The Best Affiliate Plugins for WordPress to Help You Make Passive Income

2020 has been a rough year for everyone and struggling financially is common in today’s time. 

However, there are many chances of making an online income with the help of an internet connection and a blog or website so you can work from home. 

If you already have a WordPress blog and want to try your luck in an online business, then you can start making passive income by doing affiliate marketing business.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Simply put, affiliate marketing is a business model in which you place banners or links on your websites or blogs and receive a commission every time your visitors click your affiliate links and make a purchase.

Affiliate marketing is a pretty easy business model to get passive income since you don’t need to advertise your own products or goods. 

Instead, you help people promoting their products on your websites and get paid based on clicks and purchases from your visitors through the affiliate links.

Best Affiliate Plugins for WordPress

One of the best things about WordPress is that you can customize your blog with plugins that add additional functionalities. 

Plugins are like a little app inside your WordPress which adds a myriad of features and can dramatically make your life easier. 

For instance, you can install a media player plugin to have a music player installed on your blog so visitors can listen to it whenever they open your blog.

In this article, I will give you the best affiliate marketing plugins for WordPress. 

The plugins which are discussed here are available for free as well as in the paid version.  

Each plugin have their own set of cool features so let’s check them out.

ThirstyAffiliates Affiliate Link Manager

ThirstyAffiliates is a tool to help you monetize your content by placing affiliate links by shortening them into neater and shorter links. 

Instead of having to remember a very long complicated links this plugin will change them to a more readable way. 

The usage of this plugin is very simple and straightforward.

Just copy and paste your links to its editor and the plugin will turn them into short links using your website URL. 

You can also add banner images to affiliate links which is cool. 

Moreover, the stats tracking and repots feature on these plugins will keep you informed about which links have the most clicks.

ThirstyAffiliates Plugin has 4,5-star ratings on the WordPress plugin repository and has been installed 10.000 times. 

This plugin is available to download for free from the WordPress repository. 

The plugin doesn’t add bloats to your database because it uses WordPress storage techniques so it is easy on your website memory and processing power.

Some of the advanced features on ThirstyAffiliates plugins are only available for PRO users. 

By paying $49 per site you can purchase the license and get a premium version with one-year plugin support and updates. 

Some of the PRO features are advanced statistics reports, automatically broken link checker, automatic keyword linking, and many more.

AffiliateWP

With AffiliateWP you can create a mutual partnership with your affiliates to attract customers through marketing means. 

This plugin can be integrated with an e-commerce platform, this makes it easy for you to monitor and track your referrals and affiliates. 

This plugin enables you to advertise your products or brand as well as have unlimited numbers of links and graphic images that your affiliates can use on their websites.

With affiliateWP, the merchants or sellers can monitor their affiliate programs thanks to the plugin statistics reports. 

You can set-up your own affiliate coupons, enable affiliate account registration, setting referral rate types, and many more features.

AffiliateWP is a paid plugin so it is not available in the free version. The cost of the AffiliateWP plugin starts from $99 for one blog with one year of updates and support.

Affiliates Manager

This plugin has a 4,5 rating with 10.000 active users worldwide. You can get Affiliates Manager for free by downloading it from the WordPress plugins repository.

WP Affiliate Manager helps affiliate marketing website to strive. 

This plugin enables you to set affiliate recruitment, create referral tracking, track and monitor your affiliates, and get information about your affiliate’s sales and traffic in real-time. 

You can also set autoresponder email replies with custom messages for newly registered affiliates. 

The best thing about this plugin is that you can monitor and track all of your affiliates without limit, therefore there are no arbitrary limits of how much information you can see on your statistics reports.

You can add unlimited numbers of banners and text links as well as to deactivate them as needed. 

This plugin also gives you a choice to pay money to your affiliates via PayPal. 

Your affiliates who have joined you will get their own dashboard to change user settings and view how much money they have earned as your affiliates.

Affiliate Manager is integrated with popular and most used e-commerce platforms such as Simple Shopping Cart. WooCommerce, WP estore, JigoShop, and many more.

