There are two things you need to do if you plan to make money with affiliate marketing. You need to find a good product to promote and you need to get as much of your traffic to buy as possible. A lot of noobs will send traffic to the product page and directly to their affiliate link.
If everyone buys then this is great.. but that never happens. All the IM gurus will tell you the same thing.. you need to get email address and build a list.. then send them the offer. Building your own sales pages allows you to build a list that you can send more offers to later. It ain’t cheap to get traffic so why not build a list of people that you can always send offers to that won’t cost you additional money to market.
There are a lot of affiliate tools out there.. which are made by other affiliates trying to sell crap. Any time I make a post I always ask for topics and a few people asked if I knew of any good plugins that can help them with affiliate marketing. A lot of people use WordPress because it’s the easiest way to build sites so I thought of some decent plugins that I know help.
Some are free and some are paid. I listed the price of the premium ones so you can get an idea of there cost. Free is always good but when you buy a paid plugin you at least know the developers are going to keep working out bugs and make improvements.
Here are some suggestions..
1. OptimizePress – Price: $97
This is something everyone selling affiliate products and offers needs to have. It is a small investment and the $97 option allows you to install it on 3 sites. You can always upgrade when you need more licenses and if you need more that should mean that you are making money so the cost is a smart investment.
This allows you to easily create landing pages, sales pages, funnels, portal pages and even blogs. With all the pre made templates to start with it eliminates a lot of the guess work. You will notice these are the same styles so many ClickBank products use. That is because they work and convert well. With this you don’t have to worry about finding a coder or programmer to make changes and you can quickly get a new page up to test in a matter of minutes using this. It’s a really small investment when you see what it can do.
Check out all the features here:
2. Pinterest “Pin It” Button – Price: FREE
If you are pushing a single product this might not be as helpful.. but if you have an affiliate site that sells a bunch of products.. like an Amazon affiliate site then this plugin is great. People love to share images and Pinterest is a big time source of traffic that a lot of people don’t even think about. Women like to share pictures of household items and clothes and guys like to share electronics like huge TVs and all the newest gadgets.
When they pin it to their board people who follow their boards will see it. If that person is interested in the item they click it and they are taken to your website. I have a few mates that are big into Amazon affiliate marketing and they build out very specific category pages and for some of the items Pinterest is the biggest chunk of referral traffic. Like I said not all sites will benefit but some will find a new source of traffic just by installing this free plugin and using it with all images.
You can download it for free here:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/pinterest-pin-it-button/
3. Better Links Pro – Price: $37
People aren’t as gullible as they were back in 2005. It was much easier to sell affiliate products because the average person was still new to the internet. It is kind of like email was back in the day. You could load up a bunch of email addresses and blast out an offer and people would actually buy. Now they know what spam is and they know how to spot and ad or affiliate offer online.
One of the dead giveaways is a long ugly affiliate tracking link. Your affiliate manager might give you a link that looks like this:
www.super-great-weight-loss-pill.com/tracking/aff2345425478.74747834833/
Most people know what that is and it can hurt your sales. This plugin helps you easy make your affiliate links not as noticeable. With it you could turn the example link above to something that looks like it is part of your site:
www.yoursite.com/lose-eight-easily/
Something like that isn’t going to scare people away. Nobody gives up info easily and everyone is scared of spam and hacks so it’s a small investment to make. You can make it up with a single sale on most products.
You can get more info here:
4. Yoast SEO – Price: FREE
This is probably the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress. If you have affiliate sites you are probably doing some SEO yourself or you have a provider doing the SEO. When you make new pages on your blog or even new sales pages this is a good tool to use to make sure the little things are done. There isn’t a plugin that will do the SEO but this at least tells you if you are on the track track when it comes to onsite optimizing.
It checks tiles, content, and your URL to make sure you have a good base to work with. I would also suggest installing the Yoast Google Analytics plugin that work with this one. You need to be able to see where all your traffic comes from. Set up goals so you can see where conversions come from. If you are working with a SEO service share the information so they can build more links according to where the good traffic is coming from.
Get it here:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/
5. Amazon Auto Links – Price: FREE
This plugin is great for some and some won’t find it useful. There are a lot of people that make really customized sites and they make them look nothing like Amazon. This isn’t the plugin if you are that person.
There are also lots of people that like to auto generate as many products as possible on plain looking product pages that look and feel like Amazon. If that is you then check this out. You can set it so your pages are automatically filled with the new products every day that fall into your categories. They will also already have your tracking code. This isn’t the prettiest option but for those that are just cranking out these sites all over and even using dirty links to rank and bank then this is a good option.
