Having looked at the blogging platform options for affiliates, it is only logical to continue the topic by looking at the top affiliate plugins and WordPress-friendly tools.
Below you will find my list of plugins and tools that affiliates use, and rate highly. The order is merely topical (network-offered plugins, plugins related to the import of data feeds, etc), and does not represent any sort of ranking.
Top 20 WordPress Tools and Plugins for Affiliates
- Affiliate Link Encoder from AvantLink – Detects and changes direct links into affiliate tracking links for the merchants that are in the AvantLink network.
- Commission Junction Product Search – Creates Commission Junction product listings within blog posts and pages.
- Clickbank Widget – Adds targeted ads for Clickbank products to your blog’s sidebar.
- LinkShare RSS DealFeed – Automatically populates your WordPress blog with deals and other promotional content.
- LinkShare AdMix – Helps integrate RSS content ads from LinkShare advertisers with your blog posts.
- PopShops Affiliate Store Plugin – Helps add products to your WP blog from any of the major affiliate networks (LinkShare, Commission Junction, ShareASale, buy.at, Google Affiliate Network, LinkConnector, WebGains, and even in-house based programs like that of Amazon).
- DatafeedR – They call it a “Factory where you build, modify and download your stores, as well as customer support, community forums, and video tutorials.”
- DataFeedFile.com Featured Product Plugin – Helps you add a product of your choice, or allows your blog’s visitors to compare prices across different merchants without leaving your blog.
- Skimlinks Affiliate Marketing Tool – Allows you to “instantly monetize untapped links on your blog.”
- 123Linkit Affiliate Marketing Tool – Transforming keywords into affiliate links.
- Pretty Link – Allows you to “shrink, track and share any URL on the Internet from your WordPress website” creating shortlinks “coming from your own domain.” Each hit is tracked with details “of where the hit came from, the browser, OS and host.”
- Affiliate Link – Another tool to shorten your affiliate links using your own domain name (and not any of the URL-shortening services). Tracking also provided.
- Ad Squares Widget – Helps you display and manage 125×125 ad square banners (and other sizes). Works “with standard affiliate ads, or even with ad network codes.”
- WP125 – A robust and popular ad management plugin for WordPress.
- Amazon Autoposter – Allows users to post products from Amazon.com in their own blogs (automatically, based on keyword match).
- Amazon Product In a Post Plugin – Help you “quickly add a formatted Amazon Product/Item to a post or page by using just the Amazon product ASIN (also known as the ISBN-10).”
- Amazon Affiliate Link Localizer – “Automatically changes any Amazon link on your site to use your affiliate ID” and “also changes the link to point to the user’s local (i.e. country-specific) Amazon store.”
- Amazon Store – Helps you quickly create your own Amazon affiliate store.
- Amazon Post Purchase – Based on the above-quoted Product In a Post plugin, but works with sidebars “in themes that support dynamic sidebars.”
- Amazon Product Link Widget – Another sidebar widget for Amazon product links/ads.
Have I missed your favorite plugin? Please post it about it below!
Tags: affiliate tool, WordPress plugins
Geno, what an amazing resource you’ve put together for blogger Affiliates. Thanks for the kudos on the ALE. I’ve seen the tool create a huge revenue stream for existing bloggers in a matter minutes after installing the ALE script in a wordpress header.
Click my name above to read about v2.
You’re certainly leading the charge in Affiliate industry blogging!
Gary-AvantLink
hi Geno..QUESTION..!!..CAN YOU RECOMMEND A COURSE ,,A BOOK OR A PERSONAL TRAINER THAT COULD TEACH ME TO EARN 6 FIGURE INCOME FROM AFFILIATE MARKETING..??
.I WOULD SERIOUSLY LIKE TO LEARN AFFILIATE MARKETING
so i can phase out my carpet cleaning job of 20 years..
i am ingorant as any one can be about Affiliate marketing,
and most of the A F marketers online just want you to buy their software
then leave you senselessly hanging in the dark only to feel you have wasted your money many times…
i want a business i can run on a laptop and travel from country to country…..thank billy myers..
Billy,
No one will “teach [you] to earn 6 figure income” if your CAPS are implying QUICK! But here’s a place for you to start your journey: How To Guide to Affiliate Marketing [for Affiliates]. Also, by the end of this week I will put together a list of online resources you can study/follow to learn affiliate marketing as an affiliate.
Thanks for your comment, Gary, and yes, AvantLink’s ALE is definitely an excellent tool for bloggers. Thank you for putting it together.
