15 Best Affiliate Marketing Tools
- February 22, 2024
Affiliate marketing is one of the most exciting and fastest growing marketing channels heading into 2024.
Through the channel, motivated brands get to pay passionate content creators, rather than giving more money to big tech in the form of advertising.
As the industry is growing rapidly, the tools affiliate marketers use changes often.
To help direct you to the marketing software that top affiliate marketers are using today, I’ve assembled a list of the 15 most popular and powerful tools.
How I Built This List
In order to create this list of the best affiliate tools, I’ve only included software that I’ve personally used, as an affiliate marketer with seven years of experience, and two exits.
Each tool on this list performs a different function, in order to avoid overlap. I’ve also included software options that are used by different types of affiliates (bloggers, YouTubers, social media marketers, and more).
What is an Affiliate Tool?
Lastly, before we jump into this list, I wanted to clarify what an affiliate tool is.
To me, an affiliate tool is any software that an affiliate uses to do what they do, regardless of whether the tool is directly related to affiliate marketing.
For example, we mention Ahrefs on this list, and while technically the tool itself doesn’t have anything to do with affiliate marketing, top affiliate marketers use it in their workflows, therefore making it an affiliate tool for the purposes of this list.
1. Geniuslink - Link Management Tool
First on this list, we have Geniuslink, an intelligent link management service. Using the platform, creators can generate shortened or branded links, with tons of powerful features built into them.
What Geniuslink is most known for, is its Amazon Associates integration that automatically redirects Amazon clicks to the correct international storefront, with higher accuracy than Amazon Onelink, while retaining the right affiliate tracking parameter, ensuring affiliates earn commissions.
However, our software does a lot more, so below we’ll dive into some of our most popular features.
Geniuslink Features
- Advanced Analytics: Gain access to insights and analytics about the traffic that passes through your links. Information such as clicks over time, countries, referrers, data, is provided.
- Automatic Affiliation: Geniuslink ensures every single affiliate link you create will affiliate properly, maximizing your commissions.
- Link Health: For supported programs, Geniuslink will alert affiliates if the products they are sending traffic to are out of stock, protecting against link rot and commission theft.
- Dynamic Link Destinations: Create logic and rulesets for your intelligent links to follow, dynamically directing traffic to different destinations depending on characteristics like their country, referrer, and more.
- Pixel Retargeting: Retarget visitors going to any destination – even sites you don’t manage such as Facebook, Google Adwords, and more.
- A/B Tests: Automatically route a percentage of your clicks to different destinations for the same audience segment. Compare landing page and storefront performance.
Geniuslink Pricing
Geniuslink has a two week free trial, and starts at just $6/m for up to 1000 clicks, costing an additional $2.50 for every 1000 clicks routed through your links.
Who's Geniuslink For?
Geniuslink is for any content creator that uses links to direct traffic across the internet, regardless of the content medium they produce.
Compared to other link cloaking software, Geniuslink’s feature set is designed with affiliate marketers in mind, but any content creator can benefit from it greatly.
2. ConvertKit - Email Marketing Tool
ConvertKit is an email marketing tool made specifically for content creators. Like other email marketing tools, it hosts your email list, and provides a suite of tools making it easy for you to grow it.
ConvertKit Features
- Customizable email templates: ConvertKit has prebuilt templates for creators to make professional email layouts without needing to code.
- Automation and Sequences: ConvertKit supports automated email sequences that trigger under certain conditions or subscriber actions, such as welcome emails for new subscribers or a follow-up email after a purchase.
- Sign-up Forms and Landing Pages: ConvertKit offers a variety of customizable sign-up forms and landing pages to help with email capture.
- Segmentation and Personalization: ConvertKit allows for advanced segmentation of email lists based on subscriber behavior, preferences, and other custom criteria. This enables targeted and personalized email campaigns, increasing engagement.
- Integrations: ConvertKit integrates with a wide range of other platforms and services, including e-commerce platforms, membership sites, and webinar tools, enhancing its functionality.
- Analytics and Reporting: ConvertKit provides detailed analytics on email opens, clicks, conversions, and subscriber growth.
