The 12 Best Wordpress Plugins for Affiliates

I'll be completely honest - I am a Wordpress addict. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I think Wordpress is the best CMS (content management system) for beginners - period. Now I know a lot of people don't think of Wordpress as a CMS - it is, after all primarily used as blogging software. However when it came to choosing a system to use for my own personal website, I quickly found that many of the other open-source CMS solutions, while possibly having more functionality that Wordpress, are really annoying to use!

I am, first and foremost a marketer - not a web designer. And while I am always trying to brush up on my web development skills, at the end of the day my web design knowledge doesn't really go beyond HTML, CSS and the most basic of basic PHP code.

What most people don't realize about Wordpress is just how much about it you can change - just with a few simple plugins or a tweak to the theme, you can basically create any kind of content-based website you'd like.

In this post I want to outline some of the best plugins for affiliates. If you're using Wordpress for your affiliate site - I highly recommend you use these as well. And if you're not using Wordpress - you may want to consider using it for at least one of your sites; you might find you're a convert... just like me!

1. All in One SEO Pack

It might not sound exciting - but this plugin is a must for anyone who wants to get search engine traffic to their website.

• Easy to use - self explanatory operation

• Avoids duplicate content problems often associated with Wordpress blogs

• Automatically optimizes titles for search engines

• Generates Meta tags - i.e. Meta Keywords and Description easily

2. Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button

Want to generate viral traffic and get ranked in social bookmarking sites? Well you have to make it easy for people to share your posts. Clean, unobtrusive looking plugin that is easy for visitors to use - which is the main thing!

• Access to 128 bookmarking sites

• Email tab makes it easy to share via any email service

• Allows easy bookmarking in any browser

• Integrates with Google Analytics

3. Sociable

An alternative to Add to Any - this plugin is one of the most popular bookmarking buttons. While it doesn't have as many features, it is probably easier to use and arguably looks better.

• Choose from 99 social bookmarking sites

• Email tab (mailto - not ideal for webmail users)

• Allows easy bookmarking in any browser

• Integrates with Google Analytics

4. Ultimate Google Analytics

Having analytics on your website is critical, yet still, many people don't do it - missing out on tons of invaluable information. This plugin adds your Google Analytics JavaScript to every page for you - so you don't have to worry about editing your theme.

• Easy set up

• No theme editing required

• Track outgoing, mailto and download links (this is great for tracking clickthrough rate - great for affiliates)

• Automatic Update

5. Contact Form 7

Many people don't like listing an email address on their website because of the spam it can receive. As a result many websites - including many affiliates don't have any way for the site owner to be contacted. This can be a critical mistake. What if the owner of a product you promote is trying to get a hold of you? What if someone has a lucrative opportunity for you? You'll miss out if you don't have a contact form. This plugin has a rare 100% consensus on Wordpress - so it's high quality.

• Supports Ajax-powered submitting, Akismet spam filter and CAPTCHA

• Multiple language support

• Can be used for multiple contact form

6. Exclude Pages from Navigation

This is a plugin that I've found extremely useful. It adds a checkbox, "include this page on menus", on the edit side of any page (default: checked) that allows you to remove a page from the navigation menu. There are often pages that you don't want to show up in your menu because they are linked to from another page. This is also useful if you want to create separate landing pages (e.g. for PPC) that don't show up in the rest of your site.

• Ridiculously simple to use - just uncheck the box!

• Excludes child pages of excluded pages as well

7. Redirection

Many affiliate cloak their redirects - often just to make the link look better (this is especially important in emails). While you can use services like tinyurl and bit.ly, the truth is outside of Twitter these can look a little unprofessional, not to mention unsafe. Redirects on your own site are far better - i.e. www.yourwebsite.com/yourredirect. This plugin makes creating redirects and tracking them easy

• Easy to create new redirects

• Click counter

• See the time, date and IP of each click (log)

8. Advertising Manager

If you want to make extra income on top of your affiliate commissions, then on site advertising is often a great way to do it. Advertising Manager manages and rotates Google Adsense and other ads on your site. Remember though - if you're doing an affiliate review or presales page - you probably don't want any adsense there taking people away from buying through your link!

• Imports ad code automatically

• Automatically recognizes Google Adsense, Adbrite, Adify, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Chitika, Commission Junction, CrispAds, OpenX, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN, and WidgetBucks. You can use other networks as well.

• Compatible with widget or sidebar modules

• Automatic limiting of ad display

9. Twitter Widget Pro

Building Twitter followers is a great way to extend your influence into a relevant group of people. This widget allows you to add your latest tweets to your blog.

• Can handle multiple widgets each with different feeds

• Logs time and date of tweet - or how long ago it happened

• Easy to add some styles and background image to feed

10. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap that the search engines use to index your site. Every time you create a new post or page, the sitemap is updates and all the major search engines that support the sitemap protocol - e.g. Ask, Google, MSN, and Yahoo are notified about the update.

• Easy to use - automatic

• Extremely good rating (100%) on Wordpress.org

11. Member Access

Want to create your own members area? This plugin allows you to create pages and posts that will only be visible to logged in members. Non members will be redirected to the Wordpress login page. While paid membership is possible with this plugin, it's not as easy to do as with some paid plugins.

• Multiple membership levels

• Content theft tracking

• Gradual content delivery

12. Shockingly Simple Favicon

This is a bit of a random one to finish with - but have you ever noticed how all the most professional sites have their logo appear next to the name of the page or the url in the browser - that's called the Favicon. This plugin lets you add your own to your site.