Are you looking for new ways to grow your affiliate marketing revenue?
There’s a lot of money to be made! In 2023, affiliate marketing made over $17 billion globally.
But while the average salary for an affiliate marketer is over $60,000, many people earn much less while a few earn much more. What makes the difference?
Here are 7 tips that will help you grow your affiliate marketing revenue.
Note: This is a guest post by Blair Williams, the founder of Pretty Links, a popular all-in-one affiliate link management plugin. We publish an expert column on WPBeginner every other Thursday. This is an invite-only column, meaning we don’t accept unsolicited guest post offers.
I will cover quite a few topics in this post. Here’s a handy list so you can jump to the section you are most interested in:
The first step in generating revenue from affiliate sales is to make sure you attract an audience that actually wants to try out the product or service you recommend.
Since over 70% of affiliate marketers get most of their traffic from search engines like Google, that makes SEO really important.
But SEO takes time, especially if you’re competing against other affiliate marketing sites for keywords with high search volume and high competition.
To earn the most commissions, I highly recommend targeting investigational keywords. Let me explain why.
Generally speaking, Google searches are performed with 4 different types of intent, and the best match for affiliate websites is investigational intent. Here’s a quick breakdown of the different kinds of search intent:
Users with navigational intent are trying to get to a particular website. Example: search on Google with the phrase www.wpbeginner.com
Users with informational intent are simply trying to find an answer to a question. Example: search on Google with the phrase who is the current US President.
Users with transactional intent have already made a decision and are ready to purchase or download the product they chose. Example: buy Apple iPhone 15 Pro
Finally, users with investigational intent are looking for information that may eventually lead to a purchase or transaction. Example: best student laptops, compare hp vs dell laptops, etc.
Users with investigational intent will want to read product reviews, showcases, and comparisons like yours before making a final purchasing decision. This means as an affiliate marketer, it’s your job to help your users find the right product and get them purchase it through your affiliate link.
They use investigational keywords in their search queries that include words like ‘best’, ‘review’, ‘compare’, and ‘alternative’.
Here are some examples of investigational intent keywords:
By targeting investigational keywords, you will drive the right audience to your site. I’ve found that means you won’t have to get as much traffic to make a decent affiliate income.
2. Publish High-Quality Content
Now that you know the investigational keywords that will bring potential customers to your site, your next job is to create high-quality content that ranks for those keywords.
That means writing in-depth product reviews, comparisons with pros and cons, video reviews, and more. Only 28% of affiliate marketers use blogs to promote their affiliate links, and I think that number should be much higher.
Not only will high-quality content bring in traffic to your WordPress website, but you will also benefit from long-term traffic that comes from your blog’s rankings.
Some of the most successful affiliates have become experts at using the product or service they are reviewing. In fact, demonstrating real-life experience in your reviews is more important now than ever.
In December 2022, Google added ‘experience’ to their E-E-A-T ranking criteria. Now, unless you show first-hand experience with the products you write about, Google may penalize you in the long run by giving your site a lower search ranking.
Darren Rowse’s Digital Photography School blog is a great example of what you should be doing. He shows excellent photos taken on Canon and Nikon SLR cameras and then mentions those cameras in posts and tutorials.
Not only does this improve his ‘experience’ score with Google, but when his visitors are inspired by the spectacular photos taken by the cameras he reviews, they will be more likely to purchase them using his affiliate links.
You can do the same by producing more content, such as detailed blog posts or YouTube videos, displaying your skills using the actual product or service. Just make sure you don’t just talk about a product’s features. You also need to show your audience how they can use those features to get great results.
3. Use a Centralized Affiliate Link Management System
The best way to add affiliate links to your website or blog is by using a plugin like Pretty Links or ThirstyAffiliates. Creating a centralized affiliate link management system in your WordPress dashboard can save you a lot of time.
For example, when one of your affiliate partners changes your link, you would normally need to find every post where the link appears and update the link manually.
But with an affiliate link plugin, you simply need to update it once, and it will update across your entire website.
These plugins will also let you cloak the affiliate links you promote on your website. Typically, affiliate links are long and ugly like this:
A cloaked affiliate link looks better and is easier to understand:
http://www.yoursite.com/refer/productname
Besides these benefits, an affiliate link manager lets you categorize your links, add notes, check for links that have stopped working, and much more. This means you can spend less time managing your affiliate links and more time creating high-quality content.
