Useful WordPress Plugins

posted in Adsense, Getting Started, Affiliate Toolbox |

If you can’t tell by now, I’m a big fan of using WordPress for affiliate sites. The price is right (it’s free), it’s a snap to install and use, and it lets you get up and running with affiliate marketing even if you barely know any HTML at all.

WordPress also has a lot of nifty plugins that people have created to make your life easier as an affiliate, too. Below are some of the free plugins that I currently use, all designed to shave off half a minute here, or a couple of minutes there, in the daily routine of working on content for assorted affiliate sites.

Adsense Deluxe: This is a very useful plugin that lets you manage Google Adsense ads throughout your site from the WordPress interface. You create the ads at Adsense but the plugin lets you quickly add them to certain pages but not others, run multiple ads simultaneously, and quickly swap out ad formats on the fly. The real value in this one is that you no longer have to manually go into templates or individual pages to swap out ads, as the plugin centralizes all of that work and lets you manage all of your Adsense ads from one location.

aLinks: This plugin allows you to quickly embed your affiliate links in your content, with a minimum of hassle. You basically tell it that you’d like the phrase “blue widgets” to always link to Widgets.com, with your affiliate link included in the link, so that when you type “blue widget” in WordPress, it automatically converts it to a hyperlink with your affiliate code attached. This seems like a small thing but it will literally save you many hours, as you routinely link to the same sorts of things, and this plugin allows you to do it on the fly.

SlimStats: This is a simple stats package that lets you quickly get website traffic stats on your WordPress dashboard. There are fancy stats plugins out there but this one is a snap to install and is designed to put very little load on your site, while giving you all of the basic stats and functionality that you need.

WP-Amazon: This one essentially pulls the Amazon catalog into the WordPress environment and makes it much easier to add links to specific titles and products in Amazon’s affiliate program.

Amazon Media Manager: Another plugin that speeds the process of adding Amazon products into your site.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 29th, 2006 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Adsense, Getting Started, Affiliate Toolbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 2 responses to “Useful WordPress Plugins”

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  1. 1 On December 29th, 2006, iggy said:

    heya scurvy,

    nice job over here.

    quick question - does slimstats show referring url’s?

  2. 2 On December 29th, 2006, ScurvyDog said:

    Iggy,

    Yep, SlimStats shows referring URLs and all that good stuff. It displays stats in four main tabs:

    1) Summary (a basic snaphot of daily/weekly/monthly traffic as well as recent domains referring visitors, new domains referring visitors, and recent search strings)

    2) When (hourly, daily, wekkly, and monthly hits)

    3) What (top search strings, top languages, and top domains that have referred visitors)

    4) Who (top remote addresses, top browsers, top platforms, top remote address by IP, and top referrers by URL)

    There’s not much missing in it that I wish was there, based on experience using other traffic stats applications. It doesn’t show the pathways that visitors take through the site, which is kind of nice to see, and it doesn’t show traffic to anything other than HTML pages and/or feeds, so you can’t see if an image is getting hotlinked and hit 172,178,182 times.

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