What’s going on in Dave here from Profitable Tools, or I review software to help you grow your business? Now, if you’ve ever seen any of my other videos or even really any other video on YouTube, you know, there’s something all about those links in the description. Or maybe I could put it on the lower third right here. That’s what this video is all about.

I’m going to show you the software that you can use to create those links to earn you money.

So the whole goal of this video is to show you how to use this software, but then also teach you how you can go from being one of those people who clicked the links in the description to you, creating the links that other people can click.

You don’t have to be a YouTube or you could have a blog or really just share your links on social media. I’m going to show you how all this works in this video. So stay tuned.

So the tool that I use for affiliate marketing is called Thirsty Affiliates. It’s one of my favorite tools that I’ve used in this genre with my least favorite name of any product I’ve ever reviewed ever. Just something about the word Thirsty Affiliates makes it seem kind of scary. But trust me, it’s definitely not. Now, this is a WordPress plugin, meaning you have to have a WordPress website to use it. There are other hosted solutions and I’ve used those in the past.

But for reasons that I’ll go into later in this video, I don’t necessarily recommend them if you can avoid it. So Thirsty Affiliates WordPress plugin, you got to install it on your site before we get into that. What is all of this affiliate marketing mumbo jumbo?

Well, really, just about any product that you can think of is going to have some way that you can sell it using what’s called an affiliate link, defined affiliate links. It’s really very simple. Just go and type in the name of the product you want, followed by affiliate program. So maybe something like ASIMO AffiliateWP, you’ll probably find a page that looks something like this. This is their sign up page. You click the button, you fill out a little form and you two can become an affiliate for really whatever vendor you want to become an affiliate for.

Heck, even Thirsty Affiliates themselves have an affiliate program. And in fact, it’s the link that I’m using. Down below is my affiliate link for Thirsty Affiliates so that if you watch this review, you think, oh, that software is pretty sweet, I’m going to get a copy. You can click the link down below. I will get a small commission. Thirsty Affiliates gets the majority of the money, but we both can help each other out.

I can show you how this software works. Thirsty Affiliates gets a new customer and I get a small commission for making the video. Now, one of the reasons that I like affiliate marketing so much is that I get to be myself. I simply find products that I’m interested in, learn about them, show you how they work, tell you what I like about them, tell you what I don’t like about them, and we all win. Now, if you have a website where you’re maybe selling something, you probably already have content on that website, maybe discussing the complementary products to your own products.

Well, you could search for affiliate programs for those products and then use a program like Thirsty Affiliates to be able to monetize a little bit of the content you’ve already made.

Once sign up for an affiliate program, you’re going to see something that looks kind of like this. It’s an affiliate dashboard and you get your very own affiliate link and they’re typically really unwieldy and very ugly. So this is my affiliate link for Thirsty Affiliates. You can see us Thirsty Affiliates dotcom slash, questionmark, AFC’s equals and then a big, long string of random characters. Now, you probably don’t want to go around sharing this on Facebook or in social media websites because it just looks kind of weird and unwieldy.

So what we do is we use link shortening software to be able to cloak this and turn it to something a little bit more beautiful. Here is a brand new WordPress website that I just set up for the purpose of this video.

You can see the euro is demo profitable tools and have already got thirsty links installed. Now I’m using the pro version here. There is a free version, but really the bulk of the features that you’re going to want to use that I’m going to show off throughout this video are in the pro version. So check out the free version, see if it’s right for you, or just watch this video and buy the pro version. All right. So let me show you how this works.

I’m going to go back over to my Thirsty Affiliates dashboard. I’ll copy my affiliate link, and then I’m back over in the WordPress website. I’ll create a new affiliate link at the top here. I’ll give this a name then under destination you. I’ll just paste in my affiliate link. Next up is Auto Link Keywords. This is one of my favorite features inside of Thirsty Affiliates.

So the way this works is I could type in Thirsty Affiliates and now any time that phrase shows up on my website, it will automatically be linked using my affiliate link over to Thirsty Affiliates so people can make a purchase.

This is really amazing because what it means is if you already have a blog with a lot of that content, but you weren’t monetizing it, you didn’t have affiliate links for specific products, you can retroactively go back and add them with Thirsty Affiliates and you don’t have to hunt through maybe hundreds of different old blog posts looking for places to drop in links. It will all be done automatically for you. Now, there are some settings that correspond to the auto linking how many times things are linked, and I’ll show you that in a minute.

