Make More Money Teaching Online with Siren Affiliates: Demo

Transform your learning site into a revenue-generating powerhouse. Motivate course creators to sell their courses and memberships through your website, and build a robust partnership network using Siren.

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How to Make More Money Teaching Online With Siren Affiliates

This webinar walks through how to use Siren Affiliates on a LifterLMS site to build multi-program incentive structures that pay course creators, affiliates, and content contributors from the same site. Chris Badgett hosts Alex Standiford, the founder of Siren Affiliates, for a live demo of a Udemy-style split-commission royalty program, a stacked instructor affiliate program, a traditional affiliate program with program groups, and a performance-weighted revenue-share pool for membership sites.

What You Will Learn

• How a multi-program approach to affiliate management unlocks business models WordPress could not run before
• How to build a Udemy-style split commission structure that pays instructors 50% royalty plus a 47% affiliate rate
• The difference between first-touch and last-touch attribution, and why you can run both at once
• How program groups prevent double payouts when two affiliate programs would otherwise stack
• How to build a Netflix-style revenue-share membership using a performance-weighted distributor pool

Key Takeaways

• Break your incentive structure into small single-purpose programs rather than one monolithic program with buried options
• Start with one or two simple programs and add complexity as your business proves it out, because commissions are easy to raise and hard to lower
• Use split commissions to turn affiliate competition into collaboration between marketers and salespeople
• Reward blog authors, podcasters, and content creators the same way you reward affiliates, using content-attribution tracking events
• You do not need to be a developer or raise venture capital to build a Udemy or MasterClass style learning platform on WordPress

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Meet Siren Affiliates and What Makes It Different

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome. I’m Chris from LifterLMS, and I’ve got Alex Standiford from Siren Affiliates. Today is a special day. We’re going to be doing a demo and an overview of the brand new Siren Affiliates release for LifterLMS integration. Siren Affiliates in my view is the future of affiliate marketing and much more. It’s about the types of partnerships you can add to your learning management system website, so that you can build a multi-referral, multi-channel partnership program.

You can essentially build what Udemy does, what Netflix does, what MasterClass does. You can do revenue share, you can do interesting membership models, you can do an affiliate program which you probably know what that is, but there’s so much more you can do. You can stack these things on top of each other. I’m really excited to get into it, but first, welcome Alex to the stage.

Alex Standiford: Hey Chris, thanks for having me, man. I’m so excited to be here. Since day one, Siren has had LifterLMS on the top of its mind. This entire presentation for me is a year in the making, because everything about this plugin has been built to be the absolute best incentive plugin specifically for learning sites. You really nailed a lot of the key talking points there. I’m just really excited to get to show this to your audience.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. I’m excited for you out there to dig into this. For some of you, these are going to be some new concepts, but I know in your mind is how do I get students, how do I get other course creators, how do I get people to help with content in a way that’s a win-win for everybody. We’re going to go into all that today.

Why Multi-Program Beats Monolithic Affiliate Software

Alex Standiford: The unique thing about Siren is that it uses a multi-program approach to affiliate management and incentive program management in general. Most affiliate plugins, if you use AffiliateWP or some other existing plugin, they only use a single affiliate program. It’s this monolith gigantic program that has all these customizations that are buried in different places, and over time your program becomes really complicated. Not to mention the fact that most of these other plugins can’t actually do a lot of the things that we’re going to talk about today.

Siren improves on that by using a multi-program approach. Basically what you’re going to see in this presentation is that instead of having just one program, you can create as many programs as you want. What this does is it simplifies how programs look and makes it a lot more clear on how they work, but it also simultaneously gives you a lot more capability on how you can build programs. The possibilities for this plugin are insane. I’m seriously just so excited about it.

Building a Udemy Clone With Split Commission Structure

Alex Standiford: For this presentation, what I want to show you is something that’s really relevant to the LifterLMS crowd, and that is to be able to create basically a Udemy clone. LifterLMS already has a lot of fantastic capability to have a multi-course site where you can have your course creators all managing their own content, all creating their own courses, selling them, and doing all of those things. Siren’s role in this case is to be able to create the incentive programs that actually allow you to keep track of how much money you owe those different course creators. We’re going to go step by step through how you can use Siren to literally create the exact same programs that Udemy offers.

