The launch of a premium WordPress Coupon WordPress Coupon Plugin (Behind the Scenes)
The affiliate marketing market is expanding rapidly and has become a very important and effective method of generating revenue. Due in large part to WordPress online marketing, lots of online entrepreneurs work at home and earn a good income from their websites. It's common for buyers to look to read reviews online before making a decision. Though this may be perceived as good or bad but, online marketers are eager to capitalize on this type of online traffic. In addition to my full-time job at my company, I develop and maintain an excellent WordPress coupon plugin specifically created for affiliate marketing. Today I am going to give you a thorough review of the procedure for developing it, as well as some of the challenges that I encountered while launching the plugin in the first place.
Affiliate Marketing Growth
Affiliate marketing can be a beneficial, low-risk method that has been that has proven effective in driving sales and awareness for brands in addition to generating revenue for publishing companies... When executed properly, it can establish mutually beneficial and genuine connections between brands and publishers, along with the publishers as well as their viewers. - Adam Weiss, General Manager and Senior Vice President of Rakuten Affiliate Network.
But, there's an abundance of trustworthy affiliate marketers out there and at times, they might require some help or encouragement in order to be noticed.
The creation of a WordPress Coupon Plugin
I usually spend the majority of my free time (if it were an actual thing) in my blog for marketing woorkup as well as being an affiliate marketer since early 2000, in addition to being a regular WordPress user. I would like to think I am in one of the groups that I mentioned earlier. Similar to what we are doing in the past, I try to review only high-quality services and products that I utilize frequently. I would like to write about products that are actually beneficial to the visitor. Unfortunately providing real value the customer means I must work harder then the typical affiliate marketer. Since the start of 2015, I was experimenting with additional ways to increase the number of people who use woorkup and that's what led to it was that the WP Coupons plugin was born.
Before I launched it, I did some study on the various options which could give me the information I required. Below is a list of what I had been seeking to achieve:
- Coupons for sale within my WordPress sidebar (both random , and specifically linked to the article). that are based on the content)
- Nice grid-like layout, reminiscent of the coupons' individual website
- Make a shortcode to allow the placing of coupons on your pages, on posts or wherever else you need them.
- Create a design that is modern and modern, or at least provide an easy method to change the design using CSS
- Fast loading, without relying on a variety of 3rd-party software, or large JavaScript use
I thought it shouldn't be complicated, would it? There were some plugins out there that accomplished a bit aspects of my requirements but the vast majority of them had been outdated and didn't have all the features I wanted. Therefore, I chose to create the plugin myself. Here are some valuable lessons I've learned during the process. Many people aren't aware of the intricacies involved in the process of creating, developing and selling an WordPress plugin. This isn't something that happens in a flash.
1. I needed to create an WordPress Plugin But I'm Not an experienced developer
While some people actually think I'm a WordPress developer, I'm definitely not. and I'm not even close to being a WordPress developer. I'm proficient with PHP and CSS but, when it comes down to creating my own loops, functions or functions inside my head, it just isn't working that way. Therefore, the first issue I had to overcome was how to develop this plug-in?
This turned out to be a little easier than for certain. The truth is that my brother is an all-time WordPress developer. So I asked to see if he'd create all of my requirements. Within the next week, I were able to put something together and working on the woorkup. Naturally, not every person is a member of a family, or even a member of the family who is an expert WordPress developer. I was fortunate enough to have been lucky. If you're trying to locate a trustworthy WordPress developer, ask the community first . Ask questions before outsourcing anything. Find a partner not just a developer could be among your biggest benefits further down the line.
2. The Demand Converted into Product
Just over six months have passed when we started operating our own plugin built on woorkup. There was a rapid growth in registrations, clicks, and sales all over the place. It is possible to direct coupons to an specific item and allow it to scroll with the user is a feature that boosted affiliate sales immediately. Over the course of six months, I noticed that I kept receiving requests from users asking questions about the plugin I used for displaying coupons on my website and where they could purchase the plugin. At first, I just replied saying that it was a custom-built feature we custom built and it was not available for purchase.
There was no intention to offer the plugin for sale when it first was created. But, we realized we were missing out on the opportunity when emails from bloggers kept coming from bloggers. This led me to join together with my brother 50/50 in order to make our personal idea into a professionally-designed WordPress plugin. That's another reason before I suggested that you look for a developer that will be trustworthy and trustworthy partner. If you're looking to move the pace of things, you've already got some of the hard work done.
An additional word of advice is to play the game prudently. Although you may be getting lots of emails regarding something but that doesn't mean that there's enough demand for the product to justify spending time designing and selling an application. Our brother and me chose to take the safer route introspection, and determine this based on feedback from users as well as sales throughout an extended period of time.
3. The choice of the brand name and domain Name
I am personally a big fan of .io domains, and so they also played an essential part in the identity of our company as we wanted the name of our company to be akin to our domain's: wpcoupons.io. Of course it was true that the .com website was an empty website which wasn't in usage. I tried getting into contact with the owner, but haven't received any response. As far as trademarks, the same is the case for making use of WordPress in your domain's name. Take care when selecting the branding of WordPress. WordPress plugin.
4. Selecting a Platform, ECommerce Solution, and hosting
I've been with working in the WordPress community for quite a long time and am now seeing many terrifying stories about the repository. Do you remember what happened with the Zerif theme some time ago after it was removed from WordPress.org. Every case is unique, and I admire for WordPress core admins but I decided that I did not need to worry about this. It could mean lower traffic and sales! There are also other long-winded hurdles you must jump over to be able to remain within the repository. In the end it's important to think about whether or not you'd like to participate in WordPress's repository. WordPress repository.
