Affiliate master guide_en

Affiliate
Master Guide
HELPING YOU BECOME A
SUCCESSFUL SITEGROUND AFFILIATE

3Affiliate Master Guide
GET STARTED AS
A SITEGROUND AFFILIATE!
We’re happy to have you as a SiteGround affiliate! This master
guide is designed to help you easily get started with our Affiliate
Program, learn how to set up your campaigns, monitor your
stats, and use the most effective affiliate marketing tactics to
unlock the earning potential of your site.

Get started
1/ Set up your affiliate account
Set your payment preferences
Provide required documents
2/ Your affiliate link in action
How to refer clients and get paid
Promotional banners
Sign-up screenshot images
How to create custom link campaigns
Advantages of custom link campaigns
Tips for effective affiliate promotion
1/ Channels to promote SiteGround
2/ How to place banners that generate clicks
3/ How to write content that converts
4/ How to write a SiteGround review
Tracking, commissions & statistics
1/ Commissions report and sales statuses explained
2/ How to read your Conversions report to increase sales
Monitor the performance of a single campaign
Compare multiple campaigns
How to get support
Table of Contents
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26
29
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33
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35

Get Started
As a SiteGround affiliate, you have your own Affiliate area where
you can quickly manage your affiliate links and banners, track
your payouts and stats, and get support — all from one place.
We can assure you, being a SiteGround affiliate is easy. But
before you start referring clients and earning commission, we
want to help you lay the groundwork for your affiliate marketing
efforts. Let’s start!

Each SiteGround affiliate is required to provide and
to keep their valid payout details up-to-date. This
way, we will be able to successfully process your
commission earnings when due.
Log into your Account and go to the Affiliate tab >
Payout Details menu. From there, make sure the
payout details you have provided upon signup are
correct and up-to-date, or update them with valid ones.
Affiliate commissions are paid via PayPal and it is the affiliate’s sole
responsibility to have an active PayPal account on file. This will
guarantee that your commission is successfully processed.
You can set a payout threshold from the Minimum Payout Amount.
If you don’t manage to reach the limit within a calendar year, we will
process your commission anyway. If you don’t specify a threshold,
payment will be issued upon each approved commission.
For affiliates who generate high commission volumes, we provide
the option for Wire transfers. Note that when using Wire as a
payment method, the default minimum threshold is 5000
EUR/USD/AUD/GBP (depending on your currency).
Set your payment preferences
1 Set up your affiliate account
digitaldeepking.com

US Persons (individuals and business)
You can find the form W-9 in My Account > Affiliate > Payout Details
> Tax Documents. For your convenience, we have pre-filled the form
with data you have already submitted upon signup. Simply review
the info, make the necessary changes, sign it, and submit it.
Provide required documents
Depending on your billing country, there are some
additional documents and/or tax information that you
might be required to submit before we can pay out
your commission.
EU Entities
Businesses have to provide their VAT or TAX ID number and
individuals are required to provide personal identification number
or VAT if VAT registered.
Non-US and non-EU individuals or businesses
Non-US and non-EU citizens or businesses are required to submit
a form W-8. For individuals, the W-8BEN form is integrated into the
Payout Details section in My Account.
For business entities, the W-8BEN-E form should be downloaded,
filled in, signed up, scanned, and uploaded in My Account > Affiliate
> Payout Details > Tax Documents. Note that you need to make sure
Form W-9
VAT or TAX ID
Form W-8BEN

Spanish Freelancers & Professionals
As a Spanish professional, you need to provide a declaration for
your tax registration with MOD 037 or 036 form as well as your
latest Social security receipt to avoid payout interruptions.
Note that if your economic activity started less than three years ago,
you can also take advantage of a lower 7% tax by providing a Start of
Economic activity statement.
All documents should be scanned and uploaded in My Account >
Aﬃliate > Payout Details > Tax Documents.
Businesses are required to provide only their CIF number.
Please note that if we are unable to process your
commission for a period of 6 months due to
inactive/invalid PayPal account or lack of billing
documents, commission will be cancelled.
that the details in the form match the information in the Login &
Proﬁle section. Any discrepancies will invalidate the form.
Once you upload your documents, they will be reviewed by our
Financial team, and we will contact you if additional details are
needed.
MOD 037/036 and Social security receipt