4. Enable Affiliate Link Tracking
Now that you’ve added affiliate links to your website, it’s essential to track how many times each one is being clicked.
This will help you see which affiliate products are performing well, and which of your blog posts are generating the most clicks.
This information will let you make improvements to your website that result in more revenue, and you can also use the metrics to negotiate with your partner companies for higher payouts. I’ll talk about this more later on.
Google Analytics can show how much traffic your links are sending to each affiliate product, but beginners can find it tricky to use.
Instead, I recommend using an analytics plugin like MonsterInsights because it makes your analytics easy to understand and supports affiliate link tracking out of the box.
Now that you know how much traffic you are sending to each affiliate link, you should compare it with the revenue you made. This will help you discover your highest-performing products, and focusing on them will boost your affiliate income.
5. Convert Up to 60% of Abandoning Visitors With an Affiliate Popup
We spoke earlier about how to increase your affiliate income by bringing more visitors to your website. It’s also important to think about the visitors leaving your site, or you will miss out on sales.
You need to grab the attention of abandoning visitors before they leave your site because 70% of them will never come back.
Nadi Lopez, a marketing specialist at Top 6 Digital, combats this using an exit-intent popup. It detects the user’s mouse movement and shows them an affiliate promotion when they’re about to leave.
He uses OptinMonster to display a popup that is customized for the content the reader is viewing at the time, like this:
The plan worked, and 17.31% of visitors who saw the popup above clicked the link.
As a result, Top 6 Digital’s affiliate revenue increased by 30%, and on some web pages, as many as 62% of abandoning visitors were converted.
Your visitors won’t click a link they don’t notice. You’ll get more clicks and revenue by highlighting the affiliate mentions in your articles.
You can try doing this in lots of different ways. Just make sure you track affiliate clicks to measure which methods are most effective on your blog and individual posts.
For example, you can highlight a link by simply bolding it or using colored text.
Or you can make a link more obvious by placing it in an affiliate product box or button. Some websites also use discreet icons like arrows or shopping carts next to the links to show they are affiliate links.
You could also create a call to action (CTA) where you mention the affiliate product or service. For best results, use persuasive language that encourages readers to learn more or click through.
7. Negotiate With Brands for a Higher Commission Tier
Finally, you can make more affiliate income by simply asking your partners for a higher commission percentage. This can potentially help you make the biggest gains in revenue.
Because you’ve already enabled link tracking, you will be able to gather the information you need to demonstrate the value you bring your affiliate partner.
Make sure you do your research first. Some affiliate plans may already offer a tiered structure that pays higher commission rates for higher sales volumes. Otherwise, you can speak to the affiliate manager about increasing the rates for your website.
Don’t become aggressive or demanding or you may damage your relationship with the company. Make sure you remain courteous and flexible and aim for a win-win outcome.
Are you looking for the best affiliate marketing tools and plugins for WordPress?
You can find hundreds of affiliate marketing tools on the market, and it can be difficult to choose the right one.
To help you, we have tested some of the most popular affiliate marketing software on real websites. While doing that, we examined different factors including ease of use, features, customization, and pricing.
In this article, we will share our handpicked list of the best WordPress affiliate marketing tools and plugins.
If you are in a hurry, then you can take a quick look at our top picks to choose an affiliate marketing tool for your website.
However, since there are so many WordPress plugins available, beginners often get confused about which tools they should use.
That’s why we researched for you and paid special attention to the following criteria when picking the best affiliate marketing tools:
Ease of Use: When testing different plugins, a user-friendly interface, technical documentation, and easy onboarding processes were our top priorities. We tried to include tools that are beginner-friendly.
Different Use Cases: Affiliate marketing tools can offer a lot of different features. We have included plugins for all kinds of use cases, including adding affiliate links to articles, saving links in the WordPress database, creating shareable affiliate links, tracking link performance, affiliate product promotion, and more.
Reliability: We have only recommended tools and plugins that we tested ourselves. Additionally, we kept positive customer reviews and customer support in mind.
That being said, let’s take a look at the best affiliate marketing tools and plugins that help you grow your business.
Why Trust WPBeginner?
At WPBeginner, we are a team of experts with over 16 years of experience in WordPress, SEO, web hosting, eCommerce, and online marketing.
We review each plugin or tool that is featured here and thoroughly test it on real websites. When doing that, we look at several factors like ease of use, features, customization, and pricing. To learn more, see our complete editorial process.