ConvertKit Pricing
ConvertKit’s pricing depends on the selected plan (Free, Creator, Creator Pro) as well as the number of subscribers on your list. There’s also a two week free trial for each plan.
The free plan is limited in features and is only for lists with under 1,000 subscribers. The Creator plans start as cheap as $9/m, with the Creator Pro plan starting at $25/m.
Most affiliates will be served well on their Creator plan, giving them access to sequences and automations.
Who Is ConvertKit For?
ConvertKit is best for affiliates who take their list seriously and as an integral part of their marketing strategy. ConvertKit is used by affiliates of all types, regardless of whether they’re primarily bloggers, YouTube, social media based.
If you’re just getting started with your email list, and don’t need all the power of ConvertKit, consider taking a look at a more beginner friendly provider like Mailerlite.
3. Affilimate - Commission Reporting Tool
Affilimate is an affiliate analytics platform designed for publishers and content creators looking to track and optimize their affiliate marketing efforts in one place.
Affilimate integrates with most affiliate networks, providing a unified dashboard for tracking your performance, clicks, revenue, and other key metrics across your affiliate links.
Affilimate Features
- Revenue Attribution and Analysis: Affilimate provides advanced attribution analytics to see which content, and even individual links drive conversions.
- Link Creation: Affilimate gives affiliates the option to generate affiliate links inside the platform, speeding up the content creation process.
- Heatmaps for Click Tracking: Affilimate has heatmaps that show where users are clicking on a page. This visual tool helps in optimizing the placement of affiliate links and understanding user interaction patterns.
Affilimate Pricing
Affiliates pricing is not public as they have a screening and onboarding process to ensure customers are the right fit. If you’re interested in the tool you can schedule a demo here.
Who Is Affilimate For
Affilimate is best for affiliates and publishers who primarily blog, and want to get deep into the analytics and optimization of their websites.
It’s not a cheap tool either, making it not a great choice for beginner affiliate marketers, who may not see an ROI from their CRO efforts.
4. Ahrefs - Keyword Research Tool
Ahrefs is an industry leading SEO tool used by some of the world’s largest brands, and helps marketers conduct keyword research, competitor analysis, website audits, and much more.
By using the data provided by Ahrefs, affiliates can be more informed on what content they should create, as well as track their progress over time.
Ahrefs Features
- Site Explorer: Ahref’s site explorer gives a top down overview of any website, letting you view metrics like organic search traffic and backlink profile.
- Keywords Explorer: Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer provides extensive data on keyword search volume, keyword difficulty, click-through rates, and related keywords. Affiliates use this to find new keyword opportunities.
- Content Explorer: This feature allows affiliates to discover the most popular content for any topic or keyword.
- Rank Tracker: Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker monitors a website’s rankings over time for chosen keywords. It tracks ranking progress, compares it with competitors, and provides insights into SERP features that are driving the most traffic.
- Site Audit: The Site Audit tool crawls a website to identify SEO issues that might be hindering its performance in search engines. It checks for issues like slow-loading pages, missing meta tags, broken links, and more.
Pricing
Ahrefs pricing starts at $99/m for the Lite plan, going all the way up to $999/m for the Enterprise plan.
Most content marketers will get by just fine on their standard plan which is $199/m. It’s certainly an expensive tool, but it’s value to affiliate marketers can’t be understated.
Who Is Ahrefs For?
Ahrefs is another affiliate marketing tool that take SEO seriously and as one of their main traffic channels. If you’re not blogging for your affiliate traffic, it’s likely not needed for you.
5. Impact - Leading Affiliate Network
Impact.com is a leading affiliate marketing network, and facilitates the interactions between merchants and affiliates.
On the platform, there are two different login portals, one for merchants and the other for affiliates.
Impact hosts some of the highest quality affiliate programs out there, like Apple, Microsoft, Walmart, making it a great idea for affiliates to have an account with them.
Impact Features
- Partnership Discovery and Recruitment: Impact offers tools for discovering and recruiting potential partners, allowing businesses to find and engage with the most relevant partners for their brand.
