Post Status Happiness Hour Session Eight

Transcript ↓

In this episode of the Post Status Happiness Hour, host Michelle Frechette interviews Alex Sandiford about his affiliate plugin, Siren Affiliates. Alex explains how the plugin simplifies the management of affiliate, loyalty, and royalty programs by centralizing various incentive structures. He discusses the development journey, challenges faced, and future plans for the plugin, including potential integrations. The conversation emphasizes the importance of building relationships with affiliates and providing them with the necessary tools and support to succeed. The episode concludes with insights into the ethical and collaborative aspects of affiliate marketing.

Top Takeaways:

• The Power of Affiliate Relationships: Alex emphasizes that successful affiliate programs are built on strong partnerships and personalized support. Providing affiliates with both the right tools and fair compensation can lead to mutually beneficial success. It’s not just about the percentage they earn, but about helping them market effectively.
• Siren’s Pricing Structure: Alex outlines Siren’s pricing tiers as very affordable, with a focus on bringing in early adopters. The initial pricing is $59 for the first year, renewing at $79. This pricing will likely increase as the plugin stabilizes and grows.
• Challenges in Affiliate Marketing Perception: Alex is focused on shifting the negative stigma around affiliate marketing by showing that it can be honest, impactful, and built on genuine partnerships. He contrasts the negative view of affiliates with the popular trend of influencer marketing, highlighting their similarities.
• Platform Migration and Customization: Siren offers platform migration support for users switching from other affiliate plugins like Affiliate WP. This feature has proven popular, and Alex plans to streamline the migration process to make it more efficient, showing a focus on enhancing user experience and meeting customer needs.
• Future Development Plans: While Siren does not yet have built-in tools for providing affiliates with marketing resources like images and copy, this is on Alex’s roadmap. He recognizes the importance of giving affiliates the resources they need to succeed, although existing tools like Google Drive and the block editor can partially solve this for now.

Mentioned In The Show:

• LifterLMS
• Udemy
• PayPal
• Stripe
• Kadence
• Affiliate WP
• WooCommerce
• Easy Digital Downloads
• LearnDash
• North Commerce
• Personalized WP
• Restrict Content Pro
• Google Drive
• PartnerShip Podcast
• WP World
• Marcus Burnette
• WordCampUS

🐦 You can follow Post Status and our guests on Twitter:

• Alex Standiford (Owner, Siren Affiliates)
• Michelle Frechette (Director of Community Relations, Post Status)
• Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)

The Post Status podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. 📝

Browse our archives, and don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS. 🎧

Transcript

Michelle Frechette 00:00:02  Welcome to another Post Status Happiness Hour. I’m Michelle Frechette. I am here today with Alex Sandiford. Hi, Alex. How are you?

Alex Standiford 00:00:09  Hey, Michel. How’s it going?

Michelle Frechette 00:00:11  It’s going well. And I see that you have, your logo right next to your name. And so you’re gonna have to tell me later how you did that, because I’m like, I didn’t know that was possible. So is that your logo, or is that, like, the standard emoji?

Alex Standiford 00:00:24  Yeah, that’s the secret. It’s just it’s the mermaid emoji. So I just I just slap that on the end of my name everywhere I can.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:31  I love it. I’m gonna emojify myself now. Is that a word? Emojify.

Alex Standiford 00:00:34  It is now.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:35  It is not. That’s right for sure. Well, welcome to the Post Status Happiness Hour. 

Alex Standiford: Thanks for having me. 

Michelle Frechette: We make you and other people happy. Talk about the things that we do in the world. So we’re also recording this. So this will go on our website and in our YouTube channel for all of posterity so people can reflect back on it later if they’re not able to be here today.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:58  So, yeah. So you are here. You have recently gone full bore with Siren Affiliates. So tell us a little bit about Siren Affiliates and what it is.

Alex Standiford 00:01:07  Sure. So Siren is a, at its most basic level is an affiliate plugin, right? I mean, but, calling it that is kind of an insult to what it’s capable of doing. it’s a pay for performance platform. So you can build, not only can you build affiliate programs, but you can also build a royalty, loyalty program. So maybe you wanted to create like an Etsy clone, or you wanted to create your own Udemy using WordPress. You could do that with Lifter and have like multiple course creators and pay them for, whenever their courses are sold, for example. basically anything where you want to pay other people who work with you, whenever they, you know, successfully do something like sell a product or something like that. But it doesn’t even have to just be selling products. It could even be, a distribution where maybe you wanted to do a bonus once a month, based on revenue share or something like that.

Alex Standiford 00:02:06  So there’s all kinds of different programs, this, this tool, this plugin can do. And it allows you to do multiple programs at the same time. So if you wanted to have like a small affiliate program and then maybe a bonus program for specific products to like, motivate people to sell certain things, you can do that. And then the person could get credit for both of those programs. The sky’s the limit in regards to that. My goal really, whenever I built this program, this plugin, is to make it to where if there’s a if there’s an incentive program that you want to create for your website Siren can do it. 

Michelle Frechette 00:02:39  That’s pretty cool. So is it does it activate on a trigger? So like if I make a sale, it triggers a payment or that kind of thing, or is it held for moderation? Can it be either or talk us through a little bit of the specifics?

Alex Standiford 00:02:53  Yeah, sure. So, it it works through a flow of several steps right now. So I’ve, I’ve thought about making it to where it can do the instant payout, an instant payout kind of approach. But I find that most people want for at least for auditing purposes and things like that. They want to have that, that paper trail. Right. 

Michelle Frechette 00:03:13  WHich makes sense. Yeah.

Alex Standiford 00:03:13  Yeah, totally. So, the a typical program. So there’s two different ones. There’s a program that’ll run. It’s all about revolving around a sale. So whenever a sale happens on the website, that’s the trigger that the entire program revolves around. Right. So there’s things that happen before the trail, but the purchase and then whenever the purchase happens, that’s kind of like the event that says, okay, this happened. Here’s how much money every the various affiliates or collaborators can get. Of course, it can be more than one, right? And then the other one is time based. So maybe it’s like once every month it’s going to take a look at the aggregate totals of, maybe the total number of sales of a specific product. And it’s going to say, oh, hey, you know, your, your course or whatever your, your product sold was sold this many times.

Alex Standiford 00:04:01  We’re going to give you a 10% bonus for that or something like that. 

Michelle Frechette: Okay. 

Alex Standiford: And either way, they all of those things get funneled into what I call obligations or rewards. And basically those, just sit in the WordPress dashboard as a, as a Siren Manager. You can go in there and you can look at those and you can see who you owe, how much you owe. And then there’s a full on payout flow that happens after that. So you can actually generate a payout. Like for example, with mine, I have a fair bit of ones that I actually owe money for right now, just because over the next couple, because I have some affiliates who’ve been selling Siren. Right. So yeah, over the. 

Michelle Frechette: Yay. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. so over the next, and dog fooding, you know.

Michelle Frechette 00:04:45  I was going to say , you own a plugin.

Alex Standiford 00:04:46  I love it, right? Right. So over the next, I have a 30 day return window for Siren, so I’m not. I don’t want to pay my affiliates until that 30 day window is done, just in case there’s something goes wrong. Right?

Michelle Frechette 00:04:58  Sure. That makes sense.

Alex Standiford 00:04:59  So. So after that 30 days up, I’m going to go into my site. I’m going to select all of the, obligations that I have that are older, that are 30 days and older, and then I can generate a payout from those and it’ll automatically tally up how much I owe every collaborator, and then allows me to export that as a CSV file or something like that, so that you can use it for PayPal or whatever.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:23  Okay. Does it automatically connect to PayPal or is it giving you the information to do that later?

