The 12 Best Wordpress Plugins for Affiliates

By Affilorama Group
The 12 Best Wordpress Plugins for Affiliates

 

I'll be completely honest - I am a Wordpress addict. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I think Wordpress is the best CMS (content management system) for beginners - period. Now I know a lot of people don't think of Wordpress as a CMS - it is, after all primarily used as blogging software. However when it came to choosing a system to use for my own personal website, I quickly found that many of the other open-source CMS solutions, while possibly having more functionality that Wordpress, are really annoying to use!

I am, first and foremost a marketer - not a web designer. And while I am always trying to brush up on my web development skills, at the end of the day my web design knowledge doesn't really go beyond HTML, CSS and the most basic of basic PHP code.

What most people don't realize about Wordpress is just how much about it you can change - just with a few simple plugins or a tweak to the theme, you can basically create any kind of content-based website you'd like.

In this post I want to outline some of the best plugins for affiliates. If you're using Wordpress for your affiliate site - I highly recommend you use these as well. And if you're not using Wordpress - you may want to consider using it for at least one of your sites; you might find you're a convert... just like me!

1. All in One SEO Pack

It might not sound exciting - but this plugin is a must for anyone who wants to get search engine traffic to their website.

  • Easy to use - self explanatory operation
  • Avoids duplicate content problems often associated with Wordpress blogs
  • Automatically optimizes titles for search engines
  • Generates Meta tags - i.e. Meta Keywords and Description easily

2. Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button

Want to generate viral traffic and get ranked in social bookmarking sites? Well you have to make it easy for people to share your posts. Clean, unobtrusive looking plugin that is easy for visitors to use - which is the main thing!

  • Access to 128 bookmarking sites
  • Email tab makes it easy to share via any email service
  • Allows easy bookmarking in any browser
  • Integrates with Google Analytics

3. Sociable

An alternative to Add to Any - this plugin is one of the most popular bookmarking buttons. While it doesn't have as many features, it is probably easier to use and arguably looks better.

  • Choose from 99 social bookmarking sites
  • Email tab (mailto - not ideal for webmail users)
  • Allows easy bookmarking in any browser
  • Integrates with Google Analytics

4. Ultimate Google Analytics

Having analytics on your website is critical, yet still, many people don't do it - missing out on tons of invaluable information. This plugin adds your Google Analytics JavaScript to every page for you - so you don't have to worry about editing your theme.

  • Easy set up
  • No theme editing required
  • Track outgoing, mailto and download links (this is great for tracking clickthrough rate - great for affiliates)
  • Automatic Update

5. Contact Form 7

Many people don't like listing an email address on their website because of the spam it can receive. As a result many websites - including many affiliates don't have any way for the site owner to be contacted. This can be a critical mistake. What if the owner of a product you promote is trying to get a hold of you? What if someone has a lucrative opportunity for you? You'll miss out if you don't have a contact form. This plugin has a rare 100% consensus on Wordpress - so it's high quality.

  • Supports Ajax-powered submitting, Akismet spam filter and CAPTCHA
  • Multiple language support
  • Can be used for multiple contact form

6. Exclude Pages from Navigation

This is a plugin that I've found extremely useful. It adds a checkbox, "include this page on menus", on the edit side of any page (default: checked) that allows you to remove a page from the navigation menu. There are often pages that you don't want to show up in your menu because they are linked to from another page. This is also useful if you want to create separate landing pages (e.g. for PPC) that don't show up in the rest of your site.

  • Ridiculously simple to use - just uncheck the box!
  • Excludes child pages of excluded pages as well

7. Redirection

Many affiliate cloak their redirects - often just to make the link look better (this is especially important in emails). While you can use services like tinyurl and bit.ly, the truth is outside of Twitter these can look a little unprofessional, not to mention unsafe. Redirects on your own site are far better - i.e. www.yourwebsite.com/yourredirect. This plugin makes creating redirects and tracking them easy

  • Easy to create new redirects
  • Click counter
  • See the time, date and IP of each click (log)

8. Advertising Manager

If you want to make extra income on top of your affiliate commissions, then on site advertising is often a great way to do it. Advertising Manager manages and rotates Google Adsense and other ads on your site. Remember though - if you're doing an affiliate review or presales page - you probably don't want any adsense there taking people away from buying through your link!

