Royalties and Collaborations on WordPress - A chat with Alex Standiford from Siren Affiliates

**[00:00:00]** hello my name is arando perz Caro and today we're talking with Alex standord from siren Affiliates how are you Alex I'm great I'm so excited to be here thanks for having me oh it's my pleasure I'm very honored that you had the opportunity to come on the video today I've just I'm loving what I see with siren and what it means for people who maybe have collaborators in their work and might want to share royalties things like that so I want to get into that into the call but think that uh it's it's such a great tool and even if someone doesn't use siren just to know that these are things that you can do within a business to help your business grow I think is is fantastic and to help others grow as well especially in the learning space and and things of that nature so yeah um again thank you for for joining me I want to start off just by having people know a little bit more about you many people already know a lot about you but how did did you get into the the whole affiliate space in the first place yeah so um whenever I first started my career as a web developer in like well actually as a WordPress user in like 2009 2010 um I was actually running my first business um where I was partnering with photographers and I was looking for ways to be able to create Partnerships even back then and of course it wasn't you know the market was nowhere near ready then or the the plugin the tech wasn't there um so a lot of it was still manual using spreadsheets and all kinds of stuff um but fast forward several several **[00:02:00]** years later I um became a web developer got really into WordPress started building you know tons and tons of Wordpress plugins and um ended up catching the eye of uh Sand Hills development and I spent a little time working on um some of their products including affiliate WP and a little bit with Ed and a couple of the different things um and that was kind of where a a fair bit of my context for you know affiliate plugins and things like that came from um but prior to that I was actually using affiliate WP uh myself on on my own site and even at the time I was a little I was a little frustrated because I wasn't able to I wanted to run this specific program where I had content creators who I had these people who wanted to write blog content about WordPress but they didn't really have a great platform to write on um so what I wanted to do was offer them a way to earn a commission on my site by writing blog content on my site so instead of and basically treat it like if somebody reads their blog post I would treat them as if they referred that visitor with an affiliate link um so yeah so it was kind of this way to it was an SEO play for me right I was able to get SEO optimized content um they were able to write content that was able to organically Drive traffic without NE and also be able to use you know my backlinks on my site and my platform and all that that stuff so they didn't necessarily have to like commit fully to creating like a Blog but they could still earn those referrals **[00:04:00]** and get all of those extra benefits that came with it um that was not something that uh I could do I with any affiliate plugin on the market at the time and I actually had to customize um my Plugin or not mine but I had to customize affiliate WP quite a bit to make it happen there was like a lot of crazy stuff that they definitely wouldn't support you know what I mean uh and the only reason why I even had a clue on what I was doing was just because I had literally been a developer on that product so I understood it in and out and I knew how to do those things um so you know that that all of that context kind of happened and then fast forward um to last year I realized I wanted to build a product and um you know long since have been moved on from Sand Hills because they got sold and uh so I spent my I was talking with Chris at lifter LMS about like some different product ideas I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do and he and I started talking about it and he made mention of the fact that you know he wished that there was a better solution for um affiliate a better affiliate solution for his customers for his course customers and um that was just when it happened I realized that like I had this problem he had this problem we're saying it in different ways we're coming from different contexts and I was just like oh my gosh like these affiliate programs need these affiliate people in WordPress need a better affiliate solution than what they have now they're wanting to do all these **[00:06:00]** different programs that fall outside of that Norm and I wanted and I knew I was like I'm the guy to build this I know how to build this I have the the WordPress background I have the affiliate background I have the customer like the usage background I have the network with the different partner the different plug-in companies that I can work with to figure out how to do this and like I was like this is me I'm the guy I'm going to do this um and so I did well it turned out great at least the part that I have played with and some of our clients have worked with I I find it different from affiliate WP which some of my clients have affiliate WP and are starting to test siren on their staging sites at the same time they're like okay so what can we do that we can't do and I think something that comes up often is split cards yeah so if you're doing W Commerce um