If Brad is viewing the front end of the site once logged in, they will see the very handy “get referral link” button in the admin bar (the black bar at the top of the site). Clicking this button copies the referral link into the clipboard meaning it can then be pasted into blog posts and emails etc. This link will track visitors to the site and Brad can be credited for the subsequent sales of these visits.

    The affiliate link will be like a normal website address, but with a slight change on the end. At the end of the link will be a forward slash, a question mark, the words “ref”, an equals sign and then the affiliate code. Please see the example below.

    www.yourwebsiteaddress.com/?ref=WELL

    If someone purchases a course using Brad’s affiliate link and then Brad logs into the website dashboard, Brad will see nothing in his “Rewards” area because if you remember, when we setup the program, we set auto approve transactions to no. Before Brad sees this sale in his dashboard you need to approve the sale. Let’s do that now.

    Login to the WordPress dashboard and click on the “Conversions” link. In the table that appears you will see an entry for the recent sale via Brad’s affiliate link. You could click on the “Transaction ID” entry to view more details about the sale, for example, what was purchased. The “Status” will be showing as pending in the table, to approve it as a genuine sale, tick the box next to the table entry and from the drop down “Bulk actions” box, select “Approve” – if it is not a genuine sale, you can also select “Reject” from this list.

    Once you have selected “Approve”, click the “Apply” button. The “Status” will now change to “Complete” but you will also note there is a number in the “Obligation ID” column of the table. The obligation is what you owe your collaborator, for example a reward or commission, in this case 10% of a sale. This obligation will show as a “Reward” in the collaborators dashboard when they next login.

    While you are logged in, having just approved the conversion (which created the obligation) it is now time to look at that obligation. Click on the “Obligations” link in the website dashboard and you will see in the table an entry for the conversion you just approved with a status of “Pending”. It is helpful to see them as pending because a single conversion might create multiple obligations for different collaborators depending on how you have setup the initial program.

    We recommend leaving it as pending until the program time window has passed, for example, perhaps 30 days. This is good practice.

    If we switch back to Brad, when Brad logs in under his “Rewards” dashboard item he will see the same obligation (called a reward) and it will also show the status, which we have left at “Pending” until the program time elapses. Just to reiterate, an obligation for you, will show as a reward for your collaborators.

    If Brad clicks on the “Engagements” option they will see that the engagement for this sale is marked as “Complete”. This screen can be very helpful for collaborators to see what is working when driving traffic to the site and which engagements have not yet converted.

    Course Creators SignUp Form

    We need to create a way of course instructors signing up to our website. We can do this using the free plugin called Ninja Forms, which allows you to create simple signup forms very quickly.

    From the WordPress dashboard click on “Plugins” then the “Add New Plugin” button towards the top of the screen. In the “Search Plugins” box type in “Ninja Forms”. Click on the “Install Now” button on the list entry by “Kevin Stover”, this will most likely be the first entry in the results list. Once the plugin has finished installing, click on the “Activate” button.

    In your WordPress dashboard you should now have a new option called “Ninja Forms”, click on this option. The wizard will now appear, you can click on the “Build Your First Form” to use the wizard or click the “dismiss this page” link. We are going to build ours without the wizard so click on the “dismiss this page” link. This will open up the main Ninja Forms screens and we are ready to build our course creator signup form.

    Click on the “Add New” button and select “Blank Form” from the options as we will be building our form from scratch. From the selection of fields on the right hand side of the screen click on “First Name”, this will add the field to your form on the left hand side of the screen. On the form field itself, hover over it and you will see a cog appear, click on this to open up the settings for the field on the right hand side of the screen. Switch on the toggle for “Required Field” meaning that someone will have to fill this box in to submit the form. At this point you can also change the labels and descriptions for the field by clicking on the “Display” chevron and filling in the boxes called “Description” and “Help Text”. Now click on the “Add New Field” link on the left to reopen the field selector on the right hand side of the screen. Be sure to click the blue “Done” or “Publish” button to save changes to your form as you go along.

    The first time you click the “Publish” button it will ask you to enter a title for your form in the “Form Title” box and also make sure the “Add Submit Button” option is set to on.

