Art Of Money

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aLinks is a great WordPress plug-in that you find on surprising few “top WordPress plug-in” lists.

What aLinks Does

aLinks is a link manager. On the Settings page, you define a “keyword phrase” and then assign it a description and URL.

For example I could set up the following:

Keyword: art of money
Description: great tips for making money online
URL: http://www.artofmoney.org

Then aLinks will scan the content of my posts and I whenever (with some limitations, see below) I use the phrase ‘art of money‘ (you define whether you want it case sensitive or not) it will automatically add a hyperlink with the information you entered.

I have one set up for art of money, so the words above should be turned into a hot link, even though I entered them in plain text.

Here’s why I like it…

aLinks Saves Time

Of course, you should hot link your blog’s name every time you enter it into a post (why? so readers who are reading in a feedreader or some other site, can easily link come to your site), but that can take a lot of time. aLinks fully automates it, once you’ve set it up, you never have to worry about making the actual link again.

Keyword Target Your Site

As well as the aLink entry above I could set up the following:

Keyword: make money online
Description: practical tips for making money online
URL: http://www.artofmoney.org/

Now I’ve entered my site’s target keyword phrase (for SEO purposes, I recommend just doing one for your home page, but you can create a different one for your categories.) Whenever I use the phrase “make money online” in any of my posts, aLinks will create a link to my home page.

This will help to educate the search engines to the fact that I consider Art of Money to be the best resource for “make money online.”

Affiliate Link Management

Hot linking to your own domain is all fine, but where aLinks really kicks butt is for affiliate linking. Let’s take an example of a product that I use and mention a lot:

Keyword: Keyword Elite
Description: keyword research tool
URL: http://smdaily.bryxen4.hop.clickbank.net/

and then I would set up another one for the keyword phrase that I want to target - this one point to my review:

Keyword: keyword research
Description: keyword research tool
URL: http://artofmoney.org/internet-business/keyword-elite-keyword-tool-review/

Whenever, even in past posts, I have used either of those phrases, aLinks will add a hyperlink and title to my posts. For someone inheritably lazy, as I am, who often just leaves affiliate links out of posts because I’m too lazy to look them up, this plug-in is a god send and could potentially boost income dramatically.

Easily Swap Out Links

Here’s another fantastic benefit that any experienced affiliate marketer will appreciate. Affiliate programs come and go. Just last week I received an email from Commission Junction that one of my advertisers had expired.

Imagine how much work it could be in some cases, if you have manually added deep links to a lot of posts using this advertiser’s affiliate program. With aLinks, rather than having to manually edit all your posts, all you have to do it swap out the URL in the aLinks settings page, and “BLAMO!” all the links in your site are automajically updated.

Other Great Features

aLinks, also has a stats feature that shows you the number of clicks you are getting on each link you have set up.

aLinks has very well done documentation that actually clearly explains how to set up and use the plug-in. One of my pet peeves is WordPress plug-ins that only the developer can figure out how to install and use.

aLinks can turn keywords into Amazon links, if you want to enable that module (read the documentation).

A Couple Complaints

1.) Even though on the setting page, you can say that you’d like to automatically replace up to “x” number of occurrences of a keyword on a page, it doesn’t exactly work.

To replace 8 occurrences of the phrase “art of money” I need to set up 8 separate (but all identical) links in aLink. Strange that they did it that way, annoying but not impossible to work with.

2.) It doesn’t seem to auto link keywords in comments. Which would be a really cool bonus feature.

3.) It would have been soooo simple to include a basic affiliate link cloaking module. aLinks would have been killer if it also cloaked the affiliate links…maybe they’ll add that functionality, but for now I’ve provided a couple ways to cloak your links manually.

A truly timesaving and highly useful plug-in that doesn’t get enough love in the blogsphere. Download aLinks for free and start entering you links once into your link manager rather than 50 times into your posts!