The 9 Best WordPress Affiliate Plugins to Start Your Own Affiliate Program

Affiliate marketing is currently one of the most widely used marketing strategies when it comes to selling products and promoting online business around the globe. It is, in fact, also one of the easiest ways you can use to promote your products or services.

Also read: The 10 Best Affiliate Link Cloaking WordPress Plugins

With Affiliate marketing, you can easily ask an affiliate, fellow bloggers or social influencers to join your affiliate program, promote your product and earn hefty commissions in exchange for the customers referred to your business. In most cases, the commission amount is usually pre-determined but is also customizable on case to case basis. But the real question is how to create an affiliate program?

How to Start an Affiliate Program with WordPress?

As simple as the WordPress affiliate marketing process sounds, things might go haywire if not appropriately started and managed.

And this is where WordPress Affiliate program plugins come into action.

These WordPress affiliate plugins help you to create your own affiliate platform and achieve your marketing process easily.

Once your WordPress affiliate platform is live, you can signup your affiliates in it. Additionally, you can easily track sales made through an affiliate’s link, monitor their performance, and view the generated revenue. A useful WordPress affiliate plugin should easily add referral links towards your product page, manage the affiliates, help grow the audience, and track the marketing progress.

In this article, let’s look at the nine Best WordPress Affiliate Program Plugins that you can use to start your affiliate platform and grow your revenue and business.

List of the Best WordPress Affiliate Plugins

#1. Affiliate WP

Affiliate WP is a useful WordPress affiliate plugin to start your own affiliate program. The plugin helps you manage your affiliates. It is easy to use plugin that boosts your business and revenue at the same time. The plugin can be simply installed and activated, and you are already in business. It has an accurate affiliate tracking tool and works with servers with aggressive caching. It gives you realtime reporting on how your affiliates are performing. The integrated payout service makes it easier to withdraw your commissions to your local bank accounts.

Affiliate WP is fully compatible with popular WordPress eCommerce and membership plugins. You can add an unlimited number of affiliates to promote the service or product.

The plugin has an easy affiliate registration form for users who want to join as affiliates instantly. The affiliate login form, registration form, and URL can be added using WordPress shortcodes. The dashboard shows your top earning affiliates, earnings, and more.

#2. Affiliates Manager

WP Affiliate Manager is another option for managing your marketing. It is a free WordPress affiliate plugin that brings in a lot of features. The plugin lets you create your unlimited affiliate programs. You can set different payout rates for various affiliates. The plugin comes with a notification system that notifies your affiliates when they earn a commission and notify the administrator when a sale referred by an affiliate is complete.

The affiliate area of the plugin is fully responsive and will look amazing in different mobile devices. WP Affiliate Manage introduces Paypal Mass pay integration which lets you pay all your affiliates with a single click.

Why should you choose Affiliates Manager?

• Manual adjustment: allows crediting an affiliate manually. It comes in handy when you want to add a bonus for reaching a goal.
• eCommerce Integration: the plugin can be fully integrated with WooCommerce, WP eCommerce, and Simple Shopping cart.
• Realtime reporting: live data reporting of affiliate’s traffic and sales.
• Autoresponder Integration: quickly add members to the newsletter lists using popular mail automation like MailChimp and Infusionsoft.

#3. Ultimate Affiliate Pro

Ultimate Affiliate Pro is one of the best affiliate plugin for WordPress. This plugin gives a premium platform to your affiliate members. It has a reward system for members based on the rank or special offer. Another unique feature of the plugin is the ability that allows members to spend their commission on the site with a discount. Ultimate Affiliate Pro packs in with complete metric features for affiliate marketing companies. It comes with cost per lead, cost per sale, cost per action, cost per mile, cost per click, earning per click, and others.

Ultimate Affiliate Pro is fully integrated with major WordPress plugins. It supports QR code, email verification, custom currency, wallet system, and many more. It is available at $59 for a lifetime license, and it includes all the magic features with lifetime updates.

Top reasons to choose Ultimate Affiliate Pro:

• Performance Bonus: allows you to set bonus commissions for an affiliate for different events or structures.
• Payment Integration: payment integration with all major payment processor, including Paypal and Stripe.
• Allow own referrals: allow your affiliate members to earn commissions for their referral.
• Lifetime Commissions: enables affiliates to receive a commission on all future purchase by the same customer.
• SIgnup Referrals: membership system to award a flat commission when referred user signs up.

#4. YITH WooCommerce Affiliates

YITH WooCommerce Affiliate is a WooCommerce affiliate plugin offered by YITH. It is an effective way to gain visibility and earn more customers to your online shop. WooCommerce is one of the top-rated eCommerce plugins in WordPress. The plugin helps to build affiliate profiles and set up commissions. The plugin also extends the relationship between a merchant and an affiliate.

YITH WooCommerce affiliate plugin supports WordPress shortcodes. Adding the affiliate links to post is easy using shortcodes. The plugin is available in a free and premium version. The premium version of the plugin gives access to exclusive features including advanced reporting, social media sharing, request commission withdraw, and others.

Why should you choose YITH WooCommerce Affiliate?

• Variable Commission rate: different commission rate for various products and users in your shop.
• Permanent association with user: commissions from future purchase from the same referral are credited automatically.
• Payment management: payment management made easy, addition and removal of affiliate.
• Affiliate Dashboard: members have their dashboard to track their commissions and progress.