    Repeat this process for all the fields you need on the form

    1. First name
    2. Last name
    3. Email
    4. Bio, you can use a paragraph text block here for a multi line answer
    5. Headshot file, you can use single line text field for this one
    6. Course idea, you can use a paragraph text block here for a multi line answer
    7. Website url, you can use single line text field for this one
    8. Expertise examples, you can use a paragraph text block here
    9. Social media links, you can use a paragraph text block here

    Adding Course Creator SignUp Form To Website

    We’ve built our course creator signup form in Ninja Forms, but now it’s time to add it to the website. From the WordPress dashboard, click on “Pages” then the “Add New Page” button.

    Give the page a title by typing in the “Add Title box, for example something similar to “Apply to teach on my academy”. Now add further text onto the page giving details of what you are looking for in potential course instructors.

    To add the actual Ninja Form to the page click on the blue or black + icon and in the search box that appears type “Ninja Form”, in the search results below you should see the block called “Ninja Form”, click on this to add it to the page. Click on the drop down menu on the block called “Select Form” and click on the form title you just created. The form will now appear on the page. Click the “Publish” button to save the page, it might ask your twice, just click it both times. If you now click on the “View Page” button you will see your page with the title and text you added as well as the Ninja Form ready for people to fill in.

    Head back to the WordPress dashboard (you can click on the WordPress icon in the top left corner) and click on “Ninja Forms” to see a list of all the forms saved at the moment. Click on the name of the signup form we just created and then click on the link towards the top called “Emails & Actions”. Click on the “Success Message” words to open up the settings and type in your custom success message in the “Message” box over on the right hand side, for example “Thank you for your application, we will reach out to you if you are approved to teach on the academy”.

    On this same screen, keep the toggle for “Admin Email” on, this will mean site admins get an email whenever someone signs up on the form. Also keep on the “Record Submission” toggle so that all submissions are also recorded by Ninja Forms. You can now add this new page as a link to the main navigation menu in the same way you added the affilate link to the footer, but this time we are adding it to the header area.

    Adding a New Instructor

    Let’s work through an example with a course creator called Heather, who would like to sell courses on our platform. Heather clicks on the menu link in the header and fills in the form. As an admin user of the site you will receive an email saying you have had a new instructor application. Once logged into your website WordPress dashboard click on “Ninja Forms” link then click the “Submissions” link and select the instructor sign up form from the drop down box of forms at the top of the screen. Click the “Edit” link next to Heather’s submission to view all the details.

    Now we need to add Heather as an instructor on the site. This is easier if you open up an extra tab of your website so you can keep the form submission details from Heather open on the original tab and then have another tab open to add the user. On this second tab, click on “Users” and then the “Add New User” button.

    Now you can fill in the boxes of the new user form by switching between the two website tabs and copying over the details you need .

    1. Username
    2. Email (use the email address Heather provided in the form submission)
    3. First Name
    4. Last Name
    5. Website
    6. Role (this needs to be set to “Instructor”)
    7. Send User Notification, tick the box that says “Send the new user an email about their account”
    8. Click the “Add New User” button

    Now if you search for Heather in the list of users and click on the “Edit” link, you can add in the remaining items such as bio and the headshot. The bio will show up in the instructor information area of the course and the headshot will automatically populate if they are using a service such as a Gravitar. Then click the “Update User” button to save the changes.

    Great job, Heather now has a WordPress user account for the site. When Heather logs in she will see the “Course” option in the website dashboard under “Lifter LMS” and be able to add her courses using the steps we detailed earlier in this guide. Heather will also be able to see the courses from other instructors, but will not be able to make any changes to these.

    Create Collaborator Account for New Instructor

    We’ve just manually created the WordPress user account for Heather but in order for Heather to receive rewards via Siren, we need to setup a collaborator account for them too. Let’s do that now.

    From the WordPress dashboard, click on “Siren” then “Collaborators” and then the “Add New” button.

    1. In the “Full Name” box type in the full name of the course owner.
    2. For the “Nickname” box type in a nickname for the course creator, perhaps just their first name.
    3. In the “Email” box type in their email address but ensure it is the same email address you used to create their WordPress user account, this ensures Siren matches the two accounts together.
    4. The “Tracking ID” box will be populated automatically by Siren. This is the code that will go at the end of the url for any affiliate links that Heather uses. You can use the code that is autogenerated by Siren but you can also change this to something more personal. You could also change this in future and all the old links you have sent out with the old tracking ID will still work.
    5. Set the “Status” to “Active” and then click the “Create” button.