This plugin has been translated into different languages to make your administrating and navigating easier if your main language is not English.

Affiliates

An affiliates WordPress plugin is a free plugin to manage and create affiliate business on your website and help you to establish a successful affiliate marketing plan. 

The paid version is available to purchase for those who seek advanced features.  The plugin is rated 4,5 stars and has been installed more than 5.000 times. 

Just like the other plugins above, this tool can help you to create and track your affiliates. There are no limits of affiliates to track.

The Pro version provides even more detailed dashboard stats such as advanced notifications, advanced commission rate, and other premium stuff. This plugin has two paid versions. 

There are Affiliates Pro and Affiliates Enterprise.

Ultimate Affiliate Pro

Ultimate Affiliate Pro is a well-paid plugin that is available to obtain from the CodeCanyon website. 

The regular license to use by one client is $69 whilst the extended license is $99. 

With the Ultimate Affiliate Pro plugin, you can make your website into a passive income machine.

The features of Ultimate Affiliate Pro plugins are:

  • Intuitive dashboard panel with detailed information
  • Fully compatible with e-commerce solutions such as WooCommerce
  • You can have unlimited affiliates
  • Multi-level Marketing system supported
  • Email verification support
  • Creating affiliate coupons and many other benefits.

Ultimate Affiliate Pro comes with well-written documentation to help you set your affiliate business up and running. 

You can get help and support from its official website by submitting a ticket should you have any problem.

Auto Affiliate Links

This plugin works by adding links to content on your website automatically based on specific keywords. 

Auto Affiliate Links was created 10 years ago and recently version 6 has been released with bug fixes, new functionalities, and more features.

Auto Affiliate Links version 6.0 has improved with the bits of help and suggestions from users in the community. The newest feature is click tracking. 

Users can get to see how many clicks each link and keyword received. 

This feature will make you get an insight into which links and clicks get the most views and which ones get fewer views.

Auto Affiliate Links support Clickbank, Amazon, eBay, Shareasale, and many other third-party marketing programs. 

You can obtain this plugin free of charge by getting it from the WordPress plugins repository.

Auto Affiliate Links has many features to help you build affiliation business system such as:

  • Statistics and tracking for clicks
  • Compatible with WP multisite
  • Enhanced link controls
  • Added ability to check broken links
  • Improved administration dashboard menu
  • You can add an individual preference for links
  • You can add a widget from Amazon product at the end of your blog post
  • Added ability to cloak links
  • You can add affiliate links in your blog sidebar

If you purchase the PRO version you will receive future updates and timely support.

Amazon Auto Links

If you still spend a considerable amount of time searching for products for your blog to put an affiliate link on, then you may want to check Amazon Auto Links plugin. 

Amazon Auto Links helps you to save time and energy because you don’t need to search for products to promote anymore.

This plugin works by displaying products from Amazon. 

All you have to do is to choose which product category is suitable for your blog and Amazon Auto Links will display related products alongside your blog contents automatically. 

If you want to display only specific products from Amazon you can paste the product address/ URL in your blog editor and the plugin will display it right away without having to bother with a shortcode.

You can utilize this plugin to display affiliate links on your post and get passive income without manually searching for affiliates. 

This plugin is available for free and has been installed more than 10.000 times with a 4.5-star rating.

Refer A Friend for WooCommerce

Rather than paying your referrals for promoting your products, you can make your own referral system on your website and reward your visitors with coupons to get discounts when they purchase goods from your website.

The free version has lots of features and the paid version enables you to have all options the free version offers plus the ability to create shortcodes, coupons for friends, advanced statistics viewer, and other useful features. 

The premium version costs $47 and the license is valid for one website with one-year updates and support

The Conclusion

Making passive income using affiliate marketing is a good choice for bloggers or anyone who is beginning to step into online business. 

The plugins listed above are good tools to help you get started to make sales and receive income using the WordPress platform. 

You may choose a plugin that is best for your need to maximize your online revenue.