Alex Standiford 00:05:29  Today it’s only exporting. It is going I am going to do the payout thing because again, dog fooding I’m going to want that myself.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:36  So for sure it’s.

Alex Standiford 00:05:38  It’s it’s been on the roadmap since day one. But I just, I every time I plan on doing it, I’m like, oh yeah, but maybe one more e-commerce integration. Yeah. It’s just yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:50  I can imagine. And so. So and if you’re not using PayPal or Stripe, it gives you that right now the opportunity to use whatever you’re using.

Alex Standiford 00:05:57  yeah.

00:05:58  And and another.

Michelle Frechette 00:05:58  You could write paper checks if that’s the way you want to do it.

Alex Standiford 00:06:00  Right. Exactly, exactly. If you. Yeah, exactly. So, and a lot of people I’m finding are using this, I’ve had, I’ve actually had several people who are telling me I’m using this with my, like, formal business partner. Like, literally we are splitting the profits of this 50/50 or some kind of relationship like that. But we wanted to like, have some kind of thing where some of these there’s there’s terms in our agreement where some products are at a different rate and stuff like that, and they wanted a way to just manage that whole thing. And they’re actually using Siren for that. So those kinds of people, like they don’t even, they don’t really want that. Right? They actually just want to be like they literally are just writing each other checks. Right? So so there’s all kinds of different approaches there. but yeah, I definitely want a straight I personally want to Stripe integration.

Michelle Frechette 00:06:44  Like I’m imagining that every conversation you would have with somebody like me or other business owners and things like that. You are not like adding toggles in your dashboard in your head like, okay, this would be great to toggle on or off. This would be great to have as a title, like not to automatically have it go, but oh, we should integrate that. But it has to be a toggle.

Alex Standiford 00:07:02  Yes. Yeah. It’s been it’s, it’s oh my gosh. It’s when it comes to features right now for me, it’s it’s like it’s like a hydra head. Every time I cut one off two more pop ups and I believe, you know, I’m trying and I’m early in the process. And like, I know conventional wisdom says to like, you know, pace myself, but, gosh, I don’t want to.

Michelle Frechette 00:07:23  It’s so hard, right? It’s so hard for sure. Absolutely. No, I, I understand that it’s like I have a roadmap, but it doesn’t mean I have to go 30 miles an hour. I can go 100 miles an hour if I want to.

Alex Standiford 00:07:35  Right. Exactly. 

Michelle Frechette: I’m still on the road. 

Alex Standiford: For me, it’s more like I have a roadmap, but there’s also shiny things. So it’s like, you know, maybe I’ll take this detour to go look at that ball of yarn off 66, you know. 

Michelle Frechette 00:07:49  Yeah, no. For sure. I’m just gonna put this up here. If we do have a couple of people watching live, if you’re watching live and you’re on our YouTube channel, go ahead and, put any questions or comments you have for Alex, or me in the, in the chat, and we’ll make sure that we get them answered. Just want to make sure that I put that up there. and I should put a banner that has when I tell you what, when you’re showing the product, I’m going to make a banner that has your logo on it or not. It’s not your logo, but we’ll have your email. That’s the word I want you URL.

Alex Standiford 00:08:18  Website? 

Michelle Frechette 00:08:21 Yeah. Yes. Website. It’s been a long day, Alex.

Alex Standiford 00:08:22  Yeah, I get it.

Michelle Frechette 00:08:25  So that people have more information. So I’ll put that there. But. Yeah. So when did you first think of building this product? How long ago versus like where you are today? Because like, for example, I had the idea for WP Speakers for like two months, and then I was just like on a Monday night, I was like, I’m going to build this thing. And on Wednesday I launched it like, I mean, it wasn’t as complex. I’m not a developer. I got to use Kadence, you know, it was a lot easier to do, but I’m sure that you didn’t build it in a day and a half. So. So what was your roadmap to this point and when did you start?

Alex Standiford 00:08:59  So honestly, the I would say the roadmap for this started, gosh, like 2016. I mean, I didn’t start building it then, but I was but I had what I would consider a rough prototype, like my first idea of an alternative program on my website that wasn’t an affiliate program. Right? It was a content bonus program for my agency that I was running at the time. and, I was frustrated because I couldn’t do it with Affiliate WP and. You know, I was a developer at the time for that product, and so I knew it well. And just the effort that it took to actually make that happen, it was like I was really bending that plugin to its to my will. Do you know what I mean? Like, it was just a lot of customizations I had to do. And I’m not trying to bash on the on again. I’m just but but like but it But it was one of those things I just couldn’t do. There wasn’t really a great solution in WordPress for that. And I didn’t really think much about it at the time. But fast forward several years, right? I’m no longer at Affiliate WP. I’ve been gone for several years. I’m working at a different place, and I’m I’m having a conversation with Chris at Lifter and we’re talking and I was just like, man, I’m I think I’m ready.

Alex Standiford 00:10:11  I think I’m ready to do a product. I think I’m ready to like, dive into this. I was talking with my coach, who I just hired at the time, and I was like, and his his advice was, go talk to some of the people. And you’re well networked. Go talk to the people in your network. Go find some people and ask them like, hey, you run a product company. What are some things that your product needs? I want to build them and sell them basically. And, and I did that. I struck out on a few that, you know, there were people who were like, no, I’m not telling you that. Or or you know, something. Or they would give me something that wasn’t relevant to what I was going to do. And but, Chris at Lifter was very forthcoming, and he was just like, yeah, man, I’ve got so many things that I that we need. And he gave me this list of like all these different ideas.

Alex Standiford 00:10:56  And one of them was a better affiliate solution for lLifter. And I was like, oh, I think I might be a really good fit for that. And it was, it was like, it was like, Stephen King says, like two unrelated ideas coming together. Wrote some of his best books. Right. 

Michelle Frechette: Sure. 

Alex Standiford: So and it kind of was that where it was like I had this problem with, with, my solution, my need for something. And he had these problems and they were different. Right. And it was coming from a very different perspective and a very different place. But I looked at it and I was like, I’m pretty sure I can bridge this gap, right? I can I can solve both of these problems. And that was last August. So basically I started I discovered this, I realized this, I was like, okay, I’m doing it. and I launched May of this year, and, almost a year to the day I launched the Lifter LMS integration with his product.

Michelle Frechette: Oh, that’s cool.

Alex Standiford 00:11:50  So it was it was a long time coming, but it it certainly felt longer. Gosh, it was such a it was quite the grind. I’m glad, I’m glad. I’m glad I’m over that. Although I do have to admit it didn’t get less crazy. It just. It’s just crazy in a very different way.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:10  Isn’t that the way it always is, though? It’s like you think of a solution for something and then like you said, it’s it’s like the Hydra. It spawns so many more. There’s a there’s a Giphy or GIF, I don’t know, whatever where like there’s a hand and there’s like more fingers, more hands off the fingers and more hands off those fingers. And that’s what it makes me think. It was like, I have this idea. It is the palm. And look at all the other ideas. Oh, and look at how those have spawned ideas. And it’s just giant root system of this.

Alex Standiford 00:12:38  It feels to me like climbing a mountain. And then I get to the top of the mountain, expecting to see a big horizon. And then I look in front of me, and I see a mountain that’s ten times bigger than what I originally just climbed. That’s kind of what it feels like. It’s like, oh, okay. Well.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:52  Funny story.