  • Imports ad code automatically
  • Automatically recognizes Google Adsense, Adbrite, Adify, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Chitika, Commission Junction, CrispAds, OpenX, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN, and WidgetBucks. You can use other networks as well.
  • Compatible with widget or sidebar modules
  • Automatic limiting of ad display

9. Twitter Widget Pro

Building Twitter followers is a great way to extend your influence into a relevant group of people. This widget allows you to add your latest tweets to your blog.

  • Can handle multiple widgets each with different feeds
  • Logs time and date of tweet - or how long ago it happened
  • Easy to add some styles and background image to feed

10. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap that the search engines use to index your site. Every time you create a new post or page, the sitemap is updates and all the major search engines that support the sitemap protocol - e.g. Ask, Google, MSN, and Yahoo are notified about the update.

  • Easy to use - automatic
  • Extremely good rating (100%) on Wordpress.org

11. Member Access

Want to create your own members area? This plugin allows you to create pages and posts that will only be visible to logged in members. Non members will be redirected to the Wordpress login page. While paid membership is possible with this plugin, it's not as easy to do as with some paid plugins.

  • Multiple membership levels
  • Content theft tracking
  • Gradual content delivery

12. Shockingly Simple Favicon

This is a bit of a random one to finish with - but have you ever noticed how all the most professional sites have their logo appear next to the name of the page or the url in the browser - that's called the Favicon. This plugin lets you add your own to your site.

46 Comments
Evgenii Prussakov 14 years ago
Good one, Chris. I'm just surprised that you haven't mentioned WordPress Affiliate Store Plugin by PopShops, or any other plugins that simplify the monetization part.
Chris Goddard 14 years ago
Hey Geno - really good point. I did miss that one. There are a lot of Wordpress plugins on the monetization side as well - though many of them might be a bit complicated for some of the beginners reading this. Poposhops is definitely worth a look though http://www.popshops.com/faq/wordpress
Christian Montealvo 14 years ago
Excellent Mark!
I added a few new ones today.
Thanks for the deep value you provide your students with.
graeme taylor-warne 14 years ago
Hey guys

Thanks for this info. What do you recommend using to create a full-on sales page. One that'll stand up to the best of the best on Clickbank. Can you recommend anything better than xsitepro?
Rotem Gazit 14 years ago
Great list Chris!
Thanks for your valuable post.
Daniel Wagner 14 years ago
excellent. I love WP. !!!!

I love those lists... really helps me. you can tick off what you alrady got and add what is missing.

I would add hop ad creator and faster im to the list....

thanks a lot again

Daniel

James Pruitt 14 years ago
Thanks Chris. I already use most of those myself, but there are a few I have to check out. Another good one to try is MY Page Order. Makes ordering static pages quick and easy.
Paul 14 years ago
Very helpful indeed.

Thanks a lot

Regards

Paul
wawan muldiyono 14 years ago
great post your information
Evanso 14 years ago
Hi Chris. I already use two of these plug ins myself, those are the Google All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps. may be I have to try the other to see how well it works. Thanks so much
John Akerson 14 years ago
Thank you Chris. This is a very nice short list of useful plug-ins. Thanks in particular for the Twitter-widget pro. I've been pretty dissatisfied with some other twitter widgets and will give this one a try.
Regards,
-John
Muhammad Jamil 14 years ago
Hi Everybody,

A very useful list of plugins for WP. I am looking for a plugin for a review site similar to Amazon.com. I have searched on Google but did not find close to one I am looking for.

If anybody is aware of such a plugin or can direct me to a resource where I can find a plugin for the purpose I mentioned, I would really appreciate. Thanks.

