5 Best Affiliate Marketing Plugins For WordPress Bloggers
Are you looking for the best WordPress affiliate marketing plugins?
Maybe you want to cloak affiliate links, shorten links, track clicks on your affiliate products and easily manage the affiliate links on your entire blog.
Every Professional Blogger use one of these WordPress Affiliate Marketing Plugins to manage their affiliate links. Like on BloggerSprout, I use PrettyLink Pro. This plugin is also used and recommended by Pat Flynn from SmartPassiveIncome.com where he earns 6 Figures every month from his blog.
In this article, I’m sharing the best affiliate marketing plugins for WordPress that are used by professionals and successful bloggers. And towards the end of this article, I’ll provide you with some recommendations for different scenarios.
Let’s get started:
Disclosure: I may receive affiliate compensation for some of the links below at no cost to you if you decide to purchase a paid plan. You can read our affiliate disclosure in our privacy policy.
List of Best WordPress Affiliate Marketing Plugins
Getting started with affiliate marketing is very simple and easy. You get an affiliate link from a company for its product and you paste that link in a post in hope that you can earn some commission.
But the truth is, as you grow and write several posts and start affiliate marketing for several products. That becomes a challenge. The challenge to maintain the links, fix broken links and change links to new ones if the company changes their affilaite links.
So to do all this, you will need a tool that is easy to use and does all the job for affiliate marketing.
1. Pretty Links Pro
Pretty Link is one of the oldest plugins for WordPress affiliate marketing. Don’t worry, When I say oldest, it gets regular updates. It is also featured as #1 in the Best WordPress Affiliate Marketing Plugins.
There are several WordPress plugins for affiliate marketing, but most of them don’t receive regular updates. Which is a very important thing for any affiliate marketeer. You don’t want your plugin to stop working after few months just because the developer discontinued his project.
Pretty Links comes in 2 variants – Free and Pro. The free version lets you set up pretty affiliate links ( shorten link) using your own domain. It also allows you to redirect your affiliate links using the 301,302 or 307 redirects that help google and other search engines understand the affiliate links and redirects.
But here’s what makes this plugin more valuabale
- Get Complete stats tracking of each link.
- See Which links are performing well.
- Check clicks sorted by IP address, location, and more.
- Easily add nofollow to your links automatically.
- Enable links group to easily organize the affiliate links.
- Allows you to pass parameters in the url
Pretty Link Pro
Most of the bloggers who are serious about Affiliate marketing always go for the Pro version. Opting in for the pro version allows you to get the full out of Pretty Link.
On BloggerSprout we use the premium version of pretty link pro. The features of pretty link pro are as follows:-
- Import Affiliate links
- Export Affiliate links
- Easily add affiliate disclosure.
- Automatically add links to keywords to all post and pages
- Automatically create new links
- Redirect user based on locations
- Easily AB Test affiliate links
- Delay the redirects
- and several other that keeps improving and adding via updates
The pro version also adds several functionalities for stats tracking, analyzing, and optimizing your affiliate marketing by providing you more advanced statistics and conversion reports.
The best feature we like is that we don’t need to add affiliate links to our keywords, the plugin adds automatically and also adds affiliate disclaimer features.
e.g:- We affiliate for BlueHost Hosting, so whenever we add Bluehost to our post, we get the option to convert the word into a link. Something like this – bluehost.
Price: Pretty Link Lite is Free. Pretty Link Pro starts at $59. We recommend you to go for Pretty Link Pro if you are serious about affiliate marketing.
2. Thirsty Affiliates
Thirsty affiliates work the same way as Pretty Link. If you don’t like pretty links then you can download thirsty affiliates.
Thirsty Affiliates includes several features that will make it very easy to manage affiliate links. Not just thirsty affiliate shorten long ugly url to short beautiful URL but it also allows you to add link shortener with custom prefix.
Example:
- https://bloggersprout.com/recommend/namehero
- https://bloggersprout.com/aff/namehero
- https://bloggersprout.com/go/namehero
- https://bloggersprout.com/out/namehero
- https://bloggersprout.com/refer/namehero
- https://bloggersprout.com/YOUR-CUSTOM/namehero
This feature allows you to track affiliate link performance on Google analytics and other analytics software.
It supports all kinds of redirection like 301, 302, and 307. The pro version supports the meta redirect and javascript redirect too.
The best thing about this plugin is that once you have created a link, it allows you to add the shorten link via a drop-down in your post editor, thus saving you time and the hassle of going back and forth to your affiliate website, just to grab your affiliate link.
Changing and editing the links are also very easy and simple in Thirsty affiliates.
What ThirstyAffiliates Premium Provides:
So this features are for those who are serious for affiliate marketing as this features are in pro version only and you need to purchase the plugin to get access to this features.
