#projectsiren — Public Fediverse posts

When Your Best Customers Don’t Know They Need You Yet

https://wpproducttalk.com/podcast/when-your-best-customers-dont-know-they-need-you-yet/

Interview with Alex Standiford and Nathan Wrigley.

https://wpbuilds.com/2026/05/28/470-alex-standiford-on-using-ai-for-personal-knowledge-management-and-team-productivity/

How to Use an Affiliate Program to Create a Content Marketing Engine

https://podcast.lifterlms.com/how-to-use-affiliate-program-content-marketing/

The MCP server is the new landing page.

https://www.alexstandiford.com/articles/essays/mcp-server-new-landing-page/

So, I’ve been working toward making Siren as both a WP plugin and a SaaS. That’s been built into the DNA of how it’s set up since the beginning. I’m finally starting to get to create a single set of front-end components that works both in WordPress and in the SaaS. Loving this.

Well, Siren is getting some halfway decent traffic. Not HUGE amounts, but enough that I’m starting to actually see quasi-useful data. I’ve always kinda sucked at analytics, and setting all of that up. Hoping Conversion Bridge can help.

I spent a lot of time today just organizing the features I envision for Siren, and next year is going going to see a lot of awesome enhancements. Can’t wait to share what’s coming!

Build Affiliate & Incentive Programs with Gravity Forms

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs_py8DbVLY

Matt sits down with returning guest Alex Standiford to talk about a big milestone for Siren Affiliates: it now supports Gravity Forms.

If you’ve ever written off “affiliate plugins” as just referral links and payout percentages, this conversation will reshape how you think about partnership programs in WordPress. Alex explains why Siren is really an incentive program builder, not just “get a link, earn 10%.” The episode gets into practical, real-world use cases like lead-based programs for agencies, revenue share models tied to performance over time, and even vendor payouts routed through Gravity Forms product fields.

They also get into the reality of running a product business alongside consulting, how AI is helping Alex move faster without magically eliminating the need for long-term maintenance, and why WordCamps can feel a little awkward when you build marketing-adjacent tools in a community that values authenticity.

By the end, you’ll have a bunch of “wait, I could do that?” ideas, especially if you run an agency, a course business, or any WordPress product that depends on partnerships.

Takeaways

• 
  Siren is positioned as an incentive program builder for collaborators (affiliates, partners, vendors, sales teams), not just a traditional affiliate plugin.
  
  
• Gravity Forms support unlocks smarter workflows like routing applicants into programs, tracking lead activity, and automating CRM and email list follow-up once someone is approved.
  
  
• You can track actions over time and do distributions (revenue share style payouts) without requiring a direct on-site transaction for every tracked event.
  
  
• Gravity Forms product fields can be used to attribute value to specific collaborators, which opens up vendor and booking-style scenarios, not just referrals.
  
  
• A strong affiliate program looks more like a product with onboarding, education, and touch points, and “10 great partners” often beats “1,200 random signups.”
  
  
  

