Getting started

From signing up to your first automatic affiliate link, in about ten minutes.

AffyLink turns words you have already written into affiliate links. You add a link once, tell us which phrases should point at it, and every mention across your site becomes a link — including the posts you wrote years ago and will never open again.

Nothing in your posts is rewritten. The linking happens when the page is drawn, which is why you can change your mind later and nothing is left behind.

What you need before you start

  • A site you can add a script to, or a WordPress site (in which case use the plugin and skip the script entirely).
  • At least one affiliate link you want to use.

That is it. There is nothing to install on your server and no database to set up.

Step 1 — Add your site

Go to Settings → Domains and add the hostname of the site you are going to use, without https:// and without a trailing slash. So example.com, not https://example.com/.

Your plan decides how many sites you can have. If you are on a plan with one site and you add a second, the first stops serving — so add the one you actually want linked.

Step 2 — Install the tracker

Settings gives you a one-line <script> tag. Paste it into your site's <head>, or anywhere in the page — it does not block rendering and it does not matter where it goes.

If you are on WordPress, do not do this. Install the plugin instead; it handles this step and registers the site for you.

The first time somebody loads a page with the script on it, your domain flips from Pending to Installed. If it stays pending, read this.

Step 3 — Add a link

Links → Add link. You need the destination URL — the affiliate URL you were given by Amazon, ShareASale, or whoever — and a name so you recognise it later.

Paste the full affiliate URL exactly as your network gave it to you, tracking parameters and all. We do not modify it.

Step 4 — Add keywords

Keywords → Add keyword, then attach it to the link you just made.

A keyword is the phrase you want linked. "standing desk". "noise cancelling headphones". Write it the way you actually write it in posts.

You can attach several keywords to one link, which is usually what you want — people write the same product name five different ways.

Step 5 — Look at a post

Open a post on your site that contains one of your keywords. The phrase should now be a link.

If it is not, wait a minute (we cache for a short while) and reload. Still nothing? Troubleshooting covers the handful of reasons this happens.

What happens next

Clicks and impressions start appearing in Analytics straight away. Impressions are how many times a linked keyword was actually on screen, which is a more useful number than pageviews for working out which links are pulling their weight.

The things worth knowing early

  • We never touch your posts. Remove AffyLink and your content is exactly as you wrote it.
  • Links go straight to the destination. We do not bounce your readers through a redirect on our domain. It is faster, and it means an outage on our side cannot break your outbound links.
  • Disclosure is on by default. See Disclosure and compliance for why that matters more than it sounds.

Something here wrong or unclear? Tell us — we would rather fix the page than answer the same question twice.