Since every article you find on Google is simply a list of paid affiliate plugins ranked by how much they pay in referral commission, I thought it would be helpful to get a thread going where people recommend plugins they actually use, free or paid.
I am going to start with four(+1) plugins we use on pretty much every affiliate website we manage.
Thirsty Affiliates (FREE): A link management tool allowing you to cloak links making them look nicer (domain.com/link/healthy-dog-food/). This way you only have to switch out one link in their dashboard if an offer expires or if you want to switch merchants, instead of having to replace several links all over your websites. Just make sure to uncloak Amazon links (there is an option for that), since cloaking is against their TOS.
It also tracks all your affiliate link clicks and displays them in a handy report. This is essential if you work with new partners and don't want to rely on their click-tracking. The paid version is $50 yearly and IMO not worth it. In fact we have a paid subscription but disabled it after we noticed that we don't use any of the pro features. The more popular alternative would be Prettylinks, but their free version is inferior in every way and they aggressively push you to buy their premium which is something I hate. While you might get away with pasting affiliate links straight into your articles at the beginning, once your website reaches a certain size good link management is essential so I recommend you start early.
One cool thing their premium version does is checking for 404s and notifying you of broken affiliate links. That's definitely a nice feature to have, however you can get it for free with the "Broken Link Checker" plugin. Don't download the one from the WordPress repository as the developer abandoned it and some bugs never got fixed. Instead get the one from Github, which is a forked version of the original and works perfectly. It'll check all internal and external links on your website and shows you what's broken. It even checks for redirects and lets your replace the old URL with one click. During the initial run it can be a little resource heavy, but on most hosting plans you won't notice it.
WPWS (FREE): Lets you easily create, style and organize product boxes and shows them all in a dashboard. You can then place them in your content with a shortcode. Before we had something custom coded for this purpose but are currently replacing all product boxes on our websites with those created with this plugin after I saw a post about it in this sub. I am fortunate enough to have access to quite a few very big sites, so we can split test on single articles over different websites and still get large enough sample sizes in a short period of time. After running tests on a couple of articles for 5 days we gathered data from about 250k impressions (1MM+ by now) and found that the new boxes increased CTR by about 10%-20%, depending on the site. Generally boxes convert a lot better than buttons or text links for us and we use them for pretty much every product (physical and digital) we advertise. This plugin is the best solution we've found so far. Again, once a website reaches a certain size having all offers you promote in one place is a huge advantage and will save you a lot of time.
Shortcodes Ultimate ($39 one-time): The free version is good to get some lightweight layout/styling options for your articles, if you don't want to code them yourself. However, we've been mainly using their premium Add-on ($39 for the bundle, which is usually cheaper than buying their "Shortcode Creator" Add-on) that allows you to create custom shortcodes. You'll be able to create code snippets (HTML or PHP) in the dashboard and then place them in your content with shortcodes. This allows for very advanced stuff, but a simple use case would be to place 2-3 shortcodes in each article and then use them to test CTAs like newsletter signups or offers you are promoting site wide. You can then just A/B test different CTAs or offers in all your articles by simply switching out the code snippets. Once again, you'll see all your CTAs in a single dashboard, which makes organizing and testing so much more easier.
AAWP ($43 yearly): If you are exclusively pushing Amazon products, AAWP is the easiest plugin for creating product boxes and tables. It pulls product info by using Amazons API so all you need to add to your content is a shortcode and the ASIN. You can also pull product lists by keywords and bestsellers, but those never really converted for us. While it can pull the price of a product, we noticed disabling the price and instead using a "Check Price Now" CTA increased CTR dramatically and revenue by about 20%. I know some people say it's bad for UX, but what can I say, I just like money.
These plugins easily save us $$$$ in man-hours per year and are highly scalable. Especially the latter is something we look for, since switching out a link management tool on a big website can be a huge pain. You want to pick something that works right from the start. Additionally, if possible I like to avoid subscription style plugins. $20 a month might not seem like a lot, but this stuff quickly adds up and if you want to sell eventually, you'll try to get costs down as much as possible to make the site look more attractive.
Would be very interested to hear other plugin recommendations that make your life as an affiliate easier. I'd be especially interested in what you guys use for popups/opt-ins as I am not 100% satisfied with you current setup.
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* This article was originally published here
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