In this episode of Partnership, Alex interviews Katie Keith, co-founder of Barn2 Plugins, a leading company in the WordPress community. They discuss Katie’s journey from running a web agency to developing and selling successful WooCommerce plugins. The focus of the conversation is on how Katie has built and managed an affiliate program for her business. This episode is packed with actionable insights for anyone looking to improve or start their own affiliate program.
Topics Covered
- Katie’s Background & Business Transition
- Katie shares how Barn2 Plugins transitioned from a web agency to a plugin shop, now offering 19 plugins for WordPress and WooCommerce.
- Katie’s experience and journey in building a thriving plugin business since 2016.
- The Structure of Barn2’s Affiliate Program
- A single program offering 30% commission on all plugin sales.
- Discussion on improving the program and setting minimum payout thresholds to prevent misuse by customers looking for discounts.
- Identifying the Right Affiliates
- Why focusing on quality over quantity is crucial for affiliate success.
- The importance of recruiting influencers and high-profile blogs in the WordPress space.
- Building relationships with affiliate partners and encouraging them to create their own content rather than relying solely on guest posts.
- Affiliates to Avoid: Lessons Learned
- Why recruiting customers as affiliates often doesn’t lead to significant results.
- The pitfalls of coupon and discount sites and how they don’t add value to sales efforts.
- How Barn2 bans affiliates who misuse Google Ads or coupon codes in their affiliate terms.
- Successful Affiliate Partnerships & Co-Marketing
- How partnerships with other plugin companies (e.g., IconicWP) generate mutual benefits.
- Examples of cross-promotion efforts with other companies, including shared customer email promotions and guest blog posts.
- Onboarding & Supporting Affiliates
- Barn2’s onboarding email sequence, inspired by GiveWP, that provides new affiliates with content ideas and strategies to promote plugins.
- Sending affiliates tailored content suggestions to help them rank better and increase sales.
- Incentives and Rewards for Affiliates
- Currently offering a flat 30% commission, but considering additional incentives for top performers based on lifetime sales.
- Exploring bonus programs to reinvigorate inactive affiliates in the future.
- Challenges of Affiliate Marketing During Black Friday
- Katie shares why affiliate marketing during Black Friday hasn’t worked well for Barn2.
- Insights on why low-effort content, like roundup posts, don’t generate sales and why focusing on their own marketing efforts works better during major sales events.
- Motivating the Team with Affiliate Commissions
- How Barn2 incentivizes its support team by offering them 5% commission for upselling additional plugins during customer interactions.
- Final Thoughts on Affiliate Marketing
- Katie emphasizes that affiliate marketing should be about genuinely recommending products you believe in.
- The importance of focusing on quality partnerships and meaningful affiliate relationships rather than signing up for affiliate networks or pursuing low-effort strategies.
Links
- Barn2 Plugins
- Katie’s Twitter: @KatieKeithBarn2
- Derrick Hernandez Shares Affiliate Recruitment and Retention Techniques
Transcript
[00:00:00] Alex: Welcome to Partnership, where your network is the wind in your sails. I’m your host, Alex Standifird, and I’m here to redefine online partnerships for bootstrapped businesses. I believe in working with top talent to expand your sales channels and enrich the lives around you, not just the pockets of big corporations.
[00:00:21] Alex: Today, I’m interviewing Katie Keith. Katie is the co founder and CEO of Barn2Plugins, and she has been a driving force in the WordPress community since 2009. With a wealth of experience building successful WooCommerce plugins, Katie has helped countless business owners maximize the potential of their WordPress sites.
[00:00:40] Alex: In this episode, we dive into how Katie runs her affiliate program, the strategies she uses to attract high quality affiliates, and how she nurtures those relationships to help grow her business. If you’re looking to launch or improve your own affiliate program, this conversation is packed with actionable insights.
[00:00:58] Alex: Let’s get started. Hey Katie, so glad you’re here. Um, why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself?
[00:01:03] Katie: Hey Alex, thanks for having me. So I’m Katie Keith, CEO and co founder at Barn2Plugins. We started off as a web agency and switched to selling plugins in 2016. And since then we’ve become a plugin shop with 19 WordPress and WooCommerce plugins.
[00:01:23] Alex: That’s wild. I envy the transition. I’m currently very deeply into the throes of agency mode, working on transitioning into doing more of the plugin stuff and things like that. So that’s really cool. And I could probably talk to you about that as a whole separate conversation, and I think we have. I guess the thing I really want to talk to you about today is your affiliate program, because I know you have all your different products and I’m certain that you have a program and you’ve been running it for a little while.
[00:01:48] Alex: So let’s explore that a little bit. First off, can you tell me a little bit about how your affiliate program kind of works in general? Is it one for all your products? Do you have different ones or how does that work?
[00:01:58] Katie: We have a single affiliate program, which pays 30 percent commission on all plug in sales.
[00:02:04] Katie: So it’s all set up the same across the board. And in fact, that’s something I’d like to explore improving, which we could probably talk about later. But right now everybody signs up as an affiliate. Send links to our plugins, publishing them on their website, however they choose to do it. And they get 30 percent commission on the initial payment.
