I need some advice about how to structure my new site using Itthinx products in my WP site(s).
I’m a subject matter expert for a consulting tool I created 40 years ago (LAB Profile). I want to set up a site offering a Forum for those who teach or who consult with LAB Profile. There are many thousands around the world who teach or consult with LAB Profile. There are many hundreds who get added to this pool every year. So, I can have an activity with LAB Profile in ‘retirement’ without traveling for training or client consulting.
I’m choosing Affiliates Enterprise, so that I can invite trainers and consultants of LAB Profile to join and they can invite their students to join and get monthly affiliate commissions for any of their students (using a 3-tier commission structure).
In addition to the Forum, I’ll offer additional products/services (online training in my updated version of LAB Profile 2.0, Master Classes, Special LAB Events, individual consulting, etc.).
My question is about how do I structure my WP site(s) so that each of the services I offer can have it’s own look and feel. I’d like to have each of these services have a unique banner for that site. But, I’m not sure how to structure this. I’ll use something like myprofile(dot)com as the initial WP based sety of landing pages for the Forum and other services. I’m thinking that the myprofile(dot)com WP site can host all of my various sales pages.
Do I establish each of the various services I’m offering as myprofile(dot)com/service1, then myprofile(dot)com/service2, etc. each as their own WP site? Does this confuse the WP software? Will Affiliates software operate okay in this environment? Am I barking up the wrong tree? What will I have to be aware of to make this work okay?
Hi Rodger,
Thanks for providing further details. In this case as far as Affiliates plugin is concerned, you should keep all your landing pages under the same domain/site since the referral assignment is based on cookies so if you try to record a referral on a different domain other than the one where Affiliates is installed, it will fail.
Regarding commissions in general it might be useful for you later on to have a look at our API regarding Referrals.
Hope it helps.
Cheers,
George
George, I’m going to provide my own checkout system and I’ll use a Paypal process. I’ve done this before without offering commissions to others. But, now I want to leverage all those hundreds of Trainers/Consultants (working with my material) who could benefit by referring their clients/students to my offerings.
I guess that my real question with respect to structure is the following:
If I have my top WP site host all of my Affiliates Plugins, will all of my landing pages need to be on that top site so that the Affiliates software recognizes my affiliates sending their clients to my sales pages? Or, will the Affiliates software recognize my affiliates sent enrollees if those landing pages are on WP site I set up on subdomains of my top(main) domain?
Hopefully I’m describing my concern properly.
Hi Rodger,
Many thanks for choosing Affiliates Enterprise for your project.
Regarding your services, how do you plan to sell those? Is it going to be a WC product or you have implemented your own checkout system? If it’s the first case then Affiliates Enterprise can integrate with WC through its offered Affiliates WooCommerce integration while for the latter you need to implement a custom integration with Affiliates plugin (we can provide API hooks on this and assist you with the whole process). Another option on this matter would be to use Affiliates PayPal integration and sell your services through PayPal giving commissions to the referrers at the same time.
As far as the presentation of the services is concerned, this is directly related to your theme as this is the part responsible for the front-end look and feel. In terms of promotion yes you can create a dedicated banner for each of your services in order to have it promoted by your affiliates and also set a unique URL if you add the following shortcode in a page.
Assume that you have created a new banner for “Awesome Service” and it has id 1.
If you add the shortcode [affiliates_banner id="1" url="http://www.example.com/awesome-service/"] in a page, it will render the output banner and the snippet for that banner. Furthermore, the output banner used by your affiliates on their promotion tools, ie sites/ profiles etc will use the aforementioned URL instead of your homepage URL.
IMO there is no reason to keep a dedicated site per service aka setup a WP Multisite since you can style each service page as you wish. The most important point here is to decide / implement how you are going to sell those services.
Kind regards,
George