In recent weeks I’ve been trying to diversify WPShout’s income — you’ll notice that Shout now sports some links in the sidebar pointing to WooThemes and WPWebHost, both using affiliate links to do so. There are a couple of ways I’m now handling my affiliate marketing through my WordPress Dashboard and this post will run down the different ways I’m now doing this.

As I did earlier in the year, I’ve kept this one relatively brief and I’ve used a screencast to show you how I do it.

Making links nice

The first thing I’ve now got is all my links in one place and standardised, all going: wpshout.com/go/product-name. I’m doing this with a plugin called Thirsty Affiliates. It’s the only premium plugin I’m using on WPShout and it’s a great way of sorting and organising affiliate links, as the picture below shows.

Using custom post types, Thirsty Affiliates provides an awesome way of giving your affiliate links a really professional look. You can sort all your links in one place and change them universally if the seller changes affiliate provider instead of having to go into every single post and page you’ve mentioned. It’s also got a neat little addon for the post editor screen which gives you all of your links in one place so you can easily add them into a post.

It really is an awesome little plugin and I thoroughly recommend you check it out.

Automatically linking

All we’ve achieved so far is make our links look nice, but that’s not too much of a help; we want to have our links added automatically to certain words or phrases for maximum profit.

I do this by using a slightly unorthodox method: a plugin called SEO Smart Links, which is meant to be used for setting up internal links to improve SEO, hence the name.

Install the plugin as usual from the Plugin Directory and activate it. Then, under Settings find Automatic SEO Links. You can then add a word to automatically link and a URL to link to, and that’s it.

That’s all there is to it

This really isn’t complicated stuff and I’m just using two plugins here to make links look nice and then automatically add them into posts. It’s another one of those things that could have been really complicated, but with the right help from a couple of plugins isn’t.