Reference and Update to
Trying the wordpress affiliate plugin

At the start of January I installed the Wordpress Affiliate Plugin. I just wanted to update you on how it went for me.

I installed it on this blog but this is not a high traffic blog and it is a very busy blog with a lot of competing links  and I honestly didn’t expect it to perform well here. I was right. In the last month I have had only two click throughs to product pages.

I also installed it on two other blogs with a more specific niche focus, higher traffic and smaller post lengths. The results were only marginally above disappointing. In the month I received 6 click throughs from one blog and 22 from the other. No sales.

I also found that odd results occasionally appeared, (but not often I must stress, overall it is very well targeted). A completely unrelated product occurring for keywords which should have confined the results to a specific niche topic. The example that stood out was for a World of Warcraft site where it unexpectedly displayed a product on prostate health.  Maybe the plugin thought it wasn’t good for gamers to sit too long in front of their computers!

So with a total of 30 clicks in a month it might take over 3 months to get one sale. On the other hand – it is a completely “set and forget” plugin and with other niches perhaps it will have better results.

The truth is that any simple advertising like this is not going to make big sales for you. I truly believe that only a passionate advocate will do that.

Conviction leads to Conversion

If you don’t know what I mean by that then read the post  at the link above.

It is not that we don’t know this, it’s just that we get tired and lazy and sometimes we don’t have any enthusiasm left to spare.

If I have learned one thing over the last few years, even though I still struggle to get this right, it is that one well written page that is promoted well about a product that you believe in and speak honestly and enthusiastically about will do more for your sales than 2 years worth of pasted PLR blog posts, or automatically generated content, advertising links and banners.

If you have a blog you want to make money with, concentrate on those pillar posts Starek talks of, that you haven’t got around to yet. Concentrate on getting lots of links to those. Promote a product that you believe in and have a passion for. Help people to understand why its so good that you use it.

The rest of your blog is filler. Of interest to some people, benefits by keeping the blog fresh, offers personality and background and may inspire trust and build your relationship with readers, but please, think again about that phrase.

Conviction leads to Conversion

If you are not convinced that a product is truly excellent, if you wont stand out on a limb and say its so fantastic you can’t live without it, then can you honestly wonder why people think “whatever” and click away.

As to the wordpress affiliate plugin, its a simple automated advertising solution which may bring you in a few sales a year just like Adsense ads can add to your income on a small scale.

Do I think its worth buying? For me I think it was, because I have a lot of blogs I can use it on and it does direct that “click away” to a potential income source. For “one blog” owners or bloggers with low traffic I don’t think it would be worth it.

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Affiliate sales are attributed because the affiliate link drops a cookie into the browser of the person who clicks the link. Most affiliate programs offer a transparent link that for people who are affiliate savvy can be “got around”.

Image via Wikipedia

When you spend hours carefully working on a review this can be disappointing.

How often it happens is debated, probably rarely in non marketing niches but in the marketing niche it may be very high.

The cookie that earns you a commission is in the link. Some people who find your article may remove the cookie before clicking it and go to the site without it, and others may even change the cookie to their own cookie so they make a commission.

Also some urls are overlong and others are obviously affiliate links and this can also cause problems.

Plugin Link Cloaks Using A Redirect

The solution to this is to “cloak” the link with a redirect. This is easy enough to do for a normal site but for a CMS such as Wordpress in php, the normal solution creates conflicts and this is better handled using a plugin.

The Go code plugin is a link cloak plugin for Wordpress that is both basic and easy to use. It simply exchanges an affiliate url for an url that displays your domain name, the word /go/ and a chosen word to describe the product. It can also be used for overlong “normal” url redirects where you want your urls “branded” with your own site name.

For example my normal affiliate url for the Wordpress affiliate plugin is transformed by the Wordpress link cloak plugin and becomes

http://www.richnicheblogging.com/monetize/go/wp-cb-plugin/

As you can see, my site name is long and my site blog is in a subfolder (monetize) , so this doesn’t gain me much benefit for shortening an url!

But if your blog is in the site root it will.

The wordpress link cloak plugin has hidden the destination site url so people must click it to discover the site it goes to and at no time is my “cookie” visible so people can change it.

Simple and effective link cloaking for Wordpress blogs.

The link cloak plugin is free and you can get it from the Wordpress Plugin Directory, with installation and troubleshooting info,  at

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gocodes/

Related articles by Zemanta

• How to Manage and track your affiliate programs (web-workathome.com)

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If you are an amazon affiliate you will probably be aware that the javascript code for amazon books can sometimes just disappear from a saved post or just won’t display unless it’s top of the post.

This amazon affiliate plugin for Wordpress does help, but I don’t recommend it unless you are prepared to try a few different settings for it. It doesn’t seem to like all themes equally and I have especial problems when I set it to show the image at the top of the post. That said if you don’t mind a bit of too and fro-ing to get it set so it displays properly, this is a very helpful amazon affiliate plugin for displaying a product in a Wordpress post.