But first, let’s finish setting up our first affiliate link. The next section down is for geolocation. You URLs. To be honest, I don’t really use this section. It is valuable if you have different affiliate links for different countries, so let’s say you have someone who’s in Russia and they have a particular shop for a product in Russia that’s maybe not available to someone who is in England.

Right. You could have different shops set up with different affiliate links, just depending on the geolocation of someone who visits your website. The next section down is the link scheduler. And this is really important, especially when there’s sales for products that you have reviewed or are recommending to people, because what you can do is send them to a custom sale page during a specific start and end time.

And then after the sale is over, it can resort back to the original link. Maybe it’s the home page or a sales page that’s unique to your brand. OK, so I think we’re ready.

Let’s go ahead and save this link and I’ll show you what it looks like. So right here, I’ve got the cloaks. You are all Damodar profitable. That tools get slashed Thirsty Affiliates. Now I can modify this. You are loved. It’s not what I like. I’ll click edit slug. Maybe I will go ahead and remove that little dash between Thirsty Affiliates and hit save. Great. So now I’ve updated this link. Now you might also be wondering.

Well what about yet. I don’t really want to get in there. That’s not right for my brand. Well you can change that as well under Thirsty Affiliates just head over to the settings and then go to link appearance. You can see under link prefect’s I have got get selected, but there’s plenty of other options to choose from. If you scroll through the list and you don’t find anything that looks good to you. Well, good news because you can also use a custom prefix.

I think I will stick with get for this video. As long as we’re on this page. I’ll walk you through some of the other interesting settings on here link category in utero. This is basically if you want to categorize your links, which I’ll talk about a little bit later on, I do recommend doing that.

You can have the category actually show up in the URL. I don’t necessarily recommend that because it just gets to be a longer useful and usually when we close links, we want them to be nice and short and easy to remember the next few options down or maybe more for ACL related things like whether you use nofollow links. Essentially what a nofollow link is, is whether or not you want to give some Google juice to the destination link. You can turn that on if you want to.

You can also have links open up in a new window. That is kind of a best practice. If you have a link that goes to an external website, to have it open up into a new tab is not a bad idea. Let’s go and turn that on. All right. We’ll save our settings here. And let’s head back to the affiliate link section. This is where I can view all of my affiliate links. There is a search bar up here.

So once you get maybe 100 or 200 links in here, it’s going to be pretty hard to scroll through things. So you can just search right up here. I find myself using that on the Profitable Tools website all of the time, but if you want to try one of these links out, I can either copy the cloaks you are all right here or just simply hit view.

And it should open me up over to the Thirsty Affiliates landing page. That is because that is where my affiliate link lands. Now, this is the perfect time to tell you if you’d like to grab Thirsty Affiliates. You’re welcome to do so using my link down below. But this is not a sponsored video. That’s again, one of the reasons I like affiliate marketing. They didn’t pay me to make this. You guys are paying me to make this.

If you find a valuable click the link and it helps me out. All right. Back over to the WordPress dashboard. So what can I do with this link now? Well, of course I can just grab this cloak you I can copy it and I can paste it anywhere I want. It doesn’t have to land only on your, you know, WordPress blog or something like that. I use them on YouTube all the time. But if you’re a content creator and you are blogging, chances are you’re going to have some pages that mention the products that you recommend or that are useful to people who use your main product that maybe you sell yourself.

Well, this is where the power of Thirsty Affiliates really shines over using a hosted solution. I have used several other hosted solutions in the past and again, we’ll get to some reasons. I don’t like that so much these days. But first, let me show you how this works. So in my demo site, I just created a blog post. I really just went and copy and pasted a review of an audio product, obviously highly illegal to just steal someone else’s content, but for demonstration purposes.

Here is a nice review of a piece of equipment called the Focus Right pro for April 24. So this is an older product, but let’s say I had wrote this blog about it and was getting lots of traffic and I wanted to start to earn some money from it. Well, I had a couple of options. I could maybe throw some ad since ads on there and, you know, earn a few cents per day. Or I could give people the option to make a purchase after they read the article.

So throughout the article I actually mentioned or I don’t, but whoever wrote this article mentioned several products. Right? We’ve got the Sapphire Pro Range. We’ve got the Sapphire Pro for 24. We also have the Liquid Sapphire 56. So there are several products mentioned throughout the review. Now, none of them have links. So what we could actually do is go right up to, you know, I’m not leaving anything. I’m still in my blog view and go right up to new and now have another option instead of a new post, new media new page, I can create a new affiliate link.

