How to Create a Referral Program in WordPress

Do you want to create a referral program in WordPress?

Referral programs or affiliate programs are a great way to get more people to promote your products to a larger audience.

In this article, we’ll show you how to easily create a referral program in WordPress and get more customers.

Why Create a Referral Program in WordPress?

A referral program or affiliate program allows you to get more people to help you sell your products and services. In return, you pay them a small commission on each sale they make. For more details, see our ultimate affiliate marketing guide to see how it works.

In simple terms, it is like building your own sales army without paying them a full-time salary.

Affiliate marketers are usually content creators who make money online by referring their users to the right products and services. There are several helpful affiliate marketing plugins and tools that affiliates can use to increase their sales.

But to manage your own referral or affiliate program, you’ll need a plugin that allows you to easily manage all aspects of an affiliate program. It should allow affiliate marketers to join your referral program while helping you track sales and traffic sent by each affiliate partner.

Now there are two types of affiliate management platforms that you can choose from.

• A WordPress affiliate management plugin
• A cloud based affiliate network

Both platforms have their pros and cons. For instance, using a WordPress plugin allows you to run your own affiliate program directly from your website. You wouldn’t be limited to the cloud platform’s policies and restrictions.

You also won’t have to pay a per transaction fee to any third-party network since you’re managing your own affiliate program. This is why most small businesses prefer to use a self-hosted affiliate management plugin.

On the other hand, cloud platforms like ShareASale, Partnerstack, and Impact make your affiliate program instantly accessible to thousands of affiliate marketers. They also have better tracking and payment systems which can streamline your workflow.

But for the sake of this tutorial, we’ll show you how to set up a referral program in WordPress using a plugin (no coding needed).

We’ll show you two top affiliate plugins that you can use with your WordPress website or WooCommerce store. You can pick one that works best for you.

Method 1. Create a Referral Program with Easy Affiliate (Recommended)

For this method, we’ll be using Easy Affiliate. It is the best WordPress affiliate management plugin on the market and allows you to easily add an affiliate program to your website.

It works with all top WordPress eCommerce platforms including WooCommerce and MemberPress.

Easy Affiliate is an all-in-one platform that comes with powerful features like affiliate dashboard, real-time reports, fraud detection, eCommerce integrations, email marketing, one-click payouts, and most importantly no transaction fees.

To get started, first you need to install and activate the Easy Affiliate plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit the Easy Affiliate » Settings page and scroll down to the bottom. From here, you need to click on the ‘Launch Setup Wizard’ button to configure the plugin settings.

Next, you’ll need to enter your plugin license key. You can find this information under your account on the Easy Affiliate website.

If you have previously used another affiliate plugin, then the plugin will offer to import your data. If not, then you can skip to the next step.

After that, the plugin will attempt to detect the eCommerce plugin you’re using. Simply click on the toggle next to your platform and continue to the next step.

Next, you need to provide your business information. Simply fill out the form and click on the continue button.

After that, you will be given the option to choose how affiliates will register on your website. You can allow affiliates to apply and then approve applications, allow public registration, or manually add affiliates.

You can choose which information you want to collect from affiliate partners, such as business address and tax information. You can make it required, collect on registration, or allow affiliates to enter it in their account.

Below that, you can choose to show an affiliate agreement. The plugin also allows you to automatically generate an agreement by filling out a simple form.

Next, click on the Save and Continue button to go the next step.

Now, you’ll be asked to set a default affiliate commission value as a percentage or fixed amount. Below that, you can configure payout options.

East Affiliate supports recurring payments and allows you to send bulk payouts both manually and automatically.

After you click on the Save and Continue button, you’ll arrive at the Creatives section. These are marketing materials that you want to offer to your affiliates. You can share your website logo, product photos, banner ads, text documents, and more.

That’s all, you have successfully set up Easy Affiliate on your WordPress website. You can now click on the Finish Setup and Exit Wizard button.

