How do you manage affiliate links on your website? If you have not yet installed any WordPress affiliate plugin, then this Thirsty Affiliate settings will help you to set up this awesome free WordPress plugin in a few minutes.
Thirsty Affiliate plugin is one of the most popular link cloaking plugins. There are many more, but the free version of Thirsty Affiliate plugin is enough for a WordPress blogger.
Although you may find Pretty Links is one of the good Thirsty Affiliate alternatives, but I have never used any other WordPress Affiliate Link Cloaker plugin other than Thirsty Affiliate plugin.
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Why You Need To Install A WordPress Affiliate Link Cloaking Plugin
Generally, people use to put direct affiliate links on their blog post. Most beginners do this kind of mistakes. But have you ever realized what will happen in case your affiliate link got changed in future?
It would be a nightmare for you to change all the links quickly. May it will not be an issue for a small website. But for a site with 100+ articles, need huge time to correct the links.
Even after that, there is no guarantee that your affiliate is not going to change the URL. So, how to save your time and quickly update your affiliate links in just a few minutes? That’s the magic of a WordPress affiliate plugin.
Not only that, with the help of such plugin you can easily create clean affiliate URLs. Yes, by default affiliate URLs looks very bad with so many parameters. Let’s take an example of my SiteGround affiliate URLs.
Actual Affiliate URL: https://www.siteground.com/shared-hosting-features.htm?afcode=2234e643e5245d6e601250e96cd51d12
After using the plugin: https://www.bloggingjoy.com/go/siteground/ [Looks awesome]
I hope you understand the importance of link cloaking in affiliate marketing. Now I just need to update the Thirsty Affiliate SiteGround link with the updated affiliate URL.
List of WordPress Affiliate Link Cloaking Plugins for Bloggers
So, there is only one way to hide the ugly long affiliate marketing URL. And that is by using a WordPress affiliate link clock plugin. There are quite a few such plugins available.
- ThirstyAffiliates Link Manager
- Pretty Link Lite
- Hidden Affiliate Links
- Easy Affiliate Links
- Simple Link Cloaker
- Simple URLs
- WooCommerce Cloak Affiliate Links
There are lots of benefits of using a WordPress affiliate link cloaking plugin. Most importantly, you can make sure your website SEO is not compromised. You can easily make all affiliate links nofollow from one place and redirect them as 301 redirects.
Thirsty Affiliate Settings (Complete Step By Step Guide)
So, now let’s set up the Thirsty Affiliate plugin with the exact settings to use. I am using the free version of the Thirsty Affiliate plugin and this is enough to start making money from your blog. This is quite easy to set up this plugin, but the impact is really huge & useful.
First of all, you have to log in to your WordPress Dashboard => Plugins => Add New.
As soon as you install the Thirsty Affiliate plugin, check the left side of your WP dashboard. You can find the Thirsty Affiliate options.
Go To Thirsty Affiliate => Settings. Let’s explore the ThirstyAffiliates Settings one by one.
General Settings
In this section, the only thing you have to change is the first option, determines the default link type when inserting a link using the quick search. Choose it as LINK, not the shortcode.
Link Appearance
This is the most important Thirsty Affiliate plugin settings area. From here we can control many things.
- Link Prefix: Choose this very carefully. It is better to choose this as short like GO or GET or Link etc. You can also use Recommends, but if your domain name is too long it may not look good.
- Link Redirect Type (server-side redirects): Choose this as 301.
- Use no follow on links? (server-side redirects): YES (Add the nofollow attribute to links so search engines don’t index them.)
- Open links in new window? : YES (It is always recommended to open any link to a new window)
- Pass query strings to destination URL? : NO
Keep the rest of the details as it is. After all the changes, make sure to click on the save changes button below.
Modules
No need to do any changes on this screen.
Import/Export
No need to do any changes on this screen.
Help
No need to do any changes on this screen.
Pro Features
ThirstyAffiliate Plugin also comes up with many more features.E.g. you can set keywords or terms with affiliate links so that whenever you use such terms they will automatically work as an affiliate link. Besides that, there are many more features to keep track of your affiliate links performance.
Check the comparison of ThirstyAffiliate Plugins FREE vs Thirsty Affiliate Pro version.
How To Create Affiliate Link Using Thirsty Affiliate Plugin
So, you are done with the installation & Thirsty Affiliate settings. Now Go To ThirstyAffiliates => New Affiliate Link.
Provide the details carefully. E.g. as per the screenshot I am creating an affiliate link for SiteGround. In the destination URL put the actual affiliate link.
On the right side, you can also create categories. Although I have not used any categories, it is good to create categories and sort the links accordingly.
On the right side, you can also find that all the global settings are reflecting automatically. That means we don’t have to make every single link as nofollow. Finally hit the save button.
How to use Thirsty Affiliate Link within a blog post?
As soon you are done with the creation of affiliate cloaking links, you can easily integrate them within your blog post. Look at your WordPress editor toolbar options. You will find an icon like TA. Use that option like you interlink any of your blog posts. That’s it.
Thirsty Affiliate Is A Must Need Plugin For Affiliate Marketers
If you have not yet installed this awesome plugin, then you must install the Thirsty Affiliate plugin. Link cloaking is the most important part of affiliate marketing, to create clean & beautiful URLs.
Hope you find these Thirsty Affiliate settings guide useful. Feel free to write a comment below and share your experience with this plugin. You can also mention the link cloaking plugin you are using for your affiliate website.
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Henry Obilor says
Thanks for taking your time to explain how to set this up. I’m grateful
Santanu Debnath says
Thank you, buddy, for finding this useful. Frankly speaking, I thought to write this guide about how to set up Thirsty affiliate plugin on that day when you asked me about how to create an affiliate link.
Kaushal Dhawan says
Hi Santanu,
I am a blogger and definitely a blogger at some stage wants to earn through affiliate programs.
As I am a new blogger, I was wondering how to start affiliate program. As I am using WordPress for my blog, these plugins will be very helpful for affiliate programs.
Thanks for sharing this article.
Kaushal Dhawan
Santanu Debnath says
Thank you, Kaushal for finding my efforts useful. You can easily start with any product which is related to your blog niche. There are many awesome Affiliate Marketplaces where you will find thousands of such products. E.g. I use Shareasale to find many programs related to WordPress, Marketing, Hosting etc. Feel free to ask any of your doubt, I would love to help you as my knowledge and experience.