380 – Exploring Siren Affiliates with Alex Standiford: redefining affiliate marketing strategies

[00:00:00] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You have reached episode number 380, entitled exploring Siren Affiliates with the Alex Standiford, redefining affiliate marketing strategies. It was published on Thursday, the 11th of July, 2024.

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Okay, what have we got for you this week? Well, it's an episode I recorded with Alex Standiford who has a new plugin called siren affiliates. I'm sure that you know, what affiliate systems do, but honestly, if you haven't looked at this, you really should. It allows so much more flexibility.

I won't go into the detail of that in this introduction. You can listen to that in the podcast. But truly, if you're used to the normal one option of a cookie that goes into the browser and that's about it. Well, this is really different. There are so many different permutations for incentivizing people to create content and help you launch your product service, whatever it may be with all of the affiliates that you have.

Truly interesting, and I think a bit groundbreaking. So have a listened to the podcast today. And I hope that you enjoy it.

I am joined on the podcast today by Alex Standerford.

How you doing, Alex?

[00:04:04] Alex Standiford: I'm great. How are you?

[00:04:05] Nathan Wrigley: Great. We've been having a right old gossip before we pressed record because Alex and I have had quite a lot of chats before he is been on the podcast, and other podcasts about a variety of different things, including living out of a, camper. We call it a camper van. And so we've had a chat about that, but that is not.

The purpose of the podcast today, the purpose of the podcast today is to bring to your attention a plugin, that you may find very interesting. We'll get into that in a little moment, but if you are in any way, shape or form into affiliate things, then keep your ears to this podcast because we're gonna revolutionize the way that you may be able to engage with affiliate marketing.

First of all, Alex, just give us a bit of background. Tell us your potted bio about WordPress development jobs that you've done, that kind of thing.

[00:04:52] Alex Standiford: Sure. so I'm Alex. I've been in the WordPress space since 2009. I've worked in doing tutorials online and things like that. Originally. I switched over into, development from that because my site needed like some membership things and, all kinds of different stuff, and, ended up becoming a WordPress developer as a result.

since then I have built, literally dozens and dozens of plugins and dozens of WordPress themes for clients and for myself. I've worked on. Some co worked for a few different companies, including GoDaddy and, Sandhill Development, working on tools like Affiliate WP and Easy Digital Downloads.

And, right now I spend a lot of time doing work with the managed WooCommerce offerings and things at, GoDaddy.

[00:05:43] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Honestly, that's like the perfect bio actually when you think about it. You've got experience with e-commerce, you've got experience working with, affiliate plugins, wildly successful stuff. okay. This is perfect, launchpad. So yeah, Bravo. The bio was right on message. First of all, dear listener, if you just wanna pause the podcast head here, I don't know if Google will have picked it up just yet, but certainly easy to remember.

The product on the, inspection today is called Siren Affiliate. Not Sirens. It's not plural. It's Siren Affiliate, so S-I-R-E-N. And then affiliates with an s.com head there, have a little browse around, and then come back and unpause the podcast. But by the sounds of it, Alex, you've got an, you've got an affiliate plugin.

And I guess the first question is, don't we have these already in WordPress? What's the, point of launching a product into the WordPress space in a market that's already, there's, a generous amount of, successful plugins that do this already.

[00:06:47] Alex Standiford: Yeah. the first thing that I wanna do is I wanna challenge the notion of what an affiliate program even can be. whenever I was running my agency, for example, I had a. Partners who would help me sell and bring in sales opportunities. And those were, more traditional affiliates. But I also had a blog content bonus program, for example, where, people could actually write content on my site.

I would pay them for writing that content. But on top of that, I, on my offering, I also paid them a bonus based on the amount of traffic that content drove to my site. to help incentivize them to Dr. Help me actually get the result that I want from that content, which I didn't really want the content to be written.

What I want is people to come to my site, right? that's like a, different spin on affiliate marketing, right? It's not the traditional relationship where you have a link and all this stuff, but it's a partnership of sorts. And, the big difference that I wanted to do, Whenever I built that, it took a fair bit of customization of existing platforms because, it just doesn't support that.

It like affiliate WP, for example, or, Slicer, any of the other ones, they all, they work with one single affiliate program and that's what it does. It lets you build a program, it lets you customize their rate and all that stuff, but it's not like you can't, just have multiple programs or multiple types of ways to offer people incentives, to incentivize people to like.

Succeed. that is the biggest reason why I've built this. and of course I've got plenty of experience having worked with these products personally, having extended these personally, having built different, programs myself in multiple ways. so that's, the biggest reason, that's the biggest differentiator, I think, is that this can support multiple different programs and it allows you to create them.

In, interesting and unique ways that helps you create a pay for performance, like a full on pay for performance platform on your site from top to bottom in your business.

