It’s a new year and with affiliate marketing continuing to increase in popularity – The Huffington Post reporting that affiliate marketing is forecasted to reach $6.8 billion by 2020 – it is time for many marketers to set new goals around growth and improvement. The tools you use as an affiliate marketer can play a huge role in reaching your goals, so we gathered a list of affiliate marketing tools you should know about to take your affiliate business to the next level.
We did a little research and asked our community members and affiliate marketers around the world what they consider to be the top affiliate marketing tools and compiled this list. We did our best to research for this article online and using our own experiences and findings through our community and HARO. All mentions are based off of honest research and recommendation and we’d like to thank those who shared their suggestions and experiences with us. So, without further adieu, here are 12 affiliate marketing tools you should know about:
Jungle Scout helps affiliates organize, track, and sift through sales data for thousands of Amazon products. It allows you to search for products that are most important to you as an Amazon seller. You can filter items by key metrics like demand, sales, reviews and more, allowing you to find the best selling opportunities.
Tailwind is a tool that allows for an easy way to manage your presence on Pinterest and Instagram as an affiliate marketer. It includes a variety of marketing tools including smart scheduling, analytics, and monitoring, content discovery, promotion, education, tribes and hashtag suggestions, to name a few.
Longtail Pro is a system that affiliates can use to find the best keywords to rank in Google. It allows you to discover profitable targeted keywords and calculate keyword competitiveness, all while teaching you everything you need to know to research, build and rank a profitable niche site.
Webtexttool gives you a leg up as an affiliate marketer. It allows you to create highly effective content, with no prior technical knowledge. The Webtexttool provides you with live optimization tips while you write, giving you the opportunity to apply the suggestions and rank higher in search engine results. Who doesn’t want optimized text from the first draft?
The team at Uptowork shared this tool with us. They love it and can’t get enough of it because Ahrefs allows them to determine the strengths of potential affiliate partnerships in terms of organic traffic which can be analyzed for every page. They also shared that this tool can be used with SimilarWeb to determine the strength of potential affiliate partners at the domain level. This allows you to see what their users are viewing and interacting with the most. It is also a great tool for backlink research and allows for you to look and see how your competitors are doing, what keywords they are using and how they are performing on these keywords. Finally, you can also target possible affiliates by seeing what influencers are being linked to your competitors and giving them an abundance of backlinks.
As mentioned above, SimilarWeb is a very powerful tool that can be used in concert with Ahrefs to determine the strength of potential affiliate partners at the domain level. It allows you to see what your users are viewing and interacting with the most. We use SimiliarWeb here at Geniuslink. We love it because we consider it to be the easy-to-use version of Google Analytics. If you want some high-level metrics on your site, or any site, at a glance, then SimilarWeb is your tool.
Blogginglove.com points out that as an affiliate marketer, it’s important to know the competition and then decide to start affiliate marketing. Buzzsumo is a great tool that gives you insight into just that. It also provides you with engagement metrics so that you can see what types of content and topics that your readers are drawn to most. You can use it to analyze which topics or products you should write about to achieve maximum conversions and you can also search for affiliate keywords as well.
DDI Development and Online Affiliate World both say that this is a must-have tool for affiliates. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer helps affiliates to write better headlines. All you have to do is put your headline in the tool and it will give you a rating, let you know why your potential audience may not be drawn in by it and it will suggest ways that you can improve it. Best of all? It’s free. Total win.
Buffer is a fantastic tool that makes scheduling social media posts a breeze. We actually use Buffer here at Geniuslink. We absolutely love it. It keeps our social channels brimming with content for weeks after spending just an hour or two curating and scheduling our posts for all of our channels. Another thing that we love? Buffer also allows you to track and analyze the performance of your posts of all of your social media accounts in one place.
Online Affiliate World raves about SEMrush. SEMrush will provide you with search data for any website and for any search engine. It tells you how well you and anyone else is doing when it comes to being found online and it will show you how you measure up compared to your competitors and how far you have to match or surpass them.
For the very advanced affiliate marketer, Trackonomics is the dashboard to pull in all of your affiliate data. The “Bloomberg Terminal of Affiliate Marketing” takes the important information from a growing number affiliate programs and networks normalizes and sanitizes it into a single dashboard where data truly becomes information. It’s not cheap but it sure is powerful!
Ahem, humblebrag, coming up.
The last tool is our very own – the Genius Link Service! Geniuslink is referred to as “a heavenly tool for anyone who is part of the Amazon Associates Program” by entrepreneur, blogger, and podcaster Pat Flynn. It’s a link translation/link management service that empowers you with a single, unbreakable link that will direct to the local storefront no matter where the shopper is clicking from. This means an impeccable user experience for your global shoppers and more cash in your pocket. Some Geniuslink clients have reported a 200% increase in affiliate commissions after signing up. Now that’s a win, win.
If you want to give us a spin, we have a no-risk free trial. Give it a whirl and see if you can immediately increase your commissions.