Important links

• 
  https://sirenaffiliates.com/
  
  
• https://gravityforms.com/
  
  
• https://gravityflow.io/

[00:00:00] 5, 4, 3, 2.
Matt: Welcome back to The Breakdown Podcast, returning guest, Alex Danford. Alex, welcome back. Hey, Matt. Great to see you. Thanks for having me. If I was a better podcaster, I would’ve had the show notes from the last episode. I think we were just talking about what you were up to with Siren Affiliates and how you use Gravity Forms and some of your, um, consulting work.
Yeah. Um, for folks that don’t know, siren affiliates.com, we’re gonna talk mostly about that. Today because you’re now incorporating Gravity forms into that product, which is amazing to hear. Yeah. Um, but as we sort of wrap up the year, uh, how are you balancing consulting work and product work? Are we doing more product than consulting?
More consulting than product. What’s it look like for you?
Alex: [00:01:00] Yeah. So for the past, I’d say six to eight months of this year, um, I’ve really been honing in on making the business more siren, my, my business, more siren centric is what I’ve been saying. So, uh, all of my decisions are being driven by, you know, how is my business going to grow so that it’s more product focused.
Um, so a lot of that obviously is focusing on growing, pro growing siren itself, and growing, you know, growing my customer base and all of those. Things. Uh, but in addition to that, I’m also still doing consulting work and things like that, but I’ve been trying to leverage siren as much as I can, uh, to one, find those potential clients that I’m working with.
And then also, of course, uh, extending siren and creating systems, uh, that leverage that. Leveraged siren for my clients.
Matt: Now, I know you were also working, well, you had multiple products, you’ve done multiple products, you have multiple products. Uh, is, is Siren still the leading one that you’re, that most of the attention goes to?
Alex: Yeah, everything ends up revolving around it in some way, shape, or form. So whether it’s extending it or enhancing it or, um, whatever I’m doing these days, uh, it’s [00:02:00] always in service of, uh. Either leveraging siren as a use case or, uh, expanding on it and building it, uh, in, in new and unique ways.
Matt: Yeah, and I, I have to ask, I’m sure maybe we’ll get into it, but I have to ask, what’s the impact of AI on your work?
We, you and I probably talked about it, uh, you know, earlier this year, uh, when you’re on, but I’m curious, has it started to impact. Sort of like the customer facing stuff, like customers going, oh, hey, why, why don’t you just add this? I mean, you have ai, just add this to the product. Or do I really need this product ’cause maybe I can build it myself.
What’s your vibe? No pun intended on AI right now. Yeah.
Alex: Um, I think AI is an excellent tool and I think that, um. I haven’t ran into situations where I’ve had customers say that they could just simply build, uh, what I’m doing instead. Now that doesn’t mean they’re not right, of course that doesn’t mean they’re not.
But, um, and I would even say if you’ve got a super dead simple affiliate program and you don’t really [00:03:00] care about long-term maintenance or anything like that, which to be honest, everybody does. But, uh, you probably could vibe, code something, you know, but the, the problem always comes down to, uh, for me it’s always the maintenance.
It’s maintaining it long term, making sure that it continues to function, um, and, and things along those lines. And also just the peace of mind knowing that somebody’s keeping an eye on it. Uh, but in terms of my own personal productivity, it’s had a very, very good impact. Uh, I’ve been able to, uh, effectively, I’ve really just started using, really in the last, I’d say, month I’ve really started to leverage, uh.
Uh, AI directly in my IDE, uh, my code editor and, and all that stuff, and truly, you know, starting to leverage that. Um, and fortunately, siren’s built in a really good way, so it’s documented and, and set up. So the, the, I had to do the foundation myself, but now AI is allowing me to be able to do extensions and, and do things like that a lot better.
Something I’m really looking forward to is, um, as I’m getting better with these things, I’m starting to, uh, create better documentation for Siren in my own all [00:04:00] of my tools. And, uh, what’s really powerful about that is that means that other people, if they need to extend Siren or leverage Siren, uh, they would be able to do so as well.
But I think that, um, whenever I think of Siren, I think of it a lot in a lot of ways as, as a platform, as a platform on top of a platform on the same way that you would look at, you know, WooCommerce or some kind of foundational tool. It’s a foundational tool for partnerships and, and things like that. So I don’t so much think about AI as being something that’s gonna.
Place siren as much as it being a fulcrum to help people extend siren and create partnerships in, in more powerful ways.
Matt: One of the interesting things that came out of, uh. Well, I mean, we’ve been, if you’ve been following WordPress Deeply and, and not just the state of, the word that came, that just passed is the abilities API, um, that’s, you know, coming into, uh, WordPress core and it’s gonna unlock a lot of, like this, uh, what I’ll call like the glue to ai, right?
Yep. Theoretically, from a 50,000 foot view, one might be able to connect their chat, [00:05:00] GPT or Claw account up to their, you know. Mom and pop WordPress website and say, do some things for me. Hey, ai, go in and clean up my blog posts or install this plugin. I’m wondering who’s gonna be holding the ball for support When customers are like, Hey, I asked Chad CPT to talk to Siren and then grab all my Gravity forms entries and then make a graph for me on this blog post page who like, and it doesn’t work.
That, then what? Like who, who has to solve for that? Yeah, it’s a scary, you know, it’s a scary proposition. It’s an exciting proposition, but it’s also like, where’s the support land in something like that. Yeah.
Alex: Um, there’s a part of me that wonders, uh, it just sounds like one of those things where somebody would just throw more AI at it, so, so, you know, oh, okay, so I’ll have your robot talk to my robot and, you know, we’ll figure it out.
I don’t, I don’t know if it’ll, I don’t know how, how far out we are from that. Um, I’m definitely watching the Abilities API, uh, in general’s. It’s still a little bit early for me to really go all in on it, but I’m, I’m very [00:06:00] much intrigued, obviously. ’cause siren’s, superpower is, its integrations, so of course I’m, I’m watching it closely and I think that there’s a lot of, um, definitely a lot of potential, especially in terms of working with it, uh, with ai.
Um, I could see. Oh my gosh, I can’t even, I don’t even know where to begin. Like just starting with the simplest things of I want describing the program that you want and it says, oh, here’s the different incentive programs that you would need to put together in siren. And it would just do it. You know, that’s the simplest term.
But I mean, imagine if you’re able to change stuff together and say, I. I’m creating this incentive program, here’s how I wanna do it. And it goes, it designs it, and then it looks at, you know, your, your customers in the past for WooCommerce. It grabs their email address, it constructs a message to send them and says, Hey, would you like to join our partnership program?
And it just a hundred percent does that, you know what I mean? And if they say yes or whatever, it automatically adds them to the system. You know, it, it gets ’em signed up, it sends them their incentive program, URL. There’s a lot that could be done with that in the future. And I’m, I’m definitely excited about it.
Uh, but I’m, I’m [00:07:00] definitely. Just kind of, I’m watching, I’m gonna see where it goes and see how the adoption, uh, goes. And also I just kind of wanna experiment with it. I have to understand how it works myself before I can, you know, confidently give it to my customers and say, here
Matt: you go. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to me, again, not to get too deep in the weeds of this stuff, but I’ve been building a plug in myself and I started thinking like, oh, wouldn’t it be cool to, you know, get on the forefront of this stuff and, and start leveraging the abilities API.
But then I was like, I, I kind of feel like you’re just o it’s like almost like opening the door. To, it’s an opening the door to the unknown for that end user, and, and that’s the part where I’m kind of like wrestling in my head. No official abilities, API from Gravity Forms just yet. Yeah, that, that’s
Alex: for sure.
Yeah. I’m kind of unapologetically hiding behind some of the bigger players for sure. Yeah. I’m just gonna let you, let, let everybody else who’s got the resources, figure it out, figure out the kinks and see how it goes, and then put something together basically based on that.
Matt: Siren affiliates.com. The integrations you said are key, uh, to the success of Siren.
You have WooCommerce, easy Digital [00:08:00] Downloads, north Commerce, commerce Lifter, LMS, and now Gravity Forms.
Alex: Yep.
Matt: Before we hit record, you mentioned that this is not just an, like an affiliate plugin. This is something where you can incentivize folks to work with you. Can you unpack that a little bit more and how you differentiate from your typical affiliates program to, uh, an incentivized program?
Alex: Sure. So, um, pretty much every business out there has some kind of idea of what, what I call a collaborator, right? This could be a venture partner, this could be a formal partnership. This could be an affiliate, it could be a vendor. Uh, there’s all kinds of these different words that we use for people who collaborate with us, who work with us in some way to help our business grow.
So siren’s entire goal is to build what we, what I call an incentive program builder. It’s an incentive program builder, and it lets you build any kind of incentive program that is that. Is designed to be used with those people. Um, so I’ll give you a more abstract example. So let’s take a look at, say, uh, Uber or Lyft, right?
They have an incentive [00:09:00] program, right? The incentive program is if you drive and you do this delivery, I will pay you this much money, right? It’s a fixed amount of money. You’re paid for performance. So the drivers in that context are the collaborators, and of course Uber is the business itself. So I’m looking at things like that, not, not just of, obviously you could do affiliate programs and you can do sales programs and things like that, but it, it’s, it’s more than that.
Anytime you ever have a partnership or any kind of connection, uh, where you need to track, uh, performance from somebody and pay them some amount of money based on that performance. Siren is the, is the go-to for that. And it isn’t even just monetary, right? It could even be, um, if you took a step back and said, maybe I have a refer a friend program, right?
