Lasso Plugin Review – How To Make More Affiliate Income

The below Lasso Plugin Review is a partnership with Lasso. All opinions are 100% my own in this Lasso review. Enjoy!

UPDATE March 17, 2022: I had a very annoying glitch here on Making Sense of Cents happen recently which has taken many, many hours to fix. When I disabled the Lasso plugin, the issue stopped. I have contacted Lasso about this issue but have not heard back. I can’t 100% say that this issue is related to Lasso, but I have not heard from them yet. Until this is fixed, I would be careful about using the Lasso plugin.

UPDATE April 25, 2022: I still have not heard back.

UPDATE July 10, 2022: I just wanted to share one final update – I still have not heard back from Lasso about this issue.

Back in 2016, I launched my affiliate marketing for bloggers course, Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing. As an affiliate marketing expert, I have received many questions about the best WordPress plugin for affiliate marketing management.

Over the years, I’ve always gone for simplicity and simply used PrettyLinks. But, now, there are so many more robust options that have proven to be much more effective and helpful so that you can make more money blogging.

Due to that, I am trying out a new option that I’ve heard great things about – Lasso.

Whether you are looking for something else to try, or if you’re a new blogger, Lasso is a popular affiliate marketing plugin for bloggers.

Lasso is a WordPress plugin that helps affiliate marketers boost through click-through-rate and simplifies affiliate link management.

I’m a little embarrassed to say that I’ve waited so long to try something new, especially as someone who runs an affiliate marketing course.

But, I’m excited to see how this will help conversion rates and improve Making Sense of Cents and my blogging business.

Today, I will be talking about what Lasso is, the valuable features that are included, the price, and my overall thoughts on this affiliate marketing WordPress plugin.

Here’s my Lasso Plugin Review.

 

What is Lasso?

Lasso was created by a team who have been running online businesses since 2012. They built Lasso because they wanted a better solution to managing their affiliate links. This is great because it means that it was built by website owners for website owners!

Andrew Fiebert, one of the cofounders of Lasso, also runs a popular money blog Listen Money Matters. As I’m still new to Lasso, I have included screenshots from his Lasso dashboard as I get more acquainted with this affiliate marketing plugin.

With Lasso, you can fix your broken links, find new products and services to share, and create user friendly custom displays.

Lasso is an all-in-one WordPress affiliate marketing plugin that helps you create custom displays for your affiliate products, such as the one below.

This is one thing that I’ve been missing from Making Sense of Cents over the years, so I think this is a valuable addition that will help me to make my blog posts more user friendly and put together.

With the Lasso affiliate marketing plugin, you also can:

• Add any affiliate links: Lasso works with any affiliate link you want to add to your website.
• Get link alerts: You can see which links are broken or out-of-stock, then instantly update them site-wide.
• Simplify Amazon affiliate marketing: Lasso helps you manage Amazon products on your site and you simply just copy/paste any Amazon.com URL, and Lasso will grab the product data for you. 
• Find monetization opportunities: Lasso will scan your site for recommended affiliate programs. You can also use Keywords to find and monetize specific anchor text across your site. 
• Get useful insights with Google Analytics: You can add your Google Analytics ID to Lasso, and see which links and pages earn you the most clicks.

As you can see, there are many areas in which Lasso can help you to improve your affiliate marketing strategy so that you can make more money blogging.

It’s much more than a link-cloaking service, although it does that too, so no worries.

 

What to do if you already use another affiliate marketing plugin.

So, if you are like me, you may be a little hesitant to try out a new affiliate marketing WordPress plugin.

For me, I’ve used the same one for years, so trying something new always seems a little scary and like a lot of work.

But, I know that there are better options out there that may help you to improve your affiliate marketing strategy and that there are things that you may be missing out on.

So, one of the first things I wondered when it came to trying out Lasso was if I could easily transfer my current affiliate links to Lasso.

And, the answer is yes!

With Lasso, you can import affiliate links from other plugins using Lasso’s plugin import tool.

You can test Lasso on your site by importing one link at a time or use the “bulk import” feature. Lasso imports links from popular WordPress plugins, such as:

• Pretty Links
• AmaLinksPro
• GeniusLink
• EasyAzon
• AAWP

You can manage every imported link from a single page all within Lasso’s dashboard. If you decide Lasso isn’t a good fit, you can revert those links back to their original state. So, that is comforting to know because I know it can be scary to make a switch.

You can see a screenshot of this below:

 

 

What I like about the Lasso dashboard. 

With the Lasso dashboard (which is right on your website, so no need to log in to anywhere separate), you can monitor all of your affiliate and product links in one place. When heading over to Lasso’s dashboard, you’ll see a screen displaying:

• The affiliate URL
• Product name
• Image
• Link group
• Total number of links across your site

Plus, at the top, you’ll see what links are broken, link to products that are out of stock, as well as possible monetization opportunities.

With Lasso, you’ll see broken link alerts in your dashboard automatically, as you’ll see in the image below.

Click the broken link icon, and you’ll see every broken affiliate link appearing on your site:

Clicking the “Locations” column for a specific affiliate link lets you see every place on your site with context for that link.

For example, when clicking on the affiliate listed at the top of the page in the above screenshot (Arcadia Power), there are 11 locations on this site with broken Arcadia Power affiliate links.

Lasso scans your site, finding every broken Arcadia Power affiliate link. This page shows us three things:

1. Content with URL (e.g., a blog post)
2. Link with context (i.e., its anchor text and how it appears in your post)
3. Link-type (e.g., text links, image links, etc.)

