Table of Contents
Content Tools
I’m a firm believer in the phrase ‘content is king’.
No matter whether Google or any social platform changes its algorithm, if your content is great, people will find it and engage with it.
I mentioned before, but being consistent is key with your content. Focus on quality over quantity and maintain a high standard.
To enable you to do this, look to affiliate marketing tools that can help ensure your content is unique, shareable and doesn’t contain any mistakes.
Buzzsumo
Price
Pro $99/Month
Plus $179/Month
Large $299/Month
Enterprise $499+/Month
Savings can be made when you pay annually for any of the above.
Overview
Creating content that viewers will engage with either on your site or on social can be hit or miss.
With additional alerts and competitor monitoring, BuzzSumo gives you the upper hand over your rivals.
Content Discovery – Find content topics or keywords that are gathering traction across the internet.
Content Research – Instead of guessing, get actionable insights on the most engaging content from billions of articles.
Influencer – Find and follower influencers creating content that is truly resonating with their audiences.
All of this comes with a Chrome Extension and a 30-day FREE trial.
Grammarly
Price
FREE
Premium $11.66/Month
Business $12.50/Month
I use Grammarly all the time and couldn’t recommend it highly enough.
Overview
Adding a Chrome Extension will check the spelling and grammar of anything you are typing.
All content on your site should be spell-checked and Grammarly makes it very easy to ensure there are no mistakes. You can even use it for any affiliate email correspondences.
If you want a more relaxed tone of voice for your blog posts. Enter in smart goals and the app will analyse your written content in real-time to maintain consistency.
This article was written using their desktop app.
Hemingway App
Price
Online Version: Free
Desktop Version: $19.99
Overview
Using colour coded pointers, the Hemingway app highlights the area of your writing that needs improvement.
Users will need to sign up for the paid version to be able to save documents and export them in various formats.
But, for most affiliate marketers the free version should suffice.
Overall, the app helps you to create shorter punchier sentences that are easier to read. Ideal in this world of short attention spans.
DulpiChecker
Price
FREE
30,000+ Words From $10/Month
Overview
If you want some additional writing features but don’t want to pay for them, Dulpi Checker is a great tool for any affiliate marketers.
Copy and paste your content into their app and it will flag any plagiarised writing that you should change.
Google hates duplicate content, so use DupliChecker to easily check to make sure no errors occur.
Networks
In order to promote great affiliate programs, you need to find them. This list of affiliate networks covers some of the biggest and best in the industry.
There is a good chance if you want to work with a brand, that they will be on one of these networks.
ShareASale
Acquired by Awin in 2017, ShareASale is probably the biggest affiliate network in the US.
With a broad range of advertisers and tools to help monetise your content. I would recommend them as your first stop in the search for affiliate programs to join.
Awin
The largest affiliate network in the UK, Awin offers the chance to work with a wealth of brands in different verticals.
Be aware that there is a charge of £5 for any publishers to join the network. This covers the cost to verify your bank details and is a barrier for any fraudulent sites wanting to join the network.
The £5 is refunded to your publisher account when you track your first sale through the network.
If you really don’t want to pay it, reach out to an affiliate manager at a brand you want to work with. They can ask Awin for a code that will waive the signup fee for you.
CJ Affiliate
Formerly Commission Junction, CJ Affiliate has a good foothold in both the US and UK market.
With a stringent approval process, the quality of publishers on the network should be strong. As a website looking for brands you can work with the likes of Dell, Argos or Wayfair on there.
ClickBank
Your website might be better suited to promoting your non-traditional retailers and brands.
Clickbank is a marketplace that is perfect for finding digital products to promote.
Commissions can be as high as +70% on Clickbank, it might just take some digging to find the best converting products.
Should you want a greater view on the best affiliate networks in the UK to work with, you can read another of my articles.
The Best UK Affiliate Networks
Social Media Tools
Any website these days needs a strong social presence. But, each platform typically needs a tailored approach, so it is important to keep updated on what your audience is consuming through a feed tracking platform.
Traffic from social is essentially free, it just takes the time to create the content and make sure it gets posted.
A social media tool will help you monitor brand or keyword activity and automate your posts to land when your audience is most engaged.
Hootsuite
Price
Professional: £39/Month
Team: £99/Month
Business: £520/Month
Overview
Hootsuite makes it easy to view multiple social feeds in one dashboard. As an affiliate marketer, this can be vital in reducing time spent flicking through multiple apps.
Most brands or individuals will have a strong presence on many different platforms. So, being able to see how all your posts are performing in one place is extremely helpful.
