Are you looking for the best affiliate link cloaking plugins for your WordPress site, but you’re not sure the best option to go with?
Affiliate marketing can be one of the most profitable ways to create passive income online.
But as you embed affiliate links in your site’s content, you’ll want to be sure that they’re helping your user experience (UX), instilling trust with your audience, and that they’re safe from hackers.
And to make sure you can do all of that, you’ll want an affiliate link cloaking plugin.
That’s why, in today’s post, we’ll share 5 of the best link cloaking plugins for WordPress. Then we’ll share 3 actionable tips for increasing affiliate sales across your site.
First, though, let’s get crystal clear on why you should bother cloaking your links at all.
Why Cloak Your Affiliate Links?
When you join a partner’s affiliate program, you’re given a special link that allows you to track affiliate sales.
But these links typically include a string of randomly generated characters that gets assigned to your account. That means your raw affiliate link may look something like this:
randomcompanyname.com/?clientID49302-JIHF-2394sk
And while you can embed the raw link in buttons, emails, your site’s content, and more, it’s much better when you can cloak that link to something shorter, like this:
yourcompany.com/productname
Doing so has several benefits for your affiliate marketing strategy, including:
- Leverage Trust With Your Brand: Since people already know and trust your brand, keeping your brand’s URL gives your audience more confidence in the affiliate product.
- Secure Your Links: Raw affiliate links are vulnerable to “stealware,” which is software that essentially hijacks your affiliate sales and reroutes them to a hacker’s account. Link cloaking prevents this from happening.
- Manage Your Links: Link cloaking services also include options for better link management. If an affiliate ever changes their products’ links, you won’t need to manually update all of your site’s content.
Now that we know why you should be cloaking your affiliate links, let’s turn our attention to the best WordPress plugins for doing so.
Best Affiliate Link Cloaking Plugins
1. Pretty Links
Pretty Links is hands down the best option for cloaking your affiliate links. It allows you to quickly and easily cloak and manage all your affiliate links from your WordPress dashboard.
No matter what stage of affiliate marketing you’re in, Pretty Links will help take you to the next level.
And not only is Pretty Links an affiliate link cloaker, but it’s also a QR code generator and branded link creator.
This gives you all the tools you need to generate massive affiliate revenue from your WordPress site.
Features
- Easy to set up
- Perfect for beginners or advanced affiliate marketers
- Link cloaking
- QR code generator
- Branded link creator
- Link management
- Sales tracking
- And more…
Price: Paid plans begin at only $79/year.
Get started with Pretty Links today!
2. Thirsty Affiliates
Thirsty Affiliates is another link cloaking plugin for WordPress that’s worth considering. It’s a popular option for WordPress affiliate marketers, and for good reason.
Thirsty Affiliates lets you cloak long links, protects you from “stealware,” and allows you to automatically add affiliate links to your site’s content with just a few clicks.
This allows you to automate a portion of your affiliate marketing strategy and more aggressively boost affiliate sales.
This plugin also gives you digestible analytics reports, smart uncloaking (for Amazon’s terms and service), a proactive link fixer, and much more.
If you’re serious about increasing affiliate sales on WordPress, then Thirsty Affiliates might be the right option for you.
Features
- Autolink keywords
- Protect your links
- Smart uncloaking
- Analytics reports and link tracking
- 3rd-party link importing
- Automatic 404 checker
- And much more…
Pricing: Paid plans begin at $49/year.
Get started with Thirsty Affiliates today!
3. Easy Affiliate
Easy Affiliate (formerly known as “Affiliate Royale”) is an “all-in-one” affiliate program plugin for WordPress. It comes loaded with all the features you’re looking for in a link cloaking plugin.
This tool allows you to cloak all of your links to keep them secure. It also comes with fraud detection, so you can know immediately if there’s any suspicious activity going on with your links.
Everything is managed from an intuitive affiliate dashboard, and you’ll get real-time reports to better track all of your links and sales.
This plugin also comes with eCommerce integrations and a “one-click payout” option to streamline payouts to YOUR affiliate partners.
Finally, there are no transaction fees, making this the perfect solution for smaller businesses working on a budget.
Features
- Affiliate dashboard
- Real-time reports
- Fraud detection
- Ecommerce integrations
- 1-click payouts (to your affiliate partners)
- No transaction fees
- And much more…
Price: This plugin begins at $99.50/year.
Get started with Easy Affiliate today!
4. Easy Affiliate Links
Easy Affiliate Links is a simple WordPress plugin that allows you to quickly cloak affiliate links from your WordPress dashboard.
You can also use this tool with either the Classic or Gutenberg editor using regular links or your affiliate HTML code.
This tool also lets you assign categories to your links, provide readers with an automated text disclaimer for affiliate links, leave some links unchanged for Amazon, and much more.
At the end of the day, if you’re looking for a simple and free affiliate link plugin, then this can be a great option to try out.
Features
- Shorten and cloak links
- Link tracking
- Works with the Classic or Gutenberg editor
- Assign categories to links
- And much more…
Price: This is a free plugin, though there is a premium version for €29 (roughly $35).
Get started with Easy Affiliate Links today!
5. WooCommerce Cloak Affiliate Links
WooCommerce Cloak Affiliate Links is a simple plugin that does exactly what it promises: it cloaks external affiliate links in your WooCommerce store.
It also adds a “disallow” to your robots.txt file, so bots aren’t able to follow those links. This keeps your affiliate URLs extra secure as you generate more passive income from your WooCommerce store.
This plugin is perfect for solopreneurs, bloggers, or young startups who want a simple (and free) plugin without all the bells and whistles.