Adding Links to Your Affiliate Referral Program

Easy Affiliate automatically generates pages where affiliate marketers can register, login, and manage their affiliate accounts.

You can view these pages by visiting Easy Affiliate » Settings. Simply scroll down to the Affiliate Pages section under the General tab.

You can now add the affiliate dashboard link to your website’s navigation menu or in the footer area. Users clicking on this link will be able to sign up or log in to their accounts.

Easy Affiliate Dashboard & Reports

Easy Affiliate makes it easy for both you and your affiliate partners to track their performance.

As the website owner, you can view all affiliate activity on your website by visiting the Easy Affiliate » Reports page.

From here, you’ll see a graph overview of affiliate stats on your website with the same data in tables down below.

Easy Affiliate also includes link tracking. You can also switch to the Clicks tab and view which affiliate URLs are bringing you more clicks.

Managing Affiliates in Easy Affiliate

Depending on how your affiliate program is set up, Easy Affiliate makes it very easy to manage affiliates.

Simply go to the Easy Affiliate » Affiliates page and you will see the list of affiliates you have approved or added to your website.

You can approve new affiliate applications by switching to the applications tab. This will show you the list of affiliates awaiting approval.

You can click on an affiliate name to view more details of their application. If everything looks good, you can go ahead and approve them.

Using Addons to Extend Easy Affiliate Functionality

Easy Affiliate comes with a bunch of integrations and extensions that you can use to extend your affiliate program.

This includes integration with top email marketing platforms, a suite of fraud prevention tools, custom commission rules, advanced commission levels, and more.

Depending on your license plan, you can view the available addons by visiting the Easy Affiliate » Addons page.

Overall, Easy Affiliate is a very robust affiliate management plugin for WordPress. It’s created by the same team behind MemberPress, so they genuinely understand the problem and have built a solution that’s both easy and powerful.

Method 2. Set up a Referral Program in WordPress with AffiliateWP

For this method, we’ll be using AffiliateWP. It is a great WordPress affiliate management plugin that helps you set up your own referral program in WordPress.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the AffiliateWP plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit Affiliates » Settings page to enter your license key. You can find this information under your account on the AffiliateWP website.

After activating your license key, you need to select a page to be used for Affiliate Area. AffiliateWP automatically creates one for you, but if you want to use a different page, then you can select it here.

Next, you need to choose the terms of service page. You can check out affiliate program terms pages on other websites to create one for your own site. After creating the page you can select it here.

After that, you need to review other settings on the page and set them up based on your own referral program policies.

Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.

Next, you need to switch to the integrations tab on the Settings page. From here you need to select the integrations you want to enable. AffiliateWP supports most popular eCommerce, membership, contact form, and LMS plugins.

Click on the save changes button and then switch to the ‘Emails’ tab on the Settings page.

AffiliateWP allows you to edit emails sent out to your affiliates. You can also upload your business logo, create your own email templates, and choose a professional email address to use to send out affiliate emails.

Note: If you are unable to receive email notifications, then follow our guide on how to fix WordPess not sending email issue.

Lastly, switch to the Misc tab on the settings page to set up advanced settings for your affiliate program. The first option on the page is to allow affiliates to register themselves. You can check this if you want affiliates to be able to sign up for your referral program.

Next, you would also want to enable reCAPTCHA to prevent bots from registering as affiliates.

You will need to carefully review each setting and change them as needed. Don’t forget to click on the save changes button to store your settings.

Adding Links to Your Referral Program

Now that you have set up your referral program, the next step is to add links to it. For example, if you have enabled affiliate registration, then you may want to add a link to the affiliate area so that interested marketers can register themselves.

Simply go to Appearance » Menus page and add your affiliate area page to a navigation menu. For detailed instructions, see our beginner’s guide to adding navigation menus in WordPress.

Clicking on the link will take users to the affiliate area where they can register to join as a new affiliate, or login to their account to see their reports.

