Affiliate marketing provides an opportunity for brands and individuals to create mutually beneficial relationships. For example, a fitness blogger can rave about her favorite protein powder and earn a commission for every tub sold to a merchant through an affiliate web link. Affiliate campaigns help brands reach 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 a company or merchant compensates individuals or publishers, known as affiliates or affiliate marketers, for promoting their products or services.
In most cases, companies provide affiliates with unique links. Affiliate marketers then promote the merchant's products or services on their affiliate sites, blogs, newsletters, or social media pages, driving traffic to the merchant's site. When someone clicks on these affiliate links and makes a purchase or takes any other 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 by earning affiliate income for recommending products and services.
Types of affiliate marketing tools
A set of well-designed affiliate tools can 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 affiliate networks can help you do that. These networks facilitate different aspects of affiliate programs. We connect brands and affiliates through affiliate marketing platforms, where sellers meet and form partnerships with publishers. These networks simplify tracking, reporting, and payments between businesses and affiliates.
affiliate link tool
Links are the basis of affiliate marketing. When someone clicks on a link and makes a purchase, the business gets what they want and the affiliate earns a commission. Affiliate link tools allow you to track link clicks (and therefore traffic sources) through a unique tracking URL or cookie assigned to your affiliate. You can then use this information to allocate commissions to your affiliates.
Affiliate link tools may also offer link cloaking (also known as link masking or URL masking) to change affiliate links to make them appear shorter, cleaner, and more user-friendly.
landing page builder
Creating attractive and intuitive landing pages is key to converting clicks into conversions. Landing page builders make this easy. These great affiliate marketing tools allow affiliates to design landing pages tailored to their audience without the need for coding skills.
Landing page builders often offer A/B testing capabilities, allowing publishers and sellers to experiment with different elements and layouts to optimize performance.
SEO tools
SEO tools help you optimize your website's visibility in search engines and can be invaluable in your affiliate marketing campaigns. These help creators optimize their content for search engines, drive free organic traffic, and increase visibility.
Many of the freely available tools include features such as keyword research, competitive analysis, and in-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 audiences, and analyze performance metrics across different social platforms.
Email marketing tools automate email marketing campaigns, generate leads, and promote affiliate products through targeted messaging. Together, these tools can increase reach, engagement, and conversion rates for your affiliate marketing campaigns.
Affiliate marketing tools for marketers
Whether you have a successful online business and are looking to experiment with different campaign strategies, or you want to become an affiliate, you can benefit from great affiliate marketing tools. Here are some of the top affiliate marketing tools to 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. With this affiliate network app, you can recruit affiliates through custom application pages, create personalized links and codes, send and track gifts to affiliates (so they can try products and recommend them to your audience), and earn commissions. can be paid automatically.
Pricing: Shopify merchants can use Shopify Collabs for free, but they do charge a payment processing fee of 2.9% of their fees.
Share A sale
ShareASale is a vast affiliate network with 30,000 sellers and over 1 million publishers.
Pricing: ShareAsale charges a one-time $625 setup fee. After that, it costs $35 per month plus a 20% fee.
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: Bitly offers a free tool for 10 shortened links per month for novice affiliate marketers. However, most affiliate marketers want to invest in one of their paid plans, which includes affiliate ad tracking tools, a custom domain, and data. Plans range from $8 to $199 per month.
E composer
Built for Shopify, EComposer is a website creation tool for building engaging, high-converting landing pages. Drag-and-drop templates are easy to use and require no coding knowledge.
Pricing: 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.
Pricing: Plans range from $79 to $599 per month.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO tool. Key features include competitor analysis, site audits, and a free keyword rank checker. One of its best features is a free keyword research tool that provides data on search trends and volume for keywords related to affiliate marketing campaigns.
Pricing: Ahrefs offers some tools for free, such as a keyword generator. More comprehensive plans start at $129 per month.
sem rush
Semrush offers a variety of SEO tools for affiliate marketers and offers some of the most comprehensive SEO features on the market for in-depth data analysis.
Pricing: Semrush’s free option includes position tracking for up to 10 keywords, affiliate site audits for up to 100 URLs, and one free template for SEO writing assistant. Paid subscription plans, starting at $129.95 per month, offer larger project limits, sharing, and in-depth analytics.
omnisend
Omnisend is an easy-to-use email marketing tool that helps connect brands, affiliates, and customers. Choose from over 250 email templates, create landing pages, and use A/B testing. According to Omnisend, a member of the company earns $72 for every $1 he spends on his SMS and email marketing.
Pricing: Omnisend offers a free plan for small email lists and paid plans starting at $16 per month for more than 250 contacts or 500 emails per month.
buffer
Buffer offers comprehensive social media marketing tools. Schedule posts in advance, optimize posting times based on audience engagement data, and manage multiple social media accounts from a single dashboard. Detailed analytics provide post-performance insights, and team collaboration features facilitate seamless content creation and distribution.
Pricing: 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 on social media, especially Instagram and TikTok. Linkpop allows publishers to insert affiliate links into their bios and sell directly from their accounts. You 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 start affiliate marketing?
Novice affiliate marketers looking to get into the affiliate marketing game can start by joining an affiliate network (or multiple affiliate networks) to find a partnership that fits 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 helps you track the performance of your affiliate links, monitor conversion rates, analyze audience characteristics, set goal tracking for specific actions, and improve the effectiveness of your campaigns by optimizing your landing pages. However, it is not a standalone solution for managing every aspect of affiliate marketing.
