Does WordPress allow affiliate links? FAQs.

Does WordPress allow affiliate links?

If you are using a WordPress CMS and are self-hosting it through a hosting provider, then of course WordPress CMS does allow you to put affiliate links into your WordPress website.

If you have a WordPress blog or website hosted on WordPress.com, you can also put affiliate links in your WordPress.com blog or website as well.

In fact, even if you have a free WordPress blog hosted on WordPress.com through their free plan, you can also have affiliate links in your free WordPress blog. 

Actually, monetizing a free WordPress.com blog with affiliate links is one of the few ways you can monetize it.

However, you should be careful when trying to monetize a WordPress.com blog that is on their free blog hosting plan.

The purpose of the free blog plan on WordPress.com is that it is used for either a personal blog or a blog that is non-commercial and/or non-profit. 

This means that the content of your free WordPress blog should not be commercial in nature. 

Writing extensively on product reviews and other content with commercial intent is generally not allowed on WordPress.com’s free blog plan.

Although if you are content is for the most part non-commercial in nature, you are allowed to put one or two affiliate links to a product or service if it is related to a particular piece of content and that product or service is intended to help your reader.

Therefore, tread lightly when placing affiliate links in a WordPress.com blog that is on their free blog hosting plan.

Where can you find affiliate links to put on your WordPress blog or website?

Obviously the most popular affiliate program where you can get links for your WordPress site is the Amazon Associate’s Affiliate Program.

In addition, there are literally hundreds of other affiliate programs that you can find on the internet. 

A few examples of other popular affiliate programs are Commission Junction or cj.com, Flexoffers.com, Shareasale.com, Rakuten.com, AWIN.com, Viglink.com, Skimlinks.com and the list goes on.

However, sometimes the best affiliate programs where you can get links for your WordPress site that are more suited to your content are usually found by using a simple Google search. For example, try typing,  “product” + affiliate program, “service” + affiliate program or “topic” + affiliate program in the search bar.

So if you can’t find the product or service that best suits the content of your WordPress blog or website, then by being a little imaginative, thinking outside the box and discovering an affiliate program that best matches your content, you may uncover some hidden gems. Not to mention usually much better commission rates and terms.

If worse comes to worst and you find the ideal product or service, but they don’t have an affiliate program, it never hurts to try and reach out to the company and approach them personally. 

They may even create an affiliate program just for you or work out some other kind of promotional deal. It never hurts to ask.

Are there any affiliate plugins I can add to my WordPress website?

Below our links to WordPress affiliate plugins that can help you manage, cloak and even track your affiliate links on your WordPress website. 

However, unfortunately you may not be able to use these plugins, if you have a WordPress blog on WordPress.com’s free plan. 

Although if you have a WordPress.com paid plan or better, you are self-hosting your WordPress blog or website on another hosting provider, then you may not only use these plugins below, but can really optimize your affiliate links by doing so.

Can I do affiliate marketing on WordPress.com?

Yes you can do affiliate marketing on WordPress.com. In fact, all of WordPress.com’s plans do allow affiliate marketing. 

Even WordPress.com’s free blog plan allows its users to do affiliate marketing by adding affiliate links into their blog’s content. But, proceed with caution as I had mentioned above.

Can I monetize a free WordPress site?

You can not only monetize a free WordPress site on WordPress.com with affiliate links, but if you have a product or service that you would like to sell and promote on your free WordPress site, you can do that as well.

However, you cannot monetize a free WordPress site with any display advertising whatsoever, including with Google Adsense.

Does free WordPress make money?

The free blogs on WordPress normally do not make money for the blogger, but free WordPress blogs do make money for WordPress.com. How? 

As part of the agreement for starting a free WordPress blog on WordPress.com, the blogger agrees to let WordPress.com show ads on their blog. 

This is how WordPress.com is able to offer a free blog plan to bloggers. The advertising basically pays for the hosting of that free WordPress blog on WordPress.com.

However, if monetization of your WordPress blog is in the plans, but you want to start with a WordPress blog or website on WordPress.com’s free plan, at the very least you should start out with a custom domain name. 

Custom Domain Names are usually only $10 on average. 

But they can save you some potential hassles if you ever come into issues with WordPress.com in regards to putting in too many affiliate links on your WordPress blog with their free hosting plan. 

If this happens it will be much easier to migrate that domain name to either one of WordPress.com’s paid plans or go to another hosting provider and self-host your WordPress.com blog there.

WordPress does allow affiliate links, so use them if you can.

As you can see, WordPress does allow you to use affiliate links, even on WordPress.com in their free blog plan allows loggers to put some affiliate links in with their content. 

Although, as I had mentioned above, you need to make sure that the content is not commercial in nature and that you use your affiliate links sparingly.

However, if you host your WordPress blog on either one of WordPress.com’s paid plans or you self-host your WordPress blog or website on another hosting provider, then the sky’s the limit basically in how many affiliate links you can use with your WordPress blog or website.

There are also countless affiliate programs that you can join to monetize your WordPress content. 

Whether you are looking to make a full-time income off your WordPress website, or just looking for a few extra bucks a month to indulge your coffee addictions, you should definitely look at putting some affiliate links on your WordPress blog within your content where relevant. 

Or else you may be leaving some easy money on the table.