Are you interested in the world of affiliate marketing and how you can become a successful affiliate?
Affiliate marketing can be an effective way to monetize your website, diversify your income and enhance your marketing skills. It is however not as easy as most make it out to be. The concept of affiliate marketing is easy in theory, but much more difficult in practice.
In this article, we will share some of the top affiliate marketing tools for beginners, what they are used for and how they can help make your affiliate marketing journey easier.
Table of contents
Flippa
If you are a beginner in affiliate marketing and want to skip the process of building, ranking and monetizing a website, you have the option of directly purchasing an affiliate website which has already accomplished all this.
Flippa makes it possible for you to find a website that has all the qualities you are looking for. It gives affiliate marketers the ability to buy established websites that have a strong backlink profile and SEO factors in place. It even allows you to find websites in a specific niche that earn a minimum amount of revenue per month.
Things to Note: While surfing Flippa to find your ideal website, it’s important to fully vet the website you have an interest in and also take a look at the past transactions and ratings of the seller who is selling the website.
SEMRush
SEMrush is one of the premier tools for performing keyword research, checking SEO ranking factors, conducting competitor analysis and so much more. SEMrush is an extremely valuable tool for affiliate marketers and marketers alike who are looking to find content that they can rank, perform SEO audits, analyze common SEO issues and improve their websites.
Below are some of the major things you can use SEMrush for.
- Conduct Keyword Research
- Perform a SEO Website Audit
- Link Building
- Content Creation and Distribution
Yoast SEO
If you are building your own website on WordPress chances are that you have most likely heard of the Yoast SEO plugin at one point or another. It’s perhaps one of the most popular and widely used WordPress plugins around.
Yoast SEO is particularly helpful for affiliate marketers who are planning to organically rank their content in order to drive traffic. The Yoast SEO is free to use and allows you to use it’s features in order to:
- Optimize your title tag and meta description
- Create SiteMap.xml files
- Write SEO friendly content
- Customize your URL’s
- Monitor the SEO status of your content
Things to Note: The paid version offers a bit more capability and can truly help you manage all your SEO needs very easily as the plugin easily integrates into WordPress.
Voluum
Voluum is one of the leading affiliate marketing ad trackers on the market. It allows you to track your paid and organic affiliate marketing campaigns down to the keyword. As an affiliate marketer it’s important to know what component of your campaign is producing revenue for you. As such, you need the proper ad tracking tool to help identify this data.
Voluum allows you to control all your paid campaigns through their state of the art at tracker. Some of its functionalities and features include:
- Mobile and desktop tracking
- Customer conversion tracking
- Organic traffic tracking
- Impression tracking
- Webhook tracking
Check them out for yourself and see the full suite of functionalities, features and integrations they offer.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a content research tool for affiliate marketers which allows you to scrape the web for trending content that has performed well on social media publications in the past. It’s a tool to help you generate ideas for content creation.
It gives you the ability to discover hot keywords, trends, topics, questions and much more through their content discovery feature.
As an affiliate marketer you need to stay on top of current trends and interest to gain an idea of the type of content that you should be creating in order to capture relevant traffic. Buzzsumo is extremely effective in helping you to accomplish that.
Recommend reading; How to do Keyword research
Google Keyword Planner
The Google Keyword Planner is another must have for beginners in affiliate marketing. It’s a free tool by Google that allows you to see the surface level details of keyword related data. It’s 100% free to use and it’s probably the most accurate tool out there.
It gives you the ability to see the estimated monthly volume generated by a specific keyword, the cost of the keyword, the competition level and much more. It’s a great way to conduct keyword research if you don’t want to spend money on a paid resource.
You can discover some great keywords by specific filtering features inside the keyword planner which can help you rank.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another keyword research and SEO intelligence tool that is considered one of the best in the marketplace. It’s quite similar to SEMRush in it’s functions and features, however it has some backlink features that are much better than most tools out there.
If you don’t mind spending a little bit of money, Ahrefs is perhaps the best SEO and keyword research tool to use if you plan on being a serious affiliate marketer. It has great options for beginners that can help you discover low-competition keywords that are easy to rank for.
If Ahrefs is a bit out of your price range check out a list of Ahrefs Alternatives here.
Keyword Spy
Although KeywordSpy has an outdated website style, their keyword research and affiliate intelligence tools are quite comprehensive. They have a massive database of keywords that you can tap into in order to find the best ones for your affiliate campaigns.
You can even spy on your competitors’ content and keywords by directly entering in their website inside the Keyword Spy tool. You can even view real time keyword tracking in pay-per click and organic traffic.
They are partnered with hundreds of different affiliate networks which can be seen inside their affiliate intelligence feature. This is extremely helpful for beginners in affiliate marketing because you can see the top performing networks along with the top performing affiliate products.
CBEngine
If you are just getting started in affiliate marketing, chances are that you will have heard of Clickbank by now. They are perhaps the largest affiliate network around and they host a magnitude of different offers and affiliate programs.
CBEngine is a website that is dedicated to helping you find the best affiliate marketing products to promote from the Clickbank platform. They will show you the hottest paying affiliate products, trending products, affiliate resources to use in order to be successful and so much more.
They have some great filtering options that allow you to get granular with your research in order to find the best products to promote as an affiliate. We highly recommend you give them a try and check out the video below which shows you how to use CBEngine.
How to Use CBEngine
Convert Kit
We strongly believe that if you plan on being a serious affiliate marketer that you immediately get on board with a good email marketing automation platform. In our opinion ConvertKit is one of the best email automation platforms out there.
They allow you to connect with your audience in a targeted way and they give you the ability to create simple and beautiful emails with powerful automated email sequences. Their software is extremely effective and easy to use and takes minutes to setup and integrate to whatever platform you are using.
We strongly recommend them and getting started with their email broadcasts and automated email sequences that can truly help drive your revenue higher.
Conclusion
All these tools can seem a bit overwhelming if you are just beginning in affiliate marketing, but don’t be scared. Learn one tool at a time and add more as your knowledge and comfort level with affiliate marketing begins to grow. See also the site of affiliate marketing income to learn more about affiliate marketing.