Launching a Premium WordPress Coupon Plugin (Behind the Scenes)
The market for affiliate marketing is booming, it has become a very important and effective method of generating sales. Thanks in a big part to WordPress web-based marketing, many online entrepreneurs work from their homes earning a decent income through their sites. It is typical for a buyer to search for reviews on the internet when considering a purchase. While this could be seen as a good or bad, internet marketers are there ready to take advantage of this kind of traffic. In addition to my full-time job at , I also develop and maintain a premium WordPress coupon-related plugin that is specifically designed for affiliate marketing. Today I am going to provide you with a in-depth look behind the process of creating it as well as some of the difficulties encountered when launching a plugin for the first time.
Affiliate Marketing Growth
Affiliate marketing is an extremely valuable, low-risk strategy proven to drive sales and awareness for brands as well as revenue to publishers... When executed properly, it can create mutually beneficial and authentic relationships between publishers and brands, along with the publishers as well as their audience. - Adam Weiss, General Manager and Senior Vice President at Rakuten Affiliate Network.
However that, there's a large number of honest affiliate marketers out there and sometimes they may need some support or encouragement to get their suggestions noticed.
The development of a WordPress Coupon Plugin
I tend to spend the majority of my idle time (if it were an actual thing) on my marketing blog woorkup, and have been an affiliate marketer since early 2000's, as well as being a regular WordPress user. It would be nice to think I am in the former of those groups mentioned earlier. Like we do on, I attempt to review only high-quality services and products that I use myself on a regular basis. I want to review products that actually provide value to the visitor. Unfortunately giving real value to the customer means I must work harder then the typical affiliate marketer. In early 2015, I started experimenting with additional ways to increase the number of people who use woorkup and that's how the WP Coupons plugin was born.
Before launching it I did some research on various solutions available to give me the information I required. Below is a list of what I was originally trying to accomplish:
- Offer coupons in my WordPress sidebar (both random and specifically based on the post). that are based on the content)
- A nice grid-like the coupons' individual website
- Create a shortcode that allows you to place coupons on pages, posts or any other place I need them.
- Make your design look modern and fresh, or at least provide an easy method to alter design with CSS
- Load fast, not relying on many 3rd software or large JavaScript usage
I thought this shouldn't be difficult, right? Well, there were a couple of plugins available that did some of what I required, however, the majority of them were outdated and couldn't do all the features I needed. Therefore, I chose to create the plugin myself. Here are some valuable lessons I've learned during the process. Most people don't understand the nuances which go into creating, developing, and selling an WordPress plugin. This doesn't happen in a flash.
1. I needed to create an WordPress Plugin But I'm Not a Developer
While some people actually consider me to be an WordPress developer, I'm not. And I am far from the idea. I'm familiar with PHP and CSS however, when it comes down to developing my own functions or loops in my head, it just doesn't work that way. Therefore, the first issue I had to overcome was, how do I create this plugin?
This turned out to be a little easier than for some. It turns out my brother is an all-time WordPress developer. So I asked to see if he'd create all of my requests. Within a week, I were able to put something together and working on woorkup. Of course, not everyone has a family or a member of the family who is a WordPress developer. I happened to be lucky. Therefore, if you're looking to locate a trustworthy WordPress developer, talk to the community first . ask before simply outsourcing things. Find a partner not just a developer could be one of your greatest advantages further down the line.
2. The Demand Converted into a Product
A little over six months passed where we were running our personal plugin built on woorkup. There was a rapid increase in the number of clicks, signups and affiliate sales across the entire board. The ability to target a coupon to a specific article and let it scroll with the user is a feature that boosted affiliate sales overnight. During those 6 months I noticed that I was constantly receiving requests from users asking questions what plugin I was using to display coupons on my website, and where they could purchase the plugin. In the beginning, I just replied saying that it was something that we custom built and it wasn't available for sale.
We had no plans to sell the plugin when it was first developed. However, we realized that we had missed out on the opportunity when emails from bloggers kept coming in. So I ended up partnering up with my brother 50/50 in order to make our personal project into a professional WordPress plugin. That's another reason before I mentioned you should seek out a developer who can be an honest and reliable partner. If you're looking to move things up further, you already have some of the hard work done.
Another word of warning is to also play it cautiously. Although you may be getting lots of emails regarding something it does not necessarily indicate that there's enough demand for it to warrant spending time developing and selling an application. Our brother and me took the safe route of by taking our time, and determine this based on the feedback of users and sales over the course of a long period.
3. The decision to choose a brand and Domain Name
I am personally a big fan of .io domains, and so they also played an important role in our brand identity, because we wanted our name to match our domain's name: wpcoupons.io. Of course, the .com site was just an inactive website that was never in use. I tried to get in touch with to the proprietor, but I never received a response. In the case of trademarks are concerned, that is true for using WordPress in your domain's name. Be very careful when choosing the branding of WordPress. WordPress plugin.
4. Selecting a platform, ECommerce Solution, and Hosting
Working in the WordPress community for some time and am now seeing many horrifying stories regarding the repository. You remember what happened to the Zerif theme some time ago, when it was taken off WordPress.org. Every case is unique, and while I have admiration for WordPress core admins but I decided that I did not want to bother about this. It could mean lower traffic and sales! There are also other time-consuming hoops you have to jump through in order to remain within the repository. In the end it's important to carefully consider whether you'd like to be in the WordPress repository.
