10 best WordPress plug-ins for affiliate marketers

Affiliate marketing is quickly becoming one of the fastest-growing advertising models on the market, helping business owners boost brand awareness and realize a high return on investment (ROI) at low startup costs. If you have a valuable product or service to sell, you can easily find an affiliate marketer who’ll promote it.

But what happens when you grow and scale your business? You need to be able to track and manage your affiliate marketers for optimal results — no matter how many you have.

Fortunately, you can do that with website builder WordPress. The key to creating a WordPress website that will work for you is using plug-ins — software additions that can enhance any website or online store. Here are the 10 best WordPress plug-ins for affiliate marketers.

1. AffiliateWP

AffiliateWP is one of the best WordPress plug-ins for affiliate marketers, giving users the ability to launch and monitor a user-friendly, yet comprehensive, affiliate program. You can track referral links, customize affiliate onboarding, and pay your affiliates in a single click — using either Stripe or PayPal. AffiliateWP is fully customizable, multilingual, and backed by smart fraud detection technology, which helps users stay one step ahead of affiliate fraud to avoid revenue loss.

2. Pretty Link

By helping you shorten, cloak, and track your affiliate links, WordPress plug-in Pretty Links helps you monetize your content — one link at a time. With the Pro version, you can replace keywords and key phrases on your site with short, shareable affiliate links, thanks to its keyword replacement tool. This plug-in also includes link rotation, a unique feature that enables you to direct one link to five different URL destinations to assist with split testing.

3. Easy Affiliate Links

Whether your WordPress site is a simple blog or a full blown e-commerce store, Easy Affiliate Links helps you create and manage a strong affiliate network to grow your traffic and sales.

Use Easy Affiliate Link’s personalized dashboard to keep affiliates informed about total clicks and earnings per click. Receive alerts regarding possible security and fraud problems before you pay out, including suspicious referring sites and conversion rates. Most importantly, pay your affiliates quickly and easily with PayPal’s one-click payout feature to keep your business — and affiliate program — running smoothly.

4. ThirstyAffiliates

Designed to help bloggers monetize their WordPress sites, ThirstyAffiliates makes managing affiliate links easy. With this plug-in, you can group your affiliate links into categories — like putting all software-related links into a software category — and choose from safe link redirects (e.g., 301, 302, 307) to prevent anyone replacing them with malware. You can even change the destination URL directly in the plug-in, instead of manually replacing the link in hundreds of articles.

5. MonsterInsights

MonsterInsights is one of the most popular Google Analytics WordPress plug-ins — with more than 3 million installations so far. It’s also perfect for tracking affiliate links, making it one of the best WordPress plug-ins for affiliate marketers. Track your affiliate links, compare affiliate traffic vs revenue, and prioritize high-performing affiliates — all without leaving your WordPress dashboard. 

6. WP Notification Bars

For affiliates looking for a better way to market promotions and alert customers about new products, look no further than WP Notification Bars. This simple yet effective plug-in lets you create and display custom message bars right on your WordPress website — helping you grow your social following or boost your e-newsletter mailing list with a quick, convenient click of a button.

7. AdSanity

Whether you want to check out your ad performance within a specific date range or simply get a general overview, AdSanity has you covered. This plug-in lets you use shortcodes, template tags, and widgets to place ads wherever you’d like on your WordPress site. Then, using its built-in tracking features — or available advanced add-ons — you can easily view how many clicks each ad receives.

8. Thrive Leads

Want to get more out of your opt-in forms? Boost your conversion rate with Thrive Leads, one of the best lead generation plug-ins for WordPress. This list-building solution helps you build hyper-targeted lists, create stunning opt-in forms, and gain a clear understanding of where your primary traffic is coming from.

9. Affiliates Manager

To drive more traffic and sales, a WordPress plug-in like Affiliates Manager can help with everything from onboarding to payment. This plug-in allows you to track unlimited affiliates, view their generated traffic and sales, and choose how you’d like to pay them — either a flat rate or percentage of each sale amount. It gives affiliates some power, too, including the ability to create their own referral links in the plug-in’s dashboard and share them on social media.

10. Jotform Feedback Button

For your affiliate program to be successful, you need proper data collection and organization, which is why Jotform Feedback Button is one of the best WordPress plug-ins for affiliate marketers. Simply use online form builder Jotform — with its helpful drag-and-drop functionality — to create or optimize forms for your affiliate program. You can build forms from scratch or customize the available premade affiliate templates, including tracking, signup, revenue, and registration forms.

Then, using the plug-in, connect your newly created affiliate forms into your WordPress site to enable them to appear as a popup on various pages of your site for efficient affiliate onboarding and management, as well as lead generation. Jotform is easy to use, fully customizable, and completely code-free.

As you can see, the right affiliate marketing software can help you manageably drive traffic and sales to your website and business. So, you can choose any of the tools from this list of best WordPress plug-ins for affiliate marketers, and you’ll be more than equipped to expand your reach and make money fast.