Video Tutorial
If you’d prefer written instructions, just keep reading.
Pretty Links is the best affiliate link management plugin for WordPress, and it is trusted by over 300,000 websites.
It allows you to easily add links to your WordPress posts, create short and memorable affiliate URLs for podcasts / social media, cloak affiliate links, and more.
You can also enable the auto-linking feature to automatically add affiliate links for certain keywords. The plugin allows you to set up redirects, which are useful if an affiliate link returns a 404 error.
Plus, it also comes with a powerful broken link checker to identify and fix broken affiliate links on your WordPress site.
Pros
Pretty Links lets you redirect multiple links to the same destination, schedule redirects to launch at a specific time, and group and organize links together.
It can password-protect your links, comes with custom redirects for different regions, performs A/B testing, and can integrate with popular marketing tools.
Pretty Links shows detailed link reports in your WordPress admin dashboard. This allows you to see which affiliate links are doing better on your website.
Cons
Pretty Links has a free plan, but most of the features can only be unlocked by upgrading to the pro version.
Why we recommend Pretty Links: We recommend this plugin because it is the best WordPress affiliate marketing tool on the market. Pretty Links allows you to create and cloak affiliate links easily, comes with a broken link checker, shows analytics and reports, and lets you create an affiliate product box, making it a great choice.
ThirstyAffiliates is another powerful affiliate link management tool for WordPress. It allows you to manage your affiliate links within the WordPress dashboard easily, and we actually use it on WPBeginner for our own link management.
With ThirstyAffiliates, you can quickly insert links into posts, cloak links, auto-insert affiliate links, export analytics data, and even see how each link performs on your site. Plus, you can sort your links into categories, which makes it easier to organize your affiliate partners.
ThirstyAffiliates can integrate with powerful tools like Zapier and Google Analytics.
It can schedule link redirection to launch at a specific time.
The plugin can optimize links for social sharing and SEO.
It also comes with custom redirects, a broken link checker, and geolocation redirects.
ThirstyAffiliates lets you manage affiliate URLs for custom post types separately.
Cons
It has a free plan, but some of the features can be unlocked in the pro version.
While testing ThirstyAffiliates, we realized that it doesn’t have a built-in split testing feature for comparing affiliate landing pages.
Why we recommend ThirstyAffiliates: Overall, it is a great link management plugin that lets you create and organize affiliate URLs easily. If you have a WordPress blog and want to manage affiliate links for free, then you can opt for the free version of the plugin.
As a smart affiliate marketer, you need to know which articles are getting more traffic, where users are coming from, and what they are doing while viewing your website.
This is where MonsterInsights comes in. It is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress (trusted by 3 million websites). It shows you actionable insights and web analytics reports within your WordPress dashboard.
MonsterInsights makes it super easy to automatically track your affiliate links. It comes with a link-tracking feature that helps you monitor URL clicks, banner ads, and other outbound links.
You can combine this information with page insights and other reports to get a more comprehensive analysis.
Pros
If you have an online store, then the plugin can also track your eCommerce affiliate sales.
MonsterInsights can track conversions from optin forms that are related to your affiliate links or offers. It also connects form submissions to specific affiliate URLs.
It can also track additional data points and integrate with email marketing services and Customer Relationship Management tools (CRMs).
Cons
MonsterInsights has a free plan that only offers basic affiliate tracking.
You cannot use it to create and cloak affiliate URLs.
Why we recommend MonsterInsights: If you want to track affiliate links and their performance on your website, then MonsterInsights is the best solution for you.
RafflePress is the best WordPress giveaway plugin on the market. It allows you to create viral giveaways and contests on your website, which helps you quickly get a lot of traffic.
It comes with a drag-and-drop giveaway builder that helps you run campaigns promoting specific affiliate products and grow your email list.
In fact, we have plenty of firsthand experience with using RafflePress to get more email subscribers. For more details, you can see our guide on how to run a viral giveaway like WPBeginner.
You can use the plugin to create a giveaway to motivate users to purchase different products using your affiliate link in the future. For more details, see our tutorial on how to run a giveaway/contest in WordPress.
Pros
RafflePress is mobile-friendly and comes with giveaway templates.
It comes with social media integration and viral sharing.
The plugin can also track your giveaway contests for affiliate products.
RafflePress does not allow you to manage or create any affiliate links.
Why we recommend RafflePress: If you want to host viral giveaways or contests to promote your affiliate products and services, then this is the perfect plugin for you.
