Maxblog Ninja Affiliate WordPress Plugin Review: I Bought it!

Last week as I was leaving a comment on a blog I noticed a discussion between the owner and one of his readers about a WordPress plugin he was using that automatically turns predefined keywords on his blog into affiliate links.

My first thought was that this was one of those programs you have to join where you get paid for each click from links on your site…you might have seen those blogs where ever second keyword is underlined twice in blue and you hover over the keyword and an annoying pop-up appears. But from looking at his blog posts I soon realized this wasn’t the case – the links were regular blue text links – nothing fancy or spammy looking.

So since I was a bit intrigued I clicked on the link in his comment and made my way over to the sales page for the Ninja Affiliate plugin. Once there, it really didn’t take me long to realize that I definitely needed to buy it. I even made a call to Wanda to see what she thought and she definitely agreed that this would save us a lot of time.

So How Does it Work?

The best way to describe how the plugin works is to use an example. So let’s  say for instance you are an affiliate for Amazon and your blog is all about fishing. And one of the products you promote regularly on your blog is a fishing rod called “The Prestige Fishing Rod”.

Now at the moment, in order to link to Amazon using that keyword phrase (ie. The Prestige Fishing Rod) you would have to grab the affiliate code from Amazon and manually pop it in to anywhere in your blog posts where you use that keyword phrase. We all know it’s not difficult to do but it is time consuming….this is where the Ninja Affiliate plugin comes into play.

With this plugin you will only ever have to grab your Amazon affiliate code once, place it in the back end admin area and from then on it will automatically add that affiliate link whenever it sees that keyword or keyword phrase (ie. The Prestige Fishing Rod)  in blog posts on your blog. This includes posts that you have created in the past as well as new posts.

You can also specify multiple keyword variations that link will apply to. For example,  ‘The Prestige Fishing Rod’, ‘Prestige Fishing Rod’, ‘Fishing Rod’ and so on.  If the plugin sees any of those keywords it will automatically convert them to links.

What I really like about this plugin is that you can specify how many links per post. You can have 1 or more, or just choose unlimited if you like.  Just be aware that too many links can make you look like a spammer. (I like to keep it at two or three.) And you don’t have to worry about all those links leaching your pagerank as there is an option to add a nofollow tag to each link.

You also don’t need to use this to link to affiliate links. You can link to other pages on your site if you like. This is a great way of getting more traffic to a particular post or page on your site.

There are a host of other features that come with this great little plugin including:

• the ability to cloak the links so instead of the reader seeing an affiliate link when they hover over the link they will instead see a keyword or whatever you choose to use.
• the ability to overide global settings for each individual post. So say you have set up your global settings to add a nofollow tag to each link but for one particular post you want the nofollow tag to be removed then this feature allows you to do this.
• the  facility to create groups so you can easily track the links you have created
• stats so you can see the number of clicks on each of the links you have created
• the ability to have each link open in a new window
• the ability to change the formatting of each link ie. link color, underline, bold, italics, font size and family
• the ability to exclude Pages from automatic linking
• the ability to exclude specific Categories from automatic linking

Final Conclusion…

This is a brilliant tool and we wonder how we ever did without it. Today we spent less than an hour creating links in the back-end which  resulted in literally hundreds of links on one of our niche blogs.  If we were to do this ourselves if would have taken us hours, if not days to accomplish.

Plus if we ever get the problem of a merchant closing down their affiliate program or going out of business then we don’t have to spend hours changing hundreds of links – all we need to do is change it once in the admin area and all the links will  change automatically.

We give the Ninja Affiliate plugin a big thumbs up. Highly recommended.

Further Reading

• Read more about the Ninja Affiliate plugin.
  

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