How should we promote our all-in-one affiliate marketing plugin?
Hey guys, in April we launched Lasso (https://getlasso.co) and while we're getting great word of mouth visits, I'm still stumped on how we can seriously amp growth. The SEO topics around affiliate marketing are insanely competitive and sadly very narrow.
Any ideas on how to successfully promote a WordPress plugin that doesn't exist in the WordPress Marketplace?
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Is there any opportunity to create a trimmed down version of the plugin and release it for free on the WordPress.org plugin repo? Or is that what you meant by the WordPress Marketplace?
Unrelated, but have you seen a lot of success with the monthly payment approach? I think that's a pretty rare tactic in the WordPress plugin space and I'm interested to know what your experience has been with it so far.
We’re not ready to do white glove service for free users - perhaps in the future we will launch on the Wordpress.org repo but for now we’re just paid.
Monthly is working out really well for us. It’s shortening the feedback loop time since we have to retain every month instead of “buy and gone”. It’s helped us grow incredibly quickly.
Plus the whole “give our code away” issue is a non-issue. Vast majority of WP users are not technical and the people who would come just for code would take it anyways - even for a yearly fee and even then I’d like to believe the code base is worth more than $190 ;)
I think it’s surprising so few are doing it. Easier to hook someone and show your value prop if they don’t need to take the leap on paying a year up front.
I hear you on the support thing. My only frontend facing plugin on the repo generates 90% of my help requests.
The idea of yearly subscriptions is so ingrained in everyone who does premium WordPress plugins that there isn't a lot of interest in trying something new. I wish more people took the chance on a different payment structure.
Best of luck with everything going forward.
What is your overall experience with the public WP repo? How much inbound interest do you see?
What are all of your plugins?
I'm a small timer but my most "successful" plugin generates all of its revenue from repo traffic. WP Terms Popup is in a highly competitive space so the marketing website receives basically no outside traffic on a day-to-day basis. The add-ons I sell enhance the actual plugin, which is free on the repo and fully functional out of the box. It gets about 25-30 downloads a day on average.
I have one other plugin on the repo right now. It's called Business Manager but, to be honest, it's in a pretty neglected state. Few installs, less than 10 downloads each day, and little traffic back to the marketing site. Most of the revenue from this one has come in the form of one-off coding jobs from clients looking to add custom features.
Finally, I have a small WooCommerce plugin that I sell called Remove WooCommerce Features. There is no free version available for this one. 100% of the traffic comes from SEO.
Collectively, all three of these plugins generated anywhere from $600 to $900 per month. Like I said: very small time. They basically help me cover a lot of the expenses of my main consulting/software business so I keep them around.
I used to have another plugin that was for writers to track their productivity. It was by far the most successful WordPress project I've ever worked on with over 10,000 active installs at the time I sold it away. But I made the common mistake of making the free version too good/useful, and the conversion to the Pro version was always poor. I spent two years trying to separate the two versions enough to make the Pro more appealing but never really managed to pull it off. So I sold it to another developer.
Oh wow, so you're a serial WP developer then :) That's awesome and IMHO a lot of this online business stuff is just about being insanely tenacious. This is our third business that's working but there were an embarrassing amount of failures or "almost" that preceded these.
Do you attempt to collect emails or anything from the free users? Do you put any sort of ad in there to promote your paid upgrades?
I think WordPress is a really underrated option for software developers looking to get into making their own products. The market is gigantic and even if you don't make huge money you learn how to create, support, and grow a piece of software with actual users.
My plugins are kind of "set and forget" so I've never pushed email/newsletter sign-ups inside of their interfaces. Most users will hardly interact with any of my plugins after the first time they set them up so opportunities to upsell them or get them to subscribe to anything are limited.
So, having said that, WP Terms Popup has three tabs: Settings, Designer, and Collector. If you do not have the Designer or Collector add-ons installed you basically see what amounts to a full-page ad for them when you click their tab. I don't do a lot of analytics but I would guess that's how 99% of all people find their way to the marketing site and purchase the add-ons.
I actually recently launched an affiliates program. Perhaps we can talk about a potential partnership?
Sure! There's an Intercom chat bubble on the site, just reach out via that and we'll take it from there :)