When a client clicks on your unique link and lands on our site, your
affiliate code gets recorded in a cookie within the client’s browser. The
SiteGround cookie is stored for 60 days, so if the user you referred
makes a purchase in this period, the sale is credited to you.
If you plan to send clients to SiteGround, the first thing
you need to do is get your unique referral link. This link
contains a special tracking code which helps us track
the sales you refer to us.
You can easily find it in your welcome email, as well as
in My Account > Affiliate > My Campaigns > Default
Campaign. Copy it and place it on your site, social
media, or other platforms where potential clients would
click.
2 Your affiliate link in action
How to refer clients and get paid

If you recommend SiteGround on your website, banners do a great job
of supporting your main promotional content. They are colorful and
attention-grabbing and if you put them on multiple pages across your
website, they will entice visitors to click.
How to choose a banner for your site
If you’re not sure which banner to use on your site, we recommend
you choose the banner message that best fits your visitors’ profile!
We have a variety of banners to suit different users like WordPress
users, WooCommerce site-creators, banners tailored to beginners or
migrating clients, and more.
SUITABLE FOR BEGINNERS SUITABLE FOR MIGRATING CLIENTS
Promotional banners
SUITABLE FOR WOOCOMMERCE SHOPS SUITABLE FOR WORDPRESS USERS

Banner sizes
Fоr your convenience, we have made different banner dimensions
so you can easily get one that perfectly fits your website layout. The
preset dimensions are currently considered the trendiest and most
effective in web design. Of course, the bigger the banner, the more
visible it will be, but you still have to balance its weight over your
main content.
If for some reason, you cannot find the right size for your site, post a
ticket in our Help Center with details about the desired dimension
and design, so we can customize it for you.
How to embed a banner on your site
To copy the banner you have chosen for your affiliate campaign,
simply click on the Get Banner Code button. From the pop-up
window, copy the code and embed it on your website where you
want it to appear.

Users building a website for the first time might find it hard to order a
domain and hosting, especially if they have no previous experience with
website management. Explaining how to sign up and providing them
with a walkthrough of the order process will significantly increase your
chances of converting these visitors into clients.
For this purpose, we have prepared ready-to-use screenshots of the
signup process which you can directly copy and use as part of your
affiliate content. To make it even more useful, you could provide your
visitors with a comparison of our main hosting plans and the included
features.
Then, guide them to choose a domain, the closest data center to their
own audience, and tell them about the benefits of our additional
services available to them upon order. Your visitors will be happy to
read your honest opinion and recommendations, so they can make an
informed decision and select the plan that best suits their needs.
Sign-up screenshot images

To begin, from the first drop-down menu, choose a Campaign Region
which determines if the link will redirect the visitors to our global,
Spanish, Italian, or UK website.
The campaign is a custom affiliate link attached to a landing page and
optionally, a banner. You can easily create campaigns from My Account >
Affiliate > My Campaigns > Add New Campaign.
How to create custom link campaigns

Then, choose a Campaign name that will let you easily identify this
campaign in your reports so that you can monitor its performance. Next,
select a relevant SiteGround Landing page that the campaign will lead to.
If you want to add a landing page of your choice, select the last option
listed in the drop-down menu: Other SiteGround page and write the
desired URL. If you wish, you can also add a banner to your aﬃliate
campaign from the Banner usage menu and select a banner language,
price, and size below.

Depending on where your main traffic is coming
from, you can choose a Campaign region that utilizes
the respective local domain. If you have mixed traffic,
we recommend you to use our main domain
(siteground.com) as it automatically redirects Italian,
Spanish, and UK traffic to the respective local site.
You can choose the most suitable website on which your
visitors could land, depending on their country of residence.
Once you’re done setting up your new campaign, click Create Campaign.
Then, copy its code and embed it on the page of your website where
you’d like it to appear.
If you are exclusively targeting Italian, Spanish, or UK traffic, we
recommend you create campaigns linking to the local domain.
Advantages of custom link campaigns

