Affiliate marketing has always been one of the most profitable ways to make a living working from your laptop.
The chance of capitalizing on your audience or Internet marketing skills to promote high-converting offers is one of the quickest and most profitable way long-term.
However, there’s a problem for affiliate marketers: it is widely competitive.
And as much as you can start with just some essential tools, you still need some other software if you’re serious about making money through this way.
Here’s a list of the best I’ve picked. They all come from my experience of 10+ years being an affiliate marketer.
Keep reading!
Domain Registration: Namecheap
Having a brand new domain is the first step you need to make to start with affiliate marketing. Namecheap is one of the most popular services that provide the opportunity to register your domain names for up to 10 years at a time so that your hard work can continue to generate healthy commissions. You can choose the right extension and the perfect name for your brand new affiliate business, knowing that you’re subscribing to a reliable service.
From my experience, Namecheap provides a more accessible interface to use than its competitors and consistently excellent customer service. You also receive free WHOIS privacy instead of it being charged as an upgraded feature which is cool because it makes it easier to keep your information away from prying eyes. There are some caps in place on some of the tiers, so choose your pricing options wisely.
Web Hosting: WP Engine
As an affiliate marketer, the amount of downtime you receive from your web hosting platform helps to dictate the revenues you earn. WP Engine offers one of the best options to choose that is still affordable without forcing you to endure a significant outage. You’ll receive better site responsiveness with this choice as well, which means your SEO campaigns get a boost as well.
This tool also provides a free staging environment for your themes so that updates aren’t pushed immediately to your site. With this feature, you can test changes without impacting the live version of your websites with ease. An automatic backup and a disaster recovery feature are both parts of the structure too.
Site Builder/CMS: WordPress
WordPress powers about 30% of all websites of the web – and that rate are even higher for affiliate marketers. It dominates as a CMS and site builder because the design and controls are intuitive and easy for anyone to understand. If you can turn on a computer, then WP will let you become an affiliate marketer overnight.
Not only is this tool free because it is an open-source option, but it also takes just a few minutes to install. With the variety of plugins and themes which are available, you can build a professional site that manages your links effectively so that your income levels can start to rise.
Site Theme and Landing Page Builder: Thrive Architect
If you want to be successful with affiliate marketing, you need to do two things: create value for others (mostly through content) and have high-converting landing pages.
Thrive Architect it’s a WordPress page builder which will come in great help. No wonders I use it on all of my websites. It’s developed by Thrive Themes, one of the most authorable companies in the industry, and it provides a visual editor that helps you to create opt-in pages, webinars, and product launches from over 220 pre-made and ready-to-use templates. Because it features a drag-and-drop design, anyone can use this tool to build a professional-looking site in very little time.
Thrive Architect allows you to create responsive pages for mobile traffic, build one-page sites that are clean and simple, yet it still offers pre-built conversion tools like countdown timers or lead generation forms. You can capture leads and grow your mailing list while improving the number of commissions you receive from your affiliate programs.
Capturing Emails: Thrive Leads
In the online marketing world, there is a saying: “The money is in the list.” The reason is that by building an e-mail list, you’re working on a proper asset that you can use anytime to promote your new content and products.
Email marketing as an affiliate must involve more than a catchy sales pitch. You need a tool that will let you create custom opt-in forms for each site and display specific offers based on preferred categories. The data that each campaign collects needs to be turned into actionable reports. Thrive Leads does it all and then some, including A/B testing to test what’s working best for you.
You can roll with this affiliate marketing tool solo, but the better deal is to purchase a Thrive Themes membership because the email capture benefits come with it for free. Then you can combine both options for a simple way to grow your online presence.
Click Tracking and Link Management: JotURL
A tool like JotURL it’s vital if you’re serious about making a living through affiliate marketing. When you run your campaigns, you want to know what’s profitable and what’s not so that you don’t waste time and money on what isn’t working. JotURL provides you all the tools necessary to make this easy.
JotURL provides numerous optimization features that will take your affiliate marketing results to a broader audience. It offers a unified solution for comparison, management, and monitoring for every link you use in your campaigns. These features eliminate the conventional trial-and-error methods that many use when building their first sites.
Think of it as a complementary tool which works with your current efforts to improve revenues and leverage your calls-to-action. Additional features include the ability to build branded QR codes and tracking links.
You can then target your traffic based on several metrics, including the operating system of the user or the geographic location of prospects, which is crucial to improve the effectiveness of your campaigns. These features allow you to see what works and what does not to improve your future performance.
As an affiliate, several highly-targeted offers can come through to boost your revenues. JotURL makes it easier to manage where you send the traffic by forwarding visitors to a specific web page based on their country of origin or other variables. You’ll receive up to 5,000 clicks per month with the first subscription tier, which reduces the risk of losing conversions.