Managing Your Referral Program in AffiliateWP

AffiliateWP comes with powerful tools to manage your affiliates, view reports, and effectively run your affiliate program without leaving WordPress.

To view affiliates that have joined your referral program, simply go to Affiliates » Affiliates page.

On this page, you can see a list of all your affiliate partners, their earnings, unpaid earnings, referral visits, and more. You can edit any affiliate account individually.

To view each sale made through a referral partner, you need to visit Affiliates » Referrals page. Here you will see all referral sales, affiliate partner, amount, and more. You can also click on the ‘Reject’ link if you suspect a referral to be fraudulent.

Viewing Your Referral Program Reports in AffiliateWP

Reporting is crucial to run a successful referral program, and AffiliateWP comes with powerful reporting features. Head over to Affiliates » Reports page for a full overview.

You can filter the reporting period by time and specific affiliate partner name. You can also view reports for affiliates, referral visits, and campaigns.

Sending Payments to Your Affiliates

AffiliateWP comes with two types of Payouts.

The first one is AffiliateWP’s Payout Services features. It allows you to easily send payments to your affiliates via AffiliateWP’s parent company. They will be using Stripe to directly deposit payments to your affiliate’s debit card or bank account.

You can enable this feature by visiting Affiliates » Settings page and switching to the Payouts Service tab.

The second method is to use PayPal, which is available as a separate add-on under the Professional license plan.

Alternately, you can also manually pay your affiliates by visiting the Affiliates » Referrals page and click on the ‘Pay Affiliates’ button.

You can then select a time period and generate a payout list which you can then use to manually pay your affiliates using PayPal, credit card, online banking, or any other payment method of your choice.

We hope this article helped you learn how to create a referral program in WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on how to get a free SSL certificate for your website, or check out our showcase of must-have WordPress plugins for business sites.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Create a Referral Program in WordPress appeared first on WPBeginner.

June 15, 2021 at 04:00PM

How to Create a Custom WooCommerce Cart Page (No Coding)

Do you want to create a custom WooCommerce cart page?

The default WooCommerce cart page is not optimized for conversions. By optimizing your cart page layout, you can significantly improve your conversions and get more sales.

In this article, we’ll show you how to customize your WooCommerce cart page without any technical knowledge.

Why Create a Custom WooCommerce Cart Page in WordPress?

Creating a custom WooCommerce cart page gives you a chance to increase sales conversions in your online store.

Research shows that nearly 7 out 10 customers will abandon your shopping cart and never come back.

By optimizing the default WooCommerce cart page, you can make more sales without increasing your current traffic.

When your visitors have items in their cart, they are very close to finishing the purchase. Your WooCommerce cart page should do everything possible to make the conversion happen.

With that said, let’s take a look at how you can customize your WooCommerce cart page with no code.

How to Create a Custom WooCommerce Cart Page in WordPress

SeedProd is the best drag and drop page builder used by over 1 million websites. It lets you easily create a custom WooCommerce cart page to make more sales.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Note: there is a free version of SeedProd that you can use, but for this tutorial, we’ll use the Pro version because it has the built-in WooCommerce blocks we need.

After the plugin is activated, you need to go to SeedProd » Settings and enter you product license key.

You can find your license key under your account information on the SeedProd website.

Once you’ve done that, go to SeedProd » Pages and click the ‘Add New Landing Page’ button to create your cart page.

After that, you need to choose a cart page template. There are dozens of professionally designed templates you can use. Once you find a template you like, hover over it and click the ‘Checkmark’ icon.

We’re going to use the ‘Blank’ template since it lets us add only the sections we want.

Next, you’ll be asked to name your cart page, and then click ‘Save and Start Editing the Page’.

This will bring you to the drag and drop builder where you can starting building a custom cart page.

First, we’ll add an image block and upload a logo. You can adjust this to look like your header without it being clickable to reduce abandonment.

