It’s not a secret that most on my revenue from CatsWhoBlog is comming from affiliate marketing. For those who don’t know, affiliate marketing consist in making money by reffering clients to a company or person that sell a product.
Althought I was already happy with the money I was making with affiliate marketing, I found a very powerful tool that allowed me to increase my affiliate revenue by 30%.
What if text converted to affiliate links…magically?
Making money with affiliate marketing is not hard if you have enought traffic and stay in your niche, but the major problem with it is to manage links. Ok, if you have a simple blog with 10 articles and you’re promoting only 3 products or so, it’s ok.But people who have a bigger blog (Approximately 500 UV/day, 25+ posts) and who promote more than 20 affiliate programs may have a hard time managing all the links. For example, the company behind a product may decide to change your affiliate link and you’ll have to replace it everywhere you inserted it. Depending on your blog size, it will be very time-consuming. And I’m not talking about the loss of profit.
For that reason, I started to use an affiliate cloacker some years ago. It was the free “Redirection” WordPress plugin. It saved me a lot of time and hassle. Unfortunely, it didn’t helped me to make more money with my blog.
But being a “quite popular” blogger have lots of good sides, one of them is definitely the presents companies are offering to me. Last week, I received a WordPress plugin called Ninja Affiliate. At first, I wasn’t interested by replacing my good old “Redirection” plugin. But I decided to give a go to Ninja Affiliate.
Converting keywords to high-converting links
So, what does Ninja Affiliate looks like? Once installed, you’ll find a new link under the “Tools” menu in your WordPress dashboard. From there, you’ll be able to add affiliate links into Ninja, cloak them and see how many times they have been clicked.
That’s cool, but the best is yet to come: For each affiliate link entered into the plugin, you can define a list of keywords that’d be automatically replaced by the related affiliate link. For example if you’re promoting WooThemes on your blog, insert “WordPress Themes” as a keyword to convert and Ninja will transform this keyword into a money making link. Of course, you can limit how many times a link can be displayed max.
Why my profits increased with Ninja
As you saw in the screenshot above, defining a list of keywords for a particular program is very easy. After being convinced by Ninja Affiliate I took 45 minutes to create “Ninja links” and associate keywords to them. The plugin did the rest and converted keywords from my blog posts into affiliate links. The same day, I made a comission from a program I haven’t sold since weeks. Since last week, I have made roughly $300 in affiliate comissions on this site alone, which is 30% more than what I earned past weeks.
Conclusion
Ninja Affiliate is priced $97, which is quite expensive. Though, there’s two things to note: Getting $97 back in affiliate comissions is definitely easy and you’ll probably get your money back within one or two weeks, depending of your blog popularity.
The second thing to note is that Ninja is offering a 60 days money back guarantee. You can grab the plugin, test it and see if it works for you. If it don’t, no worries, just request your money back.
30 Comments
While I definitely agree that this practice is a good idea, there’s little to no reason to buy Ninja Affiliate.
Why?
Because there are two plugins out there that combine to offer all the same functionality except for support (which you really shouldn’t need anyway).
If you use the plugins SEO Smart Links (good for SEO as well as affiliate marketing) and GoCodes (great for affiliate links) you’ve got everything Ninja Affiliate offers.
I received a solicitation to promote Ninja Affiliate but when I asked what extra functionality it offered over the free option I mentioned, the owner had no answer. Save yourself the $97 and use the two free plugins. You won’t be disappointed.
Great post, and very interesting information. Also great info from Ben Cook, get this type of stuff for free is just great.
Really a good article and such a good plugin… maybe too expensive for start up blogs…
The idea behind the plugin is great (and efficient too, as you showed)… however i don’t think that create a plugin that does the same things of ninja affiliate would be so complex …
LOL! it also works whitin commets!!!!
I hate to sound like the one who always criticize in a negative manner here, but have you considered the negative impact of this? In my opinion, cloaking links, not mentionning affiliation or hijacking commenters’ comments with affiliate links any time they mention “ninja affiliate” does not sound like a conservative attitude towards long time readers. Again, just my 2 cents.
@Ozh probably you’re right!
But it’ really funny that indirectly you’ve spot the way to solve this issue: using quotes
“ninja affiliate” <— is not going to be turned into a clickable link!
@Ozh, when we say “cloaking” we simply mean sending the links through a redirect. for example on my site all affiliate links are wpblogger.com/recommend/whatever
This keeps the links looking clean, and prevents them from passing any value in Google. I doesn’t mean you don’t still need to disclose that they’re affiliate links somehow.
Having it impact comments I think is just a matter of settings. I usually only allow a few automatic links per page and they’re taken up before we ever get to the comments.
now it’s working…. I can assure, before didn’t work!
Really strange!
@Ozh: No problem for criticizing, I always encourage free speech.
Looks like you’re happy with your “computer-unrelated job” and I’m happy for you. But there’s a lot of people like me (And most of this blog readers) who don’t want to obey to a boss and prefer making money online. What’s wrong with that?
You block ads, and you expect bloggers to let you know when a link is an affiliate link. (So you’ll not click on it, I suppose) I don’t really understand this attitude, but well.
No offense in my comment. Just my opinion.
@JB: I do not criticize making money online, at all. I do make money online myself, not my main income source, it “just” pays family holidays and computer equipments and gadgets, but I’m very happy to do so.
I just find it cheesy to find out that a link is an affiliate link when not being warned about it. My immediate thoughts are “is the guy really endorsing the product or is he just trying to make me buy it”?