Sites like Udemy use a split commission setup for their system. Basically what they’re doing is they give 50% of the value to the instructor when the course is purchased organically through their site, but then they’ll actually give them 97% instead of 50% to the instructor if that instructor was actually responsible for the sale using their own referral link. What this does is it puts a really heavy emphasis on instructors to generate their own sales when they can. However, if they don’t have the reach yet to be able to generate those sales, they can still rely on that platform to help them with the sales while they develop their audience.

What’s really cool about this to me is that it allows creators to depend on the platform early on for their sales, and then as their audience grows, the amount of money that they get significantly grows along with it, because their audience is going to be buying using the creator’s affiliate link. Those two things stack together, so instead of earning a 50% commission on those sales, they’re earning that 97%. We can create this exact same program in Siren using a combination of different program structures.

Setting Up the Instructor Royalty Program

Alex Standiford: Let’s walk through how you can replicate that split commission structure in Siren, where you have the 50% and the 47% that stacks on top of it. The first one is going to be a royalty program, which is going to pay your instructors when their course is purchased. We’re going to set that to 50%. The second program is going to be an instructor affiliate program, which pays your instructors when they refer the sale for their course. We’re going to set that to 47%. This means our course creators can earn as much as 97% of a sale on their course if they’re also responsible for selling the courses themselves.

These percentages are arbitrary. I’m basing them off what I know of Udemy’s current platform, at least in the past. If you wanted to do something different, you absolutely can. There are so many different ways you can build these programs.

I’m on a bare-bones demo site of LifterLMS with a single course, the demo course that comes with LifterLMS. Side note, Chris, I really loved how easy it was for me to set this up. I already have Siren installed on this site, and two collaborators set up. With Siren, we call them collaborators instead of affiliates, because your relationship with them varies. It’s not just an affiliate all the time. Sometimes it’s a course creator, sometimes it’s something else. When I was creating this, I didn’t feel affiliate was the right term. These are the people who are working with you in some way and are capable of earning commissions from you.

I’ve preset two of them, Brad and Steve. Both have accounts on this site. Steve is going to be an affiliate, and Brad is going to be an instructor. Brad is already set with the instructor permission inside LifterLMS as a user, so he has access to his own courses and can create all of that.

Choosing Program Structures and Engagement Tracking Events

Alex Standiford: The first program is the royalty program that pays instructors when their courses are sold. Go to Programs, click Add New, and name it Instructor Royalty Program. Give it a description like “Pays course creators when their courses are sold.” Set it to Active. Leave the currency as US Dollars. In a future version, you’ll actually be able to pick store credit here as well, so if you wanted to create a program where you’re paying in store credit instead of cash, you could.

The expiration time isn’t relevant to a royalty program, so leave that blank. It’s going to be very important for the next program. For the program structure, set it to Every Engagement Wins. What a program structure does is determine how the system calculates the winner, who’s going to win the referral out of all of the people who are qualified. Newest Engagement Wins, for example, would be the last person to refer that visitor. In this case, since it’s a royalty program, we literally just want everybody to always win every time, as long as their product is one of the products being sold.

Engagement tracking events are the other side of that. On some program structures, you might say the newest engagement wins, and in that case it would be whoever did the last engagement with that visitor before they made a purchase. An engagement is any kind of event that happens that’s specified on the program. There are events like Site Visited, Blog Post Visited, and several others. In this case, since we’re doing a royalty program, all we really care about is that the Collaborator Product is Sold. Set the value on that to 1.

Configuring Percentage of Transaction and Auto Approvals

Alex Standiford: Set the incentive structure to Percentage of Transaction. Since this is the royalty program, we’re going to give them half, 50%. Credit them for sales, not renewals. You could technically tick the renewals box if you wanted. Basically it says only sales are eligible, but if they happen to have their own membership or something on this site, you could tick the renewals box and they would get credit for the recurring commission as well. In this case I’m not using recurring, so I’m just going to do sales.

Tick the Auto Approve Completed Transactions box. What this does is say whenever an order is complete, automatically create the reward and approve it. If we don’t tick that box, it’ll still create the reward, but you have to manually go in and approve it. It depends on how your site is set up.

