WordPress is by far the best blogging platform and content management system available in my opinion and I know a lot of my affiliates use it to develop sites to promote our affiliate offers at PeerFly. Using WordPress to promote affiliate offers is smart because there are already a bunch of great plugins available to make your life easier, including some great free ones. One example that I have been using for a few years now on my affiliate blogs and this blog is Pretty Link.
Pretty Link is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to easily mask your affiliate links. Masking your affiliate links simply means hiding them with a redirect. You can do this yourself by setting up your own redirect page, but with Pretty Link you can do it directly within your WordPress admin without any coding required. Here is an example:
http://www.lukepeerfly.com/join redirects you to my PeerFly referral link: http://peerfly.com/?r=386
So, I can give people a link with my domain in it when promoting PeerFly. This is great for promoting affiliate links because it hides the fact that it’s an affiliate link. This will usually help increase your conversion rate and it also gives you full control over your links. For example, when I was promoting the survey for #1 Affiliate Manager and Affiliate Network by PerformInsider.com I setup my own masked link and once the survey was over I had that link just redirect to LukePeerFly.com so if anyone was still seeing and clicking that link in emails or on social networks they’d go to my blog instead of a dead survey page. By setting up my own redirect with Pretty Link I was also able to track every single click I sent to the survey with Pretty Link’s hit tracker.
Installing Pretty Link on your WordPress is simple. Just head over to Plugins -> Add New within your WordPress backend and search for Pretty Link. Once you’ve installed it you can add new links in your backend and then track them on the Hits page. I’m not going to do a screencast or anything like that because if you have WordPress installed and want to give it a try it’s really simple. Of course, you are welcome to contact me if you have any questions.
Hey Luke- Thanks for the wonderful post as always! I am a big fan of your blog & have learned a lot from it.
I was wondering if this plugin allows noindex/nofollow option? Although I wanted your personal opinion on whether it is good to nofollow affiliate links? I have a site that does well without nofollowing affiliate links. What’s your take on this…
Look forward to your reply.
Best Wishes,
Chetan
Yes, you can nofollow links within Pretty Link. I took a screenshot of the Add New Link settings and you can view them here. I nofollow some links, but I’m pretty bad at remembering to do it. lol
hi luke i have tried and tested the pretty links lite plugin but it doesn’t add the nofollow attribute u can check it if you preview a post…any alternatives??
It should add the nofollow. Weird. I’d hit up their dev team and let them know :)
Thanks for the screenshot. This is a definitely a good plugin and I will test it out on some of my new sites.
Enjoy all your posts. Please keep bringing more!
Take Care
thanks for this info. i think its going to help me. pretty links looks good. I did sign up with peerfly and look forward to starting with you soon. thanks,
david
Great!
Hey there,
I’m trying to hide my banner links. I use pretty link and I copy pasted the link.
But it doesn’t work… what exactly do I paste in the affiliate link box?? it works fine when it comes to http: links but not the banner ones.
Thanks for your help cos i really need it lol
I’m not sure where that affiliate link is coming from.