The main pitfall of affiliation links is to fail at making readers confident that the product you’re writing about is really worth it. I despise blogs such as Quick Online Tips who do too much affiliate linking without really reviewing products (or at least they did a few years ago before I decided enough was enough)
I don’t think disclosing that a link is affiliate will keep readers from clicking on it, if you’re genuinely enthusiastic about it. See Jeffro’s initiative on http://www.wptavern.com/buy-through-me, all it received was positive comments. I did use one of his links.
Stuff like cloaking links into a frame so you don’t see you’re going, etc, just don’t inspire trust to me. Again, maybe it’s just me and other don’t care, but I doubt so.
@Loige: the link was not showing but JB edited my comment
(the trick was not to enclose words within quotes if you’re wondering)
I’m pretty sure commission is spelled with two ‘m’s. Small errors like these can make you appear unprofessional, even when your content is tops.
I like the idea of full affiliate disclosure as well. I’d be willing to bet the average web user has very little idea what is an affiliate link is, and promoting the link as an affiliate may even help sales. (It would be interesting to A/B test).
On my site canvas2010.wptheming.com/ I put a message that says: “All the links to Canvas on this site are affiliate links, and any purchases made following this link will help support new mashups, child themes and support requests.”
If I saw that notice on someone’s site, and I thought their post was of value to me, I would make sure to come back and use their link when I was ready to purchase.
Perhaps Ninja Affiliate could actually be a useful to help make affiliate links clear. For instance, you could have the permalink be catswhoblog.com/affiliate/ninja and perhaps have those links show up in a different color which is marked as a sponsor link.
It’s an interesting debate.
I prefer to put the affiliate link myself in the content as i can choose and decide where the affiliate link should appear. If use the Ninja Affiliate, the affiliate link will just appear everywhere with the keywords.
I am also using this plugin for my affiliate venture and really help me to manage the link.
Ninja-affiliate authors can improve the plugin by simply put a special class on all the generated link, so would be really easy for the blog designer to customize the affiliate links in a special manner… for example he/she may use special colors, icons or, with bit of javascript, even a popup message that will clearly explain the objectives of the link.
Would be not so difficoult to display a message like this: http://img291.imageshack.us/img291/5189/86740192.jpg when clicking the affiliate links…
(doing so only after a click ensures compatibility also with touch based devices)
Sorry for my bad english, I hope I have been clear enough
@ Loige,
I think that would be a great addition to any of the three plugins mentioned above, especially as an option to turn on or off. This would satisfy both side I think?
Any plugin devs up to the challenge?
I had briefly checked out Ninja Affiliate, and didn’t think much of it. This was of course when my blog was new and didn’t have many articles or affiliate links. After reading this post though, I’m going to have another look at the plugin.
Thanks for the post & congrats on the 30% increase!
@Adam W. Warner
That kind of behavior could be easily done with a few lines of jQuery… There should be just an easy way to collect all the affiliate links (“a” tags) within the page… As I said before the easiest way is to have a specific class on each affiliate “a” tag ( simply “affiliate” may be the best choice) and do something like this:
$("a.affiliate").click( function(){
//bubble displaying logic here
} );
Anyone with a bit of jQuery experience could easily accomplish this task
And anyway I’m sure it will not be so difficoult also using other js libraries and neither with raw js code…
The only problem is that the affiliate class should be added by the ninja-affiliate plugin… I didn’t ever used the plugin so I don’t know if it’s something that everyone could easily implement by directly hacking the plugin code. Anyway I think that this is a feature that we could request to the plugin authors…
Another good thing would be adding an explicit “title” attribute to the link containing the same message that will be showed within the popup message. This is not only a best pratice but also a way to provide the same information to everyone who has disabled javascript.
Obviously to grant “no-script” compatibility the title should be added directly by the plugin while creating the links… Maybe that’s another feature to require…
This could be a good solution for blogs not created in wordpress (there are some out there actually!)
interesting
thanks for the tip! affiliate commissions really can add bonus to your earnings :p
I agree with comments here: it might be detrimental to your blogging reputation in the long run if you just transform keywords into affiliate links. Maybe a header or footer explaining that there are affiliate links in the post might help. But it is a great source of cash.
great post Jean, I think i should get that myself!
Being a very new Affiliate Marketeer and not being able to make any sales as yet I assume this will help me out a lot!
Only 1 thing though looks like I will need to save up £60 first to get it! but should not be too long!
Am really fired up at the mo as I met Mark Anastasi at his Clickbank Millionairs seminar in London last thursday!
I learned a lot actually! 1 thing I have been doing wrong for the last 6 month is giving away my eBook on blogging as a free download!
My big mistake though was i had no autosubscriber in order to build my list and people was just downloading my book!
Of course I realise the error of my ways now and have aweber but am still giving my book away for Free! It took me a week to write up the book and in hindshight i think i should have shown it a little more respect!
After all the money is in the list! thanks for sharing!
-Phillip Dews
Nice, but this plugin looks like pretty simple one. It shoud be free :/
I’m thinking that the markup of the link should also contain a rel=”nofollow” … so maybe this plugin definitely needs a way to define custom link templates…
@Loige, thats one of the other reasons I prefer to use SEO Smart Links + GoCodes. All my automated links are sent through a redirect and thus don’t pass any page rank to sites outside of my own.
I just bough this plugin. I never buy plugins but the premise behind this was to much to pass up.
Bought it as well, and it looks like commissions already increased.
FYI, I just added an affiliate disclosure to CWB “About” page.
This is a very good idea, to make keywords into affiliate links. (Thumbs up)
I will write this down and try this in the future, but I will probably try a free alternative because I am sure that there is one.
The awesome and free plug-in SEO Ultimate is also capable of doing this.
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