How would it be if your work as affiliate marketer would be easier and more profitable? To your advantage you can use a lot of online tools, from SEO and AdWords to Social Media and WordPress, tools that can help you maximize your earning potential in affiliate marketing. This is applicable both if you are an experienced affiliate marketer or if you are a beginner with no technical skills. Let’s see a good collection of tools useful in affiliate marketing, most of them free.
The affiliate marketing industry had a tremendous development in the last years. Yes, nowadays we can speak about a high competitive industry, about people who make a living from affiliate marketing – some of them with quite an opulent lifestyle – but the experience showed us that everybody has a chance. And you should try it if you haven’t until now. Because nowadays you have access to great case studies and know-how, to great tools that can make your efforts easier and more profitable. None of the known tools won’t make you rich overnight or to earn easy money, but will help you on your way to success to reach the edge.
We’ve compiled a list of good tools for affiliate marketing, grouped by activity: SEO, PPC, WordPress, Content, Social Media, and Link Tracking, most of them free of use and some with trial versions. We recommend you to test them, to use it wisely and to find a real help in them for your affiliate marketing work.
SEO
1. Google Search Console a.k.a Webmaster Tools
This Google product is one of the most used tools for SEO and a good start for your SEO actions. And it is free. Is good to know that this product is basic for a specialist, but it can help you improving key factors in SEO. For example, you can optimize how your pages appear in the SERPs or you can see how your sites are doing speed wise.
I know that its name can be confusing, but actually, it is one of the essential tools for SEO. Why? Because it helps you in the keywords research process, one of the main steps needed if you want to develop affiliate projects based on content or product feeds. You will need to register an AdWords account to use it but is free. This Google Keyword tool is useful more for comparison.
We are sure you have heard about Google Analytics and most probably you use it, but you could explore more its features useful for your site SEO. For example, you can separate out your branded search traffic from non-brand search traffic – using the Channel Groupings feature. Or to create customs reports like a link analysis report that allows you to see which of your inbound links are sending the most valuable traffic, showing visits, goal completions and more.
4. Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool
Used mainly for SEO and technical content audits. It can help you to find duplicate content, server errors, meta robots tags, canonical tags, and more, it has a lot of features. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool is free for sites up to 500 pages.
5. SEMrush
SEMRush is a powerful tool, packed with advanced features, focused on competition and keyword research. Because the affiliate marketing is a competitive industry, this tool allows you to analyze your competitors, what keywords they are using and how well those keywords are performing for them. If you are active in many European countries, is provides you data from various markets.
6. Keyword Spy
Also useful for competitive analysis, because for sure you would like to know what top affiliates are promoting and where. Apparently they have a “lifetime free trial”, so go for it.
7. Majestic SEO
Majestic helps you more with the link building – great and effective features in this chapter – and competitors analysis. It will show you all sorts of cool info about keywords and details about your sites’ link profile. They have a monthly fee of €39.99 for the silver package.
8. Fruition’s Google Penalty Checker
We all know that affiliates often get hit by Google algorithm updates. This is the moment when you can use Fruition if you’re dealing with a drop in rankings, this tool will tell what happened, for free.
PPC
9. Google Keyword Planner & Google Analytics
You already know them from above, so we won’t insist on telling you that both are essential for your online marketing activities. Including your pay per click campaigns. If the Keyword Planner is useful for the keyword research, Analytics provides everything you need to track the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns.
10. AdWords Scripts
Who doesn’t love the AdWords Scripts? They help you automate a lot of time-consuming tasks and to save time and money. You can search through an impressive collection of AdWords scripts, from competitor tracking, real-time position bidding to scanning your landing pages to detect errors on your pages or site.
11. Google Trends
They say Google Trends is an essential free data source for smart PPC marketers. And who are we to argue with that? In affiliate marketing is really important to follow the seasonal demand, so you can use it to search trend data. For free.
12. Optmyzr
AdWords campaigns can bring you great conversions for your affiliate marketing efforts. For that you have to test a lot, to research, to optimize… Optmyzr is one of the software that offers you a great variety of tools for that, from advanced reporting to optimization suggestions and data visualizations. You try it out for free for 14 days.
13. Facebook Text Overlay Tool
If you ever have run a Facebook ad you know about the frustrating rule that your image or video thumbnails ad can’t contain more than 20% text. To make sure your ads can run on Facebook and Instagram, check them with Facebook Text Overlay Tool.
14. Instapage
Instapage is a landing page builder integrated with a variety of programs, including Google Analytics, and that includes built-in tools for utilizing Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Is comes with a drag-and-drop editor, so you don’t need any coding experience to use it. For the free version, you’re only allowed 100 visitors a month, for a monthly subscription you can receive WordPress integration, responsive pages for mobile, unlimited pages and A/B tests, unlimited custom domains etc.
