Jesse and I jumped into the world of affiliate marketing with both feet about 14 months ago. We started by building one website that came out of an inside joke that we had. Since building our first site to now, we have some affiliate marketing tips we would like to share with you, specifically about the best WordPress plugins for affiliate marketers.
There are probably more out there we haven’t discovered yet, but this is our top 8 by far! By using these plugins plus the combination of doing good keyword research and good on-page SEO, the website we built 14 months ago brought in $2,800 in the month of December alone.
Best WordPress Plugins for Affiliate Marketers
1. EasyAzon
EazyAzon is one of our best finds. If you live in the United States, did you know that you are probably only getting credit for Amazon sales in the US on your affiliate site? If you sign up for affiliate accounts in other countries such as Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and United Kingdom. Some websites may only have 50% traffic from the US, so you could be missing out on 50% of your sales, or half of your income! This plugin “localizes” the links for wherever you viewer is located.
The other thing this EazyAzon can do is provide buttons so that your viewers can add products on your site directly to their shopping car. Once in their shopping cart, if they buy the product within 89 days you will get credit for the sale.
They can also hover over a link and see an ad for a product on Amazon. This plugin is great, but we mostly use it for the ability to localize links and earn higher commissions.
2. Pretty Link Lite
Do you notice when you hover over one of our links (like our link to Pretty Link Lite) it shows up as “https://simplesites.info/go/pretty-link”? You probably don’t want your website full of just affiliate links as Google may not rank this favorably. Pretty Link Lite will cloak the links for you. It will also make each link a no-follow.
The best part is that if you put it in a sub-directory such as /go/, you can track all links in the /go/ subdirectory as an outbound link and implement goal tracking. Through this system we can see what percentage of people that visit our site will click through to Amazon (or another affiliate).
3. Universal Star Rating
We were ecstatic when we found Universal Star Rating. Want an easy way to increase your conversion rate? Add stars! It’s that simple! Try not to lie if you can, but you can list products in order of ratings. We just look at the actual customer rating in Amazon and then list it on the page.
We often list products that cost more and have higher reviews with other products that are cheaper with lower review scores. This will encourage your viewers to give into “social proof” to buy the higher-priced product.
4. TablePress
One great strategy for affiliate sits is to create a product table comparing different products with a clear winner or two. You want to use this to persuade people into buying the higher-priced product so that your commissions are higher… duh! TablePress makes this very easy. You can upload a simple CSV file and it will create a table for you. The table is easy to customize with CSS. You can even include pictures. You can also allow viewers to sort the table based on cost, rating, etc.
If you want a real winner? Combine this with Universal Star Rating!
5. Magic Liquidizer
So you have a really sexy table with pictures and star ratings, but it would really suck if the table weren’t responsive and looked horrible on mobile devices, right? Welcome Magic Liquidizer! Jesse found this plugin for our toolbox. This simply makes your table created in TablePress responsive. Don’t think about it too much, just install the plugin and it will make everyone’s life better.
6. SumoMe
So you have an affiliate site and it converts, but what about all of those people that don’t convert? You don’t just want them to LEAVE do you? It would be really great if you could market to these people again, right? SumoMe is great for this. With the click of a button you can have a way to easily grow your email list.
You can have a sticky bar at the top of your site, a popup box in the corner, or even a popup over your entire website. You can customize the message, call to action (it doesn’t just have to be for collecting emails…), colors and more. It integrates with MailChimp, AWeber, and more.
We don’t do much with the email lists we have grown from our affiliate sites, but at least we have a list to use if we choose to. We get frequent opt-ins through SumoMe.
7. WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates
This plugin is pretty awesome! We only use WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates on one site at the moment but plan to use it on more. You can pull in multiple Amazon products into your page at once and create a store out of them. It doesn’t look like your typical Amazon store however. It integrates with WooCommerce so that it looks like the entire transaction is being done on your page. Part of me thinks its best to get them over to Amazon as quick as possible, especially since I believe many people wouldn’t want to go through an entire transaction with a website or brand they are unaware of or don’t trust… but it’s cool nonetheless.
Another perk of WooCommerce Amazon Affiliates is that you will get all sorts of long tail traffic. You will come up in the SERPs for random products that are for sale on your page and get a commission on the sale.
Here are some features of this plugin below.
*WARNING* Do NOT automatically pull in all the descriptions with the products!! We did this on two sites and within days had duplicate content penalties. We removed the duplicate content, removed the plugin, and the penalty lasted for two months. It was terrible, but we learned a lesson. Keep that in mind and this plugin is cool!
8. WordPress SEO by Yoast
An SEO plugin may be a no brainer, but if you’re not taking advantage of this plugin, it may be wise to do so. WordPress SEO by Yoast is great because you can easily target one keyword per page and it will help to follow best on-page practices such as including the keyword in the title, meta, headings, and within the body. It also generates and maintains a sitemap for you which can help your site to be crawled more efficiently.
9. Mouseflow
Mouseflow is a plugin that allows you to record website visits. From the time a visitor lands on your page, it screen records where they go and what they click on. We don’t install this on every site, but it is nice to see how people are interacting with your site, especially if your conversion rates are low. It will also show you a heat map, click map and scroll map. The free version allows up to 100 recordings per month. When our sites were young this was okay, but now we blow over that in any given day!
10. Sticky Widget
This one is a favorite tool for Jesse more than it is myself… but this allows you to make a widget “sticky”. If you have a long page the widgets in your sidebar will be quickly scrolled past, but not with Sticky Widget!
You can make any type of widget sticky that you want whether it’s social follow icons or an ad you created for the top-selling product on your site (which just so happens to be the most expensive product as well). I should probably use this widget more, maybe Jesse is on to something here.