Ninja Affiliate Review 2012

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.

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.

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).

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.