Sending Emails: GetResponse
Some tools in this category promote themselves as being friendly to affiliate marketers, only to penalize them after sending out their first offer. You won’t have that problem with GetResponse. If you structure your messages as valuable content instead of outright spam, then the delivery rates are exceptionally high with this tool.
The features of this platform include a visual email editor, RSS-to-email capability, and perfect timing with the basic plan. Step up to their Essentials level for split tests and unlimited pages and visitors.
Pricing depends on your subscriber numbers, but you can expect to pay at least $15 per month. You can try it free for 30 days.
SEO and Competitor Research: Ahrefs
This subscription-based service offers a comprehensive link index of every useful search engine marketing tool you need for success. There is a content exploration feature that simplifies the creative process while pointing out where you might have weaknesses within your domain as an affiliate.
All of the data comes instantly, which means you can use the features of Ahrefs to monitor backlinks, follow their growth, and dig into the search traffic of your competitors to find ways to improve your position. Another great tool that you’ll discover is the keyword ranking benefit so that you know what to say in different languages and geographic locations.
If you intend to use organic traffic from search engines as a primary source of visitors for your website, this tool is a must-have.
Competitor Research: WhatRunsWhere
Sometimes the best information comes from what your competitors are doing right now. This intelligence tool helps you to glean insights on the types of advertising which work to pull visitors away from your brand, allowing you to become more competitive instantly.
Over 120,000 unique publishers in over 20 countries receive coverage with this tool, allowing you to see which creative messages make the most impact. Then you can tailor your affiliate marketing work around this information to quickly improve the visibility of the brands you create.
Facebook Advertising: AdEspresso
This tool gives you the option to test numerous ad variants on Facebook. It gives you A/B testing options, allows you to target various audiences, and take a more in-depth look into your analytics to see if there are ways to reduce costs or improve your ROI. These features help you to reduce the risk of running into ad fatigue.
You can control ad frequency with a couple of clicks, keep your CPC costs at manageable levels, and improve your relevance scores immediately. AdEspresso is powered by Hootsuite and is a premium option, so consider adding it to your repertoire when you are ready to scale your business upward with a significant investment into your paid outreach efforts.
Content Creation: Grammarly
Grammarly works to improve your writing by pointing out the typos, formatting errors, and other issues that can lurk in your content. You can type a post into their tool directly, download a file to it, or copy and paste from your word processing software.
You get to set the levels of formality to ensure the text reads like a conversation or a traditional essay. After correcting the problems, you then transfer the information to your publishing site. There is even an option to check for online plagiarism with your content. If you are unsure of the quality of your work, Grammarly allows you to purchase the services of a human proofreader as well.
The basic grammar check feature is free. The professional version is quite affordable if you purchase the yearly license.
Visual Content: Canva
This tool allows you to create visual aids that are useful for social media posts, emails, and other forms of graphic-based marketing. You can create images that share information about blog posts, build charts, or insert visuals into your existing content without the need for a designer.
There are hundreds of free banners, backgrounds, and image available with Canva. A premium version gives access to even more content for a low monthly rate. You can edit the graphics within the platform, and then download them to your computer or mobile device for sharing.
Video Content: Camtasia
This software suite allows you to create video presentations and tutorials from a direct recording plugin or screencast to PowerPoint. You can choose the screen area to record, add audio, or implement additional multimedia options separately or simultaneously based on your current needs.
A single license allows you to install Camtasia on two machines, and it is compatible with Windows and Mac for maximum versatility. Over 14 million users currently use this tool, including some of the biggest brands in the world today, including Coca-Cola, Intel, Amazon, and Netflix.
Over to You
Affiliate marketing is getting more and more competitive every year. It’s your choice whether using tools to get better results faster or not.
Curious, what are your favorite affiliate marketing tools? Comment below….
About the Author
Angelo Sorbello is a serial entrepreneur and Founder of Astrogrowth. He built and later sold several online businesses in the past ten years, and he works on and invests onto companies that strive to make a positive impact. You can reach out to Angelo on Twitter
Hi, Thank you for the useful info!
I need some advice. Is it better to have a webpage or two to sell one good high-end product? Or do you think it is better to have a blog with lots of different products from different affiliate programs?
Hello Joquim, If you have a “webpage or two to sell one good high-end product”, it will likely never make it. There is a lot of competition out there and will build a huge websites with tons of content and many, many pages to pull the search engines and far outrank you. That isn’t to say that it wouldn’t work, but it’s very very rare. We have several affiliate marketing links on this website, but they are all related and we build content (several pages) for most. I hope that helps! Thanks for stopping by.