Marketing Tools — 09 Jul 2020
Top Tools for Affiliate Marketing
I want to jump right into the best affiliate marketing tools available, but before I do, it’s important to define what affiliate marketing really is. I find that having a solid understanding of this really helps when it comes to creating your strategy. So, here’s a quick definition of affiliate marketing:
Affiliate marketing is a mutually beneficial relationship in which a company works with affiliate marketers to promote its products and in turn, affiliate marketers earn a sales commission for successful conversions.
As you can see, affiliate marketing is fairly straightforward. Many people who are just starting out in affiliate marketing have one question: Can I make a passive income?
The answer is a resounding “Yes!” You absolutely can make a passive income with affiliate marketing but you need to look at it as a long-term goal.
The benefit of using affiliate marketing to build a passive income is that you don’t need a large knowledge base to get started.
Focusing on subscription-based products that offer recurring commissions in combination with high-ticket items is a solid strategy to start with. Regardless of your interests, there is an astounding array of niches and products that you can successfully promote.
Now, in addition to creating a long-term strategy, in order to really scale up your affiliate marketing business, it’s in your favor to create an affiliate marketing toolkit. Without further ado, let’s take a look at the top tools available for affiliate marketers.
This tool is best for: Crafting an Advertising Campaign Strategy
Description: AdPlexity is a data driven tool that allows users to get an insight into what ads your competitors are successfully running.
This spy tool saves you a ton of research hours and money by providing comprehensive data on successful mobile and desktop ad campaigns.
When you use AdPlexity you’ll get an insight into which types of ads are doing well for specific keywords, advertiser, and even affiliate network.
As a beginner affiliate marketer, this tool may have a bit of a learning curve. You’ll receive an absolutely huge amount of data that you can work with to build a unique strategy.
You can get insight into what the most successful affiliates are doing to get inspiration for your own unique strategy.
Pricing: AdPlexity plans average at about $199 per month. This is certainly an investment, especially if you’re new to affiliate marketing, but you’ll get valuable data in return.
Each package is designed for specific ad campaigns such as mobile and eCommerce.
This tool is best for: Conducting competitive research.
Description: Similarweb.com allows you to evaluate competitor analytics and online marketing strategy. With this tool, you can get an overview of your competitor referral traffic, as well as the sources they send traffic.
As an affiliate marketer, you can also use this tool to your advantage.
The research solution allows you to get a better insight into your competitors, and target audience by looking at which media channels they utilize most.
Comprehensive audience demographics give users a solid idea of who is interacting with their content.
SimilarWeb also allows you to compare your own websites directly with your competitors. This gives you the ability to identify gaps and create stronger strategies for your audience.
Pricing: SimilarWeb is great for those of you just starting out because it offers a totally free tool, but they also offer a paid plan for enterprise level business.
The free plan gives you a month of mobile app data, three months of web traffic data, and five results per metric. If you want to upgrade, an enterprise package can be created specifically for your needs.
This tool is best for: SERanking is great for conducting website audits to improve overall functionality.
Description: SERanking is a full SEO solution but I find this tool really shines when it comes to site audits. If you don’t know what a site audit is, let me explain.
A site audit is essentially a full scan of your site to identify potential issues that could be hindering your success.
As an affiliate marketer, using a site audit tool is a super effective way to target problems on your site and address them head-on.
The SERanking site audit tool uses a variety of sources when scanning your site for a comprehensive run-down.
This site audit tool will identify technical errors, missing meta tags, slow loading speeds, faulty images, and the number of internal links on the site.
Pricing: SERanking offers a free trial to all new users. Paid packages start at $39 per month and include website audits for 25,000 pages in addition to other SEO tools.
This tool is best for: Use Mailchimp to create email marketing campaigns and boost conversions.
Description: Mailchimp is a reputable email marketing service that helps you create successful email marketing campaigns.
If you’re not utilizing email marketing as an affiliate marketer, you should start immediately.
This is one of the best ways to build a relationship with your audience, generate quality leads, and make more conversions.
Mailchimp is great if you’re a beginner to email marketing. This service includes handy email templates, A/B testing, and custom domains.
Pricing: Mailchimp offers a free plan for those of you on a budget. This has all of the basic tools you’ll need to get started and includes up to 2000 contacts.