M. Jamil
Eric Marlow 14 years ago
Great useful post Chris. I haven't looked at all of them yet, but I think they're all free to download and use. The exclude pages from navigation is particularly useful for me. Thanks for the heads up.
mark keeler 14 years ago
Great list of free plugins. Thank you!
Mario Magalhaes 14 years ago
Thanks for the post. There were a couple of tool I did not know about.
Mario
Alessandro Zamboni 14 years ago
That's an outstanding list !
I was using only 4 of them, and all the others 6 are really useful for my blogs.

Especially "Ultimate Google Analytics" because on my blog I had some problems in Google Analytics installation...
I love also "Twitter Widget Pro" because it's easy and permit to my visitors to stay in touch with my own Twitter profile.
Thanks Chris, that's really a post I will keep in my Favorites !

Goodbye by Alessandro Zamboni.
best affiliates 14 years ago
Hi! You have a nice site, very informative.
If you don’t mind can you suggest some sites you know that have the same subject as yours?
Devin Elder 14 years ago
Great post Chris.

I'll add Pagemash to the list, it lets you drag and drop for page order, and you can "hide" pages from the nav bar and create family trees too.

The Affiloblueprint WP theme is the best I've used, it's simple and forces you to keep it that way, but has everything you need.

I've had problems with the Redirection plugin breaking my sites, so I do manual redirects, I just trust them more!

Also, do either AddtoAny or Sociable include nofollow?
Navaneeth Venugopalan 14 years ago
excellent info man.
Bobby 14 years ago
Great list, thanks, just what I needed for my new WP Site.

one thing i noticed is that the links on this page take you away from this site? Is this a good thing?
Jeff 14 years ago
It would be good to include a PDF print button. At the moment the first page prints, then you get 5 blank pages and then the comments print.

Why?

Jeff
Jeff 14 years ago
Hello,

Further to last. I saved web page to local drive and then printed... and it printed everything.

Strange.

Regards
Jeff
Kieran Gracie 14 years ago
Hi Chris

Any way I can instal an RSS feed in my WordPress AB 2.0 Theme? I need RSS for a particular project, and I have read that RSS works on WP blogs only?

I am not a programmer, and find that the WordPress plug-in site is very difficult to understand.

Regards

Kieran
Chris Goddard 14 years ago
Hey everyone - thanks for comments - responses to questions below:

@DEVINELDER: I don't know if Sociable or AddtoAny automatically nofollows - I assume you mean do the links to the bookmarking sites include a nofollow. As far as I know it doesn't. While there might be other plugins that do this, I'm not sure how detrimental to your site it would actually be. As Google has changed the way they treat nofollows, having a link - nofollowed or not, still divys up the linkjuice. So while it is still worth doing nofollow sculpting to a certain extent - particularly in terms of making sure the right pages are indexed, I wouldn't loose sleep over having followed social bookmark buttons.

@Bobby: It can be very easy to get almost selfish with your traffic - i.e. people come to your site, and you don't want to give them any obvious ways to leave. However you have to balance this with your desire to provide good content. A post like this where I'm talking about Wordpress plugins - it's pretty necessary to link out. I always use the _blank attribute to make an external link open in a new window or tab though - that way the person isn't actually leaving your site and they can easily come back to it.

@Jeff: Can't say we get too many requests to print out our blog posts to be honest - and we probably won't have the development time to do it anytime soon. However if you're wanting to print it without the rest of the web page - I suggest you copy and paste the text into a word processor like Word and then print it.

@Kieran: Do you mean adding RSS like an RSS widget or do you mean having an RSS feed on your site? You should still be able to install RSS widgets to display other RSS feeds, however the theme builds static pages rather than the normal blog part - so no, you can't actually create an RSS feed from it. This is likely to change in the next version though.
Kieran Gracie 14 years ago
Thanks Chris. I want to create an RSS feed, so I guess I have to either wait for an updated AB Theme or change from WordPress.

