In my last video on this channel, I talked about Fluent Cart, which is the new upcoming shopping cart software from WP Manage Ninja. I think it’s going to do a great job of taking on WooCommerce because it’s got a lot of things going for it over top of WooCommerce. In this video, I want to talk to you about Fluent Affiliate, which I actually thought was going to come first, but I don’t know which one is going to come first actually from the release schedule. But Fluent Affiliate is looking quite nice, and not only that, it’s going to, I think, at least in my world, it’s going to completely replace Affiliate WP. Now, it’s not been released yet, so what I’m going to show you here is just a sneak peek, a bit of a first look at the insize of Fluent Affiliate. It’s still coming along in some ways. So let’s go ahead and dive into it, and let me show you the insides. Now, when my clients ask for affiliate programs, Cams. Typically, I don’t have any choice but to go to Affiliate WP. Now, there are a few other ones out there, but I can’t say that I have a whole lot of experience with them.

The one that I’ve worked with the most is Affiliate WP, but I’m not a massive fan. Even though it’s a very powerful product, there’s a couple of things I really don’t like about Affiliate WP. One is it’s an awesome motive product. And so I’m not a big fan of awesome motive. I respect the company for what they do. However, I I’ve complained a few times now about the tactics of awesome motive, some of the things they’ve done with some of their plugins, the fact that it damn near auto installs plugins sometimes, that they’re really aggressive with their cross-sales and up-sales inside of WordPress. So I’m not going to repeat all that, but that’s one of the things I don’t like about it. And secondly, I’m not a massive fan of the multiple plugin model where you install one core plugin, in this case, Affiliate WP, but then you have all this army of add-on plugins to make it do various things. And so what happens is, in some cases, you end up with five or 10 different plugins just for the affiliate program. And I just don’t like that model. I mean, I’m one that likes to have my plugin list be less.

So when I knew about Fluent Affiliate, I was like, Okay, this one’s going to be one worth watching. You guys probably already know, I’m a pretty big fan of the company WP Manage Ninja. I’m a heavy user of of Fluent Forms, of Fluent CRM. I use Fluent Community in a few different places for clients. I’ve used most of their plugins, honestly. I’m probably going to end up using Fluent Cart in some places, although it’s going to be hard to peel off a commerce, I admit. But I think Fluent Affiliate is probably going to be my go-to when a client ask for an affiliate program. And I have a desire for an affiliate program as well, but I got rid of AffiliateWP for some of the reasons I just told you. And also my needs are different because I do mostly services. I don’t need to… It’s just a little bit different. And in fact, one of the things I’d like to be able to do is to just simply use an affiliate program software as a referral manager for referring people into, say, my newsletter. So where we can keep track of how many referrals and maybe do various things depending on how many they come in.

That’s not something that most affiliate software does because most of us designed to do a monetary commission and send out that. And in this case, I’ve got something a little bit different in mind. But anyways, all that being said, I want to take a look at Fluent Affiliate. I was able to get a copy of it. It’s very much an early stage product, but I want to show you the insides of it and let you see where it stands. Okay, so this is a completely fresh install of Fluent Affiliate. However, what you’re looking at here is a staging staging site copy, one that’s actually out of date, but it’s a staging site copy of my own website. Okay, so we’ve got Woocommerce installed here, and we’ve got a bunch of other plugins, Fluent CRM and all that. But what you’re seeing here is a fresh install of Fluent affiliate on my own staging site. So let’s look around here. Let’s just check out some of the situation. I don’t have any affiliates, obviously. So it’s basic. This is very similar. We have referrals, I’d be able to see the sales, the payouts. Okay, interesting. Be able to pay affiliates.

And you can probably select a group here. That’s something that I saw I’ll call it. I’ll show you in just a second. Minimum payout amount. Okay, and I’m assuming this is going to go out through something like PayPal or something. I have not actually checked into this yet. I obviously don’t have any affiliates to pay right now. Then we got the visits. So we will be tracking the incoming. Now, I think what’s going to show us the most here is a couple of things. First of all, let’s pop into the settings so we can see some of what this thing does, because right now it’s all pretty basic what you’d expect from an affiliate program software. Okay, so popping into the settings, let’s look at our referral settings. We can set our variable for tracking cookies. We’ve got it in the URL, I should say. Now, most of this is the stuff that’s probably going to stay default, honestly. You can set, of course, your affiliate rate percentage, fixed rate or percentage based. Most people are probably going to go with the percentage based. You can select your currency. Most people, at least that I work with, are going to stick with the US dollar.

