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How to allow affiliates to easily promote external sites

Last updated on August 19, 2022 by Andrew Munro
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External Referral Links add-on for AffiliateWP

Are you using AffiliateWP but have another WordPress-based site you would like affiliates to promote? If so, then the free External Referral Links add-on is for you.

Let’s say you have 2 websites, SiteA.com and SiteB.com:

SiteA.com

This is where AffiliateWP and your chosen eCommerce/membership system is already installed.

SiteB.com

This is a completely separate website with its own installation of WordPress. It has been set up to promote your products and/or services on SiteA.com and purely acts as a marketing site.

You tell your affiliates to promote SiteB.com and they go ahead and share their referral link, which will typically look like one of the following:

  • http://siteb.com/?ref=123
  • http://siteb.com/?ref=john

A customer clicks on the affiliate’s referral link and arrives on siteB.com. They are absolutely thrilled with what they see and click one of your various “call to action” buttons or links. After arriving on SiteA.com the customer makes a purchase, you receive a sale, and everyone is happy… or are they?

The affiliate who originally referred the customer did not receive a commission on the sale – why is that?

This is simply because AffiliateWP is installed on Site A, not Site B. When the customer clicked on the link the affiliate shared, nothing happened. There was no code on site B that interpreted the affiliate’s ID or username in the URL.

You might think that installing AffiliateWP and your eCommerce or membership system on Site B would solve this problem. Since they are separate sites, they have separate databases, which means separate data. In no way are the two site’s data shared.

So how can affiliates promote site B but earn a commission on site A when the customer purchases? The answer is fairly simple. By collecting the affiliate’s ID or username from the URL (including the referral variable) and passing it to any links within the site that link to site A.

This is exactly what External Referral Links does. It will take the affiliate’s ID or username from the URL and store it as a cookie in the customer’s browser. Any link on site B that links to site A will then have the affiliate ID or username intact.

Since a cookie is used, the customer can freely move between pages on site B and it will still link correctly. You can also set the cookie’s expiry; if the customer leaves the site and comes back later, it will remember which affiliate referred them.

External Referral Links can be downloaded right now from the WordPress repository.

Download

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7 comments on “How to allow affiliates to easily promote external sites”

  1. Pingback: Weekly Roundup: May 29, 2015 – Sell with WP
  2. giuseppe says:
    June 19, 2015 at 10:05 am

    hi, is there a way to display a welcome message when my site is visited by a person who has been advised by an affiliate?
    I am a webmaster and I’m using affiliatewp completed. Can you help me please.
    greetings

    Reply
    1. Andrew Munro says:
      June 19, 2015 at 5:39 pm

      Yes there is! A consultant can help you with that: https://affiliatewp.com/consultants/

      Reply
  3. uriel ben abu says:
    July 26, 2022 at 7:55 am

    Hi, I can’t find the External Referral Links area in Affiliates ยป Settings
    I have the affiliatewp plugin with a license and I also installed the AffiliateWP โ€“ External Referral Links plugin as listed in the article here.
    What do I do if I have 2 websites?

    Reply
    1. Andrew Munro says:
      August 14, 2022 at 6:23 pm

      Hi there! Because the External Referral Links add-on is designed to be installed on another website, you’ll need to access your main WordPress Settings menu and then click on “External Referral Links”. This is because AffiliateWP is not installed on the second website and the AffiliateWP settings screen does not exist.

      Reply
      1. Gabriella says:
        November 16, 2022 at 12:01 pm

        Hi Andrew, is the plugin still working as expected? I see it has been updated in 5 months so not sure if it’s still being supported. Do you have any idea?

        Reply
        1. Andrew Munro says:
          November 16, 2022 at 3:37 pm

          Hey Gabriella! Yes it’s working as expected. It’s a relatively simple plugin and since it doesn’t have any known bugs we don’t have a reason to update it ๐Ÿ™‚

          Reply
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