- Automated Contracting and Onboarding: Impact streamlines the process of legal contract creation and onboarding of new affiliate partners.
- Tracking and Attribution: Impact provides all the advanced tracking and attribution technology needed, allowing merchants to accurately track the sales, leads, clicks, and other KPIs of each partner.
- Flexible Commission Structures: Impact supports various commission structures, including CPA (cost per action), CPC (cost per click), and revenue sharing models.
Impact Pricing
Impact is free for affiliate marketers to join, however there is a screening process to go through in order to gain access to the Impact marketplace, where affiliates will find the widest selection of offers to promote.
Affiliates can be invited by brands to join and promote them specifically, bypassing this screening process but limiting accessibility to the marketplace.
Who Is Impact For?
Impact is for both merchants and affiliates, and in my experience, has the highest quality of affiliate offers, giving it the spot for best affiliate network on this list.
Affiliate networks like ShareASale, Awin, and Avantlink are also worth taking a look at for more high quality affiliate offers.
6. TubeBuddy
TubeBuddy is a browser extension and mobile app that helps YouTube creators with tools to manage and optimize their channels.
TubeBuddy Features
- Advanced Video SEO Tools: TubeBuddy provides tools for optimizing video titles, descriptions, tags, and thumbnails to improve search visibility and ranking on YouTube.
- Bulk Processing: The bulk processing feature allows users to update video details, such as descriptions and tags, across multiple videos simultaneously.
- Thumbnail Generator: TubeBuddy includes a thumbnail generator that helps creators design eye-catching thumbnails using still frames from videos and custom text, shapes, and images.
- A/B Testing: This feature enables creators to test different thumbnails, titles, tags, and descriptions to see which variations perform the best, helping to optimize viewer engagement and click-through rates.
- Publishing and Scheduling Tools: TubeBuddy allows users to schedule videos and create publish checklists to ensure all best practices are followed before a video goes live.
- Channel Analytics and Health Reports: The tool provides detailed analytics and health reports, offering insights into channel performance, subscriber growth, view trends, and more.
- Competitor Analysis: TubeBuddy enables creators to track and analyze competitors’ channels, providing insights into their strategies and performance, which can inform content and growth strategies.
TubeBuddy Pricing
TubeBuddy’s cheapest plan starts at $7.50/m, but for beginner YouTubers under 1000 subscribers, you can get 50% off using the code “RisingStarBuddy.” Their legend plan starts at $33/m, and is their most comprehensive solution.
Who is TubeBuddy For?
TubeBuddy is really for all YouTubers that are looking to consistently pump out content. It fills a similar role that Ahrefs does but for Youtubers. It’s also extremely affordable making it a great option even for beginner YouTubers.
7. RankMath - Best SEO Plugin for WordPress Bloggers
Rank Math is an SEO plugin for WordPress websites, designed to help optimize content for better search engine ranking.
Additionally, Rank Math integrates with Google Analytics and provides detailed analysis of website traffic and SEO effectiveness.
Rankmath Features
- User-Friendly Setup Wizard: Rank Math has an easy-to-follow setup wizard that helps users configure the plugin according to their site’s specific SEO needs.
- On-Page SEO Analysis: The plugin provides an advanced on-page SEO analysis, offering real-time insights and recommendations for optimizing individual posts and pages. This includes checks for focus keywords, content length, meta tags, and readability.
- Advanced Keyword Optimization: Rank Math allows users to optimize their content for multiple focus keywords, including synonyms. It offers suggestions to improve keyword usage and density within the content.
- Rich Snippets and Schema Markup: The plugin supports a wide range of Schema types, helping users add structured data to their posts, which can enhance visibility in search engine results through rich snippets.
- XML Sitemap and Breadcrumbs: Rank Math automatically generates XML sitemaps and supports breadcrumb navigation, both of which are crucial for effective SEO.
- Google Search Console Integration: The plugin integrates directly with Google Search Console, allowing users to monitor search performance, keyword rankings, and index status directly from their WordPress dashboard.
