Affiliate marketing is a highly competitive field. Finding the right affiliate network and making content that pushes people to your partner’s products is just one part of the equation. You’ll also need access to the right tools to help you succeed and grow your affiliate marketing business.
We’ve looked at some of the most popular affiliate marketing tools to help find the best ones for you.
What to Look For in an Affiliate Marketing Tool
When building this list, we looked at several factors to choose the best affiliate marketing tools. Those factors included:
Affiliate marketing focus. Of course, the most important thing for a tool to be effective is that it solves your specific problem—in this case, affiliate marketing. Tools that are directly applicable to affiliate marketing and with a wide range of uses in the industry ranked well.
Cost. Many of these tools have a free tier along with paid options. We looked for tools with free trials and reasonably affordable costs compared to their benefits.
Ease of use. The most effective tool in the world isn’t helpful if no one can figure out how to make it work. We looked at how easy these tools are to use, even for the less technically inclined.
Customer service. Tools with solid customer support and plenty of resource pages or knowledge bases scored well.
13 Best Affiliate Marketing Tools
If you’re looking for tools to help grow your affiliate marketing business, here are our top choices.
Yoast SEO
One of the most effective ways to drive traffic to an affiliate marketing campaign is search engine optimization (SEO). With good SEO, users will find your website naturally as they search the web through Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines.
Yoast SEO is a popular tool that integrates with content management systems like WordPress. You can feed the tool information about the keywords and audience you want to reach, and Yoast will rate your content. It also provides suggestions for improving your content’s SEO and generating more traffic.
Yoast has a free WordPress plugin, but you can unlock extra features like automatic dead link redirects, internal linking tools, and more when you purchase the Premium plugin for $99 per year.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another SEO tool, and one of its most valuable features is keyword research and content analysis.
Keyword research lets you learn about popular keywords people are searching for, which you can add to your content to boost SEO.
Content gap analysis lets you compare your website to competitors in your industry. Ahrefs will look at your and your competitors’ sites and generate a list of keywords where your competitors rank highly but you do not. Once Ahrefs has identified the gaps in your content, you can use that to focus your future content creation.
Ahrefs can also check your competition’s backlinks and paid traffic funneling. It offers a limited free trial, followed by payment plans starting at $99 monthly.
Dash.fi
You have to spend money to make money, and dash.fi is all about helping you get the most bang for your advertising buck. All of the SEO and email outreach in the world can’t beat appropriately placed advertisements that push customers to your website.
Dash.fi is a financial platform built for growth. It offers unlimited virtual cards that you can use for ad spending and tools to track and control ad spending easily. It also helps automate accounting tasks and offers up to 3% cash back on advertising purchases for the first two months of spending.
Google Search Console
Google is one of the most popular search engines on the planet, so if your goal is to optimize your website for search, Google Search Console is an essential tool.
Google Search Console’s free tool lets you see how Google views your site and how it uses that information to direct traffic to you. It also provides insight into different pages on your site, such as letting you view traffic trends or which search terms have led the most traffic to your pages.
Google Analytics
Another powerful, free Google tool is Google Analytics. This service provides important data such as the amount of traffic your site has received, fluctuations in traffic over weeks or months, bounce rates, and other important info that can help shape your marketing strategy.
ConvertKit
Building an email list and using it to promote affiliate offers is an excellent strategy for growing your affiliate marketing business. ConvertKit is a fully featured tool that helps with mail list automation.
ConvertKit helps you build a landing page, sign-up form, and other web pages to increase conversion and get people to sign up for your mailing lists. You can then use the tool to automate the mailing process.
For example, if your audience is interested in gardening, you could advertise a free introductory course on composting for anyone who signs up for the mailing list. With ConvertKit, you can automatically send those introductory emails with the course to those who sign up.
Add your affiliate links to those generated messages, and you can automate much of the money-making process.
HubSpot
An alternative to ConvertKit is HubSpot’s email marketing tools. These tools can help with automating mailing lists, email tracking, sending thank you messages, or building email marketing campaigns based on flows that you can customize.
HubSpot offers an easy-to-use visual editor and templates on which you can base digital marketing campaigns. It also integrates with HubSpot’s other marketing tools, including its contacts database, lead generation tools, and landing page builder.
Canva
Though it’s a sad truth for writers, the best-written articles in the world won’t draw as much attention as a well-designed web page with great copy and engaging images.
Canva can help you create custom images for blog posts and websites, even if you have limited design skills. Use the tool to generate appealing images for your website to improve your SEO and user engagement.
Canva offers hundreds of thousands of templates and over one million photos and graphics for free. Users opting for a paid plan will receive dedicated customer support, more cloud storage, and content scheduling, plus will unlock all of Canva’s templates and graphics.
AffJet
Some affiliate marketers choose to find a single affiliate marketing program and stick with it. That strategy has distinct benefits, but others prefer to sign up for multiple networks and use all of them at once.
If you go that second route, signing into each platform individually for performance tracking can be a hassle. AffJet makes it easier by building a single dashboard that includes all the data from your various affiliate programs.
AffJet automatically imports data from the top programs to make it easy to stay current on sales. It also tracks market trends and can help you identify underperforming campaigns.
Grammarly
It’s not the most exciting or interesting tool on this list, but that doesn’t make Grammarly any less valuable.
One of the most important things to focus on when writing copy for landing pages or blog posts with affiliate links is to ensure that your writing is easy to read and error-free.
Grammarly is a free automated grammar checker that can help you find and fix those grammatical issues that a typical spell checker won’t catch. Its paid premium service also enables you to identify complicated sentences or words that could make reading your articles difficult and hurt your SEO rankings.
Flippa
Building a website from scratch and getting it ranked highly on popular search engines is probably the most difficult, yet most important, part of affiliate marketing. You’ll struggle to find paying customers if your site doesn't rank.
Flippa allows you to skip that process and buy an established site. Sites listed for sale will show information about their target audiences, site age, and revenue, making it easy to find a site in your niche.
You can also use Flippa to sell sites you’ve built. If you have a highly-ranked site in a niche you’re no longer interested in or simply want a quick infusion of cash to invest in another venture, Flippa can turn your website into money.
ManyChat
Talking directly with people is a great way to convince them to make a purchase, but you’ll quickly find that you don’t have the time to chat with everyone interested in your offers.
ManyChat can help with that problem by letting you integrate its chatbot with popular social media and chat platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and SMS. You can use the service to automate customer service, promote affiliate offers, or get people to sign up for email lists.
You can also use ManyChat’s templates and prebuilt flows to help set up a chat experience or create your automations from scratch, making the tool highly flexible.
ManyChat has a basic free plan for beginner marketers with up to 1,000 contacts and a $15 monthly plan for those needing access to more contacts and SMS or email chat.
Amazon Affiliate WordPress Plugin (AAWP)
Amazon is one of the easiest companies to work with as an affiliate marketer. People can buy almost anything on the site, so you’ll likely find products you can promote.
The AAWP helps you avoid some common issues with promoting Amazon products. For example, it can automatically update pricing information or create affiliate links for your site. And because the tool integrates with WordPress, you can create product boxes, automated bestseller lists, and comparison tables for products.
While there isn’t a free version of this plugin, it’s still affordable at the cost of €49 per year for one site. You can purchase more expensive plans if you need multisite usage.
Final Word
Affiliate marketing can be a lucrative industry, but it’s also highly competitive. With a few tools, you can significantly improve your campaigns’ performances and boost your income.
