A long-awaited request by our customers has been the option to earn affiliate rewards when they recommend Shield to their audience, colleagues and friends.

Today we’re pleased to annouce our affiliate rewards scheme that launches alongside Shield 9.1. This article outlines the basic principles of the scheme as it stands today.

Why We’re Launching An Affiliate Rewards Scheme

We encourage everyone to spread the word and even leave us a review on WordPress.org, and we’re delighted with the response we get. But we wanted a way for clients to pass on a recommendation in other ways, and at the same time earn a reward when it results in a sale for us.

Of course, this is a popular form of marketing for many online services and our hope is that with your advocacy, we’ll be able to grow the Shield platform into a powerful security service provider.

If we can bring our clients along with us, then so much the better!

The Principles Of Our Affiliate Rewards

There are a many ways to approach affiliate rewards and we’ll outline ours below and some principles that have guided our decisions.

#1 Make it easy

It’ll be easy to get started with our affiliate scheme. There are 2 easy steps to get started (assuming you have an active subscription):

  1. Register for our affiliate rewards scheme by agreeing to the terms.
  2. Turn on the Shield Security plugin badge on the sites you’d like to promote if you’re using ShieldPRO

It’s as simple as that.

We’ve integrated your referral code automatically into the link for the ShieldPRO plugin badge. It means that each time someone clicks on your badge link, you’ll get the credit for any purchase they make.

You can of course use standard referral links, and the details on how to construct those links will be in your affiliate control panel.

#2 Make it rewarding

You’d like to think that an affiliate rewards scheme would be rewarding… it’s all in the name. Here are the key points of our referral rewards:

  • Current reward rate is 15% (subject to fees applied when we payout).
  • 15% rate applies to each license renewal.
  • This rate doesn’t include any taxes paid by the customer.
  • All referral rewards are subject to your account having at least 1 active license i.e. if you don’t have any active licenses, all referral rewards are cancelled. (this goes back to point #1, above)
#3 Payout rewards will be delivered using PayPal

For now, the simplest form of paying out affiliate rewards is with PayPal.

We know that for some people this mightn’t be ideal, and prohibitive in some cases if you can’t access PayPal. For now, however, this is unavoidable.

Once we have ironed-out any kinks, we plan to systematise and automate referral payouts, and even payout directly into people’s bank accounts. This is long-way off, and depends on how things develop. Demand and scale will dictate this.

A note on currencies: we operate in £GBP as our primary currency, but we understand that most of our customers do not. We commit to paying in £GBP, and wherever possible, we’ll convert to U$D or €uro if that’s preferred by you. We can’t promise we’ll always be able to do this, and wherever possible, we’ll use pre-existing cash in the respective currency so as to avoid excess fees for you.

We’ll make any necessary currency conversions and in a fair manner (no mark-down etc.)

How Can You Sign-Up As An Affiliate?

We’ve tried to make this as easy as possible and since you need to be a customer with us, you’ll already have an account so there’s no need to register separately.

Here are the simple steps to setting up your Affiliate Account:

  • Log into your account here
  • Go to your Affiliate Area Dashboard
  • Complete the form (the form will only be shown to you if you’re a current customer). Items you’ll need are:
    • Your primary website
    • Your PayPal email address
    • Your Agreement to the terms and conditions of our affiliate program

And then you’re done. You’ll be able to get your affiliate URL in your dashboard once your account setup is complete.

As we mentioned above, you can use the Plugin Badge to automatically give you an affiliate reference without manually inserting URLs anywhere.

Feedback, Comments and Suggestions?

It’s early days in our affiliate rewards system so we seek your patience while we get things sorted, if there are any hiccups. There may be bumps in the road, but we’re committed to rewarding our advocates today and into the future.

The referral reward rates may also change (up or down) – we’ll continue to assess this, particularly when our pricing tiers are updated.

If you have any questions about any our affiliates program, or any points outlined here, please do leave us a comment below.