[00:02:22] Alex: Very nice. Yeah. 30 percent is, uh, it’s a good, it’s a good rate. I need to up mine apparently. Yeah. I try to always be competitive, especially when you’re like the front runner, like you’re competing and you’re trying to like make your program attractive. I’ve been thinking about that a lot. That’s great. So I guess my audience, a lot of the people here are usually pretty new to programs or affiliate programs, or they’ve been running one for a little while and they’re trying to get some inspiration on how to run them better.
[00:02:47] Alex: So something I always like to ask is what are some of the first steps that you think someone should take whenever they are looking to find affiliates for their program?
[00:02:54] Katie: I would say you need to identify what kind of affiliates will actually generate sales for your product. Because a lot of people take more of a numbers game approach and just try to get any old person to be an affiliate.
[00:03:09] Katie: So I’ll start with one that I think people get a lot wrong, which is recruiting your customers as affiliates. As a general rule, your customers only want to buy your product once, so encouraging them to be affiliates isn’t particularly helpful. They basically use it as a way to get a discount off that purchase they’re going to make anyway.
[00:03:28] Katie: And we’ve legislated against that a bit by setting a 50 percent minimum payout. So if they only ever make one referral, which is them using another email address. They’re never going to get paid actually, because they will never reach that 50 commission. So that’s what you don’t want. And it’s easy enough to put it in your order confirmation emails, whatever.
[00:03:51] Katie: If you like this product, recommend it to others. But typically I would say they are not useful affiliates. So I would divide the useful ones into two groups. One, and this is my favorite group, is the Influencers, which in the WordPress plugin space, that’s often not individual influencers. It’s more things like high profile blogs, writing about press, WordPress news sites, that kind of thing.
[00:04:18] Katie: So the ones with good domain authority that produce a lot of content about WordPress and people trust them, they appear in search results for lots of queries relating to that topic that you want to rank for, I would say that’s the best affiliate and to find those, you need to build relationships with them.
[00:04:37] Katie: With my best affiliates, I started off by offering guest posts for them with affiliate links. And then once they could see that our plugins sell, I took over and supported them in producing their own content about our plugins. And this is the key thing that makes us the best affiliates compared to second tier one.
[00:04:57] Katie: They need to agree to that. And most don’t, they’re like, keep sending me guest posts, but an affiliate needs to be proactive. While guest posts are a starting point, you do need to think, this will sell. I’ve given you the formula. I will keep giving you keywords and things. You now need to take over. And I’ve got a couple affiliates that have done that.
[00:05:17] Katie: One of them has, I think, made, I don’t know, 70, 000 with us or something lifetime, which is great, whereas others just don’t do anything after I stop sending the posts.
[00:05:28] Alex: Right. I love that you touch on the idea of, it’s like the message you’re sending is, I’ve proven to you that my product sells. I’ve given you the tools you need to be able to sell it.
[00:05:37] Alex: Now, all you have to do is have the audience to use it, to do it.
[00:05:40] Katie: Absolutely.
[00:05:41] Alex: That’s a great way to look at it. It’s funny. You bring up the customers, the example of customers as affiliates. I also think about all of those coupon sites and those discount sites that are pretty common, especially in the WordPress space.
[00:05:52] Alex: Software in general gets it a lot. It’s the same thing where it’s like, those aren’t really a great example of an affiliate because if somebody’s on that site, they’re probably just looking for a discount. So it’s not actually getting you the result you want. So I like that. I think that’s a great way to, to think about that, to look for affiliates that actually are partners that are working with you to help you.
[00:06:09] Katie: Yeah. I think coupon sites are even worse than how you described it because people are not browsing the coupon site, looking for deals. I don’t think that’s their business model. People find my website through my own SEO. Then they Google barn to coupon code, then they land on the coupon site. So they’ve not added any value whatsoever.
[00:06:31] Katie: They didn’t even find me the customer. So for that reason, we’ve banned those. We have affiliate terms and conditions, which we, I think collated from various other ones, like Gravity Forms and things like that, that have good ones. And we say that with coupon codes, we will deactivate your account. If we discover you’re promoting our plugins in that way.
[00:06:51] Katie: Okay. And another one that we’ve banned is Google ads. Some people do allow affiliates to bid for their ads. But we don’t allow it for brand terms because we rank number one for Barn2, anything to do with Barn2. So I don’t want to be paying someone 30 percent because they have paid a small amount to rank in a Google ad for Barn2.
[00:07:14] Katie: So that’s also in our terms. And you really do have to check this stuff. My virtual assistant regularly checks. She Googles Barn2 and she nearly always every week finds someone that is bidding for that and deactivates their accounts. And similarly, every few months, I think she looks at the coupon code sites featuring us and she’ll find them.
[00:07:35] Katie: So you do need to check.
[00:07:37] Alex: Yeah, that’s good to know. So that’s a lot of really good context on what kind of affiliates to avoid, right? So let’s talk a little bit about the types of affiliates that are the ones you want to find. You touched on this a little bit already, but how do you determine the types of affiliates that are best suited for your program?