forone for anyone who's doing W Commerce if you're tried to do an affiliate program before the problem is that I can say okay sure you're an affiliate you're going to get 30% commission 20% 10% whatever based on however we track you y but the problem is I don't want you to get a commission for the whole cart because it's not that you're referring traffic which in some cases that's what you want but in some cases maybe this is an instructor for the course and it's the the instructor author or whoever recorded the the course and so you want to give them for those $30 $100 or whatever that the product costs in the carts I want to give them **[00:08:00]** their royalty payment totally and doing that with other tools it's impossible because they just focus on the whole cart so yeah how did you do that in Siren what's the difference uh how do we how do we think about collaborators yeah and and siren so there's there's so many different ways that this is handled so first off the big one of the big changes that siren has against other platforms is um it has what I call a multi-program approach to manage affiliate management so instead of having a single monolithic giant program that has all these custom settings buried in it and like different products have different like rates and different Affiliates have different rates and all that stuff none of that happens how it works is you just create another program so one program could be could say this program pays people whenever or pays Affiliates 10% whenever this specific product is sold right you can get that specific and then if you need to create another program you can so if you wanted to create two different programs maybe you have two different rates for products you would just create two programs and then only say these programs apply to these products and set different rates for them and all the different settings there um if you wanted to on the other end of that like say you wanted to create um maybe maybe you have some Affiliates who have a different rate than other Affiliates this is very common right so other plugins what they'll do is again monolithic program so you have to go into the affiliate screen and give that affiliate a special rate um and that's a pain in the butt to me because then you have to like dig **[00:10:00]** in and figure out who's got what rate and what are they at and you know they've kind of made it a little bit better with groups so that you can set a group rate and things like that but it's still it's still awkward so I centralized all of that in the programs screen so you don't Affiliates don't have rates or you know collaborators don't have rates um oh instead a program has a rate so you set a rate for a program and then you add collaborators to that program instead so um if I have an affiliate who I want to give a 10% rate and I have another one who I want to give a 20% rate I'm just going to create two programs one for the 10% and one for the 20 and add those Pro collaborators to those actual programs right so it allows you to um centralize all that it makes it a lot easier to manage and then on top of that it also allows you to do some really cool complicated um potentially complicated like you know I guess I should say power right like there's a lot of depth there um because you could create uh for example on siren site you I have two programs that are running one where um I pay the first visitor the the first person to refer a site and then I pay also for the last person so if you're a podcaster and you referred somebody really early in the sales cycle to siren site with your affiliate link and then somebody else referred it to actually get them to convert months later or like a month or so later right I would still pay both of them right would I because **[00:12:00]** I have two programs one program would pay the first person a smaller amount and then the other one would pay the last person a bigger amount and then if the and then there's also cases where it could be the same person right but it's it's just so there's a lot of like different ways you can create programs customize programs um and tailor them to your needs and it all happens in that one screen oh that's great there I think a lot of interest was spun recently with the lifter integration right because courses are a big one online courses they're fantastic there's they're a great way for people to share knowledge and also make money right but mostly help people and in that space of course you can have affiliate but like we were talking about earlier you you a lot of the times you just want to give people royalties for whatever content they created like you were saying for the blog post and so in this space I see that you can have someone own a product right so that collaborator owns the product and what does that mean in the sense of a program does that mean they automatically get access to whatever that program does yeah so um there's a special kind of way there's a you in Siren you can create what you well like you said a royalty program and basically what that would do is it will pay the collaborator for a a royalty for products that are sold that they own right um and you can associate different products with that collaborator by basically giving them ownership and what that means depends on the platform or depends on the plugin um for example in the context of lifter **[00:14:00]** um they would own they you would associate that product with them by saying they are the course instructor right so they own that product now um