Let’s say you have two articles on your blog: one comparing WordPress
hosting providers and another one on how to start a WooCommerce
website. In this case, we strongly suggest you don’t send all your traffic
to our home page but fine-tune the landing pages. For example, send
the traffic coming from the WordPress article to our WordPress Hosting
page and the one from the WooCommerce article to the Managed
WooCommerce Hosting page.
Custom link campaigns help you make the most out of your
promotional efforts by letting you separately track the performance of
the mediums you use (blog posts, emails, social media, etc.). You will be
able to get meaningful stats and draw conclusions about what type of
Campaigns let you track the performance of different
channels separately
Campaigns help you serve the right landing page to the right
target group
Sending your visitors to the most relevant landing page
increases your chance of converting them into clients.
siteground.com – best to use it when you have traffic from all over the
world as it will automatically catch the visitor’s region and display prices
in the appropriate currency (USD, EUR, or AUD) depending on which
country the user is coming from.
siteground.es - strictly caters to our Spanish traffic and displays prices
in EUR.
siteground.co.uk - handles UK traffic and displays prices in GBP.
it.siteground.com – best for all-Italian traffic and displays prices in EUR.

Campaign links are also quite handy for developers, vloggers, and other
professionals who need to share a shorter and an easy-to-remember
link directly with their audience. It could also contain your brand name,
so instead of the long default campaign link, you can create something
like siteground.com/go/yourbrand.
You can create short and easy to remember links
content and platforms work for you. We go into more detail about
tracking the performance of your campaigns in the Tracking Section.
16

Tips for effective affiliate
promotion
Effective affiliate promotion can be achieved using a mix of
techniques and promotional formats. In order to create
successful affiliate content, you need to utilize different
channels, display the promotional content in a proper way, and
provide tailored and truly valuable information to your
audience. We go into more detail about achieving that below.

If you are serious about making money online, you
most likely have a website already. This is a great
starting point to position SiteGround with a banner
or fresh content and begin to drive traffic our way.
As we’ve seen time and time again, blogging is one
of the most effective ways to start generating
affiliate income. Create reviews, comparison blog
posts, or educational content about website
management and optimization. More details about
how to create valuable content will follow.
1 Channels to promote SiteGround
Your site
Blogging
If you have a list of subscribers, you can leverage
this medium too. Sending emails is an excellent
method to incentivize your subscribers to read more
about SiteGround and eventually purchase a service.
During a promotion like BlackFriday or
CyberMonday, it’s best to focus on this with a
dedicated email or a series of dedicated emails to
boost results.
Email

In recent years, a big part of content marketing has
shifted to video and streaming. So consider using this
marketing channel. You can create educational videos
for your visitors on how they can start and manage
a website using the handy set of tools and services
SiteGround provides.
Promote to your fans
If you have a big following, you can promote new posts, features,
and deals directly to your followers.
Promote to groups
There are multiple groups on social media that focus on website
creation for different niches — from travel and fashion bloggers to
ecommerce stores. You can use these groups to promote affiliate
content or your services together with SiteGround.
Social media ads
To reach an even more narrowly-targeted group of people, you can
also run social media ads. Display them to people with specific
interests or to fans of related pages to promote your own content
even better.
Social media is diverse and so are the opportunities
to promote there, whether you take advantage of
your existing followers, participate in groups or use
paid ads. Here are some ways to take advantage of
social media.
Social media
Video content

If you are an experienced developer or designer and
you feel comfortable sharing your knowledge, you
can try expanding your affiliate marketing reach by
teaching others. Create courses to educate people
on the basics of building a site and elevate the topic
to explain more advanced features. You could also
consider running a course on your own website, a
YouTube channel, or via platforms like Udemy and
Skillshare.
Courses
If you offer a service or a product supplementary to
hosting, you are most probably having regular
conversations with clients who reach out to you for a
quality host recommendation. In these cases, you
can simply explain what makes SiteGround so special
and share your affiliate link directly with them.
Direct recommendations