This keeps your branding in place but gives your visitors fewer exits, so they’re more likely to make a purchase.

Next, simply select the ‘Image’ block and drag it over to your page. Then, upload your logo from your image library.

You can customize this entirely with the options panel on the left.

Next, click the content and sidebar block in the ‘Choose your layout:’ section.

This lets you create a section for your cart, plus a testimonial section.

After that, locate the ‘Cart’ block in the WooCommerce section and drag it over.

You can customize every part of the cart, including font choice, colors, buttons, and more.

Next, you can add a testimonials block. These act as social proof for your visitors and show them that they’re making the right decision.

Locate the ‘Testimonials’ block and drag it over to the open section.

You have full control over the appearance of your testimonials.

There’s the option to add a customer photo, change the testimonial, add a position, and more.

If you want to add multiple testimonials, then follow the same steps above.

Another great idea is to add a star rating underneath your testimonial.

Simply select the ’Star Rating’ block and drag it under your testimonial.

If you want to create scarcity to encourage your customers to make a purchase now, then you can add a scarcity timer to your cart.

All you need to do is select the ‘Countdown Timer’ block and drag it to the top of your cart. Then, select the ‘Visitor Timer’ option so that the timer will refresh for all your visitors.

Next, add a headline notifying your shoppers they have a set period until their cart will expire.

Simply drag over the ‘Headline’ block and enter your text.

Another great feature to add is a popular products section. This lets you improve your sales by promoting other popular products your customers might be interested in.

To do this, just drag over the ‘Best Selling Products’ block from the ‘WooCommerce’ section.

You can also choose any of the other product blocks to add as well.

For more details on adding popular products to WooCommerce, see our guide on how to display popular products in WooCommerce.

After you’ve made your changes to the cart page, you can publish it live by clicking the arrow next to the ‘Save’ button and select ‘Publish’.

Next, you’ll need to adjust your cart URL in the WooCommerce settings.

Go to WooCommerce » Settings and then click on the ‘Advanced’ tab.

After that, select the new cart page URL that you created with SeedProd. Make sure to click ‘Save changes’ at the bottom of the screen.

Depending on the WooCommerce theme you’re using, your visitors can now navigate to the cart page easier.

This will help your visitors view their carts on mobile devices too.

You can continue to customize your cart page with SeedProd, adding new blocks, and changing the design until it’s perfect.

Continue to test try different elements, to see what improves conversions the most.

To track your WooCommerce cart conversions, see our step by step guide on how to setup WooCommerce conversion tracking.

Bonus: How to Further Improve WooCommerce Cart Page Conversions

Once you have created a custom WooCommerce cart page, you can further improve the conversions and reduce cart abandonment.

This helps you make even more revenue from your existing traffic.

Here are a few simple ways to do it.

1. Reduce Cart Abandonment with Timed Popups in WooCommerce

Nearly 70 percent of all shopping carts are abandoned. One of the best ways to reduce cart abandonment is with a timed popup.

OptinMonster is the best WordPress popup plugin used by over 1.2 million sites.

It uses a unique Exit-Intent® technology to display popups exactly when a user is about to leave your site.

You can entice them back with a unique coupon code just for them.

If you’ve already offered your visitor a coupon, then use an educational popup that helps with any questions and reassures them about their purchase, like this one from WPForms.

There are even more unique popups and slide-ins you can add to your site too.

For example, if a customer adds an item to their cart and leaves but later returns, then you can add a slide-in that offers a coupon to complete their purchase.

For more details, see our guide on how to create a WooCommerce popup to increase sales.

2. Boost Sales with Social Activity Notifications in WooCommerce

Social activity notifications alert your visitors to new purchases that have been made in real-time. This uses FOMO to improve your conversions and push them to buy.

The simplest way to add social proof notifications to your WooCommerce cart page is with TrustPulse.

