Hey guys,
Affiliate marketers have always had tools that make their life easier. Do you think you are missing one that could give you an edge over your competition?
Read this guide to find out about the best affiliate marketing tools and plugins in 2021.
What are affiliate marketing tools?
Affiliate tools are any online resources that help to make your ad campaigns more successful. The tools all affiliate marketers should have are;
Why do you need affiliate marketing tools?
In a word, competition. To stay ahead of your competitors in the affiliate game, you need to keep to the cutting edge with your ad campaigns. Affiliate tools allow you to do just that.
Each affiliate tool allows you to make a marginal optimization, which, when combined together, allows for you to have an overall optimized affiliate marketing campaign. This combined effort puts you ahead of the curve, allowing to increase your spend on the best-performing traffic.
Benefits of using affiliate marketing tools include:
What to look for when choosing affiliate marketing tools?
Here are the top tips we have for choosing the right tools for your affiliate marketing strategy.
Overview of affiliate marketing tools
️ What is a landing page builder?
You all know by now that the best way to warm up a potential customer to your offer is through a landing page. And the best way to get the best landing pages on the market is to make them yourself. This is where lander builders come in.
A great landing page builder allows you to make eye-catching and effective landing pages that will increase your conversion rate. They also allow you to make big changes to any landing pages you might find using a spy tool. As we know, the trends in affiliate marketing can change in an instant, and it’s best to be able to react to them quickly.
Also, you can opt for templates that have been tried and tested and are already proven to increase conversions. That allows you to have a leg up in ensuring that when your ad gets in front of the right person, they will click on it.
Landing page or website designs range from simple drag and drop schemes where you can add your compelling advert copy and images, to more complex pages that require a little more coding expertise. It’s also worth noting that you might need some creative design tools like Canva to increase the visibility of your lander offer.
️ What is a spy tool?
To put it, simply a spy tool is a tool that can be used in the affiliate industry to spy on other landing pages and offer pages run by your competitors. It’s all part of the competitive research process that every affiliate should be doing. This is done to ensure that you have the best offer for your potential customers and to double-check your offer isn’t being used by every other affiliate out there.
It uses a large database of landing pages being used on various traffic sources, and in any vertical, ad format, or geo out there. The best spy tools do not only allow you to see the different landing pages being used but also rank them by conversions and which have the highest click-through rate.
So, you can rely on the data to tell you the full story.
The best thing about this data is that it is live, updated in real-time because that’s how fast-paced the affiliate industry moves.
Do you think you are ready to keep up?
Well, we will give you a head start by suggesting some of the best options in the affiliate market.
️ What is an affiliate ad tracker?
You know that you should be optimizing your campaigns, but do you know that you need to be tracking them too? Well, you can’t optimize without any data, and tracking your campaigns will get you just that.
Affiliate ad trackers are used to track the referral, made by you, the affiliate, to the customer that buys your recommended affiliate products or services from the company selling the product or service.
This tracking process is needed in order to ensure you get your commission and any other people or businesses in the affiliate chain like affiliate networks get their piece of commission too. Using this tracker also puts you in the driving seat, as you can manage and more importantly optimize your campaigns at your leisure. Having an overview of all of your campaigns available to you means that you get a clear idea of which campaigns are performing well and which need improvement or need to be killed.
️ Affiliate web hosting services
☞ What is web hosting and why do affiliate marketers need it?
So, we have covered why it is important to build your own landing page, but it is also worth having a server that is dedicated to hosting your affiliate offer landing pages. This is because as with much of life, time is money.
By this, we mean that the faster your webpage loads for the visitor seeing your page, the higher the chance there is of them clicking on your ad. All affiliate marketers will end up using web hosting in some shape or form sooner or later. Affiliates like you choose to use it right from the start as it’ll cut down on the loading time of all of your landing pages, and for all of your visitors.
