There is more information than ever on what software is most helpful to affiliate marketers, especially since there seems to be more tools coming out every day.
If you haven’t already surrounded yourself with a community of affiliate marketers, it can get difficult to decipher what tools are necessary and where is truly the best place to find them.
That’s why we wrote this compilation. If you’ve been following along with the Geniuslink blog, you’ve seen that we love interviewing tried and true affiliate marketers to reveal best practices in the affiliate space. Since starting our Affiliate Profile interviews, we have started to see trends in what these pros recommend. Most specifically what tools they recommend.
One question we always ask is:
What is one piece of software or a web service (besides Geniuslink) that allows you to be more effective as an affiliate marketer?
So we got to thinking, what tools have people been recommending for the past year? Hopefully, this can be a great place to start if you’re new to affiliate marketing, or a great conversation starter for all the pros out there.
Almost Half of the Affiliates Interviewed Recommended Ahrefs.
If you’re not already utilizing Ahrefs, here is what our veteran affiliates said about it:
Farasat Khan: As an affiliate marketer, I have hands-on experience with lots of tools. But lately, Ahrefs has been the Swiss Army knife for SEO. Their database is huge and is constantly updated. It not only helps me keep an eye on my efforts but also allows me to research my competitors very efficiently.
Joe Clements: The one piece of software I absolutely couldn’t live without is Ahrefs. I use it every single day. From brainstorming new topics to go after tracking keyword rankings. It’s also very good for keeping an eye on the competition. The other service I rely on is Asana. I use this to run my entire editorial team, as well as keep track of everything that is going on in my business from marketing to quarterly objectives.
Bill Andrews: For me, it is Ahrefs. Typically, I know what I want to write about but using Ahrefs allows me to use data to back up my hypothesis. Additionally, it has been invaluable for me as I search for link building opportunities and insights into what my competition is doing.
Darcy Ogdan-Nolan: Ahrefs is an affiliate marketer’s best friend. Everything we do to craft our strategy and build our site out is done on the back of Ahrefs. Granted, it isn’t the cheapest software on the market but back to my previous point – some things are just worth paying for.
Andy Feliciotti: First I just want to note a site I learned about from Kraig Adams called Payoneer. This service makes it easy for you to get paid from international affiliate programs. That being said Ahrefs has been a tool I use almost daily to track my SEO efforts.
Winston Nguyen: Ahrefs – I use it for market research (it’s great for determining competition), traffic estimates, monitoring backlinks, and building backlinks. I also use Keywords Everywhere for keyword research.
Angelo Sorbello: Ahrefs is my favorite tool, ever. It makes me save so much time and makes me a more efficient marketer. The second tool I use the most is Lemlist to send outreach e-mails for link building.
John Holloway: Ahrefs all the way. A great tool that helps me find topics that our visitors would find helpful and interesting. We aim to be a top educational resource on life insurance, so covering all the important topics is key.
Other Recommended Tools to Consider
Ben Taylor: I tend to recommend Trello to anybody willing to listen. It’s just such an easy way to organize projects, thoughts, plans, and ideas.
Miguel Oña: I like Travelpayouts.com for flights (Kayak), hotels (Booking), transport (Omio), and rental cars.
And Civitatis for activities and tours in the Spanish language (All my blogs are in Spanish).
Evan Ankney: I am heavily into analytics, so Google Analytics is a must for me. I have everything tagged on my website, so I know when people click on affiliate links, what affiliate links they clicked on, where they came from, etc.
Whitney Bonds: Strike Out No Follow Links is a free Google Chrome extension that helps you figure out what Affiliate links your competition is using (or that’s at least why I use it) by automatically crossing out any link that is a no-follow link. Typically you always want your affiliate links to appear as “no follow” because you don’t want the search engines to crawl those URLs. It could appear that you’re being ‘salesy’ with affiliate links throughout your article and the search engines do not want to promote that. No follow links are your way to get around it.