It’s the best social proof plugin for WordPress and WooCommerce in the market and has been proven to increase conversions by 15%.

It can be set up in a few minutes, and you can automatically display a notification bubble with recent purchases, free trial sign-ups, and more.

The notifications won’t get in the way of your cart or user experience. The only thing they do is improve your store conversions.

For more details, see our guide on how to use FOMO on your WordPress site to increase conversions.

We hoped this article helped you create a custom WooCommerce cart page without writing any code. You may also want to see our step by step guide on how to improve WooCommerce SEO to grow your traffic, and our expert picks of the best WooCommerce plugins for your store.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Create a Custom WooCommerce Cart Page (No Coding) appeared first on WPBeginner.

June 14, 2021 at 03:20PM

6 Best SEO Checker and Website Analyzer Tools Compared (2021)

Are you looking for the best SEO checker and website analyzer tool?

An SEO checker tool can help you get a clear picture of your SEO, give you ideas to improve, and help you increase website traffic from SEO.

In this article, we’ll share our expert picks of the best SEO checker and website analyzer tools.

Why Use a SEO Checker and Website Analyzer Tool?

An SEO checker and website analyzer tool can help you see if your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is working.

There are many moving pieces when it comes to SEO, and it can be hard to keep track of everything.

By using an SEO checker, you can see if your website is optimized for SEO and what changes you can make to help you get more traffic.

SEO checker and website analyzer tools can help your website in a lot of ways.

• Help you fix any SEO errors holding your site back
• Simply get more traffic by making improvements
• Keep track of offsite SEO strategies like backlink building
• Uncover areas where you can outrank your competition

That being said, let’s take a look at the best website SEO checker and rank tracking tools you can use to grow your business.

1. AIOSEO

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the best SEO plugin for WordPress used by over 2 million websites. It is the most comprehensive SEO toolkit that will analyze your website and let you know how you can improve your SEO.

It’s very beginner-friendly and has a setup wizard that will walk you through the process of choosing the best SEO settings for your website.

It will analyze your entire WordPress website and give you an SEO score, along with a detailed report of what you can change.

For example, it might tell you to add internal links, external links, fix broken links, change your headers, add a meta description and meta tags, and much more.

Even if you’ve never done any SEO before, this plugin will educate you and show you what to fix.

You can also fully optimize every post and page on your WordPress website by customizing the meta title, meta description, and more. Each page will be given a TruSEO score, as you make improvements the score will get higher.

By making all the changes this plugin suggests, you’ll have nearly perfect on-page SEO and will easily get more traffic to your website.

There’s also a competitor research feature that will show you how well your competitor’s are optimized for SEO.

AIOSEO also comes with smart XML sitemaps, Rich snippet schema markup, robots.txt editor, built-in social media integration, and a ton of other useful features to grow your search engine visibility.

2. SEMRush

SEMRush is one of the best SEO tools in the market. It’s used by WordPress blogs, SEO experts, and business owners of all sizes.

We use SEMRush here at WPBeginner for a lot of SEO tasks like tracking keyword rankings and keyword research.

You can use this tool to analyze your website and conduct an SEO audit.

There’s an in-depth backlink checker that will show you all the sites linking to yours, along with their authority and the anchor text.

This will show you if your link building efforts are working and even find potential partnerships. It can also help you spot spam links before they negatively impact your SEO.

As you work on your SEO strategy, you can use the keyword tracker to see if your rankings improve.

You can even track specific keywords that are the most valuable to your business.

You can take advantage of the 7-day free trial or the limited free plan that gives you access to basic SEO and website data.

If you want detailed SEO reports and SEO analysis features, then premium plans start at $119.95 per month and gives you full access to website, SEO, and traffic data.

3. MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress used by over 3 million websites. It allows you to easily set up Google Analytics in WordPress and view your traffic metrics directly in your WordPress dashboard.