Filtering Which Line Items Count Toward Commissions

Alex Standiford: The last piece is the critical part that actually makes this work: Include in Commission Calculations. This allows you to specify which parts of the order and transaction are used when calculating the commission. Say you wanted an affiliate program that doesn’t include discounts. You don’t want discounts to be a part of the calculation. If you charged $100 for something and you’re giving them a 10% commission, and the product is on sale for $50, you could still give them $10 instead of $5. It depends on whether you want to include those discounts.

By default I pretty much always use Discounts, Fees, and Line Items. That’ll include discounts, and include any additional fees, which most of the time isn’t applicable in LifterLMS except for maybe a sign-up fee if you’re using WooCommerce Subscriptions. If there’s ever a fee on top of whatever the original product is, that would apply here. You can include shipping costs and tax costs if you want. Obviously there are some implications there.

With line items you can filter down further what kind of line items are eligible. You can actually make it so a program only applies to specific products or specific categories. What’s really cool is if you had an affiliate program with a special course that you’re really trying to push for a limited time, you could create a program temporarily that has an extra percentage of transaction, or a fixed amount for every one they sell. This lets you make sure that if that person buys multiple things, the bonus only applies to that one specific product.

In our case, the only thing we really care about is Collaborator Owned. What that’s going to do is only give credit to the sale if the collaborator who won owns the product that was sold. We have to associate the product with the collaborator.

Assigning Course Owners in LifterLMS

Alex Standiford: Whenever you create a collaborator and set them up as an instructor, LifterLMS actually already has a way built in to set an owner for a course. In fact, you can set multiple. At launch right now this only supports one owner, but it’s built to be able to support multiple in the future. I just haven’t set it up yet because I didn’t want to unintentionally create some kind of bug too soon.

Go into your course, click on the little LifterLMS icon, and you can associate different course creators with the course. As you can see here I have the administrator and Brad Wellington associated with it. LifterLMS actually allows you to change the order of these, and right now the person who’s on the top of this list is the one who receives the commission. Make sure you go in and set your creator, then make sure they are on top so they are the ones that get the commission. I know it’s a little confusing. It’s not a great experience, and it’s something I’m still thinking through how I can improve.

So now we have this course, Brad owns this course. In this case we’re saying Brad basically created this course and he’s the one maintaining it. We have a program in place that will pay him 50% whenever somebody buys his course.

Creating the Instructor Affiliate Program

Alex Standiford: Now we create the second program, the instructor affiliate program, which pays him when he refers a sale for his course. Set that one to 47%. Back to Siren Programs, add a new program, name it Instructor Affiliate Program. Description: “Pays course creators when they sell their course.” Set it to Active. US Dollars.

The expiration time matters here. What this does is basically say how long does somebody have from the time they visit the site to the time they make the purchase before we no longer say that sale is valid for that course creator. If you’ve ever heard of a cookie window, that’s basically what this is replicating. It’s not actually using the cookie technically, but that’s irrelevant. Set the expiration time to 30 days. If an instructor refers a visitor to buy their course and that person buys it within 30 days, they’ll get credit. If you wanted to make this forever, you could just leave it blank. I’ve seen all kinds of different cookie windows. Thirty is a pretty good start.

I’ve also seen people create multiple programs where one has a long expiration date and another has a really short one. That way you create a marketing versus sales program where you’re paying somebody more if they’re able to get them to convert quickly, versus actually just referring them earlier in the funnel.

First-Touch Versus Last-Touch Attribution

Chris Badgett: Could you touch on that last-touch attribution or first-touch and explain that a little better?

Alex Standiford: There are a couple of different ways you can approach an affiliate program. You can say I want to pay the first person who referred this visitor, the first person who introduced this product to this person. Or you can say I want to credit the person who last referred this person, because they’re the ones that actually got the person to convert. There’s an argument either way for which one is the appropriate take.

For me, I think the answer is both. There’s no reason why you can’t with Siren create a split commission structure where you are rewarding the oldest person, the first person to make the referral, some kind of smaller commission, and then the last person to make the referral a bigger commission. What’s really cool is you can add your affiliates to both of those programs, and they can get a stacking of commission. If they referred somebody and got the sale all within like a seven-day period, they’re going to receive the highest commission they could possibly get.