And instead of paying people with money, I’m paying them with, you know, points or some kind of internal currency that you have in your system that you can then turn around and use for discounts. Like I think about a lot of grocery stores where they have those reward systems and stuff like that. So it can, it can leverage kind of, uh, things along those lines as well.
Matt: Does it always have to be. And this is is gonna unpack [00:10:00] to another question, but does it always have to be a monetary transaction that Siren sees on the website? Does it always have to be fixed to like a transaction that happens on the website? What, and, and let me frame it a little bit better so that the listener, and, and maybe you can get it a little bit more, I’m thinking, wow, wouldn’t this be great to have an incentive program for a WordPress agency?
Mm-hmm. But WordPress agency, you know, if I’m charging, uh, five to $10,000. Maybe I’m not transacted, transacting that through gravity forms. Right? Right. Everything could, could I still use Siren at that capacity to track somebody’s, um, points if I wanted to have somebody refer business to me? Yeah. You
Alex: actually touched on a really interesting, uh, thing that makes against Siren unique here is, uh, we, it has a concept called distributors.
And basically what those do is it allows you to, um, instead of paying people, associating things directly with transactions you can associate. Actions that happened over time and pay based on that. So, um, I’ll give you an example. Um, so let’s [00:11:00] say you have a, a salesperson, maybe you have a team of salespeople and you want those salespeople to direct traffic to, uh, gravity forms or their, their form on gravity forms for leads, right?
And you wanna pay them. The tricky part about paying for leads is if you just shovel a whole bunch of garbage there, um, you’re paying for garbage. You know, anybody who’s ever had an, who’s ever done, uh, ads on Facebook or something like that with improper targeting knows you’re basically just lighting your money on fire.
But if you have good quality leads, it can be a real great, it can be a real good boon. So, um. What you can do is you can say, I want to pay these, these people to get this, to get leads to fill out this form, right? And what I’m gonna do is instead of paying them every time they get a lead, I’m going to create a, uh, revenue share where once a month I pay out a percentage of the total amount of revenue that the business made for the month.
And the amount of money I pay to each salesperson is directly [00:12:00] proportionate to how many leads they brought in that past month. So that’s just kind of one example, so you can disconnect that transaction from, from the actual act itself. Um, another, another example is, uh, another revenue share that I’ve seen a lot of people do with in the LMS space, the learning management space is, um, they’ll have multiple course creators.
Or content creators, and they’ll pay a revenue, share a share of the memberships from the past month based on, uh, which course creators got the most engagement from The people who, who, which cust, which course creators had the most customers, uh, complete their course, complete their lessons and, and things like that.
So Siren can track those actions over time and then pay a distribution based on, uh, the number, the,
Matt: their score. The wheels are turning in my head and I’m gonna paint a picture. I wanna paint a couple pictures. Sure. Uh, number one. Pretend you know somebody that has a WordPress podcast. I don’t know who this person is.
Okay. But let’s just pretend they do. [00:13:00] Okay. But they have and they have a free newsletter. Could there be a thing with Siren? ’cause I use Gravity Forms. Uh, did I say me? I meant that person. That person. Yeah. Yeah. That person uses Gravity Forms to get them on a newsletter. Could you have like this fun point system where like the most people that refer people to sign up for this newsletter and then like.
I don’t know. We get them a a, a buy them lunch or something like that. Like could, could we score them and and track that kind of thing? Or does the payout always have to be cash on the other side?
Alex: Uh, no, you can actually specify any kind of currency you want in the system. Um, it comes with just all the normal currencies, um, but out of the box it supports multicurrency.
So whenever, if you had multiple programs, ’cause you could run multiple programs in sirens. So, uh, it has to support multiple currencies too. So if you wanted to create your own custom currency, that’s, you know, uh, podcaster points or, or whatever you wanna call ’em, right? And you want to make that. Maybe it attributes directly to some kind of coupon discounts on your site or something like that, [00:14:00] or, or whatever, right.
There’s, there’s so many different ways you could take that. Uh, yeah, you can absolutely do that. And then it, it would track, you know, here’s how much money you owe this person in dollars here much how, how much you owe them in, you know, these points that you’ve created in your system. Uh, yeah, absolutely.
Matt: Yeah, that’s, that’s awesome. To just backtrack to that, uh, agency example, I think what I’m hearing is that let’s say you have a team of, of folks that are helping you sell, uh, or you wanna build your own, sort of like referral system program with like your local network of business owners. Mm-hmm. Is the plumbing like to have a landing page.
Let’s talk about, let’s use gravity forms in this context. Have a landing page for each individual representative and say, if you want to earn these. Points or get some commission from me, send them to the landing page that we have, and that gravity form is there and that’s what Siren is tracking. Is that the foundation of like, how that would be set up?
So there’s a couple different ways that Siren can
Alex: actually track who to credit. Um, the first one is, is an affiliate link, right? So a referral code, and that’s in the end of the [00:15:00] URL. Uh, the second one is, uh, what you were just saying. You can actually create a form and associate it with a specific. Uh, collaborator, a specific person.
So, uh, what’s really cool about that is then if you have like a very, a very important, you know, a sales team or something like that, you can create a landing page for each of them individually and give them their own form and give, and, you know, and set it up. And then if that form gets filled out, we, you know, beyond any shadow of doubt who it was.
So, what’s interesting though is you can actually take that a step further. And, uh, with gravity forms is e-commerce capabilities. You can actually associate the individual product fields in gravity forms with the collaborator so that if that product is sold, they get credit. Uh, this kind of flips the script.
So we’ve been talking about sales and intake, uh, but what if you had. Uh, a whole bunch of vendors that you wanted to keep track of how much you owe them, or something like that. Like maybe you’re, uh, you, you are creating a booking form for a, uh, wedding venue, right? And you have upsells on your gravity form or something like [00:16:00] that.
You know, a, a photography, photography, videography, all these other. Different things, uh, catering, stuff like that, and you want to build it in as a, as a product, but you know, you outsource that to a photographer or something like that. You could set it up to where that those different fields and gravity forms are associated with a collaborator.
In this case, that would be the photographer or those other vendors. And once that form gets filled out, siren will automatically say, oh, hey, you owe this much money to this person because they, they are taking this, and then it’ll track all of that for you. Mm-hmm. So there’s, on the flip side, there’s, there’s this whole other way of tracking, um, that doesn’t just involve, you know, like you were saying with the, the landing page and, uh, the affiliate links and, and things like that.
Matt: Yeah, I was just looking at the, the features page over on siren affiliates.com for Gravity forms, and I see, I mean, there’s tons of things that it can do with gravity forms. I like some of the stuff you were just talking about, like route applicants into different, uh, programs automatically, like, you know, the more and more.
Obviously it’s why we have you on the podcast to learn more about this stuff. [00:17:00] Uh, but the more and more like I hear you talking about, I’m reading this stuff, I’m like, wow, this thing goes well beyond, just like, give me a link that says REF equals Yeah. You know, and here it is and I get 10% whatever, like this thing is doing some serious stuff.
And I, and I love the fact that you’re not just focused on. What’s my commission, what’s my affiliate payout? Like this, this can build richer thing, you know, richer things. Do you have any nonprofit examples in your, in your work so far with this? It might be too early on, but a lot of folks use gravity forms for donations and nonprofits and nonprofit sponsorships.
Have you, have you run into that at all yet in your case studies?
Alex: I haven’t ran into a case study for it unfortunately. I’d love to. I think that there’s a lot of opportunities there, you know, especially because the, the. You know, money is usually pretty tight in those contexts, so this is a great opportunity for that.
I just think about good old fashioned fundraisers, like, like, you know, the kids do with with candy bars and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. You there, there’s rev share opportunities there where you don’t have to pay for the stuff upfront, you know, you’re paying based on how much you need. [00:18:00] There’s so many different ways that I think Siren could really help with that.
I just haven’t had an opportunity to, uh, go deep with anybody on that.
Matt: The website looks a little bit different than when we chatted a while ago. Yeah. Uh, what, what, what, what went down? It looks great. I mean, it looks great. I, I didn’t mind it be before either. I’m just saying like, it looks like you’re leveling it up a bit.
Alex: Yeah. Um, so I got a, uh, I went to Word Camp after building that initial version of the site and I got some feedback on it.
And, um, just generally, I just didn’t love what I had so far. It was just kinda my first iteration. I had to get something out the door, you know, uh, it was just me and, uh. I realized I needed help. So I hired a designer and they were just amazing and they worked with me and they built this awesome s shaped logo that has two fishing hooks that look like they’re shaking [00:19:00] hands.
