Essential Affiliate Marketing Tools For Your Blog
Affiliate marketing is one of the most efficient ways to earn money online while blogging. It’s passive income but if you work hard and smart enough, you can keep that income flowing heavily. Of course, you’ll have to put more effort into it than something like ads; those affiliate products or services ae not going to sell themselves, after all. You can go the extra mile for this with some handy affiliate marketing tools.
Like any blog, tools will make your blogging career easier and lighter. Most of the time they’re there to automate tasks for you so you can focus on the content and other aspects of your website. Some tools, however, are also complementary to your affiliate marketing ventures. Regardless these affiliate marketing tools are a must-have no matter how big or small your blog is.
Take a look at some of the best and most crucial affiliate marketing tools that you can’t miss.
One of the first things you’ll need to have when you’re into affiliate marketing is an affiliate network. CJ Marketing is one of the best in that regard and can easily help you or set you up with a trusty affiliate company. When it comes to affiliate networks or advertising, CJ Affiliate is also one of the biggest and most influential.
No doubt you’ll benefit from joining their own established affiliate network. It is worth noting that CJ Affiliate actually specializes in pay-per-performance programs, meaning it might be better to establish your blog’s audience first before delving in and partnering up with an affiliate through CJ. Other benefits include real-time analytics and some bonuses for top performers.
Once you’ve hooked up your website to an affiliate program, you can’t just rush in and select whatever product or service to write about. If you want results and good returns for your effort, you’ll have to do your search engine optimization (SEO) homework. One of the easiest and most comprehensive ways to do this is with SEMRush, it has a free version too.
SEMRush is pretty much an SEO keyword ranking tool which can let you know which is trending or what you should be writing about. This way, you can make the most out of your affiliate posts. The more popular the affiliate post, the better the returns. A little research can go a long way and plenty of affiliate marketing tools can help you with that. There are also other SEO keyword ranking tools apart from SEMRush that you can try.
Sometimes no matter how well your affiliate posts perform, there will be dry spells in income. After all, your partner company will usually only compensate you based on how well your posts perform. If you want a more steady stream of income to supplement your affiliate marketing’s, Google AdSense (or other online advertisement programs, really) can help greatly.
It provides you a more reliable way of making passive income while you wait for your affiliate program rewards to kick in. The downside is that your blog might begin to look more like a marketing platform or a full-fledged advertiser for companies but such is the world we live in these days anyway. For this, you will need a healthy following for your blog.
Everflow is a real-time analytics tool which also functions as an all-around affiliate tool for your website. It helps you manage the number of affiliates you have and also gives you a deeper insight into your affiliate posts’ performance. In turn, it can help you improve your content for the future and can increase your income from affiliate marketing.
They also have an extensive fraud protection function that extends to clicks, impressions, conversions, and post-conversion activities. This way both you and your readers or audience are protected from security attempts to a certain degree. One of their best functions is automation; this lets you run your marketing campaigns easier.
RELATED: Affiliate Marketing for Dummies: How To Set It Up On Your Blog
In a nutshell, AffTrack is a tool that lets you manage your affiliate network easier. The tool and program prides itself on the wide variety of functions it can offer bloggers from invoicing to real-time tracking and even anything in-between, according to them. It has also been popularly used since 2009 and already has a good reputation in the affiliate marketing industry.
For the benefits it offers, however, AffTrack doesn’t exactly come at a cheap price tag. Its unlimited program costs $499 for 12 months but it does offer a nice beginners package for $1 that lasts 3 months provided you are new to their program.
Radius is actually Impact’s own affiliate marketing tool and it is every bit as competitive as the other marketing tools here. Meanwhile, Impact is a fast-growing and popular marketing and advertising company. Their tool Radius can certainly help you manage your affiliate program with ease as it lets you keep track of many things from coupon, rewards, loyalty and cashback sites among many other aspects.
It can also let you contract with the affiliates and then automatically provides you the analytics of your affiliate program once you’ve found a partner. Moreover, the tool promises flexibility and in-depth insights into your affiliate progress and status.
Last but no the least on our list of affiliate tracking and management software is ClickInc. You can also treat this one like an all-in-one tool to help for anything affiliate related for your website. It lets you contact your affiliate partner, use your affiliate links to get better SEO, provide you with SERP ranking information, and is even handy enough to tell you which partners have dropped your program.
Their tool is also simple to use and only requires the registered URL of your affiliates, meaning you can set it up quickly and be on your merry way. We have to warn you though, ClickInc is quite pricey at $25/month. Still, there’s a free 30-day trial if you want a test run.
If you want a more mainstream but less intimidating affiliate network, then Awin might just fit your needs better than CJ Affiliate. It features more than 15,000 advertisers and more than 200,000 publishers. You’ll have no trouble finding an affiliate partner here. Some of their clients are also big names like HP, BuzzFeed, Etsy, Emirates, Clear, AliExpress, and Forbes to name a few.
Of course, there are also some of the more niche affiliate program partners for your website if you prefer. Their clients are ever-increasing so you don’t really need to worry about missing out on some of your preferred affiliate partners.
For best results, make sure to review and these affiliate marketing tools and software especially the redundant ones (affiliate tracking tools, affiliate networks). Some of them might be better than the others depending on your needs.
RELATED: Affiliate Marketing Tips to Build a Profitable Business
