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…