Tom 14 years ago
Hey Chris,

I strongly recommend checking out Headspace2 - it's an alternative to the All-in-One SEO Pack, but with a number of additional features. Very powerful.

It's written by the same guy who wrote the Redirection plugin you mention in #7.
Chris Goddard 14 years ago
@Kieran - You don't have to change from Wordpress! You may just want to look into another theme - pretty much all have RSS - we just removed it from ours to make it easier to build more standard individual page sites. All Artisteer themes will be RSS capable.
Elizabeth Enright 14 years ago
Hi Mark and Chris!

Just signed up for Affilorama Premium and enjoying it so far. Thanks for an amazing learning community, support and info.

Questions..

Is there a plugin out there that will hide my Amazon links that I import from datafeeds? (I'm looking into different datafeed tools/plugins that will allow this). I've worked very hard on an ecommerce blog and every link to amazon is showing.

Also, my tags are messed up from the import, some imports have no tags and now I have to go into each post and modify. Or they have unneccessary tags (mesh, big,) and not my keywords.

Another strange this is.. Some of the search results will show up correctly on google with all the details in the description, but then it takes the user to a general page and not the correct post. Could this be a tag issue, or more like description missing, etc.

Thanks so much..

Liz




14 years ago
This is a great list!
Does anyone have any recommendations for a plugin which send full posts to twitter and facebook?
Tom 14 years ago
some great plugin you have recommended... thanks... I found 2 I will try out.
ThemeDigital 14 years ago
Hey, you forgot PrettyLink

It's by far the best plugin for affiliate links I've ever seen. And yes, it's free :)

http://blairwilliams.com/pretty-link/
Carol 14 years ago
Great post! Always looking for good plugins! I am always on the look-out for fantastic WordPress tips to suggest to my own readers.
mbt shoes 14 years ago
Oh..wonderfull post and great information …will have a try all the tips..thanks…
Online Shopping 13 years ago
Great post! Always looking for good plugins! I am always on the look-out for fantastic WordPress tips to suggest to my own readers.
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Internet home business 12 years ago
All great plugins, however I wanted to mention that I use to use the All in one SEO plugin but have since switched to the SEO plugin by Yoast and find it to be much more thorough. Also the redirection plugin for cloaking affiliate links is another 'must have' if you're an affiliate marketer.

Liz :-)
alex 12 years ago
I was also expecting to see more plugins that were specific to affiliate marketing, like the Geotargeter for Amazonplugin which dramatically increases Amazon affiliates earnings.
blog U-Like.gr 12 years ago
Fine way of describing, and good piece of writing to get facts regarding my presentation focus, which i am going
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Christine 12 years ago
Great list! Here's another... I just started using the Wishpot plugin. It lets you pick products and share them on your site or on social networks. So far so good. If you wanna check it out http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wishpot-publisher-pro/
Santosh Mishra 12 years ago
WordPress has several tools to promote a blog. I’ve found Best WordPress Plugins to increase search engine ranking and get lots of traffic. These plugins are proved and will certainly be helpful to any blogger.
sanjay 12 years ago
Good collection, you can also use wordpress seo by yoast. And most of the themes now are using wordpress menu so you don't need to exclude pages in the navigation area.
Yogendra Sharma 12 years ago
Redirection Plugin is very useful. I searched for such a plugin, this suits for what i required. Thanks for sharing.
Kamran Akmal 12 years ago
How about this Free EzTraffic wp plugin http://uptodate-seo.info
Ricky 1990 11 years ago
Hi affilorama,

I am finding a wordpress plugin which can help me to create a review page, for example: top10bestwebsitehosting.com or hosting-review.com. Please inroduce some plugins to me.

Thank you so much !
Sai Krishna 11 years ago
I just love using my favorite ad rotate plugin which helps us to show affiliate banners on side bars.Thanks for this helpful plugins list.
Eugene Nyawara 11 years ago
My personal favourite has to be the Contact or 7, solves so many contact form challenges.