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Onboarding Affiliate Marketers

Once you activate your Affiliate Program, you can start onboarding affiliate marketers to promote your product and earn commissions.

You can onboard affiliates manually by adding them through the Freemius Dashboard, or you can allow potential affiliates to apply through an application form.

Once affiliates have signed up and been approved, they will receive unique referral links and can monitor their earnings by logging in to the Customer Portal.

Adding Affiliates Manually​

  1. Open the Freemius Dashboard.

  2. Choose the product from the Products tab under the Freemius logo.

  3. Click the Affiliate Program menu item.

  4. Click the Affiliates tab.

  5. Click the Add Affiliate button to add a new affiliate.

  6. Enter the affiliate's email address, name, and the domains through which they will market your product.

    • The email address will be used to send the affiliate their unique affiliate links and for all future communications.
    • The name is used to personalize the emails sent to the affiliate.
    • The domain is used to validate that the affiliate is promoting your product from an approved domain. You can add multiple domains separated by commas.
    • You can also add additional optional information about the affiliate, such as their PayPal email address (for payout purposes), promotional methods, stats description, and promotion method description.

  7. Click the Add Affiliate button to complete the entry.

Once you add an affiliate, they will automatically receive an email with a direct link to their Affiliate Dashboard and their custom affiliate links, which they can start using right away to promote your product.

Create Clean URLs for Affiliates

Since the URLs are not very user-friendly, for WordPress websites, we recommend that affiliates use a plugin like Shortlinks to map the links to cleaner URLs.

Affiliates Application Form​

User Dashboard Affiliate Application Form​

We provide a user account management platform that comes with a ready-to-use affiliate sign-up section. It includes a form with required fields that must be completed by the applicant.

Once the potential affiliate agrees to the terms and submits the form, an email will be sent to you for approval.

Follow these steps to activate the affiliate program in the user dashboard.

WP Admin Affiliate Application Form​

  1. Log in to the Freemius Developer Dashboard.

  2. Go to the SDK Integration page.

  3. Scroll to the submenu item selection and check the Affiliation option:

  4. Selecting the box adds a new parameter to the integration snippet:

    'has_affiliation' => '<moderation>', // <moderation> - selected, customers, or all.

  5. Update the integration snippet code in your plugin or theme.

  6. Refresh WP Admin, and you should immediately see a new Affiliation submenu item that links to the affiliate program terms:

  7. Clicking the Become an affiliate button displays the affiliate application form:

Customizing the form​

  • To increase awareness of your Affiliate Program, the SDK automatically triggers an admin notice after 30 days of product usage:

    However, you can disable the notice by including the following code:

    // Replace “my_freemius” with your shortcode.
    my_fs()->add_filter( 'show_affiliate_program_notice', '__return_false' );

  • If you set your Affiliate Program to permit only paying users to become affiliates, the notice appears only for your customers.

Affiliates Application Form on Your Website​

If you would like to create a custom affiliate application form for your site, you can leverage our PHP-SDK to integrate your form with Freemius.

You will need to create a page on your website and add a form using your preferred form plugin. On the backend, you can connect that form to the Freemius Affiliate Program using our PHP SDK. This allows you to automatically create new affiliates in the Freemius system once they submit the form.

Here is a backend PHP implementation:

<?php
  define( 'FS__API_SCOPE', 'developer' );
  define( 'FS__API_DEV_ID', 1234 );
  define( 'FS__API_PUBLIC_KEY', 'pk_YOUR_PUBLIC_KEY' );
  define( 'FS__API_SECRET_KEY', 'sk_YOUR_SECRET_KEY' );

  // Init SDK.
  $api = new Freemius_Api(FS__API_SCOPE, FS__API_DEV_ID, FS__API_PUBLIC_KEY, FS__API_SECRET_KEY);

  // You can get the product's affiliate program terms ID from the AFFILIATION section, it's stated right in the 1st tab.
  $api->Api("/plugins/{$productID}/aff/{$affiliateProgramTermsID}/affiliates.json", 'POST', array(
    'name'                         => 'Full Name',
    'email'                        => '[email protected]',
    'paypal_email'                 => '[email protected]',
    // Should not include an HTTP/S protocol.
    'domain'                       => 'affiliate-main-site.com',
    // An optional param to include additional domains/sub-domains where the applicant will promote your product.
    'additional_domains'           => array('affiliate-2nd-site.com', 'affiliate-3rd-site.com'),
    // Optional comma-separated combination of the following: 'social_media' and 'mobile_apps'.
    // This is useful if by default you don't allow promoting through mobile or social, to manually (& optionally) create custom terms for the applicant after approval.
    'promotional_methods'          => 'social_media,mobile_apps',
    // An optional free text where an applicant can provide some stats data about their reach.
    'stats_description'            => '100k monthly PVs. 1,000 Instagram followers. I manage a FB group of 20,000 members.',
    // An optional free text when an applicant can explain how they are planning to promote your product.
    'promotion_method_description' => 'I am going to write a review of your plugin and sharing through my social reach of 100k followers.',
    // An option applicant state. Defaults to 'active'. One of the following states: 'active', 'pending', 'rejected', 'suspended', 'blocked'.
    'state'                        => 'pending',
  ));

Next Steps​

When an affiliate submits the form, you will immediately receive an application email with the affiliate's name, email address, and information about where and how they plan to promote your product:

Scroll to the bottom of the email to get the direct link to the affiliate settings in the Freemius Dashboard, where you can approve or reject the affiliate's application request:

If you approve the affiliate, they will receive an email notification with a link to their Affiliate Dashboard and the affiliate links they can use to promote your product.

If you reject the affiliate, you will be prompted with a dialog box where you can add the rejection reason, which will be sent to the applicant in the rejection email.

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