[00:07:52] Alex: Um,
[00:07:52] Katie: Well, because we’ve been going a few years, it’s now through experience. So I know, I mentioned a minute ago that there were two groups that I would particularly try to get as affiliates. One of them was the influencer high profile blogs in my industry that I mentioned. And I know that because that is what’s worked out of all the scattergun things I did when we started our affiliate program.
[00:08:16] Katie: Those are the ones that have generated the most sales. So I know now to focus on that. And the second group that I, out of the two that I said are other plugin companies in my space. So other plugin companies are not necessarily my competitors. They might be offering a complimentary plugin, which my customers might use in addition to my own plugins.
[00:08:39] Katie: And so where I find a kind of shared target market, that might be a good opportunity for a shared partnership arrangement, which could include affiliate links. So my favorite example of this is IconicWP, which are really similar to Band 2. They are exclusively WooCommerce add ons. We are mostly WooCommerce add ons.
[00:09:04] Katie: I probably have to say add ons for WooCommerce now, don’t I? Anyway, moving on. So they’re really similar, but they actually only have a couple of overlapping plugins. Most of the time, their plugins do different things to what ours do, but we have a really similar customer base. I think we are their best affiliate and they’re our second or third best affiliate.
[00:09:27] Katie: And that has been the case for many years. So we’ve done. All sorts of things to cross promote each other’s plugins. We’ve guest posted on each other’s sites a lot. So we will choose a keyword that we want to rank for in multiple sites, but that doesn’t compete with any of their content, of course. So for example, they don’t have a discount plugin for WooCommerce and we do.
[00:09:51] Katie: So they were happy to publish an article about how to set dynamic discounts in WooCommerce and vice versa with content on our site. So. Even if they’re competitive, you can find ways to help each other. One Black Friday, I think it was two years ago, we even did a thing where we emailed our own customers about each other’s plugins, so.
[00:10:12] Katie: I have a restaurant ordering plugin for WooCommerce, whereas they’ve got a delivery slots plugin and lots of restaurant customers want to be able to choose a delivery slot. So the plugins work really nicely together. So we emailed our restaurant ordering customers, offering them an extra discount on Iconics delivery slots plugin.
[00:10:34] Katie: And similarly, they emailed their Delivery Slots customers saying build a restaurant ordering form with Barn2’s plugin. And it didn’t generate tons of sales, but it did generate five sales each or something, which is
[00:10:48] Alex: not nothing. For sure, and on top of that, you also get a lot of really great evergreen content that, um, is probably going to just bring in a continual trickle, right?
[00:10:56] Alex: It makes me think about I actually, I just did this. I had a similar experience with Lifter LMS. We did a collaborative video on YouTube on how to basically create a Udemy clone using WordPress. So we use Lifter LMS plus Siren to basically where Siren did all of the. All of the programs, all of the partnership programs and things like that for all the commissions and stuff.
[00:11:17] Alex: And then of course, LFTR managed the actual course creation and the multi learner platform and all of that stuff. And so we did a lot of cross promoting in that same way. So I agree. That’s definitely a really good audience. I think that’s a really good approach.
[00:11:29] Katie: Yeah. I heard that that worked well for you as well, and people were interested.
[00:11:33] Alex: Yeah, I did. I got a nice selection of sales from that and, uh, some really good evergreen content. So it’s definitely. Something that I intend to repeat, find, not just with Chris, but also to find other potential partners. I think it’s a really good strategy.
[00:11:45] Katie: Yeah.
[00:11:46] Alex: Is your affiliate program open or do you have an approval process first?
[00:11:49] Katie: We have an approval process, which only consists of my virtual assistant checking that their description of what they’re going to do looks genuine.
[00:11:59] Alex: Okay, that makes sense. Okay, cool. So then let’s move on and talk a little bit about the idea of onboarding. So after an affiliate is signed on and they’re starting to work with you, what are some of the things that you do to help them get started in selling your things?
[00:12:13] Alex: So to put that another way, What are the key components of a successful onboarding process for your new affiliates?
[00:12:19] Katie: For us, the most important thing that we do is an email sequence, which I think it continues over several months. It’s, they’re not that frequent because I realized being our affiliate is not their day job.
[00:12:32] Katie: It’s not the most important thing in their life. It’s one of many things. So we send the usual welcome email, which has a list of different ways that they can promote our plugins, like writing blog posts, publish a YouTube video, that kind of thing. So a typical list of ideas. And then it becomes more specific over time.
[00:12:53] Katie: I should say that our email sequence is heavily inspired by GiveWPs, which is really good, actually. They send really nice, helpful emails to their affiliates. So we’ve largely copied that. And what they do is that they will actually suggest exact content that you can produce. So you need to write it, make the wording unique, but they will give you the outline and keywords and things for an article, which they know is likely to rank.
[00:13:22] Katie: And we do the same. So our sequence contains different content ideas for them so that they can implement that.
[00:13:31] Alex: Hmm. That’s really good. And I should just mention Derek Hernandez is the one who actually runs the give WP affiliate program. I actually just interviewed him a few weeks ago. So I’ll add that link in the notes because it’s definitely relevant to what Katie was just talking about.
[00:13:43] Alex: And he’s got some really good content in there as well. That’s great. So it sounds like you’re. Emails are kind of focused on giving them inspiration and ideas on the kind of content that they can write about to help them figure out what’s working and what’s converting. How do you also ensure that your affiliates understand your actual product itself as well as their benefits?