Alex Standiford 00:12:53  Yeah. Right.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:55  Little aside. So I am not a heights person. I can be at the top of the CN tower and look down through the floor like, that’s fine, but it’s what I’m actually hanging like from the gondola that goes up the side of the mountain. I don’t like that. And so years ago, with my ex-husband, went up to a Whiteface Mountain, which is one of the tallest mountain in the Adirondacks, and that the one of the ones that they used for, the Lake Placid Olympics.

Alex Standiford 00:13:25  Northeastern Adirondacks. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:28  Exactly. So I’m looking up and I’m like, okay, that doesn’t look too far. I can do that. So we get on this gondola and I’m like white knuckled and I’m just trying not to cry because I just have this fear, right? It’s like it’s not rational. I agree, we get to the point where I think we’re at the top, we level off and there’s like five times more mountain that we still have to go up. So yes, you just triggered that memory. Thank you.

Alex Standiford 00:13:54  Yeah. Whoops.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:57  But yes, it is exactly like that when you start working on a product.

Alex Standiford 00:14:01  Yeah, I get that

Michelle Frechette 00:14:03  So that made me think of that right away. Just thinking I’m going to go ahead and look at. I managed to get your.

Alex Standiford 00:14:09  You did it! 

Michelle Frechette 00:14:10  Got your mermaid in there too. So yeah. It’s sirenaffiliates.com  if you’re interested in exploring more. But why don’t you show us a little bit? I’m gonna, I can bring up your, your screen up here and walk us through a little bit.

Alex Standiford 00:14:23  Sure. Okay. So, whenever you have Siren installed, this, this current install happens to have Lifter installed, which has a few different, which allows it to have a few different engagement events and allows you to create some different programs. If you were using. But I’m also, currently Siren supports LifterLMS and WooCommerce. 

Michelle Frechette: Okay. 

Alex Standiford: I’m working on Easy Digital Downloads as well as an North Commerce now. And then I have my eyes set on a certain other course platform that, you may.

Michelle Frechette: Is it LearnDash? Please tell me it’s LearnDash.

Alex Standiford: I would, I would like to. Yeah, I’d love to. That’s on the. That’s on the list. Yes. Another. Another. Less less public time perhaps. Yes, but but, anyway, so so, over here, you’ll see. There’s a Siren. There’s Siren, and, there’s all these different options. There’s programs, there’s distributors, there’s collaborators, all these different things. But really what I want to show here is kind of the key thing about Siren, which is its key differentiator. Different differentiator is, it has a multi course approach to affiliate management. So let’s go ahead and delete these test ones because we don’t need those bad boys. Okay. So instead of so if you are coming from a space where you’ve worked with some kind of traditional affiliate plugin before, this concept doesn’t exist because the plugin itself is the program, right? Those plugins, they give you an affiliate program, they give you one specific solution and one specific thing.

Alex Standiford 00:15:55  They might have extensions. They might have things that allow you to like customize those plugins or those your one program in some kind of special way, but they don’t really have a way to be able to do more than one program at a time. 

Michelle Frechette: Okay. 

Alex Standiford: And a couple of the consequences of that is they end up spreading out all of their settings throughout the plugin. So, for example, maybe you want to have a certain affiliate, a certain set of affiliates who have a different rate, maybe instead of being paid 15%, maybe they’re like super special affiliates or something like that, and you want to give them 20% instead of 15%, right? Okay. 

Michelle Frechette 00:16:32  You negotiated a different rate with them.

Alex Standiford 00:16:33  Yes, exactly. Maybe. Maybe they’re. Yeah, they’re they’re a plugin partner. Or they’re some kind of. They’re on some kind of different level.

Michelle Frechette 00:16:40  They’re they’re super influencers.

Alex Standiford 00:16:43  Yeah. Something like that. Exactly. You would have to go on those plugins. You go to that specific person, or you put them in a group or an affiliate group or something like that, and you set their rate right, and they’re able to do that. Siren takes all of that concept and the idea of different rates on products, different rates on collaborators, different rates on all this stuff and different terms. And it flips it all on its head. And it says instead of managing this stuff, instead of a collaborator or instead of an affiliate having a rate and instead of a product having a rate and all of these different things, we’re going to centralize all of this. Everything is through the program. The program has a rate, and you can have more than one program and collaborator and affiliates rather, affiliates in this case can be in as many programs as they want to be in. This allows you to create programs with different rates, right? And then add certain collaborators to those different programs, thereby giving them the special rate or the different rate. But it also gives you the added benefit of also allowing you to have programs that stack on top of each other. So maybe you want to have a, like I said earlier, where you have a program where it’s like a 10%. And then on top of that you also want to force specific products, right? Maybe you have a specific category that, you offer like a $5 bonus if it sells on top of that. You can do that, and one affiliate can get both of those on a single transaction. So it allows you to like, not only manage your programs a little bit easier because it’s all centralized, but it also allows you to break down the complexity of a monolithic affiliate program into smaller pieces so that you can actually manage it a lot easier.

Michelle Frechette 00:18:26  It almost sounds like you can be all things to all people if you need to.

Alex Standiford 00:18:30  Yes. That is the goal. Like I said, my goal was Siren is if there’s an incentive program, it can do it. 

Michelle Frechette: Gotcha. 

AlexStandiford: And I am very, very close. I think like I, I, today I had a support request for somebody asking me about a specific like, type of program that they wanted to run. And I was like, oh, you got me. I can’t do that one yet, but I know exactly how to do it and how to implement it in the system I have. And I was like, I’m good, I got you. I’m going to do it. It’s on the roadmap. Shiny object, you’re involved. Let’s go. so.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:03  I have tomorrow.

Alex Standiford 00:19:04  Yeah, right. I’ll have it tomorrow. Exactly. What are you talking about? I’ve been working on it during this whole livestream. So. Okay, so, so in the create program screen, you know, you’ve got your name, so we’ll just call it an affiliate program. Maybe my keyboard. Keyboard isn’t working right now. Hold on.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:22  Oh, no.

Alex Standiford 00:19:23  No, that’s how it goes. Well, tell me, is it my keyboard? Now? Yeah, it is totally my keyboard. Hold on a second. Let me.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:33  No worries. This is what happens when it’s live. You never know what you’re going to get, right? It’s all good.

Alex Standiford 00:19:40  Yeah. Live streams are dynamic.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:44  So, as I said, if you do have questions, put them in the comments. We’re going to get Alex to answer them live. And the link for Siren Affiliates is simply Sirenaffiliates.com. I love it when there’s a link that’s so easy. Yeah. We’re connected again. Go for it.

Alex Standiford 00:20:01  Yes. Okay. So, so let’s call this an affiliate program, right. you can give it a description so it pays may generate. Let’s say I’ve done this before. Okay. so you can set the status. You can also set the currency, to any kind of, you know, currency based on whatever you’re paying in. it doesn’t actually do the conversion. It’s currently assuming that, you know, whatever you’re putting in this is so if you’re if you’re selling products in US dollars and you want to sell in Euro, it’s not going to convert that for you. So you’d have to use fixed pricing or stuff like that. Okay. But the reason why the big thing that’s exciting about the currency is that in a future version, it’s actually on my roadmap for this month is, to, to make it possible to do, store credit.

Alex Standiford 00:20:54  So if you have. Yeah. So, one of the things that, North Commerce has been talking with me about is that. So the idea of, you know, you can instead of setting a currency here as US dollars, you could set it as, you know, store, credit store credit for North Commerce or store credit or whatever. Right? I haven’t quite figured out exactly what the terminology is, but the idea here is that you could pick that currency here and you could create like a refer a friend program. Right? So all of your all of your customers then instantly become collaborators who can then sign up for the Refer a Friend program. And they’re only on that program, they’re not a part of the affiliate program and all that other stuff, but they’re on this one. So if they refer a friend, they get $50 in store. 

