Affiliate marketing is one of the best options out there for those who want to make money online. It’s really simple to promote products using a blog or a website.
It becomes even better if your website is running on WordPress as there are many plugins that help you maximize your affiliate income.
If you’re already into affiliate marketing, you might have noticed that the affiliate links are very long and look ugly when shared somewhere.
Fortunately, with WordPress, you can clean up this URL and make it short and simple. How?
This is done by link cloaking. Here’s how it works:
Here’s an example of an affiliate link –
www.affiliatewebsite.com/?url=dhd4grwsgg4229t5&afflt=67472
With link cloaking, you can turn this URL into something like this:
www.yourdomain.com/go/productname
In a nutshell, link cloaking can help you clean up the affiliate link and make it look short and simple.
Why Should You Cloak Your Affiliate Links?
Link cloaking is awesome but why you should do it? Here are three reasons why link cloaking is recommended for affiliate marketing.
1. Short & SEO Friendly URLs
First of all, everyone loves short URLs. Thus, cloaking affiliate links and making them short helps the visitor memorize the URL.
Apart from that, it becomes easier for you to share your affiliate links to others.
Cloaked links also help with your website’s SEO as it balances the ratio of internal and external links. Having so many external links is not good thus cloaking them helps to maintain this ratio.
2. Tracking Affiliate Links
The biggest nightmare of affiliate marketers is to track their performance. If you’re an affiliate, you also know how time-consuming it is to log in to different affiliate dashboards just to check your statistics.
With an affiliate link cloaking plugin, you can track all your affiliate links in one dashboard.
3. Updating Affiliate Links
What if you want to update the affiliate links? Again, this process is a nightmare as it eats up a lot of your valuable time.
An affiliate link cloaking plugin can help you manage this task easily without spending a lot of time.
Best Affiliate Link Cloaking WordPress Plugins
Now that you know the importance of link cloaking and how it can help you as an affiliate marketer, let’s take a look at some of the best affiliate link cloaking WordPress plugins.
Let’s dive into the details of these plugins.
1. ThirstyAffiliates
ThirstyAffiliates is one of the best affiliate link cloaking plugins for WordPress. The fact that it’s more than just a link cloaker makes it even better.
You can cloak your affiliate links and even uncloak them. The plugin also has a great auto-link feature with which you can provide keywords and the plugin will auto-link affiliate links in your content.
The plugin provides detailed statistics including graphs about your link performance. It also has a 404 checker to help you find broken links and fix them.
Here’s a breakdown of the features available in this plugin:
- Autolink keywords
- Uncloak affiliate links
- Detailed reports
- Geolocation links
- Proactive link fixed
- Automatic 404 checker
- CSV import/export
- 3rd party link importing
- Google Analytics events
The plugin has both free and paid versions. The free version has limited features while the pro version comes with all features. The pricing of the pro version starts at $79.50 for a single site license and goes up to $199.50 for 10 sites licenses.
Check: ThirstyAffiliates Coupon Code – Get 50% OFF!
2. Pretty Links
Pretty Links is another great plugin in this list of best affiliate cloaking plugins. The plugin helps you shrink, cloak, and track your links. Apart from this, you can redirect links.
Pretty Links is not just a link cloaking plugin as it also creates a short link for all the pages and posts on your website. You can also add relevant links in your content by specifying keywords.
Here are some features of Pretty Links WordPress plugin:
- Shorten and cloak links
- Redirect links
- Automatic keyword linking
- Create short links for posts and pages
- Shortcode support
The single-site license of this plugin costs $99.50 per year while the 5 sites license costs $199.50 per year.
Pretty Links also offers a free version of their plugin with basic features that allow you to create short links.
3. URL Shortener
URL Shortener Pro is an affiliate link cloaking plugin by MyThemeShop. Just like other link cloaking plugins, you can create short links with URL Shortener Pro.
But what makes this plugin unique is that it doesn’t add any load to your website and can be up to 40% faster than other link cloaking plugins.
You can choose from three different redirection methods. These are:
- 302 Temporary
- 307 Temporary
- 301 Permanent
The plugin is compatible with almost all plugins and themes.
You can organize your affiliate links in different categories.
Here is the list of features available in this awesome plugin:
- Create short links
- 3 redirection methods
- Organize links in categories
- Redirect with JavaScript
- Open link in new window option
- Option to add different tags to cloaked links
- Shortcode support
- Set up redirection delay
- Bulk replace links in posts and pages
- Bulk replace keywords with short links
The plugin has both a free and a paid version. The free version has limited features while the paid version with all features costs only $19 for one site.
4. Simple URLs
This free plugin by Lasso lets you create, manage, and track outbound links. You can also create redirects.
The plugin is really simple as it adds a custom post type to your WordPress site where you can manage all your links.
When it comes to link stats, the plugin is very basic as it only shows the number of clicks to your affiliate link.
Here is the list of features of this plugin:
- Create and manage affiliate links
- Create redirects
- Basic link stats
5. Easy Affiliate Links
With this plugin, you can manage both cloaked and non-cloaked links on your website. You can create short links and cloak them. You can also arrange and organize your links using categories.
