Wordpress Plugins - the sunshine.co.uk model

With sunshine.co.uk win­ning so many awards in the affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing stratos­phere i am won­der­ing how long it will be before other com­pa­nies attempt to dom­i­nate their mar­ket using sim­i­lar tech­niques and also whether other plu­gin coders may decide to take on the project them­selves for a 2nd tier commission.

Hav­ing launched in May 2007 sunshine.co.uk set them­selves ambi­tious tar­gets in a fiercely com­pet­i­tive mar­ket and decided to host their affil­i­ate pro­gram through Affil­i­ate Future.

In an inspired move sunshine.co.uk decided to break with the norm and  pro­vide affil­i­ates with excep­tional resources and tools to help them achieve their goals in a proac­tive man­ner. To start the pro­gram off with a bang they offered good incen­tives and com­mis­sions to get the affil­i­ate com­mu­nity buzzing, many top affil­i­ates saw this as a great chal­lenge and an oppor­tu­nity to com­pete with and against their fel­low affiliates.

Five months after launch­ing their affil­i­ate pro­gram Sunshine.co.uk had attracted no fewer than 444 affil­i­ates, who drove 452,477 unique vis­i­tors to the site. These affil­i­ates sold 1,470 hol­i­days gen­er­at­ing in excess of £700,000.

Although there were many weapons to the Sunshine.co.uk affil­i­ate arse­nal i per­son­ally dont think there was any big­ger weapon than the bespoke sunshine.co.uk word­press plu­gin. This plu­gin enabled even those with lim­ited word­press expe­ri­ence to open and pro­mote their very own hol­i­day super­store and receive 7% com­mis­sion on all sales. The func­tion­al­ity could be used on any blog and even non travel sites were achiev­ing good returns.

I think that Sunshine.co.uk is a great exam­ple of a com­pany embrac­ing affil­i­ate mar­ket­ing, lis­ten­ing to affil­i­ate mar­keters and achiev­ing great suc­cess because of there efforts! When will other mer­chants look at and take notice of the right way to do things — maybe they already have!

This is when i began to think about other pos­si­bil­i­ties (i am not a pro­gram­mer of any sort so apolo­gies that i cant get tech­ni­cal). Many peo­ple design good use­ful plu­g­ins with no finan­cial reward, why do they not choose a pro­gram with a good 2nd tier com­mis­sion and cre­ate a sunshine-esq plu­gin that helps oth­ers pro­mote pro­grams (with­out hav­ing to get into the com­pli­cated world of datafeeds) and pocket their 2nd tier com­mis­sions for their trou­ble — im sure you could even nego­ti­ate a higher 2nd tier, espe­cially if you achieved any­where near the suc­cess of sunshine.co.uk’s plugin