Michelle Frechette 00:21:37  Oh that’s cool. So if somebody is selling in pesos though, the the payout could be is also pesos. 

Alex Standiford: Yes. 

Michelle Frechette: So if they’re even even that that’s the same okay. Thank you, just making sure..

Alex Standiford 00:21:49  So then you can set an expiration time. So this is kind of like a cookie window. So if you’re creating a typical affiliate program right. You want to you don’t want to say so. Like just I’ll take a step back real quick. An affiliate program works by a, an influencer or a blogger or something like that. They’ll share a link with people, and you’ve probably seen these links before where it’s got a special little code at the end of it. And that code basically says tells the, the website, hey, this was referred by this specific affiliate. Right. And that’s how it tracks it. That’s how it knows. And then if the person who actually clicked on that link then turns around and makes a purchase, you know, time passes could be it could be two minutes, it could be 60 days, it could be two years. Doesn’t matter. As long as they make a purchase, that person, that affiliate would actually get the commission, they would get the reward, they would get credit.

Alex Standiford 00:22:44  But the problem is, is, you know, that two the two year example in those numbers, I said there that’s like really far in the future. And did that affiliate really actually make that sale happen, or did it just happen to be a link that got clicked two years prior to. And here we are. So, you kind of want to set a limit on how long you can wait before you invalidate that credit, right?

Michelle Frechette 00:23:07  Like a 30 days or even even a year if you want to. Right? So. 

Alex Standiford: Totally. 

Michelle Frechette: Okay.

Alex Standiford 00:23:12  Totally. Exactly. It doesn’t have to be, like, short, you know, it can be as long as you want. a common one is is 30 days. So we’ll just do 30 for this. So basically that’s saying that from the time they click on the link to the time they make the purchase. Let me say that again. From the time they click on the link, they have 30 days to make the purchase in order for you to be able to get credit for that sale.

Michelle Frechette: Gotcha.

Alex Standiford 00:23:37  So, that’s not relevant to all programs, but this specific program, it certainly is. Then you can set a program structure. So the program structure actually defines, who gets paid and how much I’m sorry, who gets paid and how that is divided out. Right. Because some programs in siren can actually divide the money among many affiliates instead of just being a single one. But in this case, we would just use probably newest engagement wins or oldest engagement wins. And basically what that means is, do we want to pay the last affiliate who referred this visitor before the sale, or do we want to reward the first affiliate? So because it’s possible that two affiliates could refer one customer before they actually make that purchase. So who do you report? Right. So that this kind of help this helps you determine that. Right. This allows you so newest engagement in order to gauge that shared engagement pool I’m sorry. Newest and oldest reward one top score runs also rewards one and then shared engagement pool and performance weighted pool actually would divide the money among all of them.

Alex Standiford 00:24:45  So if you had like five affiliates who referred somebody, you could actually use shared engagement pool and it would just divide the commission among all of them evenly. 

Michelle Frechette 00:24:55  Oh that’s cool. Now if if, if I wanted to game the system, make sure that only my link gets used, could I tell somebody, open it in an incognito window. Well, that bypass all of this. I mean, not that I’ve tried to game the system or anything.

Alex Standiford 00:25:09  Yeah, technically, I think that might work. because, yeah, technically. 

Michelle Frechette 00:25:15  Is it based on cookies?

Alex Standiford 00:25:17  Yeah, yeah, it’s based on the, Yeah. The the opportunity based on cookies. 

Michelle Frechette: Just curious, 

Alex Standiford: But just if they were, if they’re already logged into a site, if they already if they’re an existing customer or something like that, that wouldn’t work. It wouldn’t matter once the purchase is made, their account logs in, and we know who you are, you know? 

Michelle Frechette: Gotcha. Okay, cool. 

Alex Standiford: But, but, you know, fraud detection, there’s things like that. You got to kind of work.

Michelle Frechette 00:25:40  Just curious. Yeah.

Alex Standiford 00:25:42  So then you have, engagement tracking events, and these are the events that actually happen on the plugin. I’m sorry. These are the events that actually happen in order for the, the collaborator to earn their reward. These are the things they have to do, right? Or they have to make happen. So there’s several of these. Right. There’s site visited, blog posts visited, a collaborators product is sold. Coupon code used of course is completed or a lesson is completed. Right. So course completed and lesson completed are specific to LMS systems, right? So you can set it up to where, you reward your course creators whenever somebody completes their course. Right. Or something like that. But in the case of an affiliate program, what you really want is that what they need to do is drive somebody to the site using their affiliate link, or they’re going to use a coupon code, right. It’s going to be one of those two things.

Alex Standiford 00:26:47  So we’ll go ahead and tick site visited and coupon code used. And you’ll see here that this little value box pops up whenever you tick those boxes. And what that does, is it allows you to specify a value like how much doing that specific action is worth. Not in dollars, not in in money, but in terms of just points right in the system behind the scenes can track those point values to figure out, who gets paid and how much they get paid. This isn’t relevant. And this these only apply to the different program structures. So let’s say let’s say you’re using top score wins, right? So maybe instead of it being the first affiliate, it’s the affiliate who drove that visitor the most times or something like that. Right. You could do that. So you could say that’s worth a point. If they drive a visitor to the site, if the coupon codes use, that’s worth five points, you know. So it’s it’s a lot more loose. Like this isn’t the best example of this. 

Michelle Frechette 00:27:45  But sure,no.But it shows how it’s weighted. Yeah.

Alex Standiford 00:27:48  Yeah, exactly. It allows you to apply a weight to these different things, if that is relevant to the program that you’re building. So then, like, of course, completed and lesson completed could get a lot of use out of there. Right? So if you were doing like a really long sales cycle where maybe you actually have an entire course that needs to be done before, the product can be sold. Maybe there’s some onboarding or some pre-sales, and you’re using an LMS system to actually do that pre-sales education. And that course creator is the actual collaborator. You could give them points for that. Right. And then so like let’s let’s build that example. So maybe there’s a performance ready to pull. And you have a whole bunch of affiliates. Right. And some of those affiliates are also creating  course content to drive sales. Right. So you could actually do course completed and less and completed. And maybe when the course is completed you give like 50 points, the lessons completed, it’s like 10 points maybe site visited is worth f5 and a coupon code is like 10, right? Something like that.

Alex Standiford 00:28:48  So then when it’s done, and maybe you’re selling like a this would be a high dollar product, right? Several thousand dollars big, big sales process. whenever the sale is done, it would then say, okay, well, here’s all of the things that this customer did in its journey, in their journey to actually making this purchase. Here’s all the points that were tallied up based on that. The percentage that the course creator gets. Is this like the cut of the, the the, reward they get is is higher than the affiliate, right? Because they went through the whole course. And that was worth a whole lot of points for them to do that. So like there’s different ways and obviously like more complexity in this, the easier it is to game like you were talking about. So you got to be a little careful. but there’s a lot of, there’s a lot.

Michelle Frechette 00:29:40  But also assume people are honest. Yeah.

Alex Standiford 00:29:44  Yeah. I mean, honestly a good a good a good affiliate program, in my opinion, a really good affiliate program is probably, like that kind of one. You’re probably not having thousands of affiliates. You probably would have a very small sales team of, you know, a dozen or so people. 

Michelle Frechette 00:29:58  You would have that your affiliates anyway for sure.