You can also monitor your keyword rankings directly in your WordPress dashboard. You can view your Google Search Console report and see the top 50 search terms your website ranks for.

To access this report you need to connect Google Search Console with Google Analytics first.

It also shows you the number of impressions, clicks, click through rate, and the average position for each keyword.

You can use this data along with the optimization tips provided by AIOSEO to boost your rankings. For example, if you find an article that ranks in the 11 or 12th position, then you can optimize it to bring it to the first page.

There is a free version of MonsterInsights available, but the pro version gives you advanced tracking, additional data, eCommerce integrations, and much more.

4. Serpstat

Serpstat was a wide range of different SEO tools that can provide in-depth website analysis. It’s very feature rich but still has a great user experience.

There are features that let you check your website traffic and SEO performance, conduct an SEO audit on your site, analyze your backlinks, and check the rank of specific keywords.

The site audit tool will show you any technical SEO issues affecting your website’s visibility and performance. The analysis report displays the most important issues first and gives you recommendations for fixing the problem.

There’s also a page audit tool that lets you compare a page on your website to a similar web page of a competitor’s website.

This lets you see if your optimizations can help you outrank your competitors in the search engine result pages (SERPS).

You’ll also find a backlink analysis tool for checking and monitoring your website backlinks.

Plus, there’s a keyword rank tracker, so you can watch your rankings improve over time.

The free seo tool gives you access to a portion of the website data available for your domain name. The premium version starts at $69 per month and gives you access to all the data provided by the tool.

5. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free SEO site checkup tool from Google that helps you monitor and maintain your website’s presence in the search engines.

Since Google is the world’s largest search engine, you’ll want to make sure your site displays correctly in Google search and has no search errors.

It will show you how your website appears in organic search, if it has any crawler, mobile usability, or indexing issues, and even problems with duplicate content.

This tool will also displays the keywords that your website currently ranks for, along with the impressions, position, click through rate, and more. You can use this information to improve your click through rate and get more traffic.

You can also use this data to come up with new blog post ideas and get even more traffic.

For more details, see our beginner’s guide on how to use Google Search Console effectively.

Pro tip: you can use MonsterInsights to track your keyword rankings directly inside your WordPress admin area using data from Google Search Console.

Google Search Console also has a page speed report that shows you if any pages on your site are having speed and performance issues.

6. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a free and premium SEO ranking tool from Neil Patel that can give you a ton of useful SEO and organic traffic data.

When you create an account, you can add a website to the tool and run an SEO check. This will check your website against common ranking factors to see if your site has any issues.

It’s not as in-depth as other tools like AIOSEO and SEMRush, but it still gives you valuable data.

This tool also includes a traffic analyzer that provides you with a detailed breakdown of your competitor’s traffic levels, keywords, and backlinks.

You can use this information to improve your offsite SEO strategy and content marketing efforts.

The free version of the tool gives you full access to the SEO audit tool, along with three free searches per day. Premium plans start at $29 per month and gives you access to unlimited searches and traffic data.

Which is the Best SEO Checker and Website Analyzer Tool? (Expert Pick)

After using the most popular SEO checker and website analyzer tools we believe that AIOSEO and SEMRush are the two best tools in the market.

AIOSEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin and toolkit. It makes optimizing your website for SEO super simple.

SEMRush is a more advanced tool that can help you with more technical SEO errors and help you build your entire SEO strategy.

Our team uses both AIOSEO and SEMRush to improve our SEO rankings.

We also tried other SEO analyzer and website audit tools like Ahrefs, WooRank, and Moz, but we decided to keep the list short to make your decision easier.

We hope this article helped you find the best SEO checker and website analyzer tools for you. You may also want to see our list of the best email marketing services, and our expert picks of the must have WordPress plugins for business sites.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post 6 Best SEO Checker and Website Analyzer Tools Compared (2021) appeared first on WPBeginner.

June 11, 2021 at 05:20PM