So this all makes perfect sense. Do you want to credit the first affiliate or the last affiliate? That’s pretty standard for affiliate software. Your cookie duration, your affiliate portal. Now, this is actually neat. Let Let me see if I’ve got this short code created already. I don’t remember if I did this. Yeah, see, I’m not registered for my own affiliate program, so we got ourselves a basic form here. Yeah, okay. Let’s check this out. I’m going to go in, but I’m going to put the short code in so we can see what this looks like. Okay, so I have added myself to my own affiliate program in here, and you could see we’ve got a really nice-looking affiliate dashboard right off the back where we can go look at our affiliate links, referrals. All right, I don’t obviously don’t have any yet. Payouts. Let’s look at our settings. Okay, I can change my PayPal email for payouts. Enable referral email notification. That’s pretty cool, actually. This is really nice looking. I will say, I mean, as somebody who obviously is an affiliate for WP Manage Ninja, this looks familiar. So it’s a nice looking layout.

Now, it’s one of those things that with Affiliate WP, I know that you need to install a different plugin just to get the dashboard for affiliates. It’s just… One thing I like about Fluent Affiliates so far is the fact that so many things are just automatically included. Oh, look at this, Generate link. I could probably plug in any link of this website, and I could generate a referral link to it. That’s very handy. So these are just things that require different plugins, like additional additional plugins when you’re using Affiliate WP. But with Fluent Affiliate, it’s all already there. Now, let’s pop back over to the admin. You can see that I’ve added myself as an affiliate here, and then I can pop into that profile. I can see, I guess I don’t have anything here, but anybody that I refer, and I can see my own affiliate information because it is, of course, integrated with Fluent CRM. I can see all of my own CRM profile information, so that’s great. I love how their software just all works together. It’s just very, very handy. So I like what I’m seeing here. I really do. It’s very clean.

And let’s pop back over to the settings and take a look around some more of these things. Okay, so we’ve already covered the affiliate area. It’s a single-page deal. Very nice. Exclude shipping. I don’t really do shipping because everything I do is digital, but you can control these things. Disable/solve referral. If I’m not mistaken, I might be wrong, AffiliateWP actually has yet another additional plugin just to do that. So this one is just a check box, much, much simpler. Affiliate commissions on subscription renewals. So yeah, they don’t have that in there. This is a pre-release product. But I imagine, WooCommerce subscriptions is going to be supported right out of the box, which is usually what I use. So that should be nice if you do a membership site and you want to offer recurring commission. Let’s go over to our affiliate group. So this one looks to be where we can set up different groups of affiliates with different affiliate percentages. So if we want to have our top affiliates, and we say we want to give them a higher percentage rate, we can do those things, and we can actually assign our affiliates to these different groups, different rates, different fixed, what have you, add little notes.

So that’s very, very handy. Let’s look at our integration settings. All right, so obviously, right now it works with Woocommerce right out the gate. Let’s check this out, see what the Manage button does. Enable Affiliate Integration for Woocommerce. Yep. Enable Branded Cupons. Interesting. Okay, cool. And then Enable Custom Rate for a Specific Product. Let’s check this because this is one that I… For what I could… See, I thought this might be missing. This is interesting because when I was checking into the products here in Woocommerce, I was not seeing a fluent affiliate area. Let’s check one of these things out. Obviously, these are all my products, but this is a staging site. Yeah, so you don’t see an area in here for setting commission rates on products. So it looks like what we do is we do this in here. So specific products, let’s choose, let’s say that one, and let’s say for that one, I wanted to do a 50 %. I would never I would do that, but that’s cool that you can do that. This is how you do it. Very nice. So it is interesting. It’s a different approach because originally, I was thinking this might be a capability that the product did not yet have because I did not see it in the actual product settings.

But it looks like you just do it in a different spot. And you can set different commission rates for different products in your system, which is very nice. Now, let’s see what this thing does. When enabled, you can offer branded coupon codes for affiliates. This allows an… Okay. Interesting. I’d have to find that in the software, but it looks like that’s… If I’m not mistaken, that’s yet another thing that would require an add-on plugin for Affiliate WP. And yet with this one, it’s just built right in. Okay, so let’s go back over to Integration settings. Obviously, they’re going to integrate with Fluent CART. Paymatic is also there, so it’s going to happen. Learndash, Tutorialms, these are all ones that are not there. It’s the easy digital download, SureCart, GiveWP, Lifter, Member Press. So there’s a lot of them coming. I don’t know where these stand because I don’t have these plugins installed. Sold, but these other ones are coming soon. So I would imagine they’re all coming soon. They’re probably focusing on Woocommerce first. And then, of course, Fluent Forms is there because you can build order forms with Fluent Forms, and so So therefore, you can integrate that with Fluent Affiliate.