Alex Standiford 00:30:01  Yeah, totally. Absolutely. So yeah, if if you’re asking questions about fraud and you’re dealing with fraud a lot. Then, you know, you’re probably. That that raises a whole nother. That’s a whole. That’s a whole nother conversation.

Michelle Frechette 00:30:13  It’s not your plugin that’s broken. It’s your system that’s broken at that point.

Alex Standiford 00:30:16  Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. So, yeah, we’re playing a game and ultimately there’s going to be cheaters, you know what I mean? So you have to make sure that you’re working with honest people. So, the and then the next thing is the incentive structure. So what this does is it determines how much money is going to be available to the collaborators who actually, win, right, who actually are getting the reward. In the case of one, obviously they would get it all in the case where it’s divided, it would get divided among all of them.

Alex Standiford 00:30:49  So you can do fixed per product, fixed per transaction or percentage of transaction and the kind of self-explanatory rate. So a fixed per product, if you have ten items in your cart, it’s going to pay you that, whatever this value is here. So if we had this to 20. It would pay you $20 for ten of those products. So it would be a pretty big commission in that case, right? Or you could do fixed per transaction, one single fixed number every time a transaction happens. Or the most common one probably is percentage. So you can the thing is about percentage is it scales really well right.

Michelle Frechette 00:31:25  So like so if you have $2 products and $2,000 products it’s a percentage not.

Alex Standiford 00:31:30  Yeah sure. Right. Exactly. But I like the idea of fixed per product a lot too, because as like an extra incentive, I like to use that one for, a really good example that comes to mind for me is like, let’s say you’re running a clothing shop online or something like that, and you have some kind of article of clothing, maybe it’s a pair of shorts or something.

Alex Standiford 00:31:52  And winter is nigh, right? And summer’s passed and you still have all these shorts and you need to get rid of them and, you know, so you’re going to do this big sale to make them. You could either one do a big sale and do this big marketing push and all this stuff to make this stuff go away? Or you could create a program that’s specifically targeting that one specific pair of pants, notify all of your influencers or your collaborators and say, hey, I created a program in every pair of shorts that you pay, I’m going to give you a $10 bonus on top of your commission, right? So it’s this extra incentive. It doesn’t have to be permanent, right? That’s the thing that’s neat about these is like you can add them as you see fit, do whatever you want with them. 

Michelle Frechette: Move inventory. 

Alex Standiford: Right. Yeah. And get that get that dang inventory out. Move that inventory. It’s not the one you any good in your in your, storage. So. All right. So let’s say that we went with a percentage of transaction. Let’s just go with like a 25%. Now here you can specify do you want to credit conversions for credit your conversions for both sales, referral or referrals. So I’m sorry. Sales or renewals. So in other words a sale would just be a traditional sale, right? I bought this subscriptions. Yeah. So, any, any sale that happens after that initial first sale is considered a renewal. So if you wanted to create a recurring commission program, affiliate program, you could do that, right? You could say, I want I’m going to pay you 25%, like in this case right here. The way this is set, it would be I’m paying you 25% for life. As long as this person is paying me right.

Michelle Frechette 00:33:32  The sale and then the renewal subsequent. 

Alex Standiford 00:33:35  Exactly. Now, what’s really cool about this is again, multi program approach. There’s a really cool opportunity here that is not easy to do with other solutions, is you can do 25% for sales and then create a second program that’s identical to this one. The only difference is it’s only for renewals okay. And then you.

Michelle Frechette 00:33:51  Lower it can be a lower yeah lower percentage.

Alex Standiford 00:33:53  So now you can say yeah. So now you’re motivating your affiliates to generate those sales. They get a big bonus for that. And then they get a smaller bonus for the recurring. Or maybe you have a whole different team that is focused on on keeping those customers, from, you know, helping reduce churn and all of that stuff. So 

Michelle Frechette 00:34:09  There’s not a lot of work that has to go into selling a renewal, like a sales person isn’t really doing much to not calling like, hey, are you going to renew that? So yeah.

Alex Standiford 00:34:18  Yeah. And in fact, you actually hear people will say that it hurts them. From a sales perspective, because you’ll get the salespeople who will who go in for that recurring, and then they’ll get enough customers that they’re comfortable and they don’t really need to sell anymore. So, you know, I mean, that’s cool, right? That’s cool and all. But it’s also kind of not, it’s counterintuitive to what you’re trying to do. Right? It’s it’s doing the opposite. So, yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:43  Now can I ask can I interrupt to ask another question, though?

Alex Standiford 00:34:46  Sure.

Michelle Frechette 00:34:46  So if I want to change the incentive structure, let’s say the percentage for a limited time, let’s say I wanted to say in the month of November leading up to Black Friday sales. Usually we give 30%, but only this time I’m going to do 40%. Can I do that at a set? Okay.

Alex Standiford 00:35:04  Yeah, you totally could. So you could the the way I would do it though is instead of changing your program, your normal one, I would actually create another program and add the extra percent on top of that. The reason why is paper trail again. So, so on the back end, whenever you look at all those sales and stuff like that, it would actually show two rewards instead of one, one for the regular program and then one for the bonus on top of that.

Alex Standiford 00:35:30  

Michelle Frechette 00:35:31  And so you won’t forget to reset it afterwards either. 

Alex Standiford 00:35:34  That’s right. Exactly, exactly. But then and it also kind of gives you a little bit more clarity. It just adds more clarity to it because it’s like, oh, there’s my why. Like why is that percentage.

Michelle Frechette: It’s so clean.

Alex Standiford: There’s no question right now. It’s there’s two. Oh I didn’t get this one this time. Why is that. Oh because that sale is done.

Michelle Frechette 00:35:50  They also got the Black Friday one. Yeah. Makes sense.

Alex Standiford 00:35:52  Exactly, exactly. It adds a lot of extra clarity there. 

Michelle Frechette: That’s cool. Yeah that makes sense. 

Alex Standiford: So let’s go ahead and put this back to that 25% or just for sales now. The last piece here is what that says including commission calculations. Basically what this does is it makes it to where you can, it allows you to specify what parts of the transaction is actually going to be used whenever we’re calculating the value of the commission. Right. Because our commissions are typically going to be are always in fact, the transaction is always a part of that.

 Right. Programs inherently in Siren revolve around a transaction okay. If they don’t, then that’s going to be a different thing called a distribution. But in this case they always revolve around a transaction. So in this case. Let’s let’s say that you well, okay. Sorry, there’s multiple pieces to a transaction, right? There’s there’s the discount. There’s there’s any discounts that were used. Right. That would subtract from the value. There’s fees for like a say you have a subscription and you want to charge a signup fee, right. There’s a that’s an example of a fee. You have line items, which is the stuff that’s actually bought, you have shipping sometimes and then you also have taxes. So this allows you to figure out what parts of that transaction you actually want to pay commissions on it. You’re probably not paying on taxes. You’re probably not paying on shipping. Right. But you’re almost always going to be paying on discounts, fees and line items. 

Michelle Frechette: That makes sense.

Alex Standiford:  Whenever you whenever you take line items here, you can see it actually allows you to specify, different categories and SKUs and types. So this allows you to filter out which products, are actually used okay for this program. So let’s say let’s say we only wanted to include or this that short the example of the shorts as we gave earlier. Right? So let’s say that in that case, you know, right now, if I, if I take all three of these like this, this program applies to every single product in our system, right? But let’s say that we don’t we only want it to apply to those shorts. So what we would do then is we could say with any of those SKUs, we know the skew of those shorts, and if we don’t, we just add one. Right. so then you would just say, you know, shorts, whatever. so now this program will only work for those shorts, even if there were multiple items that was in the cart. So if there was like a whole bunch of stuff, maybe they bought socks and a shirt and and a jacket and all this stuff.