[00:14:02] Alex: Is there anything special that you’re doing in that onboarding process to help with that or do you just think that by the time they sign up that they usually just kind of understand your product?
[00:14:09] Katie: We will give them links to things like the knowledge base so that they can learn. And we also have a lot of content on our own site for each use case.
[00:14:19] Katie: So if, for example, we are emailing them a suggestion to create a topic, an article about the topic, how to create a document library in WordPress using our document library plugin, of course, then we might link to our own tutorial on our site and say, create something like this, but make it unique, change the structure.
[00:14:40] Katie: So use ours for inspiration and product knowledge. But yours needs to be unique. And we highlight the benefits to them of making it unique as well, because obviously it’s not going to rank or generate commission if they’re just going to duplicate our original content. So we do all of that. And we’ll also send them free copies of our plugins if they ask.
[00:15:01] Katie: That’s only for people that actually are genuinely creating content, not just for customers that want a free copy. And typically I will set the license key to expire after a month or something like that. So. That it can’t be abused.
[00:15:15] Alex: That makes a lot of sense. Earlier, you touched a little bit on co marketing.
[00:15:18] Alex: So you were talking about the idea of writing content or guest posts, having writing guest content and things like that on their site. I would consider that co marketing of sorts. And you also touched on this a little bit with the collaborative effort with the other plugin company that you mentioned.
[00:15:32] Alex: Do you have any other co marketing efforts or things like that that you do? And can you share some more examples if you have any?
[00:15:38] Katie: Yeah, I have many examples. So a recent one. Is that we sponsored WordCamp Asia this year in Taiwan, and a guy came over to our booth, a plugin company owner who I didn’t know, and we were just talking about what our respective plugins do.
[00:15:55] Katie: And he mentioned that his plugin provides a spreadsheet style interface for editing WordPress content. And I thought, Hmm, my Document Library Pro users want a way to bulk edit the information about their documents and then update links to documents and things like that. So I said, Oh, would this work with my Document Library plugin?
[00:16:17] Katie: And we got talking. And the end result of that was that he spent actually several weeks developing an add on for our Document Library Pro plugin. So his was called WP Sync Sheets and he created an add on, which is now available on their website. And so that’s a nice example of co marketing. And then of course, we emailed our users and publicized it.
[00:16:40] Katie: And he did start tracking sales very quickly from that, which is great. And I think there’s a very fine line between affiliate marketing and co marketing or partnership work, collaboration, all of that, because It’s not just about the affiliate link. If anything, that’s like a bonus. So for example, WP Sync Sheet hasn’t actually created an affiliate program yet.
[00:17:05] Katie: He keeps saying he’s going to do that. You should contact him. He needs a plugin. Yeah. Um, but we did all this without affiliate commission because he has integrated with our plugin and that is adding value to our users because it’s not a feature that we wanted to develop. So if someone will only buy our plugin because they want to do bulk editing of the documents, then.
[00:17:28] Katie: Now we can point them to his plugin, even without an affiliate link, there’s still benefit to us. And I think he’s signed up for our affiliate program. It doesn’t have to be reciprocal because there are many ways that you can get rewarded for partnership work.
[00:17:43] Alex: Yeah, that’s a solid example, for sure. A lot of the plugin, co marketing, things where there’s natural integrations, that just makes sense.
[00:17:51] Alex: I’d love to hear more examples if you have more, for sure. This is something that I think people think about a lot.
[00:17:56] Katie: Yeah. So one example is similar to yours, actually, that we did a collaboration with Lifter as well, and I went on their podcast similarly, which was when we launched our document library plugin and we are both affiliates for each other.
[00:18:11] Katie: So it’s all about choosing a use case that affects both of your user base. So in your case, it was. Creating a Udemy clone because that particular use case combines LMS and affiliates. So in my case, it was how to add a searchable resource library to your courses. So that if you’ve got an online course, then students often, you might want to send them like 50 resources for further reading or something like that.
[00:18:39] Katie: So with our plugin, you can insert a searchable, basically a table of resources, which might be third party website links or. Downloadable course handbooks, worksheets, whatever you can insert that into your Lifter LMS course. So we chose a mutually beneficial use case and we’ve blogged about it on each other’s sites.
[00:19:00] Katie: I think we’ve added it to our knowledge base and also we discussed it on the podcast. Even though you think, Ooh, document library plugin, LMS plugin, nothing to do with each other. If you’re a bit creative, you often can find those connections.
[00:19:14] Alex: And I think a lot of the, to, to that point, especially with software, I think a lot of times, whenever you’re building something that has a lot of capability and has a lot of use cases, oftentimes it’s the integrations where you will find those specific use cases and those specific markets.
[00:19:31] Alex: It makes you think of Stephen King, where he always talks about how two unrelated ideas can combine together to create something great. And I think of that a lot whenever I think about all these integrations and things like that, like even with Siren, for example, like. It’s a partnership platform, right?
[00:19:45] Alex: So it’s very broad and it’s difficult to describe exactly what it’s really good for specifically. Like I can say broadly affiliate programs or incentive programs or anything like that. But the second I involve another plugin, all of a sudden use cases happen. It turns into, I can build a Udemy clone. It becomes actionable in a different way.
