Affiliate marketing offers brands and individuals the opportunity to develop mutually beneficial relationships. For example, a fitness blogger can rave about their favorite protein powder and earn a commission for every unit of protein powder sold through their affiliate web link. Affiliate campaigns help brands gain new customers, bloggers make money, and readers discover great products.
With the right tools, affiliate marketing programs can make affiliate marketers more productive, making it easier to find partnerships, manage links, and share content. Here are some of the top affiliate marketing tools and networks that help merchants and publishers maximize their affiliate revenue and grow their online presence.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a strategy in which businesses or merchants reward individuals or publishers, known as affiliates or affiliate marketers, for promoting their products or services.
In most cases, businesses provide affiliates with unique links. Affiliate marketers promote the merchant's products or services on the affiliate's site, blog, newsletter, and social media pages, driving traffic to the merchant's site. When someone clicks on one of these affiliate links and makes a purchase or takes another desired action, the affiliate earns a commission.
Affiliate marketing allows businesses to expand their market reach and outsource lead generation without upfront marketing costs, while publishers can monetize their online presence and earn affiliate income by recommending products and services.
Types of Affiliate Marketing Tools
Well-designed affiliate tools help you run a successful affiliate marketing program. Use these tools to manage different aspects of your affiliate campaigns, including optimization, communication, and content creation. The best affiliate marketing tools are:
Affiliate Network
Building and maintaining relationships with affiliates takes a lot of time and effort. Using an affiliate network can help. These networks facilitate different aspects of affiliate programs. They connect brands and affiliates through affiliate marketing platforms, where merchants meet with publishers and forge partnerships. These networks simplify tracking, reporting, and payments between companies and affiliates.
Affiliate Link Tools
Links are the basis of affiliate marketing: when someone clicks on the link and makes a purchase, the business gets what they want and the affiliate earns a commission. The affiliate link tool allows you to track link clicks (and therefore traffic sources) through a unique tracking URL or cookie assigned to the affiliate. You can then use this information to assign commissions to affiliates.
Affiliate link tools may also offer link cloaking (also known as link masking or URL masking) to make your affiliate links appear shorter, clearer, and more user-friendly.
Landing Page Builder
Creating an engaging and intuitive landing page is key to turning clicks into conversions. Landing page builders make this easy. These great affiliate marketing tools allow affiliates to design landing pages tailored to their audience, with no coding skills required.
Landing page builders often have A/B testing capabilities, allowing publishers and merchants to try out different elements and layouts to optimize performance.
SEO Tools
SEO tools are extremely useful in affiliate marketing campaigns as they help optimize a website’s visibility on search engines. SEO tools help creators optimize their content for search engines and drive unpaid organic traffic to increase visibility.
Many of the freely available tools include features such as keyword research, competitive analysis, and on-page optimization suggestions to help affiliates identify relevant keywords and topics with high search volume and low competition. By strategically incorporating these keywords into their content, publishers can improve their search engine rankings and attract more website visitors to their affiliate links.
Email and social media marketing tools
Most affiliate marketers use multiple platforms to attract internet users to their affiliate offers. Social media marketing tools allow digital marketers to schedule posts, engage with their audience, and analyze performance metrics across different social platforms.
Email marketing tools automate your email marketing campaigns, generate leads, and promote your affiliate products through targeted messaging. Together, these tools increase the reach, engagement, and conversion rates of your affiliate marketing campaigns.
Affiliate Marketing Tools for Marketers
If you run a successful online business and want to try out different campaign strategies, or if you are looking to become an affiliate, you can benefit from good affiliate marketing tools. Here are some of the top affiliate marketing tools that can help you grow your affiliate marketing business.
Shopify Collaboration
If you run a Shopify store, Shopify Collabs is the place to connect with affiliate partners. This affiliate network app allows you to recruit affiliates through a custom application page, create personalized links and codes, send and track gifts to affiliates (allowing affiliates to try your products and recommend them to their audience), and pay commissions automatically.
price: Shopify Collabs is free for Shopify merchants to use, but there is a 2.9% payment processing fee that they charge.
ShareASale
ShareASale is a large affiliate network with 30,000 merchants and over 1 million publishers.
price: ShareAsale charges a one-time setup fee of $625, after which it costs $35 per month plus a 20% commission.
Bitly
Bitly is the best link shortening and tracking tool for affiliate marketing. It's easy to use and allows you to monitor the success of your affiliate links and analyze performance metrics.
price: For new affiliate marketers, Bitly offers 10 free shortened links per month, but most affiliate marketers will want to invest in a paid plan that includes affiliate ad tracking tools, a custom domain, and data. Plans range from $8 to $199 per month.
Electronic Composer
Built for Shopify, EComposer is a website creation tool for building engaging, high-converting landing pages. Its drag-and-drop templates are easy to use and no coding knowledge is required.
price: Plans range from free to $82.50 per month.
Seed Prod
SeedProd is a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to create landing pages. With SeedProd, you can choose from a variety of templates and themes to create beautiful pages that can adapt to different screen sizes.
price: Plans range from $79 to $599 per month.
Arlephus
Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO tool. Its main features include competitor analysis, site audit, free keyword rank checker, etc. One of its best features is the free keyword research tool that provides data on search trends and volume for keywords relevant to your affiliate marketing campaigns.
price: Ahrefs offers some tools for free, such as the keyword generator, and more comprehensive plans start at $129 per month.
Sem Rush
Semrush offers a range of SEO tools for affiliate marketers and has some of the most comprehensive SEO features on the market for in-depth data analysis.
price: Semrush’s free option includes position tracking for up to 10 keywords, affiliate site audit for up to 100 URLs, and one free SEO Writing Assistant template. Paid subscription plans, starting at $129.95 per month, allow for increased project limits, sharing, and in-depth analysis.
Omnisend
Omnisend is an easy-to-use email marketing tool that helps connect brands, affiliates, and customers. Choose from 250+ email templates, create landing pages, and use A/B testing. According to Omnisend, for every dollar spent on SMS and email marketing, merchants earn $72 in profits.
price: Omnisend offers a free plan for small mailing lists and paid plans starting at $16 per month for 250+ contacts or 500+ emails per month.
buffer
Buffer offers comprehensive social media marketing tools. You can schedule posts in advance, optimize posting times based on audience engagement data, and manage multiple social media accounts from a single dashboard. Detailed analytics give you insight into post performance, and team collaboration features allow for seamless content creation and distribution.
price: Buffer offers a free plan and paid plans ranging from $6 to $120 per month.
Link Pop
Linkpop is a great tool for affiliate marketers, especially on social media like Instagram and TikTok. Linkpop allows publishers to insert affiliate links into their profiles and sell directly from their accounts. They can also customize landing pages and use their analytics to track performance.
price: Linkpop is free.
Affiliate Marketing Tools FAQ
What is the easiest way to get started in affiliate marketing?
Beginner affiliate marketers who want to get into affiliate marketing can start by joining an affiliate network (or multiple affiliate networks) to find a partnership that suits their interests and business goals.
Is there affiliate marketing software for brands?
What are the benefits of affiliate marketing tools?
Affiliate marketing tools help brands and publishers manage and optimize various aspects of their partnerships and affiliate marketing strategies. Choosing a good affiliate marketing tool can greatly improve the ease and effectiveness of your affiliate marketing efforts.
Is Google Analytics an affiliate marketing tool?
Google Analytics can help you track the performance of your affiliate links, monitor conversion rates, analyze audience characteristics, set up goal tracking for specific actions, and optimize your landing pages to improve the effectiveness of your campaigns, but it is not a standalone solution for managing all aspects of your affiliate marketing.