Scheduling your social posts is a secret weapon for maximising your exposure on various platforms. Pick a day and build out a week or two’s worth of content at one time.
Using a scheduler will also help you remain consistent with your posts. Stick to a particular time or day and watch your followers grow.
Hootsuite offers a FREE 30-day trial
Buffer
Price
FREE
Pro: $15/Month
Premium: $65/Month
Business: $99/Month
Overview
With a mix of publishing, engagement and analytics tools, Buffer is a nice alternative to Hootsuite.
Trusted by over 75,000 brands, Buffer allows you to visually plan and schedule content across different social channels.
Feeding back metrics for each individual post, affiliate marketers will get a better sense of what is engaging better with their audiences at any given time.
Buffer offers a FREE 14-day trial
Landing Page Tools
No one wants to get a user onto their site, only for them to click straight off again.
As soon as someone lands on your site, show them an informative and visually pleasing landing page.
If you include clear calls to action on this landing page, it will help affiliate marketers guide potential customers down a crafted sales funnel.
The end goal for affiliates is to earn a commission. A quick loading landing pages with all the information they initially need will help start guiding them through your funnel. Hopefully leading to a commission at the end.
For affiliate marketers looking to create these landing pages, it is important to use a specialist tool. Landing page partners have a host of high converting templates as standard, with built-in functionality such as split-testing.
Here are some of my favourites.
ClickFunnels
Price
Standard: $97/month
ClickFunnels: $297/month
Overview
This is an all-in-one suite of tools for affiliates to market, sell and deliver products or services online.
Click Funnels’ has a simple drag and drop webpage editor that helps you build high-converting templates for landing pages.
Want to create a more in-depth sales funnel? Then their tools also include apps for increasing upsells and developing a follow-up funnel.
All of this is provided to affiliates without the need for design or development expertise. The sole purpose of Click Funnels is to help you scale your online business with practised sales funnels.
Click Funnels offers a 14-day FREE trial
InstaPage
Price
Business: $199/Month
Enterprise: Custom plans available
Overview
If you are an affiliate marketer that is using any kind of paid ads to drive traffic to their site. Then you know how vital conversions are for maximising your ROI.
By efficiently creating dedicated landing pages for each individual ad, Instapage boasts that they can boost your conversions by up to 400%.
This will help to reduce the estimated 96% of advertising budgets wasted by post-click page experiences as a result of ads.
Even if you don’t use paid ads. We all want our affiliate traffic to convert as highly as possible. Using specific landing pages has been proven to increase the percentages of that happening.
LeadPages
Price
Standard: $37/Month
Pro: $79/Month
Advanced: $321/Month
Overview
Lead Page is a website and landing page software aimed at small businesses.
With an easy to use drag-and-drop builder, they help companies find new customers and grow their business online.
Effectively implement A/B testing to hone your page into converting at a higher rate. While their other tools will help to convert visitors throughout your site with pop-up and alert bars to generate more leads.
Unbounce
Price
Launch: $80/Month
Optimise: $120/Month
Accelerate: $200/Month
Scale: $300/Month
Overview
Take the guesswork out of building a high-converting landing page with the Unbounce platform.
You can create a landing page in minutes using their vertical-specific templates as a foundation. So, no matter whether you want something that is more agency, Saas, or eCommerce looking, there is a design to support it.
All templates have been made with user experience in mind. That way they will offer a greater chance of conversion based on industry best practices.
Unbounce offers a 14-day FREE trial
Lead Generation Tools
Expand your conversion optimisation tools from just a landing page to all areas of your site.
Potential customers will land on a variety of different pages of your site. So, as an affiliate marketer, you need to be able to engage and convert no matter the page they land on.
Create a deeper connection with your visitors by getting them to subscribe to your email list. When they buy into who you or your brand is, they are more likely to follow your product or service recommendations.
This is where lead generation tools come into play.
ConvertKit
Price
Free
Creator: $29/Month
Creator Pro: $59/Month
Overview
With ConvertKit you can use their customisable templates to build beautiful pop-ups and action bars in just minutes.
Coding and design resource can be expensive for affiliates. ConvertKit doesn’t need any coding know-how and gives you access to GDPR compliant designs that look great on all devices.
Why not take your lead generation tools even further. ConvertKit can sync with landing pages and a CRM system to scale your marketing to the next level.
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OptinMonster
Price
Basic: $14/Month
Plus: $30/Month
Pro: $47/Month
Growth: $80/Month
Overview
Convert your traffic with the powerful optimisation tool from Optin Monster.
Not content with just providing pop-ups, this tool gives you access to innovative software such as gamification, exit-intent detection and geo-location targeting.
