What is the best affiliate WordPress plugin?
We asked 7 affiliate blogging heavyweights what their favorite plugin is, and why. As you’ll see, there is one plugin that stands out from the rest, because it’s the only one that was picked twice.
Experts best affiliate WordPress plugins:
1. ThirstyAffiliates
2. Pretty Links (1 & 2)
3. WP Review
4. AAWP (Amazon Affiliate WordPress Plugin)
5. ConvertBox
6. LeadPages
Want to find out which one? Just keep reading!
1. ThirstyAffiliates
(Compatible with our wecantrackWordPress plugin)
Picked by: Amit Mishra of Tryootech, where he writes about his own blogging journey and helps others to start theirs.
Used for: Cloaking affiliate links.
Amit has been doing affiliate marketing for more than seven years and has enjoyed every part of the journey. For him, affiliate marketing is something that can help you pay your bills and make you financially strong.
“The best thing about affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to worry about products, sales, delivery, after sales or customer support. Just promote what you want to promote, receive commissions, and enjoy yourself.”
What makes ThirstyAffiliates Amit’s favorite affiliate WordPress plugin?
Typically, affiliate links won’t win any beauty pageants, thanks to the codes that are crammed in there to track the people that clicked on your link. ThirstyAffiliates helps you to cloak those long, ugly affiliate links. It also helps you to optimize your linking process, by adding automated links to the keywords that you provide.
Amit: “I use ThirstyAffiliates to manage my affiliate links and I highly enjoy what this plugin has to offer. It’s very helpful if you have many links added to your blog, as I do.”
2. Pretty Links
(Compatible with our wecantrackWordPress plugin)
Picked by: Peter Keszegh of OnlinebizBooster, where he helps people to grow their online business.
Used for: Optimizing your linking process.
With OnlinebizBooster, Peter is dedicated to helping other people from all around the world to scale up their online businesses. One of his biggest goals when he began building OnlinebizBooster was to share valuable advice and information and save entrepreneurs from making the same mistakes as he did when starting out.
“I would say that affiliate marketing has been an incredibly rewarding journey. And it’s not only because of the lucrative passive income I earn while I sleep. I enjoy how my content can contribute to other people’s affiliate marketing journey as well. Overall, I’ve come a long way and I’m very proud of where I am now.”
What makes Pretty Links Peter’s favorite affiliate WordPress plugin?
“Pretty Links is something I’d recommend to any affiliate marketer. The way it works is it makes things a little bit easier for you by creating short links for your domain on your behalf. This means you don’t have to spend countless hours going over your content, multiple pages, and widgets just to add the right links because the software does it all for you.
I’m not kidding when I tell you that I wish I’d come across the platform sooner. It would have saved me resources to have discovered it. Furthermore, it also has a few other nifty features that make its price completely worth it such as giving you the ability to group and organize links, track click counts so you know which links are performing better than others, automatically replacing keywords, and more.
Think of it as an all-in-one affiliate marketer optimization tool. It makes things easier for you while making sure that your website is as streamlined as possible so that you don’t have to worry about unattractive short links. This way, your affiliate links will promote your brand for you and you can focus on creating content and other, more important aspects of your website.”
3. WP Review
Picked by: Nick Loper of Side Hustle Nation, which he has founded on his firm belief in “the hustle” as a way to build your income.
Used for: Easily creating reviews to enrich your content.
Nick wasn’t in our super affiliate rockstar review just because of his charming smile. This guy knows what he’s doing, and has known so for quite some time.
In Nick’s own words, when asked about his experience in affiliate marketing:
“I’ve been in affiliate marketing since 2004, and it’s been my primary source of income for most of that time.”
The favorite affiliate WordPress plugin of someone with this track record in affiliate marketing? WP Review, that can help marketers to create a full-blown review website in any niche.
What makes WP Review Nick’s favorite affiliate WordPress plugin?
“This review plugin makes it easy to create rich-data-compatible product reviews on your posts. These are really helpful for readers to summarize the information in your post, and to make your post stand out in the search results by getting the visible star ratings with your listing.
The free version of the plugin is pretty robust, and you can customize the look and feel of it to match your site.”
4. AAWP (Amazon Affiliate WordPress Plugin)
Picked by: Craig Campbell of Craig Campbell SEO, an SEO-expert and successful builder of several Amazon affiliate websites.
Used for: AAWP is probably the best WordPress plugin for Amazon affiliate websites looking for an easy way to increase revenue from the Amazon Associates Program.
The Amazon Associates Program is probably one of the most used and popular affiliate programs today. Owing to Amazon’s huge and versatile stock offer. There’s something there to promote for almost every affiliate marketer out there.
Craig owns multiple Amazon affiliate websites, which he built over many years of experience in affiliate marketing.
“I’ve been doing affiliate marketing for around 10 years now and would consider myself fairly experienced on the affiliate marketing side.”
What makes WP Review Craig’s favorite Amazon affiliate WordPress plugin?
“On any of my Amazon affiliate sites I use the AAWP plugin. I mainly like this plugin for the calls to action and comparison tables that it can add for you using a shortcode. You can also add best seller lists and a whole bunch of other stuff using nice clean snippets of info that are a lot more professional looking than your average button.
