Affiliate Program Standards

The Royal Plugins affiliate program is built around quality, not volume. We’d rather pay one strong affiliate well than chase fifty links from sites we’d be embarrassed to be listed on.

What we look for in an affiliate

You’re a strong fit if:

  • You publish original content that solves real problems for WordPress site owners, agencies, freelancers, or business owners.
  • Your audience is reachable, identifiable, and engaged — a newsletter, a YouTube channel, a podcast, a blog with traffic, an active social account, an agency client base, or a course/community.
  • Your site or channel looks like something you would trust if you landed there as a buyer.
  • You’re willing to actually try the products you recommend.

We approve all kinds of partners — bloggers, course creators, agencies, freelancers, YouTubers, comparison-site editors with genuine reviews, and consultants who recommend tools to their clients. There is no minimum traffic requirement, but there is a minimum quality bar.

Site and channel standards

If you’re applying with a website, your site must:

  • Have a clear focus and an obvious owner (an About page, a real name, a way to contact you).
  • Use a clean, readable design.
  • Make the primary content the primary thing on the page.

We will not approve sites that look like:

  • Ad-saturated layouts — pages where the article, navigation, and ads visually compete and the ad blocks dominate the layout.
  • Multiple stacked popups or modals — newsletter popups + “subscribe to notifications” prompts + chat widgets + exit intent + cookie banner all firing at the same time.
  • Browser push-notification prompts — sites that ask for “show notifications” permission on first visit are an automatic decline.
  • Mega-menu directory dumps — navigation listing dozens of unrelated categories (Hosting, Email, VPNs, Forex, Crypto, Insurance, etc.) where it’s clear the site exists to capture affiliate commissions across every vertical, not to serve a specific audience.
  • Coupon-aggregator or “free download” / nulled-plugin sites — anything that distributes paid plugins for free, hosts pirated or “GPL-relicensed redistribution” copies of premium plugins, or aggregates discount codes scraped from other sites.
  • AI-spun or scraped content — articles that read like they were generated to fill SEO slots, with no author, no opinion, no original screenshots or examples.
  • Made-for-AdSense content farms — high page count, low per-page substance, listicles assembled from web search results.
  • Sites built around fake reviews — “best X in 2026” pages where every item is rated 9.7/10 and every link is an affiliate link.

This isn’t an exhaustive list. If your site reminds us of one of the above, we’ll decline.

If you’re applying with a YouTube channel, social account, newsletter, or community, the same spirit applies: real audience, real engagement, real content. Bot followers, view-bought videos, and recycled clips are not it.

Conduct standards

Whether you’re approved or not, these apply to anyone promoting Royal Plugins products:

  • No trademark bidding. Don’t bid on “Royal Plugins”, “ForgeCache”, “SiteVault”, “Royal MCP”, “GuardPress”, “SEObolt”, “FormForge”, “Royal Affiliate”, or any of our product or brand names in Google Ads, Bing Ads, Meta Ads, or other paid channels.
  • No coupon-extension spam. Browser extensions that inject affiliate cookies at checkout are not permitted.
  • No self-referrals. You may not use your own link to purchase. We track this and reverse commissions automatically.
  • No incentivized clicks or cashback offers without our written approval.
  • No misleading claims. Don’t say a plugin does something it doesn’t. Don’t fabricate features, pricing, or results.
  • No comment spam, forum spam, or unsolicited DMs. Posting your link under unrelated YouTube videos, in WordPress Facebook groups against group rules, or in cold DMs gets your account terminated.
  • No bait-and-switch redirects. The page a user lands on should be the page you described.
  • Disclose your affiliate relationship when required by law in your jurisdiction (FTC in the US, ASA in the UK, etc.).

Review process

  1. We review your site, channel, or audience within 3–7 business days.
  2. We may email you to ask one or two questions if it’s not obvious from your application.
  3. If we approve, you’ll get a confirmation with your dashboard link and your unique referral codes.
  4. If we decline, you’ll get a short email letting you know. We don’t always provide a detailed reason.

If you applied and you’d like a second look after making changes to your site, you’re welcome to email us at [email protected] with a short note about what changed.

Why we’re strict about this

We make the products. Every affiliate placement is, in effect, an endorsement by us of where our products are seen. If you’re listed on a site that pops three modals and asks for notification permission, we are too — and that’s a brand decision, not just a marketing one. We’d rather have fewer, better partners.

Thanks for reading this. If you got this far, you’re probably a good fit.