[00:09:00] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, let, me just e explain my experience with, With affiliate systems and because I think it's highly likely that there's a bunch of people listening to this podcast who've never gone anywhere near setting up or utilizing somebody else's affiliate system. But it is essentially the way it works for me.

Obviously, I'm, I make content. I have to say I'm not really using affiliate links too much, but, they're out there and I've definitely used 'em in the past is that I would find a product. Let's say it's a WordPress plugin and I notice that they have an affiliate system. So I sign up for their program, typically wait a couple of days for them to authorize me and do some background due diligence just to check that I'm, I'm some, something to do with WordPress.

Get a confirmation email, click on a link, and then go to their platform, set something up, add a PayPal account or something like that. And then I get this one link. And this one link is the link. And if I want in any way. To get money out of their affiliate system, I have to use that link over and over and over again, and then it's on me.

To figure out what that means. And, I could create a piece of content, I could smuggle it into an email, and, disguise it. Hopefully there are anyway we can get into that. but the point is I've got that one link and it's bound to a 10, 20, 30% of the sale thing, but that's it.

Now some of the affiliate programs allow the, vendor to say, okay, we've got this one link for, I don't know, Christmas. We've got another link, which you might use at, black Friday, and here's a link for just generally speaking. But usually it's just the same thing, it's just.

it just ends up at a different landing page, but the percentage doesn't change and all of that. So it, it is a fairly gi given the amount of data that's out there and the, the way that you can adapt products and make things dynamic, it does feel like the whole affiliate thing is in need of a bit of a shake up.

So tell me if I've got your proposition right. You are hoping to make it easier for people like me to create content, and it's more of a partnership because you are going to say, if you are successful, your affiliate content, then we will, presumably we might alter the, amount that you get.

So it goes from 10 to maybe 15 or 20 or something like that. So that's encouraging me to. To, put more of an effort in, because not only am I going to hopefully get more clicks, but the more clicks I get, the more value each one of the subsequent clicks get. Have I got that broadly right or have I missed the, target entirely?

[00:11:42] Alex Standiford: I think you're on the right track. I think the, key difference is, the software itself is, for me, it's all about creating. Multiple opportunities to create different relationships with people that breaks the mold of how it traditionally works, right? another example, maybe you have a course creator, maybe, you wanted to create like a Udemy clone or something like that.

Like a, your own WordPress based, multi-course creator platform, like LinkedIn Learning or something like that. But it's like specifically for a niche or whatever. you could set it up to where people create courses and they publish those courses on your site, right? And they use your platform to be able to actually like, get the leverage and get the traffic.

and maybe you set up the entire program so that they can, get a, get their own cut of, all the sales. and then maybe on top of that, they get a percentage, like a performance weighed percentage of the. Like a fixed amount of money every month based on how many minutes people spent watching their courses or something like that.

So like

[00:12:51] Nathan Wrigley: Oh

[00:12:52] Alex Standiford: have a, Yeah. So so it's not just an affiliate program. Like an affiliate program is like the smallest, like one of. Any number of different ways that you can work with people in your, in, with your website. So like maybe you have, like you were saying, a traditional affiliate program.

Maybe you have a super affiliate program, maybe where the rates are a little bit higher and the way you work with those people is a little bit tighter. So maybe instead of it just being like, there's a thousand people on this list and they all have one link. Maybe it's 50 people who, are like pop influencers in your space or whatever.

And you're like in the thick of it with them, right? You're like, I've tested this, I've got this thing seated, I've got it built. I've proven that it works. here's the exact steps that I used to do that. Now can amplify this message and try it again with your lists? And you make a cut from that.

So there's just all kinds of different partnerships that exist naturally in how we all work together. and we've just all assumed it's either one of two things. Either you're an affiliate doing sales. Or you are a paid contractor being paid to do a task, and I'm challenging the notion that those two things can blend a little bit more.

another example maybe, of something that I plan on doing for Siren is a bug bounty program. So basically, I will have publicly announced bugs that aren't like, major security flaws or something like that. And I'll say, Hey, if you are interested in participating in this, in, in this, these are the bugs I've, I'll have some kind of difficulty set to them based on the context or whatever.

And if you fix that bug, I. I'll pay you an amount equal to whatever that Bounty is. it's not like it's, a, it's closer to a traditional setup, but it's still, performance based, right? It's based on you did this thing, so I'm gonna pay you that thing. I don't care how long it took you, I don't care, what it is, but it it's a program that's built around that.

So my goal with Siren even is going to be to like. Allow businesses to lean into that gig economy a little bit more and make it a little more nuanced and, thoughtful. if, even if you think about companies like Uber, that's a bigger example really, but, it may be a little bit infamous in a lot of ways too.

but, it's, that's a performance based model, right? So you, have a person who has a car. And, they're responsible for getting people from one spot to another, and every time they do that, they get paid. So it's, performance based. So there's just so many different ways that those can be built.