On top of that this plugin helps create your tracking ID. This is one of the biggest pains when it comes to affiliate marketing; adding your tracking IDs to a website with a whole bunch of content. So AAWP has multiple benefits and would be one I would definitely consider for affiliate marketing if you are using Amazon as a monetization method.”
5. ConvertBox
Picked by: Khris Steven of KhrisDigital, writing about everything that’ll help you build your online traffic, income and business.
Used for: Easily optimizing the conversion of your visitors.
“Having been involved in affiliate marketing for over three years – just like every affiliate who started from nowhere – I’ve had my own fair share of struggles, before finally hitting the 6figure mark. My main affiliate strategy is finding low competitive keywords, creating contents around them, ranking and monetizing them. Using SEO was how I was able to go from $5 in my first year to over $100k last year.”
What makes ConvertBox Khris’s favorite affiliate WordPress plugin?
“Using ConvertBox allowed me to squeeze out more conversions from my existing site traffic through adding exit intent pop ups and bars on targeted pages.
Deploying exit intent pop-ups helped me increase affiliate links clicks on my monetized posts and also helped me to generate more leads on my informational pages.
With ConvertBox, I have been able to double my affiliate clicks and conversions overnight. Without adding new contents on my site.
By far, this happens to be the best marketing tool investment I made in the last year.”
6. LeadPages
Picked by: Jacko Meijaard of InternetSuccesGids.nl, the number one platform on earning money online in the Netherlands.
Used for: Optimizing the conversion process.
Jacko is one of thought leaders on affiliate marketing in the Netherlands. He started his own journey as an affiliate and internet entrepreneur ten years ago. Now he is dedicated to sharing his learning with “the next generation” of Dutch affiliate marketers, through digital courses, insightful podcasts and blogs and a personal tutoring programme for those who really want to go all-in on building their affiliate future.
What makes LeadPages Jacko’s favorite affiliate WordPress plugin?
We all know that building traffic is only a part of becoming successful as an affiliate marketer. You have to be able to convert those passive visitors into someone who takes action. Preferably, an action that earns you some money, or otherwise gets you their email address so you’ll be able to reach them in the future.
Jacko uses LeadPages “[…] to easily create landing pages for my blogs. This way I can easily create opt-in pages and collect leads.”
Collecting leads is commonplace in online marketing and can be of great value for affiliate marketers as well. By creating an email list of people interested in the topic you’re writing on, for example, you’ll have a growing resource of marketing potential for new articles you wrote or new products you wish to promote.
7. Pretty Links (again)
Picked by: Ian Fernando of IanFernando.com, a speaker, online strategist and creator of content about digital and affiliate marketing.
Used for: Optimizing your linking process.
This is the only one in this list that was picked by two people. And for good reason: Pretty Links is one of the best affiliate WordPress plugins out there for optimizing what’s at the core of any good affiliate practice: you linking process.
About Ian
Ian Fernando has been in the affiliate business for more than 15 years, which means he has seen and quickly adapted to most of the changes the market has gone through. Over those years, he has acquired experience in leveraging every imaginable traffic source. On IanFernando.com he shares the insights that those years of experience have brought him, helping other affiliate marketers to gain the insights that they need to succeed.
What makes Pretty Links Ian’s favorite affiliate WordPress plugin?
Ian loves Pretty Links for one simple reason: “It is so easy to use and implement.”
Which is exactly what you want your WordPress plugins to be. Their main task should be to make your life easier, not take up valuable time with an extensive learning curve and the accompanying frustration of having to figure out how to reap the most benefits.
Conclusion: the best affiliate WordPress plugin depends on your goals
That sounds like stating the obvious, but it was one of the main reasons for us to conduct this interview. The best plugin for you is the one that is best able to do the job you expect of it. Be it to boost your conversions, optimizing your link process or adding a review option to your site.
The common denominator in all the entries in our survey, is – perhaps unsurprising – optimization of processes. All these plugins share the trait of making life more productive for their users, by automating time consuming tasks.
The less time you have to spend on optimizing links, building your landing pages and finding the right product, the more time you have to actually scale your business and make money.
What also stands out, is that most plugins focus on one aspect of affiliate marketing and specialze in that topic. Number four in this list, for example, grew to be probably the best WordPress plugin for Amazon affiliate by focussing on optimizing as much as possible for the Amazon affiliate user. This means that as an affiliate marketer, you have a wide range of plugins to choose from and optimize your affiliate strategy.
It’s the same reason why we built our dashboard in such a way to integrate with over 300 affiliate networks, as well as Google Analytics, Google Ads and Facebook Ads. To offer an affiliate attribution dashboard that shows all the data that you need in one place, so you don’t have to waste time collecting that data but can simply get what you need and use it to optimize your business.
Bonus! Leverage these plugins as some of the best WordPress affiliate programs as well.
This makes these WordPress programs great to promote as an affiliate who is targeting businesses or any other audience that might have their own WordPress website. You can help them to improve that website by advising these WordPress plugins that are beloved by some of the best affiliates in the business, and at the same time creature your own – often recurring – income from their WordPress affiliate program.