Paid plans start at $9.99 to $299 per month and include a range of advanced email marketing tools. If you expect to have a much larger contact list, the basic paid plan covers up to 50,000 contacts.
This tool is best for: Use this tool to find the email address behind websites.
Description: This may be the most unique tool on this list. What Hunter does is provide a tool that helps you track down email addresses behind companies, websites, and professionals.
You may be asking, why is this important for affiliate marketing? Well, the ability to effectively contact people has multiple benefits. You can use this tool to reach out to relevant sites for collaboration, guest posts, and expert round-ups.
This type of content not only increases your audience reach, but it also gives you the opportunity to gain more backlinks.
To use this tool all you have to do is type in the name of a domain and it will give you a list of results.
Pricing: Hunter offers a free plan that gives you up to 50 monthly requests. After that, paid plans start at $49 per month and give you up to 1000 monthly requests plus additional premium features.
This tool is best for: Affise is great for businesses who want to manage and track affiliate campaigns.
Description: Now, because affiliate marketing is a two-way street, I wanted to include an option for business owners.
This tool is for business owners who need help optimizing their marketing campaigns. This company offers several feature-rich packages that help businesses create highly effective marketing strategies.
In terms of affiliate marketing, Affise helps businesses track the success of their campaigns, manage affiliates, offers, and payouts.
Working with affiliate marketers can be a lucrative option for many businesses, but it’s a lot to manage. A tool like Affise can make this process much easier and more effective in the long run.
Let’s take a look at an example. Using Affise, Globale Media was able to see a 40% increase in revenue in a single month.
It’s safe to say this tool works.
Pricing: Affise offers plans starting at $299 per month which includes everything you need to successfully manage ad campaigns for your small business.
This tool is best for: Ahrefs is perfect for conducting keyword research and monitoring backlinks.
Description: If you’re like most affiliate marketers, you’ve embraced the power of the blog. With blogging, of course, comes SEO and that’s exactly why it’s such a powerful tool. SEO is notoriously tricky to master but there are a few excellent tools out there to help you along. One of the most popular options is Ahrefs. Ahrefs provides a suite of SEO tools such as the Keyword Researcher that provides important analytics regarding keywords to help you guide content creation. The other tool that provides value to affiliate marketers is the ability to check your backlinks. Ahrefs offers a free backlink checker that reveals how many backlinks your site has as well as the number of referring domains. As an affiliate marketer, one of the best ways to bring in the target audience is to get relevant backlinks. I highly recommend checking out these tools from Ahrefs to boost your SEO.
Pricing: While they do offer some free tools like the backlink checker, full packages range from $99 to $999 per month. These packages include a full range of SEO tools.
This tool is best for: Google analytics will help you better understand your target audience and track your visitors.
Description: Google Analytics is a tool that gives users information to help get an understanding of who is visiting your site. You’ll get access to important audience demographics such as age, gender, and interests. This information is absolute gold for the affiliate marketer. In order to gain leads and make conversions, it’s crucial that you understand who is interested in your content and affiliate products. This tool will also give you an idea of the geographic regions your visitors are located in, how much traffic your site gets, and where that traffic is coming from.
Pricing: Google Analytics is free to use but they do offer upgraded packages if you’re looking for advanced features.
If you’re here as a business owner, the good news is, affiliate marketing is a great way to boost your business.
Working with affiliate marketers means you increase your audience via your affiliate marketers.
The affiliate marketer you work with often promotes products on multiple platforms which hold the potential of generating more leads for your business.
It’s a low-risk strategy to increase the success of your business with little effort on your end.
As you can see, there are a variety of tools out there that can greatly benefit you as an affiliate marketer. These tools offer a comprehensive set of features that can really boost your success as an affiliate marketer.
Each of these tools focuses on important factors that should be addressed when creating an affiliate marketing program.
Affiliate marketing is a win-win situation for both businesses and marketers. Use these tools to your advantage to scale up your journey and take your affiliate marketing to the next level.
Head of PR and Marketing Communications
Anastasia Zaichko is a creative B2B marketer, passionate about helping companies achieve their sales, growth and visibility objectives. Weekdays she's all about identifying new opportunities for marketers to grow and get more value from affiliate channel. Weekends include traveling, partying and instagramming about all of the above. She strongly believes in the power of content, networking and the Universe.
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