[00:20:03] Alex: And I think even as you’re talking about your product, I hadn’t even considered that until you said that. And then now just the second that you say that Lifter and LMS integration, I’m like, Oh man, that is a really great use case for that. That really does add a lot of value. And it makes it very clear what that value is.
[00:20:19] Alex: So I love that. I love that the way you’re talking about partnerships isn’t just about, like you said, the affiliate link, it’s really about finding those benefits and explaining those benefits to an audience that you otherwise may not have had access to.
[00:20:31] Katie: Absolutely. Yeah. The primary goal is selling each of your products.
[00:20:36] Katie: And then affiliate commission is like an extra bonus, but you want to grow your business. And unless your primary business is affiliate, then you want to sell your products, don’t you?
[00:20:46] Alex: Totally. Yeah, that makes sense. So on the topic of finding affiliates, I’m gathering just from being around you and seeing you at work and things like that.
[00:20:53] Alex: It sounds like a lot of your affiliates you’re finding from other plugin companies and just naturally from networking. Are there any other methods or strategies that you’re using to find and attract affiliates to bring them in?
[00:21:04] Katie: We have a full time YouTuber now. And so over the last year or so, we’ve done a bit of attempting to recruit as influencer marketers for other YouTubers, like higher profile ones than us, for example, so we’ve contacted quite a lot of those and you’ll find that the big YouTubers are quite difficult to get on board because people contact them all the time, of course.
[00:21:29] Katie: And so sometimes you need to pay for them to feature your products and they will expect affiliate links as well, but you can do your best to negotiate. And perhaps after you’ve done one video, for example, as with my guest posting strategy, if they see that is generating sales, then you might be able to convince them to keep going and do more.
[00:21:49] Katie: So we have done that kind of thing, but sometimes we’ve had to pay as well as do the affiliate links.
[00:21:55] Alex: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. How are you finding those YouTubers? Is it just kind of by osmosis, just by being in the space, you’re just paying attention to who’s around you? Or is there some kind of specific process that you’re going through when you’re searching to find them?
[00:22:07] Katie: Yeah, it’s partly just knowing who’s big in your space, and it is also searching at the time that you want to. So, if you’re Googling something like, how to design a WordPress website, then, you’ll find it. You can see what the top spots are. And of course with YouTube, the numbers are all very public. So you can see how many subscribers they’ve got and how often they produce content.
[00:22:31] Katie: You can see the quality of their content as well. But one thing I found with affiliate marketing in general is that the big ones are far more effective at generating sales than the small ones. Lots of small ones. So let’s say someone gets twice the traffic as two smaller ones. The two smaller ones will not generate, their sales will not add up to the sales of the bigger one that’s twice their size.
[00:22:59] Katie: There’s something about winner takes all with SEO, both in Google and YouTube. So I wouldn’t bother with having loads of small affiliates that have quite new sites. If you think they’ve got potential then by all means, try to get in there early and help them to grow. And then you will benefit as they grow in the future.
[00:23:18] Katie: But as a general rule, assuming that everybody will remain the size they currently are, then you need to be aiming big for the biggest players in your industry. And that will get way more sales than lots of little ones.
[00:23:31] Alex: I think that makes a lot of sense. I think that related to that, a suggestion that I’ve heard in the past is to find somebody who is right, just about to hit that first.
[00:23:41] Alex: Page of Google hit that so they’re on like page two and they’ve been ranking and they’ve been around for a while and they’ve done All of the foundational hard work to be able to get themselves to the next phase, but they’re not necessarily there yet But they’re like really close if you can be lucky enough to find somebody and identify them in that situation You might be able to Get in with them, get a good program with them, get the benefits of those sales without necessarily having to pay that big YouTuber commission, for example.
[00:24:08] Alex: But sometimes that’s hard to find. So you got to go with what’s available. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So can you share any incentives or rewards programs that you use to motivate your affiliates? We’ve talked a little bit about how you’re paying. You sometimes will pay a YouTuber or something like that.
[00:24:23] Alex: Is there anything else aside from that 30 percent commission that you might do for a certain echelon of affiliates? Some people have what they call a super affiliate program, for example, where the higher commission and things like that. Is that something that you practice or are you flat 30 and that’s that?
[00:24:38] Katie: Currently we’re flat 30 and that’s that, but this is something that I would like to explore and measure the results. So I would like to maybe offer increased commissions based on lifetime sales generated or something like that to reward them, to keep going and give them greater rewards and so I think there are lots of more complex structures that you can do, I don’t know, I haven’t tested yet whether that makes a difference.
[00:25:05] Katie: Thanks. Because, um, generally, if they are motivated, they’re motivated. 30 percent is quite good. They don’t have to provide the support or the product or anything like that. So I feel that it’s good enough, but there is more psychological marketing that we could be doing, which we haven’t done yet.
[00:25:23] Alex: And it makes me think a little bit about bonus programs or one time competitions or things like that to potentially bring in.
[00:25:30] Alex: Affiliates who haven’t really contributed a lot to motivate them to try. We talked about that a little bit at WordCamp US. Have you had a chance to process or think about that a little bit? Yeah.
