Ninja Affiliate Review 2012

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Ninja Affiliate Review 2012

Ninja Affiliate will mask any link to look as if it were a part of your domain name. It's most prominently used by affiliate marketers to mask affiliate links on Wordpress sites, but can be used for URL branding and shortening, too.

Use this revised 2012 review of Ninja Affiliate to learn how the plug-in works, see it in action and read about its several features.

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Ever had the need to re-name ugly affiliate links, because nobody clicks them? That's what this plugin does, and there are no others: my Ninja Affiliate review will show you exactly how it gets this task done.

About Ninja Affiliate


Ninja Affiliate is a premium plugin for Wordpress, allowing you to "mask" your affiliate links so that they can have a more branded and customized appearance using your own domain name. It does this by using your actual domain name as the"root" of the URL.

There are no alternative or similar plugins that do what Ninja Affiliate does, which has contributed to its developer's huge success in the past several years. Few plugins have created waves in the affiliate marketing industry as this one has, and that alone piqued my curiosity to give Ninja Affiliate a try. This review is based on my experiences of the plugin.

Using Ninja Affiliate to Brand Affiliate Links

Ninja Affiliate links


The Problem With Affiliate Marketing
An extreme frustration that affiliate marketers deal with is the fact that their affiliate links are either ugly or give away their account name. For instance, affiliate publishers like Commission Junction typically generate links that look like this:

http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-1234567-12345678


For starters, any user who hovers over a link and sees it pointing to a made-up domain like "anrdoezrs.net" (which happens to be a masking URL that Commission Junction uses) is immediately going to lose a lot of trust in where that link is actually pointing to. Over time, the failure rate for links pointing to these "ugly URLs" contributes to a *lot* of lost sales.

The Solution Attempted by Ninja Affiliate
In response to the affiliate sales lost over time due to "ugly links," Affiliate Ninja attempts to resolve the issue by using your own domain name to selectively mask these links. With the Ninja Affiliate plugin, you can "create" a link in the backend, paste in your affiliate URL, rename it, and have have that same "ugly link" look like this, instead:

http://www.mysite.com/nike-shoes


The obviousness of 'which link looks better' doesn't even need an explanation -- and the results on your live site will be the near elimination of sales lost due to customer mistrust in your links. Since your main objective as an affiliate marketer is to "drop cookies," that's what Ninja Affiliate helps you do with a vastly higher success rate.

Ninja Affiliate Links & SEO
To clear up any misconceptions: now in 2012, search engines can tell the difference between a cloaked affiliate link and a regular affiliate link. Cloaking your links simply has no SEO benefit; but, most importantly, it won't negatively impact your site on search engines in any way. That goes for link cloaking in general: even with bit.ly and others.

How Does Ninja Affiliate Work?

Ninja Affiliate

The screen shot above shows the creating a cloaked affiliate link in Ninja Affiliate. This process encompasses the following actions:

1 | Name your link: Name your link: it will appear on Ninja Affiliate's back-end menu.
2 | Affiliate/Destination Link: Copy and paste your actual affiliate link here.
3 | Ninja Link: Here, you'll rename that ugly affiliate link to whatever you want.
4 | Group: If you have lots of links, group them into categories so they're easier to find in Ninja Affiliate's administration panel.
5 | Cloak It: This will edit what the "TITLE" of the link's landing page says.
6 | Convert Keywords to Ninja Links: This will hyperlink every instance of the keyword you choose here, throughout your site (personally, not a feature I'd use these days).

Ninja Affiliate Links On A Live Site

Ninja Affiliate before and after

Above, you can see what the link from the example would look like on a live website. The "Before" link shows the ugly old "anrdoezrs.net" URL, and the "After" link shows the result after Ninja Affiliate was used to mask the link with the domain name of your website.

Get Ninja Affiliate

Get Ninja AffiliateIt's still the only way to effectively cloak your affiliate links in Wordpress: Ninja Affiliate is a must-have plugin for any blogger or affiliate marketer who wants to retain a sense of professionalism and integrity in the affiliate links they post. Get Ninja Affiliate either for one site, or buy a license and install it on unlimited sites -- either option also gives you lifetime support and free updates.

Get Ninja Affiliate

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Pixelrage

Hi, I'm Mark, and I go by the screenname "Pixelrage" - thanks so much for checking out my work here on Squidoo! If you need to get in touch with me,... more »

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