Optimise your lead-gen further with actionable insights and A/B testing to make sure everything is performing at the highest level it can.
More than 1.2m websites use OptinMonster and with a WordPress plugin to boot, it has never been easier to start converting your traffic.
KyLeads
Price
Monthly: $50
Yearly: $500
Overview
KyLeads offers flexible tools that help grow your email list, segment leads and generate sales.
Using quizzes can help you gather more information about your customers during the sign-up process. You can then use that information to better segment and subsequently optimise better to convert long term.
Personalised targeting can help affiliates target the right visitors at the best time possible for conversion. While insights can offer feedback on what is working and what isn’t so you can tweak creatives where needed.
KyLeads offers a 14-day FREE trial
Design Tools
Affiliate marketers need to design content for all different types of mediums. From social posts to onsite creative, there is always a requirement for engaging content.
But, securing the service of a specialist designer can be expensive. In addition, they might not always know your brand vision and how to best execute it.
The below tools can help speed up your content creation while saving you a fortune in design personnel or software costs.
I personally have used all three of these tools and continue to use them in my daily work life. They have honestly made it much easier for me to maintain a consistent branding across all my channels and sped up my execution of content.
Canva
Price
FREE
Pro: £11.99/Month
Enterprise: £24 per person/Month
Overview
Canva was founded so that anyone could create and collaborate on amazing graphic design.
Simple drag-and-drop layouts make it easy to customise the wealth of templates available or to create your own.
Make anything from social media posts to ebook covers or presentations with their handy-sized artboards ensuring the right size is already optimised for the chosen outcome.
PicMonkey
Price
FREE
Pro: £12.99/Month
Overview
Like Canva, Picmonkey is a photo editor and graphic design tool.
Their powerful software makes it simple to edit photos or build graphics without the need for more expensive alternatives.
It doesn’t matter what you are building for, PicMonkey helps affiliate marketers create standout visuals that make a point, express a view, and leave a lasting impression
The simple interface and access to a ton of free stock images reduce the heavy lifting sometimes needed to create jaw-dropping content.
Affinity
Price
£49.99
Overview
If you like the advanced features that Adobe’s suite of software tools have but don’t want to pay the monthly fee. Then Affinity offers a fantastic alternative.
Available for Windows, Mac and iPad, Affinity Designer is an award-winning vector graphics software available for a one-off fee. Dependent on your personal requirements, there is also Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher.
It offers much of the software you would find with Adobe software apps and if you need some guidance there are a load of help guides and videos to support.
Email Tools
After using your lead generation tools to optimise landing pages and engage visitors on your site it is time to communicate effectively with those that have signed up.
Mailboxes are overflowing with emails, so you need to ensure that your communications stand out from the rest.
Like with email marketing, affiliate marketers should be segmenting and personalising their emails to get a better response.
To be able to efficiently do this at scale, you need email tools that will sync with your existing lead generation software.
GetResponse
Price
Basic: $15/Month
Plus: $49/Month
Professional: $99/Month
Enterprise: $1,199/Month
Overview
GetResponse is an inbound marketing software that kind of does it all.
Their suite of tools covers everything from engaging visitors on-site and sending targeted communications to hosting knowledge webinars.
Offering a lot of the features you would find in the individual lead generation and CRM tools they build on this with marketing automation.
Additional tools allow you to find, engage and sell to potential leads whether you distribute products, courses or other items.
This software comes highly recommended by some of the best online marketers around.
Mailchimp
Price
Basic: Free
Essentials: $9.99/Month
Standard: $14.99/Month
Premium: $299/Month
Overview
Mailchimp is the all-in-one integrated marketing platform for small businesses, to grow their sales on their terms.
Starting from a free account, you can scale up as your email list grows or you need to send more targeted communications to a greater number of people.
It doesn’t matter what you are trying to sell, MailChimp makes it easy to build and send a single campaign or a larger tailored workflow of emails. Just use their simple drag-and-drop email templates or upload your custom HTML one.
Campaign Monitor
Basic: $9/Month
Unlimited: $29/Month
Premier: $149/Month
Overview
Campaign Monitor can help you drive better results from your email marketing.
Using their tool will assist you in gaining loyal customers and subsequently managing their journeys with a best-in-class email campaign.
Affiliate marketers need software that will do the heavy lifting for them. Campaign Monitor’s visual journey designer makes it easy to create more timely emails that keep your audience engaged with beautiful designs.
Their smart segments and data approach to emails will result in higher conversion rates from your communications. Which is the goal of all email marketing activity.
Email Template Tools
Sometimes, the templates offered by the CRM tools are not fitting with your brand.
