Are you looking for the best affiliate marketing tools and plugins?
Affiliate marketing is a smart way to make money online by promoting products and services that you like and use. When your users make a purchase with your tracking link, then you earn a commission (it’s a win win).
In this article, we’ll share our handpicked list of the best affiliate marketing tools and plugins for WordPress.
Best Affiliate Marketing Tools and Plugins
WordPress is the most popular website builder among affiliate marketers and bloggers. Mainly because it gives you access to the best plugins and tools to promote your partners while bringing more traffic to your website.
However since there are so many WordPress plugins available, often beginners get confused about which plugins and tools they should use?
That’s why we did the research for you … and for us because we also monetize our website partially through affiliate marketing.
In our experience, you’ll need tools that help you do the following:
- Easily add affiliate links to your articles
- Manage and save affiliate links inside WordPress
- Create shareable affiliate links for social media and podcasts
- Grow your audience and build a loyal following
- Track the performance of your best affiliate campaigns
That being said, let’s take a look at the best affiliate marketing tools and plugins that help you grow your business.
1. Pretty Links
Pretty Links is a popular affiliate link management plugin for WordPress trusted by over 200,000 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 auto-linking feature to automatically add affiliate links for certain keywords. The plugin allows you to set up redirects which comes in handy if an affiliate link is returning a 404 error.
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.
2. ThirstyAffiliates
ThirstyAffiliates is another powerful affiliate link management tool for WordPress. It allows you to manage your affiliate links within the WordPress admin dashboard easily.
You can quickly insert links into posts, cloak links, auto-insert affiliate links, and even see how each link is performing on your site. You can also sort your links into categories, which makes it easier to organize your affiliate partners.
The reason why the top two spots in our list are taken by link management plugins is because it’s that important. You need to choose either Pretty Links or Thirsty Affiliates.
3. MonsterInsights
As a smart affiliate marketer, you need to know which articles are getting more traffic, where are users coming from, and what are they doing while viewing your website.
This is where MonsterInsights comes in. It is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress (trusted by 2 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 monitor URL clicks, banner ads, and other outbound links. You can combine this with page insights and other reports to get a more comprehensive analysis.
MonsterInsights is user-friendly and easy to set up. For detailed instructions, see our beginner’s guide on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress.
4. RafflePress
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 to create engaging highly engaging giveaway campaigns. This helps you run campaigns promoting specific affiliate products, run seasonal campaigns, or grow your email list.
For more details see our complete RafflePress review or head over to step by step instructions and run your first giveaway or contest in WordPress.
5. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is the best email marketing service on the internet. It allows you to stay in touch with your website visitors even after they leave your website.
You can easily create an email newsletter, run email campaigns, and grow your subscribers with their platform.
You can create beautiful email campaigns in seconds by using its drag and drop email builder with tons of templates. You can promote your affiliate partners via your newsletter which opens up another channel to grow your affiliate earnings outside of your website.
Constant Contact provides detailed stats on how your campaigns are doing, and you can run A/B test to see what format your users find more engaging.
Alternative: SendinBlue / ConvertKit
6. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is the best lead generation and conversion optimization tool on the market. It comes with a powerful Exit-Intent® technology to convert your abandoning 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 commission, convert website visitors into subscribers, keep users engaged and spend more time on your site.
OptinMonster allows you to run split tests and boost your email signup rates. You should check out our guide on how to build your email list in WordPress.
7. WP RSS Aggregator
WP RSS Aggregator is a popular WordPress RSS plugin. It is ideal to fetch content from affiliate networks into your WordPress site. You can use it as a content aggregator, news curator, and combine it with your original content to increase your affiliate earnings.
With its powerful add-ons, you can set up auto blogs with your affiliate networks. It will automatically fetch products as posts into your WordPress blog, and you can edit those posts to add your own original content.
8. SEMRush
SEMRush is one of the best SEO tools on the market. It is a complete SEO and marketing toolkit for content creators and 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.
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 their SEO writing assistant tool.
You can use the same 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.
Alternative: Ahrefs
9. WPForms
WPForms is the most beginner-friendly WordPress contact form plugin. It comes with a drag and drop form builder to create any type of forms on your website easily.
You can use WPForms to create an affiliate sign up form and allow potential partners to send affiliate requests on your website. It integrates with popular services like Constant Contact to automatically send replies to your users.
WPForms also offers multiple pre-built templates for a user registration form, a sign up form, a poll/survey form, and more.
10. AdSanity
AdSanity is the best ad management plugin for WordPress. It comes with powerful display options to place ad banners on your header, sidebar, and footer of the website.