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Last but not least We were required to select a host solution for our WordPress website. You wouldn't believe it, but I was one of the initial customers. I contacted Mark through Skype when I was acquainted with the work they did. The period of time was lengthy before I joined the team. I've used every WordPress hosting service and the speed was unbeatable. If you pair EDD with EDD You'll be able to have very fast loading ECommerce website ( Pingdom Test).
5. Affiliate Program
Since my brother and I worked full-time jobs We knew that we had to go down the affiliate-program method. It was difficult to promote the plugin daily, and we were hoping that we could rely on members of the WordPress community to help spread the message. Since I am an affiliate marketing professional myself, I knew the potential consequences if people were aware that they could earn a fee from selling the plugin.
The other major thing that we needed to resolve was which percentage of the commission we be willing to offer to other users if they help sell the plugin? The way we approached it was that we first started with a lower quantity, and then we reached the 20percent mark as we heard the feedback of our users.
To make sure that everything was functioning properly to ensure that everything was working properly, we came up with AffiliateWP which was created by Pippin. We're glad we did! Setup was easy and we had it running in just a few minutes. If you are looking to launch an affiliate program to promote the WordPress product or plugin It's hard to outdone! The affiliate program accounts approximately 50% of all sales that occur every month.
6. Development
The first thing we had to finish when we got the plugin in production was to run tests on it using different WordPress themes in order to make sure it was compatible. It was as simple as creating a staging space and began the installation of hundreds of WordPress themes. Below are our most well-loved themes that which we tried our plugin on:
- WordPress Twenty Eleven
- WordPress Twenty Twelve
- WordPress Twenty Thirteen
- WordPress Twenty Fourteen
- WordPress Twenty-Five
- WordPress Twenty Sixteen
- Avada
- Themex
- Divi
- Themes are Thrive
- Sparkle
- Schema
- Newspaper
- WordX
- Extra
- Sydney
- Activello
- Zerif Lite
- Athena
- Orca
- Total
- Dante
- Superior
- ColorMag
- Spacious
- Poseidon
- evolve
- Nisarg
- Tortuga
- Gadgetine
The advantage for staging would be that after the theme tests were completed the staging environment was removed. staging environment. After that, we built a new stage environment specifically designed for testing new plugins. The staging environments are accessible to the public via their own URLs so my brother could add new features to the environment the environment as well as I had the chance test them before we could push the changes into production.
If you're developing an WordPress plugin, it is essential to put a straightforward procedure in place, especially for having to deal with a lot of people. It's not advised to develop work on the live website!
7. Your business's performance is vital.
Performance was extremely important to our team from the very beginning. One of the things I dislike about WordPress creators is that they do not care. Even for plugins not that big is crucial. It should be able to work at a certain level. Currently, our plugin doesn't make use of any JavaScript and has a size of less than 40KB for the backend, and less than 2 KB on the front end. Each component is completely self-contained, and don't have 3rd dependency on third party services.
It was possible to link coupons to a specific blog, and then have it scroll along with the person using it was a feature that increased revenue from affiliates within a brief time on our woorkup site. To enable scrolling instead of creating the feature by ourselves, we used the already great available Q2W3 Fixed Widget plugin.
If it's not broken , do not repair it! The benefit of doing it by this method was to keep JavaScript from the plugin to those who weren't using the scrolling function. I suggest developers look at all your options prior to giving more weight to your plugins. The possibility of adding this feature by ourselves, and even made the ability to scroll available, however the decision was a matter of time.
8. Reacting to comments from users and keeping a Changelog
If I had to guess, I'd think that 90 percent of the features we've added come from the feedback of our users. Many of them are clever suggestions that we'd never had in mind by ourselves. For example, a Tweet by Colin the other day urged us to include the possibility to utilize forge in certain post types. It's a simple task to add on our website, and we've rolled it to our latest version.
@brianleejacksonthe @wpcouponsio's
February 15, 2017
A second thing that I recommend is making a changelog and features request page, as well as publicizing them. These pages make it clear to users that you're committed to improving the functionality of your WordPress plugin but they also assist you to keep track of what you're supposed to work on. Additionally, you can make use of premium services such as UserVoice to simplify the process further, and let people vote for every new feature.
Examples of Feature Requests
Changelog Example
Some Hard Lessons Learned
The growth we've witnessed has been phenomenal in the use for our WordPress coupon plugin in the last few years. It has grown so much that we're currently putting a large portion of our efforts into the development of our coupon plugin. It's also not to say that we did not learn several lessons from the process:
- Don't overestimate the amount of time required to create a brand new WordPress plugin by starting at the beginning and working through. If you believe the plugin will need you to work for five hours a week, then estimate it to be ten hours.
- Give documents and instructions. If you are generous, that you will have less time responding to support requests. We have decided to make use of our Heroic Knowledge Base plug-in that is fantastic!
- Discuss with your staff members potential new features if they arrive. It's not recommended to satisfy everybody. Include things that add value to the plugin.
- Utilize your existing contacts and those you've met in the WordPress community to drive higher sales. Give them coupons for discounts to market your WordPress plugins and themes on their website, along with an affiliate programme. This wasn't something we did in the beginning, and it should have been doing this since the beginning.
Summary
It's evident that there is a lot happening behind the scenes in the background when it comes to something as simple as the WordPress coupon plug-in. Many developers must manage all aspects of the coding aspect to helping and marketing. In this way, I've earned a lot of respect for WordPress developers in general, especially teams that have created their own websites. beginning with a blank slate.
If you're looking to learn more about the WP Coupons plugin and the features it offers, don't hesitate to check it out on wpcoupons.io. We'd like to hear your opinion is on the subject, especially if you are a web developer. Have you had similiar learnings that you've learned along your journey? What advice would you give to others that are starting the same path?
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