: Updated: The Best Wordpress Affiliate Link Manager Around – Internet Marketing

This morning I got an email from MaxBlogPress, saying that they had just updated their Ninja Affiliate plugin. I have been using this plugin for years on many of my WordPress sites (including this one.) It is extremely handy, and one plugin that I would certainly miss if I didn’t have it (I’ll tell you why in a second) so I was definitely interested in an update.

To be honest, I don’t own a lot of commercial WordPress plugins – PhpBayPro and this are it. Most things you want to do on WordPress can be accomplished using free plugins. Sometimes I also create my own simple plugins, since I can make them do exactly what I want. But the two that I bought are both essential plugins. To recreate either of them would take a lot of work, so I love that they are both 100% ready to help me make money, right out of the box.

PhpBayPro is a topic for another post, but read on to see why Ninja Affiliate is so useful…

What does MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate do?

In a nutshell, it is an affiliate link manager, cloaker, which can also create automatic keyword-based links using your affiliate links?

Why do we need this?

Of course, you can insert your own affiliate links straight into the WordPress post editor. There are three problems with this:

It is tedious – I don’t know about you but building up affiliate links from the various network tools, complete with tracking IDs, Prosper 202 variables, etc is just boring. I want to create my links once, and then be able to use them many times throughout my posts, sidebar, banners with a couple of clicks.
It is error prone – if you are setting up the full blown affiliate link each time you want to use it somewhere in your blog, your chance of making an error (and thus losing cash) is magnified.
Changes – say you set up a cloaked link in a post, and then you want to remove cloaking. You’ll have to edit the post, and everywhere else you used that link.
Organisation – having affiliate links directly inserted into posts all over your blog means that you’re more likely to have dead links, which is just a wasted opportunity. Good luck finding all your dead links!
Tracking – you can track affiliate link clicks with something like Google Analytics, but this requires additional setup in your account, and is unreliable. I find it essential to track the clicks that each link receives.

Similar to this, sometimes you have multiple affiliate links within a single post (e.g. end of post, middle of post, etc.) – setting up an individual link for each of these is just BORING if you don’t have some form of tool to help you.

Of course, I’m using it in this post. Check out the links to the Ninja Affiliate sales page to see how I’ve used it!

Here’s how Ninja Affiliate helps you:

1. You set up an affiliate link once and can then easily insert it into a post using a menu the plugin adds to the WordPress post editor, just by highlighting a word or image, and selecting the link you want.

2. If you change your mind about enabling/disabling cloaking, or even the destination of a link, you can change all this in the link settings, without touching your posts, theme, or wherever else you’ve used the link.

3. Another massive time (and sanity) saver it gives you is the ability to add affiliate links to a list of keywords, wherever they appear in your blog. I don’t recommend doing something like adding your affiliate link to lots of general keywords – there’s no real benefit in doing that. But you can use it in a couple of good ways:

a) Auto-link product names, e.g. ‘Sham-Wow’. When people see the link they’ll assume it’s the product detail page.

b) Auto-link phrases you often use to send traffic on to the affiliate page, e.g. “Get more info now!”

There are a bunch of useful options with this feature to control the maximum number of keywords auto-linked. You need to use your discretion here to keep the links effective.

4. Be more organised – one place to store all your affiliate links. Easy to change or remove them.

5. Track the success of each link – see how many clicks they’ve received; and see which URL on your blog sent the most clicks for a given link.

6. Easily set up variations of the same link to tell you which link (e.g. top of page, middle, etc..) got you the sale. Ninja Affiliate allows this through the use of what they call ‘sub-campaigns’. You can have unlimited sub-campaigns per affiliate link, each with their own tracking ID. So this is a really quick way to track variations of the same link.

A few other things worth mentioning:

Ninja Affiliate links are automatically nofollow’d for SEO reasons (you can disable this if you want)
You can add custom formatting to all affiliate links
You can turn on/off the ability to open affiliate links in a new window or the same window

Click here to see videos showing exactly how Ninja Affiliate will make your life easier

What’s in the update of Ninja Affiliate?

Since the trigger for this post was the update, I thought I’d quickly explain what they changed:

Complete visual redesign – I have tested it for a while and it is definitely easier to read.
They’ve added more navigation options in the Admin so you can get around the config screens more quickly.

It’s not a huge change, but the previous version, which hadn’t changed in a long time was doing everything it was supposed to do already!

I’m Interested, Where do I get Ninja Affiliate?

This plugin is $97 for use on unlimited blogs. They now have a $37 option for a single blog.

As I said, I bought it over 3 years ago and it has paid for itself many, MANY times over.

$37 is a great price, but if you are an affiliate marketer, you are going to need the unlimited version.

Enough from me – the sales page has videos, screenshots and explains all the ways this plugin will make your life easier.

See the Ninja Affiliate sales page now

Confused? Leave a comment

If you want more info or specific examples on how to get the most from Ninja Affiliate, then just ask me. I’m more than happy to create most posts about this.

Updated: The Best WordPress Affiliate Link Manager Around