15. Canva
Canva is an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop design platform that’s online and free to use. It can help you design your PPC and Social Media visuals. Besides the tool itself, Canva put together an awesome free stock photo resource list.
WordPress Plugins
16. Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin
Your should know that WordPress+SEO= Love. You can have a lot of wins through a combination of SEO and good content. You can improve the results through plugins like Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin, you can rely on it in order to write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress.
17. Widget Logic
Useful if you are using affiliate banners in your sidebar or other widget areas. You can control which banners ad show up on certain pages, posts, categories or tags. This makes ads more targeted based on what type of content that visitor is viewing.
18. Restrict Widgets
A free plugin you can use to serve targeted advertisements on your blogs. It lets you easily control the pages that each widget will appear on and avoid creating multiple sidebars and duplicating widgets.
19. MailChimp
It is a pity to lose a big percent of your traffic – they say around 75% – and not to create a beautiful community around your website. So, start building an e-mail list, the e-mail marketing solution MailChimp will help you with that, it is one of the most beginner friendly e-mail services. You can integrate it in your platform.
Content
20. Buzzsumo
Want to know which blog posts or infographics or video have gotten the most shares in the last week? Buzzsumo will show you that, really helpful if you want to have popular content. Also, you can find out who are the influencers on a specific topic, if you want to reach them. You can search based on keywords and countries. It is a paid tool, but you can use the trial version.
If you are struggling with the lack of content ideas, yu can find here a gold mine. Based on your target audience and other data you can provide them, you receive several hundred ready-to-use headlines and topic ideas. Really fun to try it. Enjoy!
Social media
22. Hootsuite
The social networks can be an important source of conversions or traffic if you are an affiliate. So, try to use it wisely. Save time and be efficient with tools like Hootsuite, that makes it easy to manage multiple social media accounts via one browser window, including to automate your social media updates. Hootsuite is free for personal use but also offers Pro & Enterprise plans. You can try Buffer also.
23. ZootRock
It allows you to Share Content and Drive Traffic to your site from Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Linkedin and WordPress. You can Share an article from a third party and you can place your own ad on the screen. You can even prioritize content by Country. It has a 30 day FREE trial with all plans!
24. Do Share
Do Share is a plugin for the Chrome browser, useful for Google+ marketing. Because a good traffic is important to affiliates, you could use Do to scheduling posts to Google+ pages and Google+ profiles.
Link creation & tracking
URL Builder allows you to create trackable links for your ads, content and social media posts, in complementarity with Google Analytics. Your work is much easier with it, you can even do simple split-testing with ad creative.
26. Link2
If you have lots of links on your website that could be turned into affiliate links but it’s just too much of a hassle to change them all by hand, Link2 can easily change them for your visitors by just adding a little piece of code on the pages they’re in. It’s a pity not to use Link2 if you have a user-generated content site. This tool is free for all the 2Performant affiliates, it can be found in the Tools section from 2Performant affiliates’accounts.
27. Bit.ly
It’s a link shortener extremely popular and extremely easy to use. You can track including the links clicked in an eBook and offers you some basic analytics reports.
BONUS
28. Gifmaker.me
If you are searching for traffic, you can try the Animated gifs. Are cool and they attract a lot of attention. This tool is easy to use and helps you create animated gifs. Cats, money or Travolta’s gifs… bring it on.
We all know how powerful an image can be. Be sure you attract attention with your articles and social media post with great images. gratisography.com is an awesome resource. You can try also Unsplash.com.
The specialist recommendation
Besides this list, which are the tools that really bring conversions and money with affiliate marketing? Which are the secrets of an affiliate marketer that manage to reach the heights in affiliate marketing?
Serban Cristian, one of the most known and appreciated affiliate marketer from Romania, have shared with us some key points from his experience. He said that the best and the most profitable tools used by him were created by programmers after his indications. For instance, he changed a WordPress plugin to insert blocks of 50 products that permitted categories creation on the fly by tag, plus meta elements insertion, an optimization that helped him to create a complete niche website in 10-15 minute. But which one is THE ONE?
From research and finding the perfect niche, from developing the right volume until measuring the results, each tool has its significance. I can’t say that a specific tool matters, it is more important to use a group of tools that will bring you the performance.
Serban Cristian, affiliate marketer
So, you should test them, see what fits you better and use the ones that help you save time and earn more.
If one of your favorite online tools for affiliates isn’t listed here, we would appreciate if you share it with us in the comments.
2Performant is a self-service affiliate platform where e-shops work easily with digital marketing natives at a cost per sale model.
We tracked more than 3,000,000 sales since 2009 for more than 550 clients and 57,000 affiliates. Come on board, we have cookies!
Mohit says:
thank a lot this’ll help me a lot