2
How to place banners that
generate clicks
Place ads next to relevant content so they can grab
the attention of your readers right away. For example,
if you have a blog post about optimizing an online
shop, apart from recommending SiteGround and our
ecommerce tools in the text, you can also place our
dedicated WooCommerce banner at the beginning of
the post, inside of it, or next to it.
Proper placement
Users usually scan a page within seconds to determine whether it
provides the information they are looking for. Placing banners above
the fold increases the chance to get your banner seen within these few
precious seconds.
Another key step for eﬀective aﬃliate promotion is placing your banners
in strategic ways across your website so they convert and achieve optimal
click-through rates. There are several guidelines for displaying banners
that you may want to consider:
Make sure you don't overcrowd your site with
multiple banners and promo messages. The fewer
there are, the easier it will be for users to grasp the
information and take action. If you are looking for
more detailed information, we recommend checking
out Google’s guidelines for banner placements here.
Keep it plain and simple

Speak to their needs
Content is definitely king when it comes to affiliate
marketing. Craft your content first and foremost for
humans and then for search engines.
The SiteGround Affiliate Program has been operating for over 11 years
and we know from experience that solid content has the biggest
potential to drive most affiliate sales compared to other methods.
Luckily for you, recommending SiteGround is easy. We offer high-class
hosting services that won’t fail your customers and also, all SiteGround
plans come with tons of great features that you can promote.
One of the most fundamental parts of creating quality
content is being able to put yourself in the shoes of
your audience and offer a solution to a problem they
are facing.
For example, if you have many visitors who complain from poor site
speed, you can easily recommend SiteGround for the great speed
enhancing solutions we offer. We have an in-house caching tool called
SuperCacher which speeds up clients’ sites drastically. We also offer a
free CDN that makes sites load super fast from any part of the world.
These are just some of the many solutions SiteGround offers and that
could be advantageous for your visitors.
3 How to write content that converts

When you write content based on your personal
experience, your message is more convincing and
your visitors are more likely to trust you. Tell your
own story and show the users you are
recommending SiteGround for its high quality.
If you want it to be persuasive, don’t stick to just one
piece of content. Undoubtedly, your audience is
interested in multiple topics that revolve around
website building and management.
Write a wide range of content
Personalize your content
If you are not familiar with our service yet, we offer a 1-month free trial
to all our affiliates. You can activate the promotion from your Home Page
> Success Tips and Suggestions where you need to look for the tip Try
Our Hosting and Gain First-Hand Experience.
If you have migrated to SiteGround, for example, you can let users know
how this helped you improve your site’s performance or let them know
you’ve tested SiteGround’s hosting and share the reasons why you love
our service.
For example, you may start a series of articles where you explain how
your visitors could first build a website with WordPress, WooCommerce,
Weebly or another application and move to topics like SEO optimization,
marketing, speed optimizations, security tightening, etc. With all these
topics, you could successfully plug SiteGround as web hosting plays a
huge role in site performance and you could recommend SiteGround as
the go-to host.

To make it easier for you to produce affiliate content, we’ve prepared
a list of ideas for you to consider:
Write an in-depth SiteGround review
The easiest start is by writing a review of our services. What kind of
hosting solutions we offer, what is included in our plans and why our
service is recommended by so many people. We go into more detail
to give you ideas on how to create a better SiteGround review
further down in this guide.
Create “Why I switched to SiteGround” post
A specific type of SiteGround review could feature your migration
process to our platform. Give you visitors details on how you
decided to move to SiteGround and how your transfer went.
Create a comparison post
Create a post where you compare SiteGround to one or multiple
competitor brands and show, for example, how our hosting offers
more and comes at a great price than other similar hosts.
Create a performance test post
You can use pingdom.com or another website performance
monitoring tool to showcase the fast-loading speed of SiteGround
hosting when our SuperCacher plugin is enabled.
Publish a post on service alternatives
When starting out, many people aren’t sure if they should use a
sitebuilder platform or open source application like WordPress for
building their site. You can create helpful content for those people,
showing them the advantages of building a site with SiteGround
where they have a choice among various apps, such as the widely
used WordPress and Weebly.