    Program 2: Course Owner Royalty Program (60%)

    Our second program is going to be a royalty program that gives course creators a reward for each sale of their courses, regardless of if they drove the sale or not.

    We have already created one program, our affiliate program open to all, and the process for this second course will be very similar apart from a couple of slight changes. Let’s get building it now.

    From your WordPress dashboard, click on “Siren” then click on the “Programs” item that appears underneath. This opens up the Programs screen for you. Click on the “Add New” button to display the information we need to set for this new program.

    1. Click the “Create” button. In the “Name” box type a suitable name for your program, in this case it could be “Course Creator Royalty Program – 60%”.
    2. In the “Description” box, write a short sentence about the program. For example “Royalty program for course creators to reward them for sales of their courses. (NOTE: the program title and description will be seen by your collaborators so please be mindful of the words and language used)
    3. Set the “Status” drop down to “Active”.
    4. Select your currency from the “Currency” dropdown.
    5. The “Expiration Time” you can leave this empty as it is not relevant in this case, there is no time limit upon which a course owner will no longer be eligible for a reward on their course sales.
    6. For the “Program Structure”, we are going to select the option for “Every engagement wins”.
    7. The “Engagement Tracking Events” are actions that need to take place for the course owner to earn the reward. In this case we select the “Collaborator Product Sold” option. In the box that appears below called “Value”, you can leave that as “0”.
    8. The “Incentive Structure” is how much you would like to pay your course owners for each of their sales. Click the “Percentage of Transaction” option and type 60 in the “Percent” box. Then for “Credit Conversions…” tick the box for “Sales” and then also the box “Auto Approve Completed Transactions” box. In our example, Heather is selling a standalone course but, if someone were selling memberships, it might also be prudent to select the “Renewals” box too.
    9. The final “Include in Commission Calculations” box lets you select what parts of the sale you want to use to calculate the percentage reward. As in our original affiliate program example, we will be selecting “Discounts”, “Fees” and “Line Items”. An important extra step here is to also select the “”Collaborator Owned” box. This means Heather will only receive 60% of sales of the courses that she owns. If Heather also wanted to earn commission on other people’s courses, she could sign up for the original traditional affiliate marketing program too. Click the “Create” button to save the program.

    Now we’ve created the course owner royalty program, we need to add Heather to it. From your WordPress dashboard click on “Siren” then “Collaborators”. Tick the box next to Heather in the list of collaborators and then from the drop down “Bulk Actions” box we can select “Add To Program” then select the new course owner royalty program we have just created and click the “Add To Program” button. You will now see that Heather has this program added to her collaborator entry in the “Programs” column.

    Program 3: Course Owner Affiliate Program (20%)

    Earlier in this guide we created a traditional affiliate program open to all. Now we are going to create an affiliate program just for course owners. This means as well as the 60% royalty program we have just created, course owners can also earn an extra 20% of their sales by driving the leads to the site that result in sales of their courses. It will be very similar to the traditional program we first created but with a couple of small changes. Let’s build it below.

    From your WordPress dashboard, click on “Siren” then click on the “Programs” item that appears underneath. This opens up the Programs screen for you. Click on the “Add New” button to display the information we need to set for this new program.

