For anyone who has a niche site that they monetize through affiliate marketing, you’ve undoubtedly run into some of the same issues over and over again.
Just a few of them:
- Managing Links – How do you make sure your links stay updated across the site when you have 100s of them.
- Pricing Changes – What happens when in that review 2 years ago you said a product cost $XX and now it’s changed to $YY?
- Missing Opportunities – I have over 500 blog posts on this website alone. How many missed opportunities to monetize a post do you think there are in that back catalogue? Hint: a lot.
- Click Throughs – Getting people to actually click your links and buy the products can be a challenge. And this is important, considering you know, that’s HOW YOU GET PAID.
These are all things I’ve struggled with across all of my sites – this one included.
But recently I’ve been introduced to a tool that might be the single best affiliate marketing plugin I’ve ever seen.
It’s called Lasso, and it’s freaking amazing.
Today I’m going to share with you how I’m using Lasso on my sites now, and why it’s absolutely game changing for how I manage my business, make money, and also provide a better experience for my readers because of it.
Full Lasso Affiliate Marketing Plugin Review
More of a visual learner? Sweet, check out my full review and detailed walk through of the Lasso Plugin:
What is the Lasso Affiliate Marketing Plugin?
Over the years I’ve tried a few different plugins for doing different elements of this, but never really found anything I was thrilled with.
The result is now having a hodgepodge of links all over my site. I don’t have an easy way of knowing what’s where, and if I have to change a link for any reason – I have to find every single instance of it and change it manually.
That’s painful.
Lasso makes fixing this easy.
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How the Lasso Plugin Works
1) Automatically Monetize and Manage Amazon Links
So let’s start out with one of the most useful features: it’s managing of Amazon links.
Yes, I know Amazon screwed many of us with their affiliate program changes, but chances are if you have an affiliate site, you’re still rocking some Amazon links.
So Lasso will do a few things for you.
First off, it will find any Amazon links on your site, and turn them into affiliate links. Pretty sweet!
But on top of that, it will help you manage them as well.
So let’s say you’re like me and you already have a bunch of Amazon affiliate links across your site. But you haven’t checked them in years, have no idea if the prices have been updated, and so on.
Lasso automatically pulls in data from Amazon to build your link.
Here’s an example of the
All of the information you see above (with the exception of Keywords, more on that later) was pulled in from Amazon. It automatically grabbed the name of the book, my affiliate url, the image, and the price.
It then saves it as a link in the
You can add a
See where it says “
But not only that, Lasso allows you to then take this information and easily display it in a beautiful looking box (that is fully customizable) like this:
The Four Hour Work Week was the original book that inspired millions of people to start living life on their own terms. If you're looking to make a dramatic change in your life, this is a good starting point.
All you have to do is click “Add
You have complete control of everything. I can change the description, colors, look/feel, buy button text, I can add a second button if I want to give people the option of buying from different places, and so on.
Oh, and did I mention? Lasso then automatically updates the price every 24 hours. So two years from now, your links will still be up to date.
Pretty sweet.
But What About New Amazon Links that Aren’t Already On My Site?
For many of you that have a new site, or are more concerned with writing your affiliate posts going forward, how do you create new links?
Easy. You simply click Add New Link, drop in any Amazon product links, and
It pulls in all the data, converts the links to one using your affiliate code, and then lets you make any changes from there.
2) Allows You to Create Links for Any Other Affiliate Program
But what about all of the affiliate products you promote that aren’t part of Amazon?
Let’s say I want to add the
I can add their logo, change the permalink, add the price, description and so on.
It comes out looking like this:
ConvertKit is the email marketing software I personally use to run my business, and I believe it's the best fit for most people. Use for free up to 1,000 subscribers!
3) Keywords Allow You to Find Missed Opportunities
Ok now you see how easy and powerful
But what about all of those places you could have included an affiliate link – but didn’t?
Let’s use
By adding the “
That’s powerful.
This is especially powerful if say a company you’ve talked about didn’t have an affiliate program, but now they do.
You can add it into
4) Update links in one place, rather than each one individually
Last year,
Unfortunately I had to do this all manually. If I was using
What took me a few hours to do and was horribly inefficient, can now be done about 60 seconds.
5) You can customize good looking display boxes
Arguably the most important aspect to successful affiliate marketing is to actually get people to click the links.
After all, if they don’t click, you don’t get paid.
We’ve talked a bit about it above, but one of the best reasons to use
You can easily drop them in anywhere, and there are half a dozen different styles to choose from (all of which are customizable).
This works especially well on resource pages, or “best of” pages.
Check out my implementation of it on my best cocktail books post on my cocktail niche site.
Or here is my Lasso display box:
Find new income opportunities, increase clicks, and measure what's making money by managing your links with LASSO.
6) I can create better calls to action for my own products
As an example:
Location Rebel Academy is one of the longest running courses and communities for showing you EXACTLY how to build a lifestyle business, that allows you to quit your job, work from anywhere, and spend more time doing the stuff you love.
