Automatic keyword inserting affiliate plugin for WordPress

by Patrick Altoft on / 24 responses

Today we are releasing a new plugin for WordPress that allows you to monetize your long tail traffic better than ever before. The plugin works by taking the keyword that a visitor used to find your site in any major search engine and turns it into an affiliate link.

This plugin works great on product sites and is especially useful if you send visitors to sites like Amazon & Ebay as the visitor will be given a cookie and you get credit for future purchases.

You can customise the link to go anywhere including your site search page if you don’t want to sell products. Screenshots of how it works are below. Please note that I don’t use it on Blogstorm so don’t try to make it work.

Download the plugin here

To install:

  • Upload affiliateplugin.php to your plugins folder
  • Edit buy.php to include your Ebay publisher id or change the link to somewhere else as you wish
  • Upload buy.php to your main directory
  • Activate the plugin
  • Go into your WordPress > Options > Affiliate link options menu and change the link suffix & prefix
  • Add the code below to your Single Post page wherever you want the ad to appear

<?php $referer = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
ebay_ads($referer); ?>

Update: You might also like to integrate these scripts-

Redirect outbound affiliate links

Geotargeting with php 

Visitor searches on Google & clicks on your site

Screenshot1

Keywords are turned into an affiliate link

Screenshot2

Visitor clicks on the affiliate link

Screenshot3

Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.

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Comments

Read the 19 comments below, or add your own!

February 7, 2008 at 11:34pm

This is fantastic, Patrick! Cheers

Christian

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February 8, 2008 at 1:01am

ditto! What a brilliant idea. There’s loads of potential here!

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February 8, 2008 at 1:03am

magical!

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February 8, 2008 at 1:50am

I might build some new blogs to take advantage of this!

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February 8, 2008 at 2:06am

This looks great. I used a similar method to create links automatically to go to Amazon based on location of the user (.co.uk or .com), but it didn’t use the search string as the text. Instead I used keywords from the title of the post to determine which ad to show. That worked ok’ish (nothing too spectacular).

This however should be way more targeted and I expect to see some nice results. If I see some good performance over the next few days I am going to look in to ways to geo target and send users to their correct ebay/amazon site.

Also I am going to test with a BUY button next week too to see what effect a buy it now type button has over the text.

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February 8, 2008 at 2:19am

Good idea about geotargeting, I added a link above to another of my scripts that does this.

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James
February 26, 2008 at 3:24am

Nice plugin Patrick!

In response to Matthew, if you’re looking to geotarget your affiliate links for specific products, there’s a great site called LinkSprinkler where you just set different URLs for different countries, and then copy and paste their link URL onto your page. Whenever someone clicks the link, it sends them to the page you specified for their country, or to the default URL if they’re from a country with no URL specified.

I use it myself to send people to Amazon USA, CA and UK and it works really well, and gives your affiliate income a nice boost!

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February 9, 2008 at 8:22am

I think I will implement it on my gadgets blog, too.
It should perform nicely.

Alex

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February 9, 2008 at 8:52am

Brilliant work Patrick! It’ll definitely come in handy.

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February 12, 2008 at 9:21am

Thanks for this, it will be very useful!

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February 16, 2008 at 2:41pm

Patrick, I wish blogspot could have this one. Most of my blogs are powered by blogger.

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February 21, 2008 at 11:21pm

Thanks Patrick, this is what I desperately need at the moment.
Good thinking.

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April 9, 2008 at 5:24pm

Does this work with the new WP and more importantly with the new Ebay Network?

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April 9, 2008 at 5:26pm

It is untested with either so far but it is pretty easy to customise for networks other than ebay so it should be fine.

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May 15, 2008 at 2:49am

Very Cool Plugin.

I going to tweak it abit to make it work like that landing sites plugin – which never worked for me

I am just going to try and keep people on a webpage a bit longer by saying you searched for xxx on google

anyways nice job thanks

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June 6, 2008 at 4:12pm

I must say this is a very nice plugin. I was having nightmares with integrating SE keywords into my pages… then I stumbled on your great plugin and decided to whack up a blog to side-support my main site.

Great work and Thanks!

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September 2, 2008 at 8:57am

this is a great plugin. thank you!

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April 21, 2009 at 1:16am

how to use this plugin with amazon?

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May 17, 2009 at 3:26am

It used great, i have add it to my blog site, the keywords have afflilie links and visitor click it, buy sometings, I will get money. hehe

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