[00:25:41] Katie: So I have been thinking about what you suggested to me at WordCamp US, which was based on my problem, which is that the vast majority of my 800 plus affiliates don’t do anything.
[00:25:54] Katie: They don’t generate visits, let alone conversions. Um, when I analyze my affiliates. Only 15 of the 800 plus have ever generated more than 1, 000 of commission. So it’s very much a 80 20 rule type thing that the small group generate almost all the results. That’s quite an extreme application of the 80 20 principle, actually.
[00:26:20] Katie: So based on that, your suggestion was that I send an email to the ones that are not generating regular sales. Offering some kind of bonus or prize or something. There’s various things it could be, aren’t there? Like, it could be a prize for the one to generate the most sales in the next month. It could be a specific monetary bonus on top of their commission for generating two sales or something like that, depending on the goal.
[00:26:47] Katie: So yeah, I am thinking of doing that. But when you look at dates, this isn’t a good time because, Things are just starting to drop off for Black before Black Friday, then it’s Black Friday, which is a whole nother ball game in the affiliate world, which we’ll talk about in a minute.
[00:27:04] Alex: And then you’ve got
[00:27:05] Katie: Christmas, which everything dies at Christmas and sales go down and affiliates aren’t working so much.
[00:27:12] Katie: So I’m thinking this is a new year project.
[00:27:15] Alex: Yeah, probably. So just for a little additional context, the idea there was to basically do a reinvigoration campaign where you basically, you email that 80 percent and offer them some kind of bonus or some kind of prize for the top affiliate. And the benefit of that is that it allows you to figure out which affiliates in that 80 percent are capable of driving sales.
[00:27:36] Alex: They just aren’t. And then once you get that information for, you know, A one time bonus that you’re paying out. You get a lot of really useful information about the health of that 80%. And it also gives you a chance to bump up and find some of those ones to potentially work with more in the future so that you can maybe get them into that 20 percent to help increase the number of active affiliates.
[00:27:56] Alex: It’s super common to see that 20%. Like you said, and usually it’s more like 5%, even in your numbers, it’s a very small and the overwhelming majority of affiliate programs have that problem. And I think that there’s. a lot of value there and thinking about that and trying to solve that problem. But let’s talk a little bit about Black Friday because you’re right, that is coming up and I gotta be honest, I am so not ready for it right now and I need to be like getting on top of it.
[00:28:19] Alex: So I would love to hear a little bit about some of the things and how you pivot for Black Friday with your affiliates, what’s working, what doesn’t work and all of that.
[00:28:28] Katie: Yeah, I’ve tried various things with affiliates on Black Friday in the past and my conclusion is it doesn’t work. I think our own efforts are where we get sales on Black Friday, our mailing list and our website banner and stuff like that.
[00:28:44] Katie: So it’s counterintuitive because everybody is publishing Black Friday roundups, top 50 million WordPress deals, that kind of thing. And you think, Oh, I need to be on all of those sites. But we used to spend a lot of time trying to get on all of those sites, also publishing our own roundups with other deals on which would have affiliate links and they never performed.
[00:29:09] Katie: I think we tracked one sale once from Codable’s roundup, Codable being quite a high profile site, as I was saying about the winner takes all thing. All these medium sites and most of the big ones did not generate any sales for us, and we didn’t do it. Get a lot from, or anything from the posts that we published on our site with the affiliate LinkedIn.
[00:29:30] Katie: So I would say that’s not a priority. And our strategy now is that when somebody contacts us saying we’re publishing a Black Friday roundup, send us your deal, we will send it. I’ll send my assistant the, of the banners and the details of the deal. So it’s not going to take her long to reply, but we no longer spend time.
[00:29:52] Katie: Contacting sites, we used to get our deals published on more than 70 sites each year with no results. And you could argue there’s some SEO benefit in that because you’re guessing links on all these sites, but they’re quite diluted links because there might be 30 plus links in that post. And so in terms of link juice and that is very low.
[00:30:14] Katie: So particularly now we’ve already got links on all these sites from previous year, we don’t particularly need them anymore. So that’s not a priority in terms of our marketing. But the other side of affiliates on Black Friday is how we nurture our affiliates. That doesn’t work either, to be honest. We’ve done things like offering them an incentive.
[00:30:36] Katie: So normally we pay them 30 percent but we don’t give their users anything additional. So one year we emailed all our affiliates and said, contact us for a custom Black Friday code in which Your people will get an extra 10 percent off on top of our usual sale, and they get their affiliate commission as well.
[00:30:57] Katie: I think about who replied and said, yes, please. And so we sent those and those coupon codes did not generate any sales. We contact them and say, publish our deal in your roundup. Fine, may as well do that, although it won’t perform. And when I analyzed the sales from our affiliates during Black Friday, it’s the same sales we would have got anyway.
[00:31:17] Katie: So. If they’ve got an article on their site, how to build a WordPress document library, that will continue converting because it would have done without Black Friday, wouldn’t it? That’s evergreen content.
[00:31:29] Alex: Yeah, that’s interesting. So the thing about the lists of the roundups, as you call them, it’s interesting that You bring that up because I think there’s a pattern we, as we’ve been talking here about the things that don’t work with these programs and it’s always low effort content.