Let’s do that.

This time, I’m going to give it the title of Sapphire Pro Twenty. Or I’ll head over to Amazon and I’m going to look for that product. So it turns out the sapphire protein for, like I mentioned earlier, is an older product. It’s actually discontinued. It’s been replaced. This is probably the next best suggestion, the scarlet to I, too. I’d recommend linking to the specific product. But just to give you an example, here is the scarlet, too.

I’m logged into my Amazon AffiliateWP platform. I can grab a text link for this right here.

I will just copy this and then go back over to my WordPress website and I will add the destination URL as the Amazon affiliate link right here. All right, let’s go ahead. And AOL keyword this to be Saffire, April 24 and hit Sèvres link.

Now let’s go ahead and load up that blog post one more time. I’ll hit view. And now what you’re going to see is that if I hover over the Sapphire Pro 24 word, it turns into a link. Now, it didn’t turn into a link. Actually, the hyperlink on this demo site have the same color text, probably best practice, but you get the idea it is now automatically went out and found those words and turned it into an affiliate link.

I don’t have to go searching through the documents or searching through my old posts. It’ll automatically find them and insert them for me and click on this to test it out. And sure enough, here we go. I’ve got an Amazon affiliate link. Now, this Amazon link actually brings us to our next feature of Thirsty Affiliates, which is the ability to unlock links. Now, we just went through all this trouble so we could cloak the links and use our own domain name for links.

But guess what?

Some affiliate programs like Amazon’s associate program do not allow you to close links. It’s against their terms of service. Thirsty Affiliates has got you covered here because we can actually uncloaked links.

Let me show you.

All right. So back over in the blog post, I’m hovering over this link for Saphire so you can see the destination in the lower left hand corner. You can see that using that domain demo nonprofitable that tools get so on and so forth. Right. We can’t use that for Amazon. Products in other stores have similar rules, but Amazon is the major player here. So how can I still use the auto linking feature, which will allow me to create content, type in words and have it auto link to my affiliate links, but not use the cloaking functionality?

Well, Thirsty Affiliates has a very simple solution to this. Let’s head over to the settings I’m under Thirsty Affiliates settings modules and then right here it says Uncloaked Links by default. This is off. I’m going to check this and then scroll down to the bottom and hit save changes. Now that that’s saved, I’ll go back over to my affiliate links and I will see all of the links that have already created.

I’m going to edit this one and over in the right hand side bar right here, right above me on this side.

No, and right over here in the right hand side bar, you can see I’ve got a new option that says Uncloaked Link, I’m going to choose. Yes. And then I’ll save this link now when I go back to my blog posts and I reload. Now, if I hover over this link, you’ll see the destination in the lower left hand corner points directly to Amazon and it’s no longer cloaked. All right. So I think you’re probably starting to get an idea of whether Thirsty Affiliates is a good match for your business at this point.

I’m still going to tell you why I prefer it over the hosted solutions. But right away, one thing the hosted solutions can’t do is automatically create links on your blog. So that is a huge plus. All right. Next up, let’s look at some more of the features that Thirsty Affiliates has. We’ve got notifications. So if you want to know when something starts to blow up, you can set up a notification so that when a certain number of clicks happen, you get an email.

All right. So that is a cool little feature. Nothing to you mind blowing there. The next section up on the side is for link categories. What this is going to allow us to do is categorize our links so that when we’re looking at our data in the nice reporting section, we’ll show you in a minute. We can see what is most effective. So a couple of strategies here.

You could categorize them by product type or maybe by affiliate partners so you can have all of your Amazon links have a specific category, or you could have Amazon links that are kitchenware, Amazon links that are houseware, so on and so forth. You get the idea that will give you the best reporting possible when you get over to the metrics.

I’m going to go ahead and make a couple of categories here. Great to know. I’ve got pro audio and software as my categories. Let me go ahead and assign these to the appropriate links. We’ll head over to the affiliate links. I’m going to do a quick edit and let’s assign the categories right here. So this is the Sapphire Pro. This was pro audio I’ll uncheck uncategorized. And then under Thirsty Affiliates again, I’ll do a quick edit. And this is software.

I’ll go ahead and update this one. And now because we have these categorized correctly, I can head over to my reporting section. This will give us a bird’s eye view of all of the traffic on our site by default. This can show us the last seven days. We can choose any custom time period that we like. We can see all of the traffic over the last year if you want. But what I really like here is that I can start to compare categories so under-report actions I can choose, add category report and then maybe I’ll choose the software link right here.