Here are the 3 main options when it comes to choosing a company that can host the site for you:
️ Affiliate campaign optimization tools
Affiliate marketing campaigns can always be optimized, either through manual tweaking or through the use of artificial intelligence, in automatic optimization. Let us show you the best ways to optimize your affiliate campaigns using some handy tools.
☞ Rule-based optimization
Rule-based optimization is your friend when it comes to making your affiliate campaigns work. Everyone likes a little help from AI, and this tool helps you by providing IF-THEN rules for your campaigns to follow, so you don’t have to worry about killing your campaign too soon or burning your budget.
Zeropark has its Rule-based Optimization feature built into the platform, so if your campaign starts burning your budget while you are not at your computer, it will be automatically stopped so you don’t waste your hard-earned money.
There are, of course, other paid auto-optimization tools, such as TheOptimizer. Whether you’d need a powerful tool like that or not, depends on how much experience you have, and what’s the scale of your business. Either way, rule-based-optimization will provide you with a free helping hand regardless of how many campaigns you run.
☞ Keyword research
If you’re an affiliate marketer, keyword research can help you in choosing targeting for your keyword campaigns, and also for making the copy on your offer pages more relatable.
The importance of keyword research should be included in every affiliate marketing strategy. Whether you are using it to ensure your affiliate website or blog ranks higher on the search engine results page, and drive organic traffic, or simply want to keep on top of the most frequently searched for items to influence your choice of affiliate offers, keyword research will help you.
If you are wanting to go broad, one keyword research tool you can use is Google Trends. It will allow you to see how often a certain word or phrase has been searched for in a given time period, and it gives insights into the most frequent searches recently too (as you can see in the example below).
Alternatively, you can opt for the keyword planner Keywords Everywhere. It will keep you up to date with search volumes of keywords and phrases as you enter them into the search engine on the SERP.
The better your page answers a particular set of questions, then the better position up the search engine results page you will get. And this is especially important if you are a blog writer, or have a website that you want to be seen by as many people as possible. As you will know by now, search engine optimization is the name of the game in the digital marketing industry.
️ What are some additional plugins every affiliate needs?
Plugins are helpful little add-ons to your browser that make digital marketing life just a little bit easier. Too lazy to go to the search bar and search for Google Translate?
Well, there is a plug-in for chrome which you can simply right-click a highlighted word on any website and it will translate it for you. This is just the tip of the iceberg though, there are a whole host of plugins for anything an affiliate marketer like yourself might need to do.
Ever wondered what the best plugins for your affiliate browser were?
Well, here are a couple of our favorites that make life a little easier. And what makes them even easier for you bloggers out there is that they are WordPress plugins too, meaning you can optimize your content as you write.
Grammarly
We know this is the first of the WordPress plugins any writer adds to their dashboard and so, if you haven’t tried it yet, then we suggest you should. Grammarly quickly ups your writing game whether that is for your blog, website containing affiliate links, or affiliate program offer page. You’ll never have to worry about a spelling mistake again. It keeps on top of your grammar and tells you if your tone of voice is friendly or not.
TinyPNG
As previously mentioned, time is money in affiliate marketing, and the speed at which your landing page loads is important. The faster the load time, the less time the customer waits, and often the smaller the bounce rate. So, TinyPNG helps to solve this problem of slow loading times by reducing your image file size, while keeping the image high quality. It’s just like magic, and it gives you that competitive edge.
If you want to read about:
- Affiliate marketing tool examples;
- Popular recommendations;
- Extra resources for campaign optimization:
Magda
Affiliate marketers have always had tools that make their life easier. Do you think you are missing one that could give you an edge over your competition?
Read this guide to find out about the best affiliate marketing tools and plugins in 2021.
What are affiliate marketing tools?Affiliate tools are any online resources that help to make your ad campaigns more successful. The tools all affiliate marketers should have are;
- A tracker to see where your money is made in your advertising campaigns (and more importantly where you are losing money),
- A spy tool that will help you spy on your competition,
- Web hosting for your landers, and trackers if you’ll go for a self-hosted solution,
- Creative tools for improving your ad copy and creatives,
- Plugins for your browser,
- And many more….
