7 Extremely Useful Affiliate Marketing Tools to Raise Your Revenue

Posted by Dante Munnis

One of the most popular, and frankly wisest, ways of monetising your blog or website is through affiliate marketing.

Think about it…

As long as you follow some very basic best practices, the worst outcome of being an affiliate marketer is driving more traffic to your website. The best outcome is obviously making money when your visitors convert and become customers of your affiliate companies.

Unfortunately, without the right affiliate marketing tools it can be difficult. This is why the most successful affiliate marketers keep an arsenal of tools that help them maximise their efforts, and create a boost in their affiliate marketing related revenue.

So if you’re already an affiliate marketer, or have considered scaling your online business with affiliate marketing, these seven affiliate marketing tools will help you out.

1. SimilarWeb

Here is a concept that may seem a bit counter-intuitive… Being original and one of a kind, is not all that it is cracked up to be.

Chances are, you have created your website or blog with uniqueness in mind. After all, you want to stand out from the crowd and offer something that nobody else is offering.This is reflected in your branding, your content, even your web design.

That is great. On the other hand, sometimes the best path to success is to find somebody else who has already become successful and copy what they are doing. This is where SimilarWeb can help.

Using SimilarWeb is easy. You simply enter in the URL of another website in your niche, and it returns a plethora of information on that competitor. This includes the number of visits to their website, whether visits have increased or decreased, where their traffic is coming from, engagement, social media traffic, organic and paid keywords, referring sites, and more.

What you will be most interested in is referring sites. If you find that one of your competitors is really hitting it out of the park in terms of traffic and engagement, take a close look at their referring sites. Chances are, those are going to be good choices for ad placement or affiliate relationships.

2. Cbengine

Sometimes, the biggest struggle you face is knowing what products and services to promote with your affiliate campaigns.

What is the appropriate price range for your audience? What products will interest them most?

To find these answers, head to the CBEngine website. It contains what is essentially a clearing house of affiliate links in almost any niche you can imagine, and is tied to the popular ClickBank affiliate marketplace. Even better, you can use their search tool to drill down to the list of affiliates that is most appropriate for your audience. For example, if your blog is all about web design, you would select computers/web as your category and web design as your sub category. Then, you can select the price range that you want, the desired ranking, and even enter a few keywords.

This tool then takes all of your search requirements and returns a list of affiliate links that match your criteria. All you have to do is grab your affiliate links and begin using them in your campaigns. In just a few minutes, you will know exactly what you should be promoting.

3. Fruition Google Penalty Checker

The good news is that Google frequently updates their search engine algorithm in an effort to reward websites that provide informative, original, and useful content, and to penalise websites that have content that is repetitive, “spun”, and are generally set up to bait visitors into clicking on ads.

Unfortunately, without understanding the ins and outs of Google’s rules, it is possible that your legitimate website might be lumped in with bad affiliate marketing websites, resulting in lower search engine rankings. Even worse, you could find your site delisted altogether.

Fortunately, if you have accumulated at least 6 months of Google analytics data, you can use Fruition’s Google penalty checker to determine how Google might be penalising your website and what you can do about it.

4. BuzzSumo

Ultimately, getting people to your website is your best way to boost your affiliate marketing revenue. This means writing and sharing content that is current, relevant, and useful.

BuzzSumo is a great tool for this purpose. You can search by topic to see which content is getting the most shares, and if you buy a subscription, who is sharing the content and the number of backlinks that have been generated.

You can also enter in the URLs of competitors or other websites in your niche to see what content they are producing that is getting the most shares.

5. KeywordTool.io

Imagine if you had a tool that would allow you to reverse engineer your marketing efforts. In other words, what would you do if you could enter in some words related to your website, or simply a topic that you feel is trending within your network, and find the keywords that were also trending?

This application provides users with honest information about the best use of keywords by a particular website. This includes providing long tail keyword suggestions.

Use this tool consistently, and you will know how to organically bring people to your website who are most likely to click on your affiliate links.

6. AWeber

Another benefit of affiliate marketing is that it tends to bring in more subscribers. This can increase the level of emails that you receive to a level that exceeds your ability to respond in a timely manner.

AWeber helps you automate at least some of your email marketing tasks. You can use its autoresponse feature to ensure that all inbound subscriptions and other emails do not go unnoticed. In addition to this, you can use this tool to help manage your affiliate-marketing campaigns.

7. Hemingway

It’s true, an app designed to make you a better writer might be the best affiliate-marketing tool you can use.

As an affiliate marketer, one of the battles that you face is establishing and maintaining trustworthiness. The mere fact that you are representing a product can be off-putting to people who come to your blog for information. Plus, the sad reality that many people throw together blogs for no other purpose than to hawk a variety of dubious products and services doesn’t help your cause.

So, how can Hemingway help with this?

Poor writing is often seen as the hallmark of a fly by night blog. The Hemingway app can help you create truly polished blog posts that will erase any doubts about your relevance to those who surf your website.

About Dante

Dante Munnis is a blogger and idea maker from Stockholm who is interested in self-development, web related topics and success issues. You can find more of Dan’s articles on Essay Republic where he shares ideas for students living a better life and building habits that stick. To get strategies for boosting your mental and physical performance. You can in touch with Dante via Twitter.

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