While providing links to products you use regularly is a good idea intuitively, it doesn't work out in the real world.
- these are typically thin content pages
- linking to it from your navigation menu wastes important link equity
- informational queries (recipes) do not convert to sales
Create a shoppable page
Something like this doesn't need a plugin and can be easily built in the block editor:
Here's how:
- create pages and link them together
- use a 4-column block
- in each column, put an image and text with a link to the affiliate product
However, we don't recommend this because it's a waste of time.
Waste of time
For 99.9% of food blogs this is a total waste of time and internal link equity.
Shop pages simply do not convert because people land on your site for informational queries (recipes), not transactional queries (purchasing). These pages are thin content and Google knows their just low-effort affiliate links.
People use whatever is in their cupboard, or they go find a recipe that they can make with what's in their cupboard.
I've never, ever seen a food blog that has brought in any meaningful revenue, except for sites doing 1,000,000+ pageviews/month. Even then as a percentage it's almost irrelevant.
If you spend 20 hours building and maintaining a shop page over the next year, you'll get a lower ROI than if you spent 20 hours posting recipes.
Exception
The one exception to this would be people with a strong social following who can develop trendy sales videos that make people deeply desire a specific item, then direct those people immediately to make an impulse purchase.
Alternative
There is a type of shoppable page that does convert and doesn't negatively impact your site, and that's a full on product write-up/review.
Keywords that you can use to research include:
- review
- rating
- pros and cons
- vs (eg. cuisinart air fryer vs instant pot air fryer)
- be specific with the model
- "any good"
- best
- amazon
- video
Food bloggers have a huge advantage here over standard affiliate sites because they have a huge amount of E-E-A-T that can be demonstrated by using the FSRI block to link to real world recipes you developed using the equipment.
Including a video walking through all the features and tips and tricks, as well as including those in the content, will create a review page that can't be matched by people spamming low-quality affiliate reviews.