Ninja Plug-in for Affiliate Marketing on Your Blog

One of the popular ways to generate revenue with your blog is through affiliate marketing. By linking to relevant products in your blog content, you can potentially made very good money if people buy those products via your link. But, affiliate links can be long and ugly. How can you best deal with this on your blog?

I was looking for a solution. I wanted a solution for WordPress where I could manage affiliate links and have my links shortened. In other words, instead of the big long affiliate links, I wanted to be able to point people to something like www.davidrisley.com/linkname/ .

I also wanted to be able to create short URLs like that as redirectors to my own posts. When I send out emails, it is much nicer to be able to include a short URL using my own domain than some super-long blog post URL or an Aweber click through link.

There are two solutions I came across:

Now, both of these are paid WordPress plug-ins. However, if you know the power of affiliate marketing for a blog, the price tags are small and reasonable for either plug-in.

I compared the two plug-ins and ultimately I went with (and purchased) MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate. It is worth every penny.

Both plug-ins allow you to set up and manage affiliate links throughout your blog. Both allow you to track clicks through your links. Where I believe that Ninja Affiliate shines over the other is with the link structure. Judging from the videos for WP Affiliate Pro, the links will go through a PHP click tracking script. It isn’t a memorable, clean link. Whereas with the Ninja plug-in, I can create link URLs with any text that I want and they re-direct just the same.

A short feature list is:

Allows clean, memorable URLs
Allows organizing of related links into groups
Allows link cloaking
Allows easy insertion of affiliate links right from the WP post editor
Auto-hyperlink keywords throughout your entire blog with your affiliate links (with options to exclude certain pages/categories)
Allows limits on number of affiliate links per post
Change the text in the status bar when hovering over a link (if the browser supports it)

Another powerful feature of the Ninja plug-in is that you can provide on-the-fly variations of any link to track different sources. For example, if I had a link to davidrisley.com/link1/, I could use a variation such as davidrisley.com/link1-email/ to track click-throughs specifically from my email list. I don’t have to create an entirely separate link for this. It is just a separate variation of the same link. I can also group links together. I only have four links in the system so far (as you can see below), but imagine when you have a lot of different links in place. Grouping will be a handy organizing tool.

Completely aside from affiliate offers, I also like how I can use this plug-in to simply create clean URLs for my posts. As you can see above, I also have a link for the 10th Problogger Flip Tip video. Instead of having to include a long post URL in an email to my list, I could include the nice, short URL and not have it screw up the formatting of my email. I had to perform a manual htaccess re-direct in the past when I did this! Over on PCMech, I have a custom PHP script I manually edited for short URL redirects – and it didn’t even track click-throughs. A friend of mine does Cpanel redirects which is, again, a manual process that still doesn’t track clicks. So, Ninja Affiliate, for me, is a huge time-saver completely aside from the potential affiliate marketing benefits.

Ninja Affiliate is probably the most comprehensive affiliate marketing plug-in I’ve ever seen for WordPress and it has most definitely filled a need I’ve had for some time.

This plug-in is, at regular price, $97. However, you can easily make back $97 with just a few affiliate sales of something related to your blog content. Anybody who is serious about making money with their blog has got to get a plug-in that does this. To do otherwise means a lot of manual labor on your part and, quite frankly, your time is better spent doing other things.