Add SiteGround to your Resources page
Users who see you as an authority want to know the tools and
services you use and recommend. Many of them will look for this
information in your Recommended Resources page.
Include SiteGround as part of a related content post
Mention and add your unique referral link in articles related to our
services and tools. Some suitable topics are SEO, website
performance, website security, staging websites, caching, etc.
Include a SiteGround recommendation as part of a listicle
For example, list posts like “Top Themes for ...” can be a great place
to add a referral link. Users looking for theme recommendations are
probably looking for a hosting, so you can easily feature SiteGround.
“Best/recommended tools to use for...” type of post
You can write a post about the tools and services recommended for
online shops and mention SiteGround. Online shops are just one
example, but you can choose to write about any type of business
and still plug our hosting. In all cases, you can feature SiteGround as
the go-to hosting because of the variety of plans we oﬀer which
allow us to accommodate sites of all sizes and purposes.
Review and write about new tools we launch
At SiteGround, we constantly invent our own speed and security
solutions and make service enhancements. Make sure you follow
our blog, social media, and newsletter to stay in the loop with
information about new tools we launch.
Create a walk-through tutorial
Sometimes a simple recommendation is not enough to persuade a
client to purchasing a service, especially when you target beginners.
In these situations, it’s best to provide them with a step-by-step
guide on how to purchase a hosting account, install WordPress, add
a theme, etc.

Widely recognized unmatched support
WordPress expertise and solutions
If WordPress is the application you are promoting, let
users know that we offer managed WordPress service.
We develop many powerful solutions for WordPress
in-house such as the WordPress Starter, WordPress
Migrator, SG Optimizer and more.
The best advice we can give you to make your reviews
convert into sales is: focus on our quality service and
translate all the great features we offer into benefits for
the clients.
One of the things that sets us apart from other web
hosts and can be easily tested even if you are not a
client is our top-rated Customer Support Service. Our
fast and knowledgeable team is happy to help clients
with their hosting issues 24/7 on three channels: chat,
phone, and tickets and in 3 languages.
Reviews are among the most popular pieces of affiliate content and
have proven to be good at generating traffic and conversion. We have
made a list of content topics which you could use in your review.
4 How to write a SiteGround review

You can emphasize that our support is knowledgeable and able to
provide assistance on a wide range of WordPress issues (something
which most web hosts don’t provide). Last but not least, we are
recommended by both WordPress.org and WooCommerce as one of the
best WordPress hosting providers.
We also make sure our clients take advantage of the latest speed
technologies: QUIC, HTTPS, latest PHP versions, and more. On top of
that, all our plans come with free Cloudﬂare CDN, which makes sites load
super fast from every part of the world.
To provide clients with the fastest hosting
infrastructure for their sites, we have built our platform
on Linux containers with SSD disks. We developed our
own web-caching service, called SuperCacher to further
boost the sites’ loading speed.
Optimized for incredible speed
Proactive approach to security
At SiteGround, we’re serious about website security and uptime. We
develop solutions to protect clients’ sites on three levels: application,
server, and network. Our security team maintains a Web Application
Firewall (WAF) with custom rules that stop numerous third-party
software vulnerabilities.
In the past year, we’ve added over 300 custom security
rules to protect clients' sites. We have also built an
in-house AI Anti-bot system which blocks millions of
brute-force attacks every day.

Free website migration
Our experts can handle everything and ensure a smooth transfer to
SiteGround for all clients on GrowBig and higher plans. We also offer
the free WordPress Migrator tool for users on the StartUp plan.
Easy start for beginners
The WordPress Starter plugin guides users through a quick and easy
installation process for WordPress, including selecting a theme and
installing essential plugins on their new website.
Developer tools
Recommend SiteGround’s advanced tools like Staging, Git, FTP, SSH,
and WP-CLI to more experienced people who can use them to
simplify their workflow.
Collaboration tools
Your audience can benefit from SiteGround’s handy collaboration
tools. If your referees are on GrowBig or higher plan, they now have
the option to add collaborators to their sites who can help them out
with site management. You can also promote SiteGround’s
white-label option, which lets customers give their clients access to
the Site Tools of a particular website so they can easily manage their
site on our platform. This feature is quite handy for developers and
web agencies, and is available on GoGeek and higher plans.
Depending on the type of clients you are after: beginners, clients of
other web hosts looking to migrate to a better service, or advanced
users, you can also highlight the fact that we offer:
Due to the fact we are nuts about security, all our plans come with
a free SSL certificate and free automated daily backups on all plans, so
clients can rest easy knowing their sites are backed up.
User-centric tools