That’s actually how Siren’s commission structure for its affiliate program works, and I find it’s a really great motivator because it allows podcasters or evergreen content to be able to generate sales over time, but also allows people who are doing direct sales with email campaigns or real actual pushes that are making conversions to be able to generate those sales too.

Why Marketing and Sales Both Deserve Credit

Chris Badgett: I think that is so cool and so revolutionary. My very first LMS project, when I started making money teaching gardening and permaculture online around 2012, I had a multi-instructor platform. The royalty program, I had to manage all that stuff manually. I had an affiliate program, but I was trying to get my instructors to use it because they had a big audience themselves. This simplifies what used to be such a headache.

That whole thing about, well, should the first person who sent the traffic get it, or the last person? There are arguments for both, or you can just do both, which is the most fair. If you want to change that time frame, the expiration time in days, the first-touch person is like, well, I think my person’s going to actually buy in 30 days. They might want to send another email to their client to get this course or membership. It’s like you’ve thought through everything.

I just want to give one more example for the people out there watching. Sometimes people think marketing and sales are the same thing, but they’re not exactly. For example, a marketer could create content about the platform and send it over to a free course on the site and drop their cookie. The sales team who works at the company or is independent contractors could come in, take those leads, email them, have meetings, and then close the sale. If you have both of those people working together, and you have the split commission, marketing and sales are working together as a team.

Alex Standiford: That’s one of my favorite things. This specific split commission structure celebrates collaboration in ways that affiliate programs usually don’t. You don’t really think about an affiliate program as affiliates working together. They’re usually competitive, usually working against each other. The idea of being able to play to each other’s strengths is really exciting, especially if you think about the fact that if those two people knew each other or were able to work together in some deeper way, the opportunities are just endless.

Finishing the Instructor Affiliate Program Setup

Alex Standiford: With this instructor affiliate program, we’re going to create this one as Newest Engagement Wins, just because that’s usually what people pick. It tends to be the one people go with, and there’s no wrong answer.

In this case we want to set the Site Visited tracking event as well as Coupon Code Used, because this does support coupons. If you want to give your affiliates a special coupon code, you absolutely can, and it will track it and give them credit as if they were using a referral link. Turn both of those on. Newest Engagement Wins, 30 days, and set the percentage of transaction to 47%. That’s going to stack on top of that 50% commission if they actually close the sale, giving them pretty much everything except for the administrative fees.

I want to really stress here: you can make that percentage whatever you want. If 97% isn’t viable for your business because you’re not at Udemy scale, you can adjust that down. You can make it a fixed amount. Whatever you want to do you can do here. For Include in Commission Calculations, again do Discounts, Fees, and Collaborator Owned, because we only really want that 47% to apply to the products that are actually owned by them. Click Create.

Now go to the Collaborators screen, select Brad, and add him to a program. Add him to the Instructor Royalty Program first, then add him to another program, the Instructor Affiliate Program. Brad is now in both the royalty and the affiliate program at the same time.

Adding a Traditional Affiliate Program for Everyone Else

Alex Standiford: Almost every website also uses a traditional affiliate program. Sites like Udemy are no exception. They have an affiliate program that isn’t for their course creators, it’s a separate thing completely. They treat their affiliates like a different entity and offer them a 25% commission. Let’s make that program for Steve.

Go into Programs, add a new program. You could do the split commission structure I was talking about earlier if you wanted, but just to keep things simple I’m doing a single affiliate program. Name it Affiliate Program. Description: “Pays affiliates when they convert sales using affiliate links.” Status Active, US Dollars. Set the expiration time to the same amount as the course creators, 30 days.

Leave it on Newest Engagement Wins. Set Site Visited and Coupon Code as the tracking events. Percentage of Transaction, 25%. Credit for sales, auto-approve transactions. The only difference with this program is that we’re going to set Line Items in general. We’re not going to specify Collaborator Owned, because we want our affiliates to be able to earn sales from any product that is sold, not just products that they own, because they don’t own any products. Click Create. Then go back to Collaborators, add Steve, and add him to the Affiliate Program.