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Last but not least We had to pick a hosting services for the WordPress website. Believe it or not, I was one of 's first customers. I connected with Mark on Skype as I was first introduced to the work they were doing. The time frame was long before joining the team. I've tried each WordPress hosting service and the speed was incomparable. If you pair EDD with EDD, you'll have an extremely quick loading ECommerce website ( Pingdom Test).
5. Affiliate Program
Due to the fact that my brother and I were working full time, we knew we needed to go down the affiliate-program way. It was difficult to advertise the plugin every day, and we were hoping to count upon the WordPress community to spread the word. Being an affiliate marketer myself I was aware of what might occur if users knew that they would earn a fee from helping sell the plugin.
The second major issue we had to decide was, what percentage commission would we willing to give away to other users if they help sell the plugin? What we did was we initially started with a lower amount, but finally reached the 20percent mark when we received feedback from our users.
To make sure that everything would be working properly, we ended up going up with AffiliateWP that was developed by Pippin. We're glad we did! The setup was a breeze and we were up running within a matter of minutes. If you are looking to launch an affiliate program to promote the WordPress plugin or product, AffiliateWP really can't be beat! This affiliate program is responsible for around 50% of all sales that occur each month.
6. Development
The first thing we had to complete when we had the plugin in production was to test it with diverse WordPress themes to ensure compatibility. We simply created a new staging area and then began installing hundreds of WordPress themes. Below are some of the most popular themes we tested our plugin with:
- WordPress Twenty Eleven
- WordPress Twenty Twelve
- WordPress Twenty Thirteen
- WordPress Twenty Fourteen
- WordPress Twenty-Fifteen
- WordPress Twenty Sixteen
- Avada
- Themex
- Divi
- Themes Thrive
- Sparkle
- Schema
- Newspaper
- WordX
- Extra
- Sydney
- Activello
- Zerif Lite
- Athena
- Orca
- Total
- Dante
- Superior
- ColorMag
- Spacious
- Poseidon
- evolve
- Nisarg
- Tortuga
- Gadgetine
The benefit of staging is that once the theme tests were completed, we simply deleted our staging environment. Then we created a new staging environment that was specifically designed for testing new plugins. Staging environments are publicly accessible through their own URLs, so my brother could add new features to the environment the environment, and I was able to try them out before we could push the changes into production.
If you're creating a WordPress plugin, is it very important to have a simple procedure in place, especially in the case of dealing with many people. It is not advisable to do development work on your live site!
7. The performance of your business is important.
Performance was extremely important to us right from the beginning. One of my dislikes of WordPress designers is the fact that they do not care. For plugins that aren't as big as this, it's important. It must be able to perform at a certain point. Currently, our plugin doesn't utilize any JavaScript and is under 40KB for the backend, and less than 2 KB on the front end. All of the components are self-contained and have no 3rd party dependencies.
It was possible to link the coupon on a certain blog post, and have it move along with the user was a feature that increased revenue from affiliates in a short period of time on our woorkup site. For the feature of scrolling rather than building the integration ourselves, we actually utilized the already great available Q2W3 Fixed Widget plugin.
If it's not broken do not fix it! The advantage of doing it this way allowed us to preserve JavaScript out of the plugin for those that didn't need the scrolling feature. I suggest developers look at all your options prior to adding more weight to your plugins. We could have added the feature ourselves as well, and even made the scrolling function available, however the decision was a matter of time.
8. Responding to User's Comments and Keeping a Changelog
If I were to speculate, I'd think that 90% of the features that we've added are from user feedback. Many of them are clever ideas we would have never considered on our own. For example, a Tweet from Colin the other day asked us to add the option to use forge on specific post forms. This is actually a easy thing to do to our site, and we just pushed this out in our most recent version.
hey @brianleejackson Will @wpcouponsio's "Force Widget" option work on customized post types, too? In the process of building this website
-- Colin Newcomer (@ColinNewcomer) February 15, 2017
The other thing I suggest making a changelog and features request page, and making them publicly available. Not only do these allow users to know that you're determined to improve the functionality of your WordPress plugin and assisting you keep track of what you're supposed to work on. It is also possible to use the premium services like UserVoice in order to streamline this process more, and let users to cast votes on any new feature.
Examples of Feature Requests
Changelog Example
Some Hard Lessons Learned
We have seen awesome growth on the popularity of our WordPress coupon plugin over the last year. It has grown so much that we're now putting much of our energy to the development of our plugin. It's also not to say that we did not learn some hard lessons in the process:
- Do not underestimate the amount of time needed when creating a new WordPress plugin by starting from beginning to finish. If you believe it will require you to work for five hours a week, estimate ten hours.
- Provide documents and instructions. The more you give means your time is less responding to support requests. We decided to use our Heroic Knowledge Base plugin which is great!
- Talk to your employees about any possible new features when they come in. It is not a good idea to please everyone. Incorporate things that bring worth to your plugin.
- Utilize your existing contacts and people you know from the WordPress community already to help drive higher sales. Offer them discount coupons to advertise your WordPress plugins on their websites, along with an affiliate programme. This wasn't something we did from the beginning and should be doing it from the beginning.
Summary
It is evident that there is a lot going on in the background when it comes to something as simple as a WordPress coupon plugin. A lot of developers currently have to manage everything from coding as well as marketing and help. Through this I've definitely earned a lot of respect for WordPress developers in general, especially teams that have started from scratch. starting from scratch.
If you're looking to learn more about the real WP Coupons plugin, and its capabilities, don't hesitate to check it out at wpcoupons.io. We'd love to know what your opinion is on the topic, particularly if you are a developer. Have you had similiar learnings you've had to learn along the way? Any other advice for people who are just beginning the same path?
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