Lasso Review: Why Every Affiliate Marketer Needs This Plugin

By Sean Ogle •  Updated: 06/01/20 •  12 min read

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:

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?

Lasso is an affiliate marketing plugin for WordPress that makes it easier to manage your affiliate links, display your links to increase click throughs, and more easily monetize your blog posts in an elegant way.

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

Lasso does a lot of stuff, so I’m going to try and make this review as methodical as possible and give you a true sense of how it can help you monetize your niche site.

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 Four Hour Work Week:

Lasso Affiliate Plugin

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 Lasso backend, that I can then find anytime I need it. Like this:

Lasso affiliate marketing plugin.

You can add a Lasso link just as easily as you can a link to any other post or page on your site.

See where it says “Lasso Link” that’s now my affiliate link.

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 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
$14.89

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.

Buy on Amazon Now
We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.
03/28/2024 09:50 am GMT

All you have to do is click “Add Lasso Display” from your WordPress menu bar, and then you can easily search for it from there and 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 Lasso does the rest.

Add New Lasso Link

It pulls in all the data, converts the links to one using your affiliate code, and then lets you make any changes from there.

Money Tree Lasso

But what about all of the affiliate products you promote that aren’t part of Amazon?

Lasso allows you to manage those too, it just doesn’t do it quite as automatically.

Let’s say I want to add the ConvertKit affiliate program to Lasso. I simply click “Add New Link” and put in my affiliate link, and it brings me to the same edit page, where I can then customize the information based on my needs.

I can add their logo, change the permalink, add the price, description and so on.

It comes out looking like this:

Our Pick
ConvertKit: Email Marketing
FREE up to 1,000 Subscribers

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!

Check Out ConvertKit Now
We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.

3) Keywords Allow You to Find Missed Opportunities

Ok now you see how easy and powerful Lasso makes this for creating new links, displaying them, and managing them both inside of Amazon and with outside affiliate programs.

But what about all of those places you could have included an affiliate link – but didn’t?

Let’s use ConvertKit as an example. I’ve been a ConvertKit user for my email marketing for years. But I know there are times that I’ve mentioned it on the site, but didn’t use an affiliate link. OR perhaps I missed a few links when they changed their affiliate provider.

Lasso has you covered.

Lasso Opportunities

By adding the “ConvertKit” keyword, Lasso will then show me all of the places that I have not used my current affiliate link on the site. So every time I’ve mentioned ConvertKit, where I could have used an affiliate link, it will tell me, and give me the option to change the link with a single click.

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 Lasso, and add the company name as the keyword, and it will show you every place you’ve mentioned it, so with the flick of a switch you can monetize the link.

Last year, ConvertKit really did change the service they used for their affiliate program. So I had to go in and update all of my links.

Unfortunately I had to do this all manually. If I was using Lasso, all I’d have to do is update the link in one place, and it would automatically change ALL the links across the site to match.

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 Lasso is for their customizable display boxes.

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:

LASSO: Affiliate Link Manager for Wordpress
14-Day Trial

Find new income opportunities, increase clicks, and measure what's making money by managing your links with LASSO.

Sign Up for LASSO Today!
We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.

6) I can create better calls to action for my own products

Lasso was built for affiliate links, but I’ve found I can use it to create much better display boxes and calls to action for my OWN products as well.

As an example:

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, Lasso makes it super easy to do display grids as well.

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:

Read This First
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
$15.75

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.

Buy Now on Amazon
We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.
03/28/2024 08:30 am GMT
Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, and Unlock Your Exceptional Life

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.

Buy Now
We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
$15.99

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.

Buy Now on Amazon
We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.
03/27/2024 11:20 am GMT
Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life
$12.99

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.

Buy Now on Amazon
We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.
03/27/2024 11:33 am GMT

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 Lasso on my site, there are 42 instances where I mentioned SEMrush. It will show me all of the places I’ve mentioned it, as well as the page it’s on. But it may not be appropriate to add an affiliate link to each of those areas.

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 Lasso link you create. So for instance, my link to Lasso is https://www.locationrebel.com/lasso

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 Lasso has a 14 free trial. And the good news is that if you stop using Lasso, all of the links will still work if you uninstall the plugin.

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 Lasso costs. It’s $19/month for each site you use it on.

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!

LASSO: Affiliate Link Manager for Wordpress
14-Day Trial

Find new income opportunities, increase clicks, and measure what's making money by managing your links with LASSO.

Sign Up for LASSO Today!
We earn a commission if you make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.

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
9.3

Performance

10.0/10

Service

10.0/10

Price

8.0/10

Features

8.5/10

Personal Affinity

10.0/10

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.
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5 comments on "Lasso Review: Why Every Affiliate Marketer Needs This Plugin"

  1. Lindsey says:

    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!

  2. Vickie says:

    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!

  3. Joey D says:

    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.

  4. Really interesting blog to read again & again. Thanks for sharing such a wonderful article. Keep sharing.

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