The WooAffiliates widget options.

Over the past few weeks we’ve been brainstorming ways of helping our affiliates advertise our themes in an efficient, professional manner. Previously, you’ve been limited to advertising banners and text links that you can manually place anywhere in blog posts, text/adsense widgets, sidebars and footers. Today we launch the “WooAffiliates” plugin that takes this a step further.

Available from the WordPress plugin repository you can now download and activate this light plugin that then enables a “WooAffiliates” widget. This widget comes with numerous simple display controls and a place to add your WooThemes username that automagically recognizes you as a WooThemes affiliate. Place this widget in a widgetized region and voila, you can proudly market WooThemes and start making money from sales referred from your site.

With version 1 of the plugin you can display a specific theme, the most popular in the past 30 days, a random theme, or the latest theme. Place this widget more than once if you like to highlight different themes in different areas of your site.

The code wranglers Matty and Warren have loads of plans to make this plugin/widget even more powerful and useful as a sales tool for you, all the while giving you complete control as to what and how you want to display it – subtly or more prominently.

To track sales made you just need to login to your WooThemes dashboard and navigate to the affiliates page. Find out more about our affiliate program here.

Find out more about the plugin on it’s WordPress plugin repository page.

A WooAffiliates widget placed on my personal site advertising the latest WooTheme available.

Adii's site now sporting a "Powered by" WooAffiliates badge in his sidebar, showcasing the theme his site is built on top of.

Then we probably need to announce the winner of the shiny, new MacBook that we are giving away… Massive congratulations to Adam Pickering from ThemeCouponCodes who generated the most affiliate sales during the WooLove period. Thank you for the loyal support in promoting our products Adam; you’re MacBook is already on its way!

To those of you that participated, but didn’t win, we’d like to say thank you as well. It’s awesome being entrenched in this vibrant & ever-growing community that is WooThemes, and we really hope that in the future we’d be able to do more of these kind of promotions, where we get to interact with our amazing users & fans!

We love being first at introducing new things to our users.

Way back in the days of Premium News, we were the first guys to release WP themes with theme options (and we’ve continued to build on this success). We were also the first company to introduce proper club subscriptions (ala “Software as a Service”) & an amazing themes club. And at this stage, I’d bet that if all goes well, we’ll be the first to a few more things moving forward.

Today however, we have something new to introduce and if we had asked anyone to guess beforehand, I’m sure no one would’ve gotten it right. In conjunction with the guys over at Payoneer, we’re releasing a brand-new WooThemes Mastercard for our affiliates & members.

Why a Mastercard?

Firstly, we wanted to add an alternative payment option for all of our affiliates; especially those who reside in countries that doesn’t offer PayPal support (for receiving funds). The WooThemes Mastercard is globally accessible and you can use it offline & online; so we’ve achieved that goal.

And secondly, we think it’s quite a cool thing to have (hopefully) thousands of people walking around with a WooThemes Mastercard in their pockets! The great thing about the card, is that it functions just like any other Mastercard and it is not only limited to usage with WooThemes.

If you’re interested in the WooThemes Mastercard, you can read more about the details over here. If you already have an account with us, it is as easy as logging in and signing up for the card from your user dashboard. If not, you can sign-up to become an affiliate (and earn some serious cash) over here.

OH: And we think you should get the card before Christmas; just to fuel some extra spending!

So what did you do? Well, the previous set of affiliate banners – which have been around since we launched WooThemes for the first time in July 2008 - still had our “old” identity, instead of the slightly, polished new look. With the new banners, we’re also trying out some new tag lines / marketing messages, so we hope that those will prove worthwhile for your users (and ultimately increase your earnings from affiliate sales)!

To get an idea of what the new banners look like, have a look at these previews (the complete set includes 32 banners in 10 different sizes):

• 125 x 125
• 300 x 250
• 120 x 240

How does this affect your current affiliate links?

We’ve just added the complete set of banners to your affiliate dashboard (if you’re an affiliate already) and both the new & old set is still available to you. You can thus continue using the old banners (for now)…

But in 2 weeks’ time, we will be removing the old banners from the system and those won’t be active anymore. This means that by the 5th of July, you need to have switched over to the new banners, otherwise you may be losing out on some pretty nice affiliate commissions.

Since we launched WooThemes Wednesday last week (about 5 days ago), affiliates has sent about 3000 visitors through to our website, of which just under 2000 are unique visitors. This means that affiliates are contributing about 15% percent of our total traffic from the first 5 days of WooThemes’ life, which is incredible in my mind! What’s even better is that these click through’s are showing a very good click to actual sales ratio, which considering that we now offer Affiliates Signup” href=”http://www.woothemes.com/affiliates/” target=”_blank”>So why haven’t you signed up yet? From our experience bloggers that blogs about any related content (to our themes) such as Web 2.0, social media, freelancing, design, development etc. gets a great return on the banners they’ve placed on their blogs. I’d suggest you try it out – it might just be very rewarding…