If you are blogger who spends hours researching and creating great content, and have no visitors it hurts, right? But now with all your hard work and after applying enough marketing strategies you are able to generate enough traffic who loves reading your content, but can’t monetize your blog it hurts even more! If you looking for making a career out of blogging then affiliate marketing is one such solution.
Affiliate marketing is the fastest growing advertising method as its cost effective for the advertisers and is the easiest way to make money online for the publishers. Affiliate marketing is a kind of marketing where you promote or advertise or recommend someone else’s product or services on your website or your blog. If your visitor happens to visit their website and make a sale from that promotion, you will earn a fraction from it as a commission. The success of your affiliate marketing depends on a lot of factors including but not limited to how many daily visitors your website gets and the way you recommend affiliated products/services on your website.
When it comes to blogging platforms, WordPress is so far my favorite as everything is so easy with it. WordPress has been nominated as the best blogging platform by the top 100 blogs. You can find pre-made themes for any niche like News & Media Themes, Real Estate Themes, Business & Corporate Themes and much more. You can also find ready to install and use plugins ranging from social media to eCommerce. If you take your time and do the research you can also find free themes and plugins from the web.
Now that you have decided to monetize your blog, let me share some affiliate marketing plugins that you can use on your WordPress blog to easily manage your links.
Premium Plugins
1. Wordpress Affiliate & Referral Links
A premium plugin to manage all your affiliates and referral program and monitor it all through their Android app. Main features of the app are:
– Enables affiliates to share their links via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.
– Integrated PayPal MassPay option to handle affiliate payments
– Works with standalone WordPress, WooCommerce, WP e-Commerce or any other plugin that uses the default WordPress registration process.
– Real-time reporting and statistics based on month or user
– An Android app to monitor your affiliates
Single Site Use – $20
2. EasyAzon
Easy Azon is a powerful tool specially designed for people who want to make money via Amazon affiliation. Important features of this plugin are:
– you can create any type of affiliate link right from your dashboard
– enables user to set DoFollow/NoFollow option, “Open In New Tab” option from the settings section
– Localization of links based on the location of the visitor, which will redirect the reader to appropriate Amazon website
– option to create product popups to grab visitor’s attention
– “Add to Cart” feature which lets the visitor add the product in there basket, so you will have extra 90 days to earn commission on that product as it will stay in your visitor’s cart.
Multi Site Use – $47 | Developer Site Use – $67
3. Better Links Pro
This plugin created by Chris Guthrie, the same guy who created EazyAzon – Amazon Affiliate Plugin. The highlighted features of this plugin are:
– Convert long ugly affiliate links in short URLs from the post editor
– Keyword Replacement. Auto inserting affiliate links by defining the keywords
– Full control over link redirection. Option to select from single-destination, multi-destination (redirects are split between multiple URLs) or Geographic-destination ( redirect visitor based on the location)
– Enables user to set DoFollow/NoFollow option, “Open In New Tab” option from the settings section
– Advanced tracking for better analytics and monetization
Multi Site Use – $27 | Developer Site Use – $37
4. Amazon eStore Affiliates Plugin
A premium plugin with tons of unique features for individuals who aim to make a living via Amazon Affiliates. The highlighted features of this plugins are:
– “Automated Amazon Content Spinner” module that will automatically spin the content using thesaurus that comes from Amazon upon import to prevent Google from finding your content as duplicate.
– thesaurus are available in different languages (English (amazon.com , amazon,co.uk, amazon.ca), Dutch (amazon.de), France (amazon.fr), Spain (amazon.es)) to support various domains.
– “Products Stats module” which provides insights on products and shows how many time was it clicked, added to the cart and how many redirects to Amazon were made.
– Execellent search feature to search by category, sub-category and keyword. Also lets you filter by Brand, Condition, Price, Rating, etc.
– Bulk upload option to import mass products via CVS upload
– Facebook integration to showcase your store to an established community on social media.
– 90 day cookie feature which keeps the product in the cart when user is redirected to Amazon, boosting your conversion so you can make more money.
Single Site Use – $36
Free Plugins
5. ThirstyAffiliates
This is a great tool to manage your affiliate links all in one place. I recommend that every WordPress blogger who use affiliate marketing as a source of income should use this plugin as its well maintained by its creators and provides all necessary features that a good plugin must have.
Some of the main features offered by this tool are:
– Link Cloaking to hide those long URLs with extra characters attached to the main URL. Which means ( the ugly looking www.techotics.com/c70daf247944fe3add32218f914c75a6 becomes nice and simple looking www.techotics.com/recommends/ThisrtyAffilates).
– Handy link picker to quickly search and/or insert links into posts.
– Easy option to quickly add new links to the post
– Autolinker to automatically insert links
– full import and export from other platforms
– link analytics to see how the links are performing on the website.
In the master setting options is give you flexibility to:
– sort your links into categories for easy access and better organization.
– add DoFollow/NoFollow option
– Open in new window options
It provides all these features in the free version and also has a paid version with extra add-ons.
6. Easy Affiliate Links
A very simple plugin that does the basic job of affiliate linking. The basic features of this plugin are:
– link cloaking by creating shortlinks
– Option to categories your links for better organization
– Easy option to add links from Visual and HTML editor
– Lets you track your monthly and lifetime clicks.
– Easy affiliate link import and export from XML.
According to their WordPress plugin page they are updating the plugin soon with a few, yet important new features like Link analytics, Geospecific links, A/B testing for link text, Broken links checker.