And, and I just, I, I loved the branding and it just kind of inspired me a lot. I looked at it, I was like, man, I can really build a cool site with this. And, uh, you know, I installed, uh. I in, I actually used, uh, Ollie Pro for this site and, um, had something put together, uh, you know, a couple weeks later. And I’ve been, ever since then, I’ve just been kind of incrementally improving it.
But it’s definitely, probably my favorite web design I’ve ever done. I really had a lot of
Matt: fun with it. Now you did all this design yourself. You just took the logo from the designer and built on top of that or your designer?
Alex: Yeah, they gave me a design brief. Um, cool. So it was probably about, I’d say 40% of it.
And then I, it, but it was enough for me to kind of take it from there. And I got to, I just, you know, I started playing with gradients and just imagined that the entire website’s underwater. And with that, you know, with that idea in mind, it just kind of. Fell together.
Matt: Yeah. You could have leaned in a whole different, uh, [00:20:00] direction with the underwater, uh, metaphor with, you know, folks drowning in their work.
Right. But I like the more tasteful approach that you, you went with instead of the first car salesman thing that pops into my head, uh, which is just, you know, uh, muscle memory. Um, it’s relatable. Yeah. You, you word camp. I, I wanna talk about that. I think we talked about this the last time, but I just wanna see where your, where your, uh, mindset’s at.
Uh, I feel like affiliates and incentive programs not a thing that. You get a lot of, um, warm hugs at, uh, at a Word camp. Right? Right. I think a lot of people in our space, uh, are very, a little bit more insular. They’re, they’re very, you know, maybe against marketing and not against, but maybe a little bit afraid to like, push in that direction.
Um, whereas you can go to, there’s probably a gazillion like, affiliate conferences that you can go to. Yeah. Um, what’s that like on your radar? I, I can imagine it’s a lot more expensive than going to Word camps.
Alex: Yeah. It’s, [00:21:00] it’s. Definitely more expensive than WordCamp it’s Act, but the ones that I’ve seen haven’t been quite as bad as I thought.
Um, but I, I’ve, I haven’t really hit the, uh, affiliate space too terribly hard outside of WordPress, outside of these conversations, just because I am trying. Because I have that same ick that everybody that you’re talking about, that you’re seeing and you’re experiencing, you know, I’ve been in the WordPress space for a long time as well, and, and I, I have that same, you know, I don’t know.
It’s just, it’s so inauthentic and I’m very big on authenticity. So, um. But what I do see in the WordPress space a lot, and I’ve experienced myself and I, I’m sure you have too, uh, we are a tight knit community. We are a very network focused community where we we’re big on networking, connecting, and things along those lines.
So my inspiration for a lot of this plugin has revolved around my own experience in the WordPress space, not so much the affiliate space. So, you know, for me, I think about. Siren less as, [00:22:00] you know, just being an affiliate plugin where it’s all about things like, you know, those, the, the bigger plugins where it’s like they’re not so much focused on the different types of programs or partnerships you can create.
They’re more focused on finding the affiliate, you know what I mean? And, and finding these, these people who are, uh, by profession, selling stuff for a living. And that’s, that’s all they do. And that’s just not, I don’t feel like that’s. WordPress in a lot of ways. Um, I’m obviously, you know, there’s definitely people out there who make good living on it, but you know, for me it’s more about authentic connections.
So that’s something I talk about a lot on the website and, and a lot to people in general is, you know, 10, 10 really good affiliates is all you need. Every affiliate program, every person I talk to who’s running a good size affiliate program, it’s the same story. It’s, I have 1200 affiliates on my site, I have 800.
And then the next question I ask ’em is, okay, how many of ’em are. Selling anything and they’ll say 10, 12. Yeah. You know, so my, my challenge to that is why go [00:23:00] find 1200 bad affiliates when you can just go find the right 10
Matt: mm. So let me put you on the hot seat a little bit. Okay. Affiliate, the affiliate program for Siren.
If I were you. I’d have that right on the top of the page. Yeah, right. You, yours is in the footer. It’s on the affiliates. Right. I mean, that’s, that’s where I found it. Is that the, the main false action. How, how, how do you want people to, to avoid the 1200? Well, I guess if you’re listening to this, you can go sign up to become an affiliate, right?
Like if you, like, if you, if you like what Alex is talking about and you like the product, it’s a great place to refer it. So how do you shape how people maybe present the. The Siren affiliates, because I can imagine, I see both sides of that coin. Like I don’t do any affiliate stuff. Right. Uh, only because it’s just, it’s just like a, it’s like a performance thing, and it’s like the traditional, like 30% affiliate thing.
Like, oh, sell this product, make a bunch of content, push to it. I like this partnership thing that you’re [00:24:00] talking about. Mm-hmm. How can I earn, how can I earn more for the hard work that I do, not just your 30% off the top. Yep. Uh, so how do you shape that with siren? Because I think that’s a lot of it.
People just sign up hoping to make 30%, then they never do it. And then that product never reaches out to the person to say, here’s how you can present us better. Like, here’s how you can actually earn more money. Yep. And I think that that’s where I, I, I struggle.
Alex: So, um, honestly, uh, the Gravity Forms integration is kind of a part of that equation for me.
Mm-hmm. Um, not to, I guess I should jump to the philosophy before I jump to the solution, but, uh, for me, I, I look at it as, like I said, if I, I focus on 10 to 12 grade affiliates, right. So, um. And I also think of my affiliate program as a product in the same way I look as a product and, and just like your product, you have a funnel, you have a journey for these people, right?
So a public facing program does make sense because it allows you to find people, it allows you to potentially bet them, and you can figure out which ones are the good one. You know the ones that are. Ready to [00:25:00] run with you in a really good fit for your program and stuff like that. Mm-hmm. Um, so it gives you an opportunity to still have that conversation with people, right?
You wanna make sure that people can still approach you about it and you want them to know that you have something and you wanna work with them. And an affiliate page is a great way to do that. Um, but one of the things that comes to mind for me that you said there that jumps out is, like I said, it’s a product.
So there’s still marketing, there’s still sales, there’s still touch points and connections and things like that, right? There’s, there’s some, there’s stuff that you have to do on your end of this deal to, as the product owner to help them succeed. Um, so one of the biggest reasons why. I’m personally excited about the Gravity Forms integration is ’cause I’m a Gravity Forms user and I really, what I’ve been doing is every time I get an affiliate, I’m manually adding them into my CRM and I’m adding all their data.
And I got tired of doing it and I was like, well, I’ve been telling Matt for a while that I’m gonna do a Gravity Forms integration because. It integrates with my CRM. It integrates with all these tools and as long as [00:26:00] I set siren up so that it can pass that information into Gravity forms, I’ve now unlocked the ability to add all of my affiliates into my CRM complete with their affiliate link and all that other information.
Yeah. Um, you know, and all the other. Powerful things that gravity forms can integrate with. So that allowed me to, now I can automate that. So if somebody signs up with the form, I approve them, they automatically get added into my mailing list, their affiliate link is there, it can automatically send the email and, and allow me to kind of have those touch points that you’re talking about.
Matt: Wheels are turning again. Uh, so you have, uh, we’ll extend the, the interview just a little bit longer. You have integration with lifter LMS. Mm-hmm. Is it feasible to say that somebody takes a course? Like you have an affiliate, uh, education program powered by Lifter LMS. Yep. They take the course, they pass the course, maybe their percentage goes up a little bit like what they earn, like May does that, is that a thing in Siren Land where if they pass a, yeah, a pass a course, they get [00:27:00] more?
No, see, this is, this is good. Yeah. Absolutely a thing. Yeah. That’s good. I like that. So, I mean, so again, just for the listener to frame of reference, here is the reasons. That Alex just said about having, you know, affiliate sites with 1200 people on it. Nobody’s selling anything. No one’s doing anything except for maybe 10.
My sort of, um, distaste for just doing affiliate stuff. For the sake of doing affiliate stuff, if you can build an enriched program, use something like Lifter, right? LMS. Fantastic. LMS. We use it at Gravity Forms. I use it, uh, personally. Mm-hmm. To have, build these courses, these modules, to level up your affiliates and have them earn more money.
And only the ones that are actually taking the time to take a course and learn this stuff are gonna be the ones that earn the most, as it should be.
Alex: Yeah. Um, fantastic. Yeah, there’s, yeah, it’s, it’s awesome. I, I love it and been having a lot of fun just thinking about it, but.
Matt: Siren affiliates.com. You can get yours now.
I won’t [00:28:00] mention the price. It is discounted right now. Don’t know how long that’s gonna last. Yeah, but Siren affiliates.com, check it out. It’s worth, uh, every penny, especially if you’re an agency owner and you’re looking to get more referrals. I remember running my local agency, everything’s word of mouth at that level.
You’re going to BNI meetups, you’re going to all of these, um, uh, what do you call it? The Chamber of Commerce. Chamber of Commerce, yeah. Now there’s like startup incubators everywhere across the country. You can start networking with these people, building out, uh, referral programs and incentive programs with them.
Um, and you’ll start earning more money as an agency owner and then sky’s the limit. If you’re a product owner, check it out. Siren Affiliates. Com, siren affiliates.com. Alex, thanks for hanging out today. Hey, thanks Pat.
That’s it for today’s episode. If you could do one more thing for me today, share this episode on social media. Your favorite Facebook group or Discord channel. Spread the word about this podcast. It really [00:29:00] helps. If you haven’t added breakdown to your favorite podcast app, point your browser to gravity forms.com/break.
Down and click the icon of your app to add us and listen to us every two weeks. Okay? We’ll see you in the next episode.