Solving Double Commissions With Program Groups

Alex Standiford: Here’s a little tricky bit. We already have an affiliate program for our instructors, but that’s a special program specifically for instructors. We also have a more traditional program with a lower commission rate. Let’s walk through a scenario where the way this is set up right now could cause a problem.

Say we have an affiliate who refers someone to our site, and shortly afterward a course instructor refers that same visitor. By default, Siren stacks rewards. That means every program that’s eligible to generate a reward is going to do that. This is great for our royalty program and instructor affiliate program, but it’s not great with our two affiliate programs, because we really don’t want them to stack. We only want one of those two affiliate programs to ever fire. Otherwise we could end up paying 122% of our total sale if both the instructor and the affiliate happen to refer the same visitor within that 30-day period. Obviously that’s not ideal.

To work around this, we create something called a Program Group. Program groups organize and manage several similar programs and treat them as a single program. With program groups, only one program within that group is activated whenever a sale is made. That alleviates the problem where the double referral would happen, because only one of the two affiliate programs would be eligible.

Go to Program Groups, add a new program group, and call it Affiliate Programs. Description: “Group of affiliate programs.” Set the group structure to Newest Engagement Wins, and apply it to both of our affiliate programs. Before any of these programs trigger a reward, the system detects they’re both part of the same group and only allows the one with the most recent referral to apply. If our affiliate refers the visitor after the course creator refers the visitor, the affiliate will receive their 25% commission. The course creator would not receive their 47% for the affiliate program, but they’re still going to get that 50% for their royalty program. That’s how we work around conflicts of interest.

Managing Instructors Before Tools Like This Existed

Chris Badgett: As somebody who’s been doing affiliate marketing, sales, content creation, course creation for a long time, you have thought of everything. I love how you’re protecting the creator, giving them tools to make it so you can think through these scenarios. What if somebody’s an instructor, an affiliate, and an instructor-affiliate. This is what makes Siren so powerful. Traditional WordPress affiliate programs have just kind of the single program, but this is a lot more advanced, and it gets people working together.

I’ve been down this road before with instructors on my platform. In the beginning I gave each of my instructors a 50% royalty, and then there was a 25% affiliate program on top of that. What I found over time was the instructors and their content were really valuable, but as the years ticked on, I was doing a lot more work as a platform creator. It’s easy to think, oh well, I’ll just go 50/50, but maybe it should, especially if you want to stack all these other programs, leave room for that. You can incentivize your instructors to make more money by also promoting their course on your platform to their audience.

Building a Netflix-Style Learning Site on WordPress

Chris Badgett: Building sites like Udemy but on WordPress, or a Netflix of learning, can be really powerful. They can also be complex. What I love is Siren is really reducing the complexity of managing all this stuff, breaking it into bite-sized pieces. One of the things we’re going to do is Alex and I are going to get together and collaborate and build a Udemy clone, Netflix-style clone website together, and take you through it step by step. We’re hitting the high notes and the highlights here. Our goal is to put a full zero-to-hero, no-step-skipped tutorial so you can literally build a company like Udemy.

Another reason I get excited: if you look at a company like Udemy, they have raised over $273 million to build the platform. Now with tools like WordPress, LifterLMS, and Siren, you can essentially build a site like Udemy or Netflix for a teeny teeny fraction of the cost. That’s how we’re bringing the power of open source, accessible, affordable software to the people. From the LifterLMS side, our mission is to democratize learning in the digital classroom, which helps entrepreneurs, teachers, learners, and it’s good to build businesses too.

I looked at MasterClass, which you might be familiar with. They used to run a lot of ads. According to Crunchbase they’ve raised a total of $461.4 million over 10 funding rounds to build that. You can build your own MasterClass. Netflix are more like movies and shows and entertainment, but sometimes people want to build like, well, I like the way Netflix works, but can I do that more in a learning context? That’s what this is.

Introducing Distributors and Performance-Weighted Pools

Alex Standiford: There’s another half to how incentive programs work with Udemy that is completely different than anything we’ve talked about, and this is literally not even possible to do with any other tool before Siren. Prior to Monday, this business model didn’t even exist for WordPress.