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 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 to your website and dynamically display ads without editing WordPress theme files.
It 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.
Bonus: Affiliate Royale
Affiliate Royale is a powerful affiliate tracking and management tool for businesses that want to start their own affiliate program.
You can use it to set up your affiliate program in a few minutes. With Affiliate Royale, you can monitor affiliate clicks, sales, and payments.
It is highly compatible with popular platforms like MemberPress, PayPal, WooCommerce, Authorize.net, and more.
Alternative: AffiliateWP
We hope this article helped you find the best affiliate marketing tools and plugins for WordPress. You may also want to check our handpicked list of the best live chat software and best WordPress plugins to grow your website.
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Do you know if all the apps listed above are compatible with each other or that they will all work together without any issues??
Unless I hear otherwise, all of these should work together
Sir please tell me which plugin is best to import products from diffrent e-stores to wordpress.
It would depend on where you’re importing from. If you check with the ecommerce plugin you’re currently using they should be able to let you know what options are available.
Hello,
I am using a travel search form.
A user can choose a desired destination and when the submit button is being hit, the user is being landed on the affiliate website and a page with certain results is shown.
I wonder if there is a plugin that can open this page with the results of this affiliate search form (search mask) inside my website (e.g. through an iframe).
Thank you in advance!
For the moment, we do not have a recommended method to have that functionality.
best affiliate link management tool for WordPress users. It allows you to easily manage your affiliate links inside your WordPress blog. thanks for sharing this useful information.
Glad we could share these
I’m starting a cabin rental business. I’m located in the Smoky Mountains and hope to represent 100 plus cabin owners and rent out their cabins for them.
my question is which free wordpress theme would you suggest
Hi ,
My site sells product using PayPal button . I want to pay commission to my affiliates when they sell my product on their Facebook.
What is the best plugin that suits me ?
Please ASAP
Hi Theodora,
We will recommend using ShareASale.
am looking for a plugins that allow youto sell a woocommerce produt and get commission
Hey Daniel,
You can add affiliate products in WooCommerce as well.
good list..thanks
Which theme is the best for affiliate marketing
Hey Srinivas,
Please see our list of best WordPress themes for affiliate marketing.
Hello, please i would like to know how i can add affiliate links to my website that when clicked it wouldn’t redirect or open to a new tab.
Great list of tools, thank you! The sheer amount of WP plugins available can be overwhelming. I love and appreciate roundup posts—you did my research for me!
Especially the info about Rel NoFollow Checkbox. I’m a brand spankin’ new blogger, and you explained nofollow links very clearly. I’m no longer confused!
Hey Ali,
Thanks for the kind words. We are glad you find WPBeginner helpful
Hello Syed,
Please can I run my WordPress site on my android tab?
Really cool list of tools!
May i say that the tracking section might be missing? In fact, if an affiliate can’t track conversions and revenues the all purpose of affiliate marketing might be missed, dont you think?
Hey,
I think there are email list building and landing pages plugins which help affiliate marketers to build their email list. Optinmonster is one of them.
Prettylinks is also helpful for link cloaking because affiliate marketers need it to make their affiliate links pretty.
Thanks for this article, I didn’t know about the aggregator which is really helpful plugin for digital marketers.
Thanks again.
Are these tips for WordPress.com or WordPress.org?
WordPress.org
that a nice short description on affilate marketing startup on wordpress. thank u for sharing such a useful info.
Very informative article. Thanks for sharing. Just started thinking of going into affiliate marketing. This will be a good guide for me.
So, Nice post, and I came here looking for the 10 ten affiliate tools. There are 2 on this list.
All the tools you listed are nice,,, and…
Thank You,
Nice list
Great post Syed, do you have any reliable indication plugin for monetized sites with adsense.
Thanks in advance.
Hello, great post! I see you recommend Thirsty Affiliates for best affiliate link management, but just wondering how that compares to Pretty Link Lite which seems to be a more popular program that does the same or similar from as far as I can see.
I only recently started putting effort into bringing in subscribers, and I’m not yet to the point of monetizing any of the my own blogs . . . but I’ve been looking into it, and this a pretty nice short-and-sweet view of it! Kinda wish I’d found it at the start of looking into all this. . . oh well!
Slightly related, that NoFollow plugin is possibly the best thing I somehow failed to stumble on for too long that I’ve seen in awhile! Don’t know why on earth that isn’t a default feature in WP.
Great list. I must say I didn’t realise that Google Analytics was free *hides*. Keep up the good work guys