7. Pretty Link Lite
A clean and easy to use plugin to create beautiful looking short URLs. Some of the features worth mentioning are:
– create clean and simple URLs
– URL shortening using your own domain (no need to use the 3rd party services like tinyurl.com, bit.ly, etc.)
– Track clicks and unique clicks on the links
– Provides detailed information like: where the hit came from, the browser, OS and host.
8. Affiliate Link Cloaker
If your only objective with the links is to make them look pretty then this is your solution. This plugin will cloak those ugly looking URLs into a readable one. It generates geo targeted cloaked affiliate links and give you the option to add it in the post either manually or automatically if the keyword is pre-specified.
The only issue with this plugin is that it has not been updated in over 2-years and might not work with the latest version of WordPress.
9. Affiliate Manager
This is a plugin that works other way around. What I mean is that this plugin is suitable for those who want to run their own affiliate program. With Affiliate Manager you can
– Manage all your affiliates from your WordPress website
– Detailed tracking of impressions of affiliate links.
– Allows to pay all your affiliates from the website
– Integrates seamlessly with the most popular eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce, Simple WP Shopping Cart, WP eCommerce, WP eStore, Easy Digital Downloads, iThemes Exchange and many more.
– Supports unlimited
– Option to decide on the affiliate payment option: flat rate or percentage.
– Multiple Language support
10. Affiliates
Another easy to use plugin if you are looking to mange your own affiliate program. Most important features of this plugin are:
– automate and manual affiliate registration for new users
– unlimited number of registrations are allowed.
– integration with most eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce, Jigoshop, WP e-Commerce, Ecwid, eShop, and Contact Form 7.
– Real-time reporting to track referral and affiliate link analytics
– comes with an API fro easy integration to use with any eCommerce and Membership system.
This plugin also comes with Affiliate Pro – premium version and Affiliate Enterprise – enterprise version for those with more specific needs.
The premium version allows integration support for Pay per Click, advanced integration with eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce, Jigoshop, TheCartPress, WP eCommerce, eShop, Ecwid, PayPal and Events Manager, integrations with social sharing platforms AddToAny and AddThis Integrations with popular forms plugins include Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms andFormidable Forms and Formidable Pro.
The enterprise version, apart from giving access to all the features in the premium version also allows multiple tiers, campaigns and pixel tracking with image and iframe tracking pixels.
11. WP Auto Affiliate Links
A simple plugin which gives you the option to automatically add affiliate links based on the keywords you have specified in the setting section of the tool. The most important features of this plugin are:
– link cloaking for better readability
– auto insert affiliate links in the post based on the pre-defined keywords
– options to make the links nofollow/dofollow or open in same/new window
– you can control the frequency of the links on the page
12. Skimlinks Affiliate Marketing Tool
A pretty cool tool which reduces your effort in affiliate marketing while it works behind the scenes for you to do all the hard work as it will automatically link the keywords to the affiliates so you can monetize it. It has its own list of merchants (over 18,000), which lets them turn more links in your post/pages into their equivalent affiliate link earning you more commissions. Some important features of this plugin are
– Easy installation,
– Let you earn from your RSS feed,
– Increase the click through rates (as it only turn links into affiliate links when they are clicked) and thereby drive more traffic and visitors to your blog. This prevents your content from looking spammy or suspicious
– No need to maintain you links as its all taken care by the plugin. All you need to do is focus on creating great content for your readers!
To use this plugin you need to create an account with them.
13. Floating Banner Ad Rotator with Tracking
A great tool to display banner ad at the bottom of the page for affiliate sales. Important features of this plugin are:
– better monetization as the banner at the bottom of the page will be seen on the page all the time to your visitors.
– Track Banner Views, Clicks and Clickthroughs to analyze the performance
– you can use your own custom HTML
14. Amazon Link
If you are affiliating Amazon products then this plugin is what you need. It let you insert product links and images into your posts, pages or widgets. Here are the important features this plugin offers:
– Supports product links from Amazon UK, US, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, India, and Japan.
– Lets user manually enter the content of the product links.
– Auto translates the description based on the location of the reader.
– Automatically adds Amazon affiliate ID of the site author
– Search functionality allows the author to easily create links in posts or pages.
– Product detail caching to ensure lower load times.
15. Amazon Auto Links
Another affiliate plugin to help you monetize your product listings. Important features of the plugin are:
– Displays a list of relevant products that are up-to-date and will tag the links with your affiliate ID just by picking the most relevant categories based on your website
– supports 10 Amazon locales
– even works with browsers that have disabled Javascript.
– can be used to insert products in posts/pages or as widget.
– You can create your own templates as well (if you know programming : HTML, CSS and a little bit of PHP)
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing is a great way to monetize your blog and if you take it seriously you can make a good living out of it. You may not require a lot of skills or put in a lot of man hours to make money via affiliate marketing, but there is one thing to remember that its not a one-size-fits-all solution. When you are affiliate with a product or service and want to list it on your website, make sure not to sound pushy! You don’t to sound like: “Hey this is a great product, buy it!”. This is turn your visitors off. Share your real opinion about the product and genuinely try to help your readers. When they are reading your blog, it means they put your trust in you and you don’t want to break that!
I have tried my best to research and list the 15 best premium and free affiliate marketing WordPress plugins. Which plugin works best for you totally depends on your niche, what you are affiliating with and what your readers are looking for. Once you start with it, and don’t give up in between. Just keep on creating great content and you will see the cash flowing in!
Let me know in comments below what plugin do you use for your affiliate marketing and how is it working for you?
