Blog Content Program

What This Recipe Does

This recipe creates a single program that pays a collaborator a commission when one of their bound blog posts influenced a sale. Attribution fires when the customer reads the post, not when they click a link, so the collaborator doesn’t need to distribute a tracking URL at all. The content itself is the tracking primitive.

That opens up a wider range of partnership structures than a link-based affiliate program supports. A guest expert you interview for a recap post earns on sales attributable to that interview without having to share a link. A creator you feature in a webinar recap earns when viewers read the post afterward. A writer contributing a long-form article on your site earns royalty on purchases from readers of that article, even if the reader found the article through search, email, social, or an AI recommendation with no referral click in the chain.

The program is also an insurance layer for AI-mediated commerce. Customers arriving from ChatGPT or similar tools frequently skip the affiliate click entirely but still land on and read the content before buying. The content view fires the attribution event whether a click ever happens.

Who It’s For

• Editorial sites and multi-author publications where writers expect credit for posts that moved readers toward a purchase
• Cross-promotional programs where guest experts, interview subjects, and webinar partners earn on sales driven by their recap content
• Content-driven e-commerce stores that want attribution to fire even when readers arrive from AI tools and bypass normal affiliate links
• Tight partnership tiers where a small group of collaborators each own a dedicated content piece and want attribution tied directly to that artifact
• Video and podcast partnerships where the creator’s content is embedded in a post on your site and the post itself carries the attribution binding

How It Works

When you apply this recipe, Siren creates a single program that listens for the boundPostUsed event. This event fires every time a reader lands on a blog post bound to a collaborator. When the reader later completes a purchase, Siren awards the commission based on the program’s resolver.

The binding between collaborator and post happens through WordPress’s native post author, so most setups need no manual configuration beyond adding each collaborator in Siren. Posts the collaborator publishes from that point forward are automatically attributable. You can also bind existing posts to a collaborator manually, which is useful for guest-authored pieces published under an editor’s byline or for transferring attribution when content changes hands.

Compared to a standard affiliate program, this setup removes the need for a click entirely. The collaborator doesn’t have to distribute a tracking link, the reader doesn’t have to click anything special, and agentic commerce flows that skip browser navigation still produce the engagement event when the customer reads the content on your site. Attribution binds to the artifact (the post view), not to a click that may never happen.

Commissions are calculated on line items with discounts subtracted and fees included, so the commission base reflects the actual revenue the order produced. Shipping and taxes are excluded.

Choosing the Right Attribution Model

The default for this recipe is newest-binding-wins, which matches how most affiliate programs treat multiple referral clicks: whichever collaborator’s content was read most recently before the sale wins the full commission. This is the simplest model and the right starting point for most programs.

You can swap the resolver to suit your partnership style. First-touch rewards the collaborator who introduced the customer to your content, even if other collaborators’ posts were read later. An evenly-shared pool credits every collaborator whose content contributed to the journey, regardless of order or frequency. A performance-weighted split scores collaborators by how many of their posts were read and divides the commission proportionally, so a contributor with three read posts earns more than a contributor with one.

Different partner tiers often deserve different models. You can run more than one of these programs side by side and scope them to different content categories or partner types so that newsroom writers, guest experts, and webinar partners each get paid in the way that fits their contribution.

{
  "version": 1,
  "name": "Blog Content Program",
  "description": "A commission program that pays collaborators when their content contributed to a sale. Attribution fires on content views, not affiliate link clicks.",
  "programs": {
    "blogContent": {
      "name": "Blog Content Program",
      "description": "Earn a commission on every sale where the buyer read one of your bound blog posts before checkout. No affiliate link required.",
      "incentiveType": "saleTransactionPercentage",
      "incentiveResolverType": "newestBindingWins",
      "units": "USD",
      "status": "active",
      "incentiveArgs": { "transactionPercent": 15 },
      "engagementTypes": [
        { "type": "boundPostUsed", "value": 100.0 }
      ],
      "transactionCompilers": ["includeLineItems", "includeDiscounts", "includeFees"]
    }
  }
}