Masking Affiliate Links with WP-Affiliate
August 23, 2008 by Jon
Filed under Reviews, Software and Tools
If you use WordPress in any of your marketing efforts (and you should be), you probably need a way to mask your affiliate links. If that’s you, there’s a free plug-in you need to know about called WP-Affiliate.
WP-Affiliate let’s you setup blog-wide masked (cloaked) affiliate links. Basically you enter in the anchor text and the actual URL, and the plug-in will give you a masked URL you can use within posts on your blog.
So as an example, if you had an affiliate link that looked like this:
http://www.affiliateproduct.com/myaffiliateid/?=myaffiliatetrackingid
WP-Affiliate could transform that link to look like this instead:
http://www.mydomain.com/recommends/affiliateproduct
I think you’ll agree that second domain looks much nicer, and would provide a better experience for your blog’s readers. You can actually see how the plug-in works by clicking any of the links on this post!
Installing and configuring WP-Affiliate is really easy… just upload the plug-in to your site, activate it from the admin dashboard, and then setup your links from the options area in the write/edit post page.
The downside to WP-Affiliate is that it won’t automatically link your chosen anchor text. You use it to create the links, but then you have to manually add them to your post. It does have a shortcut to send your link to the editor window, but that is still a manual effort.
However considering how well it does what it does—and especially considering the price—I plan on using WP-Affiliate on this blog, and I encourage you to do the same!
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Thanks I am using a german version of such a plugin. http://blog.mgcontent.com/affiliate-link-plugin-fur-wordpress/ pretty neat which lets you manager you affiliate link. Decide a phrase and put the affiliate link behind, choose if it works for all article or as single link and you’re done.
Read Manuel Merz’s last blog post: Build A Niche Store
It looks promising, but I don’t speak German. Do they have an English version?
Great plugin - thanks Jon!
Much simpler than stuffing around with ’secret’ php files and hoping for the best!
Read makka’s last blog post: It’s Bristol so it must be Banksy!
Makka,
You’re more than welcome!
I actually tried a couple of the premium WordPress affiliate plug-ins, and the free WP-Affiliate works better than any I’ve tried. Kinda funny that a free plug-in works better than a premium $100 plug-in, but it does.
Not that I am aware of. I could translate it for you. Do I need permission from the original author as well?
Read Manuel Merz’s last blog post: Build A Niche Store
Manuel,
Thanks for the offer!
However I’ve already gotten quite a bit setup with the WP-Affiliate plug-in, so I’ll probably just use that for now.
I have wp-affiliate installed and wanted to use if for all my affiliate links. Problem is the mechanism to generate links does not display on static pages, just posts. What is the deal about that? They don’t expect anyone to place an affiliate link on a static page? The author of the plugin does not seem all that accessible and I noticed you were discussing it here and using it so I thought I would ask about this here.
How do you handle affiliate links on static pages?
Thanks for your review!
Jeff
Jeff,
Great question! I never tried using WP-Affiliate on static pages before, and you’re correct that the plug-in options don’t appear in the “write page” editor.
However… I did a quick test, and if you copy & paste the masked URL that you already setup in WP-Affiliate from the post editor, and use that as the hyperlink for text on a static page, everything works just fine.
So while it would be great to have access to the WP-Affiliate options and pre-defined links you’ve created, you can copy & paste the masked link and use it anywhere on the blog without any trouble (which is good to know because I hadn’t tried it until now).
Jon, I also was wondering if that would work, good that you tried it out. But for me I am afraid it falls quite short, as most of my silo structured cms/blog will be pages with posts only in support of the pages, I will have to copy and paste way too many links. Have you had contact with the wp-affiliate author? Unfortunately the plugin seems very slow to develop. SEODude seems too busy at work to do much development on it.
Will look for other solutions.
Jeff
I have looked, and unfortunately there is no other solution.
What I’ve thought of doing is combining the aLinks plug-in with WP-Affiliate. (http://alinks.headzoo.com/) Unfortunately, I can’t seem to get aLinks to activate on my blog.
I would be interested in hearing from anybody who’s successfully installed and activated aLinks on WordPress 2.6.1.
(No, I have not been in contact with the WP-Affiliate author.)
Jon,
I will try out that plugin, but how does it help to accomplish tracking links made on pages, I am afraid I do not follow how it will help.
Jeff
Perhaps we’re not discussing the same thing, but here’s how it would help as I envision it.
You create masked affiliate links using WP-Affiliate. Then you configure aLinks to automatically replace specified anchor text with the masked link on all posts and pages.
That way everything is completely automated for all pages/posts.
Does that make sense?
Ah, ok, but for now, as the functionality is not yet available in wp-affiliate, the affiliate links have to be created in a post, correct?
Jeff
As it turns out it is a mute point, I get the following error when I try to install:
aLinks Installation Error
Deactivating aLinks. The directory /home/singular/public_html/wp-content/plugins/alinks/temp/logs does not exist. Check your installation.
The folder does in fact exist and has all the necessary permissions.
Only hope is wp-affiliate getting the ability to make links in pages. Why would the author have written it like this? Is there something inherent in WP that makes this necessary?
Jeff
Jeff- There’s another plug-in called GoCodes that might work better for you. I haven’t tried it, so if you get a chance to test it, please let us know how well it works. Thanks!
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gocodes/
Thanks to the article, Now there is more reason to comment than ever before! Everyone should participate. I am incorporating what your wrote to our project!
For those still wondering how to get the two plugins to work together, I found one that combines it all into one. I’ve installed it on one of my blogs and it seems to work just fine for both SEO and Affiliate needs: http://www.wpanchortext.com
Read Jmo´s last blog post: U.S. lawmaker to push repeal of online gambling ban