Working from anywhere worldwide as an affiliate marketer is a huge perk for many people. But, it can also be a bit of a double-edged sword, and this is why you’ll need the right affiliate marketing tools.
With a set work schedule, it can be easier to stay focused and productive, but without the right and necessary tools, your best efforts could go up in smoke.
In this blog, we’ll discuss the affiliate marketing tools every marketer will need to utilize to ensure and or maximize success in 2023.
DISCLAIMER: – Some of the links in this article may be affiliate links, which can provide compensation to me at no cost to you if you decide to purchase a paid plan or individual product. These are products I’ve personally used and stand behind. This site is not intended to provide financial advice and is for entertainment only.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is online marketing where people promote products and earn a commission on every sale they make.
It’s a trendy skill to make money online, and more and more people are doing it every day as they trade in the 9-5 job for the opportunity to be their own boss.
In 2022 many people are learning affiliate marketing to make money online. With affiliate marketing, you promote products and earn a commission on every sale you make.
It’s a great way to be your boss and trade in the 9-5 lifestyle. Read what Outbrain has to say on their blog about this very lucrative business model that is affiliate marketing in what I consider to be not only a very extensive post but a very thought-provoking one as well.
While affiliate marketing may have had its fair share of bashing by disgruntled participants in the marketing industry over the years, it can be said however that it is favored by the majority over all other business models.
Even the popular model that is network marketing that once held the reins has had to give way to affiliate marketing. It should also be noted that when it comes to the threat of recession that online businesses can and do hold their own.
This could be why the popularity so easily favors more and more online businesses as these entities can be run from home or even remote areas. Such is the power of a digital or online business.
What About The Downside Of Affiliate Marketing?
While it may seem incredulous to believe affiliate marketing can also have a downside. When you think about it, as an affiliate your job can sometimes be harder than that of the vendor.
We tend to look at affiliate marketing through the lens of the vendor and we look at what goes into the product creation process and then getting that product to market. What we don’t see often is what happens behind the scenes.
I have had the pleasure of seeing how easy it can be when you know what you are doing to go about creating a digital product. It certainly has a number of moving parts but it is not too difficult.
What is really the hard part is an affiliate having to now come and market that same product to an audience of possible buyers that may actually be interested. Different strategies now have to be employed both to woo the customers and to get the click.
What many persons looking on do not realize is this. Due to the promotion methods that have to be used, often the means of securing eyes for the product being promoted, sees that audience being captured by the product vendor.
In other words, unless the affiliate is smart enough to capture the leads for himself before pointing them to the offer at hand, they become the ” property ” of the product vendor.
The vendor then can at some later time or within the back end as it is called, market more higher costing or value products where the big bucks are made for the vendor, but to the exclusion of the affiliate who brought the traffic in the beginning.
That’s the downside right there of the industry. I am not saying it is unfair but it does require one to be smart in their marketing efforts if they would end up in the winner’s circle.
The idea would be to work hard, but also to work even smarter. Dean Holland addressed this in his book, “The Affiliate Marketer’s Playbook.” It actually shows you what and where affiliate marketing is today and how to cope with what is occurring within the industry at this time.
The concept of affiliate marketing is rising in popularity, but it is challenging to succeed at it. The competition in digital marketing is making it more challenging to create a sustainable affiliate marketing business.
So how to build a successful affiliate marketing business? For starters, you’ll need affiliate marketing tools to help you get the job done properly.
There’s no shortcut to success. Yes, you heard it right. There is no shortcut to winning, but we can work innovatively using tools that save us time and give us results in a much quicker timeframe.
With that in mind, we shall now take a more detailed look at the top affiliate marketing tools and a couple of the top affiliate marketing platforms most commonly used to give affiliates the best possible chances of online success.
One other thing I should mention here is that many in the affiliate marketing world especially those whom we shall classify as beginners are being taught that they do not need anything but an offer to promote, and traffic to drive to the offer.
But when you consider and admittedly so that the affiliate marketing process constitutes a journey and has stages, it can be seen that from that perspective, someone at the beginner stage, may not require the tools that someone at the intermediate or advanced stage may require.
And so it is not to say that tools are not needed, but at what stage do they come into play? Truth be told there is no avoiding them (affiliate tools) and you can appreciate that fact more as you contemplate the many factors of the industry.
Why Is It So Important To Have & Be Using Affiliate Marketing Tools?
For the most part, persons coming online in search of a way to make additional income have all had their searches end up at the same destination. Affiliate marketing.
Now while this speaks volumes for the business model, it is hardly an easy feat for most new marketers, with the greater percentage of affiliates either failing, quitting, or both. One would tend to expect reversed statistics.
But this is real. So for anyone deciding to get into the MMO Niche, and recognizing that he or she will need to be seen, as well as known, liked, and trusted then it becomes prudent to equip oneself with the right arsenal of affiliate marketing tools. It is that simple theoretically, but even harder to perform in practice.
