Weebly Affiliate Program Review
We are continuing our series of articles consisting of reviews of affiliate programs. Today, we’re looking at everything you should know about the Weebly affiliate program.
You might have heard of Weebly before, at least in passing, even though it’s a bit less popular compared to similar services such as Wix or Squarespace, for example. Let’s take a look at whether recommending Weebly services to your blog or website audience might make sense for you.
Weebly Affiliate Program Review
What is Weebly?
Weebly is a highly convenient and easy to use website builder, which takes all of the technical hassle out of putting up a site or a blog. Its tool is highly user-friendly, which means that it will take a regular user less than one day to have everything up and running.
The problem with these website builders (including Weebly) is that they’re not really great for specific things. For example, when you recommend Weebly products to your readers, you need to be clear about what they can do with it.
From the information that we came across, it seems that Weebly is not really good for affiliate marketing, for example. You can’t use the same intuitive SEO tools that you can have access to on WordPress, for example, and that’s a significant drawback for someone looking to use organic search to increase their monthly unique visitor number.
On the other hand, Weebly is great for websites like portfolios, presentations, or even sites specifically designed for events and RSVP-ing to them.
The two main products that you, as a Weebly affiliate, are the website builder and the online store plan.
The website builder is available to everyone, and it’s even free if they aren’t bothered by that ‘weebly.com’ termination in the URL. The paid plans start at $5 per month for the most basic one and can go up to $25 depending on the features that Weebly users most need.
Some plans are actually pretty nifty in that with the Pro one, for example, that is priced at $12 per month, you get a free domain and also $100 Google Ads credit.
The Online Store plans are a bit more expensive with the lowest priced one costing $12 per month and the largest one being priced at $38.
You might ask yourself: what’s the difference between all of these plans? Well, when it comes to the Online Stores, it’s pretty simple. You are not allowed to have more than ten products in inventory on your website at the same time if you opt for the most basic plan, for example. So, your inventory should get a say when it comes to picking the right plan.
Joining the Weebly affiliate program
What we have to note about this affiliate program is that the company does not manage it by itself. Everything is handled by ShareASale, including the payments, the affiliate links, and any other marketing tools that you might come across there.
So, the first thing to do, if you are not already using ShareASale as a part of your affiliate marketing process, is to join the network. Don’t worry, it’s not complicated at all and you can get your reply in a matter of a couple of days.
The downside to having to join ShareASale is that you need to pay a small fee to have your application reviewed and if you happen to be rejected, you will never get it back.
Once you become a ShareASale user, you can utilize the platform to look for the Weebly affiliate program and then sign up using the network. Weebly will review your application and let you know if they have accepted you into the program in a matter of 2-3 days.
When all that is done, ShareASale is in charge of absolutely everything. The payments are usually sent out on the 20th of every month unless you opt otherwise and there will be a minimum payment threshold that you’ll need to have made from your commissions to be able to get your earnings.
How much can you earn with the Weebly affiliate program?
This is perhaps the most interesting section of this article since that is what most affiliate marketers want to know before joining a program.
You can make pretty decent money with the Weebly program considering that the commission rate is something to write home about — you get paid a flat 30% rate on all of the orders placed through your affiliate link. Best of all, the tracking cookie lasts for 120 days, so you have plenty of time at your disposal.
What we think could have made the Weebly affiliate program even better would have been a potentially recurring earning opportunity.
You’ll see in one of the sections that we will put together below that some programs do include this and they are quite popular for this reason (an example would be SEMRush, although it’s not in the same niche).
Even so, the 30% commission rate is pretty good, and we really can’t complain about the cookie duration. If someone gets the lowest plan available, which costs $5 per month and is billed for the whole year, you’ll earn $18.
If a person clicks on your affiliate link and then orders one of the highest priced plans, meaning the Business Pro one for online stores, you can earn around $40 to $50 off the bat. We’d say that something that makes this company easy to recommend and in turn, help you get conversions, is the wide range of plans available that cater to both complete news and people who want to open up their online shops.
Payment options
Weebly isn’t really a part of the payment process in that everything in this sense is managed by ShareASale. As one of the largest and probably one of the most trustworthy affiliate networks out there, ShareASale doesn’t have a bad reputation when it comes to processing payments.
As previously mentioned, you will be paid on the 20th of every month and there will be a waiting period of a couple of weeks before your commissions are approved.