- 404 Monitor and Redirection Manager: The plugin includes tools to monitor 404 errors and easily set up redirects, which is essential for maintaining a healthy site structure and user experience.
Rank Math Pricing
RankMath charges just $5.75/m for their pro plan, which should be more than enough to get its most important features.
Who is RankMath For?
RankMath is for affiliates that primarily blog, and use WordPress as their content management system. Its main competitor is Yoast SEO, so if you’re not using any SEO affiliate plugin, consider one of the two.
8. Clearscope - On-Page SEO Optimization Tool
Clearscope is an SEO content optimization tool that helps writers and marketers rank higher on Google through the use of AI and NLP.
The main feature Clearscope is known for is its keyword and entity recommendation features. Their AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithm scans the top results for a keyword, and lists the words and entities to include in an article based on what Google is rewarding in the Search Engine Results Pages.
Clearscope Features
- Keyword Research and Analysis: Clearscope provides in-depth keyword research capabilities. It helps users identify relevant and high-performing keywords for their content, ensuring that they target terms that are likely to drive traffic and engagement.
- Content Grade and Recommendations: The tool analyzes content and assigns a grade based on how well it’s optimized for targeted keywords. It offers actionable recommendations on how to improve content, such as suggesting additional relevant terms, optimizing for readability, and adjusting content length.
- Search Intent Understanding: The tool analyzes search intent, helping users create content that aligns with what searchers are looking for. This improves the chances of the content ranking higher in search engine results pages (SERPs).
- Integration with Content Management Systems: Clearscope can integrate with various content management systems, like WordPress and Google Docs streamlining the workflow.
Clearscope Pricing
Clearscope’s pricing starts at $199/m, which includes 15 content reports per month. Depending on how many articles you’re trying revise or put out a month, you may need a higher plan.
Who is Clearscope For?
Clearscope is meant for bloggers who are serious about their content and its SEO ranking. It’s a pretty expensive tool, but depending on the income generated from your blog, using its features to increase your blog posts rankings can more than pay for itself.
9. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, providing insights into user behavior and engagement.
Google Analytics 4 let’s website owners and marketers to understand how visitors interact with their site, including which pages are most visited, the duration of their stay, and the source of the traffic.
This powerful tool also offers advanced features like goal tracking, e-commerce reporting, and audience demographics, enabling users to make data-driven decisions to optimize their website and marketing strategies.
Google Analytics Features:
Traffic Reporting: Google Analytics tracks and reports website traffic, giving insights into the number of visitors, page views, session duration, bounce rates, and more. It allows users to understand how visitors are interacting with their website and which pages are the most popular.
Audience Demographics and Interests: The tool provides detailed information about the audience, including demographics like age, gender, interests, geographical location, and the devices they use. This data helps in understanding the target audience and tailoring content and marketing strategies accordingly.
Real-Time Reporting: Google Analytics offers real-time reporting, showing what is happening on a site at any given moment. This includes the number of active users, their geographic locations, the pages they are viewing, and their actions.
Acquisition Data: It shows how users arrive at a website, whether it’s through search engines (organic traffic), social media, referrals from other websites, or direct visits. This helps in analyzing the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and SEO efforts.
Conversion Tracking: Google Analytics allows the setting up and tracking of specific goals, such as form submissions, product purchases, or any other actions deemed as conversions. This is key for measuring the effectiveness of a website in achieving business objectives.
Customizable Dashboards and Reports: Users can create custom dashboards and reports that focus on specific metrics important to their business or marketing goals. These can be set up to provide regular updates on key performance indicators.
Google Analytic Pricing
Google Analytics is and always has been a completely free tool to use!
Who is Google Analytics For?
Google Analytics is a staple in the website and blogging world, with nearly every website taking advantage of its powerful feature set.
Many website owners are frustrated over the forced migration from Universal Analytics over to Google Analytics, and have looked for some of the paid analytics platforms like Fathom or Plausible.
10. LinkWhisper - WordPress Internal Linking Tool
Link Whisper is a WordPress plugin designed to simplify and enhance the process of internal link building.
It uses artificial intelligence to suggest relevant internal links which helps improves SEO and user engagement.