The premium features are:-
- Automatically links to set keywords
- Complete Stats tracking reports
- Different URL based on geo-location
- Allows you to smart uncloak affiliate links like Amazon’s affiliate links.
- Fix affiliate links from the front end.
- Automatically check for broken affiliate links returning 404 error.
- Import affiliate links
- CSV Export affilaite links
- Supports 3rd part link importing.
- Supports Google Analytics Events.
- and many more, you can check here – ThristyAffiliates Features.
The cost for one site license is just $49 and it will allow you to get all those features mentioned above. I will say, it’s a steal for that price.
Price: The Lite version is Free and the Price starts at $49.
3. URL Shortener by MyThemeShop
URL shortener is another link cloaking plugin made by myThemeShop. URL Shortener is available in 2 variants – Free and pro.
URL shortener also provides the basic facility of link cloakings like 301,302 and 307 redirects. The developer of this plugin claims that this plugin loads faster than any other link cloaking plugins, although we haven’t tested it.
This plugin tracks your link across the internet and provides you a complete report of clicks made on social media or clicks on other websites. The advance stats reports is a premium feature.
Some of the features of URL Shortener are as follows:-
- Supports all 3xx redirects
- Tracks link clicks across social media
- Easy to use
- Support link categories
- Options to open link in a new window.
- Supports rel-nofollow and rel-noreferrer.
- Supports title Attributes for links
- Easy to insert into post by using its shortcode.
- Supports automatic keyword linking and can limit replacements per keyword.
- Easily import from Pretty link plugin.
The price of the premium plugin is very low and the license for a single site is just $19. Normally the price is $29 but you can get it for $19 – Click here.
The premium version of the plugin extends the features of the free plugin. The premium features of URL Shorteners are mentioned below.
URL Shortener Premium
- Redirect with Javascript
- Redirect with META refresh tag
- Redirect with invisible iframe
- Cloaks URL ( Show different URL on mouse hover )
- Setup redirection delay
- Limit Replacements of Keyword links
- disallow folders in robots.txt
- Advance Stats
Depending on your needs, you may opt for the pro version. The free version is enough for those who are just starting in affiliate marketing.
Price: The base version is FREE. The Premium version is $29.
4. Highway Pro
Highway Pro is a modern Link shortener and cloaking plugin. It’s built with a great user interface and React driven dashboard.
The name itself suggests that the plugin is a premium plugin and the downside is that it doesn’t have a Lite or Free version.
The plugin supports multiple redirects for a single URL based on several parameters and conditions. Its best for Amazon affiliates to automatically redirect users to different Amazon websites based on their locations and all the activity can be tracked on its modern stats dashboard with graph.
Highway Pro Other Features
- A/B test URLs
- Limit Access by hours
- Show content without redirecting
- Auto-save on edit
- 8 conditions types for redirects
- Automatic link insertion based on keywords
- Track url performance on social media and other websites.
The 8 Different Condition types that it supports are:-
- Device
- Country
- Disposable
- Date Limit
- Hour Range (NEW)
- Referrer (Origin)
- User Agent
- Roles & Capabilities
The 6 Different targets that it supports:-
- Direct
- Rotating (NEW)
- Post Type (Post, Page, Product + more)
- Content (Post type without redirecting) (NEW)
- Taxonomy (Categories, Tags + more)
- Not Found (404)
Price: The Price of HighWay Pro is $49 with lifetime updates.
5. Easy Affiliate Links
Easy affiliate links used to be popular back in days when there weren’t many options for link shortener or link cloaking.
But over the years it has lost its popularity as it has very limited features and the user-interface also looks like 1990s.
Current features:
- Compatible with both the Classic Editor and new Gutenberg Block Editor
- Supports normal links or affiliate HTML code
- Supports attributes for your links
- Supports Amazon compatibility link cloaking
- Automatic disclaimer for your affiliate links
- Easy access from post editor
- Supports categories to your links
- Track click counts
- Import affiliate links from XML and CSV
- Export links to XML
Although the plugin is good, but however I will prefer Pretty Link Pro
Which Affiliate Marketing Plugins for WordPress should you choose?
You are not limited to any 1 tool, Depending on your needs and your niche, any of these tools may satisfy your wants. If I have to recommend any tool for affiliate marketing for bloggers than I will suggest either ThirstyAffiliates or Pretty Link.
Both ThirstyAffiliates and Pretty Link are owned by the same company and they work the same way. But both have different features and addons when it comes to the premium versions.
But if you want to run an affiliate system to tracks your affiliate sales and commission, then AffilaiteWP is the best solution. AffiliateWP is for those who have created their own digital product and are selling using WordPress eCommerce and want to create their own affiliate network ( like Shareasale ). AffiliateWP is created by the team who created the famous digital eCommerce software Easy Digital Downloads.
I hope this article has helped you get your own affiliate marketing plugin for WordPress. If you have any queries, you can comment below or contact us.
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