WordPress Affiliate Pro Review
The Challenge
When you put affiliate text links in your WordPress blog posts, you’re bound to run into several problems.
- When you establish a new affiliate relationship, you must manually edit the blog posts where you want to insert text links to those affiliate offerings. That’s hard core tedious, especially when the new affiliate links belong on many blog posts.
- When an affiliate relationship is terminated, you must go through tens, if not hundreds, of blog posts to remove those links. Talk about a real pain in the butt.
- There’s also the issue of cloaking your affiliate links, so that someone can’t easily rob you of your commissions.
How Does WordPress Affiliate Pro Alleviate These Problems?
In summary, WordPress Affiliate Pro gives you the ability to:
- Connect keywords and keyphrases to an affiliate link,
- Automatically turn those keywords into text links inside your WordPress blog posts and pages,
- Hide (cloak) the actual affiliate so that it’s never seen by the visitor, and that rogue toolbars and other software can’t insert third-party affiliate codes into your links and steal your commissions,
- Fully manage your affiliate links within the WordPress Administration panel, which makes adding, changing, and removing affiliate links a walk in the park.
The Upside of WordPress Affiliate Pro
There’s obviously a lot more to WP Affiliate Pro than what I listed in the summary.
For example, you have complete control over the number of affiliate links that WPAffiliatePro inserts into any blog post.
To illustrate, let’s assume you have a post about Skin Care. You’ve established an affiliate relationship with TheSkinStore.com through Commission Junction, and you decide that you want instances of the phrase “skin care” to be turned into hyperlinks that point to TheSkinStore.com with your affiliate links.
The only trouble is, the phrase “skin care” occurs many times in your post text. Let’s assume it occurs 20 times. It will look real weird if all 20 occurrences of “skin care” were to be hyperlinks going to the same destination. It’s just not natural. It’s not the way people normally write blog posts.
Well, with WP Affiliate Pro you can instruct it to never turn the same keyword into an affiliate link more than a certain number of times on any post of page. That takes care of too many of the same affiliate link on any given page.
What about having too many affiliate links on a post, when you’ve defined ten different keywords each with the own affiliate link?
No problem. You can instruct WP Affiliate Pro to never put more than a certain number of affiliate links in total in a post or page.
Dandy, I hear you say. You’re right.
But, if you’ve set a limit to the total number of affiliate links on any post, and you happen to have more affiliate links than that limit that are relevant to the post, how does WPAffiliatePro know which keywords to replace and which keywords to ignore so that it doesn’t exceed the total limit?
Again, no problem. When you define a keyword and its affiliate link, you assign a “weighted average” to that particular keyword. WP Affiliate Pro will first use the keywords with a “heavier” weight, and if there’s still room left in the post, it will start using the “lighter” weight keywords.
This is really cool, because you can assign the heavier weight to your better converting or higher paying affiliate links. So, your money maker affiliate links are always going to be inserted into the post text first. The lower performing affiliate links are the ones that’re going to be dropped if needed.
In terms of styling, you can tell WP Affiliate Pro the CSS class name in your CSS style sheet that formats your affiliate links, and it will assign that class to every affiliate link it creates. Or, if you don’t do that, your affiliate links will have exactly the same CSS styling as all the other hyperlinks (which is what I personally prefer).
Last, but not least, WP Affiliate Pro also has an built-in click tracking function. You can either turn it on or turn it off, depending on your preferences.
The Downside of WordPress Affiliate Pro
Even though I like WP Affiliate Pro in total, there are a few things that I don’t like.
The URL that’s displayed in the visitor’s browser status bar can definitely be improved.
When you create a new keyword / affiliate link combination in the Admin panel, you can give WPAffiliatePro the status bar text that you want to display. However, in Firefox that status bar text does not display by default. And, in both Internet Explorer and Firefox the user sees the WP Affiliate Pro click tracking URL when he clicks and holds the mouse button on a particular hyperlink. This click tracking URL looks something like, http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-affiliate-pro.php?id=1. I don’t know about you, but that URL would not give me as a web surfer the confidence that the link is going to take me to a place where I’ll find what I’m looking for.
I hope the owners of WP Affiliate Pro, Daniel Turner and Marc Lindsey, will soon bring out an upgrade that plugs into the WordPress mod rewrite hooks, so that more user friendly URLs can be displayed to the user.
The second thing I don’t like is the fact that the plugin’s PHP code is encrypted. I like tinkering with a plugin’s code if I want it to do something slightly different, or I know of a better way of doing it. With WP Affiliate Pro you can’t do that. The PHP code is all encrypted. Not a big deal, certainly if you’re not someone who stick your fingers into plugin code.
The third small thing I don’t like is that you must put the “wp-affiliate-pro.php” file directly in your WordPress plugin folder. No, it’s not a duh statement. I like keeping my plugins organized by putting each one in its own subfolder within the plugin folder. WPAffiliatePro craps out when you put it in its own subfolder. You see, that’s typically the thing that I would have quickly fixed myself if I had access to the PHP source code. Again, not a big deal, just a minor irritation.
The Summary
If you’re running a WordPress blog and you do affiliate marketing, I definitely recommend WP Affiliate Pro. It’s the best affiliate links manager for WordPress that I’ve encountered.
Also, you buy it once and you can use it on all your WordPress blogs. I feel it’s definitely priced right for the licensing terms and the powerful functionality that you get.
WP Affiliate Pro was originally developed by Catalin Ionescu. He also did some PHP coding work for Daniel Turner and Marc Lindsey of PLRPro. They liked his work so much that they decided in 2007 to buy WP Affiliate Pro from him. I know Daniel and Marc, two of the best and honest individuals in the Internet Marketing industry. They sell only products of extremely high quality.
Check out WP Affiliate Pro for yourself today.
Reviewed by: Dewald Pretorius
September 28th, 2007 at 7:29 am
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