Alex Standiford 00:38:34  But they also bought those shorts. The only thing that transaction would still apply, but the only part of that one that will apply are the shorts. Right? So it’s still going to trigger it. It’s just not going to trigger the whole transaction. It’s only going to trigger for those shorts.

Michelle Frechette 00:38:47  So because that’s the item you’re really trying to move and try and incentivize.

Alex Standiford 00:38:50  Yeah. exactly. So, that’s that’s how that’s how that works there. So with all of that, you’re setting up your program. I mean, well, and just like that, we’ve set up a basic affiliate program, right? 30 days, newest engagement wins, site visited, coupon code used, percentage of transaction, and then only for shorts. Let’s actually get rid of that. There we go. So and then you just click create and it will create the program. And then from here we can actually, add our collaborators to this program. So I have no idea what collaborators are in here right now. Oh good I do.

Michelle Frechette 00:39:30  So so so so let’s say you wanted to add somebody. You just you’re putting their information in, you can add.

Alex Standiford 00:39:36  So you can click Add New. So we’ll add Michelle. 

Michelle Frechette 00:39:40  You don’t have to type my last name. It’s okay.

Alex Standiford 00:39:41  Thank you. Gosh.

Michelle Frechette 00:39:44  I didn’t put it on the screen. I was gonna see.

Alex Standiford 00:39:46  That was a great read. Did you I don’t know if you saw me look over at the screen. I was like, what is her last name? I got? I can’t spell it.

Michelle Frechette 00:39:52  I can say it, but I don’t know it. Yeah.

Alex Standiford 00:39:54  Right.

Michelle Frechette 00:39:55  Michelle at Post Status.Shot. Yeah.

Alex Standiford 00:39:57  Thank you. So, so yeah, it’s just as simple as just doing that. So.

Michelle Frechette: Super easy. Yeah. 

Alex Standiford: And then I can add you to a program, I can set your status and I can click create. That’s it.

Michelle Frechette 00:40:09  There and there I am.

Alex Standiford 00:40:10  Yeah. And then if I wanted to add Brad and Steve later, I could do that just by doing a bulk action here and clicking Add Program and then.

Michelle Frechette: Oh very cool.

Alex Standiford 00:40:19  And now they’re a part of that program as well. Now what’s and there’s, there’s different flows for this. Right? I actually have a form that’s a block that allows you to kind of automate some of that stuff. But honestly, I, I’ve personally found that it just there’s an application process for this anyway. So the automation aspect of that is kind of limited on it’s on how valuable it is in my opinion. So I find that it is probably more valuable to just create a form using the forms plugin of choice to have an application, and then once the application comes in, you look at it and then you just manually add them like I just did. And then if you actually had a user, as long as it matches this email, it would automatically set it up to where you could see your, your dashboard from there. but if you don’t have a user and I just had to use a collaborator, I can also send you a login email right here. And if I click.

Michelle Frechette: Oh okay.

Alex Standiford: It would actually email. Yeah. And and then you would go, it would walk you through and say, hey, this person is trying to create this affiliate account. Is this actually you. Right. And you validate it. It’s a and then it sends you another email so that you can actually set your username and password in WordPress using the normal WordPress flow. So all of that works. Alternatively, if you wanted to just manually create the user, you could do that too. So yeah. So there’s a few. So now we’ve added them to a program. And then the other end of this are distributors, which is kind of like a program, but it’s retroactive. So a program is everything that happens that leads up to a sale. A distributor is everything aggregate that happened over the past certain period of time, and then that is used to figure out how much is being distributed, right? How much is being paid. So you’ll see it’s very similar.

Alex Standiford 00:42:11  So in this case, maybe it’s a, we’ll do a profit share. Right. And this is something that’s really common to use for say, let’s say you have a membership site with, course creators, or maybe it’s a, it’s a membership site with, like a gym. Right. And you have different trainers and they’re signing people up to different classes and stuff like that. And you happen to be using some kind of e-commerce solution through WordPress.Siren can actually track your gym trainers performance on how many people they’re getting to sign up to training classes, and how much their attendance is. And actually, you can associate their bonus with that performance. Right. Wit Siren.  And that’s kind of what the distributor does. So you do a profit share maybe we’ll say pays for course creators based on performance. Right. So at the status you can set the revenue percentage. So we’ll say to like a 10%. So basically that’s saying 10% of the revenue that applies to this distributor over the last whatever however long we’re going to pay out.

Alex Standiford 00:43:09  Right. And you’ll see down here, you’ll see that including commission pool, this is very similar to the transaction thing that we saw programs. Right. So you can filter which products actually apply towards. So 10% of the products that we say are relevant to this. Then we can trigger it as often as we want, maybe monthly on the first or something like that. Sure. all the tracking events look a lot like a program, right? All the different things that have to happen. But this time, the points make a lot more sense, right? so maybe, of course, maybe maybe in the in the context of a profit share. You have course completed and lesson completed. So maybe every time a course is completed, we’re going to give you ten points. Every time a lesson is completed, we’ll give you one. Right. So this incentivizes our course creators to get people to get our existing members to watch their content, to get value out of their membership. Right. This is the kind of thing that helps reduce churn.

Alex Standiford 00:44:07  This is how we’re able to incentivize, this is how companies like Udemy, for example, actually incentivize, their course creators to actually give their course away for free for for those Udemy members who are paying a monthly membership, right? They’re paying like a 25%, distribution based on the number of minutes those videos are watched their videos. Okay. So, so you can you can do that and then you can specify the incentive structure. Right? Top score wins. Obviously you could do a single bonus, right? Whoever, whoever sells the most products in this month will get all the all the money, right. The full the full thing. You could do a shared engagement pool or performance weighted pool. So shared would obviously be anybody who’s who’s even participating in this at all will get an equal share performance weighted pool is is so cool though. So what this does is it takes this percentage, this number, their total point value. And it uses that to figure out how big of that revenue share they would get.

Alex Standiford 00:45:18  So like if I go to everybody. So I actually built this this thing to help me illustrate this. So let’s say you have a shared pool right? And you have I don’t know 20. And we’ll do 10. You have ten course creators right. So ten pays here. Those are your course creators right. And you over the course of a year or over the course of, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. For this distribution, was earning, how many $100,000? Right. So some kind of large number there. And you’re paying 25% of that, right? So it’s going to be a $25,000 payout to all of them. Now, if it’s equal, they each get $2500 bucks apiece. Right? But in the case of a distribution pool, the weighted the performance weighted pool, we are actually going to calculate how big of a share they get based on how many points they scored during that period, based on how many times the members completed courses and completed lessons.

Alex Standiford 00:46:18  And, so if I add this little bias here, this kind of simulates that. 

Michelle Frechette: Oh yeah. Yeah. 

Alex Standiford: See like, so this person did a lot of the work or got the overwhelming majority of the points right. So they get a much bigger payout than the person who did less right. So this allows you to kind of, incentivize people to,

Michelle Frechette 00:46:41  It’s almost a contest at that point. Yeah. Like, how much of it can I mean, not a bad contest. It’s incentivized contest, which is a good thing.

