Free Alternative to Ninja Affiliate Link Cloaker Plugin for WordPress

It sure looks like a great plugin for any wordpress blogger who uses affiliate programs and wants to protect their affiliate links and keep them organized and easy to modify, but MaxBlogPress’s Ninja Affiliate plugin is not worth the price.

I almost bought the plugin myself, but when I saw the $97 dollar price tag I had to do a double-take.

‘$97 bucks for a plugin?! Come on!‘

If you’re reading this page it’s likely that you had a similar reaction and are now looking for a place to download Ninja Affiliate for free, or at least find an alternative. If this is you, you’re in luck! I found an alternative that works just as good, and the best part is that it’s free — keep reading.

Of course Ninja Affiliate is a useful tool, and for many bloggers it’s on their list of must have plugins for WordPress — and with good reason! Ninja Affiliate allows you to do a bunch of really great things like:

• automatically convert any keyword on your blog into an affiliate link
• track affiliate links and clicks
• cloak affiliate links to stop affiliate link theft
• manage all of your links from within wordpress editor
• limit the number of keywords converted into affiliate links
• custom formatting for your affiliate links

With all of these great features it almost makes it seem worth paying for… but wait! You don’t have to!

I’ve found a combination of two FREE plugins will do the exact same thing as Ninja Affiliate, it’s just not quite as pretty looking!

First you should install the plugin called GoCodes. GoCodes will allow you to cloak your links, track them, and manage them, all within the Tools -> GoCodes screen in WordPress. GoCodes keeps all of your links organized in one place, and you can choose what the cloaked link will look like, for example you could change an ugly amazon affiliate link that looks like this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002X3XR70?ie=UTF8&tag=explorinfin0b-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B002X3XR70

into this:

http://www.exploringinfinity.com/recommend/your-wish-is-your-command/

You can see many links here on this site that use GoCodes. I’ve been using it a lot since I discovered it about a month ago and I’m very happy with the way it works. You can go back and edit your affiliate links without having to change the links in your posts and pages by simply editing your GoCodes redirects, too. This is good if your affiliates change their tracking system or links for some reason, or if you want to remove links to certain products for whatever reason, you don’t have to go back through all of your posts and pages and manually change everything! GoCodes will do it for you.

Get GoCodes here, it’s a smart thing to do!

And the second plugin to complete the Free Ninja Affiliate Alternative is SEO Smart Links. This is the plugin that will allow you to convert any keyword you choose into a link on your blog. It will also limit the number of keywords to convert per page and all the rest. It’s simple to use, just like GoCodes, and it does everything you need to get a free version of Ninja Affiliate without the fancy art and hefty price-tag.

Once you have SEO Smart Links installed you can set it to turn whatever keywords you want into a link, yes, even affiliate links. You can cloak your affiliate links in GoCodes and then set SEO Smart Links to turn every instance of the keyword “Your Wish Is Your Command” into a link to the cloaked affiliate link produced with GoCodes. You can even set it to only convert 1, 2, 3, or 1000 instances of it per pages, that way if you have a keyword heavy article you won’t have 30 or 40 links throughout the article but only the first 1 or 2 or however many you’ve set in SEO Smart Links.

With these two plugins installed you’ve basically scored yourself a free copy of Ninja Affiliate without stealing! Good job!
Happy Cloaking!