I have recently started to get a little bit into affiliate marketing. On my WordPress site, I started adding various relevant affiliate links to my articles. However, as time went by, I got more and more tired of it. A lot of questions were running through my head.
Possible problems
- Why does it take so long to add even one link to an article?
- Why do I have to go through article after article and add the same links over and over again?
- Can’t someone abusethose links when they are directly visible in the articles?
- Do those links look credible to people when it is obvious just by hovering over them that they are pointing outside the domain, and also contain a large number of different “weird” parameters?
- What if a link changes? Am I going to have to go through all the articles one by one and fix it again?
- Couldn’t all of this be dealt with somehow more intelligently?
- How to automate and manage it from one place?
Requirements for the plugin
So I started googling and searching for a suitable plugin to WordPress with the requirements:
- ability to mask affiliate links to make them more credible and point to my website domain, not to the promoted website
- possibility of centralised link management
- easy insertion of links directly in the article editor by selecting them from a list of predefined links
- after changing the URL of a given link, so that I can edit it in only one place and so that it is then automatically changed in all articles where this link is used
Plugin found
I tried several plugins that met my basic requirements, but the plugin that appealed to me the most was ThirstyAffiliates. In this free version, it can actually do quite a lot, it has simplified my work considerably. All affiliate links are nicely in one place where I can easily manage them. Then, when editing the article, when inserting a link, I no longer have to manually create each link over and over again, but simply select it from this predefined “link repository”.
And the best in the end
As a proper IT guy, I wasn’t satisfied with this functionality 🙂 and I was looking for a way to make the insertion of links into articles even easier, or even completely automated. So I checked out the features of the paid version of this plugin. Of all the Pro features, one caught my eye: automatic insertion of links based on keywords. Wow, this is a blast! I didn’t even think twice and immediately purchased the plugin. Of course, the plugin has many more great features in the paid version, but this one caught my attention the most.
Now when I want to insert an affiliate link into an article, I don’t have to edit the article and add the link. In the aforementioned “link store” of this plugin, I just add a new link and set it to what keywords it should be applied to. That’s all. When surfing the site, the plugin will automatically make sure that in all articles will be added affiliate links on the defined keywords, which will also be automatically masked, so that at first glance they will look like links to other articles on the site. Isn’t that amazing?
If you are also actively involved in affliate marketing, I recommend this paid version with all ten of my fingers crossed. For a single site it costs about $79, but it will save you hours of work that you can use in a much more meaningful way.
In the comments you can write me what plugin you use and how satisfied you are with it.