On a separate note, I believe that having WordPress plugins can create quite a competitive advantage of one affiliate network over another. Earlier this morning, as I looking at the affiliate plugins available, I was sadly surprised that none of my three favorite affiliate networks have proper WP plugins. With all of the amount of valuable blogging going around — Mommy Blogs, frugal living blogs, some amazing niche (industry/product-specific) blogs, etc. — this is just not an area for affiliate networks to ignore. There is still a lot of room for creating new, value-added, rich-in-features plugins.
Just today I have renewed my plan with Datafeedr. They have improved their system quiet a bit. In the past there was no way to filter our the products with missing images. Today it took me about 5 minutes to filter out about 500 products out of 5,000.
The downside of course is that your website needs to make the minimum of what it costs to use Datafeedr.
Thanks for that feedback, Vlad. I’ve never tried DatafeedR, but heard good things about them. Thanks again for that comment.
I have been recently impressed with how fast Blogsense is updating.
http://www.blogsense-wp.com/
I worry about link management within WordPress, the plugins don’t encourage centralized management.
Never heard of BlogSense. Gotta look into it some time. Thanks, Andy.
thanks Gene for another great post…it’s making waves on twitter in Romania
Sorry for misspelling your name Geno..that’s what happens when you think in two languages at the same time
No problem, Razvan, and glad you liked the post.
Thank you for this extensive list. I’ve heard of a few of them but hadn’t known there were nearly this many.
I’m especially interested in the Amazon plugins. One of my blogs has a decent earning through product reviews and mentions.
Murlu, you’re most welcome.
There are actually quite a few other ones too. I only picked the higher rated ones, and the ones I’ve heard good things about. You can find the other ones at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ (there are over 200 plugins if you search by the word “affiliate”).
Helpful list – thanks Geno.
A couple other data feed plugins that I blogged about yesterday:
CSV 2 POST and Easy CSV Importer
Thank you, Shawn. Those look really interesting.
Thanks for the list – I definitely will look into some of these for my & my husband’s affiliate sites
Glad to be of help, Trisha
Cool plugins! I am thinking of populating the sidebar of my blog and definitely, the CJ plugins will be helpful. Very good list of affiliate plugins!
Fantastic post. I already knew about skimlinks, but not that they had a wordpress plugin. Their indexing seems to take forever if you just add the code and wait – this might change things.
Thanks again!
Dave, Thomas, thank you for your comments, and glad you’ve found the list of help.
Hey Geno
We have a free plugin that is only a few weeks old and currently only UK focussed within mobile (cell) phones affiliate marketing (price comparison) but maybe you could check it out and see what you think? If anyone out there wants us to create a module for their comparison data then just get in touch especially if you are in the USA or Canada.
Great site and tweets too btw!
Will definitely check it out, Andy. Thanks for posting about it.
Looks like LinkShare has just updated their DealFeed plugin to include coupons from their Coupon Web Service [more here]
Thanks Geno for the mention!
We’ve got some pretty cool additions to our WP plugin coming out in the next few weeks. One function that’s worth mentioning is that we can auto-affiliatize merchant links within your RSS feeds too via our WP plugin.
@Thomas – I think you might be unclear about what Skimlinks does, as there is no indexing going on. Our base product converts existing merchant links in content into affiliate links automatically when clicked, so we don’t need to index your content at all. To parse a page takes under 5ms and the click/link rewriting process is very fast averages under 200ms. Very quick
You’re most welcome, Joe. Thank you for commenting, and addressing Thomas’ comment too.
Feel free to chime in again once the next version of your WP plugin comes out, outlining the key functions. “Auto-affiliatizing” of links within RSS feeds sounds like a cool one.
Geno –
Awesome list. Is there one that handles individual post ads? I need something that will show me ads on the HOME page and different ads on the actual post page.
Thoughts?
Good question, Mark. I would suppose that one of the 125×125 ad management plugins would have an option like that. You want to browse around. I don’t use any of the above, but included them here based on their rankings on the WP site, and judging by what I’ve heard about some of them from affiliates.
Hi Geno –
Thanks for the 123LinkIt mention! To provide a little more detail about our plugin, we allow bloggers to monetize their blogs without knowing the ins and outs of affiliate marketing. We sign up to the networks and programs, analyze the context of their blog posts, recommend relevant affiliate links for their content and convert them automatically.
Our next release includes intelligence & more automated features that will always optimize the keywords with the best performing advertiser and that will make it even easier and faster to use.
We’re currently in our pre-launch stage and we’re using the time to collect feedback from our users to improve the tool. Our goal is to turn the plugin into the most useful affiliate tool bloggers use. If anyone has feedback, we’d love to hear what you think.
Thanks again!
Best,
Yasmine, Founder of 123LinkIt.com
Very interesting, and thank you for your comment, Yasmine. So, bloggers that use 123LinkIt don’t have to sign up to networks and affiliate programs themselves, and everything is run through your affiliate account?
