Easy Affiliate Links: A Free Pretty Links Alternative

Are you into affiliate marketing & looking a way to optimize your affiliate links?

In the past, I have mentioned about free Gocodes WordPress plugin that I use to manage all my affiliate links. Not sure why, but today Gocodes plugin was pulled out of WordPress plugin repo & now there is only a few such free affiliate link manager plugin left in the WordPress plugin repo.

One of them is Thirstyaffiliate,  Pretty link which is free for the lite version & have a Pro version with advanced feature. Pretty link is indeed a great plugin for a serious affiliate marketer, but most of the affiliate marketing newbies who want to stick with free options have limited alternatives.

To ease out your pain, I ended up finding all free alternatives to Pretty links & tried numerous plugin to find the best Pretty links alternative which is free & have all the features which an affiliate link manager WordPress plugin should have.

If you have been a regular reader of ShoutMeLoud, you would know I evaluate all plugins in term of long term usage & SEO effects.

Finally, I found one plugin call Easy Affiliate Links, which seems the best free alternative to Pretty links or any other WordPress affiliate link plugins.

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This plugin doesn’t offer geographically targeted link cloaking that is essential for Amazon affiliate program but provides the generic solution that any entry level affiliate marketers require.

In this tutorial, I will share the review & usage guide of Easy Affiliate links (EAL) plugin to help you get started with.

Easy Affiliate Links: Free Affiliate link manager plugin

EAL is one free WordPress plugin that is must have for any affiliate marketers. It turns your ugly affiliate links into pretty links, and also offers basic stats such as monthly clicks & lifetime clicks on the link. This plugin utilized the post types feature of WordPress & is easy to use.

One of the features of this plugin is categorization, which makes the link management easy. What I liked about this plugin is, it let you add affiliate links directly from the post-editor section.

Without getting more into theory, let me show you how to use this plugin. The very first thing you need to do is, install & activate the plugin. You can check out the plugin official page here.

After plugin activation, click on Affiliate links> Settings to configure default settings of the plugin. The most important part is slug that defines how your clocked URL would be like. Default is recommended, and you should change it to something like go or visit to make it more meaningful. Let me explain the slug part for you, as this is essential & it will play an important role in the days to come.

Here is a long URL (Affiliate link): https://www.instamojo.com/denharsh/shoutmeloud-affiliate-marketing-guide/

If you don’t change the slug, by default all your affiliate link would be like:

https://shoutmeloud.com/recommended/affiliate

If I change the slug to go, my links would be like

https://shoutmeloud.com/go/affiliate

Do remember, you need to configure it just after the installation. So without getting much into the technicality of it, only change the recommended to go in the setting page. Here is what the setting page should look like:

Easy Affiliate links configuration
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Once this is done, the next step is to start adding the affiliate links. Click on Affiliate links> Add new & make your ugly affiliate links look pretty.

This part is easy for anyone who have used Pretty links plugin or any other plugin to manage their affiliate links. If this is your first time, don’t worry as below image is self-explanatory.

affiliate link cloaking
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In case of confusion, feel free to ask me in the comment section below. This is how you will add all your affiliate links & from here things get interesting. As you can directly copy shortened link by clicking on Affiliate links or you can use the button in post editor section to add links.

Let me show you how to use this button feature from post editor section. When you are writing a new post, click on Affiliate link button in the post section:

Affiliate link add
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This will bring up this pop-up where you can insert already created affiliate links, or you can create a new cloaked affiliate link. (See screenshot below for better understanding)

Easy Affiliate links WordPress plugin
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This plugin do have import & export features, which will be useful for those who want to migrate from Pretty links plugin to this one. I haven’t tested this feature yet, but will try it in coming days, as this free affiliate plugin looks impressive than the Pretty links plugin.

Conclusion:

I’m glad I discovered Easy Affiliate links plugin that seemed to be the best free Affiliate link cloak WordPress plugin out there.

Even for an existing user or the first time user, this plugin is the best solution out there. Go ahead & try it, you won’t be disappointed.

For now, I would also like to know how are you managing affiliate links on your blog?

Do share this post with your friends who are into affiliate marketing, they will thank you later. 🙂

Was this helpful?

Thanks for your feedback!
Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

18 thoughts on “Easy Affiliate Links: A Free Pretty Links Alternative”

  1. harris

    I have gocodes plugin for years and have created hundreds of affiliate links with it. Is there a way to export these links and import them in another plugin?

    Thanks

  2. Ashish

    I do not why easy affiliate link is not working with my blog, any help ..

  3. Siddharth Choudhary

    Great plugin, But when you want even more things to manage your affiliate links, then you should try Thirsty Affiliates Plugin (Paid). It is just excellent.

  4. Rahul

    Hello Harsh,
    Does this plugin contain any option like gocodes to make the affiliate or cloaked link no follow?

  5. Asif

    WOW, I actually wrote about this a while ago and was looking for my position in the search and found this to be on top spot. Great.

  6. Jeramey

    Harsh,

    This is a great alternative if you are looking to have an easy and manageable way to incorporate affiliate links. I’m glad you shared this with everyone.

  7. Naresh

    Hi Harsh,

    Nice post. Nice plugin too. I’ve been using this plugin (Easy Affiliate Links) for past few months, it works like a charm! Yeah, well said, “must have plugin for any affiliate marketers”.

  8. Nitin Verma

    Wow ! Nice share buddy…. Now I can easily manage my affiliate links through “Easy Affiliate Links”.

  9. MINHAJ UDDIN

    Hi Harsh,
    Really a great article you shared with us. Easy Affiliate links seems very helpful for affiliate marketers. I think it can be a good alternative which we can use for best results. It’s features are so awesome.
    Anyway. thanks for sharing this plugin with us,

    Have a nice weekend!

  10. Siddaiah

    Hi Harsh,

    I am using Pretty link for my affiliate links I am very happy with it, I don’t know that Gocodes has been pulled out of WordPress, after reading this article easy affiliate links also looking worthful to use, thanks for showing step by step guide how to use this easy affiliate links, see you soon.

  11. Suresh Thakur

    Thanks Harsh, I was not much aware about the affiliate marketing. This post make me to think about it and will follow your ebook soon. Keep inspiring us great stuff.

  12. Deepak Rana

    Informative tutorial Harsh bro.After reading this article, I installed the plugin to try out my hands on it. I really liked this plugin.But It’s changing the text color to green (affiliate text), Need help regarding this Issue.
    & I have noticed that it have Import & export option 😉

  13. Derek

    Great blog post, I may check out this in the future. Right now I’m using simple URLs by StudioPress but they lack features in the plugin. 🙁

  14. Bigwas

    Easy Affiliate links seems a promising affiliate tools for starting affiliate marketer like me although I am presently using thirsty affiliate. The easy affiliate links developer I read is considering adding a broken link checker which is great.

  15. Yordi van Dijk

    Superb post!

    You made my day Harsh ! Till now I was using pretty link but I was not really satisfied with it. Definitively going to step over on this one.

    Cheers,

    Yordi

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      @Yordi
      Happy to help 🙂

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