WindowsKnowHow Affiliate Agreement

This agreement is designed with you in mind, as well as to protect WindowsKnowHow and our customers.

Affiliate Registration

You do not need to have purchased a WindowsKnowHow license in order to become an affiliate, although we do recommend that you buy a personal license in order to familiarize yourself with the product, regardless of which license you plan to promote (e.g. personal, team, corporate or enterprise). We do not offer free licences for affiliates, sorry.

We manually review and approve all affiliate registrations, which may take a few days, so we appreciate your patience. If approved, you’ll be given a unique referral ID that you can use to promote WindowsKnowHow via referral links. Check out your private Affiliate Area for detailed statistics on your referrals and commissions.

Commissions and payouts

You’ll earn 50% commission of the final selling price when a customer purchases a new WindowsKnowHow license using your referral link. Here’s the breakdown of earnings by each license level we sell:

Our Personal license sells for $29 – you earn $14.50.
Our Team license sells for $595 – you earn $297.50.
Our Corporate license sells for $1995 – you earn $997.50.
Our Enterprise license sells for $2995 – you earn $1497.50.

We also allow you to offer coupon codes of upto 20% as an additional incentive to your customers. Please note however that if a coupon code is used, it will reduce the commission you receive as you’ll earn 50% of the final selling price (after any discount codes have been applied). See the Discount Codes section below for further details. Please also check your private Affiliate Area for more details on how to create coupon codes for your customers/audience.

We pay out affiliate commissions in USD via PayPal in the last week of every month. We only pay commissions on purchases that are older than 30 days (in case the customer requests a refund within the first 30 days). The minimum payout balance is $50.00, so you will only receive a payout once your commission value goes above this. There is no maximum payout balance.

We do not allow referrals to be generated on your own purchases.

Here are the details of our program in summary:

To register as an affiliate you do not need to have an active WindowsKnowHow license, although it is recommended.
We do not give out free licenses to affiliates.
You’ll receive 50% commission of the final selling price for every new sale you refer. See the Discount Codes section below for more.
Minimum payout balance of $50.00, and no maximum payout (we pay in USD).
Commissions older than 30 days will be paid within the last week of each month.
Referrals are paid out via PayPal.
Referrals cannot be generated on your own purchases (this includes using a different email address).

Discount Codes

Affiliates can optionally request custom discount codes that are specific to their account, which they can pass on to their audience as an additional incentive to purchase a license through them.

Discount codes offer a percentage saving off our licenses and range from 10% to 20% (affiliates can choose how much discount they would like to offer within this range).
A single discount code can be created for all licenses (Personal, Team, Corporate and Enterprise) or separate unique codes can be created for each license. This is useful if you want to give different discounts for each license (e.g. you could offer 10% discount for Personal licences, 15% for Team licences and 20% for Corporate and Enterprise licenses.
Discount codes are account-specific so are unique to each affiliate. Therefore if a discount code is used during a purchase, the sale is automatically tracked to that affiliate, whether their referral link was used or not. Discount codes can therefore be used independently of affiliate links and will still be tracked to the associated affiliate.
Purchases made using your discount code will reduce your commission for that sale, as the 50% commission value applies to the final sale price (after all discounts have been applied). For example, if a customer purchases an enterprise licence using your 20% coupon code, they will pay $2396 and you will earn 50% of that – which is $1198. For this reason, coupon codes are completely optional and you can choose whether to give them to your audience or not.

Referral cookie lifetime:

When a potential customer clicks on your referral link, a cookie is stored in their browser to track your referral. The cookie is then stored for a generous 30 days to give your referred customers time to decide if they wish to purchase WindowsKnowHow, or ask us any pre-sale questions they may have.

A referral won’t be awarded if:

The customer uses a different browser to purchase than the one they originally used to visit our site (because the cookie does not exist in that browser).
The customer purchases after 30 days (because the cookie will expire).

Direct Link Tracking:

We use a feature called Direct Link Tracking, which allows you to skip the referral link (e.g. ?ref=123 or /ref/123) when you link to our site from your own https:// website. You can submit a direct link to your own website in the Settings tab of your Affiliate Area. We’ll review your direct link submission, and when it’s approved you’ll no longer need to use a referral link when linking to WindowsKnowHow.com directly from your site.

Note: Direct Link Tracking is only available if your site has an SSL certificate, and therefore the https:// protocol. We will only approve websites that are 100% owned by you.

Refunded purchases:

Referrals older than 30 days and in good standing (i.e. the purchase has not been refunded) will be included with each commission payout (if the commission balance totals $50.00 or over). If a purchase is refunded, a commission won’t be paid out for that referral.