I’ll go ahead and fetch the report. And now I can see all of these software clicks versus all of the total clicks. It’s a really nice. Way to kind of compare how different categories are more effective for your audience in the last feature than I want to talk about for Thirsty Affiliates relates back to what I’ve been hinting at this entire video. One of the reasons you might want to host this versus trusting another platform to do it for you, it’s importing and exporting.

So here’s the deal. I started this channel using another hosted solution for affiliate links.

I’m not going to name any names here, but I did notice that I would get emails often in the middle of the night because a lot of you folks are all over the world. You’d click one of my links and it wouldn’t work. It would make me look like I typed the wrong link in or something like, hey, what is the correct link here? Well, it turns out that the platform I was using for the redirects for cloaking the links would go down periodically.

So what I did is I actually set up an up time monitor to kind of keep track of them. Now, this is actually a different one. I’ve started kind of as a hobby, keeping track of a few different link cloaking software or link shortening software. These are tend to be, you know, the ones that you pay a single time and then you get access to them. And I’ve noticed that while they don’t have terrible uptime, you can see that over the last 30 days, it’s 99 percent.

Over the last 24 hours, it’s only 94 percent. We had a long outage last night of an hour and 23 minutes. And then even just a few days before that, there was another one for 18 minutes. And right at the end of last month, there was another one for 14 minutes. So these hosted platforms that I’m not naming names, but voice depending on is up about 98 percent of the time.

But I’m getting enough volume, enough clicks that that 98 percent is just not cutting it. Now, when I host my own WordPress websites, I’m using high quality servers and they almost never go down. If you look at uptime robot, you’re going to see about 100 percent uptime for almost every site we run. But then I started thinking, well, what if the service that I depend on gets sold or my account is accidentally deleted or they get hacked or something terrible goes wrong?

Well, all of the traffic that I depend on is going to go to nothing right now. And all of the links will be bad. There’s no way that I can get off of that platform easily and move over to another one without doing a ton of manual work. I have to find all of the old you URLs, maybe by going through social media posts or YouTube URLs and then recreating them over on another service. That is not a very good feeling and is what led me to switch over to Thirsty Affiliates.

Now, one of the comments that I’m sure is going to come up is why should I use Thirsty Affiliates versus another link shortening platform that’s also hosted on WordPress? And the most popular one is called Pretty Linc’s. Well, truth be told, Pretty Links owns Thirsty Affiliates. They’re developed independently, but they were acquired and slowly the features have become almost equal. The reason I like Thirsty Affiliates versus pretty links is not the name is already mentioned. I don’t really care for the name, but it’s that reporting section.

I really like how you can compare different categories. Pretty Linc’s doesn’t really have that because Pretty Linc’s is meant more for bloggers, not for affiliate marketers.

So it really does make sense to steer towards Thirsty Affiliates if you’re doing affiliate marketing. So what I recommend Thirsty Affiliates. Well, obviously, if you watch this video. Yes, it’s what I use. I really like it. It hasn’t let me down since I switched to it about six months ago. So definitely check it out. If this is the type of thing you do now, if you’re over on another platform already, well, you’re kind of stuck because as I heard you mentioned, there’s no way to get all your links off.

If you only have a few, maybe consider doing that manual work before you build your AffiliateWP marketing empire and are trapped by whatever platform you’re relying on.

Just something to take into consideration. Now, Thirsty Affiliates is not really something I have any qualms about.

I’ve never given a product a perfect ten out of ten, and I don’t really feel like Thirsty Affiliates deserves that because it’s really just utilitarian. It does what it says it’s supposed to do and it works well. I don’t really have any issues, so I’m just going to be kind of fair here and give it a solid nine point one. It’s a great application. I depend on it for my business and I recommend that if you do this type of thing, you can check it out to you.

That’s going to do it for this video.

If you’ve enjoyed it, make sure you click the like button down below. And you know what? I know a lot of people have strong opinions on links Shawna’s. So if you completely disagree with me, leave me a comment down below. Don’t be afraid to hit that that thumbs down button. I’m not afraid of a little criticism. Let’s have a conversation about what you think the best link shortener is. I want to hear it. And hey, if you don’t want to leave it in comments, head over to the Facebook group.

We’re having lots of good discussions about different marketing software over there, different software to help you grow your business. That’s going to do it for this video. Thank you for watching. And I’ll see you in the next review.