If you are using WordPress to power your affiliate marketing site(s), plugins are one of the easiest ways to automatically optimize your pages.
If you have never used plugins before or are just launching your site, there are several elements to your site you should consider improving through plugins including:
- SEO (search engine optimization)
- Expanded insights
- Site speed
- Email Capturing
- Ad Placement Simplification
The following plugins will help you achieve all of the above while providing some additional helpful features to ensure your site reaches its potential.
Pretty Links
Pretty Links is a WordPress affiliate marketer’s best friend as it includes several helpful features for perhaps the most important component of your promotion: your affiliate links.
Here’s just a few things you can do with this plug-in that will simplify your affiliate life.
- Easily add links to your posts
- Make your URLs more concise, marketable
- Enable auto-linking so that links are added for specific keywords
- Analyze detailed link reports
It also gives you the ability to add redirects to your links so your audience will never find themselves on a 404 page if a link becomes comprised for any reason.
Download Pretty Links
SEM Rush
If you use WordPress to run your affiliate site/page and rely at least partially on organic traffic, a great SEO plugin is simply a must-have.
SEM Rush offers a slew of SEO features including a top-notch keyword research tool that allows you to analyze your own rankings, track keywords, and discover what others are doing.
Its most powerful ability may be the comprehensive analysis it can perform on competing sites. This can provide you with TWO significant benefits:
- Gain a better understanding of what niches/verticals are currently lucrative for other affiliates. This can give you new ideas on how to pivot your own promotions.
- Discover pages your competitor’ rankings while receiving actionable tips as to how you can beat them.
Its simply a versatile, all-around SEO plug-in that automatically transform you into a more knowledgeable affiliate.
Monster Insights
Another mandatory plug-in for your affiliate arsenal is one that is going to provide you with expanded insights and analytics. MonsterInsights will achieving that goal and then some.
This plug-in pairs with Google Analytics to provide you expansive real-time reporting right in your WordPress dashboard. It also simplifies the process of setting up Google Analytics, requiring zero coding.
Here are some of its standout features:
- Link tracking feature to monitor URLs, ads, and any outbound links
- In-depth reports to help you determine your best performing pages
- Compatible with other plug-ins, providing additional insights
- Highly-regarded customer support team
AdSanity
This is a great ad-management plug-in if you are an affiliate who acquires traffic through display ads you place on your site. It will help to both organize and optimize your various ad placements
Some of the things you can with AdSanity include:
- Manage your affiliate campaign ads right on your WordPress Dashboard
- Place ads anywhere on your site through easily accessed shortcodes, tags and widgets.
- Assign ads designated times to display on your blog
Another unique feature that is more relevant than ever is the ability to inform visitors that they need to disable ad block to view your content. This can help you retain visitors that you might have otherwise lost.
Constant Contact
Just because someone visits your website and leaves without clicking on an offer link does not mean they are no longer valuable. If you can at least capture their email, they could become future business for you down the line.
Constant Contact excels at being a two-in-one service. Not only can you capture visitor emails but their service also gives you the ability to create custom newsletters then you can then send to those leads.
You can use their Email Template Builder or just choose from hundreds of pre-made mobile-optimized templates.
Whether your objective is getting those visitors back to your site or promoting campaigns to them directly through email, Constant Contact can help you achieve both goals.
Robust real-time reporting and analytics rounds out this valuable plug-in’s features.
WP-Rocket
A slow site can be a major problem for two reasons:
- Your visitors may leave before any of the hard work you put into your site has the chance to entice them.
- Faster competing sites will be ranked more favorably.
Luckily there are several plug-ins available that can help you increase your site’s speed. WP-Rocket might be the best.
What makes this plugin so great is that it starts working as soon as its activated. Your site’s speed should immediately improve as it automatically begins caching your pages.
It will also ensure the images on your page(s) only load once a visitor scrolls to them. This will reduce the weight of your HTML, CSS, etc. and further increase your site’s speed.