Strategies that include lead generation, SEO, keyword identification, and even marketplaces to even locate the best possible affiliate offers are something that every marketer should be thinking about. But not all do.
Within the selection of tools that will be revealed should be noted that the best free affiliate marketing tools will also be considered as well as the best tools for affiliate marketing.
Essential tools for affiliate marketing are not to be left out.
Affiliates Need All The Help They Can Get & Then Some
One of the reasons I have put together this list of top essential affiliate marketing tools is to help affiliates get all the help they can as theirs is a rather formidable task as you think of it.
Most affiliates simply look at affiliate marketing in the following way:
- Determine a profitable niche.
- Find a program to promote with good affiliate benefits.
- Find products & offers to promote that they like.
- Strategize on the best methods to attract prospects and close sales.
- Get paid hefty commissions.
With this limited approach, you can now see why so many will fail after becoming involved in this industry. People have been fed a dream that for the most part is a lie as too many important factors have been left out.
While the upcoming list may feature my top 9, I could have listed so many more items. But I think that what’s included in the list gives what is required for an affiliate marketer to have, as you can see that the affiliate marketing tools are indeed a great asset to own.
The Top 9 Affiliate Marketing Tools Every Marketer Should Use
The tools listed below are not in any order that suggests which ought to be considered as being the number #1 tool or otherwise. There are listed randomly and mostly in relation to what was cooking up in my mind at the time.
You are invited in the comments section of this article to mention any tools that you think should have made it onto the list in the first place, and I’ll be sure to give your suggestion my utmost attention.
1. Flippa
Flippa is a bidding marketplace for people to buy and sell websites, like eBay. It is an excellent resource for affiliate marketers who want to buy sites with solid backlink profiles and jumpstart their SEO growth.
Flippa will also provide knowledge on which types of businesses are the best to get involved with and which are the fastest revenue-generating ones.
When it comes to affiliate marketing, the first step is building partnerships with sites that need sales. We’ve tried a few affiliate networks, including CJ Affiliate and Impact. But our go-to resource for affiliate partnerships is ShareASale.
ShareASale connects publishers with advertisers looking to increase their product sales. Publishers get paid per phone call, lead, or website visitor they drive to the advertiser’s site.
If you’re considering becoming an affiliate marketer, you might wonder where the best place to start is. While you can make more money by working with advertisers,
ShareASale is a great option for getting started and is one of the best free tools for affiliate marketing.
3. SEMRush
SEMRush is a fantastic tool for keyword research, SEO mistake-fixing, and competitor analysis. I’ve been using it daily since 2016, so I may be biased!
Nonetheless, it is useful for getting insights into improving your website’s ranking and performance.
This tool is essential for marketers who want to understand what content has the highest ROI for their competitors and identify on-page SEO.
Some of the basic things that we use SEMRush for:
- Researching top-performing competitor content that we should be writing about
- Observing our keyword rankings every week
- Doing SEO audits to watch for website issues that could hurt our search rankings
4. Ahrefs
Ahrefs and SEMRush are similar (keyword analysis, on-page audits, competitive content research, etc.). But, Ahrefs focuses more on backlinks, while SEMRush emphasizes on-page SEO.
Ahrefs provides insights about new and old backlinks, sites that are linked to broken pages on your and another website, and competitor backlink growth.
It helps marketers make decisions about their websites and improve their link-building strategy.
Some of the basic things we perform on Ahrefs:
- Checking new and old/lost backlinks to our site
- Checking competitor links to find new link-building opportunities
- Finding places that are links to broken pages on sites (and then 301’ing those pages to another appropriate page)
- Research competitor content to identify new content ideas for your site
There are many SEO tools; deciding which ones to invest in can take time. Ahrefs and SEMRush are our favorites, but we understand that not everyone can afford to use both services.
If you’re trying to choose between the two, we recommend looking at your budget and seeing which fits better into your plans.
If you’re looking for an edge over your larger competitors, Ahrefs is a great choice. If you’re already an industry leader or are very close to it, we recommend using SEMRush.
You can try both services for free to see which works better.
5. RankMath Pro (SEO)
RankMath is one of the best SEO plugins we can add to any site for SEO. It provides advanced SEO functionality to every page, including, but not limited to:
- Title tag & meta description customization
- Canonical link customization
- Sitemap creation and customization
- Meta robots customization
I especially love to use RankMath when it comes to my on-page SEO and ensuring that I can reach if not 100% optimization on my pages, I can still come pretty close.
6. Grammarly
If you’re publishing content on your affiliate site, then Grammarly is a must-have tool. In short, Grammarly is a spell-checker on steroids. It catches not only spelling errors but also grammar and punctuation mistakes.
It can save you much time and effort in the editing process.
Grammarly is not only a spelling checker – but it also identifies grammatical errors, such as incorrect word usage and comma placement. It can be a valuable tool for anyone who wants to improve their writing skills.