Link Whisper also provides insights and reporting on a websites link structure, making it easier for website owners to identify and fix broken links and enhance their site’s navigability and rankings.
LinkWhisper Features
- Automated Link Suggestions: Link Whisper uses artificial intelligence to suggest relevant internal links.
- Easy Link Management: The plugin provides a user-friendly interface for adding, editing, and managing internal links throughout your website. You can quickly insert suggested links with a single click or modify them as needed.
- In-Depth Link Reporting: Link Whisper offers detailed reporting on your site’s internal linking structure. You can see how many inbound and outbound internal links each post has, identify posts with few or no internal links, and spot opportunities to improve your internal link structure.
- Broken Link Checker: The plugin includes a feature to identify and fix broken internal links. This is crucial for maintaining a healthy, user-friendly website and avoiding negative SEO impacts from dead or incorrect links.
Linkwhisper Pricing
Who Is LinkWhisper For
LinkWhisper is best for affiliates who are primarily bloggers that use WordPress. As a website becomes larger with more articles, the value of this tool increases, as the manual process of internal linking can become overbearing.
11. Affiliatable - Affiliate Display Generator
Affiliatable is an on page display builder for website owners and content creators.
Affiliates can use the plugin to create comparison tables, product boxes, and top picks lists that are visually appealing and CRO optimized.
Affiliatable integrates with various affiliate programs and provides an easy-to-use interface, allowing users to efficiently design and implement affiliate elements into their websites to boost engagement and revenue.
Affiliatable Features
- Product Boxes: Affiliatable allows for the creation of attractive product boxes that can be embedded in website content. These boxes typically include product images, descriptions, ratings, and affiliate links, providing a concise and engaging way to showcase affiliate products.
- Top Picks Lists: Users can create “Top Picks” lists, which are effective for highlighting recommended products or best sellers.
- Customizable Designs: Affiliatable offers customizable design options for all its elements, without its users needing to know how to code.
- Supports All Websites: Affiliatable integrates easily with all websites, regardless of whether they’re WordPress based.
Affiliatable Pricing
Affiliatable works off of a per site license model, in groupings of 1, 5, and 10. They also have a free plan, that can be a great starting point for affiliates, but as you become a power user of the service, you’ll want to consider upgrading to a paid version to gain access to their premium templates, schema features, and Geniuslink integration.
Who's Affiliatable For?
Affiliatable is for affiliate marketers that use blogging as their main traffic source, and want to create custom displays to improve their call to actions and increase their conversion rates.
12. Loom
Loom is a video tool that makes it easy for creators to film their screen and camera at any point in time, and instantly share a link for collaborates to view. Loom videos can also be downloaded immediately, making it a great tool for filming affiliate tutorials.
Loom Features
- Simultaneous Recording: Record your camera, microphone, and desktop screen simultaneously. This feature is particularly useful for creating detailed and engaging presentations or tutorials.
- Instantly Shareable Videos: Once recorded, videos are instantly available to share via a custom link. Loom videos can also be easily downloaded, making it a great way to stitch content together.
- Unlimited Storage and Extended Recording Length: Users on higher-tier plans have access to unlimited storage and can record videos up to 6 hours long.
- HD Recording, Click Emphasis, and Drawing Tools: These features enhance the clarity and interactivity of videos, making them more engaging and informative.
Loom Pricing
Loom has a free plan that lets creators shoot up to five minutes of video, however it comes with loom branding is unable to be downloaded.
For just $12.50/m, the business plan suits most customers needs, and allows for unlimited shooting time, recordings, and most importantly, the ability to download the videos.
Who is Loom For?
Loom is great for all marketers looking to record their own computer screen, and easily distribute and share it. If you create affiliate content primarily in the form of text, it may not be a great option for you.
For affiliates that make a lot of onscreen tutorials, or collaborate in teams and create standard operating procedures, it’s a great software.
13. Camtasia
Camtasia is a comprehensive video editing software and screen recorder that offers various features for creating professional-quality videos.
