Confessions of a Six Figure Professional Blogger

Ninja Plug-in for Affiliate Marketing on Your Blog

December 22, 2008 | Blogging, Feature, Making Money

One of the popular ways to generate revenue with your blog is through affiliate marketing. By linking to relevant products in your blog content, you can potentially made very good money if people buy those products via your link. But, affiliate links can be long and ugly. How can you best deal with this on your blog?

I was looking for a solution. I wanted a solution for Wordpress where I could manage affiliate links and have my links shortened. In other words, instead of the big long affiliate links, I wanted to be able to point people to something like www.davidrisley.com/linkname/ .

I also wanted to be able to create short URLs like that as redirectors to my own posts. When I send out emails, it is much nicer to be able to include a short URL using my own domain than some super-long blog post URL or an Aweber click through link.

There are two solutions I came across:

Now, both of these are paid Wordpress plug-ins. However, if you know the power of affiliate marketing for a blog, the price tags are small and reasonable for either plug-in.

I compared the two plug-ins and ultimately I went with (and purchased) MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate. It is worth every penny.

ninja

Both plug-ins allow you to set up and manage affiliate links throughout your blog. Both allow you to track clicks through your links. Where I believe that Ninja Affiliate shines over the other is with the link structure. Judging from the videos for WP Affiliate Pro, the links will go through a PHP click tracking script. It isn’t a memorable, clean link. Whereas with the Ninja plug-in, I can create link URLs with any text that I want and they re-direct just the same.

A short feature list is:

  • Allows clean, memorable URLs
  • Allows organizing of related links into groups
  • Allows link cloaking
  • Allows easy insertion of affiliate links right from the WP post editor
  • Auto-hyperlink keywords throughout your entire blog with your affiliate links (with options to exclude certain pages/categories)
  • Allows limits on number of affiliate links per post
  • Change the text in the status bar when hovering over a link (if the browser supports it)

Another powerful feature of the Ninja plug-in is that you can provide on-the-fly variations of any link to track different sources. For example, if I had a link to davidrisley.com/link1/, I could use a variation such as davidrisley.com/link1-email/ to track click-throughs specifically from my email list. I don’t have to create an entirely separate link for this. It is just a separate variation of the same link. I can also group links together. I only have four links in the system so far (as you can see below), but imagine when you have a lot of different links in place. Grouping will be a handy organizing tool.

Picture 8

Completely aside from affiliate offers, I also like how I can use this plug-in to simply create clean URLs for my posts. As you can see above, I also have a link for the 10th Problogger Flip Tip video. Instead of having to include a long post URL in an email to my list, I could include the nice, short URL and not have it screw up the formatting of my email. I had to perform a manual htaccess re-direct in the past when I did this! Over on PCMech, I have a custom PHP script I manually edited for short URL redirects – and it didn’t even track click-throughs. A friend of mine does Cpanel redirects which is, again, a manual process that still doesn’t track clicks. So, Ninja Affiliate, for me, is a huge time-saver completely aside from the potential affiliate marketing benefits.

Ninja Affiliate is probably the most comprehensive affiliate marketing plug-in I’ve ever seen for Wordpress and it has most definitely filled a need I’ve had for some time.

This plug-in is, at regular price, $97. However, you can easily make back $97 with just a few affiliate sales of something related to your blog content. Anybody who is serious about making money with their blog has got to get a plug-in that does this. To do otherwise means a lot of manual labor on your part and, quite frankly, your time is better spent doing other things.

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  • With so many people joining the discussion I wondered if any of you could point me in the right direction.
    I am currently using the google blogger setup.

    Here is my question:
    Blogger allows you to set links in the sidebars. Is there any way to have those links be dynamic. In other words, your blog reads a text file (somewhere on some other site) and posts the links found in that text file.

    I am a PHP programmer but it appears that google does not parse the links for PHP code so putting PHP code in the links areas does not result in execution of the code.

    Many thanks,
    Robert
  • Maybe everyone has their own agenda when they write about the "Top Ten Plugins" for Wordpress or other platforms but from my experience the Ninja plugin is by far one of the most comprehensive affiliate cloaker and PHP tracking script available.

    Simply put, the guys at MaxblogPress have been at the blogging game for a while now and they do know their stuff.

    Great post!
  • Whenever I see the top 10 Wordpress plug-ins for this guru or that one, I never see Ninja mentioned. Do you think they just don't know about it, or is it a case of jealousy?
  • I'm new to blogging about my affiliate marketing experience, but I agree with Volker above. Much of the loss of income that newbies to affiliate marketing experience is due to attempting to re-invent the wheel. We're all trying to do it all ourselves, when there is so much information out there that can guide us to those great incomes. My original goal was $10k monthly, but I'm quickly surpassing that and finding that my original goals were far too small. I'm thankful for all the great AM blogs like yours that have guided me along the way and helped me to make it.

    I haven't yet tried Ninja, but I'm looking into it. Thank you so much for your review of the product, and I've enjoyed the varied discussion here in the comments. I appreciate being able to see pros and cons, and to learn of the competitive plugins that may also serve the same purpose.

