Thirsty Affiliates Review 2025: Does It Work?

I started blogging knowing that I wanted it to be my full-time job, without knowing exactly how to get there.

Thankfully, by taking courses such as Cooking with Keywords and Jumpstart Your Pinterest, using RankIQ, WPRM, and more, I managed to build up enough traffic to join Mediavine within 7 months and monetize via display ads. (Click through for my review of Cooking with Keywords and RankIQ, a keyword and content optimization tool. )

People always say that it's hard to earn affiliate income as a food blogger- true- so I didn't do anything with it at first.

However, when I reached over 200,000 page views, I felt that I was leaving money on the table for ignoring Amazon and other opportunities for passive income. Hence, the investment in Thirsty Affiliates Pro

What is Thirsty Affiliates?

Thirsty Affiliates is a plug-and-play affiliate link management plugin for WordPress. It was recommended by several affiliate marketers that I follow to help website owners like us make money.

Since you're here to find out whether the plug-in will work for you, I'll go straight into how Thirsty Affiliates has helped increase my revenue, before discussing how it works. (Usually people add all the fluff- how it works etc- first to increase display ad revenue :P)

There is a free version, and the paid version starts from US$99.60 a year or US$8.30 a month (only the price of 1 large Starbucks latte!)

Why Invest

Here's why I recommend the basic plan of Thirsty Affiliates Pro (US$99.60) to my blogging friends:

• I made back the investment within 1 month (with only 2 affiliate prorammes)
  • by using the automatic keyword linker, you can add a new affiliate link instantly
  • this helped me qualify for Amazon Associate AND make more sales (I qualified for Amazon Associates within a month of getting Thirsty Affiliates Pro- had attempted twice before to no avail)
• You do NOT need coding skills to use it: it is super easy to add a new link, download reports etc (very important as I'm a tech noob)
• tried and tested: by me and 443,521+ other people (That is the number of downloads by WordPress Sites Worldwide)
• there's a 14-day refund policy
• helped me make sure each affiliate url actually works
  • the automatic 404 checker is an easy way to keep track of links
  • which obviously boosts my affiliate revenue (can't earn anything off a malfunctioning link)
  • Amazon affiliate links, in particular, change very quickly. It's impossible to keep track of which links are still working, if you have a blog with a few hundred posts UNLESS you have a link management plug-in (or a lot of time)
• helped me track and maximise affiliate link performance with its link analytics and reports
  • true story: I didn't realize when one of my affiliate partners mistakenly assigned my affiliate sales to another blogger!!!! Luckily, she realized a few months later and told me! But she could have kept it a secret, and I would have literally lost THOUSANDS of income in revenue.
  • With affiliate link click tracking, such mistakes are less likely to go unnoticed!
  • You can assign thirsty links to link categories, so you know what type products sell best
• increases clickthrough rate
  • there's a geographic redirection setting so you can automatically send people to their local store (people are obviously more likely to buy from local sites, due to concerns over international shipping fees etc)
  • you can cloak your link and make it look more professional (people are more likely to open link if the link looks legit)
• it prevents affiliate commission theft (via cloaked links)
  • this can be a stranger stealing from you OR
  • your affiliate partner could be not paying you, sometimes by mistake, sometimes not. (This has happened to me at least thrice.) If you have the data to show you have the clicks, you have more evidence to confront said partner.
• you only need the premium version if you have more than 1 affiliate site

There are a few other benefits of Thirsty Affiliates that I've seen people proclaim, but I don't have proof of them, so I'll mention them below and not here. (Will make a note of which ones I've yet to prove.)

Note: Thirsty Affiliates has a ton of functions but I confess I only use 2 or 3. (Not because the other functions are not useful, but because I haven't had time to look into them. Once I do, I'm sure I can get affiliate income up more.)

What Does It Do?

Automatic Keyword Linking

This Thirsty Affiliate WordPress plugin feature, automatic keyword linking, helped me qualify for Amazon in 1 month (after trying 2 to 3 times, unsuccessfully.)

I earned back what I invested in the plug-in, within a month.

In total, I link to about 100 products- $60 monthly isn't a lot, but keep in mind that food blog affiliate items are usually stuff like "glutinous rice flour" and what not, which only cost a buck or so.

Without this plug-in, I would be losing US$720 a year JUST in Amazon affiliate income!

Note: Once I spend time cleaning up my affiliate strategy, I'm confident I can use Thirsty Affiliates Pro to increase my affiliate revenue substantially.

Makes Updating Affiliate Links Easier

Another true story: when I first tried to enter Amazon Associates, I embedded the WRONG links into my site.

I only realized a few months later.

By then, I had forgotten where I'd put the links- as I had entered the links manually (not via a plug-in), I needed to go to each individual webpage to edit the links. As a result, I couldn't change the bad links! (So you may still find yourself at a weird destination url if you click some of the links on my site.)

With Thirsty, it's super easy to change your links. It takes 1 minute.

You just go to the "Affiliate Links" section of your dashboard (under "Thirsty Affiliates"), find the link, and edit it. That instantly changes the link across ALL the URLs the link appears on!

Cloak Affiliate Links

Thirsty Affiliates took my long, ugly affiliate links, and shortened them instantly. I did not need to learn complex coding or tamper with the back end of my site to get the cloaked link.

It take a link from this:

http://www.merchantsite.com/product/abcaaaa456slah10s@l_your-affilaite-ID_gb43al=action

to this cloaked url:

www.mysitename.com/yourkeyword

This is important for several reasons:

• it prevents your affiliate commissions from getting stolen (true story: people can steal your affiliate ID and siphon off your affiliate earnings.)
• makes the link easier to share on social media and more memorable
• makes the link look more secure (which some claim increases the click-through rate. I don't have data for my clicks before and after shortening, so can't prove this)

Note: at the same time, you can easily uncloak links. (Amazon does not allow link cloacking.)

Track Link Performance

Shows you which Keywords/ Links Perform

I had always struggled with keeping tabs on my affiliate links. Which keywords are getting clicked on and which clicks are converting?

There is some talk after the HCU that having too many affiliate links can be bad for your site (wrt Google ranking), so I don't want to keep non-performing links! And I also want to know what products I should lean more into.

With Thirsty Affiliates, tracking became incredibly easy. It generates detailed reports immediately, so you can see which keywords (and thus which links) are performing, and which not.

Seeing the number of clicks each link received was eye-opening. It guided me on where I should focus my efforts for maximum affiliate income.

For example, cooking equipment obviously earns more than a bag of flour. However, I wasn't sure if linking to a, say, baking tray, really worked as don't most home cooks already have them?

So I added an affiliate for a baking tray, checked in a few months later, and found the keyword/ link barely had any clicks. Time to remove it then and add other types of links that had high conversion rates.

Free vs. Pro: Which is the Right Choice for You?

Ideally, we all want the best blogging plug-ins. However, we can't always afford it! Especially if we're new bloggers, barely monetizing. So I hope to help you make the best decision for where you are at this stage of your blogging journey:

Here is the difference between the free and paid versions of Thirsty Affiliates:

To be honest, I see no point in food bloggers going for just the free version. The most common way we make affiliate income is via Amazon (not super lucrative, but better than nothing) and you need the automatic linking feature (only available in Pro/ paid) to expedite the process.

However, if you have under 1000 visits a month, you may not need Thirsty Affiliates for now.

Note: if you do not renew your license, your Thirsty plug-in will still work. You just don't get the support and updates.