Alex Standiford 00:46:49  Yeah, absolutely. so this allows you to create something like that. Now, it doesn’t necessarily have to be like even sites like Udemy, for example. This isn’t the sole source of income, right? Like, it could be. It could be, but it’s it’s a little it could get a little tricky, right? I mean, if you think about it, I guess like sites like YouTube are kind of this anyway, right? People who get the most views get the most money.

Alex Standiford 00:47:10  It’s, it’s you can build a program like that with this. So and then of course the including the commission pool, this allows you to specify what products are actually relevant to that, calculation. And in this case we would only want subscriptions. Right. We only want to calculate that revenue. We don’t really want to calculate every time a course is sold in this revenue, because that’s not a part of this. We only want to give you a revenue share of the membership subscriptions. So we can do that there. and then we can create that hopefully I added everything right. It’s kind of all over the place there.  And then I can go in and add these people to that distributor, just like I did with the program.

Michelle Frechette 00:47:58  Oh. Very cool.

Alex Standiford 00:48:00  Here we go. So now they’re part of the profit share and a part of the affiliates. So that’s like a real quick.

Michelle Frechette 00:48:06  I gotta start selling man. Now that I’m in that pool.

Alex Standiford 00:48:09  That’s right, that’s right. So yeah, that’s that’s kind of a I mean, that’s a lightning quick demo.

Michelle Frechette 00:48:16  Yeah. Yeah.

Alex Standiford 00:48:17  The key things about Siren, the biggest thing, like I said, that excites me about it is just all the possibilities. Whenever I have, one on ones with my customers. Because whenever you buy Siren, you can actually get a one on one, I let you, I ask that, hey, one on one with me, you know.

Michelle Frechette 00:48:34  So some good onboarding so they can understand how to use it.

Alex Standiford 00:48:37  Totally, totally.

Michelle Frechette 00:48:38  I love that.

Alex Standiford 00:48:39  And it’s been really fun to talk to people about it  because you’ll see, it’s like today I had somebody who I was talking with and I just saw the lights turn on as we were talking, and because they actually bought the product, they bought it because they were like, I think this might be relevant to what I want, but I’m not completely sure. So they bought it kind of on a little bit of a gamble and then scheduled the meeting with me. And we talked about it. And he he was sitting there describing the problem to me.  And it was like, exactly what I have solved here. Right? And I was like, I’m just sitting here and I’m just thinking, I’m like.

Michelle Frechette 00:49:15  Let me show you something.

Alex Standiford 00:49:16  He’s going to love this, right? Yeah. So so then I, you know, I showed it to him and he was all he was, you know, you just saw his eyes light up and he was like, man, this opens up so many possibilities for me, you know? So it’s it’s cool. I’m really excited.

Michelle Frechette 00:49:27  Show us. Show us your pricing structure. Yes. You must have a pricing page up there that you can show. 

Alex Standiford 00:49:35  Oh, yeah or. You mean to buy it?

Michelle Frechette 00:49:37  Yeah. People are interested in and becoming, like, using this on their own sites. How does that work?

Alex Standiford 00:49:43  Yeah. So I, So if you wanted to buy Siren, I have three different tiers. I’m probably pretty low right now.

Michelle Frechette 00:49:52  I was going to say.

Alex Standiford 00:49:53  That it’s still, it’s it’s aggressively low.

Michelle Frechette 00:49:55  Very, very affordable.

Alex Standiford 00:49:57  Still still still very the value that I’m offering is, is a lot on this.

Michelle Frechette 00:50:03  Does it renew at the regular price. That’s the next question.

Alex Standiford 00:50:06  It does renew at the regular okay. So so $59 for the first year $79 thereafter. so.

Michelle Frechette 00:50:12  Still very affordable.

Alex Standiford 00:50:13  Very affordable for sure. it’s not going to be priced like this forever for sure. It’s just mostly I’m just trying to get the people who want who can go on a limb and try this out with me and, and use this product and, and every integration I do, every feature I add the program. The the plugin stabilizes just that much more. And so anyway, yeah. So the price is basic, plus, and pro. I do one, three and ten sites. I also offer a platform migration from other plugins if you’re looking for that. So, you know, if you’re an Affiliate WP user or any of the other ones.

Michelle Frechette 00:50:52  It makes it easier than having to redo all that key entry, right?

Alex Standiford 00:50:56  Yeah, totally.mYeah. And, I’ve had enough people take me up on that. Then I’m like, oh, crap, I got to build something to speed this up, but but, you know.

Michelle Frechette 00:51:06  So let me ask you another question, and I don’t know the answer. So if I’m asking a question you don’t have a solution for yet, forgive me in advance, but there’s two things that incentivize affiliates. One is the money that they make. Right. But the other is the tools and resources that you give them to be able to market it well. Is that part of your dashboard yet, or is that something that’s coming to be able to give them images and language to use that kind of stuff?

Alex Standiford 00:51:34  So, yes, that is definitely something that’s coming, although it’s it’s so close to being solved without me, to be honest. I mean, between the block editor and the capabilities of plugins like, you know, Personalized WP or, or Restrict Content Pro even there’s there’s all these different plugins out there that can even.

Michelle Frechette 00:51:54  Google Drive, quite honestly.

Alex Standiford 00:51:56  Yeah, exactly. It’s it’s it’s like it’s one of those things. It’s like this. There’s so many different ways that can be solved really well without me needing to build a, a specific solution. That I just haven’t prioritized it. But I mean, as a practice. Yeah, absolutely. There’s there’s so many resources, like, I actually I do a, I have a on my, on my blog here, there’s a, right here, this guide, I have a like an affiliate. Well, that’s not neat. Live is dynamic.

Michelle Frechette 00:52:31  Yes it is. I didn’t know we had a theme song for it, though. Yeah.

Alex Standiford 00:52:35  No kidding. Da da da da da. so anyway, this guy, basically, it’s a it’s a campaign of things that I teach on how to, like, grow your first affiliate program, how to find your first affiliates, how to, you know, help them and support them.

Alex Standiford 00:52:51  And I think, I think, like, in terms of what you’re saying, with that number two being the support and things, I think that is arguably more important because I could I could tell you, I’m going to pay you 100% of every sale that you generate, and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you can’t sell it 100%. Zero is still zero, right? But if you go to a person and you say, hey, I’m going to pay you, 25% or 30% right of this, of my revenue, I am going to give you the resources I have just developed and set up this thing. I’m going to give you the resources that you need. I’m going to do a live webinar for your audience, and I’m also going to offer you a coupon code that is specific for your audience only. That is like really, really good. what do you think of that? That’s a whole different ballgame, right?

Michelle Frechette: Absolutely. 

Alex Standiford: Because because the conversation, those two numbers are those two things.  You’re talking about the assistance to be able to do it. And the percentage those two things together are a multiplier, right? By themselves. Either one of them, if either one of them zero, it’s still not going to help. You’re not getting money. so if you can really help somebody, you’re basically going to them and saying, hey, I want to make I want to give you a chunk of my money or the money from these sales. I’m going to do a lot of the legwork. I’m just asking you to, you know, give me an opportunity to wow your audience. Right? And if you come with that, with this humble, you know, like, I want to help and I’m. And I’m almost like a coach. Like an assistant, you know, and I yeah, it really changes this dynamic. I think a lot of people tend to look at affiliates as numbers instead of people. 

Michelle Frechette 00:54:37  It’s about relationships.

Alex Standiford 00:54:39  Oh, absolutely.

Michelle Frechette 00:54:40  That’s I mean, I honestly think it’s all about relationships.

Alex Standiford 00:54:43  Yeah, for sure. I mean, even my, my podcast is called PartnersShip. Right. And it’s literally because that’s the that’s what this is all about. It’s working together. It’s finding people.

