Affiliate marketing is a great way to make a living. WordPress is a great content management system. And a marriage of the two has yielded super benefits to so many internet marketers. Smart affiliate marketers know that they can earn more by optimizing their affiliate websites with the help of suitable affiliate marketing plugins.

Here we introduce the seven best affiliate marketing plugins out there.

1. PopShops Affiliate Store Plugin – This is one cool plugin that can save you valuable time as you try to add relevant links to your blog posts. It covers all the big affiliate marketing networks out there – not that these big sites will always have the best deal for you, indeed, we’ve got some better ones if you care to look around. However, if you’re a member of sites like Commission Junction, LinkShare, and Amazon, then this one is worth a look.

2. All in One SEO – Affiliate marketing has a lot to do with rising above the noise and being heard. Search engine optimization is key to the idea of getting the search engines interested in what you’re doing and the number one SEO plugin out there (and it has been so for quite some time) is the All in One SEO. No coding required. Get the meta details, tags, No-follow, and Do-follow attributes best tweaked to your site.

3. Ad Squares Widget – A great plugin that lets you add as many affiliate ads into your sidebar as you want to. The standard ad square size is 125 x 125, but this is easily changed. And as with all good plugins, you don’t need any coding experience here. The plugin supports AdSense®, Javascript, XHTML and PHP code. A great way to make optimum use of the space on the blog sidebars.

4. Datafeedr – Lets you build huge webstores; build one or create a hundred webstores, it is your choice. Put simply it is a script that culls data feeds from 4,600 merchants & 16 affiliate networks so that you can build your store. You can easily install this on a sub-domain.

5. Google Analytics for WordPress – A must-have for all affiliate marketers; the plugin brings the all-powerful and all-informing data powerhouse from Google to your WordPress blog. Track keywords that get you traffic, sources of traffic, time spent on the site and relevant information that you can tweak for greater returns.

6. Pretty Link – Create short-links from your own domain; no need to use external services. A great tool for making text links attractive and more click-worthy; particularly for forums and social media sites like Twitter. The plugin also tracks the hits on the URLs so that you know where the traffic is coming from.
7. Social Share 2.0 – Every affiliate marketer worth his salt knows that social media is a big contributor to getting traffic and prospective customers; adding posts to a host of very good social media sites can be a time-consuming chore. But no more; this plugin lets you add your posts to the top social media sites in a jiffy.