Today was mostly about tying up loose ends and making sure I’m ready for next week.

• Reviewed/organized client tickets and do some tree shaking
• Has discussions with contractors on my team about what they need
• Recorded source video for Gravity Forms/Siren introduction

I really need to stop watching Final Fantasy content on YouTube 🤦‍♂️

Closing up the day with another 12 pages to optimize and create. This time it’s both for Siren’s website and some proper sales pages on my own site. I’m sitting on a figurative gold mine of 10+ years of WP domain authority that I’m squandering. Fixing that this week.

Just got off a really productive 1:1 call with a new Siren Affiliates customer. I showed them how to set up their programs in the way they want, and walked through how payouts works.

And as it happens, they were using Groundhogg. 🤔

Today:

• Finished Gravity Forms integration 🎉🎉🎉
• Finished 12 new feature pages on Siren’s website
• revamp the header menu

Tomorrow is going to be back to doing some client work, but I’m thinking I’ll be able to work on more pages for Siren’s site too.

#ProjectSiren #BuildInPublic

Another feature coming to the Gravity Forms/Siren Affiliates integration – assigning an affiliate to a form. When that form is submitted, that affiliate can be configured to always get credit.

Great for building lead pages and forms dedicated to specific salespeople.

The next version of Siren will support Gravity Forms!

• Credit affiliates on Gravity Forms sales
• Pay per lead from Gravity Forms submissions
• Build collaborator sign-up flows in Gravity Forms
• Use Siren data in Gravity Forms notifications & automations

Using Ollie’s menu designer for the feature submenu on Siren. Not live yet, but this is going to really help clarify Siren’s feature set. I’m having so much fun with this site!

Just spent about 5 hours doing discovery work on everything I want to implement in my upcoming Gravity Forms integration with Siren.

That seems like a lot of time spent not coding, and even though I know better, I was so tempted to just skip this part and get right to coding. I’m really excited to finally break ground on forms plugins because there’s SO much Siren can do with them, so the urge to “get started” was really strong.

And WOW I’m glad I didn’t make that mistake. As I started researching, peeling back layers, and noting my findings, I discovered so many things that I had not considered in my initial conceptualization of this integration.

I would have definitely used up more than 5 hours doing rework, or worse yet, I would have written up a bunch of technical debt that would have slowed me down for more integrations in the future.

This just re-affirms my belief that the best place to start a project is a good ol’ fashioned Google Doc, NOT your code editor.

Working on integration pages on Siren’s site today. Glad to finally feel like the site’s foundation is in a good-enough place that I can start honing in these types of pages.

In this LMScast, Alex Standiford from Siren Affiliates shared, developing incentive affiliate systems that compensate affiliates, instructors, and content producers according on performance, engagement, and conversions is the secret to increasing the number of courses and memberships sold.

Instead of using a single one-size-fits-all approach, course authors may build up many tailored programs by using Siren Affiliates in conjunction with LifterLMS. In addition to offering beginner-friendly programs for new promoters, this enables you to provide bigger commissions to professional affiliates. With the help of the platform’s multi-instructor revenue sharing feature, instructors can earn royalties automatically based on lesson completion, course engagement, or subscription performance.

They can also choose to promote their courses as affiliates and receive additional commissions.

In order for numerous contributors affiliates, content producers, or instructors to concurrently get rewards for increasing traffic, generating leads, or closing deals, Alex highlights the need of stacking incentives. You may create incentive programs that drive frequent launches, transform cooperation into growth, and take advantage of seasonal events like Black Friday to increase sales by utilizing coupon-based monitoring, event-based triggers, and customizable payout criteria.

Additionally, Alex points out that this strategy is quite flexible for different business models. Like partnership income sharing, content platforms, and e-commerce royalties, making it an automatic and scalable method to expand your online business without depending only on advertisements.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

And be sure to subscribe to get new podcast episodes delivered to your inbox every week.

Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of LifterLMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. Today I’m joined by a special guest. He’s back on the show. It’s Alex Standford. He’s from Siren Affiliates. You can find [email protected]. By the way, if you’re watching this live there is a special Black Friday discount that Siren is doing.

It is 70% off. The coupon code is Lifter 25, so L-I-F-T-E-R two five. And you can get started with an incredible affiliate platform. But the great thing about Siren is it’s not just an affiliate platform. Alex has developed something that. Allows you to really create any kind of incentive program you can think of.

The more I learn about it and understand it, my mind is blown. It happens whenever somebody gets into siren. We’re gonna get into that today, but first, welcome back on the show, Alex. 

Alex Standiford: Hey Chris. Thanks for having me. I’m glad to be here and it’s great to see you again. 

Chris Badgett: Yeah. It’s I love talking to you as a friend, but also the way that you think about incentive programs.

It is just fascinating and not only think about it, but you’ve literally solved it for learning management systems, sites, e-commerce, content creators. There’s all this stuff you can do. I know we talk about affiliates because that’s something that’s pretty well under. Understood. And we’re recording this in the middle of November, so this is Black Friday season.

Let’s just start with talking about. What people can do to set up an affiliate program and why Black Friday matters. Why event based sales like Black Friday. It’s not the only time of year you can run a sale. But how to work with affiliates to just get more traffic, sell more courses and memberships.

Alex Standiford: Yeah. Okay. I’m a big fan of Launch, launching frequently, launching often, launching early and I don’t necessarily mean just, your initial product launch. An initial launch, launching this podcast episode with you, or launching a cross promotion with other people doing an integration with another company or another plugin in my con in my case with Siren.

Obviously I’m using Siren myself, so obviously I’m thinking about it in that context. But the point is I’m very big on launching. And whenever I launch things, I love to launch them with somebody else so that I can borrow their microphone, I can borrow their email list, I can leverage the audience that they have worked hard to attract, to be able to grow my own business, and then also incentivize them to do so and give them something in return.

And that’s basically the fundamental. Value behind creating a really well thought out, really well designed, intentionally designed affiliate program. Because it lets you, not only are you able to grow your own business, but you’re able to also pay people who you like and trust and personally work with.

It makes me so happy to know whenever I’m working with you, for example, on affiliate program, doing affiliate links and things like that it makes me so happy to know. That whenever I get customers and I turn around and I’m paying for the traffic and the benefits that I received from these conversations that I’m paying you, I’m directly enriching your life instead of just paying Google for an ad or paying some faceless corporation.

