5 Must Have Plugins for Any WP Affiliate Site
Posted on January 29, 2010 by Amit
Well, it’s now old news that many affiliate marketers use WordPress as a CMS for their affiliate sites. The affiliate site doesn’t have to be a blog. With many free designs (themes) for wordpress, the power of fre plug-ins and ease of use, WordPress is in wide use.
Many of my existing affiliate sites run on wordpress. Whether its a product review site, a comparison site or a coupon site, wordpress can be used as the CMS.
There is a group of wordpress plugins I use on most of my sites and I think no matter what kind of an affiliate site you are building, it will help you a great deal if you used these plug-ins. The first thing I do after I install a wp site and activate a theme, I add these plug-ins, that’s before I post my my first post.
There are certain plugins that I will use for one blog and not for another. Like the Exec-Php plugin or the pop shop pluging to display datafeeds. I haven’t listed those plug-ins here. Rather this is a list of plug-ins I will install on any WP affiliate site I build, no matter kind of an affiliate site it is.
- Page Link Manager
- All in One SEO
- Contact Us Form
- Link Shortcut
- Ad Rotate
A tiny plugin with a very small foot print, it allows you to exclude or hide some of your pages from your site navigation. Most wordpress themes display all your pages either on a sidebar or on a menu bar at the top as part of the site navigation, and that is wonderful. But if you are building Landing pages for search engine marketing, you won’t want to have those pages listed on your sidebar, will you?. Also there are certain pages like Privacy Policy or About us or FTC disclosure, which you wouldn’t want to show in your sidebar or in the menu bar. Links to these pages, though important, belong in the footer (bottom) section of your site, they don’t do much to drive traffic or keep your users on your site.
Using this plug-in I exclude the pages I don’t want to show in my page navigation, and then I will edit the footer.php and add the links to my privacy policy, about us pages there. And about my landing pages, they will never have direct link from anywhere on my site.
As powerful and friendly WordPress may be as a CMS, its not very SEO friendly out-of-the-box. So you need this wonderful plug-in. It lets you optimize your pages, posts, categories and your website(home page). Add a title which is different from the post heading. Generate keywords and description meta tags for pages, posts and categories. Not only do you need to install it, but you should remember to use it for all your posts, pages and categories.
Download link
Create a contact us form easily within minutes and then create a new page and put a single line of code in it, and voila, you have a pain free contact us page on your site. No programming required.
On a side note I hide my ‘contact us’ page using the PageLink Manager plug-in then manually insert a link to it in my footer.php, something like
<a href=”contact-us”>Contact Us</a>
Download link
This plug-in will shorten an affiliate link to something like yoursite.com/goto/vendor1. The link will clean, legitimate and also it will hide your affiliate link. Links can be set up as 301 or 302 redirect. Also since all the link shortcuts are stored in a database and maintained in your wp admin panel, you can easily change a link destination without having to find and edit all your posts. Say for instance you used to promote a certain product from Vendor A and then Vendor A closed shop, you can easily send change the destination for your link to Vendor B who sells the same product or to eBay. No sweat. If you had embedded affiliate link in your posts directly, you will need to edit all those pages to switch the link to Vendor B.
Helps you place and rotate ads on a page, post or in the sidebar. You build ad groups and add banners to each. Then place a small line of code in any page/post or in the sidebar (by editing your theme’s sidebar.php) and the plug-in will rotate the banners and optionally track clicks.
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