Most of your activity as an affiliate requires writing and promoting
content, but a key part of your efforts should also be analyzing
stats. We help our affiliates make the most out of their campaigns
by providing them with detailed reports. Find yours in My Account
> Affiliate > Reporting once you start generating sales.
There, you have two types of reports. The Commissions report
shows stats about all generated sales and their status.
The Conversions report depicts stats about clicks generated to our
site, sales, and conversion rates. You can see the information from
the conversion report visualized in the Performance graph section.
Tracking, commissions &
statistics
29

The Commissions report section gives you a quick access to detailed
information about your sales and their current status, your commissions,
the campaigns you’ve used, and more. You can apply filters and different
search criteria to extract the insights you’re looking for.
Commissions report and
sales statuses explained
1
Our affiliate system has a live tracking, so the minute a sale that qualifies
for an affiliate sale is registered, it will appear in your Commissions
report with a status Pending. You can get stats split by different sale
status from the Status drop-down menu.

In Pending status are sales that are currently within
the standard withhold period of 30-days (for standard
sales), and 60-days (for 1-month and cloud hosting
sales). Once the withhold period is over, they are
reviewed and can either get Extended or Approved.
Pending
Approved
Sales that are marked Approved meet our
requirements. They have been reviewed by our team,
and will be paid out depending on your payment
settings.
Sales which don’t meet our requirements yet, get
Extended for 30 more days in order to get reviewed
again, and eventually approved. Instead of simply
cancelling sales that don’t meet our requirements,
we extend them up to 3 times, as we understand that
there may be a wait period between the purchase
moment and the actual activation and usage of the
hosting account.
Extended

Commissions for sales marked as Paid have already
been processed and paid to you.
Paid
Cancelled
In status Cancelled are sales which have been
cancelled by the client within the 30-day money back
guarantee period or by our Affiliate Team as it didn’t
meet the criteria for approval.
If your sale is not tracked, you can easily check its status using the
Missing Sales tool in Help Center > Contact Us > Affiliate Support >
Missing Sale. Add the name, email, and domain of the client you referred.
If a sale is eligible for commission, it will be automatically credited to you.
For more information on what qualifies as an affiliate sale and our
approval criteria, please refer to our Affiliate Program Terms and
Conditions.

Monitor the performance of a single campaign
You can analyze how your campaign performed over
time. Choose a time frame and under Campaign,
select the desired campaign for which you want to
see more details.
In order to best use the statistics to your advantage and get meaningful
insights from them, it is vital that you track the performance of your
campaigns separately. You can draw that detailed info from the
Conversions Report.
If you have made experimental changes such as including a new
paragraph, changed the title or similar changes, you will be able to easily
see how these changes affected performance.
Successful affiliate marketing isn’t possible without proper
data analysis. Convert affiliate stats into meaningful
insights and take action accordingly.
How to read your Conversions
reports in order to increase sales
2

Or it could be the opposite. If a campaign has good conversion rates, but
low traffic and in turn, low sales, there are ways to promote it more
aggressively and increase the traffic to it.
This will quickly show you which campaign is driving the most traffic
and/or sales and how it converts. For example, if you see high traffic
from a campaign that underperforms in conversion rates compared to
other campaigns, you can think about how to optimize it and work on
increasing the conversion rate. Some of the common reasons for traffic
not converting well are:
The post could be driving low quality or irrelevant traffic.
Not sending visitors to the right landing page.
Lack of definite recommendation which confuses readers and
causes them to search for more info elsewhere.
You can easily see how different campaigns compare
to each other in terms of performance. Go to your
Conversions Reports, choose a time period, select All
under the Campaign menu, and choose Breakdown
By month or week.
Compare multiple campaigns

How to get support
Before reaching our Aﬃliate Support Team, you may be able to
ﬁnd answers to your questions in our comprehensive
Help Center. Note that you also have a quick access to support
articles on every page within your Account. Just click on the Help
drop-down and type your question if it is not included in the
suggested list of articles.

If you still need help, do not hesitate to contact us. Our dedicated team of
friendly Aﬃliate Support Experts will be happy to assist you. You can
reach the team from the Help Center > Contact Us > Aﬃliate Support.

Affiliate master guide_en

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