You can easily create an email newsletter, run email campaigns, and grow your subscribers with their platform. You can then promote your affiliate partners via these emails, which will open up another site to grow your affiliate earnings.
During testing, we also liked that Constant Contact provides detailed stats on how your campaigns are doing, and you can run A/B tests to see what format your users find more engaging.
Pros
You can track clicks on your affiliate links within Constant Contact reports.
Constant Contact lets you create beautiful email campaigns in seconds by using its drag-and-drop email builder with tons of templates.
You can connect the tool with social media platforms and promote your affiliate products there.
You cannot use the tool to manage affiliate links that you add to your email newsletters.
It can be a bit difficult to use for beginners.
Why we recommend Constant Contact: If you want to add affiliate links to your email newsletters, then Constant Contact is the best choice for you. It easily integrates with WordPress and lets you build a powerful email campaign for your affiliate products.
Pricing: The Lite plan costs $12 per month for a single user, and it has a 30-day money-back guarantee.
OptinMonster is the best lead generation and conversion optimization tool on the market for affiliate marketers and website owners. It comes with powerful Exit-Intent® technology to convert your abandoning website visitors into subscribers and customers.
You can use OptinMonster to add affiliate links to lightbox popups, slide-in signup forms, sidebar forms, floating bars, and more.
Each optin allows you to create new opportunities to maximize your affiliate commissions, keep users engaged, and spend more time on your site.
It comes with a conditional logic feature to show different affiliate product popups on different posts or pages.
The plugins allow you to display targeted optin forms based on visitor behavior, location, or device to promote relevant affiliate links.
OptinMonster’s detailed reports can also track clicks, leads, and sales generated through your affiliate links.
Cons
OptinMonster does not offer a free plan. However, its connecting plugin is free.
It does not offer affiliate link management features.
Why we recommend OptinMonster: It is a great choice if you want to promote affiliate products using popups that will be displayed on specific pages or posts.
WP RSS Aggregator is the best WordPress RSS plugin on the market that is ideal for fetching content from affiliate networks to share on your WordPress site. You can use it as a content aggregator or news curator and combine it with your original content to increase your affiliate earnings.
During our testing, we discovered that you can set up auto blogs with your affiliate networks. The plugin will automatically fetch products as posts, and you can edit them to add your original content.
Pros
WP RSS Aggregator can extract affiliate links from your chosen RSS feeds and automatically insert them into your aggregated content.
It shows different formats to display affiliate products attractively on your website.
It can categorize and manage aggregated content based on product categories, brand partnerships, or specific affiliate programs.
Cons
It has limited features related to affiliate marketing.
The quality of your affiliate product content can depend on the content quality of your chosen RSS feeds.
Aggregating content from different sources can lead to copyright issues.
Why we recommend WP RSS Aggregator: If you want to fetch content for your affiliate products from other sources, then WP RSS Aggregator is a great choice.
Pricing: The basic plan costs $79 per year for a single site.
Semrush is one of the best SEO tools on the market. It is a complete SEO and marketing toolkit for content creators and is highly effective for affiliate marketers.
It comes with an incredibly powerful keyword research tool, which allows you to track keywords, find new ideas, see your keyword rankings, and more.
We also like that you can use the keyword research and competition analysis tools to see which affiliate products are popular among your competitors, find new affiliate partners, or find new niche products to promote.
Pros
You can use it to run competitor analysis and see which keywords your competitors are ranking for. Semrush then provides actionable tips to beat them in search rankings with its SEO writing assistant tool.
You can use the tool to generate content ideas that are relevant to your affiliate products.
It can improve SEO rankings for your content and track brand mentions and conversations related to your affiliate products on social media.
It can also help find websites that could be potential sources of backlinks for your affiliate content.
Cons
Semrush’s free plan has limited features, and its paid plan is a bit expensive for small businesses. In this case, you can use the WPBeginner Keyword Generator to instantly get 300+ new keyword ideas. You can also use the free Keyword Density Checker to find out what keywords your competitors are optimizing for.
It is more focused on your site’s SEO than affiliate content.
Semrush has a steep learning curve.
Why we recommend Semrush: If you want to research keywords related to affiliate products and analyze your competitors, then Semrush is the perfect solution for you.
Pricing: The Pro plan costs $129.95 per month for up to 5 projects.
WPForms is the best WordPress contact form plugin. You can use WPForms to create an affiliate signup form and allow potential partners to send affiliate requests on your website.