Why do you need affiliate marketing tools?In a word, competition. To stay ahead of your competitors in the affiliate game, you need to keep to the cutting edge with your ad campaigns. Affiliate tools allow you to do just that.
Each affiliate tool allows you to make a marginal optimization, which, when combined together, allows for you to have an overall optimized affiliate marketing campaign. This combined effort puts you ahead of the curve, allowing to increase your spend on the best-performing traffic.
Benefits of using affiliate marketing tools include:
- Increased credibility with mistake-free copy
- Being able to stand out from others by creating engaging landers
- Cutting losses by optimizing based on tracked data
What to look for when choosing affiliate marketing tools?Here are the top tips we have for choosing the right tools for your affiliate marketing strategy.
- It is important to look out for free trials when choosing your affiliate marketing tools as these can help you test out the product before burning your budget on a tool that does not work for you.
- Some tools are entirely free too, which is always a bonus when they help you make money. Bonus profit for your campaigns!
- But that’s not to say the tools for affiliate marketing that you have to pay for are a rip-off, they are not, especially when they end up increasing your ROI.
- You just need to remember to always take into consideration what kind of ad formats, GEOs, and offers you’re running and pick the additional tools based on that.
Overview of affiliate marketing tools
️ What is a landing page builder?You all know by now that the best way to warm up a potential customer to your offer is through a landing page. And the best way to get the best landing pages on the market is to make them yourself. This is where lander builders come in.
A great landing page builder allows you to make eye-catching and effective landing pages that will increase your conversion rate. They also allow you to make big changes to any landing pages you might find using a spy tool. As we know, the trends in affiliate marketing can change in an instant, and it’s best to be able to react to them quickly.
Also, you can opt for templates that have been tried and tested and are already proven to increase conversions. That allows you to have a leg up in ensuring that when your ad gets in front of the right person, they will click on it.
Landing page or website designs range from simple drag and drop schemes where you can add your compelling advert copy and images, to more complex pages that require a little more coding expertise. It’s also worth noting that you might need some creative design tools like Canva to increase the visibility of your lander offer.
️ What is a spy tool?To put it, simply a spy tool is a tool that can be used in the affiliate industry to spy on other landing pages and offer pages run by your competitors. It’s all part of the competitive research process that every affiliate should be doing. This is done to ensure that you have the best offer for your potential customers and to double-check your offer isn’t being used by every other affiliate out there.
It uses a large database of landing pages being used on various traffic sources, and in any vertical, ad format, or geo out there. The best spy tools do not only allow you to see the different landing pages being used but also rank them by conversions and which have the highest click-through rate.
So, you can rely on the data to tell you the full story.
The best thing about this data is that it is live, updated in real-time because that’s how fast-paced the affiliate industry moves.
Do you think you are ready to keep up?
Well, we will give you a head start by suggesting some of the best options in the affiliate market.
️ What is an affiliate ad tracker?You know that you should be optimizing your campaigns, but do you know that you need to be tracking them too? Well, you can’t optimize without any data, and tracking your campaigns will get you just that.
Affiliate ad trackers are used to track the referral, made by you, the affiliate, to the customer that buys your recommended affiliate products or services from the company selling the product or service.
This tracking process is needed in order to ensure you get your commission and any other people or businesses in the affiliate chain like affiliate networks get their piece of commission too. Using this tracker also puts you in the driving seat, as you can manage and more importantly optimize your campaigns at your leisure. Having an overview of all of your campaigns available to you means that you get a clear idea of which campaigns are performing well and which need improvement or need to be killed.
️ Affiliate web hosting services
☞ What is web hosting and why do affiliate marketers need it?
So, we have covered why it is important to build your own landing page, but it is also worth having a server that is dedicated to hosting your affiliate offer landing pages. This is because as with much of life, time is money.
