AffiLinker Review

Plugins / , , /

For an Affiliate Marketer, being able to manage your posts links is really important. Having the ability to change a keywords links quickly and easily when your affiliate link changes will save you a ton of time. Looking for a product to do this I cam across AffiLinker.

Link without Linking

Normally, in an article you would manually select one or more keywords and link them to a specific product or site. Highlight the word or phrase, click the link button, paste the link in and hit go.

Time consuming if you are doing this on every article for the same keywords.

AffiLinker allows you to setup up links in the dashboard for specific keywords and will automagically link them for you.

How does it work?

Using Javascript, the plugin takes your link and keyword list (one or more), and then depending on the settings will change the first occurrences of those keywords into affiliate links.

Keyword phrases or singular words can be used, the list is separated by commas.

It is even possible to add affiliate links within comments and to prioritise one link over another.

One flaw with the system is that, when Javascript is turned off, the links no longer work.

Generally this is no issue as most people use Javascript, but it would be worthwhile checking your analytics to see how many people visit your site with Javascript off, before using this plugin.

affilinker settings

Control

As mentioned, the setting help control the links so you don’t end up with just links!

You can limit the number of overall links and the number of same links on a page. You can also exclue the home page from links and other pages by ID (it would have been nice to see a checklist of pages instead of using ID’s).

You can also prioritise keywords so that they get linked first so not to get excluded from the page quota, which is a nice system.

Beautiful Links

AffiLinker allows you to change the link style and colour, to something different than your theme supplies, you can even do this with individual links so one can be a standard underlined blue, and another a bolded red with a dotted underline and yellow background (the colours are your choice of course!).

Link Cloaking

Built into AffiLinker is a simple Link cloaking tool, which is great. The link cloaking tool uses a basic structure:

www.yoursite.com/Visit/keyword

The Visit word can be changed by you but is across the board on all links. The keyword is well the keyword that is being linked.

This is pretty good, but you need to have “pretty permalinks” turned on in your settings as it won’t work with the default (and ugly) wordpress links.

Link Tracking

AffiLinker also provides a tracking system for the links. I was really excited about this feature, but unfortunately found it to be quite basic. It simply logs the number of times that keyword has been clicked and how many unique clicks it gets.

If you have the keyword “theme” 50 times across your site, it doesn’t tell you where or when they were clicked, so it’s not the best system currently.

Also the link tracking only occurs if the link is cloaked so Amazon links will not get tracked (you shouldnt be cloaking those…).

affilinker tracking

Summary

AffiLinker is a decent plugin, but I think it depends on your site, personality and visitors as to whether it would be good for you.

  • Lots of traffic who turn of Javascript? This isn’t for you.
  • Old sites that need updating with new affiliate links? This will be awesome for you.
  • Hate having to type out the same link on the same keyword time after time? Get this plugin

Pricing wise, there is a free version to test, but with the premium one you get more features and you may as well jump and get the unlimited everything plugin as the only real difference is the number of affiliate links you can use, and its a one off fee of $47.

You can pick up AffiLinker here