And Siren is built to be able to allow you to create those in, any number of creative ways.

so I say it's an affiliate program just to get people in the door so they understand what it is, Because that's a language that people understand, but it's really a performance.

it's a performance platform. It's a performance incentive platform.

[00:16:00] Nathan Wrigley: So on the website again, siren affiliates.com, it says the ultimate. Pay for performance platform for WordPress, and it says an affiliate plugin on steroids. So it sounds like if you're just into the traditional way of, here's a link, if somebody pays, somebody buys, you'll get that percentage.

You do that. But then it sounds like there's all these, there's this layer of stuff on top where you get to be all creative. And one of the examples that you used there was, watched. Minutes of content, let's say in a course or something like that, that immediately, struck me as completely revolutionary.

I, I have never heard of that capacity for some sort of timer to go on, and, if you've driven somebody who is obviously highly engaged, that's worth more to me, so dear affiliate. It's worth more to you. So if you can drive traffic and I, okay, so I've got that as a notion that you can do something quirky, like measure minutes.

But what are the other, give us some interesting other things that you can do above and beyond a normal affiliate network.

[00:17:04] Alex Standiford: Sure. so I, I talked a little bit about the course profit share, the blog content bonus. another one could be something like a, customer satisfaction program. So maybe you have, a support, program or so like you have people who are, who do the support for your, company, right? And maybe you have Maybe you're paying them like a base pay or something like that to basically just, work and like they have a salary or whatever. But on top of that, maybe you have a way to automatically, whenever a new ticket comes in, that's an opportunity, right? You can see that as an opportunity for them to perform, because at the end of the day, what you want from a person who's doing support, it's not just making sure customer satisfaction is top-notch.

Of course, that's a thing, and of course that's a part of it. Another thing is there's a lot of sales opportunities that actually happens inside of support, right? maybe you, yeah. So maybe you like, give them a point and, the whole system can work based on point. So whenever you're building a platform, you can say this, whenever you do this thing, it's worth a point.

Whenever you do that thing, it's worth five points. And then like. Whenever the conversion happens, whether that's on a time, like a schedule, maybe once a month we tally up your points and figure out what it's worth. Maybe, we tally up your points whenever the person checks out of a cart or whatever.

But, everything's point driven based on your actions while that customer's in their process. So maybe you could, say. Every time somebody gives you a five star review on the, their feedback, really good feedback or positive feedback, maybe we give you a little bit of incentive or maybe we just give you incentive every time you get feedback from them.

Period. Because all we want is feedback. We don't even care, like if it's good or bad, we just wanna know how we're doing. that's, a. A measurable, important thing to companies, so incentivize that. maybe you pay them a bonus. Maybe it's a completely separate program on top of that, that, anytime a salesperson converts or sends a person over to, a pro, a related product page or something like that based on your, based on their support ticket, if that person converts, maybe they get credit and they get a little bit of a bonus from that or, something like that.

But that could be a complete, and it's in that manner. It's similar to an affiliate program, but it's still gonna be a separate program. 'cause it's only reserved for the actual people who are on your support team. And that entire incentive structure can be different, right? It could be a fixed price, it could be a smaller percentage, it could be whatever it wants it to be.

So you have, plenty of options there and like you can just create two or three or four multiple different programs that kind of create like this whole big picture on how a person. is incentivized within your company?

[00:19:59] Nathan Wrigley: So the notion that I've got with an affiliate system that currently exists, the ones that I've used in the past is the, so you, you. use an affiliate link, you drive traffic. But the, that link has, had no consequence typically until somebody clicks the buy now button. So the, whole point of that affiliate link, if, you're into it on a, if you're really, into it, and that's your way of making a living is to get as many people to click the link.

But then really there's no point in that click unless they then at some point, and cookies could come into play. But unless they click Buy Now and at that buy now point some money. Heads in your direction, it gets put into your account. It sounds like what you are building is more of a like a point system where the conversion doesn't have to be the buy now button.

The conversion could be visited a page. It could be, oh, I don't know, spent time on a page. It could be minutes watched on a video. Again, just to be clear, have I got that right?

[00:20:56] Alex Standiford: Yeah. Everything is a series of events, so you can say, whenever this thing happens, award, credit related to this opportunity. And that opportunity just continues to build points until a very specific event, another specific event happens that turns that opportunity into a conversion. That could be a purchase, like you said, that's the most common one.

So that the common path there is affiliate link gets clicked. That's a point. then that person who clicked on that link now makes a purchase. That's that event. Then tallies up the points from that affiliate or multiple affiliates, which I can get into that second. And, tallies up how much money they get paid based on that.