[00:31:44] Alex: Low effort content never generates the leads and the things you want. So coupon sites, low effort, not going to do anything. Roundups, low effort. It’s not going to work. And then you had a third example. What was it? It was
[00:31:55] Katie: Google ads.
[00:31:56] Alex: It was Google ads. That’s it. Low effort. Yeah. So you’re not getting any value out of that.
[00:31:59] Alex: That might generate sales, but all of those are, are Oftentimes at best ineffective, at worst, just straight up parasitic, right? Just taking from you instead. So that’s really interesting. And then, so it sounds like in general, just affiliate programs just don’t really matter for you for Black Friday. And that, that doesn’t surprise me too much when I think about it, because.
[00:32:21] Alex: If I think about my own experience with it, I’m not looking at affiliate sites for Black Friday sales. Usually I have something that I need in that moment, or I’ll happen to be on an email list for something that I’ve been interested in for a long time. And Black Friday is all about the conversion, right?
[00:32:36] Alex: So it’s not even necessarily, I think when I think about affiliate programs and things like that, a lot of times they’re higher up in that funnel. Right. So they’re usually on the lead focused side of it. Whereas. These Black Friday sales are very much conversion focused. So I guess if I think about it, a more effective program would probably be a more sales centric program, if that even makes sense in whatever the context you’re in.
[00:32:57] Alex: So maybe you had somebody like, I imagine in my case, like I’m still very lean, right? I’m basically myself. So, like, I could see a scenario where maybe I have a person. Who is like a support person or something on my team who on that day, I’m having them basically be on call, but for that, while they’re doing that, they get a cut of any sale that happened because they talked to the customer directly or something like that, maybe to help answer questions and things like that, just to give a little extra incentive to, to work on a day that somebody may not want to work or something like that.
[00:33:29] Alex: But outside of that, I think you’re right. It makes a lot of sense that of course it’s not because people aren’t buying Things that they don’t know about on Black Friday. Usually they’re usually buying things that they’ve kind of already wanted and kind of already knew about. And Black Friday was just what got them over that hump to actually make that choice, at least in the context of software.
[00:33:49] Katie: Yeah. And I’m kind of happy about that because let’s say I’m doing a 30 or 40 percent discount at Black Friday. Well, with it’s an affiliate link, I have to pay an extra 30 percent to them. That’s really not much margin and you can’t exclude your affiliates from your Black Friday deals. That’s not how it works, but they’re not necessarily the highest value sales you’re going to get because of that extra commission.
[00:34:14] Katie: And also statistically, people who buy on Black Friday, if you have annual renewals, like most plugging companies do, then they are statistically less likely to renew next year. So it’s all about that initial payment, which you’ve got to give a discount and commission on.
[00:34:29] Alex: Yeah, that’s not ideal. You’re right.
[00:34:31] Alex: And because then at that point, you’ve got basically nothing left and you really won’t see any real payout for that until next year, basically whenever they renew, assuming they renew.
[00:34:39] Katie: It’s interesting what you said about giving the support person a affiliate commission, because we do that. We introduced this about six months ago.
[00:34:48] Katie: So our support team obviously get paid a salary anyway, but I thought, how can I make them a little bit more salesy? They’re obviously trained to promote the plugins and things, but I wanted to make it in their interest to, for example, suggest an additional plugin. So we now give them 5 percent commission.
[00:35:08] Katie: It’s low because they’re getting paid anyway. So if I gave them 30%, that wouldn’t be fair because they’re getting their time paid for. So I agreed 5 percent and. That’s if they suggest a plugin that the customer wasn’t already interested in. So if it’s just a pre sales, it’s their job to reply and say, yes, the plugin has the feature you need, whatever.
[00:35:31] Katie: But if they say, Oh, I noticed you’re using WooCommerce product table, that works great with WooCommerce product filters, our other plugin, because then people can find your products more easily, that kind of thing, that is the support agent using their initiative to sell an additional plugin, and that’s the one that they’re allowed to put the affiliate link on.
[00:35:52] Katie: They haven’t made hundreds of sales, but they know they’ve made a number of sales through that, which is great.
[00:35:58] Alex: For sure. And I think that kind of thing is something that, especially with this era of chat bubbles in the bottom corner, I’m using Crisp for the chat. I’m sure HelpScout and other ones do it too, but you can actually set it up to do a round robin.
[00:36:10] Alex: So whenever somebody sends a message, it just sends it to the next person in the support channel. So basically it’s like assigning that sales opportunity to that person. So then they’re able to, like you say, have that conversation and potentially do those upsells. I just think it makes a lot of sense because it’s really conversion focused, right?
[00:36:29] Alex: Like I said, it allows you to figure out ways with your team or somebody that you really trust that knows the system really well to be able to help push those people over to actually make the decision to buy. It makes me think about companies like Radio Shack, which was a store where whenever I worked there, they had cell phones that they would sell.
[00:36:48] Alex: And every time I’d sell a phone plan, I would get like a 20 commission or something like that. And they had commissions for all kinds of stuff. They’re like batteries and all these other upsells. Like you’re saying that as I’m doing the checkout. I would offer them these different things and try to upsell them on these things.
