Monetization is an integral part of any WordPress website. When you’re looking to make a profit from your website, you need to look for multiple sources of revenue. Don’t just limit yourself to ads! WordPress blogs and similar content can have tons of different ways of making profits. Affiliate Linking is one such way to improve profits for your company through various means.
Once you’re in an affiliate program, you are provided with various incentives to direct traffic to other website or services. This might be in the form of offer codes, discount codes, or reference codes to be attached to your links. This kind of linking that makes use of reference codes can be regarded as Affiliate Linking.
While we will not be explaining the entire process of getting into an affiliate program, we will be providing you a tutorial on how to add affiliate links in WordPress. So, without further ado, let’s go straight into the guide.
How to Add Affiliate Links in WordPress:
The most efficient way of creating affiliate links in WordPress is to use dedicated third-party plugins made for the task. These plugins let you easily create affiliate links and attach them to re-direct links or custom links. Not only do they help in streamlining the process of creating affiliate links, but they also help you manage them. Affiliate link WordPress plugins let you easily categorize various links and even manage all of them on a single platform.
So, why don’t we take a look at some of the most popular WordPress affiliate linking plugins available on the WordPress market and discuss the processes required to use them?
1)Thirsty Affiliates
Thirsty Affiliates is one of the most popular affiliates link plugin available for free. This WordPress plugin is extremely simple, and creating new affiliate links is a very easy task. The plugin comes with easy to use tools to help you instantly create new affiliate links on the go. Moreover, its hierarchical category management lets you easily keep track of all your various affiliates.
Similarly, you can also enable safe redirects on your affiliate links as well as cloaked URLs. Additionally, you can also add images to your affiliate links, and since it uses custom post types, there is no risk of link clashes at all.
Key features:
- Extremely simple and beginner friendly.
- Hierarchical categories, link shortener, Redirects, and Cloaked URL features.
- In-depth click statistics and reports.
2) Easy Affiliate links
Easy affiliate links help you create affiliate links quickly and easily. Create both cloaked and un-cloaked link that can be easily accessed straight from your editor screen. Moreover, Easy affiliate links are completely compatible with both the Classic editor as well as the Gutenberg block editor. Easy affiliate links also come with additional statistics functions. Keep track of redirected traffic from your affiliate links using this plugin.
Furthermore, Easy affiliate links also come with nifty features to ease up your task even more. This includes the ability to export your affiliate links to XML as well as importing them whenever required.
Key features:
- Easy to create affiliate links and shortlinks.
- Classic editor and Gutenberg editor compatible.
- Lets you import and export affiliate links.
3) Shortlinks by Pretty links
Pretty link lets you easily create shortened links and make full use of your affiliate programs. Its click tracking and statistic let you easily keep track of traffic redirection. Easily track the number of clicks per link as well as unique clicks per day and more filterable statistics. Pretty link is an affiliate link management tool made to help your website and blog grow organically and in a sustainable manner.
You can easily categorize links into groups and even set up permanent or temporary redirection for your links at any time. It’s multiple affiliates linking and link cloaking features seem almost too be good to be true for a free WordPress theme.
Key features:
- Easily create simple URLs and affiliate links with tons of redirection features.
- Detailed statistics and traffic reporting features.
- Intuitive, easy to use AJAX admin user interface.
How to add affiliate links in WordPress using a Plugin:
Now, to demonstrate the required process involved in adding affiliate links to WordPress, we’ll be using Thirsty Affiliates. However, if you decide to use any other plugin, you really don’t have to worry about it. The main steps required to use these plugins can be almost identical and with a bit of help from the plugin’s documentation and our demo guide, you’ll be ready to go.
So, without further ado, let’s start our tutorial on How to add affiliate links in WordPress using the Thirsty affiliates plugin. To do so, you will have to install the plugin on your WordPress website. If you want to learn how to do so, please consider going through this article.
Next, to manage your affiliate links, you need to open the Thirsty affiliates plugin interface. To do so, simply click on the Thirsty affiliates listing on your WordPress admin dashboard.
Creating WordPress Affiliate links and Cloaked URLs
This is where all your affiliate links will be listed and you can easily sort through them using the given interface. Similarly, you can manage Affiliate link categories and manage settings for your affiliate links from the submenu under Thirsty affiliate on the left sidebar. For this demonstration, why don’t we go ahead and create a new Link category by simply clicking on Link categories.
The process involved in creating a Link category is similar to creating categories in WordPress in general. If you want to learn about this, click here.
Once we’ve created all of the categories necessary, you can either go back to the Main interface or click on the new Affiliate link sub-listing on the left sidebar under Thirsty Affiliates.
Once you’re in the New affiliate link page, you’ll be presented with this screen.
Here you can simply Add in the Title of your affiliate link and then add in your URL with the required reference code. The Link categories section on the right lets you choose what categories to save your current affiliate link on. Similarly, the link options section lets you add in multiple link options to your affiliate link such as Opening in new tabs, no follow tags and redirect type.
Once you’ve managed your options, entered the URL, and added in your affiliate link title, click on Save link button on the left. Then, you will be provided with a cloaked URL on the next screen, and you can also edit more details once you’ve saved your links. Moreover, you can also view the cloaked URLs straight from the main Thirsty affiliate interface.
Inserting WordPress Affiliate links in WordPress posts and blogs
Now that we’ve covered the part where we teach you how to add affiliate links in WordPress, it’s time we show you how to use these links. First of all, you can simply embed these cloaked URLs in the form of hyperlinks on your blogs, but the easier way to do it is by simply using the built-in Thirsty affiliate tool.
Simply open your WordPress post editor, and since Thirsty affiliate Is completely Gutenberg compatible, you don’t even have to switch to the Classic editor to use its tool.
Just highlight the text you want to link and click on the TA tool on your editor toolbar. Then, type in the name of your affiliate link on the given search bar and click on it. Then, click on the Enter icon, and it’ll instantly link the highlighted text with your affiliate link.
Concluding:
Thus, you’ve managed to learn how to add affiliates link on WordPress and enabled it on your posts. If you have any confusion regarding any of the steps, don’t shy away from commenting about it and we’ll help you to our best extent. Moreover, if you have any question regarding affiliate links in general, we’ll be more than happy to help you out.
Similarly, if you to learn about adding in more monetization features or various website changes, why don’t you check out some of our other articles: