The reason why affiliate marketing is becoming more and more popular these days is because it is one of the smartest ways to be your own boss and earn money while you sleep.
Once you become an established affiliate marketer, you can work anytime and from anywhere in the world and still make a lot of profit. But how do you get there? Beginnings are always so important. If you start right, you won’t have to put in as much effort. And by starting right, I mean getting started with the right tools.
How will a carpenter produce good furniture if he doesn’t have sharp tools? Similarly, how will you become a successful affiliate marketer if you don’t have your required tools? To help you start on the right note, we have put together a list of the sharpest tools you need for beginning with your affiliate marketing journey.
Flippa
Based in Melbourne and San Francisco, Flippa is a marketplace for buying and selling online businesses, websites, apps, and more. This would definitely serve as an essential platform for people who are looking to advance with the process of developing a quality affiliate site from scratch. This will not only help you find a website in your niche, but also one that is ready to go with an established track record.
Like eBay, Flippa serves as an ideal bidding marketplace for individuals to start with buying and selling websites (it is something like eBay for websites). It also allows affiliate marketers to buy sites having a strong backlink profile in order to kickstart SEO growth.
However, we recommend you run a full backlink audit before purchasing a domain. This is a must to ensure that the domain isn’t being inflated by black-hat SEO practices. We’ve seen a lot of affiliate marketers who have bought a site with a strong backlink profile but are ultimately penalized by a Google algorithm update. This happens due to the black-hat link-building practices by the previous site owner.
BuzzSumo
This is a content research and planning tool that helps affiliate marketers run a quick search in order to find and create content that is relevant. Besides helping you identify content that resonates with your audience, BuzzSumo also helps you search the web for trending content that works to make your posts more viral. From articles and blogs to videos and infographics, it provides you insights about various forms of content.
Competitive knowledge is very important when it comes to writing content for affiliate marketers. BuzzSumo helps you find what kind of content your competitors are publishing and what networks have proven to be most effective for them. You can also optimize your content by comparing it with your competitors accordingly.
MarketMuse
MarketMuse is an amazing software designed especially for writing quality content. It is is a cloud-based enterprise content planning solution that helps content creators and marketers, marketing agencies, publishers and e-commerce companies optimize the value of their online content. The solution automatically scans a company’s online content using algorithms and further compares it to the content on similar and competing websites. It then makes suggestions for improvement based on those comparisons.
MarketMuse helps you identify inconsistencies, topical gaps or whatever might be missing in a company’s online material. It also suggests what changes are needed to improve the quality of your content which in turn improves search engine rankings and makes it more thorough and engaging for the visitors.
SEMrush
SEMrush has to be your go-to tool for keyword research, fixing SEO errors, and most importantly, competitor analysis. With a massive database system of over 46 million domains and 120 million keywords, this tool is trusted by prominent internet marketers and companies around the world.
As an affiliate marketer, it is important to analyze the content marketing strategy of your competitors. This tool is a must-have if you are a marketer looking to understand what content is driving the highest ROI (Return On Investment) for competitors, as well as analyzing on-page SEO issues. SEMrush allows you to perform a detailed analysis and assessment of your existing content. This would make for a great way to track and achieve your content marketing goals.
There’s more— SEMrush can also be used as a content audit tool for your distribution strategy. You can weigh your content marketing strategies using the suggestions provided by SEMrush and improve the quality of your content in order to maximize the impact. Most importantly, SEMrush, helps you amplify the content marketing strategy with included tools like Content Audit, Post Tracking, and SEO Content Template.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another significant tool for SEO and keyword research. If you want to make your website SEO friendly, this is one of the much-needed tools in the world of affiliate marketing. Although it serves many of the same functions as SEMrush (like keyword research, on-page audits and competitive content analysis), the most important function of Ahrefs is that it emphasizes more on backlinks than on-page SEO.
This tool definitely helps affiliate marketers gain in-depth insight into their backlink profile. This includes new backlinks, lost backlinks, and websites that are linking with the broken pages on your site (along with the domain rank of those sites).
Yoast SEO
If you are a WordPress user, this should be your number 1 plugin. As an affiliate marketer, one of your main goals would be to rank in the top position in search engines. Yoast SEO can help you make this happen and is an easy way to maintain your webpages’ SERP ranking. The plugin provides advanced SEO functionality in every page, including these— title tag & meta description customization, canonical link customization, meta robots customization, and sitemap creation and customization.
Further, Yoast SEO is widely known for its analytical features. It comes with the built-in metabox options on posts and pages that will help you develop better keyword usage and maintain a proper content length. In addition to monitoring sentence length, passive voice and heading distribution, it also performs a Flesch reading test to determine the readability of your entire post. With a bunch of built-in advanced functionalities for XML sitemaps, page meta, url redirects, open graph, and more Yoast SEO is truly the all-in-one SEO solution for most WordPress sites.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a must-have for those who regularly publish content on their affiliate site. It is an automated spelling and grammar checker that not only helps point out spelling errors but also identifies grammatical errors such as incorrect word and comma usage.
Grammarly can be your best friend when it comes to checking new posts and making edits faster. The real-time Grammarly editor will notify you whenever you make a grammatical mistake or typo. This helps ensure your content is of consistent quality. One of its most interesting aspects is that it can understand the meaning of your sentence correlating the words. This means it understands what you are trying to imply and can help you maintain your own writing voice.
DupliChecker
For those working with a content team in producing content, it is highly recommended you run each article through a plagiarism checker like DupliChecker. It is an amazing free web app that solves the problems related to content quality and plagiarism for most affiliate marketers writing for a blog. No doubt, it might bring up the issues of trust here. However, a case of plagiarism even if by accident, could result in some serious legal issues. So, better safe than sorry, right? Writers using this can make use of free features like text analysis, keyword research, web management, SEO, Domain Tool, and IP tools to improve and keep a check on the quality of their content.
Google Analytics
A web analytics service offered by Google, Google Analytics is one of the most popular digital analytics software that tracks and reports website traffic. It is Google’s free web analytics service that allows you to analyze the interaction details of the people visiting your website in-depth. It provides valuable insights that can help you understand your whole website and allow you to take the proper steps to shape the success strategy of your business and improve your affiliate website.
With Google Analytics, you can split test, track links and conversions, analyze different behaviors, and be able to figure out the real insights into how users interact with your affiliate site. It is by far the most extensive analytics tool available for affiliate marketers.
MailChimp
Email being one of the dominant ways of marketing, this list of the most essentials tools for affiliate marketing would be incomplete without an email marketing tool. Emails are effective at conveying a lot in a simple and attractive package. MailChimp is one of the most popular email-focused affiliate marketing tools and can help you with the automated management of your email campaigns. It literally simplifies the entire process and takes care of all aspects of email marketing.
With MailChimp, you can create newsletters, manage subscriber profiles, track email opens, set up drip campaigns, and add social sharing. This tool also lets you create single or multi-stage email marketing campaigns as well as add links to third-party websites in your emails. You can get an email campaign ready for action in just minutes using preset customized templates.
If you want to take up some courses on the ‘whats, hows, and whys of affiliate marketing’ before you start, you definitely need to check out these 5 best courses. You can then start with the tools and you will be unstoppable in your affiliate marketing journey. Also, check out the Top 8 Affiliate Marketing Websites in MENA if you are ready to grow big in the region and beyond.