How to Use Link Whisper to Increase Affiliate Conversions

Link Whisper is my favourite internal linking tool.

One of the reasons I love it is that it can do so much more than most people expect.

Obviously, it can help you with internal linking new posts to old posts, and vice versa. But there are some hidden talents it has that most people don’t think of – like turning it into a budget friendly Affilimate dupe!

Link Whisper’s unique ability to track all links, domains, and clicks, gives us a great snapshot of what users are doing on our site. We can easily analyze this to find what’s working and do more of it, or to find what’s not working and to fix it.

It’s not hard to do, but is less intuitive apparently cause I haven’t seen anyone else doing this. So I’m going to walk you through step by step how you can do this with your own site.

All you need is a Link Whisper paid account, and somewhere to write things down if you’re not implementing ASAP.

Auto-Linking Method for Adding Affiliate Links

Link Whisper’s Auto-Linking function finds any specific word or words used on your site and automatically adds a link to them.

This is meant to be used to link every mention of a keyword to a specific post – for example “Link Whisper” would automatically link to my Link Whisper tutorial blog post.

But we can use it in a different way.

Instead of a keyword for another blog post, you can add a keyword for a product or tour or service.

Let’s say you’ve had a travel blog for 2 years and we keep mentioning the Fairmont Chateau Laurier hotel, but you didn’t link to it because you weren’t in an affiliate program yet.

You could manually go back through all 50 of your blog posts to add it in, or you could type in “Fairmont Chateau Laurier” as the keyword, and put in the Booking.com affiliate link as the link.

Now every time you mention it in a post, the first time the keyword shows up in the post will be linked.

You can customize this more by clicking on the gear icon beside the “keyword” entry area. This brings up a list of options to make this more specific for your site.

Here are the options:

Option	Description
Add link if post already has this link?	Toggle on if you want this link to be added to a blog post that already includes it if the keyword is used in the post.
Only link once per post	Toggle on to only add the link one time per post, defaulting to the first time the keyword is used.
Only create internal links when target is published?	Toggle on to only add the link if the target link is a published post. If it is draft or scheduled, the link will be added once the post is live.
Override “One Link per Sentence” rule?	Toggle on to override Link Whisper’s default rule of only adding one link per sentence. This will ensure any use of the keyword is linked, even if there is another link in the same sentence.
Limit how many autolinks are created?	Toggle on to set a maximum number of times the link will be added across the entire site. Once the maximum is hit, Link Whisper will no longer add the link to the website. However, if a link is deleted, it will add another one somewhere on the site to replace the deleted link. Type in a prefered amount.
Select links before inserting?	Toggle on to manually approve which links can be inserted in posts on the website. It will not publish any link until you approve them individually.
Set priority for auto link insertion?	Toggle on to set the priority for the link to be inserted versus another Auto-Link, if there are more than one that could apply in a sentence. Links default to “0” priority. If they are higher, they will be prioritized over the other option for the link to be added.
Prioritize long-tail autolinks?	Toggle on for Link Whisper to prioritize long tail keywords over short tail keywords for insertion. For example, “The best shoes in the world” would be preferred to “Best Shoes” since it’s longer.
Only add links to posts published after the given date	Toggle on to only add the Auto-Link to posts published after a certain date. Then set the date you prefer.
Make Keyword case sensitive	Toggle on to only add links to keywords that match the case you typed in. For example, polish vs. Polish would need very different links.
Restrict autolinks to target page’s language	Toggle on if you have Polylang active on the site so that the link will only go in posts on your site that match the language of the target post. For example, if it senses the target link is in French, it will add the link to French articles on your website.
Restrict autolinks to specific categories or tags?	Toggle on and select from a multi choice list which categories and/or tags that Auto-Link should be added to.

I recommend linking every instance for an affiliate link, even if the post is already present.

You can also restrict it by category or tag if you were linking a generic term like “best hotel” for a specific city tag.

Another example is having a dog site with a golden retriever and a chihuahua category. The “dog bed” for goldens will be much bigger than the one for chihuahuas, so you’ll want to link a different bed for each.

Domains Report Method for Changing Affiliate Links

The Link Whisper Domains Report shows you every domain your site links to.

At a glance you’ll be able to see how many posts on your site have links to the domain, and how many links total exist on your site.

If I link to a specific hotel before I’m in an affiliate program, and then I join an affiliate program later, I will want to switch out all those direct links for the affiliate link.

I’ve also had to do this when Trusted Housesitters changed their platform in 2023.

You can either search by the entire domain or by the specific link. I recommend specific link unless it’s an entire platform change like the Trusted Housesitters situation.

In that case, I had links to specific stays as well as their homepage, so I had to find all of them.

For example, if I search for the Booking.com link for the Chateau Laurier on my build in public site, I have 20 posts with the link and 36 total uses of the link.

You can click on the number under “Posts” to see which posts are included. Click “edit” to go into the post and edit it, or “view” to go to the published link for the post.

I prefer to use the “Links” tab and see the individual uses of the link. It shows you the anchor text in square brackets, and a button to “Edit URL”.

Click this and it will allow you to edit the URL within the current window. It saves so much time clicking between post edit areas.

You can edit all 36 instances of this link from the same window!

You can also select individual or bulk links to delete them if, for example, a company went under and no longer exists.

Change Domains

In the same area, we also get another amazing feature for affiliates: mark a whole domain as no follow, sponsored, and open in a new tab.