The payment threshold for sending out the earnings to the affiliates is $50. Technically, it shouldn’t take you a really long time to get to this limit considering the calculations that we did above.
Read more: Top Australian Affiliate Programs
As for the payment options, there are three main ones that ShareASale uses — cheque, direct deposit, or Payoneer. What does that mean for you? Well, that means that even if you are based in a completely different country other than the United States, you can still promote Weebly products and get paid your commissions as any other US resident. In fact, it’s probably easier for you since you don’t have to supply ShareASale with any lengthy tax information, as an American would.
If you want your cheque delivered through FedEx, you will have to pay $20 for that, so that might not be the best payment option for anyone.
Pros and cons of being a Weebly affiliate
When it comes to reasons you should consider joining the Weebly affiliate program, there are quite a bit of them. The commission itself, along with the fact that you can get your reply in a short amount of time and you get to benefit from a 120-day cookie, are the most significant advantages you can benefit from.
To make things just a little better, you also get to work with a personal manager from the brand, which means that in case you run into any problem and you want to ask someone how you can fix it, whether that be a technical one or not, you actually have someone to get in touch with.
Joining the program doesn’t cost a single cent although you do have to pay for the fee for joining ShareASale if you aren’t a user of the platform.
When it comes to the cons, there sure aren’t a lot of them. We would have appreciated a recurring commission, but given that the plans are so budget-friendly, it’s probably very difficult for the brand to give this to the affiliates.
Another aspect that could be a drawback but the company doesn’t have any control over it anyway is the fact that this niche, the website builder/online store builder one, is pretty much overly saturated with competing businesses.
Some are cheaper or more intuitive, so you have no guarantee that you will be able to convince your audience to get a 1-year plan with Weebly. Moreover, these website builders are always in competition with WordPress, the world’s largest content management system.
Depending on the template that you install on your WP site, you can build the pages and design pretty intuitively, too.
How does the Weebly affiliate program compare to others?
While there are a lot of other options out there, we’d like to note that Weebly probably has one of the best commission rates in this niche. As you will see below, pretty much none of the following affiliate programs offer a 30% rate.
Bluehost
Bluehost is one of the top leading companies when it comes to web hosting and the neat thing about the brand is that they have many more products available. So, if you decide to become a Bluehost affiliate, there will be a fair share of products and services that you will be able to recommend to your audience.
As you can expect, the website builder and the plans including the domain and hosting are also budget-friendly on Bluehost, too, so you aren’t going to be able to make a fortune as an affiliate.
On the other hand, each referral will make you a $65 commission, which is considerably more than you can make with similar programs. And given the reputation that Bluehost already has across the world, you will have less of a hard time recommending it to your readers.
Flywheel
This is another website builder that has become more or less popular in the past few years.
The brand’s affiliate program is quite unique in that the commission rate that you can expect is entirely different. In fact, each referral will make you 3x the value of the monthly fee they have to pay for their plan — even if they get the yearly plan, that is.
For example, for managed WordPress hosting (yes, the website builder isn’t the only thing available here), the lowest plan is priced at $13 per month and billed at $150 per year. So, instead of you getting a percentage of the entire sum of $150, you’ll be paid 3 x $13, meaning $39.
WordPress.com
In case you didn’t know, WordPress also has an affiliate program, that is for their own site hosting services. It’s not as easy to set up a website with WordPress in that you either have to get the right plugin and template or use a separate website builder or theme that enables you to have good control over everything.
And with the largest plans, the only ones that allow you to customize everything and install plugins, for example, the cost is pretty prohibitive. A business plan is priced at around $500 for every two years, meaning a whopping $250 per year.
As an affiliate you will earn 20% out of the value of each plan that your audience purchases through your referral links.
On the one hand, that seems great since WordPress products or services cost a lot — but they also do not address an audience strictly composed of complete newbies. Learning how to use WordPress is very easy, but it does take some time.
Final thoughts
So, should you promote Weebly and join the Weebly affiliate program? If it suits your niche and audience, we’d say that the answer to this question is a clear yes.
The commission rate is pretty decent, you get a 120-day tracking cookie, and everything works through ShareASale, one of the most efficient and convenient affiliate networks out there. So yes, Weebly makes a great option for affiliate opportunities.
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Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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