To create more complicated designs that allow for more customisation, then you might need email template software.
These template tools allow for creating and exporting designs in different formats so they can be uploaded to your different CRM platforms.
BeePro
Price
FREE
Freelancer: $15/Month
Team: $30/Month
Agency $120/Month
Overview
With direct integration with various email service providers, BeePro reduces email production time with smart design tools and review/approval features.
Whether your affiliate team is a single or multi-person collective, BeePro software can make it easy to plan email projects and execute branded designs.
I use BeePro for my affiliate activity, partly because it allows the flexibility to create my branded designs. But. also because of the ability to insert merge tags, unsubscribe links, and other special links compatible with my email software.
SEO Tools
The behemoth that is Google can make or break an affiliate website.
Get it right and you can get a steady stream of free traffic onto the site, ready for you to engage and convert.
Fail to rank and you are left scrambling around on social or paid ads to get a foothold in your niche.
Thankfully there are a ton of resources and SEO tools to help you spy on competitors and gain a competitive edge to outrank them in Google.
Yoast
Price
FREE
Premium: £89
Overview
This nifty WordPress plugin is one of the most popular SEO tools for the biggest CMS website builder.
Yoast analyses your site in-situ to attain whether you have the best chance of ranking.
Within your WordPress dashboard, you can assign keywords for blog posts and Yoast will assess your writing and how the keyword has been distributed through the text.
Using best practice guides, Yoast can overwrite default settings of your theme to make sure you are better optimised to rank higher in Google.
SEMRush
Price
Pro: $99/Month
Guru: $100/Month
Business: $399/Month
Enterprise: Custom
Overview
A robust solution for any affiliate marketer looking to gain a competitive edge through SEO, PPC, content or social media marketing.
It is trusted by a wealth of marketers across the world and bills itself as an online visibility management platform.
The dashboard can analyse a competitors site and churn out a ton of useful information surrounding their backlink profile, keyword ranking, most visited pages and much much more.
Moz
Price
Standard: $99/Month
Medium: $179/Month
Large: $249/Month
Premium: $599/Month
Backed by the largest community of SEOs on the planet, Moz, similar to SEMRush has built tools to gain data on numerous elements of SEO.
We know the Google algorithm takes in a multitude of different data and touch points. So, you need an intelligent software tool like Moz to be able to compete.
Moz can assess your site, uncover technical SEO issues and recommending improvements. All while tracking the performance of you and your competitors across 170+ search engines.
Ahrefs
Price
Lite: $99/Month
Standard: $179/Month
Advanced: $399/Month
Agency: $999/Month
Ahrefs says you don’t have to be an SEO pro to rank higher and get more traffic.
By using their software and helpful guides and tips you can start to gain a greater knowledge of what you need to do to rank higher on Google.
When planning content, Ahrefs has tools to find the top-performing content in your industry. This will help you focus your activities on that which has a higher propensity to perform better.
Ahrefs has an offer for a 7-day trial for just $7
LongTailPro
Price
With SEO and PPC, uncovering longtail keywords can enable you to reduce ad costs and gain a competitive edge.
In minutes, you can uncover longtail keywords that can get you tons of high-converting online traffic regardless of your niche.
Simply enter some words or phrases from your niche and LongTailPro will churn out related words with competitive market knowledge to support.
WordPress Affiliate Management Tools
WordPress holds a market share of over 60% for CMS software and over 35% of the internet is powered by WordPress. There is a good chance that your affiliate site was built with WordPress.
Due to its size and ease of use, there are a ton of useful plugins marketers can use to build a successful business.
You might already be a fledgeling business that wants to use affiliate marketing to grow its customer base and increase sales.
If you are on WordPress then you are in luck. Some affiliate management plugins can make launching an affiliate program even easier.
Here are a few.
Affiliate WP
Price
Personal $149/Year
Plus: $199/Year
Professional: $299/Year
Overview
AffiliateWP provides advanced affiliate and referral tracking, integrated seamlessly with your WordPress site.
It has everything you would expect of a traditional affiliate network with the ability to set cookie lengths, provide coupons, manage payouts and much more.
For businesses that have the resources to find and onboard affiliates, then running your own program could be a great way to save costs.
WP Affiliate Manager
Price
Free
Single Site: $39
Developer License: $97
Overview
Are you running an eCommerce store, a membership site or have you created a plugin? No matter what industry you are in, launching your own affiliate program can be very profitable.
With WP Affiliate Manager, you can manage, track and pay your affiliates directly from your WordPress website.
It integrates with a ton of other plugins. So, regardless of what plugin you are using to sell your products, WP Affiliate Manager can seamlessly work with them to launch an affiliate program.