We reserve the right to reject affiliate commissions for any reason. Commission rejections may occur for the following reasons:

The sale that the referral was based on was refunded
The method by which the referral was generated was in violation of our promotional policies (see below) or violated the spirit of the Affiliate Agreement.

Affiliate news and updates:

By becoming an affiliate you agree to receive emails from WindowsKnowHow. These emails will be sent to affiliates only, on an ad-hoc basis, and may include important information regarding the WindowsKnowHow affiliate program. These emails will also provide you with relevant news and updates to help you effectively promote WindowsKnowHow. As an affiliate you may be privy to embargoed or time-sensitive information in these emails (this information may only be promoted after an embargo is lifted).

Affiliate application rejection

We reserve the right to reject affiliate applications for any reason. We also reserve the right to choose whether we provide an explanation or reasoning for affiliate application rejection. Below are just a few reasons why an application may be rejected (this is not an exhaustive list):

Affiliate applications for websites that sell, advertise or engage in pornography, phishing scams, spamming, illegal business practices, or that include any material infringing on National or International Copyright will be rejected.
Affiliate applications for websites that we do not believe are aligned with our industry or business may be rejected.
Affiliate applicants with websites that re-sell any of our products will be rejected.
Websites considered inappropriate by WindowsKnowHow will be rejected.

Inappropriate websites:

The following types of sites are not permitted to become an affiliate: adult sites, sites that display adult material or banners, sites that promote violence, hatred or bigotry, sites that promote or engage in illegal activity, including (but not limited to), hacking, cracking, nulled, and warez sites. Affiliate applications for inappropriate websites will be rejected, and we reserve the right to choose whether or not to provide a rejection reason.

Questions regarding your application:

When you apply to become an affiliate we may email you at the email address you have supplied with some questions regarding your application. This may be because:

We didn’t understand something in your application, or,
We’d like to learn a bit more about how you will promote WindowsKnowHow and need a little more detail.

If we reach out to you and we haven’t heard back within 7 days, your application may be rejected. If your initial application is rejected, you are welcome to reapply to become an affiliate and provide us with more detail for reconsideration.

Dormant affiliate accounts

We hope you’ll stay with us and actively promote WindowsKnowHow to keep earning referrals. If we can help you come up with ideas on how to promote WindowsKnowHow, please let us know. An affiliate account is considered dormant if no visits have been generated after a 6-month period. A dormant affiliate account will be temporarily deactivated if no visits have been generated after 6 months.

WindowsKnowHow Affiliate Program Policies

Here are some examples of recommended ways to promote our site:

Tell clients, customers or friends about WindowsKnowHow, and give them your affiliate referral link.
Write a review or a blog post about our video guide and link to our site with your referral link.
Reach out to a broad audience with your social network accounts. Tweet about us on Twitter with your affiliate referral link, post about us on Facebook with your affiliate link, or communicate to your Linkedin
followers about the video guide with your affiliate link. Spam-free promotion is usually the best way to get more referrals.
Provide value to others by answering related questions on other sites with helpful responses, and using your referral link in your replies.

Non-recommended ways to promote our site:

Any type of spam is prohibited. Please respect the posting rules of any 3rd-party websites you use to promote WindowsKnowHow.
Any illegal activity or activity deemed offensive by us is prohibited. This may result in referrals being rejected and/or your affiliate account being deactivated.
Pretending to be professionally associated with WindowsKnowHow. Affiliates aren’t employees of WindowsKnowHow and have no employee rights.
Pretending to actually be WindowsKnowHow 1000% prohibited.Cloning our site, copying our site, using our copyrighted site assets, and pretending that a site created by you is an official WindowsKnowHow site is unethical and prohibited (this includes using services that automatically clone websites, or place them into iframes).
False promotion to customers that you are endorsed or operated by WindowsKnowHow is prohibited.

If you’re unsure or concerned that some activity you’re about to proceed with may be considered prohibited, please ask us.

Consequences of non-recommended promotional methods:

If your promotional methods step outside of these terms, your referrals may be rejected and we may disable your affiliate account. We reserve the right to do this and may or may not notify you in the instance that this occurs. Please use allowed promotional methods, and help us to help you succeed as an affiliate!

Inappropriate websites:

The important stuff:

By accepting these terms and conditions you are providing your nonlegal agreement to abide by them. By registering and being approved as an affiliate in our affiliate program you agree that your commissions are subject to approval before they are accepted and subsequently paid.

The affiliate relationship does not represent a professional or formal agreement, and as an affiliate you are not an employee of WindowsKnowHow. You agree that this is not a legally binding relationship and as a result may not take legal action against WindowsKnowHow. These affiliate terms and conditions are subject to change without notice.

We appreciate you taking the time to read through these T’s and C’s and for agreeing to them. We look forward to having you on board.