Michelle Frechette 00:54:53   I mean that kind of really went into your theme of the whole Siren and mermaid thing too. That was that was pretty nice. Yeah, I like that.

Alex Standiford 00:55:01  I couldn’t have lined up better. I got partnership.fm, the domain, and I was like, are you kidding me? Oh, oh that’s that’s mine. Yeah. I’m I’m taking that. That is mine now. Thank you. so.

Michelle Frechette 00:55:11  Yeah, you’re going to have to have me on your podcast now, you found out a couple of mine. We’ll talk later. We’ll talk later. Yes.

Alex Standiford 00:55:18  That is.

Michelle Frechette 00:55:21  I’m gonna take the screen off here so we can see your face, our faces again. A couple of minutes left. If anybody has questions. I know there’s always more people watching after the fact than live.  If you have any questions, put them in the chat. we’d be happy to answer them before. Before I let Alex get on with the rest of his day. For sure. But, yeah, so I, I’ve asked a lot of really good questions, so it’s possible that I’ve asked all the questions there are to be asked at this point. 

Alex Standiford: Nailed it. 

Michelle Frechette: I’m just really excited. I I’m so good. I totally, but no, I’m just I’m super excited for you. I know this has been, like you said, a little a little ways in the making as far as road mapping to get to the point where you launch, get some feedback, start to get some activity around sales and things like that. And I’ve been watching, as you know, I’ve been watching you the whole time hoping for your success. Of course. 

Alex Standiford: I appreciate it. 

Michelle Frechette: Yeah. Of course. And I know that, you know, nobody builds a product and just walks away and says, oh, it’s going to take care of itself right now. So you are hustling all the time and like you said, adding more things, thinking about other ways to be successful with it and and help your customers be successful with how they’re using affiliate sales, for sure. 

Alex Standiford 00:56:35  100% that’s the theme between the podcast and the one on ones I’m doing. And and all of that. It’s all about not only building this plugin, but also kind of challenging the notion that, affiliate program, affiliate networks or affiliate systems are bad. Because I hear that there’s such a stigma associated with it, and I, I really am. My goal is to challenge that and be like, no, we are, we can be. This can be good. This can be honest. 

Michelle Frechette 00:57:01  This can. Yeah. But you also hear.

Alex Standiford 00:57:03  Friends, you.

Michelle Frechette 00:57:04  Know, affiliate sales are bad, but influencer marketing is where it’s at.

Alex Standiford 00:57:08  Yeah. Right?

Michelle Frechette 00:57:09  Joke. It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing.

Alex Standiford 00:57:12 My link in the bio. 

Michelle Frechette 00:57:14  Yeah, exactly. I’m, I’m. I might have something like that in one of my bios, I don’t know. 

Alex Standiford 00:57:20  I’m not judging. I mean, you should. Yeah. You should. Totally. If I get value from it, who cares?

Michelle Frechette 00:57:27  Absolutely, absolutely.

Alex Standiford 00:57:29  That’s that’s definitely where I’ve been mentally, though, is just, like, challenging that stigma and, helping people understand how they can create partnerships that can change their lives and their partner’s lives.

Michelle Frechette 00:57:42  So when is your next vacation? Because it sounds like you might need one.

Alex Standiford 00:57:46  Oh, geez.

Michelle Frechette 00:57:48  First day of WordCamp U.S.. Michelle, I know exactly.

Alex Standiford 00:57:51  Yeah, right. No kidding. No kidding.

Michelle Frechette 00:57:54  You will be WordCamp Us, though. So people. 

Alex Standiford: Oh, yeah. 

Michelle Frechette: So they want to do meetings one on one. 

Alex Standiford: Yes.

Michelle Frechette:  Is there a way for them to reach out to you? To set up a one on one. Do you have something like that that people can?

Alex Standiford 00:58:05  I don’t have a way to do that, but I totally should. I’ve been scheduling some. I totally should. I have, obviously I have, you know, they can reach out to me on X on Twitter or anything like that. Post Status. Of course. I’m in there all the time. Perhaps obnoxiously so. 

Michelle Frechette 00:58:22  I mean, if you’re obnoxious, am I? So, yeah. No judgment there.

Alex Standiford 00:58:27  But, you know, I would love to schedule some one on ones, and now I’m going to be chewing on that for the rest of the day. And you might see a tweet from me that just says, hey, it’s good to have one on one with me.

Michelle Frechette 00:58:37  I may have a calendar link for that already set up for myself. So yes. 

Alex Standiford: There it is. 

Michelle Frechette: I would strongly encourage it.

Alex Standiford 00:58:41  Yes for sure a great idea. Yeah, I’m there for like a full week. Like I’m.I learned everybody starts showing up a week beforehand, so. Yeah. No kidding.

Michelle Frechette 00:58:51  Exactly. Excellent.  Well, I want to thank you for being here. Before I go, I want to let people know who’s coming up next week. And I know, I know, you’ll want to be tuned in for this one. Next week. We’re going to have Marcus Burnett here to talk about the WP World. Since he launched that. Is your mind blown by all the stuff he adds?

Alex Standiford: It’s insane world. 

Michelle Frechette: Like it’s how much it’s he should change it from the WP World to like the WP Universe, I think, because there’s so much baked into that. So I’m really looking forward to it.

Alex Standiford 00:59:21  Went from like this, it went from this  a map of everybody in WordPress to like a job board, almost like it’s it is. Yeah, I’ll butcher any description of it, but it, it has.

Michelle Frechette 00:59:34  Do you know what the actual origin of it was?  Because I do.

Alex Standiford:  I, I don’t what?

Michelle Frechette:  So he lives in Florida where there’s a lot of people who are impacted by hurricanes and weather. And so he wanted to create just a spreadsheet of people in the Florida area that he could that could check in on each other and make sure they were okay in those situations. And that turned into the map, which turned into the WP World, which is now worldwide, not just Florida. Isn’t that cool?

Alex Standiford 01:00:02  That’s wild. That is so cool.

Michelle Frechette 01:00:04  So that’s another example of seeing a need and finding a way to fill it for sure.

Alex Standiford 01:00:07  Would have been great when I was traveling. What am I going to stay?

Michelle Frechette 01:00:11  Exactly. Like who can I couch surf with? Yeah.

Alex Standiford 01:00:13  No kidding. Gosh.

Michelle Frechette 01:00:14  Next time. Next time. 

Alex Standiford 01:00:18  Yeah. No kidding. Next time.

Michelle Frechette 01:00:20  Yeah. So we’ll have an opportunity to chat with him next week. So hopefully you’ll tune in for that. And everybody else will too. And then we will not have a Happiness Hour during WordCampUS because I’ll be busy. So we’ll return the week after that. I don’t know who we’ll have yet. We’re still working on the schedule beyond that point, but we’ll be there.  Alex, any final words? Anything like you’d like to share that I forgot to ask you about?

Alex Standiford 01:00:43  Nope. I don’t think so. just just come see me ask questions on on Twitter or whatever, and and, I’ll be around.

Michelle Frechette 01:00:50  Excellent. And I’m sure we’ll be talking to each other between now and then, but I’ll see you at WordCampUS for sure.

Alex Standiford 01:00:55  Yeah. We’ll see you. Look forward to it.

Michelle Frechette 01:00:58  Me too. So thank you, everybody else, for being here. We really appreciate it. We’ll see you next week with Marcus Burnett. on the WP, the Post Status Happiness Hour. I can’t remember where I am today. That’s how long a day it’s been. We’ll see y’all next week.