[00:37:05] Alex: And it really motivated me in that case. It ended up because I was paid so little because it was like a minimum wage job, basically. It had the potential to double my income if I was doing it and doing it really well. And I know that’s not necessarily what you’re saying. It doesn’t sound like the 5 percent plus the sales that you’re talking about is like that big of a bump, but it’s certainly going to be a motivating factor.
[00:37:24] Alex: If I was in that moment and I was like, Oh, this is an opportunity for me. This is something that I’m incentivized to do. I can do that. I love that. I think that’s, I think it’s great that you’re doing that because I think it’s a missed opportunity that I think a lot of other plugin companies aren’t really thinking about or doing.
[00:37:38] Katie: Yeah. When I tweeted about it, a lot of people didn’t like the idea for various reasons, like it’s not their job or they should be doing it anyway, that kind of thing. But I thought, I’ll give it a go. It doesn’t hurt.
[00:37:50] Alex: Yeah, I’m a big fan of incentive programs, obviously, but I’ve thought about other ideas, like bonuses for support tickets, like the number of tickets completed in a month, if it’s above a specific threshold, like there’s all kinds of incentive programs that companies do all the time that go beyond just what an affiliate, like the affiliate program, right?
[00:38:08] Alex: It’s a different thing in a lot of ways, but in the context of Siren, it’s not like all of these things can be done inside of that system. So I find myself thinking about. Those kinds of things a lot. This has been really great. Is there any other topics that we haven’t talked about that you wanted to touch on or think about?
[00:38:24] Katie: I suppose just as a finishing point, I really liked what you said a minute ago about, it’s about adding value. So I do believe that with affiliate programs, you shouldn’t just be signing up for affiliate programs just to make the money. It should be something you’d actually want to benefit, want to be promoting anyway.
[00:38:42] Katie: And actually one thing we haven’t discussed that you’ve reminded me of Is affiliate networks, things like a share a sale or impact radius or something like that, where you’re joining multiple affiliate programs in one go. I personally think they’re completely pointless because that’s not how you should be promoting products.
[00:39:03] Katie: You shouldn’t just have a website. This is my affiliate website and just randomly sign up to thing. It should be things you’d be promoted. Like my relationship with IconicWP, I want to promote their delivery slots plugin because my restaurant ordering customers need it. That’s a genuine recommendation.
[00:39:21] Katie: And so I try to make an affiliate link and you’ll see many affiliate links on the Bantu website, but they are all things that we genuinely believe in and think are good quality products. And so I think there’s nothing wrong with taking a cut of that. A mutual benefit thing, but I don’t like affiliate marketing just for the sake of it.
[00:39:42] Alex: Yeah, for sure. I agree. I think Pat Flynn talks about this a lot. I don’t know if you’ve watched his podcast, Smart Passive Income, but he’s a pretty well known affiliate marketer. He’s been in this space for a long time. A lot of his content is about that subject of doing affiliate marketing well. And a lot of it is that it’s all about being genuine.
[00:39:57] Alex: It’s all about being sincere, promoting the products that you believe in and putting in the effort to actually make them convert and make them sell. Only selling things that you. Genuinely think are good products that are worthy of your recommendation. And honestly, any good affiliate marketer is going to fundamentally understand that I think, right?
[00:40:14] Alex: Because you don’t become a good affiliate marketer without that. Like in absence of that, I don’t think because you can’t keep an audience. They’re not going to trust you. And if they can’t trust you, then they’re not going to listen to you. And I think that’s, I think that kind of relates to what you were talking about, the difference between two smaller ones with small amounts of traffic versus the one big one.
[00:40:35] Alex: The difference there. Is that it’s the trust, it’s the quality of their audience is a big, is the multiplying factor there, I think. I really like this talk because a lot of the theme here has been around that. I’ve really heard that from just talking to you through all this. The idea, like you said, the quality of the content and the coupon sites and all these other low effort things.
[00:40:56] Alex: They don’t offer any real value, so they don’t actually generate any sales. So, yeah, that’s really great context and I appreciate that. Okay. That’s all. So Katie, can you tell me where people can find you online and where they can find your products?
[00:41:09] Katie: The main place you can find me is Twitter, which is KatieKeithBarn2 and you can find my products at barn2.
[00:41:17] Katie: com.
[00:41:18] Alex: That’s great. Thank you so much. And then just as a side note. You should definitely be following her on Twitter because she publishes all these tweets that are like really detailed stuff about the things that are going on in her business, charts and stuff like that. It’s been really helpful for me personally.
[00:41:29] Alex: So I really appreciate it. So I think that if you’re looking for that kind of thing, definitely follow her on Twitter, she has lots of really good stuff like that. Okay. That’s all. Thank you so much for your time, Katie, and we’ll see you around. Thanks for having me. Bye. Thank you for joining us in this episode of partnership where your network is the wind in your sails.
[00:41:46] Alex: I hope you found today’s discussion insightful and inspiring. Remember the strength of your business lies in the partnerships you build and nurture. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review. For more tips and insights, visit our website at partnership. fm. This is Alex Standifird, sailing out.