And then it turns it into an obligation that, it's paid out as a reward. so then another example could be, like I was saying earlier with a log content bonus program, right? So maybe every time somebody visits the page, that's a point, right? That's credit. They get credit for that. Maybe every time somebody comments on their post that's worth five points. And then once a month, the conversion event happens on a schedule once every month.

We always do this conversion, and what that'll ha will do is it'll tally up all of your points and all the points of all the writers on the blog and it'll say. Okay. We have a budget of a thousand dollars a month that we're paying out in bonuses based on how many points you get that determines what percentage of that thousand you get.

And then it, it creates the obligations based on that and it just builds them all out.

[00:22:25] Nathan Wrigley: So this then can be like a full on point system or like a leaderboard. What you've just described sounds to me like some sort of leaderboard where the metric doesn't have to be a cash reward. It could be like a leadership reward, which then, at some point in the future you could turn into cash.

You can say, I don't know, person that comes first gets a thousand dollars or 10% of the slice, and the next person gets 8% of the slice and so on. So it's much more granular. you can do it in any which way you like, but behind it all is sitting. This mechanism of well points is that fair? Is points or something equivalent to points, is that always in play in whatever actions you set up?

[00:23:05] Alex Standiford: Pretty much, everything is bound to a point value. even if it's just literally A one where it's just, it's always one point. Whenever an affiliate, like if you have a basic affiliate program, for example, you're not gonna use points, right? You're gonna say, the last affiliate who clicked on this link gets one point.

And if they have that point, they get a payout based on however much money the program says their rate is. what's but, What's interesting about that because, and the reason why I did that obviously is 'cause it gives you all of this extra flexibility. But like even with an affiliate program for example, one of the annoying thing things that's always annoyed me is this notion of the last affiliate always wins, or the first affiliate always wins.

Yeah. I knew this would get you. I knew.

[00:24:01] Nathan Wrigley: This can be heartbreaking.

[00:24:04] Alex Standiford: yes, absolutely. it's not, it's less annoying. It's a little less annoying whenever the product is an easy conversion, right? So it's something that's like a low cost, almost like an impulse buy or something like that. Yeah, that makes sense.

Because there's probably only ever gonna be one person who's directing that traffic. But what happens if you're in a case where it's a, it's a. It's a bigger commitment, right? Where it's say, a WordPress plugin is a pretty good example, ironically enough, where it's I'm committing to paying for this software once a year, and not only am I committing to using that software, but I'm committing to, depending on that software, pretty much for year, potentially years to come.

you're basically creating a, it's a real commitment, that probably requires a few. Touchpoints, right? It's not gonna just happen that first time. So why is it that an affiliate program like that would pay only the last person who drove that traffic? Because there's several touchpoints in that conversation for me, usually whenever I make a purchase like that, it comes from several different recommendations from multiple people.

why not pay all those people? Why not give all them credit? You could set up something where In, Siren, because of this score based system, affiliate A drives traffic to the site. Okay? They get a point, affiliate B drives traffic to that site with their affiliate link. It's the same product or whatever.

They get a point. and then whenever that sale converts, you could divide that number, divide the value of that. That payout among all of them. You could divide that, you could say the first person who did it gets all the money. The last person who did it gets all the money. Maybe you set it up to where it's weighted based on the recency of the, the affiliate.

Maybe the first affiliate gets half of it. The second one gets a fourth, maybe the third one gets an eighth, and it just keeps on cutting in half until it's some number that is not, inconsequential or whatever.

[00:26:08] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's really

[00:26:09] Alex Standiford: many different

[00:26:10] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because the whole affiliate system at the moment is bound to that moment where the buy now button happens, there's no system of points accruing in the background. you can have, the first, click or the last click.

Either way, you're gonna annoy. Somebody. And a good example here is if you've got a really powerful influencer who is the first person to produce a piece of content and you've got a first click, but all they do is lodge a cookie on the website for 60 days, but they're not the people who made the persuasive content that actually pushed people over the line to buy it.

the one who got in first gets, gets all of it and everybody's talked about the injustice. everybody in the affiliate space has talked about the injustice of this, and it can. It can genuinely feel a little bit on Joss because you may have created a superior piece of content, which was clearly explaining the product better.

You could even track that They'd done loads more for your business, but ultimately the system is set up that way. So this whole point system is fabulous. And I really like the sort of profit share. I guess I'm just gonna describe it that way of, we've got 15 people all with six points. They're gonna get the same thing even though none of them.

Were the people that we know ultimately led to the click. That's brilliant.