Download it here free:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/amazon-auto-links/
6. WP Review – Price: FREE
Google rich snippets are confusing. If you read their guide on how to get the stuff to show up it might not sink in. This plugin can get you the stars and rating and automatically show them in the SERPS. If you are ranking for a product don’t you think people are going to click on the listing with the most 5 star ratings? It only makes sense.
There are a bunch of options that can be done. There are points and percentage rating systems but I only use stars. They look good and stand out and people are used to them. The yellow really makes your listing stand out. I’m not saying to use fake ratings but do you really think some of the listings out there really have 5,345 REAL 5 star ratings? Not a chance but nobody is checking them.. that high number just helps their click rate.
You can do the same. Crank out those reviews and make your page stick out in the SERPS.
Get it here:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-review/
7. OptinMonster – Price: $49 per Year
Already mentioned how you need to build a list. You hear it all the time so it must be important. There are so many popup plugins but a lot of them look cheap. This one is $49 a year but it has the most options. You can link it to whatever mail program you use to send your emails to your list right form the form.
It has a bunch of features that others don’t. Is has all kinds of triggers you can set…pop at exit.. pop after so many seconds.. pop on some pages and not others. It also have a good dashboard to track split tests and it has a analytics section. There are also forms you can submit in blog posts and some optin boxes you can set to slide in on the bottom. So many options.
The only bad thing about this one is all the add on plugins. Just make sure you don’t install the ones you aren’t using. No need to slow your site down for no reason. Make sure you have good hosting and you won’t even notice. If you are on shared $1 hosting and you install every plugin you can find you will see a slow load speed.
Check it out here:
8. Ultimate Nofollow – Price: FREE
If you are spending a lot of money ranking product pages and affiliate sites by building your own PBN sites or spending money on a SEO service then you want to keep as much link juice on the page to help you rank. If you have a lot of links going out you will want to use this plugin so you can quickly add nofollow to all those links going out.
Some people say it doesn’t matter but just to be sure I would do it. If you just have a single cloaked affiliate link going out then it isn’t a big deal, but if you have a product category page that you are ranking and there are dozen out links going out then nofollow them. That is a lot of juice being passed that you want to keep for yourself.
There are some affiliate gurus that say it doesn’t matter but if you look they nofollow their links.. so are they full of it or saying that so others have a harder time ranking? If you have a regular blog then linking out you don’t need to worry about nofollow because you want it to look natural. 50 product affiliate links on a page will suck your juice so nofollow them. Or don’t do it if you don’t think it matters. If you are like me and think it does use this free plugin.
You can get it here:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/nofollow/
9. Exit Redirect – Price: $19
This is the old classic popup that annoys the piss out of people. Why do so many affiliate sites use it? Because it fucking works! This is great to use to throw a coupon code or instant price reduction. So many ClickBank sites use a exit block like this. Do you care if you piss some people off? Most will never even visit your site again.. and they are interested in whatever you are selling so take every step to get them to buy form you. If they don’t they will get it somewhere else and someone else will get the affiliate payout.
This will be the best 20 dollars spend that will pay for itself by saving a single sale. It’s not the nicest looking popup but it is so simple and the style works. I would put this on your site if you are selling a single product and have a special lower price you want to offer to anyone that leaves before buying.
Get it here:
http://www.icegram.com/addons/exit-redirect/
10. Affiliate Power – Price: FREE
This is probably one of my favorite tools. This shows you how much money every single post has made you. There are many sites that have multiple pages that push offers and this plugin will show you every dollar that is made from each page and post. This helps you understand what content is converting better and you can then use that to adjust your other pages and for when you are making new posts.
There is also a premium version of the plugin that gives you more info and shows you how much money every referral source and keyword brought in. So many people think that they can’t access the information that they need because they are a noob. Plugins like this give you the information that you can use to really improve your numbers. It takes work but if you are willing to work a free plugin like this can help you make so much more moniezzzzz.
Grab it here:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/affiliate-power/
Hopefully some of you will find some of them helpful. If you are pushing affiliate offers you know how important it is to stretch every dollar in order to get a return! We always hear stories of super affiliates making $100,000 a day but what they leave out is the $85,000 they spend on ads.. you have to know what you are doing to reach that level. These are just a few basic plugins to help you improve.
Any questions, feedback or whatever you know the drill by now.. fire away in the comments below! Until next time guys..
