Get the most from the Six Apart Affiliate Program

If you're a plugin developer or one of the many Movable Type community members who contribute by creating tutorials for the platform, there's some new opportunities to benefit from our recent launch of the Six Apart Affiliate Program. As we've mentioned, the Six Apart Affiliate Program pays you to recommend our blogging platforms to your site's visitors, and you earn 10% of the purchase price for any users who buy Movable Type licenses. How does that relate to your plugins? In many cases, the features that older plugins provide(d) date back to out-of-date versions of Movable Type, sometimes from years ago, when certain features weren't built into the system yet. If your plugins have been superseded by built-in functions that exist in Movable Type 3.2, there's a good opportunity for you to benefit while improving the experience for your users.

1. Update your plugin pages to remove (or make less prominent) the download links. This keeps new users from getting confused and installing plugins that might conflict with or even reduce the functionality of their blog.
2. Explain that the feature is available natively in Movable Type now. You may want to refer them to the appropriate Movable Type documentation page.
3. Sign up for the Six Apart Affiliate Program and direct your visitor towards your affiliate link to get both Movable Type and professional support.
4. Spend less time supporting people on old versions of your plugins and more time developing new features or working with your current clients.
5. ???
6. Profit!

In brief, if you've got old code lying around that people find by googling and you're not charging for support, there's a benefit to both you and your users in directing them to the right place. You make a few dollars, and the user gets professional support as well as all the benefits of newer versions of Movable Type. These tips also make sense if you have old tutorials which no longer apply. For example, if you explained how to make pretty URLs during the MT 2.x days, you can point out that MT 3.x and higher (including 3.2) include clean URLs by default, and that upgrading means dozens more helpful features as well. A great way to judge the value of this opportunity is to check your server logs to see which older pages of yours get the most visits, or to search for which of your pages on your site are ranked highest in search engines. (To do that in Google, just use the format http://www.google.com/search? q=site:example.com and replace the site URL with your own address.) If the links near the top show any of your plugin or tutorial pages, those are the ones to target first. We'll be posting more tips in the future about how to benefit from the Six Apart Affiliate Program, but this is one of the first, best ways to help yourself and your customers.