#5. ReferralCandy for WooCommerce

ReferralCandy for WooCommernce is a powerful WordPress affiliate program plugin that automates the customer referral campaign on your WooCommerce store. It offers a reward to customers who refer people to your site with discounts, cash, and free products. The plugin lets everyone win: the original customer gets rewarded, their friends get a discount, and you make more sales and get a new customer. The plugin is easy to set up and run.

ReferralCandy plugin has full integration with major eCommerce platforms including Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, and others. You can easily connect your marketing apps for email marketing, analytics, and re-targeting. All of these features come with a price tag of $49 monthly or $3999 if you choose the annual enterprise plan.

Why ‘ReferralCandy’ could be a great choice?

• Customized reward option: choose from cash rewards, store discounts or custom gifts.
• Automated referral program: automatically invite customers, detect successful referrals and prevent referral fraud.
• Best-in-class support: live support with expert guides and support team 24/7.

#6. Affiliates by Itthinx

Affiliates by Itthinx is a good alternative as an affiliate WordPress plugin. Using the plugin, you can add affiliate links to your WordPress site in minutes. The plugin provides you with a set of tools for growing your WordPress affiliate program. It has a fresh and intuitive dashboard that aids in promoting your site, product, and services quickly.

‘Affiliates plugin’ provide free integration and extensions with different plugins. It can be used with WooCommerce, Events manager, and Paypal. To use this plugin, you will need to spend $19 to $399 per year depending upon the features you’ve subscribed to.

Top reasons to choose ‘Affiliate by Itthinx’:

• Realtime reporting: exclusive dashboard for live data reporting
• Payment: distribute affiliates commissions efficiently to a large number of your affiliates
• Automated affiliate registration: registers affiliate automatically without any recruitment process.

#7. Affiliate Royale

Affiliate Royale is a complete WordPress affiliate program plugin. The plugin lets you launch your affiliate platform in no time. It offers efficient affiliate tracking, commission management, and distribution.

The WP affiliate plugin can also be integrated with the shopping cart efficiently. The plugin comes with customizable charts for data visualization of clicks, sales, and payments. Affiliate Royal for WordPress is available in Developer edition ($165) and Merchant Edition ($85). Both versions are available with one year of premium support.

Why should you choose ‘Affiliate Royale’?

• Personalized affiliate dashboard: for affiliates to manage their account, monitor their status, payment history, and links.
• Powerful Admin Panel: offers full-fledged admin area to manage your affiliates. It shows various information related to the affiliates, incoming clicks, transactions, and reports.
• Shopping cart Integration: a simple way to integrate shopping cart and membership software. Tight integration with PayPal, wooCommerce, memberpress, and others.

#8. Post Affiliate Pro

Post Affiliate Pro is another award-winning plugin for WordPress when it comes to Affiliate Marketing. It lets your affiliate grow without any boundaries. The plugin enables you to increase your sales and drive more customers to your site. It is an easy tool to track your entire affiliate network. This affiliate marketing plugin offers easy integration with API, 170 detail integrations with payment processors, memberships, and CMS.

The plugin offers multilingual support for affiliate marketing websites. Affiliates will be able to use the application in more than 36 languages. The price of the plugin starts at $99 for the Pro version. It will cost you $477 if you plan to opt for the network version.

Why should you choose Post Affiliate Pro?

• Multilevel Tracking: multiple unique tracking methods with different link styles, custom tracking code, direct link tracking.
• Fraud Protection: monitors all transactions generated in the system and decline fraudulent transactions without any alert.
• Private Campaign: allows you to create private affiliate campaigns that can be viewed by the selected ones only.
• Split Commission: a unique feature that rewards all affiliates that participated in the sale.

#9. Thirsty Affiliates

ThirstyAffiliates is one of the top downloaded Affiliate marketing Plugin for WordPress.

Please note that ThirstyAffiliates is not an affiliate plugin to start your own WordPress affiliate program, and you can only use it to cloak your own affiliate links or the links of someone else’s products.

It supercharges your marketing efforts and helps to convert your cold traffic into an income source. Thirsty Affiliates comes with a dashboard that helps you manage your affiliate links in an organized way. The plugin is easy to set up and customize. The plugin also lets you import and export affiliate links using CSV. All of these features from Thirsty Affiliates will cost you from $49 if you choose a single site license, and will go up to $149 for ten site license.

Why Thirsty Affiliates is the good option for Affiliate marketers?

• Amazing Reports: that provide statistics of the sales data in tables and charts.
• Autolink Keywords: automates the process of linking the link for a given keyword
• Google Analytics: integration with Google Analytics provide detail reporting.
• Smart Uncloaking: disguises your links easily and protects against commission theft.
• Proactive link fixer: frontend links are always working and are up to date
• Geolocation link: set alternate destination for international visitors

Other alternatives to WordPress Affiliate Program Plugins

Affiliate marketing is gaining popularity day by day and will stay here for a long time. All of the plugins mentioned above comes with amazing features, support and full compatibility with WordPress.

Though setting up your affiliate program with networks such as ShareASale or Impact may sound effortless and more tempting compared to your self-hosted affiliate program with WordPress plugins, the later is more rewarding and offers long-term benefits. You can easily change your terms, commission rates, tracking links anytime at your own will. It also saves you from the high network joining fees.

And finally, check this list if you are looking for mere affiliate link Cloaker plugins to simply mask your links.

Do let us know which plugin you choose and your reviews about the same in the comment section below.