It comes with a drag-and-drop form builder to create any type of form on your website easily.
It also offers multiple pre-built templates for a user registration form, a signup form, a poll/survey form, and more.
Pros
It integrates with popular services like Constant Contact to automatically send replies to your users.
The plugin can use data for user behavior, location, and device to show different forms to users.
All the form entries for affiliate request forms will be stored in the WordPress database.
Cons
Some of the plugin’s features are not available in the free plan.
WPForms does not offer any specific affiliate management features.
Why we recommend WPForms: If you want to build a specific form to accept affiliate requests from small businesses, then WPForms is the best choice for you.
The plugin allows you to add affiliate links to your ads and get more clicks. With the publishing options, you can also set the start and end date for ads so you can promote exclusive deals from your affiliate partners.
It also shows complete graphical stats for individual ads, so you’ll know which ad placement is performing well on your website. You can also select a date range to view custom reports for specific ads.
Pros
It allows you to cloak affiliate links.
AdSanity lets you organize your affiliate links into groups and categories.
It allows you to show specific ads based on user location, device, or behavior.
Cons
AdSanity can be expensive for some users.
It has a learning curve.
Why we recommend AdSanity: It is the perfect tool for website owners who also use Google AdSense and other ad programs to supplement their revenue. You can easily place ad code on your website and dynamically display ads without editing WordPress theme files.
Pricing: The Basic plan costs $59 per year for the AdSanity core plugin and updates.
You can use it to set up your affiliate program in a few minutes. With AffiliateWP, you can easily monitor affiliate clicks, sales, and payments.
It also allows you to have an unlimited amount of affiliates actively promoting your product or service. This means you can grow your business as quickly as you want.
Other features that we liked during testing include a built-in affiliate dashboard, automatic affiliate creation, and a referral link generator.
It lets you set up tiered commissions, recurring commissions, and custom commissions for programs.
AffiliateWP also creates and manages specific coupon codes for targeted promotions.
Cons
It does not have a free plan.
Why we recommend AffiliateWP: If you want to start your own affiliate program to promote your products on other websites, then AffiliateWP is the best choice.
WP Tasty Links is the perfect affiliate marketing plugin if you have a food blog or online restaurant website.
This plugin easily integrates with WP Tasty Recipes and lets you add affiliate links inside recipe cards, replace keywords with specific affiliate URLs, and cloak links to make them look pretty.
Plus, the plugin sets appropriate link attributes for SEO and analyzes the click-through rates of the affiliate links added to your site.
Pros
It can automatically insert relevant Amazon images next to your affiliate links.
WP Tasty Links offers seamless integration with Gutenberg to make link insertion easier.
It can link relevant keywords to internal pages or products within your website.
Cons
WP Tasty Links does not have a free plan.
It’s not a good choice for affiliate link management if you don’t have a restaurant or food-related site.
Why we recommend WP Tasty Links: It is the ideal plugin if you have a food blog because it easily integrates with WP Tasty Recipes, which is the best recipe plugin on the market. It makes it super easy to add affiliate links directly to your recipe cards.
Pricing: Each of the plugins costs $49 per year separately. You can get all the plugins for $149 per year for a single site license.
Which Is the Best Affiliate Marketing Tool for WordPress?
In our expert opinion, Pretty Links is the best WordPress affiliate marketing tool on the market. It is an all-in-one affiliate link management tool that lets you cloak links, add them to specific keywords, and create affiliate product boxes easily.
It even has a free plan, making Pretty Links a great choice.
On the other hand, ThirstyAffiliates is also a great link management tool for your website. Similarly, if you want to track affiliate links, then we recommend MonsterInsights.
If you want to add affiliate links to your email campaigns, then Constant Contact is a great tool as well.
Additionally, you can use OptinMonster to promote your affiliate products in popups, sliders, or floating bars.
Frequently Asked Questions About Affiliate Marketing
Here are some questions that are frequently asked by our readers about affiliate marketing in WordPress.
What is the best free affiliate plugin for WordPress?
If you are on a budget and need to create affiliate links, then we recommend the free version of ThirstyAffiliates because it offers most of the features required to build and manage simple affiliate URLs.
Which WordPress theme is best for affiliate marketing?
In our expert opinion, Astra is the best theme for affiliate marketing because it has multiple layout choices for affiliate marketing websites and also supports third-party plugins to add more features.