Copy and paste the link text into notepad and look in the code for a 10 digit number prefixed by asin  for example – “&asins=0321395387″. The number only is what you need to input in the plugin to display the book. The plugin gives its options under the post editor or you can create drafts for several products at a time if you choose.

You can get the free plugin and full instructions at

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/amazon-product-in-a-post-plugin/

and see it working below where I have asked it to display a highly recommended book on learning about blogging for offline businesses.

The book description is from Amazon.

“Written from the business person/designer’s perspectives, this book shows how businesses can leverage current, real-world blogging techniques, tools, and platforms to promote and enhance their ventures. The key idea is that the conversation with your market is stronger and more meaningful with a blog.

Filled with practical information and a how-to approach, this book provides case studies of companies as large as Boeing or General Motors and as small as Clip-’n-seal. Readers will learn about the types of business blogs, how companies use blogs, how to sell blogs to management and IT, effective blog design, content, and conversation, pitfalls to avoid, how to develop Web presence, and more.”

If you enjoy recommended amazon books in posts by doing book reviews, this may help you to speed up the process a little.

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The most common forms of monetizing a blog are Adsense and Clickbank.  Adsense is an easy add to a blog sidebar but if you only have a blog on marketing or blogging, or you have a niche where advertisers do not pay high for a keyword or you don’t have a lot of traffic – then you’ll be lucky to get paid every six months from Adsense. Not one of the best forms of monetization for these scenarios, although for a good niche on a blog with high traffic – it’s good.

Clickbank products are a much better form of monetization as the payout of commission from the sale of a Clickbank product can be very lucrative.

Cautionary Note Regarding Disclosure and Reviews

First let me caution the uninitiated about two important facts regarding affiliate marketing.

If you value your reputation and your business – ONLY recommend Clickbank products that you know will give value to your readers. If you have not personally bought and used the product – do some basic research and read reviews ( real ones) from people who HAVE, before you recommend them.

Be aware that in November web law changed regarding reviews and affiliate products and a disclosure off some sort is now compulsory that says that if the customer does buy the product through your affiliate link, you gain a commission from that purchase.

That said, the main problem with Clickbank products  is the time it takes to research new products, protect your link and add the product information to a blog post, especially as php folder redirects don’t work well with a php blog platform like Wordpress. ( I have a new plugin to try and solve this to try out)

A swift solution to quickly add related  Clickbank products is to use the Wordpress Affiliate Plugin.

NB. This is not a free plugin and should you purchase the plugin through a link on this page I make a commission . Thanks!

To use the carpenter analogy – you work faster and more effectively when you are using the right tools for the job. Plugins make things easier to do. Anything that automates something is saving you time.

The Wordpress Affiliate Plugin is very inexpensive, when you consider that one or two sales will pay for it. It gives you a professional looking display and you don’t have to mess around cloaking links for multiple products or tossing up between choosing products for post links or text linking in sidebar displays.

The Wordpress Affiliate Plugin is a good blog monetization tool.

It is a tool you have to be careful with -but what isn’t? Ask any carpenter about how to use a sharp chisel or a drop saw and they’ll answer “carefully”! But when you don’t use the right tools it will take you that much longer to achieve good results.

The plugin creator, Nikola Janovic, is touted as an expert for “set it and forget it” tools for WordPress blogs.  He’s also created a program that automatically uploads content to your blog. Now he has one that automatically monetizes your blog with Clickbank ads.

Nikola Janovic offers a 30 day test drive of his WordPress Affiliate Clickbank plugin. You’ll get free technical support from Nikola but there is no ongoing cost, free lifetime upgrades and you can install it on as many WordPress blogs as you’d like.

See the Wordpress affiliate plugin at work

You can see the plugin working by scrolling to the bottom of this post. You can also watch the video on his site to see how slick and professional-looking these ads are. They don’t look like Adsense ads or any other ads out there (that people are mostly blind to by now). They are simple, informative links that attract people to click on them.

It takes only a few seconds to upload and install this plugin and another minute to choose some settings. That’s it. Then each time you write a post the plugin will automatically insert relevant Clickbank ads with your affiliate ID automatically embedded in the link.

You can choose what to title these links. The default is Related Products, I have not changed this. You can choose how many links to display. You can also choose keywords related to tags on your blog.

I purchased the Wordpress Affiliate Plugin at the end of last month and I have only just installed it on this blog, so I cannot say more at this stage but I will revisit this with a review when I see how the results pan out.

I am unsure at this stage if automated “related product” links are right for this blog yet but what’s right for me and what’s right for you are two different things.  The tool is good and if it works as described it will speed up the monetization process for bloggers in many different fields.

OK – lets see what happens when I save this post! …

Hmm… I like it. It’s unobtrusive and classy and I think, it may actually add value to this blog by pointing to products people may be unaware of.

By the way, as a bonus Nikola Janovic includes 20 WordPress video tutorials that will show you step by step how to set up a WordPress blog and fully monetize it. So for not yet established bloggers, you can’t help but benefit from watching these videos.

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