There are plenty of resources available for online marketers when it comes to incorporating the use of affiliates into a marketing campaign or strategy. Some companies design their own affiliate programs while others join an external affiliate service. Depending on what internet resources are used for various purposes, such as Facebook and Twitter for social media, WordPress for blogging, or one of the many tools offered by Google for advertising and analytics, you can make use of the internal programs and applications to maximize your affiliate marketing as part of your overall campaign.
WordPress is a great tool for blogging and is a well-established bloggers’ domain. One of the many advantages to using WordPress is that you have the ability to forego the site’s extension in your blog’s name and use a domain name that appears to stand alone (i.e., “www.example.com” rather than “www.example.wordpress.com”), and it also provides several plugins for use to generate an income through affiliate marketing.
Here are the top five that you can evaluate for use with your WordPress blog:
1. Affiliates
The Affiliates plugin provides an affiliate program management system that allows you to get started immediately. It works for shops, developers, and sellers, and can be integrated with almost any e-commerce platform. The Affiliates plugin offers a variety of options such as the ability to see real-time reporting, create referrals, and track visits to your site through affiliate links.
2. WP Auto Affiliate Links
The ability to associate keywords with affiliate links is the primary purpose of this plugin, and it will automatically convert given keywords into specific affiliate links when the keywords appear in your blog posts. The program also provides an administration page through which you can manage your links, change settings, assign keywords, and perform other functions.
3. Easy Affiliate
This plugin is one of the easiest to enable and one of the quickest ways to capitalize on your blog entries and convert clicks into cash. It connects your blog to over 3,000 partner sites and automatically converts your blog’s links into relevant affiliate links.
4. Thirsty Affiliates
This highly rated plugin provides with a dashboard from which you can monitor and modify your affiliate links, “beautify” your existing links through redirection or cloaking, assists with adding links to blog posts, and has a link picker tool for insertion of affiliate links in your content.
5. Affiliate Power
The Affiliate Power plugin offers a basic and premium version, with the differences being that the basic version allows you to track income per post, rather than per referrer, keyword, campaign, or several other options. You can receive a statistical overview of particular periods or receive detailed tracking data that can be converted into an Excel spreadsheet. With the many tracking options, this plugin is a great tool for affiliate program management.
Making the most of your blog’s potential can easily be done when you select from among the many WordPress plugins and programs designed to enable you to capitalize on your content. By using affiliate programs, you are able to tap into a larger target market and realize the benefits of reciprocal advertising through joining affiliate programs and creating your own.
Affiliate marketing is just one more powerful weapon in your online marketing arsenal, so take advantage of the opportunities provided by the many tools and options offered and increase your visibility, site traffic, and conversion rates.