[00:27:27] Alex Standiford: Yeah. Yeah. I love it. And what's cool about it to me is, and you touched on it a little bit, it flips the relationship between affiliates a little bit. So like right now, you look at other affiliates as competitors, as opponents, as people who are potentially gonna be taking money away from you.

you don't want that, This flips that. It makes it so that those affiliates could potentially work together. Maybe you have one who's focused on driving traffic, right? Driving large quantities of traffic to the site. And then another one is focused more on, converting those people.

So like the content they write and. Just naturally works together and they don't even necessarily have to like directly collaborate with each other, right? there's just natural synergies that would just develop in your program as a result of that. Where some people are really good at driving traffic and some people are really good at, getting the conversions done.

And maybe those are even like with weighted program, you could naturally make it so that the last person to convert maybe gets a different cut than the other people in the program based on The effort. So like it allows you to like. Create this program that's fair. And motivates everybody at every step in the sales process.

It's not just that one specific moment.

[00:28:43] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like from the affiliate, the people making the content side of things, it's far less adversarial, and the time pressure won't be quite so much as it would've been with a first click cookie. The, and it just means that you're not necessarily competing quite so hard against. To each other, and honestly, I don't really have any experience with the competition in the affiliate space, but I'm sure that it must be, it must get quite competitive.

it, let's say for example, apple launch a new product. it really is a case of get the video out in the next nine seconds so that we can be the, first people who've surfaced any of this content. Now it can be. More. it's okay if I wait a day and produce a longer piece of content that's not rushed, then I've still got a chance.

it's not all about that exact moment. So that whole landscape of affiliates becomes far less adversarial. and from that, it feels like you, you probably could get a slightly different relationship going with them as a product owner. Because you don't have all this rivalry going on under, backbiting and trying to figure things out as quickly as possible and get the content out as quickly as possible, you know that if you wait a week, it doesn't make any difference.

So long as you accrue some clicks, that's gonna work in your favor. That's really nice.

[00:29:55] Alex Standiford: Yeah, the partnerships would just naturally be able to develop within your own company. that's, I think that's cool. I think, because you as the owner, you win there, right? Like by empowering your affiliates and giving them a platform that allows them to work together instead of against each other. You are giving them the opportunity to be able to not only make more money and focus on the part of the sales system that works really well for them, you're also ensuring that you're able to like, help them optimize that and like you can have the individual conversations with them and build a much more nuanced program.

Based on your own knowledge on your own sales cycle, right? So because you should, obviously you're gonna know that it's not just a set it and forget it, you're gonna understand your own product and you're gonna know like the timelines and things like that. Current affiliate programs, they solve this like complicated big commitment thing with like really long cookie, really long cookies.

So okay, you've got 90 days to get this person to be convinced that they wanna. Buy your specific product or something like that. And I just don't, I don't know, I don't think it makes a lot of sense to, to force that. that's an option of course, and sometimes it makes sense, but there's so many different ways you can approach this.

[00:31:13] Nathan Wrigley: we're recording this at the end of the first quarter. Towards the end of the first quarter of 2024, and at the moment the website is, full of buttons with join wait list. So obviously it's telling me that this is a brand new product. how aggressive are you gonna be with shipping this?

what roughly do you think is the time when this is gonna be available to, to purchase and experiment with? You've got a kind of interesting double fronted market. Place here as well because you've got affiliates to sell to and you've got, you've got them presumably selling their stuff to their affiliates.

So it'd be interesting when are you hoping to launch?

[00:31:53] Alex Standiford: I would really like to have this thing launched before summer. yeah, so that's my goal. I'm shooting for that. I am doing a, a pre-launch. I'm starting to send content and information specifically about this platform. Directly through that email list, which is why you'd wanna join that wait list.

Of course. and when the time comes, I'm plan on giving a pretty, some pretty special offers that are gonna be like one time only deals, specifically for, siren. And it's gonna be like, something that's just, I'm literally never going to offer this again. It's this is it.

This is a very, you only launch, your product from never existing to existing one time. If you're on this wait list and you're interested in this, get on that list because whenever it does launch and it is time, you're gonna get an offer on this that you'll never otherwise see.

[00:32:48] Nathan Wrigley: It's gonna be really interesting seeing you, affiliate market your own, eating your own dog food. Basically you can

[00:32:55] Alex Standiford: Absolutely. Oh my

[00:32:56] Nathan Wrigley: use your own product to, to encourage, influencers in the WordPress space. Do you know what? We haven't talked about WordPress at all. And this is like the major, this is the major piece.

This is a plugin, right? This is all built

[00:33:08] Alex Standiford: Is a WordPress plug.

Yep.

[00:33:10] Nathan Wrigley: so tell us about that a little bit. I'm guessing it's a plugin. Do you have ambitions to, to add in other things? does it work with, the traditional payment gateways with things like WooCommerce and things like that?

Just give us a little bit of the background of the WordPress bit.

