Associated Links is not a plugin to Associated Nodes, but a module that uses Associated Nodes.
It is a basic example of how to use the Associated Nodes to display the result of node associations.

Once you have activated the Associated Links module, and after you have created and configured Associations, go to admin/build/block. You will see blocks named "Associated Links : name-of-your-association". There will be a block for each association.
You just have to put the block in the region you want. It will appear on a node page and it contains links to associated nodes.

The associated nodes are sorted in the block by their matching score with the viewed node.

In the configuration form of the block, you can activate an option to use Ajax loading. When associated nodes are not in cache, the time to compute them can be long, especially if there are multiple associations and a lot of criteria. With the Ajax loading option activated, the page can be loaded quickly and the blocks appeared as soon as associated nodes are calculated.