Affiliate Royale
Price
Merchant Edition: $85
Developer Edition: $165
Overview
A complete affiliate program plugin for WordPress. Affiliate Royale enables you to start a program for your products and drastically increase traffic, attention and sales.
Integrated with various payment methods, you could get an affiliate program live within minutes.
Affiliate Royale helps to remove the expensive and complicated setups that were normally associated with the launching of a program. That way, you can concentrate on what matters, making more orders.
Link Cloaking Tools
Affiliate marketing is a fantastic way to monetise your blog or online presence. To be successful at it, we need customers to click our links and purchase on the retailer’s site.
Traditional networks churn out big, long, ugly affiliate links which can put customers off.
Beautify those links by cloaking them to look nicer and to encourage more click-throughs.
Thirsty Affiliates
Price
One Site License: $49
Five Site License: $79
Unlimited Site License: $149
Overview
A WordPress plugin, Thirsty Affiliates is a great tool for supercharging your affiliate marketing.
In its simplest form, it helps to cloak those ugly affiliate links with a custom link. Those new links can help build trust and tie your links in with your overall brand.
But, it goes much further. From automating link cloaking by intelligently using keyword matches, to adding event tracking for Google Analytics reporting. It is a key plugin for any affiliate marketer using WordPress.
Pretty Links
Price
Beginner: $49
Marketer: $99
Super Affiliate: $149
Overview
Another WordPress plugin, Pretty Links makes it easier for you to make more money from your website.
The Pretty Links plugin combs through all the content on your site and intelligently finds where to add an affiliate link. The links they use are all cloak with your desired branding to take the time and effort out of monetising your site.
If you are hosting a webinar or podcast, I would heavily recommend using short easy to remember links. Listeners can easily write them down or enter them into their search bar increasing the opportunity to earn more commission.
Don’t leave money on the table. Make sure you are covering all bases when it comes to making money with affiliate marketing.
Bitly
Price
FREE
Basic: $29/Month
Premium: $199/Month
Overview
Branded links drive 34% more clicks than non-branded ones. So, you can use Bitly’s free URL shortener, but to build trust, their link-cloaking software will have a greater effect on your affiliate marketing activity.
Bitly helps you to work smarter. The all-in-one link management platform enables you to scale your link generation while getting access to real-time analytics.
All Bitly links are encrypted with HTTPS for added security and their platform is used by brands such as Nike, Disney and The New York Times.
Affiliate Reporting Tools
The affiliate programs you want to join (or have joined) will not all be on the same network. Constantly signing in to each dashboard to see what is working is time-consuming. Take advantage of reporting tools with API to all the major (and minor) affiliate networks and platforms. That way you can see all your activity in a handy dashboard anytime you want.
An affiliate reporting tool will make sure you are analysing your affiliate activity to ensure your resources go into what is working.
Affluent
Price
FREE
Startup: $19/Month
Business: $100/Month
Overview
To make more informed business decisions, you need to have a strong understanding of current performance. Affluent aggregates data from all of the affiliate platforms you work with, showcasing the data in visually appealing dashboards.
Recently bought by the affiliate network Impact, we are intrigued to see how they grow over the coming 12 months.
Affluent tracks over $10 billion in annual affiliate revenue to help publishers, agencies, and advertisers grow their businesses.
Affluent offers a FREE 14-day trial.
Voluum
Price
Discover: $69/Month
Profit: $149/Month
Grow: $449/Month
Agency: $999/Month
Overview
Voluum enables marketers to track, analyse and optimize all their affiliate activity in one tool.
This tool integrates nicely with affiliates that are using multiple landing pages or directing different offers to different visitors. It monitors over 30 metrics with regards to every visit, clicks and conversion, in real-time.
Want to optimise your performance further? Get access to A/B testing software, accurate reporting and data drill-downs that will help you find out which offer or landing page is working better.
If you are already using an affiliate reporting tool, then Voluum offers a handy comparison page to see how they stack up.
AffJet
Price
FREE
Starter: £5/Month
Medium: £15/Month
Large: £30/Month
Overview
With AffJet you can quickly and easily add your affiliate networks and start importing your data into their dashboard.
Once the data is in your custom dashboard, use their filters and data analysis tools to spot trends and understand which brands are working better on your site.
AffJet connects with hundreds of affiliate networks enabling you to report on all your earnings in one dashboard.
Take your affiliate marketing activity to the next level by demoting lifeless links, double down on missed money-makers and boost commission instantly with one performance mega-dashboard
Depending on your plan, AffJet offers up to a 30-day FREE trial.