So that makes a lot of sense. Let’s check on to your email notifications. All right. So from name, you could probably have a different email address for your affiliate program or your affiliate program manager, email headers. You can control all these things. It makes a lot of sense. There’s not a lot there. Let’s go through notifications. Yeah, so you got these and you could turn them on and off. You could Probably, let’s see. Customize Body. Yeah, you can get right down in here and customize pretty much everything about these emails. So that’s really nice. And of course, we did see in the main portal that even the New sale notification to affiliate looks like they have the ability to turn that on and off in their own profile, so that makes a lot of sense as well. Let’s pop over to Registration settings. All right, so enable affiliate registration, require admin approval, if you want to do that. So one thing I’m seeing here is that… Let’s see. One thing I’m seeing here right now is that these fields, you can’t add custom fields, okay? And some people may want to. Now, one thing I have not yet explored is the integration with fluent forms to see if perhaps you can use fluent forms to therefore take in any information that you would like, and then you can map up to these things.

I bet you that is there. But what I’m not seeing on this is the ability to add custom fields, at least on this screen. But the rest of it makes perfect sense, and it’s nice and simple. Migrator settings, I would imagine this is not going to do anything right now. Let’s see, it’s disabled due to existing… Yeah, I’ve got data in there, so it’s not going to let me. So I actually don’t know what it supports, but support affiliate WP, and we are good there. All right, license management, yeah, that’s going to be self-explanatory. And then this one I came across, I was like, Well, this is interesting. So this one means that you could use Fluent Affiliate on one site and refer commissions into it from different sites because you can support multiple domains through one installation of Fluent Affiliate. And then when I clicked on this to check it out, it looks like what it’s doing is it’s taking me over to GitHub, where I can get the Fluent Affiliate connector plugin. So basically, I can set set up other sites as child sites and feed everything into one install, Fluent Affiliate. That’s really cool.

It makes perfect sense from their perspective because WP Managed Ninja has all their sub brands like Fluent CRM, Fluent Forms, all those, which they probably have set up as child sites, all feeding into WpManagedNinja. Com, where the affiliate program is set up. So it makes sense that they would do this right out the gate, but that’s great for the rest of us as well. So you know where I could see this coming in handy is for somebody who runs a store in a Woocommerce setup on one site, but their membership site might be someplace else. And let’s say they’ve got something going on over there on that membership site, they could feed stuff into Fluent Affiliate. So that’s very, very handy. I’m not going to go through the work of testing it right now, but it’s really nice to see it. Now, coming over here into Fluent Forms, because it is one of their integrations, I’m just going to open one of these up randomly. Let’s go directly to the settings because I want to see what the integration looks like. Let’s go over here to Integrations. Okay, now let’s do the Fluent Affiliate Registration Integration.

All right, so If I were to set up a form, influent forms, we can, let’s see, create new WordPress User plus Affiliate, Create Affiliate for an Existing User. All right, cool. I could see either one of those being applicable in different circumstances. I can map these form fields to the different So their email address. See, these look like they are all the… Let’s see, a quick note. What would you like to… Yeah, it looks like what they’re doing is we’re now mapping the Fluent Forms fields to the settings, the fields that we saw over there inside of Fluent Affiliate. And so we can use a Fluent Form to basically set up custom registration forms. And even it looks to me like even if the field that you’re asking as custom is not necessarily mapped to Fluent Affiliate, we could still collect it, we could still put it into Fluent CRM or something like that. So You actually have quite a bit of flexibility here with this. And then we can use the global setting. We could auto-approve everybody who comes in via this form or keep them pending so that we have to, as affiliate managers, approve or decline.

So that’s That’s really cool. Very self-explanatory, very easy to use. Let’s pop on over to Fluent CRM. All right, so here in our list of automations, let’s just see what we have available. Let’s go to, and we’re going to do a new automation. Nothing prebuilt, but I didn’t expect that. But here we have a fluent affiliate set of triggers. So now we could trigger this when we approve their account, if they’re in there as pending, when we send them a payout, when there’s a successful for a referral. This is all really cool stuff. Very cool stuff. Now let’s do one just so I can see what the actions are. Let’s go ahead and just do one. Let’s tag and just see if there’s any actions as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, are there any… Okay, create an affiliate account. All right, cool. Easy enough. So basically, we could also take… We have users and they do certain things. We have an automation step that we We’ve automatically enrolled them as an affiliate. So that’s also handy as well. Let’s say somebody purchases something and we want to automatically turn them into an affiliate. We can do that.