Hi Geno,
Thanks for responding!
You got it, we basically work as a sub-affiliate signing up for the programs ourselves, aggregating the commissions, and then pass them on to the bloggers. Our revenue model is performance-based and we’re currently taking a 15% cut out of the commissions we help generate.
The idea came from how long it took me to add affiliate links and banners to my posts. I couldn’t find a tool that cut down on my time AND managed the process for me so I decided to build it myself.
P.S. On the comment error, I think it’s because I used the a href rel=”nofollow” tag incorrectly. I’m using Chrome right now so if the comment goes through, that must have been it
Best,
Yasmine
Hi Geno
do you know a plug in which auto post product for a specific category you choose from Amazon and actually build up your blog content automatically?
i heared it is not free (around 240$) and was developed by a German developer but i cant find it.
How about a plugin that lets me create an affiliate program
I know that there are plugins to help integrate existing affiliate programs/platforms in your WP site (e.g.: Post Affiliate Pro WP plugin), but don’t know of any that would let you create an affiliate program as such, Christien.
If you have an existing high converting affiliate based site such as a price comparison site we might be interested in creating a module within our price comparison plugin and splitting the revenue with both you and our affiliates. We would take care of everything apart from the datafeeds which need to come from you
Get in touch if you want to know more.
Nice plug of your product, Andy.
It is a good one. So thanks for mentioning it.
Great list of plugins, glad you did the list of top 25 blog posts as I would have missed this post otherwise
Happy Christmas!
Thank you, David, and Merry Christmas (and Happy New Year) to you too!
Hi Geno
Thanks for your list! I will try some plugins, very useful for my plan !
Have a nice day !
One thing , can you help me ? which plugin you use to display widget Most Viewed Posts ? i tried many plugin but not good !
The plugin I use for that is called WordPress Popular Posts
Hi Geno,
I was wondering whether you could suggest a WP plugin for the following purpose:
As an affiliate (= content publisher), I’m looking for a solution that will track traffic from text links in PDF documents for various affiliate programs. I imagine it like this:
1. User clicks on a text link in a PDF document
2. User is directed to a landing page (on our website) where a cookie or other tracking is activated
3. After the tracking is activated, the user is immediately and without further action on the side of the user redirected to the destination web shop.
In one sentence, what I’m looking for is: A simple administration system for my affiliate text links which allows me as an affiliate to participate in various affiliate programs, regardless of the filetype in which my content is delivered.
Must-have features:
- The system must work with many different affiliate programs (e.g. Amazon, ClickBank, Commission Junction…) and tracking technologies
- After an affiliate program is set up in the backend of the website (that means: after inserting the line of code that will make the tracking work), adding of new product links must be possible for me as a publisher without programming knowledge. That means for example: After the programmer has set up the Amazon affiliate program on the landing page, I as a blogger can produce new PDFs with new trackable text to new product links on the Amazon website without having to consult the programmer again.
Nice-to-have features
- The redirect through the landing page should happen as quickly as possible. Ideally, the user doesn’t recognize the redirect at all but experiences it as direct click from the PDF to the destination web shop. If that’s not possible, a redirect can take up to 3 seconds and give a quick view of our logo with a friendly message like (“Hi there, you’ll be redirected in a moment, have a happy day”)
- The traffic should go through our website because we want the backlinks from the PDFs
Benefits I expect from this
- Backlinks to our website, improving our SEO
- We track traffic coming through text links embedded in the content, no matter of the file type (PDF, HTML website, RSS, email, Facebook, Twitter…)
- With Googe analytics, when users click the text links, we can measure how our content has spread
Sorry for the long description. Can you give me advice if you know about a WordPress plugin for this?
Thank you very much for your interest and help,
Raffael
I’m sorry, Raffael, but I haven’t heard of any such plugin.
Having said this, why does it have to be a WP plugin, in the first place? Why can’t it be something like AffMeter?
Hi Geno,
thanks for the quick reply, I’m afraid that AffMeter won’t do the job for this. But I will keep searching and if I find something, I will post it here.
All the best,
Raffael
Happy to announce that apparently ‘Pretty Link’ will do the job, here’s the answer from their customer service:
“Pretty Link can do this easily for you. Each pretty link can be tracked and automatically handles the re-direction for you. As far as we know the pretty links will work with all of the merchants you listed. Pretty Link does not yet support Google Analytics but we have it 90% coded for the next release due in a couple of weeks.
I would recommend giving the Lite version of Pretty Link a shot as it will do most of what you need. Then if you like it, you can upgrade to Pro once we’ve released the Google Analytics version.”
Nice, and thanks for the update, Raffael.