    I'm definitely going to need something like Ninja soon. I just posted about my first ad buy and things are really taking off for me! http://dangerbrown.com/my-first-ad-buy-just-began/
  • Ahah, another gem in the DavidRisley.com archives. I'm now researching similar plug ins, apps and tools for blogger. Thank you.
  • Hi,

    My first time on your blog. Loads of great infos here.
    Although I am with AP Affiliate I will try the Ninja plug-thanks to your rerview.

    To find the right tools, plug-ins or software is what makes all the difference between those trying to earn money and super affiliates. Reckon, I lost 2 years or so doing it all by myself.

    So far I haven't spent much time on blogging but now you got me:-)

    Thanks & Take care, Volker
  • I've been using Ninja for one of my blogs. It's a great plugin!
  • Jacob - email to Simon sent. If I had yours I would have BCC'd you on it. See you on the OIOPublisher forums. :)
  • Sure Seshu, just email him at admin [at] oiopublisher [dot] com. Thanks! See you in the OIO forums :)
  • Jacob - Happy to give credit where credit is due. Is there a way for you tell me how I can contact Simon? I'll look in the downloaded files if I see anything or maybe on the OIOPublisher site. Thanks again. I am looking forward to setting it up soon.
  • Seshu - OIO is a terrific, terrific plugin and its creator, Simon, is a good guy who gives great support. I'm not using every feature that it has, but OIO is managing my banners and text ads while tracking everything.

    2 areas for improvement are better performance (the tracking mechanism is too resource-intensive) and easier styling of the various forms and emails (right now you need to hardcode customizations).

    One of the reasons I bought it is because it lets you create your own affiliate program; that alone is worth the cost. The other major reason is the automation i.e. how you can set it up to let people buy and install their own ads without any intervention.

    Here's my old GoCoded aff link:

    http://jobmob.co.il/go/oiopublisher/

    Seshu, if you want to do me a favor, shoot an email to Simon about how you heard about OIO from me so he can set me up as the referral. That's the kind of guy Simon is.

    Before I forget- there's not much need to use OIO in tandem with GoCodes; OIO tracks clicks through 301 redirects. The only reasons you would use GoCodes in this case would be to make the ad links look nicer on mouseover and/or to redundantly track clicks so as to confirm the numbers.
  • David - through December, OIOPublisher is available for $30. I just bought it. Will be testing it out on my refurbished blog - Tiffinbox - http://www.tiffinbox.org soon! Thanks for the heads up Jacob.
  • Seshu - OIO is very different from Ninja. Ninja is for affiliate links and tracking, whereas OIO is more of a banner ad manager for your blog. OIO is pretty good. I bought that one several months ago. Will need to do a write-up on this blog about it.

    Jacob - I'll stick by Ninja. I'm not in a habit of paying for plug-ins either, but this one was worth it for me. And if GoCodes does provide stats on clicks, their site sure doesn't make that clear. From their site, the only thing it looks like it does is the re-direct. But, if it does stats, too, then cool.
  • Hey Jacob -

    Thanks for mentioning OIOPublisher. I just looked them up. What has your experience been using that plug-in? Do you use GoCodes in tandem with OIOPublisher?

    http://www.oiopublisher.com/about.php

    David - what are your thoughts about OIO v. Ninja?
  • GoCodes does do link tracking, otherwise I wouldn't recommend it either. You can even reset the count to 0 if you decide to reuse a shorturl e.g. for a different campaign later in time.

    It's true that it doesn't do auto-replacements but there are other free plugins that do.

    In general though, paid plugins are usually an issue of convenience and support. For those reasons I purchased OIOPublisher though I know of other plugins that cover most of its features.
  • OK, I pulled up GoCodes in the Google cache and checked it out. It does allow short URLS and re-directs, but that's it. It does not do any link tracking, auto-replacements, nothing. So, no, GoCodes isn't even in the same ballpark as Ninja Affiliate.

    If all you want is short URLs, then GoCodes will work. If you want to do actual affiliate campaigns with tracking, do Ninja.
  • Jacob - just because something costs money and the other does not makes one better than the other? A more descriptive, indepth comparison might be in order before making that decision, no?
  • Jacob, I don't recommend things only for commissions. Ninja is an awesome plug-in. I'd check out the one you mention, but the site isn't working for some reason.
  • Seshu- the Ninja Affiliate plugin cost money. GoCodes does not.
  • It would help to tell us why it is a "waste of money". Thanks!
  • Waste of money, although I can understand you aiming for your own aff commissions.

    Just use the GoCodes WP plugin.
  • Thanks Dave,

    I really have been thinking "To buy it? not to buy it?" for almost a week and i couldn't find a proper neutral review! it is extremely beneficial.

    Thanks,
    Firas
  • I haven't yet tried it with WP 2.7. I'm not expecting any issues with it, though. From what I've heard, most people's plug-ins work just the same with WP 2.7.

    But, I'm going to sandbox it and then do the upgrade just to be sure. :)
  • Have you had any issues using this with WP 2.7?
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