A Few Other Little Cool Features I Like About Lasso
There’s a handful of cool other little Lasso features I like that are worth mentioning
You can add grid display boxes
Let’s say I’m working on a resources page, or doing a round up review post. On top of doing a single display box,
As an example, if I’m doing a review of all my favorite business books, I could do display grids by section. For instance, this is what a group of my favorite productivity books might look like:
Atomic Habits might be the best book ever written on building habits. Seriously, do yourself a favor and pick it up. Your productivity will thank you.
Learning how to learn can be difficult. But once you do? A whole new world opens up. Jim's book Limitless is a fantastic starting point.
I've ALWAYS struggled with focus. And I'm not sure there's a single book that has been more influential in helping me conquer that.
We live in a world that in conspiring against us. It's constantly trying to distract us from doing the important tasks in life. This book is the playbook for stopping it.
Literally it only took 3 clicks to add this in once I’d made the group. Extremely simple, and extremely powerful.
You can easily add a “featured” attribute
See in the grid above where I added a badge to the top of Atomic Habits that said “Read This First”? You can add a badge like that to any display box, that says anything you want.
It’s a small, but thoughtful feature, that can really help drive clicks to the things you want to promote most.
You can easily track links in Google Analytics
Obviously if you’ve got an affiliate site you want to know what’s working and what isn’t. All you have to do is add your Analytics Tracking ID to the settings area of Lasso, and it will automatically track clicks on all of your links.
Lasso is a Brand New Product, So It’s Not Perfect
Overall, I’m incredibly impressed with how well this plugin works considering it’s only been out for a few months.
The team is pushing updates and bug fixes every week, and overall I’ve had a very smooth experience with the plugin. In fact, it feels almost more like a piece of software than a typical janky WordPress plugin.
That said, there are still a few things I’d like to see improved.
It can be a little tedious reviewing the monetization opportunities
Let’s say as I’m implementing
So reviewing each post to decide if I should monetize can take a little time. Not a huge deal, but something I noticed.
When creating custom permalinks you can’t quite modify as much as I’d like
You can edit the permalink for any
I originally wanted to use https://www.locationrebel.com/recommended/getlasso – but the way their tracking is currently built, you’re unable to add in that / modifier.
It’s frankly simpler and easier not to have it, it was just an adjustment to how I’ve usually done these types of links.
Finally, It’s a commitment
It’s awesome
But if you’ve added display boxes all over your posts, then you’ll have to manually remove those if you stop using the plugin.
I’m so in love with Lasso that I can’t see a scenario where I’ll stop using it, but it’s worth making sure you do your own tests before you go too hard on it.
How Much Does Lasso Cost?
By now you’re probably wondering how much
So just under $250/year, or if you pay the yearly price you get 2 months free, making it $190.
And honestly? For the value I’ve already gotten out of this in a few weeks of using and getting familiar with it? This is a no brainer for anyone with a blog, niche site, or affiliate site.
It can be a little intimidating to plunk down the cash on this if you’re starting a new site, but honestly, you’ll be glad you did. Building your affiliate site and links correctly from the beginning is much easier than trying to do it after the fact.
Final Thoughts on the Lasso Affiliate Marketing Plugin
The bottom line is, I’m in freaking love with Lasso.
Not only has it made managing hundreds of affiliate links much easier, but it’s the rare plugin that can make a marketing pitch look elegant and actually increase the reader experience, and increase clickthroughs and earnings.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time with the plugin now, so if you have any questions just drop a comment below and I’ll do my best to get you a quick answer!
Find new income opportunities, increase clicks, and measure what's making money by managing your links with LASSO.
Affiliate Disclosure: Some of the links on this page are affiliate links (duh). Meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. If you have any questions about this, feel free to contact me!
Lasso: Affiliate Marketing Plugin
$19/Month
Pros
- Makes Managing Links VERY Easy
- Display boxes look great
- A huge level of customizability
- Pulls in automatically from Amazon
- Elegant backend design is enjoyable to use
Cons
- Can get expensive if you have a lot of sites
- Needs a little more refinement around opportunities
Sean Ogle
Sean Ogle is the Founder of Location Rebel where he has spent the last 12+ years teaching people how to build online businesses that give them the freedom to do more of the things they like to do in life. When he's not in the coffee shops of Portland, or the beaches of Bali, he's probably sneaking into some other high-class establishment where he most certainly doesn't belong.Join over 40,000 people who have taken our 6 part freelance writing course. Sign up below and let’s do this together.
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Excellent review, Sean! Very thorough. I’ll be looking into Lasso for my blog. I can see how it will make everything easier now and as I move forward.
Thanks!
I love the thoroughness and balance of this review. I had been on the fence about trying this right now but I think you’ve convinced me to give it a whirl.
One question though. I think it’s great that if you stop using Lasso the links will still remain. However, you mention that you will need to remove the display boxes. Does that mean those don’t remain functional if you stop using it so you are “required” to remove it or could you just leave them?
Thanks!
You wrote:
“Over the years I’ve tried a few different plugins for doing different elements of this, but never really found anything I was thrilled with.”
To make this review much more useful it would be nice if you mentioned what those other plugins were and exactly why Lasso is superior. I haven’t done a lot of research on the premium versions (I use the free version of ThirstyAffiliates) but from what research I have done it seems that all the premium versions offer similar functionality.
Really interesting blog to read again & again. Thanks for sharing such a wonderful article. Keep sharing.