[00:33:25] Alex Standiford: So at launch I am going to focus on WooCommerce. I'm making it compatible with Woo. It's gonna work with it. Natively. And then, I'm also working with other integrations, some partners, some LMS platforms and things like that will make it so that, you can build different programs that are specific to, to their platforms and, things like that.

So that's gonna be coming a little bit later this year. Right now it's all about, woo, I just gotta get Woo to work.

[00:33:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. said that sentence so many times,

[00:34:01] Alex Standiford: Yeah,

[00:34:02] Nathan Wrigley: I've just gotta get woo to work.

[00:34:03] Alex Standiford: I just gotta get Whoa to work. Gosh. so that's the first focus. yes, it is a WordPress plugin. it's basically you just, you install it just like any other plugin.

it creates a whole separate, interface. It doesn't actually use the WordPress dashboard. It ends up creating a separate one. that's very much by design, because I didn't want. I wanted to be sure that this system can decouple from WordPress if I ever want it to. And what I mean by that is like I wanna be able to build an app for this, a mobile app, for example, so that you can actually like, manage your program.

the WordPress interface isn't good at that right now. so I had to create a separate interface so that whenever somebody wants to, so in the future, if I want to create a web app for this or a mobile app for this, I've already built it in a way that I can do that easily. which is not an easy problem to solve whenever you're trying to make it extendable.

but I've got it pretty well figured out now.

[00:35:07] Nathan Wrigley: So WooCommerce at the beginning for handling payments, I'm guessing, but also does it integrate with WooCommerce in terms of, the capacity to, oh, I don't know, sell things with WooCommerce, with affiliate links. So if I've got a WooCommerce

[00:35:20] Alex Standiford: Oh yeah.

[00:35:21] Nathan Wrigley: I'll be able to offer my affiliates the ability to sell the products in that WooCommerce store.

So there's sort of two options in there. And also I hadn't even. Thought of this, you talked about LMSs, so a learning management system. And prior to, 20 minutes ago or so, you were talking about how you could measure the amount of minutes watched. It hadn't occurred to me that this is gonna be really interesting inside the WordPress ecosystem of plugins.

'cause there's just so many things, around curating content and presenting content in different ways. So an LMS. CRMs, there's loads of those. There's, obviously plugins, which do all sorts. And maybe part of your roadmap in the future is to extend out so that, siren and I guess it's called Siren, not Siren.

Affiliates always, siren is gonna, the intention would be to link up with some of the more, popular plugins that, that, it can link with.

[00:36:14] Alex Standiford: That's basically all I'm gonna be doing this year.

[00:36:16] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

[00:36:17] Alex Standiford: it's integrating it's, is, I've been talking with, I've been in space for a while, so I know a lot of the people who own those products and things like that. So I've been talking with, several of them and just creating those relationships and, tell 'em, Hey, I'm working on this thing and.

I've actually gotten some really good candid feedback from some of them and some ideas on, what they're missing from affiliate programs right now and what their customers are complaining about. And I'm helping them build, I'm working with them to build these integrations so it's not just, the shotgun approach of I'm just gonna create as many, put as many logos on my site as I can.

It's, very intentional. It's very nuanced. Yeah. And, it's intentional, it's nuanced, and I'm, I am, I'm going to be treating every integration that I create, with some thoughtfulness. one of the things that's always I've observed about, other affiliate plugins is, certain integrations get all the intention such as WooCommerce, and. As a result, it ends up that the other integrations tend to not work very well. or they, they're limited in some manner. so I've been very methodical and intentional on all of that. And of course I have all that context from having worked on these, for a while. And I have a pretty good grasp on what a good integration looks like.

yeah, that's been. That's pretty much all I'm gonna be. That's like the majority of my development right now is just getting, once the software's built, is gonna be just getting those integrations

[00:38:02] Nathan Wrigley: It sounds like it's kind of WordPress all the way down as well, which is nice. we've got something built inside of WordPress for the WordPress community. now just on that point, if you, sign up to the, wait list, obviously you've been working on this, not in the dark, 'cause you've obviously reached out to other plugin developers, what have you, but it's been Alex doing the work.

Trying to figure out what this product means. How open are you from, the, day that you launch the product and get it out into the community? how open are you gonna be to derailing your own roadmap? should the community say, wait, we'd like it to do this. Hang on, Alex. You had an intuition, but we're telling you the different thing.

In other words, it's always fun if you get in early on a products journey 'cause you, you have that capacity to influence it a bit. Do you have the roadmap nailed down or are you gonna be intentionally open to, people derailing you?

[00:38:55] Alex Standiford: That's a lot of the reason why I, created, that's a lot of the reason why I'm built this wait list right now is because I'm trying to start to, to seed those conversations and create those. 'cause the prior, my prior, I know what I'm going to build, right? I know the things I'm going to build. What I don't know is what order they're going to be built in.