The plugin is under active development and here are some new features that will be soon in the plugin:
- Geo-specific links
- A/B testing for link text
- Broken links checker
Here are the features currently available in Easy Affiliate Links plugin:
- Create short links
- Cloak links
- Assign categories to your links
- Link tracking (monthly and lifetime)
- Import/Export links to XML
The plugin is very simple and easy to use and it’s available for free.
6. EasyAzon
EasyAzon is the holy grail of Amazon affiliate marketers as it has features that will help you turn your Amazon affiliate site into a money-making machine.
You can cloak your links, apply a nofollow attribute to your links, and do a lot more. The plugin provides a link localizer which creates an affiliate link based on the location of the visitor.
You can also enable product popups so whenever a visitor hovers to your link, a popup appears that grabs more attention and results in more clicks.
Here’s a quick overview of the features available in this plugin:
- Create and cloak links
- Apply nofollow attribute
- Open link in new tab option
- Display product pop-ups
- Link localization
- “Add To Cart” feature
The plugin is completely free.
7. Affiliate Links
This plugin allows you to shorten any internal or external link. You can cloak affiliate links and increase your earnings.
The reason why this plugin made it to this list is the detailed statistics it offers for every link. You can get details about how many time a link was clicked by the user, the browser used, the language used, and more.
You can also create conditional redirects based on the user’s language, browser, Operating system, and platform.
The plugin also supports Google Analytics event tracking.
Here are the features available in this plugin:
- Create short links
- Detailed statistics
- Conditional redirects
- Google Analytics event tracking
- Set redirection type
- Add nofollow header
The plugin costs $25 and is very helpful if you want to cloak your affiliate links and want to understand your user and how they interact with your website.
8. Auto Affiliate Links
As the name suggests, this plugin automatically adds affiliate links to your content. You can specify the links and the keywords and then let the plugin do the linking work automatically.
You can also set the links as dofollow or nofollow. Auto Affiliate Links gives a list of 100 most used keywords on your website so you can add affiliate links easily.
If you’re worried about your content being filled with links, don’t worry. You can limit the number of affiliate links added by setting a frequency range.
The plugin is available for free and is great if you want to automatically add affiliate links to your content.
9. WooCommerce Cloak Affiliate Links
This plugin allows you to cloak your WooCommerce affiliate links. You can cloak all your external links in your store using this simple plugin.
You can also set a redirection method to either 301, 302, or 307. You can organize your links by adding categories.
The plugin is really simple and free.
Which Is The Best Link Cloaker Plugin For You?
So, we have discussed all the 9 best affiliate link cloaking plugins for WordPress. The question now is:
Which plugin is the best for you?
Now, I can’t give a general answer because you may have different needs and requirements. Due to that, I have given recommendations below based on different requirements.
I Want
A Plugin That Automatically Adds Affiliate Links To Keywords
There are a couple of plugins in this list that have these features but the one I recommend is ThirstyAffiliates.
The reason here is that besides auto-linking, it provides many other features that would help you improve your affiliate marketing.
An Affiliate Link Cloaker Plugin With A Broken Link Checker
Again, the answer is ThirstyAffiliates. The plugin comes with an automatic 404 checker that checks for broken links and lets you fix them quickly.
A Plugin That Provides Detailed Link Statistics
Affiliate Links is my recommendation here as it provides very detailed stats about the links and your user.
You can get in-depth insights as to the browser, language, and device of your user. These statistics can help you improve your affiliate marketing strategy and increase your revenue.
An Affiliate Link Cloaker Plugin For My Amazon Site
If you’re running an Amazon affiliate site, go for EasyAzon. It’s the best affiliate link cloaker plugin for Amazon affiliate marketers.
You can auto-link keywords, localize affiliate links, display product pop-ups, and a lot more. EasyAzon can significantly help you improve your affiliate revenue.
A Free Link Cloaker Plugin
While ThirstyAffiliates does offer a free version of their plugin, I would recommend Pretty Links here as its free version is very simple to use.
The Best Affiliate Link Cloaking Plugin
I hope you already guessed the answer. But in case you didn’t, it’s ThirstyAffiliates.
This plugin has all the features you would want in a link cloaking plugin. From auto-linking keywords to geolocation links, ThirstyAffiliates is the best link cloaking plugin for WordPress.
This plugin has been in business for a while. And you should use a plugin like this. There used to be a plugin named MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate. This is no more in business. So you need to be careful while choosing a Link Cloaker.
So, these were my recommendations for the best affiliate link cloaking plugins for WordPress. I’d recommend you to chose the plugin wisely. Because I’ve seen that some plugins like Ninja Affiliate shut down their business.
If you have any questions about any plugin, feel free to comment below.
Or, if you have any plugin recommendation or you want a recommendation, let’s discuss in the comments.
Also Read:
- 7 Best WordPress Plugins to Manage Your Links Better
- 5+ Best URL Shortener WordPress Plugins
- 7+ Best Internal Linking WordPress Plugins
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. That means if you make a purchase using any of these links, we will earn a commission without any extra cost to you. Thanks for your support.
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