Affiliate Marketing Tools: The 10 Tools Every Marketer Needs

Do you want to be able to work from home and set your own hours? Discover the techniques that the most successful affiliate marketers utilize to create their businesses!

Who doesn’t want to be able to work from anywhere in the globe without having to follow a strict schedule?

Top affiliate marketers don’t have to fantasize about living this lifestyle; they have the opportunity to do so.

People are trading in the 9–5 lifestyle for the chance to be their own boss, and affiliate marketing is becoming increasingly popular.

The only problem with this idea is that turning it into an affiliate marketer is a difficult task. Building a long-term affiliate marketing business is becoming increasingly difficult due to the growing popularity of digital marketing.

So how do you build a successful affiliate marketing business? You start with the right tools.

We’ve built out a list of the 17+ best affiliate marketing tools that you need to use. We’ll continue to add new tools to this list every few weeks, so check back regularly.

Our favorite affiliate marketing tools:

1. Flippa

Flippa is a must-have for anyone looking to skip the steps of creating a successful affiliate site from the ground up. Individuals can buy and sell websites on this site, which acts as a bidding marketplace (think eBay for websites). Flippa enables affiliate marketers to purchase sites with a high backlink profile in order to jumpstart their SEO growth.

One thing to note: we recommend running a full backlink audit before buying a domain, check to see whether it’s been inflated by black-hat SEO techniques like PBNs. We’ve seen far too many affiliate marketers purchase a site with a strong backlink profile, only to be penalized by a Penguin algorithm update as a result of the previous site owner’s black hat link-building practices.

2. ShareASale

Building agreements with sites in need of revenue is the first step in affiliate marketing. CJ Affiliate and Impact are two affiliate networks that we’ve tried out. However, when it comes to affiliate partnerships, ShareASale is our go-to option.

ShareASale connects publishers with advertisers searching for assistance in increasing sales. Publishers can be compensated for each phone call, lead, or website visitor that they generate for a client.

While working directly with advertisers would almost always result in a bigger income per transaction for affiliate marketers, ShareASale is a wonderful place to start.

3. SEMRush

SEMRush is our go-to tool for keyword research, fixing SEO mistakes, and competitor analysis. Fair warning: I’ve been using this tool daily since 2012, so I’m a bit biased here.

This tool is a must-have for marketers who are looking to understand what content is driving the highest ROI for competitors, as well as analyzing on-page SEO issues.

Some of the primary things that we use SEMRush for:

• Finding top performing competitor content that we should be writing about
• Monitoring our keyword rankings on a weekly basis
• Running SEO audits to watch for website issues that could hurt our search rankings
• Monitoring press mentions

4. Ahrefs

SEMRush and Ahrefs perform many of the same tasks (keyword research, on-page audits, competitive content analysis, etc). Backlinks, on the other hand, are given far more weight by Ahrefs than on-page SEO.

Ahrefs gives marketers detailed information on new and lost backlinks, sites linking to your website’s broken pages, and rival backlink growth.

Some of the primary things that we use Ahrefs for are:

• Reviewing new and lost backlinks to our site
• Reviewing competitor link profiles to find new link building opportunities
• Finding sites that are linking to broken pages on our site (and then 301’ing those pages to another relevant page)
• Finding top-performing competitor content to identify new content ideas for your site

Two of our team’s preferred SEO tools are Ahrefs and SEMRush. Most business owners, however, cannot afford to invest in both services.

For those who are competing against much larger sites, we recommend Ahrefs. SEMRush is recommended for people who are already at or near the top of their industry (more about this in our SEO FAQs). Furthermore, for individuals who want to compare the two, both offer a free trial of their service.

P.S. Read how we use these two tools in our keyword research.

5. Yoast SEO

This is the first SEO plugin that we add to any site that we work on. Yoast SEO provides advanced SEO functionality to every page, including:

• Title tag & meta description customization
• Canonical link customization
• Sitemap creation and customization
• Meta robots customization

This is a completely free utility. The paid version, on the other hand, includes 24/7 assistance and an advanced reroute manager. You can use this redirect manager to reroute broken pages or 410 pages that should be removed from search results.

Looking for help managing content marketing and SEO? Learn about our content marketing services to see how we would help you to scale.

6. Grammarly

Grammarly is a must-have for affiliate marketers that publish content on a regular basis. In a nutshell, Grammarly is a spell-checker on steroids.

Grammarly not only highlights spelling mistakes. It also detects grammatical problems such as the misuse of words and commas.

This tool is used by our staff in its free version. The commercial edition, on the other hand, includes far more sophisticated content review features.

P.S. We recommend downloading the desktop app as well as the browser extension.

7. Duplichecker

Grammarly is a must-have for affiliate marketers who often post material. In a nutshell, Grammarly is a super-charged spell-checker.

Grammarly does more than just point out mistakes in spelling. It also detects grammatical errors such as misspellings and comma misuse.

Our team uses the free version of this product. The commercial edition, on the other hand, comes with significantly more advanced content assessment tools.

We run every article that our team produces through this tool.

8. Hemingway

Another excellent article review tool is Hemingway. The Hemingway app, based on Ernest Hemingway’s writing, assists you in simplifying your writing.

You want to make your writing more simple, right?

Yes, since it doesn’t matter if you know what “nudiustertian” means (and they have zero interest in going to the dictionary to look it up).

Your readers are looking for information. Not the nonsense you throw in to make yourself sound clever.

Hemingway can assist you in simplifying difficult statements. It also highlights adverbs and complicated words that can be replaced with simpler alternatives.

9. Sumo

Getting people to visit your website is a good thing. It’s preferable to convert them into consumers.

The majority of internet visitors will not be prepared to use their credit card the first time they visit your site.

So, how are you going to make money off of these visitors? When they’re ready to buy, you sell to them.

The most successful affiliate marketers recognize that building an email list is the most effective approach to scale. This allows them to attract repeat visitors who will buy things from them in the future.

Sumo offers an easy way to install email capture forms on your site (and they even offer a free version of their service).

10. Google AdSense

It’s nice to get paid for each recommendation, but why stop there? As you grow, Google AdSense provides a second cash stream.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with AdSense, here’s how it works:

AdSense allows you to set up ad blocks throughout your site that other sites can pay to use. You can select payment per ad on your site in a handful of different manners:

1. CPM (cost per thousand impressions) — get paid a flat fee per thousand website pageviews to a given ad. Rates can range from $1-$3, and go much higher for niche categories.
2. CPC (cost per click) — get paid for every ad click on your site. Rates will vary from one industry to the next. However, $1/click and a 1% click-through rate (CTR) is a safe benchmark to work with to estimate expected earnings.