they own that course and then lifter because of lifter's capabilities you would just set that user to an instructor and then you can actually customize then that that instructor can customize and modify their course as they see fit and then anytime that product gets sold they would be commissioned they would receive that royalty they would receive a notice that hey your product just got sold you know we're paying you that 50% 25% 60% whatever percentage you know has been agreed on but what's really cool is like again since it's a multi-program approach you can do a royalty program for your instructors but then on top of that you could also do a royalty affiliate program so this actually allows you to perfectly emulate what like big platforms like you to me do um where you can say yeah I'll pay you a 50% royalty right I'll pay you 50% royalty for every course that's sold that you own all the time forever MH but I'll tell you what if you sell the product yourself if you're the one who actually does the sale and it's your product I will pay you an additional 40% on top of that 50% so now I'm paying you 90% of the value of that commission I'm going to keep 10% just as a as a you know feed to maintain the site and all that stuff um and uh you know so so it incentivizes them to not only earn from their royalty but it also incentivizes them to actually generate sales and generate leads and be a more active member in **[00:16:00]** that way so you're able to pay them for performance that's not required right you don't have to have both of those but if you wanted to take it to the Next Step it's easy enough to do it's just adding another program um and then so that's that's the lifter use case of like a product owner but there's also other ones like uh what about something like Etsy so imagine you have a scenario where you wanted to create um a like an Etsy clone where you have a whole bunch of people who are creating their own Parts maybe they're making some like 3D printed things or or something like that and they're selling them on the site um you can make it to where you can associate those products with them give them ownership of those products and then whenever they sell you know you let them know hey this product's sold you know we're going to pay you 90% or whatever you know it does and and it works exactly the same way so siren would handle keeping track of who gets owed what with that there's obviously other plugins and other things that might need to get involved in the mix for some notifications and stuff depending on the context but um yeah so that's that's really what it's all about and that's um where there's been a lot of interest and excitement this week because uh the lifter LMS integration kind of brought in a lot of those additional features that I didn't have ready at launch that I wanted to get ready shortly afterward and I had to have them for lifter because it was the entire use case um so right but I mean but for anyone who's listening that that **[00:18:00]** do not like I personally do not use lifter haven't yet um we use learn Dash a lot and if you're using learn Dash or if you built your own version of Noms this still works because you have woocommerce if you use woocommerce so if you have the woocommerce integration from learn dash at the end of the day you're setting a collaborator for the product and so you have a course product somebody buys that product on W Commerce it's linked to the course they get immediate access all that's handled already by learn Dash but you can handle the royalty um generation with siren just as it is now because of these new changes that also apply to woocommerce right yeah exactly and that's why I that's why I made a point to do the woocommerce at launch because there's just so many plugins that integrate with it so you know while people are waiting for those Integrations to come along I at least have an answer to that question right so lifter was the first one um mostly because Chris was there you know he was with me he helped me we worked together on he gave me a lot of advice he's been so helpful um so I've been and I was also I was I've always used lifter as well prior to so um nothing gets learn Das or anything like that like I I just I just I've heard great yeah I've heard great things about lifter like recently because of you I I dug into it a little more and it's such a like a whole everything in one kind of platform so I think for many use cases it's it's an Ideal tool but again I haven't tried it yet hopefully **[00:20:00]** uh in the next few weeks I'll I'll give it a go also yeah so one quick question if you are doing like a woocomerce or or lifter or whatever uh integration for royal mhm if someone they were buying in the cart but you had a Black Friday deal 30% off or 40% off does siren handle a way for people not to get the whole royalty for the the original cost but rather the discounted cost or how does that work I know a lot of people have that question yeah that would be a problem right um imagine I I take 90% off and I'm giving you 50% of the commission oh no I'm losing money no um so the way siren handles that is um there's there's there's this option inside of whenever you're creating a program where you can specify what parts of a transaction should be included in the calculations in fact that's actually how you're able to ensure that the um different products aren't included for example so what it does is you can say don't include taxes don't include you know shipping uh include discounts and include