How To Host An Affiliate Banner On Your Site And Insert With ThirstyAffiliates

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affiliate banner

Quite often affiliate programs give you a banner image to drop onto your site.

The code usually looks something like this:

<a href=”https://staging.thirstyaffiliates.com?aff=12345“><img src=”http://example.com/link-to-the-image-on-their-server.jpg” /></a>

So what happens when you want to download the image and host it on your website so you can serve the image wrapped in your ThirstyAffiliates affiliate link code?

Here’s how you do it:

Step 1: Setup The Affiliate Link

  1. Goto Affiliate Links->Add New to create a new affiliate link in ThirstyAffiliates
  2. Set the Destination URL as the first bolded portion (note, you should be using your HTML banner code provided by your affiliate program, not the one above!)

Step 2: Save The Image And Attach

You will also want to host the image banner on your site.

  1. Open a new tab in your browser and visit the second bolded URL (again, from your HTML banner code, it will look similar to above)
  2. Right click on the image and hit save to save it to your computer
  3. While still on the same affiliate link edit screen click on Upload/Insert on the Attach Images section
  4. Click on the Upload tab in the top left, hit Upload, then find the image you saved to your computer earlier. Finally hit Add To Affiliate Link.
  5. Your link should automatically save itself, but if not, hit Save Affiliate link now.

Step 3: Insert your new banner code into widgets or pages

The affiliate link picker lets you insert images with your affiliate link already wrapped around it.

Open your page/post, choose where you want to drop in the banner and then hit the little green “aff” button on your editor. Find your link then click on the small image icon and select your image. It’s that simple.

If you want to add this banner to a widget you can do it this way:

  1. Create a new page
  2. Drop the affiliate link in using the Image type
  3. Flick your editor mode over to Text/HTML editor and copy the HTML code that it generates
  4. Drop this code into your widget or if your theme has a field for banners you can pop it in there

The other way you can do it is by using this guide to add a rich editor to your widgets.

Conclusion

So now the image is served from your own website rather than your affiliate program’s and it’s wrapped in your short ThirstyAffiliates affiliates link rather than a direct affiliate link.

This also has the added side effects of using our premium add-ons like Stats tracking or automatically adding Google Click Tracking code.

Hope this helps you with your banner code!

Affiliate Link Disclosure

11 thoughts on “How To Host An Affiliate Banner On Your Site And Insert With ThirstyAffiliates”

  1. I’m new to Thirsty Affiliates, and still evaluating it before I decide to switch to it. I use a plugin called Ad Injection to insert randomised ads (from a selection I’ve configured) into posts, and also into a sidebar widget.
    The first thing I wanted Thirsty Affiliates to do once I’d created the links, was to show me the code I needed to insert. I quickly realised that I needed to carry out the workaround you describe in this post, and I was wondering if it would be possible to build this into the plugin so that once a link was created, users would have the choice to simply copy/paste the appropriate code, rather than having to go through the process of inserting the link into a dummy page just to be able to copy the relevant code?
    This would be awesome!

    1. Hi Alan,

      Thanks for the feedback, I’ll take a look into this but at this stage the above would be the best method for achieving what you’re after.

      Cheers,
      Josh

  2. Hi Josh,

    On my blog, i am using ad widget. This ad widget has two options. One option is to add Ad image url and second option is to add Ad link url:.

    I want to know which link to add in Ad link url option?

    I am using Thirsty Affiliates. When i add an affiliate link in it, it automatically creates a clocked url.

    So, i have to add this clocked url to Ad link url option in ad widget that Thirsty affiliates creates for any affiliate link?

    Please let me know

    Regards,

  3. Couldn’t you also (after locally saving the image) upload the banner image to the WordPress Media Library?

    Then, copy and paste the affiliate-id provided HTML into Thirsty Affiliates. But before doing this, one would just need to remove the Image Source code from the HTML link provided by the affiliate program.

    Then drop that “revised link” into Thirsty Affiliates and attach the image from the WordPress Media Library.

  4. Hi plugin authors,

    after reading the instructions for inserting the links into the widget, I do not understand what you mean by “image type” in the second point of “Drop the affiliate link in using the Image type”.
    Where is the image type to be found?
    Thanks,

    Milada

    1. Hi Milada,

      You can add images to your affiliate links and then insert those images into your posts/pages using the Image insertion method.

      In the link picker it looks like this:
      Link insertion types

      Hope this helps!

      Josh

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