The Link Whisper settings area allows you to select specific domains to mark as no follow and sponsored, and allows you to set all external links to open in a new tab

But we don’t always know the domain patterns of an affiliate before we’ve started using them. For example, Travel Payouts has “tp.media”.

I only know that from this report area, because I never bothered to check for the pattern when I made the links.

Under the “Applied Domain Attributes” column, you can set any link to be Open in New Tab, Open in Same Tab, No Follow, Do Follow, and Sponsored.

You can only add one of new/same tab and no/do follow, since they cancel each other out. It will grey out the one you aren’t using.

I recommend marking all affiliate links as No Follow, Sponsored, and Open in New Tab.

Clicks Report Affilimate Dupe Method

The Clicks Report shows all of the clicks for each link a blog post.

I think it’s initial purpose may be to track internal link clicks, but I use it to track my affiliate link clicks.

Since it shows each unique link with its anchor text, I can see how often every individual affiliate link was clicked in my affiliate blog posts.

Why do I do this?

Beyond just finding out that a certain link gets a lot of clicks, I can analyze this data to figure out why it gets those clicks.

Then I can apply the same methods to other links and increase my affiliate income.

That’s how I 3x my income with Affilimate when I first started running this type of analysis.

Now, Affilimate also shows you a heatmap of where people are clicking and how often they buy from that click – because we mostly care about where conversions are happening.

That’s harder to tell with Link Whisper.

You have to cross reference purchases in the specific affiliate portal, which can be a nightmare (ahem, Booking.com).

I find TravelPayouts easiest for this, so let’s walk through how I set this up:

1. Open a free TravelPayouts account and buy a paid Link Whisper subscription
2. Find a product, let’s say the Fairmont Chateau Laurier hotel on Booking.com
3. Convert the link with TravelPayouts, and add a “subID”. This is a unique traffic marker that will tell us where the link is going and being used. I make a new subid for every use of the link on the page (i.e. subID: ottawahotels-image, ottawahotels-header, ottawahotels-cta, ottawahotels-text).
4. Add the link to the relevant spot in the post, and wait.
5. Analyze the clicks report to see which link, with which UTM gets traffic.
6. Check how much that link earns according to TravelPayouts.
7. Divide the number of purchases by the number of clicks. This will give you your conversion rate. I do this in a spreadsheet and have a column that automatically does the calculation for me.
8. Higher conversion rates are better. Find the highest ones and analyze why they work. Then try to repeat those methods across your site.
9. Find the lowest conversion rates and try to figure out why they’re low. Is the content unexpected? Is the link broken? Is it too expensive?
10. Pro tip: move the best converting affiliate in a listicle to the #1 spot in the list.

Tada! You’ve saved a few hundred dollars as a beginner – I prefer Affilimate as someone with no time to do this manually all the time – and made enough money to afford a tool like Affilimate or Get Lasso down the line.

I put off an affiliate audit like this for 6 weeks, finally got around to it, and that’s how I had my first $30k month on my travel blog! (Over $25k was just from affiliates.)

Video Demo of All Methods

Conclusion

I’ve been using Link Whisper since 2021 and had no idea people weren’t using all these cool features! It’s much more than a basic internal linking software – which is why every other one I’ve tried has fallen far short.

I highly recommend setting aside a week to audit some of your affiliate blog posts with Link Whisper, add some new affiliate Auto-Links, and ensure your domains are properly marked (or switched to new platforms when needed).

It may take longer than a week, but give yourself a set time to at least get started.

You’ll learn so much from the data you’ll have on what people are clicking and start to uncover why certain things convert better. Once you understand that, you’ll be well on your way to doubling and even tripling your income like I did!

Before you do that, be sure you have the best affiliates set up for your travel blog. The wrong affiliates won’t covert no matter what you do.

Read More About Monetizing Your Blog

• 60 Best Travel Affiliate Programs for Bloggers
• How to Make Money as a Travel Blogger: 15 Ways I Made $30k
• Ezoic Review: Will it Increase Your Blog Revenue?
• Mediavine Requirements (And How to Reach Them)
• Travelpayouts Review: 6 Figure Travel Blogger Weighs In
• How I Made $26.5k on Black Friday by Blogging & What I Learned Along the Way
• Blog Business Planning Workshop: Setting Profitable and Achievable Goals
• How I Made $110k in a Month in June 2023 👀
• 19 Best Ad Networks for Bloggers to Make 6 Figures
• How to Make $6k on a Digital Product Flash Sale
• I Sold a Starter Site For $2k. Here’s Exactly What I Did!
• How to Use Link Whisper to Increase Affiliate Conversions
• Selling Digital Products with Email Marketing for Beginners ft. Kate Doster
• Growing a Niche Site to $50k Series
• How to Make Your First $10 From Affiliate Sales in 7 Steps
• Are ConvertKit Email Ads Worth It? 6 Week Case Study Review

Read More About Internal Linking

• How to Use Link Whisper to Automate Blog Internal Links
• Link Whisper Review: SEO Expert’s Take on the Internal Linking Tool
• Should Internal Links Be No Follow or Do Follow?
• What is Internal Linking? An SEO Guide
• How to Use Link Whisper to Increase Affiliate Conversions
• How to Create Jump Links in WordPress in 2 Steps 🤯
• How to Add a Hyperlink in WordPress (Block and Code Editors)

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