Add In-context Affiliate Links To Blog Posts With Incredible Ease

Perhaps you've come across blogs sporting words within posts which are hyperlinks. Such links are referred to as in-context links. The links may well be ads produced by a piece of code from an ad network. Or they might be links crafted by hand by the post's author. These links may lead to another post within the same blog or to a totally different website altogether. Another possibility is to have links to affiliate products as a way of creating income from the blog.

If you are running a blog with WordPress, there is a free plugin called aLinks available to facilitate easy creation of in-context links. To use the aLinks plugin, you create a list of keywords along with a URL for each keyword phrase. The plugin then alters all occurrences of each keyword phrase, making it a link to the desired URL.

As if that's not enough, the aLinks download also includes the Deeper Blog and Amazon Basic add-on modules. The Deeper Blog module improves SEO within your blog by creating a web of internal links. It does so by letting you can choose keyword phrases, for which the plugin then searches through your blog's posts to make links for matching keyword phrases. To aid monetizing your blog, you can use the Amazon Basic module, with which you assign keyphrases to search terms so that it creates links going to an appropriate product.

After downloading the .zip file, you may need to unzip it and rezip it without the documentation file to get it to install from the WordPress dashboard. Or you can upload the contents of the aLinks folder directly to your web host after unzipping the package. Follow the instructions in the documentation file to do this.

As soon as the plugin is installed and activated, an aLinks menu will show up under the normal WordPress menus on the left side of your dashboard. You must go into the settings menu and enter your Amazon.com affiliate ID so as to utilize the Amazon Basic module.

You can set up your keyword phrases from the 'Keyphrases' menu. The top section of this page is the toolbox, which is useful for finding and editing keyphrases. The next section is a box that shows your current keyphrases, along with the description and type. If you scroll down below that, you will find the forms where you submit the information to add your keywords to the database. Just fill out the information in the appropriate section and click 'Update Keyphrase' to add it. The aLinks plugin does the rest.