Regina Caligiuri: When it comes to affiliate marketing, SEO goes hand in hand. The better your SEO game, the more traffic you will get, driving more affiliate sales. I have dabbled with many SEO tools, some paid and some free. The one tool I have come to use daily is SEOquake. SEOquake is a free toolbar that is an extension for the Chrome browser. Once installed, it will give you tons of stats right in the SERP search.
Stacy Caprio: TablePress is a great plugin or tool for any affiliate marketer because it allows you to compare products and easily structure your posts for more effective SEO.
Adam Weiss: As I’ve started my own business – I’ve found HubSpot to be a great tool to use to track what I’m working on and who I’m connecting with. I’m also, maybe obviously, an advocate for the affiliate networks & platforms and the value they provide to all the partners in our space.
Daniel Gillaspia: Google Trends is a fantastic tool and can come in handy when researching niches, topics, and keywords. If you are dealing with a topic, niche, or area that emerged within a single state or region, you can use Google Trends to help predict how that niche will emerge nationwide and that’s a trick I’ve found pretty useful.
Tommo Williams: Convertkit, or any good quality email marketing system. Although I mentioned before that targeting buyer keywords is by far the most efficient affiliate model, you still have users who are not quite ready to buy, and within any niche, there are also likely to be outlying keywords that are people close to wanting to purchase, but not as close as for buyer keywords.
Erin Trafford: I love to use the Mediavine Create card plugin to create round-ups and lists.
Florencia Zaccagnino: I use Google Analytics and Search Console to know what the readers are searching for, which words and links are they interested in, and I will create more of those topics or types of posts.
Kendal Clarke: We have started running more contests using Gleam, which has been great in helping drive user engagement, get a newsletter and social signups, and build closer relationships with brands. Gleam has been easy to use, relatively affordable, and flexible with the contest signup actions.
Matthew Allen: As the co-founder of the best damn a that ever existed – I would be foolish to not mention AmaLinks Pro here. AmaLinks Pro makes inserting Amazon affiliate links so fast and easy (without ever leaving WordPress), and it also provides options to insert beautiful and engaging link types. Our Showcase Boxes (product information boxes) and state-of-the-art Product Comparison Tables are unlike anything else you can build with other plugins. Oh! – and did I mention that AmaLinks Pro is fully compatible with Geniuslink and they work amazingly well in conjunction with each other?
Khris Steven: I use a bunch of tools, ranging content marketing tools, keyword research tools, email marketing tools, WordPress plugins, and a dedicated sales funnel builder.
One which I can’t really do without that allows me to be more effective is the lead capture plugin (Thrive Leads) that helps in building my list and owning my owner traffic for nurturing and following up with affiliate offers.
Jeremy Owens: I recommend new affiliate marketers to invest in a paid web hosting plan. Although it is already common knowledge to do so, I still see rookies create this suicidal mistake. As such, it is worthy of mention.
For more advanced tools for affiliate marketing, I recommend using Pretty Links to manage and track earnings from all of your affiliate links. Aside from affiliate link management, it is also perfect for email campaigns with its proprietary “cloaking feature” that enables marketers to put affiliate links in emails discreetly.
James Canzenella: Surfer SEO. This tool is so good that I slightly hesitated to even mention it here. In a nutshell, it helps with your on-page SEO efforts and moving up in Google. It’s also very easy to use, and I’m looking forward to the updates that they will be adding in the future.
Nick Rasmussen: I now oversee every step of the partnerships lifecycle through a combination of Mediarails by Impact, and the Streak CRM. Each one of these makes your life as an affiliate marketer much smoother.
Domingo Karsten: As an investor, I’m not completely without bias here, but if you want to take your affiliate marketing efforts to the next level with paid advertising I truly recommend We Can Track to automatically integrate conversion data into Google-, Facebook- and Microsoft Ads.
Feel free to check out full interviews in the Affiliate Profile section of our blog. Additionally, if there is other software you recommend, don’t be shy! We’d love to hear about it in the comments.
