7 Must Have Affiliate Marketing Plugins For WordPress

The WordPress framework is one of the best solutions for designing, developing and launching websites in as short a time frame as possible. The modular nature of WordPress allows quick and easy customization and configuration, which is especially important to Affiliate Marketers. The vast WordPress plugin library allows website owners to make the most of their affiliate marketing websites. Here are a few essential plugins to help Affiliate Marketers fully optimize their campaigns.

1. WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam :The infiltration of spam into the comments section of blog posts and other areas can derail the legitimacy and hurt the page rankings of your various sites. WP-SpamFree features intelligent filters for weeding out blog content spam, trackback spam and pingback spam. This plugin manages to eliminate virtually all spam through the new Enhanced Comment Blacklist feature, and without pestering visitors with CAPTCHAs and other annoying safety precautions.
2. All-In-One SEO Pack:An absolute must for any site, this extension is the Swiss Army Knife of plugins. In a nutshell, it optimizes your WordPress blog or website to rank highly in the Search Engine Results Pages based on the content specific to your page. The All-In-One SEO Pack automatically generates the meta tags that Search Engine crawlers look at when they index websites to determine where they will be ranked for important keywords, and it even tweaks internal links for optimal ease of navigation.
3. Google Analyticator:As any seasoned Affiliate Marketer knows, the profitability of a site hinges largely on understanding your visitors, identifying their needs and delivering solutions tailored to their unique problems. Tracking and analytics play a large role in making that happen. Google Analyticator automates the addition of Javascript tracking codes to individual blogs and web pages and organizes the collected data in an easy to read format for clear traffic analysis.
4. Affiliate Link:Cleaning up unsightly, never-ending affiliate links and redirects goes a long way in making your site more presentable and professional looking. The Affiliate Link extension allows you to shrink, cloak and track any URL and analyze traffic through a unique and simplified Admin Panel that gives you incredibly detailed and accurate reports. It’s one of the best all purpose link cloaking tools available through the official WordPress plugin repositories.
5. Sociable:The surge in the popularity of social networking sites has in many ways been a great boon to Affiliate Marketers. Facebook, Digg and Twitter are all great ways to drive immense amounts of traffic to your site, so it’s a good idea to make it easy for visitors to upvote and link to your posts. Sociable adds link widgets to your posts and RSS feeds from over 99 different social bookmarking sites to make sure that your fans can let other people know about you and increase your exposure on the web.
6. Google XML Sitemaps:This plugin creates specialized XML sitemaps that allow major Search Engines to more efficiently and thoroughly index your site. It’s an important component in proper SEO, and Google XML Sitemaps also lets Search Engines like Google and Bing know when you publish new posts so that your most recent content shows up in the results as soon as possible.
7. WordPress-Banner:Headline banners and other Affiliate Advertising Graphics have been shown to substantially increase conversions for affiliate sites. Managing them all can be a pain, which is why the WordPress-Banner plugin is such a godsend. This handy add-on can randomly select different banners from the same affiliate program or from various different programs depending on how you want to set it up. For high traffic sites, it’s a great way to test out the effectiveness of each banner and see how well they convert.

Making money in the world of online Affiliate Marketing is difficult enough without having to worry about all the minutia and fine details of Search Engine Optimization, Keyword Optimization, tracking and analytics. These helpful and effective plugins take care of many of the back-end operations of running a successful affiliate site. Ultimately, they’ll give you more time to plan your marketing strategy, promote your web real estate, and maximize the profits of your online marketing efforts.