So for me, affiliate marketing and creating affiliate programs and things like that. Yes, of course. It’s a great marketing strategy and there’s a lot of benefits to it, but for me it’s very much a personal thing too. It’s just awesome to me to think that I’m able to like help and enrich the lives of people around me at the same time.

Chris Badgett: You use Siren affiliates yourself. So at the beginning of this show, we mentioned the 70% off coupon code Lifter 25. Which you can [email protected]. And. How does that work in the background? If somebody uses that coupon, and I know you also have like URLs that you can do that automatically apply that.

So if you’re watching or listening to this, if you go to the LMScast website, you’ll see a link and mention of the coupon code and stuff like that. But how does the affiliate system actually work? 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. An affiliate, a typical affiliate program, works using a special link. Basically you have you, Chris, as an affiliate for Siren affiliates.com gets your own, get your own special affiliate link with a tag at the end of it.

And whenever somebody clicks on that link. I’m able to say, oh, hey, I know that came from Chris because it’s his special link. And then siren behind the scenes tracks, all of that, keeps track of that. And then if that person makes a purchase you then get credit for that sale. Now the coupon code works in very much the same way, whereas if somebody visits the site, even if they didn’t use your special link, if they just visit the site and they use the Lifter 25 coupon code.

It then knows, oh, hey, that’s Chris’s coupon, that’s lifter lm s’s coupon code. Let’s make sure that whenever this transaction’s complete that we give Chris credit for that. Or LifterLMS credit for that for that purchase. 

Chris Badgett: Nice. What there’s I wanted to help people with a challenge I’ve had as somebody who does affiliate marketing.

I gladly pay affiliates for. Sending traffic that converts and all that stuff. There’s this challenge of, there’s, I see it as two types of affiliates. The first type is what I would call a professional affiliate marketer. They’ve been doing it, they for a long time, they know how it works.

They’re probably, promoting many different brands and things. But then there’s also a big opportunity to just get regular people that aren’t classically trained as affiliate marketers. To join your program. But they can’t, they don’t, they’re not going to do well with a lot of friction because they’re new to affiliate marketing.

They just wanna sign up and go. How do you, how does Siren serve the first time affiliate from their user experience standpoint? 

Alex Standiford: Yeah the big thing about Siren is the, and one of the biggest reasons why I created Siren in the first place was because I recognized that, I was frustrated with one size fits all affiliate program solutions out there.

So basically the way they work is you create a single affiliate program and it just assumes that every program is gonna work in exactly the same way. And you end up with all these special cases where different people have different rates and they have different needs and stuff like that. Siren uses a multi-program approach.

So instead of having just one program, you can create as many incentive programs as you need. And I say incentive program, not just affiliate program, because there’s all kinds of different programs you can create with the system that goes way beyond just affiliate programs. But with with that, it allows you to create a program, different programs for different types of affiliates.

So maybe you have an affiliate program that is targeting those. Professionals. You could, it could be like a super affiliate program. I like to call ’em where, maybe they get a slightly higher commission rate or maybe their terms are a little bit different in some way. Then maybe you have a more basic affiliate program that most people go to that’s like public facing that you give to the people that aren’t professional affiliate marketers, but are people who would like to refer your business and hey, they would like to get a kickback whenever that opportunity comes.

So you can, it allows you to create multiple programs like that. And the thing that I love about that is it actually. Turns, it makes it a lot easier to treat your affiliate programs or any of your programs in general as a product in itself. So now all of a sudden you can create this program with its own rules, its own sets, settings, and have it as an offer that you then are able to offer as a product that you’re able to push out and sell and promote to affiliate marketers in a different way than you would promote it to the basic affiliate program to other people.

Chris Badgett: Let’s blow people’s minds a little bit with there’s the idea of the affiliate program, which is a, incentivized sales and tracking and system for that. But in the learning management system space, you solved a key problem, which is multi instructor platforms. And so if you’ve heard of a website like Udemy.

Where a course creator gets a cut of the revenue and there’s all these nuances of what if there’s one membership like masterclass? How do you, does everybody get paid the same or do they get paid based on course completion or popularity? Tell us about how you can use Siren to build a multi instructor rev share platform.

Alex Standiford: This is, this was actually one of the biggest reasons, one of the other biggest reasons why I created Siren in the way I did. Like I said, it’s an incentive program builder, not just affiliate program builder. It allows you to create these revenue shares like what you’re talking about. So for just to give you an example, Udemy the way that, that.

Company has historically ran. I’m not exactly sure how it runs today, but I know last time I checked about a year ago the way it basically worked was it has, you can sign up for a, as a customer, you can sign up as a, on a subscription model, so you can pay a monthly fee and have access to a large library of the courses that are available on Udemy.

And actually Kindle does this as well with their direct KDP publishing platforms. So you can opt into that and basically you get paid a share based on based on how many pages people read of your books compared to other people in the platform. And the same thing applies with Udemy, where they track based on the amount of time people spend consuming your content, consuming your courses.

With LifterLMS for example, you’re able to actually track things like whenever a lesson is completed or a course is completed. So because of that, we’re able to actually leverage that information to create our own revenue sharing platform with Siren that allows you to pay all of the multiple course creators on your platform based on how much traffic and how much.

How much the members of that program that site are consuming their content compared to each other. To put it in plain terms, let’s say you have a membership on your site for a hundred dollars a month, right? And you have all these different course creators on your site, and they all have.

Access and the people are consuming all these course creators content for free for the membership, you can set it up to where whoever had the most people complete courses and complete lessons in that last month will get the biggest share of the revenue. And then the person with the least gets the least amount.

So if you had a hundred dollars a month, maybe you’re creating a pool of 25%. So $25 per customer is available and it’s gonna be distributed among all of your course creators, right? And the top performer did the majority of the work. So maybe they get, of that 25%, they’re gonna get 10%, and then the rest of them get, 5%, 3%, 2%, 1%, whatever, based on how well they perform.

Chris Badgett: And this is where it becomes mind blowing is Alex has also figured out with Siren affiliates how to stack all these things on top of each other. So you can have rev share with your course creators. You could also have affiliate marketers sending traffic. You can even have content creators on your site.

Get like writing blog posts that if they click the link from their blog post or whatever, like all these people can be incentivized in different way. Yep. So it’s a, the ultimate pay for performance system. And there’s a lot of great content that Alex has created on how to actually set all this up and do all this, but he’s thought through everything.

For example, you don’t wanna. Accidentally give away set up a program that 150% of their revenue is owed to other people. But he’s thought through all this and teaches you how to do it. Yeah. Any pro tips there? ’cause like a beginner affiliate. Let’s just use a simple affiliate program. The first question you get is what percent commission should I pay?

Like, how do you coach somebody in terms of designing incentives and percentages? 

Alex Standiford: Yeah, so the first thing that comes to mind for me with that is, of course you have to know your profit margin. You have to know, you have to know your business numbers fundamentally. And the commission tends to reveal itself from that.

So that’s a factor. Another factor in that is also just looking at your competitors, seeing what they’re offering, seeing how much what, how much what percent they’re offering and things like that. And also considering the fact that. One of the great things about Siren, because you’re able to run multiple programs, you don’t have to give everybody one percentage rate.