Features
- Cloak your links
- Redirect status configuration (301, 302, or 307)
- Add a “disallow” to the robots.txt file
Price: This is a free plugin but, as you might expect, doesn’t have advanced features you may want as you scale your business.
Still, it can be an excellent option for WooCommerce store owners just getting into affiliate marketing.
Get started with WooCommerce Cloak Affiliate Links today!
These have been 5 of the best affiliate link cloaking plugins for WordPress.
And now that you have the link cloaking tools ready to go, let’s look at 3 actionable ways you can increase affiliate revenue.
3 Strategies to Boost Affiliate Sales
1. Use an Exit-Intent Popup
To boost your affiliate sales, you need to get more eyes in front of your affiliate links. And to make the most of your site’s traffic, you should be using an exit-intent popup.
An exit-intent popup will appear as users are actively trying to leave your website.
This is important because nearly 70% of people who leave your site never come back.
That makes an exit-intent popup your last-ditch effort to get more of your audience to click through to your affiliate link.
And to build an effective exit-intent popup, there’s simply no better tool than OptinMonster:
OptinMonster is a premium WordPress lead generation plugin. It allows you to create “optin campaigns,” which are things you’re already familiar with, such as popups, floating bars, slide-in scroll boxes, and more.
These campaigns aren’t just designed to grow your email list (though they do that, too).
Instead, they can be used to get your audience to take the actions you want them to, such as clicking through to an affiliate product.
It’s the same strategy Top 6 Digital used to increase their affiliate revenue by 30%. They drove more profits from affiliate links with a simple popup that looks like this:
So, how does it work?
Everything begins with selecting one of OptinMonster’s 50+ templates:
These were designed to save you time, money, and headaches in the campaign creation process.
Plus, they look great across devices, including mobile, tablet, and desktop.
From there, you’ll want to make a few modifications to your campaign. This can be quickly done with OptinMonster’s inline text editor:
This gives you the ability to personalize every aspect of your campaign’s messaging, including the text’s:
- Message
- Font
- Size
- Color
- Background color
- Alignment
- And more…
From there, you can use OptinMonster’s codeless drag and drop builder to add new functions to your campaign:
Without needing any coding or design experience, anyone can add new functions to their campaigns in seconds.
This can include call to action (CTA) buttons with links to your affiliate products, as we saw Top 6 Digital do earlier.
Finally, you’ll be able to add advanced triggers like OptinMonster’s Exit-Intent® Technology.
This lets you configure your exit-intent popup using simple drop-down menus, which means you don’t need any “tech skills” to have a professional exit-intent popup on your site in minutes.
Want to see it in action for yourself? Click below to start your 100% risk-free OptinMonster account today (all plans are backed with our 14-day money-back guarantee, no questions asked):
2. Leverage Social Proof
To get the most from your affiliate sales, your site’s audience needs to trust your website.
If people don’t view your brand as credible, they won’t trust your affiliate recommendations.
And to INSTANTLY boost trust across your site, you need to add social proof notifications to your WordPress site with a tool like TrustPulse:
TrustPulse is the best social proof software available for any website platform, WordPress included.
That’s because it lets anyone create social proof notifications for their site FAST. You’ve likely seen these types of campaigns before.
They look something like this:
These small notifications are incredibly effective and have been shown to boost conversions by up to 15%.
And since the notifications can have a link attached to them, you can add your cloaked affiliate links to redirect customers to your recommended products.
This not only leverages social proof (because people can see how popular these products are), but it also improves UX since it redirects users to affiliate pages without any friction.
Plus, TrustPulse is one of the most affordable options on the market, starting at only $5/month.
Ready to try it for yourself? Sign up for your 100% risk-free TrustPulse account today!
3. Track Everything
As we said before, getting the most sales from your affiliate links means getting the right eyes in front of them.
And to do that, you should constantly have your finger on the pulse of your site’s analytics.
This lets you know which pages and posts are the most popular. That way, you can embed your affiliate links across those resources for higher sales.
Or, you can use the data to strategize new types of content that you know your audience is attracted to.
Either way, understanding what your audience engages with (and doesn’t engage with) can be one of your biggest advantages as an affiliate marketer.
That’s why you should invest in a tool like MonsterInsights:
MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress and gives you instant access to all of your site’s crucial data.
With this plugin, you can get a quick overview of your top-performing posts and pages, as well as further insights into your audience’s demographics:
This is important because many people find Google Analytic’s user interface (UI) to be intimidating.
As a result, they don’t check in with their data as often as they should to improve their affiliate marketing strategy.
MonsterInsights fixes this problem.
Directly from your WordPress dashboard, you can accurately track your affiliate links, sales, and other key performance indicators (KPIs) across your site.
This lets you make smarter data-driven decisions as you optimize affiliate sales.
Plus, MonsterInisghts provides you with detailed reports that you can actually understand and digest in seconds.
If you’re serious about increasing affiliate revenue for your brand, then a tool like MonsterInsights is a no-brainer.
Get started with MonsterInsights today!
And that’s all for today! These have been 5 of the best affiliate link cloaking plugins for WordPress, along with 3 actionable tips for increasing your affiliate sales.
We hope you enjoyed this post. If you did, then you’ll definitely want to check out the following resources:
- How to Cloak Affiliate Links in WordPress (+ Tools & Tips)
- Making Money While Your Sleep With Affiliate Marketing
- Earnings Per Click: How to Win Big With Affiliate Marketing
- Easy Affiliate Marketing Tips to Increase Your Income
These articles will have everything you need to optimize your affiliate strategy and start driving more passive revenue today!
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