Do you know what I mean? and that is where the feedback from the wait, the, my email list would come in and things like that. So the people who I'm really gonna be taking that advice from is gonna be that list first. I'll be listening, I'll be like publishing and talking and asking questions on it.

As, my, website, has plenty of places for me to be able to ask questions, my personal

[00:39:38] Nathan Wrigley: yeah.

[00:39:38] Alex Standiford: so I'll be, utilizing that a lot. but I, but the primary source of the, feedback is gonna come from that, and that's definitely gonna have an impact on, when I build for what type of, solution.

[00:39:57] Nathan Wrigley: And, dear listener, I think it's fair to say that Alex is a thoroughly nice chap. that counts for something in my book. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna be looking at this. I'm gonna dive in with both feet as soon as it's, as soon as it's ready for inspection. It's just occurred to me we haven't covered out on this whole one thing, which is what, how does the UI work?

The most impossible thing in the world is try to describe a UI in an audio podcast. But does, do you build these actions in a similar manner that you would do, say for example in Zapier where you drag blocks in and if somebody does this, then it leads to this and you link things with arrows and just, quickly describe how that works.

Obviously, the most broad description possible, I'm not trying to get you to describe what every box does in detail.

[00:40:46] Alex Standiford: so it has a series of, I, I've broken it down into three key, a program itself into three key components. One, how's the money divided or how's the reward divided? It doesn't have

[00:40:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:40:58] Alex Standiford: It could be whatever you want. how's the reward divided? The other one is what are the things that earn points and how many points do they earn?

what events happen on your site that. Reward a person with points. And then the third thing is, when does the, when what event triggers the point calculation and, reward itself? The actual

[00:41:28] Nathan Wrigley: Yep.

[00:41:29] Alex Standiford: so it's broken into those three things from an interface perspective and. I've set it up so that all three of those are things that can be extended by third party developers, myself included.

Actually, I'm literally from the day one, I've been building it so that I am myself, I'm treating myself as a third party for everything I build. So like that way, whenever other people integrate with it, I'm like, oh yeah, I've already done this. I'm not, giving myself like special access. I'm trying to build it in a way that allows, anyway.

so these different. these three different pieces, can be built by any, developer that you know wants to. but it will also include with any of the integrations, they will be able to customize all of those in different ways. So maybe you install and activate again, an LMS plugin, and all of a sudden all these different events related to courses are added.

So if somebody completes a course, give a point. Somebody does this give a point? whenever, and maybe the payout happens whenever a person finishes a course or maybe a payout happens whenever they buy the course or things like that. So like the plugins will extend what your options are in those three different ways.

[00:42:36] Nathan Wrigley: I can only imagine how complicated this has been to build, just the description of it is, is hard enough to, imagine, but the reality of building it must be difficult. Can you, can you layer these things? So for example, can you say, I dunno, if they visit a page and they stay for 30 seconds and then they subsequently do this other thing, can you layer things on top or is it just a case of Okay, there's, one thing.

We deal with that one thing and then we move on.

[00:43:01] Alex Standiford: you could, yeah. I would, it would. Every single solitary event like that, has, its, has an opportunity to set its own metadata that's specific to it. So you can say, so maybe one event is like only a point base and it's a one-time thing, but maybe you create another event and the programmer would have to write this in.

But, and it says. After, like they could build the interface out to, to do that, right? there's really no, there's really no limit on what they can do as long as they fall within those three things and the developer has the information that they need to be able to execute that they can add it.

[00:43:45] Nathan Wrigley: So a couple of questions. Firstly, the developer one, will end users who don't have any coding skills. Will they be able to implement Siren in some way? Or is it always gonna require a developer or will you just meaning, if you wanna extend it, you'll probably

[00:44:01] Alex Standiford: Oh yeah, I, yeah, if you wanted to extend it, you need to develop, you will, if you want to extend it in a way that it doesn't already allow you to do. So You won't need a developer to be able to do these things. you can build any, of the programs that I've talked about to this point, will be things that you're capable of doing,

[00:44:22] Nathan Wrigley: All in a click point, drag kind of thing. Interface. Yeah. Nice. Okay. And the other one is, in WordPress, we're obviously, we're very concerned about GDPR because we wanna know where that data is going. And you did say earlier. Something akin to, maybe at the FU in the future, you'll want this to be some sort of SAS app or mo No, I think you said mobile app.

and it made me think where is that data? is all this data being held in the WordPress database? And, that's it really just that question.

[00:44:50] Alex Standiford: Yeah. It's all in the WordPress database. Exactly. and it, and it basically could be. the anonymity of data has, been something I've been watching. Obviously I've been with, paying attention to GDVR for a while now. and, there's, in the affiliate circum, in the affiliate kind of thing, there's definitely some like things you gotta be careful with tracking, but.

