I’ve been using and testing out several affiliate management plugins for WordPress, I found that Thirsty Affiliates is so far the best plugin for affiliate management. I that, and I am going to tell you in this review why you should use Thirsty Affiliates plugin.
Out of all plugins I’ve tested, Thirsty Affiliates plugin which is developed by Josh Kohlbach is the first plugin I could actually understand how it works, the idea of this plugin is pretty simple and uses WordPress functions mostly, this is the main reason I recommend it.
Thirsty Affiliates features
Thirsty Affiliates plugin comes with a very easy to use interface, you won’t have any problem figuring out where you saved your links, especially with the categorize and search features that is actually pure WordPress functions.
Here are the main features of the plugin:
→ Built-in affiliate link cloaker
For those who don’t know what is link clocking is, link cloaking is a SEO technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user’s browser. By this you will be able to hide your actual affiliate links and protect your commissions.
Thirsty Affiliates allows you to set your links up exactly how you want them with customizable prefixes and editable slugs.
→ Easy affiliate links categorization
Organize your links in categories and subcategories, never got frustrated trying to find a link. ThirstyAffiliates is easy to manage, and you can simply search for any link and find it in seconds even if you have 1000s of affiliate links saved in your blog!
→ Backup your affiliate links
It’s really cool to be able to backup your affiliate links using any of the WordPress backup tools or plugins, plus the ability to include them in your weekly automatic database backup! ThirstyAffiliates is the affiliate link manager that makes managing your affiliate link collection pretty easy, and it dosn’t mess with your database like other plugins does.
→ Built-in shortcodes for easy insert links
This is pretty nice feature, once you install the plugin you will see a new button in your post editor, this button will allow you to easily search your affiliate links by name and insert it directly into the post body where you want to be, it’s also customized to add rel nofollow and also open link in a new window, so you don’t have to do this each time you insert a link.
→ Add image to affiliate links
Another awesome feature of Thirsty Affiliates, you can assign images to your affiliate links, so it can be used easily.
→ Free Click Stats Addon
The plugins comes with a free click stats tracking addon. When I asked Josh why he didn’t include the tracking in the core of the plugin, he told me that there are a couple of other addons in the making. So, I won’t share this information now on this review, it should be a nice surprise!
How is works
Thirsty Affiliates is using post types to add links and categorize them, this is why I highly recommend this plugin as it uses pure WordPress functions to create and store the links, which means the best performance and the lowest resources usage in the long term.
This is really different than any other plugin in the market, you won’t find a better plugin, and I am sure of this because I had many issues with other affiliate management plugins, I am making the move now to Thirsty Affiliates plugin and I will remove any other affiliate management plugins installed on FamousBloggers.net as soon as I am done!
Lucky me, I am having great time testing out the pre-releases with Josh to make sure things works fine before he makes final releases of the plugin!
And, just in case if you are wondering whither I am using → Thirsty Affiliates now on the blog!
I want you to know that it’s running now on this blog successfully, and I am working on emigrating all my affiliate links.
This plugin is good, and I was looking for it, but I didn’t find it.. The good thing is the plugin found me!