One of the things Udemy does is share a 25% commission to their course creators for memberships specifically. It’s a revenue share. They say if we made $100,000 this month, they’re going to take $25,000 of that and distribute it to all their course creators. What’s really cool is they don’t just divide it evenly between every course creator, because they’re not all created equally. Some are driving a lot of traffic and value for members, and others are driving less. What they do is pay people based on how many minutes their content was viewed in that period. I call it a performance-weighted pool. There’s a pool of money, the $25,000, and they pay it out based on the performance of each individual person.

Siren can build one of these. It’s not a traditional program, it’s actually called a Distributor. Let’s say we created a shared pool with 10 course creators. We’re going to pay 25%, and we’re going to say we did $100,000 that month. The total payout would be $25,000, and the course platform gets the $75,000 that’s left. With 10 creators they would each receive $2,500. Not too bad.

But what would happen if creator 10 didn’t really do anything? Maybe they have one course and nobody’s looking at that course and they’re not really pulling their weight. Creator 1 at the top of the list maybe has dozens of courses with hundreds of lessons and has been here for a decade, driving 90% of your traffic. Top 1% of performers. It doesn’t seem right that you’re going to pay creator 10 the same $2,500 as creator 1. You might have trouble keeping creator 1 with your platform if everybody’s receiving an equal amount.

Of course you want to reward that. You want to reward them for being successful, for driving traffic, for providing value to the customer base. To do that, we create a performance-weighted pool. It emulates that Udemy experience. The first creator would receive around $3,300, which is just over 13%, and creator 10 only receives around $1,300. You can increase the bias more or less, so you might have a higher bias where you’re paying $6,000 to the top creator and less than $100 to the bottom. There are all kinds of different ways you can approach that.

How Revenue Sharing Works With a Membership Model

Chris Badgett: If you think about Audible where you get books, or you think about music platforms like iTunes or Spotify, or Netflix, the user is just paying a monthly fee. Then you have all these creators putting books, songs, movies, shows in, but you don’t necessarily want to split the revenue share equally. It’s also pay for performance. Well, who’s got the best books? They make more money. Or the best songs. Now you can do this for education, which is really cool.

Alex Standiford: Distributors work a lot like programs. The only difference is that they’re not associated with a single transaction. Programs are always associated with a transaction, whereas Distributors are associated with historical performance. This can apply to the performance-weighted pool we’re talking about. It could also be a bonus. You could say a 3% bonus on top for the single top performer this month. There are bonus structures you could create.

You could even create a sliding scale with this. You could create a basic affiliate program like Amway, for example. Those multi-level marketing systems, a lot of them work like that. What they’ll do is pay you a flat percentage during the month, and then at the end of the month they calculate the bonus based on how much stuff you sold and apply all of that to a sliding scale. You could literally do that by creating multiple distributions and offering a higher percentage for each level based on how many sales they did in the last month. Distributors are designed specifically to solve that problem in a concise and simple way, without adding complexity to programs in the process.

Configuring the Shared Instructor Pool

Alex Standiford: Go into Siren, then Distributors, and add a new one for a performance-weighted pool. Name it Shared Instructor Membership. Imagine you have a website with an academy, a collection of courses, multiple instructors. There’s only one membership that gives access to everything. How do we pay all the contributors making courses? Based on the performance of each other.

Set the status to Active, currency to US Dollars, revenue percentage to 25%. Set the schedule to go every month on the first day of the month. If you wanted to do a double schedule, weekly, or annual bonus based on the year’s performance, you could do that too. For now we’re sticking to monthly.

For the events, set this to Course Completed and Lesson Completed. Every time a student completes a course that is owned by a collaborator (owned by Brad in this case), we give him a point, and it keeps track of those points over time. Same thing with lessons. I’m going to update the Course Completed value to 10, so that adds extra emphasis on students actually getting all the way through the course. They get a point every time somebody completes a lesson, and 10 points every time that person completes the course. The weighted pool is going to base how big of a share they get on how many points they scored in the last month. Whoever had the most students complete their lessons and courses gets the highest share.

