aLinks WordPress plugin creates automatic links within posts

A few days ago I downloaded a WordPress plugin called aLinks. This plugin has been around for a while, but I’d never thought to try it until now, even though Lucia from Big Bucks Blogger was singing it’s praises last September. I should have tried it earlier! This plugin has a ton of potential.

Bloggers link to lots of sites in their posts. They link to their blogging friends, they link to past posts, they link to great websites they’ve just discovered and some even add affiliate links to their posts. It’s just something we do. I’ll even go so far as to bet that most of the bloggers reading this post likely link to at least one site in just about every post they write.

Why not make linking easier?

The aLinks plugin has been designed so that you can set up a link within the plugins admin area and then never have to hyperlink to that phrase every again!

I haven’t set up the plugin on this blog yet as I wanted to try it on one of my smaller less trafficked blogs first while I test to see if it causes any CPU over use problems on my server. (remember last year I went through two web hosting companies because my sites were using too much of the shared servers memory!)

If you’d like to see what one of the links looks like once it’s set up check out this post on My World. I used the built in Amazon module to quickly create a link to an Amazon page that sells dog beds. Now whenever I write the words dog bed in a post on My World it will automatically link to that Amazon page for me. Not only that, but I set up the aLinks plugin so that it will find any of my past posts that have any of the keyword phrases that I created and it will add the links to them too.

I have a number of blogs and I make references to them occasionally so I spent a few minutes setting up automatic links for my various blogs. Now all I have to do is type in the name of one of my blogs and when I publish my post the link to whichever blog I mentioned will appear. Just that alone will save me some time.

Considering that I have so many blogs I also appreciate the export/ import feature. Once you create your list of keyword phrase links you can import them to another blog using the plugin. That’s going to come in handy once I’m done setting up the first blog I’m trying aLinks on!

This plugin has too many great features for me to describe in one post.

I’ll just finish by telling you that you can add modules to the plugin for a few affiliate programs such as eBay, Clickbank, Commission Junction, iTunes and several others, as well as one for Wikepedia. This means that along with the built in Amazon module you’ll be able to monetize your blog by scattering a few links to products you’re happy recommending. Link the word “book” to Amazons bestseller page and anytime you use the word book in a post you’ll automatically have a link that could earn you money.

The aLinks plugin has been updated recently to work with WordPress 2.5.1 so if you’re a WordPress Blogger consider giving this plugin a try.

Update – I don’t use this plugin anymore because it stopped working and there doesn’t seem to be anymore updates. In fact creators page no longer seems to exist. Sorry!