fees and include all lineup items right and that's the basic that's a basic example right so those three things You' include line items fees and discounts um and by including discounts you're actually saying calculate all of this and also calculate the discount along with that which would then subract that total so if you had like a 90% off or something like that it's going to only calculate they're only going to get Commission on whatever the 10% value is that the person actually paid out of pocket um but it's but it's there for you to be able to disable that if **[00:22:00]** for some reason you want to do that I I I can't think of a use case for it but it was easy enough to add it and I I was like it's here I'll just do it it's fine I'm sure there's there's some scenarios where they they always get the full especially if let's say the Creator or the instructor or whoever the collaborator is is bigger than the company they might always get a license fee for it no matter what price it's sold at I I I guess that that so one last question here regarding uh like specific to siren I know um we have to go in a few minutes the payouts it's a big thing how is that handled how do I know who I need to give money and do I can I mark that I already paid them do what how do I pay them how does that work yeah um so you uh there's there's a there's a two-step prog process to payouts so um the first step whenever whenever somebody um whenever an affiliate or a collaborator whatever um earns their commission earns their reward is what I call it because it's a generic term right a reward so it could be a it could be an affiliate commission it could be a royalty it could be both right it could be a combination of those it could be anything whenever they earn their reward um in Siren something called an obligation is created and for every reward there's a single obligation all the way down um and actually I'm going through this right now I have several obligations for uh lifter that were created because they you know they were using an affiliate link whenever they launched this **[00:24:00]** they they've generated several sales so um what I need to do then is basically whenever the time comes to make that payout right in my case I'm waiting until the 30day return window is done before I actually make these payouts so that if anybody returns it I can cancel those obligations before I actually make the payment um so then so um other plugins how they work is that's it this you would see this obligation screen and you would and they would just there's like a button to like generate a report and it just dumps it into a spreadsheet and it tallies up the totals and it gives it to you as a spreadsheet and then it marks them a sold and that's it um I felt that that was like as a starting point the spreadsheet part is okay right we can we can work with that that can be imported into PayPal stripe you know done manually through whatever system whatever there's there's so many different ways that's okay the problem was if I had problems paying an affiliate for some reason maybe their account was wrong or whatever there's no way to track that in the system once it's once it's you know what I mean as soon as those payouts are dumped out in that spread sheet there's no tracking it's done and you have to you have to now manually track it for the rest of that and I did not want that for siren I wanted something better so what I did was instead of it just dumping into a spreadsheet directly it actually creates a um a payout a single payout record that has I'm sorry it's a um it's not a payout it's called a uh oh no **[00:26:00]** it's gone my brain oh it's fine anyway so it's an entity it's an entity so it creates this thing that has a whole bunch of payouts and um you're you're able to uh look at that and it'll be a single record so it'll be like we did a payout on this day and then if you click on it it shows you all of the individual all of the individual like tallied up amounts like what would actually be in the spreadsheet and it assigns a status to them and it says they're paid unpaid whatever so then from there so it's separate from obligations it's a separate screen right from there you can say all right I'm ready go ahead and I'm going to pick the ones I'm ready to pay now and I'm going to export them as a spreadsheet or I can say I already paid this one market has paid Market is paid so it gives you kind of a checklist yes it gives you a checklist of every affiliate or every collaborator rather um and how much you owe them for that specific payout and if it's paid or not that way you can keep track in Siren of the status of your different payouts without needing to like manually do it or anything like that oh that's perfect and then you can still just take a box and and hit the button to download them download it as a spreadsheet as an Excel sheet or whatever um and it'll also automatically mark them all as paid whenever it does that if you want it to um so you know you still get the Simplicity of of it for the the general cases where it goes well but you know if something goes **[00:28:00]** wrong you can come back to your dashboard and you can mark it as unpaid just so that you you know you have it recorded I still owe them right and then they see that on the front end I still owe this per I still owe you this right so it it kind of helps with the accountability aspect of the actual paying part of this which I think is arguably the most important step right you want yes you want more transparency