    1. Click the “Create” button. In the “Name” box type a suitable name for your program, in this case it could be “Course Creator Affiliate Program – 20%”.
    2. In the “Description” box, write a short sentence about the program. For example “Traditional affiliate program only open to course creators and their own courses”. (NOTE: the program title and description will be seen by your collaborators so please be mindful of the words and language used)
    3. Set the “Status” drop down to “Active”.
    4. Select your currency from the “Currency” dropdown.
    5. The “Expiration Time” can be set to 30 days, like in the original traditional affiliate program.
    6. For the “Program Structure”, we are going to use “Newest engagement wins” (the last person who referred the lead).
    7. The “Engagement Tracking Events” are actions that need to take place for the affiliate to earn the reward. The most common used are “Site Visited” and “Coupon code used”. Ticking these boxes will reveal another box below called “Value”, you can leave these as “0”, again we discuss this field in more detail in the documentation area.
    8. The “Incentive Structure” is how much you would like to pay your course owners. Click the “Percentage of Transaction” option and type 20 in the “Percent” box. Then for “Credit Conversions…” tick the box for “Sales” and then also the box for “Renewals” if you would like affiliates paid on recurring payments as well as initial sales. This is useful for cases where you need affiliate to nurture and maintain relationships, but in this case we would just select “Sales”. To save yourself a step you can also tick the “Auto Approve Completed Transactions” box.
    9. The final “Include in Commission Calculations” box lets you select what parts of the sale you want to use to calculate the percentage reward. We would normally recommend ticking “Discounts”, “Fees” and “Line Items”. This where there is an important difference from the original traditional program we created. In the “Line Item” options that appear after ticking it, we want to also tick the “Collaborator Owned” box. This means course owners will only qualify for this reward on courses that they own. If Heather wants to earn commission on other people’s courses she could sign up for the traditional affiliate marketing program too.

    Now we’ve created the course owner affiliate program, we need to add Heather to it. From your WordPress dashboard click on “Siren” then “Collaborators”. Tick the box next to Heather in the list of collaborators and then from the drop down “Bulk Actions” box we can select “Add To Program” then select the new course owner affiliate program we have just created and click the “Add To Program” button.

    Siren is very powerful and allows program stacking, meaning that multiple programs can fire for a single transaction. This very helpful, but there are some instances where this can take the percentage of a sale paid out to over 100% so it needs careful consideration.

    In the programs we have created so far it is possible that all three could fire on a sale and we would pay out 90% of the sale in commissions. This is ok as under 100%, but still quite high. Instead, lets look at making a change so that only one of the affiliate programs can issue rewards for a single sale. For example, either the traditional affiliate program, or the course owner affiliate program. In order to do this, we need to create a Program Group.

    Creating a Program Group

    From the WordPress dashboard, click on “Siren” then “Program Groups” and then the “Add New” button. You can now start to fill in the boxes on the “Create New Program Group” screen that appears.

    1. For the “Name” box type in something such as “Affiliate Programs”.
    2. The “Description” could be “Pays collaborators when they generate a sale with their link”.
    3. The “Program Structure” works in exactly the same way for a program group as it does for the individual programs we have created. If you click on the “Newest Engagement Wins”, this will look for the affiliate who had the most recent engagement through all the programs in the group. So for example, if a course creator makes a referral but then afterwards an affiliate makes a referral for that lead, the affiliate will get the reward.
    4. In the “Programs” section, tick the box next to the two affiliate programs we created, the traditional affiliate program and the course creator affiliate program. If you ever need to add programs to a program group after you have already created the program group, you can do this by editing the program group and selecting the new programs here. Alternatively, you could go to the “Programs” screen and then tick the programs you want to add, click on the “Bulk Actions” box and select the “Move To Program Group” option.
    5. Now click the “Create” button to save your program group. That’s it, you’ve created your program group meaning your affiliate programs will no longer stack and only one will fire on a sale.

    Real Life Sale Cases

    With all the processes we have built it leaves us with 5 sale examples and how the commissions will work in each case. Let’s have a look through them individually in more detail.

    In this case you would receive 100% of the sale

    This would qualify for the course creator royalty program meaning Heather would be eligible for 60% of the sale, you would receive the remaining 40%.

    (3) Brad, one of your affiliates, sells a copy of Heather’s course

    Heather would receive 60% of the sale due to the course creator royalty program, Steve would get 10% of the sale from the traditional affiliate program and you would get the remaining 30%.

    Heather would receive 60% of the sale due to the course creator royalty program then another 20% from the special affiliate program for course creators. This would leave you with 20% of the sale. In this example, when you view “Conversions” in your WordPress dashboard, you will see two entries, one for the course creator royalty program and one for the course creator affiliate program. If we ticked the box to say auto approve in the program setups both will have a status of complete and there will be two matching obligation records showing as pending.

    (5) Both Heather and Brad are involved in the sale of a copy of Heather’s course

    Heather would receive 60% as normal from the course creator royalty program but then it would depend on who was the newest engagement for the sale. If it was from Brad’s link he would receive 10%, otherwise if would be Helen who receive the extra 20% commission. This would leave you with either 30% or 20%.