While it offers high-resolution screen capture, separate recording of microphone, system audio, similar to Loom, it’s intuitive interface and drag-and-drop functionality make it a great video editing tool.
Camtasia also provides a range of assets like templates, music, and effects for creative video editing, along with cursor effects for enhanced viewer engagement.
Camtasia Features
- Screen Recording: Captures high-resolution screen activity.
- Separate Track Editing: Allows individual editing of microphone, system audio, camera, and cursor tracks.
- Intuitive Interface: User-friendly drag-and-drop functionality for ease of use.
- Templates and Assets: Variety of pre-made templates and design elements.
- Cursor Effects: Enhances cursor visibility to guide viewer attention.
- 4K Video Editing: Supports editing high-resolution video content.
Levanta
Levanta.io is an affiliate marketing platform that allows for direct partnerships between Amazon sellers and publishers.
Using the Amazon Attribution API, merchants can determine which off-site campaign results in a sale, and attribute it to a particular affiliate.
This let’s you do affiliate marketing on top of Amazon, with custom commission rates (some go as high as 30%!) and a longer 14 day cookie window.
Levanta has a wide variety of products covering most niches, and is growing rapidly with new ASINs being added every day. Amazon Affiliates will find massively elevated commission rates compared to the Amazon Associates program, while still being able to participate in both.
Levanta Features
- Direct Partnership Integration with Amazon: Levanta integrates with Amazon’s Attribution API, allowing Amazon sellers and publishers to partner directly. This integration enables enhanced commission opportunities and provides a 14-day attribution window.
- Custom Performance Reporting: The platform offers custom performance reporting tools. These tools are crucial for sellers and creators to track and analyze the effectiveness of their affiliate marketing strategies on Amazon.
- Effective Tracking and Management: Levanta allows Amazon sellers to effectively track and manage their associates.
- Comprehensive Affiliate Dashboard for Creators: Levanta provides an all-in-one Amazon affiliate dashboard for creators to manage links, review affiliate income, and track performance with easy-to-use reporting tools.
- Simple Setup and Account Management: Levanta offers a straightforward setup process for both brands and merchants. Affiliates can be onboarded to the platform for free after a short approval process. Brands have to select between the different plans, but can upload their Amazon catalogue onto the site in just a couple clicks.
Levanta Pricing
On the affiliates end, Levanta is a completely free tool and functions very similar to an affiliate network.
For brands and merchants, Levanta’s Standard plan starts at $150/m + 5% of affiliate sales revenue, with Levanta Gold coming in at $750/m and 3.5% of affiliate sales revenue.
Who is Levanta for?
As stated above, Levanta is a two sided partnership platform for both sellers looking to growth their sales, or any affiliate that drives traffic to Amazon.
Any Amazon affiliate can join quickly and start promoting products right away. They may find products they already promote on the platform already, giving them a free boost to their Amazon EPC.
15. Canva
Lastly, but certainly not least is Canva, a user-friendly graphic design platform that offers templates, design tools, and a vast library of images. Canva makes it easy for affiliates to create professional visual content, such as thumbnails, featured images, and infographics for their content.
Canva Features
- Templates: Offers a wide range of customizable templates for presentations, social media graphics, flyers, and more, suitable for various purposes and industries.
- Photo Editor: Provides tools for cropping, filtering, and adjusting images, as well as advanced photo editing options like background removal.
- Drag-and-Drop Interface: Simplifies design creation with an intuitive interface that allows easy placement and adjustment of elements.
- Collaboration Tools: Facilitates teamwork on designs by allowing multiple users to edit and comment in real-time.
- Brand Kit: Centralizes brand-specific assets like logos, color schemes, and fonts for consistent branding across designs.
- Design Elements: Provides a vast library of graphics, photos, icons, and other elements to enhance designs.
Canva Pricing
Canva has a Free plan, and it can work fine for those just getting started with the platform. For those that want to make Canva a regular part of their workflow, and gain access to hundreds of templates and premium designs, then consider upgrading to their paid plan Canva Pro.
Who is Canva for?
Canva is a powerful tool for any affiliate marketer that wants to design their own thumbnails, featured images, and infographics.
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