The top affiliate marketers don’t need to fantasize about this lifestyle – they have the option to live this way.
Affiliate marketing is becoming more and more popular every day as people trade in the 9-5 lifestyle for the opportunity to be their own boss.
The only issue with this concept is that making it as an affiliate marketer is no easy feat. The rising popularity of digital marketing is making it harder and harder to build a sustainable affiliate marketing business.
So how do you build a successful affiliate marketing business? You start with the right tools.
We’ve built out a list of the 17+ best affiliate marketing tools that you need to use. We’ll continue to add new tools to this list every few weeks, so check back regularly.
Disclaimer: the following list contains a lot of WordPress plugins. Plugins are one of our favorite features of WordPress sites. However, installing new plugins always has the potential to interfere with your current site functionality. Please test out each of these plugins on a staging site before installing them on your live site, or work with a web development team to ensure that these plugins are compatible with your current site.
Our favorite affiliate marketing tools:
1. Flippa
Flippa is essential for anyone looking to leapfrog the process of building a successful affiliate site from scratch. This site serves as a bidding marketplace for individuals to buy and sell websites (think eBay for websites). Flippa allows affiliate marketers to buy sites that have a strong backlink profile to kickstart SEO growth.
One thing to note: we recommend running a full backlink audit before purchasing a domain to ensure that the domain isn’t being inflated by black-hat SEO practices like PBNs. We’ve seen far too many affiliate marketers buy a site with a strong backlink profile, only to be penalized by a Penguin algorithm update due to the black hat link building practices of the previous site owner.
2. ShareASale
Affiliate marketing starts with building partnerships with sites in need of sales. We’ve tested out a handful of affiliate networks including CJ Affiliate and Impact. However, ShareASale is our go-to resource for affiliate partnerships.
ShareASale connects publishers to advertisers who are looking for help driving sales. Publishers can get paid per phone call, lead, or website visitor that they drive for the advertiser.
While affiliate marketers will likely see a much higher commission per sale by working directly with advertisers, ShareASale is a great starting point.
3. SEMRush
SEMRush is our go-to tool for keyword research, fixing SEO errors, and competitor analysis. Fair warning: I’ve been using this tool daily since 2012, so I’m a bit biased here.
This tool is a must-have for marketers who are looking to understand what content is driving the highest ROI for competitors, as well as analyzing on-page SEO issues.
Some of the primary things that we use SEMRush for are:
Finding top performing competitor content that we should be writing about
Monitoring our keyword rankings on a weekly basis
Running SEO audits to watch for website issues that could hurt our search rankings
Monitoring press mentions
4. Ahrefs
Ahrefs serves many of the same functions as SEMRush (keyword research, on-page audits, competitive content analysis, etc). However, Ahrefs places much more emphasis on backlinks than on-page SEO.
Ahrefs provides marketers with in-depth insights about new and lost backlinks, sites that are linking to broken pages on your website, and competitor backlink growth.
Some of the primary things that we use Ahrefs for are:
Reviewing new and lost backlinks to our site
Reviewing competitor link profiles to find new link building opportunities
Finding sites that are linking to broken pages on our site (and then 301’ing those pages to another relevant page)
Finding top-performing competitor content to identify new content ideas for your site
Ahrefs and SEMRush are two of our team’s favorite SEO tools. However, investing in both services isn’t realistic for most business owners.
We recommend Ahrefs for those who are competing with much larger sites. We recommend SEMRush for those who are already the industry leader, or very close to it (more about this in our SEO FAQs). To add to this, both offer a free trial of their service for those that want to compare the two.
5. Yoast SEO
This is the first SEO plugin that we add to any site that we work on. Yoast SEO provides advanced SEO functionality to every page, including:
Title tag & meta description customization
Canonical link customization
Sitemap creation and customization
Meta robots customization
This is a free tool. But the paid version offers 24/7 support, as well as an advanced redirect manager. This redirect manager allows you to redirect broken pages or 410 pages that you want to be removed from search results.
Looking for help managing content marketing and SEO? Learn about our content marketing services to see how we would help you to scale.