You could give the most important, the ones who are gonna be the most impactful to your business. You can, as I say, I like to say, roll out the red carpet for them, right? You can give them the highest rates, the best rates, you can give them the rates that are more competitive than your competitors.

You can. Do whatever and then have a smaller rate for the general public or something like that, potentially. And that will make it to where your average, your average percentage rate goes down a little bit between the two of them. The way I think about it is usually, like I said, first off your profit margin, how much that you would be willing to let go in a worst case scenario.

I also like to look at what my competitors are doing, and then I and then I think about, what kind of people I’m trying to attract and how I would want to divide up the different programs that I’m going to offer. And then, and that kind of helps me figure out a baseline for what that percentage needs to be.

Then I take that number, I cut it in half, and I start there because you wanna have wiggle room. You don’t wanna start with your entire. The entire amount that you’re willing to give away if you stretch and reach out on your tiptoes. You wanna start smaller than that and work up from there. That way you have a little bit of wiggle room to work with and a little bit of opportunity to do that.

Especially if you have a bigger, a bigger program that’s gonna hit on higher percents. ’cause the best affiliates are probably gonna be the ones that are gonna be hitting that percentage the most anyway. So you gotta be a little thoughtful about all of those things.

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So this is a podcast and not like a screen share situation, but, and you do have lots of great videos on getting sirens set up and how to design these programs, but just talk us through the. If somebody’s interested and they’re like, yeah, I’d like to make more money through a, an affiliate program and get more traffic to my courses and memberships.

How simple is this to set up? What are the basic steps? 

Alex Standiford: Yeah, so in Siren the process is literally going into the site in clicking on add new program, which then it gives you a field that basically a program creation screen. And inside of there’s a few different key things such as tracking events.

Basically all programs are broken down into a few things. You’re defining what events you’re tracking to give somebody credit for, such as clicking on an affiliate link or using a coupon code or a lesson was completed or a course was completed, right? For whatever your program is. You then also have to figure out what the rules are, how, what, how you’re going to distribute.

The earnings the reward, right? Even with a program. It can pay multiple affiliates. It can pay just one affiliate. It just depends on how you want, how do you determine which collaborators win whenever whenever the transaction is completed. Then the third piece of that is how much.

How much are you going to give? Is it a fixed amount? Is it a percentage of the transaction? And it’s, I think it’s basically those two. And it’s also like how many items in the transaction. So maybe if maybe you have a program just an off the wall idea that I always think about whenever I think about this.

We’re coming into winter, obviously, and if you were a clothing site. Store selling clothes, and you still have this batch of shorts that were in stock and you wanna get rid of them quickly before winter closes. You could obviously create a clearance sale on your site, but you could also create a program that’s temporary that you give to your affiliates that says, if you sell these shorts, I will give you a bonus of $5 for every pair you sell.

So you could use a fixed rate reward for that, for example. So there’s a few different ways to determine, how much money you pay out whenever the reward happens. And then the last but not least is what parts of the transaction are actually eligible for this. So this allows you to filter programs so that they only apply to certain products.

This allows you to. Exclude parts of a transaction. Maybe you don’t want to include fees, maybe you don’t want to account for discounts. Maybe you have some really weird thing that I can’t even consider, and you wanna include shipping costs into it. Who knows? You can break down and determine what those are as well.

What’s really cool about that is you could then have, if you had those shorts for that program I was talking about earlier, you could have a program that only applies to those shorts, but then you could also have an affiliate program that applies to all products and they would be able to stack on top of each other, so you would be able to pay that.

You know that. That one time flat fee because somebody was able to sell those shorts. And then you’re also able to pay the percentage to the affiliate who was actually able to do that transaction. And then even on top of all of that, one of the other things that comes to mind for me for this is you can actually associate ownership of a product or a course.

With a specific affiliate. And what’s really cool about that is that it allows you to create royalty programs. With a multi-course instructor example that we were talking about earlier, you can set up a program so that whenever a course creator’s program. Product. Our course is sold. They always get a cut of the sales.

I recently had a customer, I have a customer right now a client of mine actually, who I’m helping them build their website. They they’re using siren for a a really cool desk, this really awesome desk set up, and it has this custom mat that fits, is inlaid into the desk perfectly. And that mat can be printed with anything on it.

So what they’re doing is they are working with a bunch of artists and they’re finding artists to create art for this mat. And then that mat they’re selling the mat with those different art pieces. And if that artist’s art is selected for that print, they receive a royalty. Then also, of course, they also get an affiliate link at the same time because they’re gonna be motivated to promote, Hey, go check out this awesome art for this desk.

This is my art. You should go buy it and you should go buy this desk and here’s my link. You can support me through that. So it, it gives, it, it just allows you to create really interesting programs and things like that go way beyond just having. A basic affiliate program with a thousand affiliates and 995 of them are just in different people who, are never gonna actually do anything with it.

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s awesome. And Siren is a WordPress based solution, so all you have to do is install the plugin and start setting up your first program, which is a, which is amazing. It’s, we’re giving you some. Interesting use cases, but to actually get started it’s really not that complicated. And I like what you said too about the multi instructor platform.

Not only can an instructor earn a royalty because their course is getting consumed. But they can, they are also incentivized to promote their course on your platform as an affiliate. So if they go above and beyond just creating the content and getting a royalty, but also helping promote it on your platform, they can earn even more money by.

Basically joining the marketing team. Yeah. Which is awesome. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah, it’s, yeah it’s great. And it’s, and that’s exactly what it was built for. So now it allows you to and the examples that we’ve done in the past, whenever, ’cause we actually did a video in the past about built literally built this exact Udemy coin that we’re talking about.

And in that example, we had set it up to where the course creator. Like I said, with a royalty program, they always receive 50% anytime that course or whatever, you can set it to whatever you want, but in our example, we did 50, I think and they can get, 50% of the sale every time.

That product is sold regardless of if they had an affiliate program or if they sold it or not. And then you can give them another, 40% and for the affiliate program on top of that. So now if they sell their own course, they earn 90% of that sale. And basically the platform gets a 10% commission or a 10% cut just for basically hosting it and maintaining it.

But what’s really cool is then you can on top of that, create a typical affiliate program, right? That isn’t for course creators. It’s just a regular program and you can have it like a 20% or something like that. That’s a lower amount. And whenever they close and they sell anything. They’re able to get a 20% commission.

And so at that point, 60% of the money is being consumed by the owner, but also the affiliate. But you still get a little bit more of that cut because they’re only getting 20% instead of 40%. So that’s what I mean about how, when you’re trying to figure out what your percentage is, it’s a little tricky.

You have to design the other pieces of the puzzle to understand how they all stack up whenever you’re using Siren, because it’s, it usually ends up being a more dynamic system than just a simple, dead simple, we have an affiliate program and this is what everybody gets.

Chris Badgett: Yeah that’s awesome. And the really, the most mind blowing part of all of this is you don’t have to do it alone, by developing, getting other people to help with sales and marketing, or creating course content. In this multi instructor example what Siren allows people to do is to work together and also be incentivized based on what, the performance of whatever effort it is, whether it’s content creation, course creation.

Affiliate marketing, sending traffic, whatever. It’s really a beautiful thing. And it unlocks growth. Yeah. And with proper incentives that all that stuff is set up and automated. So it is, the genius is in designing whatever your unique incentive program’s gonna be. It’s

Alex Standiford: yeah. Yeah, it is. And actually why, speaking of that, something else that comes to mind for me there that’s really interesting to me that I hadn’t actually fully considered when I originally built it, but this is, this has been what has come out of it.

