How to Create Affiliate Links in WordPress On Easy Mode

By Josh Koop •  Updated: 11/13/20 •  5 min read

I enjoy writing content more than most as I stick to things I find interesting or intriguing to me, where this can go south is when I have to go back through to look for affiliate offers to add value to my posts to build income.

This all changed recently when I found out that I have been doing this the hard way and that I could save myself hours of hassle by adding one simple plugin to my site.

How do you create affiliate links in WordPress easily? Look at a powerful link building plugin, the best on the market for WordPress is LinkWhisper as it allows you to build strong internal links along with auto-linking words and phrases to links that you could point at affiliates and similar offers.

Why would you choose a paid tool instead of using a free tool or manually adding links into content, what is the benefit to using a tool?

Well for myself I know what words and phrases I will use around specific tools or products and this allows me to focus on making the best content possible instead of creating content trying to make sales.

What is LinkWhisper?

LinkWhisper was built by Spencer Haws of Niche Pursuits due to issues he has when trying to keep internal links up to date on his old and new content, as his sites grew the links were always at newer content and less at aged content.

Out of this irritation the idea was built to construct a plugin that would live up to the needs he had, this was the day the idea of LinkWhisper began in earnest.

As he built it it slowly became more of a product that others were asking about and less of a tool for his websites. This has grown into a exceedingly useful tool that can help you maintain a healthy blog by making sure all content has strong interlinking.

The issue many others have is in building external links out to appropriate affiliate offers, many need spreadsheets within Google Docs to maintain the list of options and ideas.

This is where LinkWhisper is a game changer to myself as a tool that can add links when I use specific phrases or words that I know need to get linked out to offers to help me grow an income without wasting time on post after post.

Building Auto Links in LinkWhisper
The LinkWhisper Auto Link Simplicity

Once you have purchased the software what you will want to do is install it onto WordPress and then Activate it with your activation key that you find within your settings on their site.

Inside your WordPress instance you will want to locate [ LinkWhisper ] and then the sub menu for [ Auto-Linking ]. This will take you to the page to start building out your affiliate links and the settings to apply them to your site.

This will take you to the LinkWhisper Auto-Linking Page and allow you to begin building the tie between keywords and the URL you want them to target when it finds them in your content.

You can click on the gear icon up by the keyword section and this will open up those link options that you can use to further refine each Auto-Link you build, this includes limiting a auto-link to a single or multiple categories and that it will add as many links as times the keyword shows up or limit it to only one.

Additional Free Option

For those looking for a free tool with much less horsepower that can help you auto link text with a URL you can look at Auto Affiliate Links. This software is fairly close n functionality to match the auto links but as it is free the code tends to be less clean and prone to abandonment.

As a business owner I prefer products I pay for as this ensures I have support for issues that is only a few click away and that any updates will be consistently applied to add features and to ensure security is maintained.

In using this tool I am able to build out the links to the content I feel should send someone to an offer while allowing me to instead focus on writing posts and helping out the readers without becoming sidetracked.

I don’t find the process of locating and linking products to be all that enthralling and it definitely is a necessary evil to ensure you can make some money from the hard work and effort you put into each and every post.

I love this plugin due to the ability to build a solid internal link foundation on all my niche websites but also for the ability to make outbound links to my affiliate offers that I know will fit the readers needs based on what I write and not force.

Josh Koop