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Let's get your affiliate strategy in shape with these WordPress plugins! Our list covers everything you need, from setting up an affiliate program to boosting affiliate participation and success.
Running an affiliate program increases brand awareness and gets those charts pointing skywards. However, building a successful strategy is much easier with some WordPress insider knowhow.
Extend your WordPress site’s functionality with our top pick of plugins
We’ve put together a list of some of the best options available. With these plugins in your toolkit, you can progressively build out a stellar marketing plan that has you covered from all angles.
Let's do this!
1. Easy Affiliate
Of course, setting up an affiliate program is your first port of call. And here's one standout option for easy setup and smooth management: Easy Affiliate.
Easy Affiliate is a WordPress plugin built specifically for creating and managing affiliate programs.
Getting started is (as the plugin's title suggests) easy as pie with their setup wizard. Integrate with key eCommerce platforms such as WooCommerce and MemberPress (mentioned below) in a click.
Track the performance of your partners based on the number of clicks they generate. This plugin also enables you to monitor sales and payments, all from within your WordPress dashboard.
Some key features of Easy Affiliate include:
- A straightforward setup
- Easy configuration for commission levels, payment systems, promotional links, and banners
- A personalized dashboard for your affiliates where they can monitor their statistics, edit their account details, download promotional materials, and more
- Automated fraud detection
- UTM parameters for easy tracking in Google Analytics
- Integration with many shopping carts and payment gateways
Price: The basic edition starts at $99.60 per year and is suitable if you’re running your first affiliate program.
2. MemberPress
MemberPress is a WordPress plugin for building membership sites. You can use it to create, manage, sell, and track subscriptions.
While not directly an affiliate tool, you can use it to set up free memberships for your partners to grant them access to exclusive content and other resources.
The more effort you put into providing your affiliates with resources such as swipe copy, design assets, exclusive information, and other incentives, the more successful your affiliate program will be.
Among other things, MemberPress enables you to:
- Get full control over access to posts, pages, feeds, communities, and more with fine-grained access control.
- Run promotions and giveaways with coupons
- Create and sell online courses
- Integrate with Easy Affiliate to track affiliate sales of memberships and subscriptions.
Price: Plans start from $179.50 per year which is all you'll need for a simple site for affiliate resources. But if you want to make the most of its content monetization and subscription capabilities we recommend the Plus or Pro plans.
3. Pretty Links
Are you grappling with the chaos of affiliate marketing links? Pretty Links swoops in as your go-to ally for smart link management.
With so many affiliate tracking links to create and distribute, it's important to have an easy way to stay on top of them. And Pretty Links helps you do just that.
This is especially great for your partners who'll appreciate the ease of embedding these shortened links into their blog posts and social media content.
Here's the lowdown on what Pretty Links brings to your table:
- Transform your long, unwieldy affiliate links into neat, cloaked, trackable, and shareable versions.
- All your social, redirect, and affiliate links, organized neatly in one central hub.
- Automatically sprinkle relevant links throughout your blog posts – talk about efficiency!
- Options galore for redirecting links, giving you full control.
- Keep a tab on the clicks your affiliate links are getting.
Pretty Links is the ideal link management tool if your affiliates are mostly bloggers and independent creators.
Price: Plans start at $99.60 per year.
4. ThirstyAffiliates
ThirstyAffiliates is another link management tool that shares many of the same features as Pretty Links. Like Pretty Links, it helps affiliates boost their effectiveness by cloaking long and ugly affiliate links.
This also helps protect commissions from theft since some malware can hijack URLs recognized as affiliate links and prevent your partners from earning revenue.
However, it has a standout feature that makes it an ideal alternative for international brands and those working with high-volume affiliate marketers.
ThirstyAffiliates' geo-location feature enables you to divert visitors who click on a link to their country's marketplace.
For international brands, this one feature has serious implications on your conversion rate, ensuring customers don't search elsewhere for the same product.
Here's a summary of the key features and capabilities of ThirstyAffiliates:
- Automatically integrate keywords in your links
- Generate comprehensive reports to help you track performance
- Alter destinations for international clicks via country-targeting
- Intelligently uncloak specific links (for example, to comply with Amazon’s terms of service)
Price: A one-site license for single-site owners starts a $99.60 per year, while a five-site license is priced from $149.60 per year. There’s also a ten-site license available from $199.60.
5. WPForms
WPForms is a powerful and user-friendly drag-and-drop WordPress form builder. You can start with prebuilt templates and also use conditional logic when building complex forms.
This can come in handy when creating your affiliate signup forms.
Key features include:
- Easily embed forms into blog posts, pages, sidebars, and more
- Prevent spam submissions
- Create multi-page forms to improve user experience
- Integrate forms with platforms such as Paypal, Stripe, Mailchimp, and more
Price: Starts at $49.50 for the most basic plan and goes up to $299.50 per year for the highest-tier plan.
6. MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is your all-seeing eye for website analytics, seamlessly integrating with different devices and campaigns.
It's your go-to tool for using analytics to gauge the performance and effectiveness of your affiliates.
View real-time statistics and access Google Analytics directly from your WordPress dashboard.
With Monster Insights, you have a powerful, yet user-friendly way to monitor the pulse of your website's activity and affiliate success.
MonsterInsights can help you:
- Track clicks on affiliate links, banner ads, and other outbound links
- Help your site stay compliant with privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
- Integrate with plugins such as WooCommerce, WPForms, MemberPress, Pretty Links, and more
- Attribute links, which lets you learn which call-to-action (CTA) buttons and links are receiving the most clicks
- Track multiple metrics to understand data such as how your site is being used or when your posts see the most engagement
Price: There's a free version with limited functionality available. The Plus plan is priced at $99.50 per year, and costs go up from there.
7. RafflePress
One solid way to grow your subscriber list, website traffic, and engagement is to host giveaways or contests or enable your advertising partners to do so.
This is exactly what you can do with RafflePress.
With RafflePress you can create actions to encourage engagement on your site and social media platforms in exchange for entries to your giveaway.
For example, you can request that entrants write a comment on your blog, or follow you on social media in order to qualify for a chance to win.
Some key features of RafflePress include:
- A drag-and-drop builder
- Prebuilt templates, which are responsive and mobile-friendly
- Tools to prevent fraud entries
- Social media integrations with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and more
Price: Prices start from just $39.50 per year.
8. SmashBalloon
The final plugin on our list, SmashBalloon, lets you display customized content from different social media networks such as Instagram and Twitter.
You could use SmashBalloon to incorporate social media feeds featuring your influencers on your website.
Some of the things you can do with this plugin include:
- Set up search-engine-friendly social feeds in WordPress without hiring a developer
- Match your feeds to your brand style and identity
- Include likes, shares, and comments for social proof
- Enable users to engage with your social content right from your site
Price: To integrate feeds from any one of the four social platforms available, you can subscribe for $49 – $149 per year, depending on how many sites you want to use it on. You can also choose the All-Access bundle (which includes feeds from all four platforms) for a discounted price of $299 per year.
Conclusion
WordPress is a powerhouse by default, but it's plugins that make WordPress the standout CMS platform for business owners.
And when it comes to leveraging affiliate marketing for your business, you have all the tools you need to optimize your strategy from every angle.
- Start an affiliate program on your site with Easy Affiliate
- Manage your links with Pretty Links or ThirstyAffiliates
- Go the extra mile by creating an exclusive affiliate section on your site with MemberPress.
You're on the road to a highly effective strategy.
Got any questions about the best WordPress plugins for affiliate programs? Let us know in the comments section below!
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