If you create, you could create two programs. One that’s focused on generating leads and one that’s focused on generating conversions. And what’s really cool about that is it could be the lead focus program is for podcasters, bloggers, long tail keyword, longer term people who are, who take a little, who are earlier in the buyer’s journey.

And then you have somebody who’s focused on conversions. Maybe they’re focused on doing webinars and they’re doing the one-on-one things where there’s the, later in the journey and pushing people to actually make that purchase. You can create a program where it’s a split commission.

So the person who was in earlier in the journey will get a commission, and then the person who actually did the conversion also gets a commission. So they both get it. And what’s really cool about that is whether they know it or not, they’re collaborating, they’re working together instead of against each other.

And. If they happen to know each other or something like that, and they know that they’re both in the same system, the same program, they can actually create programs collaboratively together to create funnels together and build entire things in service of promoting your product. So there’s this entire idea where you’re able to create collaboration between your collaborators in a way that is really difficult to do.

In a monolithic single affiliate program solution, usually in those cases, they’re competitors, right? They’re always only one person ever wins in those solutions. But with Siren, since there’s multiple programs, there can be multiple winners and you can set it up to where they they’re able to actually work together and collaborate.

Actually, something that I’ve seen a lot of people do is they’re working with business partners. Who are owned a portion of the company and they’ll actually use Siren to track their revenue share with each other. So they’ll set it up to where they’ll say, I’m an owner this is the founder that it’s a 40, 60 or something like that, the revenue.

And they literally just build an incentive program that is just those two people and they just make it to where it’s a 40, 60 split and they set it up in siren and then they don’t have to worry about tracking how much everybody gets or anything like that. It’s just built directly into the system.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And just one more pro tip before we go. It’s not necessarily just about making money, and this is why the incentive program is can be a lot more powerful than ads. For example if you wanna differentiate leads from sales, the simple way to think about that is you could have a free course on your site that you use to warm up your audience, introduce them to you, and stuff like that.

And then you have your paid program, but those people in your free thing are, I would consider leads and you could, I would rather pay these affiliates or partners, $5 for every free signup than do ad do an ad based funnel with Google or Facebook or whatever that’s, where I’m just rolling the dice and crossing my fingers and hoping it’s profitable.

So it’s, yeah it’s so cool what you’ve built. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah. It’s awesome. Thank you. Yeah it’s been a lot of fun and there’s I’m honestly, and what’s crazy is I’m just, I feel like I’ve just like word vomited a lot of exciting, interesting things about siren here, but I feel like it just scratches the surface on a lot of the things that it can do.

So there’s some pretty cool solutions that I’ve seen where people are, have, created. Things that are similar. They’ve created programs more similar to DoorDash, but instead of delivery drivers, it’s vendors working on, fixing bugs or working on code for a website.

I’ve seen people, like you said, build Udemy clones. I’ve seen people build Netflix clones where there’s different, it doesn’t have to be educational content. It could also be it could just be video content, movies or special, some kind of niche entertainment. I’ve seen, obviously people create plenty of affiliate programs and things like that but the point is revenue share.

And royalty programs come to mind too. I’ve seen people create Etsy clones where they have a whole bunch of artists. There’s actually one customer I know who’s using this for 3D printing. So they have a site where people who do 3D printed models. They can share it on that site and sell those models to people who have 3D printers.

And when the product is sold, that 3D, the person who made that 3D model, gets a royalty. So there’s all kinds of different ways that this can be used. I see. I’ve seen local furniture shops use it for consignment deals to sell furniture in their. In their in their store. Because all they do is they associate those products with a specific collaborator, and then once that sells, they get com, they get their, their cut.

I’ve seen. All kinds of, just, there’s just so many the list just goes on and on. There’s just so many different ways car dealerships are using it to, create bonus programs on top of just selling for the regular affiliate deals. I use it in my own web agency.

I have a salesperson who sells things at my business at my web agency, and they, they’re using WooCommerce in that case to basically create quotes using an order. And if that order goes through, it just automatically gives, knows how much to give them for a commission. ’cause it’s just all handled directly through that system.

So the sky’s the limit. If you can figure out what to, how to make it work with, WooCommerce or lifter LMS and the program exists, I bet you can build it in siren and if you can’t. You should talk to me ’cause I would like to see what you figured out that you would wanna do that can’t be done.

’cause I bet it can be done. 

Chris Badgett: Just for context, Udemy raised a total of $274 million. Over nine rounds to build this platform. Yeah. With LifterLMS and Siren, for less than 1% of far less than 1% of that, you can build the same thing. And you don’t have to spend $274 million. And this is the best time of year where you can get the best tools at the best price.

So head on over to siren affiliates.com. Use the coupon code Lifter 25. And that’s a great deal and get started. And if you want more leads and sales, start building your affiliate and partner programs. That’s it for this episode of LMS Cast. Alex, thanks so much for coming back on. Keep up the great work and at Siren and we’ll have to do this again sometime.

And if you’re listening to this and fascinated, go to YouTube and search for. LifterLMS, siren Affiliates, build a Udemy Clone, something like that. And you’ll find the in-depth tutorial where we showed you how to build a site like Udemy with the revenue share and everything. Just using Siren LifterLMS and WordPress, and you’re ready to roll.

But thanks for coming, Alex. We really appreciate it. 

Alex Standiford: Yeah, thanks Chris. I’m glad to be here and I appreciate it. We will definitely do it again sometime soon.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

Aaaand that’s it! This update is live!

Siren is all about running more intimate incentive programs, so it just made sense to have this capability baked-in, and I’m really glad it’s here. I’ve already found a couple of situations where I needed to use it.

Siren 2.1.0 adds some really nice, and highly-requested quality of life changes, and support for crediting collaborators with orders manually.

Quick down-and-dirty demo:

This will also enable you to create orders from integrations, and manually attribute sales. Super handy for sales teams using Siren to manage order attribution.

Working on the transaction builder for Siren Affiliates this morning.

There’s another nice little upgrade on this transactions screen – you can see the source of the transaction across integrations. I want to do more of these little QOL upgrades in future versions too.

This update will add a transactions screen, so you can view existing transactions, add new ones, and credit collaborators with transactions.

Your programs will automatically apply the appropriate rewards from there.

Pruning My Business Back to The Essentials

https://www.alexstandiford.com/articles/personal-updates/pruning-my-business-back-to-the-essentials/

If you’re running affiliate promotions this Black Friday, Siren has a very competitive commission offering. If you’ve been on the fence about growing your business with incentive programs, now is a great time to make that jump!

Just got another review for Siren Affiliates recently! Let’s GOOOO

These guys are the best. The program is simple and easy to use and their support is very quick to answer questions.

Editing videos for an upcoming course on Siren today. Gearing up for our Black Friday promotions and the influx of new customers with some improvements to documentation. The software has once again graced me with a solid freeze frame. Do I always look like this? 😄

I Developed And Successfully Launched Siren Affiliates

https://www.alexstandiford.com/portfolio/i-developed-and-successfully-launched-siren-affiliates/

I Built A Knowledge Base Using The Block Editor, And Whoa.

https://www.alexstandiford.com/articles/blog-posts/i-built-a-knowledge-base-using-the-block-editor-and-whoa/