Set the incentive structure to Performance Weighted Pool. You could also use Shared Engagement Pool, which would just divide it evenly among all of them. Sometimes that makes sense. You could also set Top Score Wins, which was the bonus I was talking about. Maybe the top performer gets a flat $200 or $1,000 on top of this. That’s a really great one for a reinvigoration campaign for your affiliates. Affiliates tend to follow an 80/20 principle, where 80% of affiliates are doing 10% of the sales. You can reinvigorate the rest by offering a temporary program with a $500 bonus to the one affiliate who generates the most sales that month, and only offer it to the lower-performing affiliates. That helps you figure out which of your affiliates in that pool are sleepers.

For Include in the Commission Pool, include Discounts, Fees, and Line Items, but only specific types. In this case we only want subscriptions, because we don’t want to give them credit for the sales. Over the course of the month, every time a sale happens on your site, it adds the value of that sale to the pool that is available for this distribution. Only include your actual membership subscriptions. Click Create, add Brad to the distribution, and you’re all set.

How Distributors Stack With Programs

Chris Badgett: How does the distributor stack on top of the affiliate program and the instructor royalty program?

Alex Standiford: They both run independently of each other, so they will always stack. Distributors will always happen in addition to those programs.

Advice for Designing Your First Incentive Structure

Chris Badgett: What advice would you have when people are thinking about designing their incentive structure? How do they think about it and make sure they don’t over or underdo the math?

Alex Standiford: One, it’s math. Two, don’t give away too much too soon. It’s easy to increase the commission you’re offering people, it’s not so easy to decrease it. My biggest recommendation would be to start simple. Start with the essential pieces to your program, and then add to it as you’re ready. I don’t know if I would do this weighted distribution pool on top of everything all on day one. I don’t even know if I would necessarily do a membership on day one. Start simple, start with the key pieces, and think in the back of your mind as you’re starting how much you’re willing to part with in terms of your commission before you even start designing these. Do not give away that full amount on day one. Give away most of that or some of that, and work through that over time.

Chris Badgett: With LifterLMS access plans, or if you’re using WooCommerce, you can handle all those scenarios. You’re building complexity, but sometimes complexity is good, because you’re just creating incentives and flows and options for everybody.

Alex Standiford: If you wanted to allow people to opt in or opt out of it, you could set up specific courses that only are eligible for different memberships inside LifterLMS. In Siren all you would need to do is create a product category. That category would be, say, membership plugins, and only the ones where they’re opted in are in that category. Then you can filter which transactions actually apply based on that category. Only the transactions that are relevant, or the events that happen for a course completed, only the courses that apply to that specific subset will actually be eligible for the pool.

Using Blog Content as an Incentive Program

Chris Badgett: One of the questions that comes up a lot is how do I get clients or customers or students. Another challenge people have is content contributions to a blog. If somebody wrote a blog post for your learning platform’s blog for SEO or general content, and after somebody views it they buy the course or the membership, can they be included in one of these programs?

Alex Standiford: Oh yeah. A little bit more old school, but the one I think about is Squidoo. Seth Godin ran this thing called Squidoo for a while where people could create what they called lenses, and basically it was a little blog post. It would have affiliate links and ads on it. This was the heyday of blog content, so the idea of ad revenue and affiliates could fund this entire site. What he did was create an incentive program where people could write blog content on their site, and based on the number of views they got, they got a share of the ad revenue. Not that different from how YouTube works now, only instead of with YouTube videos it was with blog content.

You can emulate that program in Siren. There’s another event called Blog Post Read. If a blog author happens to be a collaborator, it works in exactly the same way as the course ownership concept, where you can say if somebody visits this site and they go to this blog post, and that blog post is owned by a collaborator and this program is active, then we will credit them as if they were a referral link.

What’s cool about that is there are opportunities for collaboration, where an affiliate links to a blog post by another affiliate. With their powers combined, with the reach of the one affiliate and the content of the other affiliate, they’re able to work together to generate a sale from that blog post. You can stack those programs. Maybe the blog content bonus program is a smaller amount, because it has organic sales and is using your reach to some degree to generate those sales. On top of that you have the higher-percentage affiliate program. Those could stack together, and the blogger is incentivized to write really good content that generates leads and converts sales.