there than any other step in the process not that you don't want it everywhere but you really want to make sure um because your collab your collaborators come payday if something goes wrong they're going to want they're going to immediately want to see hey what's going on here you know I have you owe me this payment I see it right there's there's transparency and um I think that's really important so I wanted to make sure to build that in as well oh that's fantastic speaking of and I if it's not there it's fine because I know it's work in progress but what about that that front end part is there a way for for collaborators to see what they're owed and and where they're at yeah so the way it works right now is it's actually built directly into the WordPress dashboard so um if a collaborator creates uh has an account they're able to see their all of their um their data directly in there so there's there's coupon codes that they can see they can see their affiliate link they can see you know their rewards and all of the data that you know would the basic data that goes into um the the the affiliate dashboard basically the **[00:30:00]** WordPress dashboard becomes the affiliate dashboard that's what it is now that's it's definitely a 1.0 like it's definitely the first version of this there's a lot I want to do to improve that including soon yes blocks coming soon tldr uh the intent is to um I wanted to start there because one it's it's easy it was easier for me to do that of course but two um Integrations like lifter or woocommerce where somebody owns the product and they have to actually manage content on the site as well are absolutely going to want that in the WordPress dashboard because they're going to be able to access it anyway so I needed this so I wanted to start there and then over time um determine probably I'm going to end up creating blocks is what's going to end up happening I'm going to end up creating a dashboard block probably some other logic block that's like you know if the collaborator logged in only show this content and just different things like that so that people can customize this to their hearts content because I know not everybody wants people to even know that their sites on WordPress you know what I mean right yeah there's there's a lot of people like that yeah so so that's that's coming um it's it's coming someday it's just there's so much stuff it's it's just good to know what to anticipate yeah for sure well Alex this has been fantastic I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me and just talking about the this whole process because using siren or not using siren is just a great thing to know about in the WordPress space so do you before we close out have any suggestions for **[00:32:00]** anyone that is planning on maybe running an affiliate program or a royalty program or anything like that yeah I have a lot um so so if uh they should definitely check out um I have a podcast that I'm running where I'm talking a lot about this stuff right I'm talking about how to run an affiliate program how to find more Affiliates how to you know motivate the Affiliates you have to generate more sales um all kinds of different programs um and and tips and advice and just entire business models that this tool can use uh because it's a very novel The the entirety of this there's a lot of novel here right there's a lot of Concepts and a lot of ideas that haven't really existed in the WordPress space I've actually been saying you know prior to this week There's entire business models that couldn't be done in WordPress without code that can be now right like siren has literally opened up entire business models right so um I have a lot to talk about right in terms of inspiration ideas on how this plugin can be used um ways to be able to use it more effectively and in order to do that I decided the best thing I could do was start a podcast so I'm doing a lot of um short 15 to 20 minute talks where I just kind of it's just a talking head I'm talking to you about a specific topic I'm offering references research and all the stuff that I have to be able to provide to people um and things that I'm just finding in my own discoveries as I'm building my own affiliate program at the same time um but then on top of that **[00:34:00]** I'm actually doing a lot of interviews with some really really talented and knowledgeable affiliate managers uh in the space um and and not only just WordPress space but just in general um some of the sorry some of the interviews I've done have been like I I've I've actually been I'm I'm asking them questions because I want to know more stuff from my own program of course and I'm like SC scribbling down notes like oh my gosh that's a great idea I need to do this I need to do that so there's going to be a lot there is a lot of really good content there now and there's going to be a whole lot of really great stuff there too and that's uh that's at partnership. FM partnership. FM all right perfect and where can people find you on social or website where's the best way to reach standford.edu for me it's my own website um and I'm I'm also very active on X I'm very active on Mastadon um you can pretty much find me in most of the slack channels uh my handle pretty much everywhere is Alex Stanford all one word ah easy enough yeah all right excellent I'll let you go now I know you you have another call but thank you so much for taking the time and I hope to speak to you soon all right Armando thanks so much man I'm so excited thanks for