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Most of my affiliate sites are run on the WordPress platform. Not just for blogging, it is a great solution for someone that doesn’t want to hand code sites in html but produce vibrant, beautiful, & easily customizable websites. Making this customization even easier is hundreds (if not thousands) of WordPress plugins available. Most of them are free and with the latest version of WordPress you can upload them right from the back end, no FTP program required. Here is my list of the top 10 wordpress plugins that I feel every affiliate marketers need for their websites.
- Akismet – This plugin works to cut down on the amount of comment spam so you never even see it. Let’s you spend more time working with legitimate comments.
- All in One SEO Pack – Get help optimizing your website with the help of this plugin. It provides fields on every post page to optimize your title, description, and keywords. As someone once told me though “this plugin only works if you input the data. You can’t just intall it & forget about it.” This plugin is made unnecessary if you are using the Thesis theme though.
- Broken Link Checker – Running a very active affiliate website means creating lots of links pointing away from your site. You don’t want to be sending all that traffic to nowhere though. This plugin runs a check to make sure the links are not broken and reports back what it finds.
- Contact Form 7 – Make it super easy for people to get in touch with you. With this plugin you can create a contact form in seconds.
- Easy Privacy Policy – Running an affiliate site means making sure all of your t’s are crossed and your i’s are dotted. This plugin allows you to put up a privacy policy quickly with various check boxes to fit your situation.
- Exec-PHP – Many affiliate marketers love the ease of creating product pages with the help of Popshops & Goldencan. You do not get an SEO benefit with using the javascript version of their code though. This plugin allows you to use the php version within your post.
- Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin automatically creates a sitemap of your entire site allowing letting the search engines index your site much easier.
- Pretty Link – Shrink down those huge affiliate links to something that is branded with your website’s url. It has the added benefit of allowing your to track how many clicks you are receiving too.
- TweetMeme Retweet Button – Make it easy for people to share your blog posts with others through Twitter. It also shows a count of how many times a post has been tweeted.
- WordPress Database Backup – Never rely on your webhost to create backups of your website for you. This plugin allows you to easily backup your WordPress site and create a scheduled backup as well.
There are certainly lots more WordPress plugins that are helpful to affiliate marketers but these are the ones that are found on all of my sites. Watch for another installment with more useful ones. What are your favorite plugins for WordPress?
Please share
Thanks for the tips. There’s a plugin that allows you to automatically add links to keywords – I can’t think of the name, but it’s $47. Do you think this is a worthwhile investment?
Hello Karen, thanks for visiting. There are a couple of plugins that will do this for free, but I do not have much experience with them. Look for SEO Smart Links and GoCodes, they may be what you are looking for.
Wow, thanks so much for a response! There are a number of sites that don’t bother answering commenters questions. I appreciate your taking the time.
I will look into those items. It’s funny, it was a commenter on my site who told me about the product for $47 (she linked to her affiliate link).
I subscribed to your RSS feed.
Karen
You are welcome Karen 🙂 I make it a point to respond to all commenters. I think a good rule of thumb is to use the free version of something & then once you are making money pay for the upgraded version if it will give you better results.
Oh and make sure you sign up for my newsletter too. You will get a free report on how to make money with your blog!
This is a great list. Might I also add that if you’re also planning to sell products on your site, I highly recommend the WP e-commerce shopping cart plug-in. The basic plug-in is free and it’s fully functional and flexible. WordPress is a great platfrom I should say.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Great list check out my top 10 usefull wordpress plugins
http://www.intelogie.com/2010/02/26/10-useful-wordpress-plugins/
That is a good list too Benoit. The TinyMCE Advanced plugin is exactly what I have been looking for, very helpful. Thank you!
Good list for reference
Is there a free plugin for Automatic content finding based on keywords or categories and then posting?
Hmm, I don’t have a free one that I have tried to recommend. Just doing a quick search I came up with the Zementa plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/zemanta/ It may do what you are looking for. Let me know if you try it!
Hi Shannon, given the topic of this post I hope you don’t mind me mentioning WpSplitTester which we just launched. It is a split testing plugin which allows WordPress users to test different affiliate adverts to see which ones make them the most money. The result is more affiliate commissions from the same amount of traffic.
Hey Shannon, this is a great post you have about WP plugins, I will add a couple more for your readers if you don’t mind. I really like the plugin called insights because it allows me to add images, videos, maps, and news right into my post. You just input the name of an image and it comes up with lots of images to choose from for your post. Also keyword statistics is great for meta tags input. Thanks for the awesome post.
Mick
Thanks for the suggestions Mick! I’m glad that so many have found some great plugins through this post, plus all these comments are showing me some new ones too 🙂
Nice info, I knew about most of them except for the wordpress database one, was having troubles with moving blogs from one host to another but I found that plugin really helped. Thanks for the info!