How This Works With WooCommerce

Chris Badgett: Education entrepreneurs have physical products or, for whatever reason, are using WooCommerce, and the product is just like a course or membership. Same thing we just discussed but a different item somebody is converting a sale on.

Alex Standiford: Everything’s identical. Everything I showed in this presentation works in WooCommerce and LifterLMS. So even if you’re using Woo without LifterLMS, it doesn’t matter. All the features I just showed you work. The biggest thing that LifterLMS has that’s specific to LifterLMS are those engagement events, the Course Completed and Lesson Completed. All of this stuff is built around the needs of this audience, for the membership stuff and the royalty program, but since your audience also has some using WooCommerce as well as LifterLMS, I needed to make sure I was thinking about WooCommerce from the get-go.

The Collaborator Experience Lives in the WordPress Dashboard

Alex Standiford: The entire collaborator experience right now is just inside of the WordPress dashboard. I opted to keep this simple because if they’re an instructor, for example, they’re going to use this dashboard to create their own courses and do all of that stuff. It made sense for Siren to be inside the WordPress dashboard as well. This is another example of what I mean when I say that since day one Siren has been built with LifterLMS in mind. A lot of other plugins have their own custom dashboard on the front end, and that adds a lot of confusion and complexity for this kind of use case. In the future I might create something where it’s possible to add a block for a dashboard on the front end, but I started with doing it like this instead of as a block because I figured it would make this all more seamless.

Do You Need to Be a Developer to Use Siren?

Chris Badgett: Sometimes it surprises people when I say I’m not a developer at all. I can barely write the HTML for a link. As a WordPress user, kind of a power WordPress user because I’ve been using it for a long time, and I get e-commerce, I get LMS, I get the idea of incentivized programs, I could put all this together just clicking around and figuring it out. You don’t have to be a developer to use this. Like you said, a developer could come in and customize it more.

Getting Support and Onboarding With Siren

Chris Badgett: If people are like, yeah, I want a Udemy clone, or I want to build the Netflix of dance or cooking, or I want to create an MBA on my platform that works like Netflix, how can they get help when they get stuck, or they have questions and they’re excited?

Alex Standiford: First things first, whenever you purchase Siren, I actually offer a one-on-one meeting with people, because I know there are a lot of new concepts here, a lot of new ideas. If you’re anything like me, you’re probably buzzing with all kinds of different inspirational ways to change your business, build your business. I wanted to start with a one-on-one meeting so I can talk through some of the things, offer the insights I have, and help with offering some of that content.

This is a new category, a lot of new content, a lot of new ideas. This is actually why I created my podcast, which is called Partnership. I’m doing tutorials and content on my site because I really wanted to teach people how people are doing these things. The truth is a lot of bigger companies have been doing these kinds of things for a while, so they have a lot of experience we can all learn from and apply in our own context. On the podcast, not only am I doing solo episodes talking about things and doing research, but I’m also starting to get an increasing amount of interviews with existing affiliate managers and some of the challenges and approaches they’re taking.

Why This Is a New Category, Not an Incremental Improvement

Chris Badgett: This literally changes business models. This opens up new business models for WordPress that prior to this week did not exist. You could not do this on WordPress before. This isn’t an incremental improvement to affiliate software. This is a new category of product that hasn’t existed before. Hats off to you. Good job.

Alex Standiford: Prior to this I was actually running an agency and I was trying to create a sales system around that, with a blog content bonus program and a multi-tier approach. I was using a different plugin. I was actually, years ago, a developer for a more basic affiliate plugin, and I was using that trying to do this. I knew that plugin really well, and the amount of code I had to write to make that work even as the most basic version of a multi-tier program like what we’ve talked about today was an astronomical undertaking. There was stuff that I, as a person who was literally writing code for that product, struggled with figuring out how to solve. That gives you context on how big of a leap this is in terms of how different it is from existing solutions out there.

Chris Badgett: I love seeing true innovation, and this is one of those. Alex, thank you for the great presentation, but mostly thank you for creating Siren. Thank you for integrating it with LifterLMS. I appreciate our conversation and collaboration around the project as well, and thinking about the online education industry and how we can empower people. It’s really cool.

Alex Standiford: Thanks so much for having me.