In case you may not be aware, affiliate marketing takes into account writing sales copy as well as emails that go out to the many subscribers that opt into the offers being promoted.
Since it is a highly favored skill, you would want to be the best at it that you can be. That’s where Grammarly comes into play.
7. Duplichecker
If you are working with a content team to help produce articles, we recommend running each piece through a plagiarism checker like Duplichecker.
It will help ensure that your content is original and not copied from another source.
It’s never fun to have to check up on someone, especially when you’re starting to trust them more and more. But, even accidental plagiarism could result in serious legal issues, so it’s essential to be vigilant.
8. Hemingway
The Hemingway app is a content review tool that helps you to simplify your writing based on the report of Ernest Hemingway.
Simplify your writing, you say?
Nobody cares that you know what “nudiustertian” means. They’re not interested in looking it up, so don’t try to impress them with your big words.
Your readers want value. They’ll only disappear from your content if you don’t write the correct phrases and sentences.
To give them a good feeling about your content, focus on writing meaty content that delivers insights instead of padding your piece with filler material.
It is an excellent tool for simplifying complex sentences. It can also help you identify adverbs and tricky words that can be replaced with simpler ones.
9. Sumo
Getting people to visit your site is excellent. But turning those visitors into customers is even better. There are several ways to increase your visitors’ likelihood of becoming customers.
From providing helpful content to offering a great product or service, there are many things you can do to turn visitors into customers.
Website visitors usually need more time to be ready to make a purchase. Most people need to see a product or service several times before they’re ready to buy.
So how do you monetize your website traffic? You can sell products or services to your visitors when they’re ready to buy. It can be done through online stores, subscription services, or contact forms.
One of the best ways for affiliate marketers to scale their business is by building an email list.
This way, they can drive repeat visitors and customers back to their site to buy products down the road. Sumo provides an easy way to install email forms on your site. They offer a free version of their service.
Sumo has been toted as one of the better email marketing service providers on the market. Others include GetResponse, Aweber, and ConvertKit to name a few.
Disclaimer: The following list also contains WordPress plugins. While we love the plugin feature of WordPress sites, installing new plugins always has the possibility of interfering with your existing site functionality. Please test out each of these plugins on a staging site before installing them on your live site, or work with a web development team to ensure that these plugins are compatible with your current location.
Final Thoughts & Two New Tools You’d Love
We have given you some of the best affiliate marketing tools around. You can use these tools to grow your affiliate marketing business and give you the best chance at success.
Currently, there are a number of tools coming into the area that feature a.i technology. I have not listed any among the top 9, but it would be remiss of me not to give attention to the likes of Jasper or Closer’s Copy.
Jasper has been getting a lot of great feedback from major bloggers in the industry such as Adam Enfroy to name one and more and more companies are including a.i among their marketing tools.
Recently the Home Business Academy introduced their a.i tool called Emmerson as part of their Premium suite of tools. You can learn more about HBA here.
While artificial intelligence is now on the upswing and can or will eventually take over one day, we still have a role to play until such happens. But such tools are not to be ignored as they can and do save you both time and money in your business.
So the first of the 2 tools was the A.I. angle and what that can do for you and your business. The other tool is in the form of a funnel builder. This is really what every affiliate will need and you can earn big from this tool.
Bonus ( Newly Revealed 25-In-One Software Tool )
I just wanted to slip in another awesome software that was released to the public not long ago and has been getting some degree of attention.
Now you may or may not know that as affiliates we are all on a journey and that will mean that some of us depending on how long we started are at various stages.
We have been led to believe that we can create 6to 7 figures businesses complete without the use of software or tools but that is just hype. It’s not true.
In fact, the right type of software and tools can not only create automation in your business but can also save you time and money.
Introducing – GoFunnelBox
To learn more about this amazing software and all the valuable tools inside I invite you to take a look here also on the page, you can see a demo performed of what the software can indeed do.
As I see it GoFunnelBox is the way of the future. Check it out here.
Conclusion
photo – compliments of Saulo Mohana
I would like to make it clear that while this article tends to focus on some platforms where tools and or services are provided that can be and are used by affiliates, there is so much more.
Also as seen from a beginner’s point of view, most persons new to affiliate marketing do get caught up in seeking to focus on tools such as funnel builders, autoresponders etc
These are important of course, but if you treat your online business as such and develop a well-laid-out plan of operation, you’ll soon realize that not all relevant tools are needed at the beginning.
This is what causes most new people to get overwhelmed and subsequently give up. So please bear this in mind.
Final Wrap-up
So that’s it. I hope you have been able to learn from this article about some of the more important affiliate marketing tools you’d want to have in your toolbox as an affiliate marketer.
Again I re-emphasize that as you progress through your journey, you will be adding tools as it becomes necessary. Not every tool is advised or is needed at the beginning.
Please comment below if you have any feedback or want to share your own affiliate marketing toolkit! Also, feel free to subscribe so you never miss new articles coming out.
Thanks for reading.
