Many content publishers use affiliate marketing to make money online. The problem is that sometimes you can forget to add affiliate links in your article and leave money on the table. Fortunately, there is an easy solution to get that income back. In this article, we will show you how to automatically link keywords with affiliate links in WordPress.
Automatic affiliate link plugins allow you to convert specific keywords or brand mentions into affiliate links. This helps you unlock more revenue from your existing blog posts.
From time to time you will forget to add affiliate links in your articles. This problem is compounded when you have a multi-author blog.
Auto affiliate link plugins fix that problem and help you maximize your earning.
Another advantage of automatic affiliate linking is that it will also add links to your previous articles where a specific keyword is mentioned. This allows you to not only monetize your new content, but also leverage your previous articles.
We have been using automatic affiliate links on WPBeginner since 2009 to automatically replace brand mentions in affiliate links.
Let's take a look at how to easily set up automatic affiliate link solution on your WordPress site.
ThirstyAffiliates is the best affiliate link manager plugin on the market. We use it on our own websites, including WPBeginner.
The first thing you need to do is install and activate the ThirstyAffiliates plugin. For more details, check out our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, you need to visit the ThirstyAffiliates »Plugins page and scroll down to the Autolinker plugin section. Then click the 'Go to Plugins Page' button to continue.
This will take you to the ThirstyAffiliates website. Autolinker is a paid plugin and costs $49 dollars. You will likely recoup this investment in the first month if you set it up correctly.
After making the purchase you will be able to download the plugin. Next, you need to install the Autolinker plugin like you would install any other WordPress plugin.
After activation, go to Affiliate Links » Settings page and scroll down to the Autolinker section.
You must first provide the license key for the Autolinker plugin. You can get this information from your account on the ThirstyAffiliates website.
Next, you need to enter the email address used to purchase the plugin. Below that, you'll see options to enable or disable autolinking on certain pages like the home page, archives, and header tags. You can also enable auto-linking for custom post types and bbPress forum threads.
On the WPBeginner site, we have autolinking disabled for headers, archive pages, and homepage. Mainly because it's too annoying in our opinion.
We definitely recommend enabling the Random Auto Link Placement option because it makes your affiliate links look more natural. If you have this option disabled, Autolinker will only link to the first keyword it finds. While this isn't bad if you only replace each brand or keyword mention once, it looks extremely bad when you have a replacement frequency greater than 1 (more on this later in the article).
We also recommend that you enable automatic linking in your RSS feeds. This will help you maximize your earnings from readers who only read your website through RSS readers. Another advantage is that this allows you to make money from people who are scraping/stealing content from your site.
Since most scraping scripts steal the article from your RSS feed, these articles will contain your affiliate links. Since we started our blog in 2009, we have made thousands of dollars from sites that steal our content using this technique.
Once you've configured your settings, don't forget to click the Save Settings button to store your changes.
You are now ready to add affiliate links. Go to Affiliate Links »Add New Page to add your first affiliate link.
You will need to provide a link name and destination URL. After that, scroll down to the auto link section and add the keywords you want to automatically link to.
You can add multiple keywords separated by commas. You can also set a limit on the number of times a keyword can be linked in an article.
In most cases, we recommend a limit of 1 link per keyword. In the past we used to have 3 links per keyword, but it gets very crowded as your site grows and you have hundreds of affiliate links.
Don't forget to click the 'Save Link' button to add your affiliate link.
Now whenever these keywords appear in an article, they will automatically link to the affiliate link you added earlier.
For detailed instructions, check out our guide on how to add affiliate links in WordPress with ThirstyAffiliates.
Pretty Link Pro is another great affiliate link manager and URL shortener for WordPress. It allows you to easily manage your links in WordPress and use the autolink feature to automatically add affiliate links to your blog posts.
The first thing you need to do is install and activate the Pretty Link Pro plugin. For more details, check out our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
After activation, go to Nice Link »Activate Pro Page to enter your license key. You can find this information in your account on the Pretty Link Pro website.
Next, go to the Nice Link »Add New Link page to add your affiliate links.
You must first select a redirect type. You need to use 301 permalinks for all affiliate links.
After that, you need to add the destination URL and the URL that you want to use as shortened or cloaked URL.
You must also add a name for the link in the title field and any notes you want to add for the link.
Now you need to click on the 'Pro Options' tab to expand it and add the keywords you want to automatically link to. You can add multiple keywords separated by commas.
Don't forget to click the create button to save your link. After saving the link, these keywords will be automatically linked in all your posts.
You still need to control how you want automatic links to be added to your articles. You can do this by going to the Pretty Link »Options page and click on the 'Replacements' tab.
On this screen, you can enable replacements, as well as set an autolink threshold that allows you to limit the number of times a keyword will link in an article.
You can also set the links to open in a new window and make sure to check the nofollow option.
Don't forget to click the update button to save your changes.
Pretty Link Pro is a powerful plugin with tons of options for features like URL shortening, redirection, and affiliate link management. Feel free to explore these options and change them if you need to.
We hope this article helped you learn how to automatically link keywords with affiliate links in WordPress. You may also want to see our full list of the best affiliate marketing tools and plugins for WordPress.
If you enjoyed this article, please subscribe to our WordPress YouTube Channel video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