By this, we mean that the faster your webpage loads for the visitor seeing your page, the higher the chance there is of them clicking on your ad. All affiliate marketers will end up using web hosting in some shape or form sooner or later. Affiliates like you choose to use it right from the start as it’ll cut down on the loading time of all of your landing pages, and for all of your visitors.
Here are the 3 main options when it comes to choosing a company that can host the site for you:
- Shared hosting
- VPS (Virtual Private Server)
- Dedicated Server
️ Affiliate campaign optimization toolsAffiliate marketing campaigns can always be optimized, either through manual tweaking or through the use of artificial intelligence, in automatic optimization. Let us show you the best ways to optimize your affiliate campaigns using some handy tools.
☞ Rule-based optimization
Rule-based optimization is your friend when it comes to making your affiliate campaigns work. Everyone likes a little help from AI, and this tool helps you by providing IF-THEN rules for your campaigns to follow, so you don’t have to worry about killing your campaign too soon or burning your budget.
Zeropark has its Rule-based Optimization feature built into the platform, so if your campaign starts burning your budget while you are not at your computer, it will be automatically stopped so you don’t waste your hard-earned money.
There are, of course, other paid auto-optimization tools, such as TheOptimizer. Whether you’d need a powerful tool like that or not, depends on how much experience you have, and what’s the scale of your business. Either way, rule-based-optimization will provide you with a free helping hand regardless of how many campaigns you run.
☞ Keyword research
If you’re an affiliate marketer, keyword research can help you in choosing targeting for your keyword campaigns, and also for making the copy on your offer pages more relatable.
The importance of keyword research should be included in every affiliate marketing strategy. Whether you are using it to ensure your affiliate website or blog ranks higher on the search engine results page, and drive organic traffic, or simply want to keep on top of the most frequently searched for items to influence your choice of affiliate offers, keyword research will help you.
If you are wanting to go broad, one keyword research tool you can use is Google Trends. It will allow you to see how often a certain word or phrase has been searched for in a given time period, and it gives insights into the most frequent searches recently too (as you can see in the example below).
Alternatively, you can opt for the keyword planner Keywords Everywhere. It will keep you up to date with search volumes of keywords and phrases as you enter them into the search engine on the SERP.
The better your page answers a particular set of questions, then the better position up the search engine results page you will get. And this is especially important if you are a blog writer, or have a website that you want to be seen by as many people as possible. As you will know by now, search engine optimization is the name of the game in the digital marketing industry.
️ What are some additional plugins every affiliate needs?Plugins are helpful little add-ons to your browser that make digital marketing life just a little bit easier. Too lazy to go to the search bar and search for Google Translate?
Well, there is a plug-in for chrome which you can simply right-click a highlighted word on any website and it will translate it for you. This is just the tip of the iceberg though, there are a whole host of plugins for anything an affiliate marketer like yourself might need to do.
Ever wondered what the best plugins for your affiliate browser were?
Well, here are a couple of our favorites that make life a little easier. And what makes them even easier for you bloggers out there is that they are WordPress plugins too, meaning you can optimize your content as you write.
Grammarly
We know this is the first of the WordPress plugins any writer adds to their dashboard and so, if you haven’t tried it yet, then we suggest you should. Grammarly quickly ups your writing game whether that is for your blog, website containing affiliate links, or affiliate program offer page. You’ll never have to worry about a spelling mistake again. It keeps on top of your grammar and tells you if your tone of voice is friendly or not.
TinyPNG
As previously mentioned, time is money in affiliate marketing, and the speed at which your landing page loads is important. The faster the load time, the less time the customer waits, and often the smaller the bounce rate. So, TinyPNG helps to solve this problem of slow loading times by reducing your image file size, while keeping the image high quality. It’s just like magic, and it gives you that competitive edge.
If you want to read about:- Affiliate marketing tool examples;
- Popular recommendations;
- Extra resources for campaign optimization:
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE 
Magda
