How to Automatically Link Keywords with Affiliate Links in WordPress

Many content publishers use affiliate marketing to make money online. The problem is that sometimes you may forget to add affiliates links in your article thus leaving money on the table. Luckily, there’s an easy solution to recover that revenue. In this article, we will show you how to automatically link keywords with affiliate links in WordPress.

How does Automatic Affiliate Links work in WordPress?

Automatic affiliate link plugins allow you to convert specific keywords or brand mentions into affiliate links. This helps you unlock more revenue from your existing blog posts.

Every now and again sometimes you will forget to add affiliate links into your articles. This problem gets even bigger when you have a multi-author blog.

Auto affiliate link plugins fix that problem and help you maximize your earning.

Another advantage of automatic affiliate linking is that it will also add links to your older articles where a specific keyword is mentioned. This allows you to not just monetize your new content, but also take advantage of your older articles.

We have been using automatic affiliate linking on WPBeginner since 2009 to automatically replace brand mentions into affiliate links.

Let’s take a look at how to easily setup automatic affiliate link solution on your WordPress site.

Method 1: Automatically link Keywords in WordPress with ThirstyAffiliates

ThirstyAffiliates is the best affiliate link manager plugin in the market. We use it on our own websites including WPBeginner.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the ThirstyAffiliates plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit the ThirstyAffiliates » Addons page and scroll down to Autolinker addon section. Next, click on the ‘Go to add-on page’ button to continue.

This will take you to the ThirstyAffiliates website. Autolinker is a paid addon, and it costs $49 dollars. You will likely recover this investment in the first month if you set it up properly.

After making the purchase you will be able to download the addon. Next, you need to install the Autolinker addon like you would install any other WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, head over to Affiliate Links » Settings page and scroll down to the Autolinker section.

First you need to provide the license key for the Autolinker addon. You can obtain this information from your account on ThirstyAffiliates website.

Next, you need to enter the email address used to purchase the addon. Below that, you will see options to enable or disable autolinking on certain pages like homepage, archives, and heading tags. You can also enable auto-linking for custom post types and bbPress forum threads.

On the WPBeginner site, we have autolinking disabled for headings, archive pages, and home page. Mainly because its too obtrusive in our opinion.

We definitely recommend enabling the Random Autolink Placement option because it makes your affiliate links look more natural. If you have this option disabled, then Autolinker will just link the first keyword it finds. While this isn’t bad if you’re only replacing each brand mention or keyword once, but it looks extremely bad when you have the replacement frequency higher than 1 (more on this topic later in the article).

We also recommend that you enable autolinking in your RSS feeds. This will help you maximize your earnings from readers who only read your website via RSS readers. Another advantage is that this lets you make money from people who’re scraping / stealing content from your site.

Since most scraping scripts steal the article from your RSS feed, these articles will contain your affiliate links. Since we started our blog in 2009, we have made thousands of dollars from sites that steal our content by using this technique.

Once you have configured your settings, don’t forget to click on the save settings button to store your changes.

You are now ready to add affiliate links. Go to the Affiliate Links » Add New page to add your first affiliate link.

You will need to provide a link name and the destination URL. After that, scroll down to the autolinking section and add keywords that you want to be automatically linked.

You can add multiple keywords separated by comma. You can also set a limit on how many times a keyword can be linked in an article.

In most cases, we recommend the Limit of 1 link per keyword. In the past, we used to have 3 links per keyword, but it gets really crowded as your site grows and you have hundreds of affiliate links.

Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save link’ button to add your affiliate link.

Now every time these keywords appear in an article, they will be automatically linked with the affiliate link you added above.

For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to add affiliate links in WordPress with ThirstyAffiliates.

Method 2: Auto Link Keywords with Affiliate Links using Pretty Link Pro

Pretty Link Pro is another great affiliate link manager and URL shortener plugin for WordPress. It allows you to easily manage your links in WordPress and use the auto-linking feature to automatically add affiliate links in your blog posts.

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Pretty Link Pro plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, go to Pretty Link » Activate Pro page to enter your license key. You can find this information from your account on the Pretty Link Pro website.

Next, head over to the Pretty Link » Add New Link page to add your affiliate links.

First you need to select a redirection type. You need to use 301 permanent for all affiliate links.

After that, you need to add the target URL, and the URL you want to use as the shortened or cloaked URL.

You also need to add a name for the link in the title field, and any notes that you want to add for the link.

Now you need to click on the ‘Pro Options’ tab to expand it and add the keywords you want to be automatically linked. You can add multiple keywords separated by commas.

Don’t forget to click on the create button to save your link. After you save the link, these keywords will be automatically linked in all your posts.

You still need to control how you want automatic links to be added into your articles. You can do this by going to the Pretty Link » Options page and click on the ‘Replacements’ tab.

On this screen, you can enable the replacements as well as set an auto-link threshold which allows you to limit how many times a keyword will be linked in an article.

You can also set the links to open in a new window and make sure to check the nofollow option.

Don’t forget to click on the update button to save your changes.

Pretty Link Pro is a powerful plugin with tons of options for features like URL shortening, redirection, and affiliate link management. Feel free to explore these options and change them if you need.

We hope this article helped you learn how to automatically link keywords with affiliate links in WordPress. You may also want to see our full list of best affiliate marketing tools and plugins for WordPress.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Automatically Link Keywords with Affiliate Links in WordPress appeared first on WPBeginner.

source http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-automatically-link-keywords-with-affiliate-links-in-wordpress/