We don’t need to have them fill out a form. It could be done automatically. So that’s very nice to see as well. All right, well, that was a nice walkthrough of Fluent Affiliate. I mean, it’s coming along great. I don’t actually know the release date of Fluent Affiliate. I thought Fluent Affiliate was going to come out first before Fluent Cart, and maybe it will. I actually don’t know the inside story on what their launch dates are for these things, but I was definitely interested in Fluent Affiliate, and I could tell you just based on what I’m seeing, that this will definitely be my go-to solution, not only for potentially myself, but also for clients who want an affiliate program. I really don’t want to use a Fluent WP. I really don’t. I don’t like having all the multiple plugins, and I don’t like putting them into the world of also motive. I just don’t. And so I really like these people. I use Fluent CRM all the damn time. I use Fluent forms all the damn time. Frankly, if you’re already in their ecosystem, Fluent affiliate is going to be just natural. It just works so gorgiously with all their other products.

That being said, obviously, they created the product in such a way where you don’t need to be using their other products to make it work. It works great with Woocommerce because, hey, the world uses Woocommerce, right? But obviously, it’s going to work with Fluent Cart, and it’s going to work with a bunch of other things as well. One thing I think would be really nice, and I didn’t see it in there, but maybe there’s a way, is to have a conversion cookie, like a little block code that you could put on any thank you page or conversion page on your site, and it would track it to an affiliate. That would be really cool because then you could have the flexibility of tracking referrals for damn near or anything, or just by having a little thing of code that you stick on a thank you page. I think that would be really nice. Now, another thing that would be really nice, and this is more for selfish reasons, but it would really make Fluent CRM 2, Just an incredible package. And that is the world of newsletter referrals. Okay, now, newsletter referrals, there’s some expensive stuff that can go along with doing newsletter referrals.

But if you go over to Beehive or some of these things, there’s ways of doing referral programs for your email list. I think it would be awesome if Fluent Affiliate had a nice, easy way to track referrals into an email list. So basically, somebody could refer new subscribers into your email list for whatever you want, track a referral, and somehow be able to compensate for that to your affiliates. And it may not be monetary. So that’s one of the things that the fixed rate or the percentage base may not work in this case, because in some cases, what you may want to do is track referrals to the opt-in for Fluent CRM potentially, or maybe other things as well. But based on the number of referrals, then we unlock something. We could trigger an automation and unlock something where we could send our affiliate a free gift. I’m telling you right now, I didn’t see it in there now, but if they could put that into Fluent Affiliate, that would be really awesome. And so I really hope they will do something like that. I’m going to prod them along because that would be great.

I run my WP Edge newsletter every week out of Fluent CRM. I would love to be able to have a referral program for my newsletter. And it’s not necessarily something where I’m going to compensate based on a I’m not going to send out payouts. I want to be able to track how many referrals come in for something like that. And I want to be able to send my affiliates cool things, okay? So I don’t know how well this would work without Fluent CRM. Maybe there’s a way where you can make this work across other platforms as well, but that would be an awesome combo, and I really hope they would build it in. Leaving that aside, I think Fluent Affiliate is really shaping up nicely at Quite frankly, it looks pretty mature as it is. It’s going to be great because I don’t have to deal with Affiliate WP anymore. I don’t have to deal with the multiple plugins and add-ons and all that crap. It’s just one… Actually, it’s two plugins, I think. Let me go over to my plugin list here off screen. I’m pretty sure there was… Let me see if there’s a pro version or not.

Yeah, I just checked the plugin list. It looks like there’s Fluent Affiliate, and there’s Fluent Affiliate Pro. So there’s going be some a free version here. I don’t know what the limitations are going to be yet. As of this video, I’m testing 0. 9. 1. So there’s stuff coming here, all right? So anyway, I’m really happy with what I see with Fluent Affiliate. Look forward to its release. I will be promoting it, but not only that, more importantly, I will be using it, and I will be promoting it to my clients. I will be installing it on client sites. This is going to be the new go-to as soon as it comes out, all right? The decision’s already been made, and I look forward to seeing what further capabilities they add to it. But I will say, check out that newsletter referral system. I really hope they do something like that because that would be really, really cool.