You might remember that a couple of weeks ago I reviewed a premium WordPress plugin called WP Affiliate Pro. In the time since then, I came across a similar premium WordPress plugin called WP Ninja Affiliate, which I managed to pick up a copy of and have been playing around with ever since. What can I say? I’m a sucker for plugins that have the potential to make my online life easier!

At first glance, WP Ninja Affiliate might seem a lot like the WP Affiliate Pro plugin due to the many similarities, but in testing I’ve found that in many ways, it is a more advanced version of that plugin. It does the things you’ve come to expect from WP Affiliate Pro, such as managing your affiliate links, adding cloaked affiliate links to your existing blog posts, and even provide you with click statistics.

In addition to all that good stuff, you’ll also be able to:

1. Assign Multiple Keywords – If you want to use multiple anchor text for an individual affiliate link, you can do so with this plugin.
2. Group Affiliates – Group your affiliate links for easy management.
3. Enjoy Smart Caching – This plugin uses a smart caching feature to prevent your blog from slowing down.

I also found that many of the functions are easier to do than WP Affiliate Pro. Also, in the time that I’ve owned this plugin, it has already seen updates, leading me to believe it is very well supported by the author. If you aren’t happy with your purchase for some reason, you have an eight week money back guarantee!

Overall, I am very happy with my acquisition of this premium WordPress plugin I plan on using it on a few of my WordPress blogs. If you find you are managing a lot of affiliate links on your blogs, I recommend you check out the WP Ninja Affiliate splash page.

With the increasing popularity of using affiliate links to generate income online, it can significantly improve your conversion rate on affiliate sign-ups by disguising your affiliate links using a URL with your domain name, then redirecting them to the appropriate affiliate. 

The idea behind using this theory is that readers will click on it thinking it is an internal link on your site, rather than taking you to a third party site.  Another benefit is that all of your blog’s links point toward an internal address on your domain, giving you control to update the URL easily. This helps avoid dead links whenever a company changes a URL and makes it easy to update your affiliate links when the need arises.

Redirects can be accomplished in a variety of ways, but as this blog focuses on self-hosted WordPress, I will be going over an easy way to do this using a PHP redirect.  Here are the steps I took when I hid my affiliate links for this website:

1. Create a folder called “Go.”
2. Create a .php document (this can easily be done with Notepad or any similar program) and name it after the appropriate affiliate link you are using.
3. Now paste the following code into the document: <? header("Location: http://youraffiliatelinkurlhere"); ?>
4. Save it into the “Go” folder created above.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 until you’ve created a .php file for each affiliate link.
6. Go to your FTP and upload your “Go” folder directly to the public_html folder.
7. Update all your affiliate links to point towards your new redirect!

Your redirect will look something like http://www.yourdomainname.com/go/phpdocumentname.php.

You can name the documents whatever you want, or you can use a different name than “Go” for your folder name.   The important thing is that you remember what you named it so that you can use your new affiliate link!