I'm setting it up so that you can still use the plugin, even if that tracking doesn't necessarily work. There's ways around it that like, it doesn't have to necessarily rely on a cookie, for example, where it doesn't necessarily have to rely on an IP address and there's different ways you can,

[00:45:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's a really, interesting topic at the moment, isn't it? Because we seem to be, apple seems to be leading the vanguard of making the cookies go away a little bit in some scenario. So yeah, I guess that makes the job of this a little bit more interesting.

Anyway, we won't get into that because I think I've probably used up enough your, oh no, it sounds like you want to go into it. That's fine by

[00:45:56] Alex Standiford: Oh, no, I was just gonna say, it's, it's, just, it's a challenging, it's just a challenging thing that you just have to be, thoughtful on. And, the, thing is with siren though, that I like is, with GDPR and things like that happening, it does. It has the potential to threaten how an affiliate program can work.

Because if for some reason, a, you were saying about the cookies, like if something happens in that law where an affiliate cookie tracking cookie or something like that is just absolutely never gonna happen, and an affiliate starts suddenly seeing a drop in sales because their, the browsers have these aggressive, Filtration things that stop tracking things, from being added and all that stuff, like it's gonna have an impact on those programs and make them less effective. to me, siren, that's a lot of the reason why I've made it so that it has, that's some of the benefit of having multiple different program types because some of those program types don't really care about the user's interfa interaction or the user's data.

That doesn't matter, right? Like, a, like reading a blog post. It doesn't matter. I don't care who you are necessarily, just that you read it And that maybe, and just commented on a post and all kinds of things. So there's just different programs don't necessarily require that kind of level of, of tracking,

[00:47:25] Nathan Wrigley: I guess also the fact that you are honing in on WordPress and WordPress may be the, not only the destination, but the source. so you know, typically if you sign up for an affiliate platform that's outside of the WordPress. Of space, which is the majority of them, then it's this third party tool. And, the, cookie could easily be stripped out, but in this case, because you are the origin of the cookie as well as the destination, I'm guessing that can be quite helpful.

So the fact that it's using WordPress and it can be built into LMSs and CRMs and all of those things which are inside of WordPress is beneficial. 'cause you are, you're you're completing the loop on yourself, not going via a third party platform.

[00:48:05] Alex Standiford: Right there. Yeah. there's different ways to track within it within, since you have, like you just said, you know the request on both ends of that and you can trust it in a different way,

[00:48:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.

[00:48:14] Alex Standiford: it does definitely

[00:48:15] Nathan Wrigley: honestly, this is gonna be really interesting to, to chart. like I said, I think we've probably gone through all of the different bits and pieces that we gonna go through today, but one more time. The, the URL minus an affiliate link is Siren Affiliates. Dot com. You never know. By the time I put this out, I may well have embedded one in there.

we'll wait and see, but siren affiliates.com. go and check it out. Join the wait list if that's still the case. If not, go and explore the website and see what Alex has put together. if somebody's listened to this, Alex, and they're curious, and I bet there'll be loads of people that are curious, where do we find you?

What's the best place to reach out to you?

[00:48:55] Alex Standiford: you can find me on pretty much. All of the, short form, social places. I prefer Macedon. I'm on Twitter again too, or X or whatever the doobie call it. And, of course you can find me on my blog and or my personal site, alex sandford.com, where I've got plenty of different places where you can contact me.

[00:49:17] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.

[00:49:18] Alex Standiford: and, I'm everywhere. it's, it shouldn't be too difficult to find me. I'm, if I'm in, if there's a Slack community or something like that, I'm probably in

[00:49:27] Nathan Wrigley: You are gonna need to be very

[00:49:29] Alex Standiford: Yeah.

[00:49:30] Nathan Wrigley: you're gonna be, you're gonna be doing the red eye, version of life for a little while. I think keeping the support tickets, and all of that. But thank you. What an interesting product. Thanks for reaching out and getting, yourself on the podcast.

Really appreciate it. Looks great. Siren affiliates.com. One more time. Go check it out. And thank you, Alex, for joining us today.

[00:49:50] Alex Standiford: Heck yeah. Pleasures all mine. Thank you.

[00:49:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's all we've got for you this week. I hope that you enjoyed that. If you've got any questions, queries, whatever it may be, head to WP Builds.com. Search for episode number 380, and leave us a comment there. It's WordPress, we've got a great commenting system. Make use of it. We'd love to know your thoughts.

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Okay, that truly is it. I'm going to just say, I hope that you have a good week. Stay safe. I'm going to fade in some cheesy music and say, Bye-bye for now.