This is one of my favorite features of Lasso because broken links on a blog can be extremely annoying.

Plus, they can be hard to find if you have hundreds or thousands of affiliate links placed on your website.

The Lasso plugin makes it very easy to find broken links so that you can replace or change them.

As mentioned above, with the Lasso dashboard, you can also see out of stock product alerts for Amazon URLs. This way, if you notice a link that hasn’t carried a product for a while, it’s best to replace it so that your readers don’t get frustrated.

You can see out-of-stock product links in your Lasso dashboard, as shown below:

Many retailers frequently run out of products or stop supplying them entirely. When you spot this, follow the same steps as you did with broken links:

• Click the out-of-stock icon
• Locate the links on your site
• Replace or remove

It might not make sense to list a product if it’s never available. An out-of-stock link could be a sign that the company no longer makes it, which means that you will definitely want to change your affiliate link.

 

How to add affiliate links to Lasso.

Adding affiliate links to Lasso is as simple as copying and pasting the URL into your dashboard.

When you’re ready to add affiliate links to Lasso, grab the product URL. Then copy and paste it into Lasso’s dashboard.

For example, if you’re an Amazon affiliate, all you’d need to do is copy the product URL:

Then, head to Lasso and click “Add New Link” and paste the URL into the dashboard:

You can see what is generated below:

Lasso automatically pulls the images from Amazon products only. For all other programs you’ll need to upload the image you want to use.

Rinse and repeat this process when adding links from any affiliate program or network.

When you’re ready to add an affiliate text link to your post, do it the way you usually would using WordPress’s editor.

 

The opportunities function in Lasso.

In your dashboard, under “Opportunities” is where Lasso looks for additional ways to monetize your site.

It looks for:

• Affiliate Programs
• Keywords
• Content

Let’s say you want to find mentions of products across your site which are not yet monetized. Imagine you run a personal finance site that mentions the cashback app Earny.

You know you’ve mentioned them but you can’t remember where you have done so.

Here’s how you can find mentions of any word or phrase across your site and turn them into affiliate links. We’ll start with Brand keywording (i.e., when you’re looking for specific product mentions).

1. Head to “Opportunities”
2. Scroll down and click “Keywords”:
3. Create your keyword (we’ll use Earny for this example) by entering it into the search field and clicking “Add Keyword”
4.  Re-enter it in the search field to pull that keyword up with every unmonetized mention

Lasso finds every mention of your keyword across your site. Along with which piece of content the word is located.

Tip: You can also use the same process with concepts. For example, Earny is a cashback app, so you could create the keyword phrase “cashback” or “cashback app” to see where that term appears on your site then monetize accordingly. Using “Concept” Keywording lets you find related mentions to the brand. An example of Concept Keywording would be if you were an affiliate for BlueHost and wanted to find mentions of the phrase “web hosting” across your site. You’d follow the same steps above by creating the keyword “web hosting.” Then, Lasso will scan your site for every mention of that phrase.

You can use Lasso’s Affiliate Program Detector, where they have a database of nearly 2,100 affiliate programs you can sign up for on their site.

So, if you link to a domain (e.g., you’ve linked to Bulletproof several times but don’t belong to their affiliate program yet), Lasso displays every one with its affiliate program you can join.

The above screenshot shows you five things:

1. The affiliate program
2. Number of programs Lasso found on your site you can sign up for
3. The payout (i.e., the commission rate)
4. Potential opportunities across your site where you could add an affiliate link
5. A link to the affiliate’s sign-up page

You can also click the affiliate program to see additional details or use the search field above the “Potential Links” column to find a specific affiliate.

 

How to track your affiliate link data with Lasso.

Here, you can see which links perform best when you set up click tracking. 

You can connect Lasso to Google Analytics and see your top-performing affiliates by Event.

In your Lasso Dashboard, head to Settings > General and then paste your Analytics Tracking ID into the field. Next, click “Enable Click Tracking.”

Now, you can track clicks (aka Events) and improve your affiliate site’s monetization strategy.

To do it, Head to Behavior > Events > Pages in Analytics.

This shows you descending order from highest to lowest, every blog post and page with the highest number of clicks (i.e., an Event).

In other words, you see each blog post and its total number of affiliate clicks. This metric lets you determine which of your blog posts get clicked the most (letting you identify your most profitable articles).

Click on any page to see the number of affiliate link clicks.

 

How much does Lasso cost?

You can try Lasso for free with a free 14 day trial.

After that, it is $29 a month, or you can pay $289 for a year long subscription (which means 2 months free).

 

My Lasso Plugin Review – Summary

The features above are all some of the things I am most excited about when it comes to trying out Lasso.

They also have many other functions which will make my switch a breeze, such as with link cloaking (making your affiliate link prettier and easier to remember). Plus, you can choose which affiliate links you want to cloak, such as if you need to stay compliant (such as with Amazon, where you cannot link cloak).

Lasso has many valuable features that will help any blogger improve their affiliate marketing income.

I like how I can still make my affiliate links “pretty” with Lasso, but I also have the option to use their more robust features, such as creating custom displays, checking for broken links, seeing out of stock product alerts, checking for missed opportunities, and seeing analytics for the affiliate links that I plan.

I believe that Lasso can be a valuable addition for anyone who is looking to improve their affiliate marketing strategy and dive deeper into something other than simply just link cloaking or shortening affiliate links.

I hope you enjoyed this Lasso review!

You can click here to check out Lasso with a 14 day free trial.

What affiliate marketing plugin do you use? What questions would you like me to include in this Lasso review?