Affiliate marketing has changed a lot in the past decade. From humble beginnings to incredible heights. Compared to previous years, the industry is almost unrecognizable. This meteoric rise in competition, profits, and techniques created some of the most dedicated affiliate marketers out there. These people live and breathe affiliate marketing, they keep track of each and every change in policies, trends, and best practices.
Competing with them, if you are new to the industry, is impossible without some serious help. This is why there are all sorts of tools that can help you gain an edge. These tools can vary drastically in form and function. While some can help you with your content, others can improve your writing skills, creative creation, or tracking capabilities. Utilizing these tools to their full extent can help you narrow down the gap between you and the best of the best in the industry!
Within this article, we will present you with some of the most useful tools that every affiliate should know about!
Tracking Tools
In this industry, optimizing your campaigns and pulling out the best ROI your campaigns can manage is the key to success. For you to optimize your campaigns properly, you will need to collect a lot of data. The best way to collect detailed data about all the aspects of your campaign is through tracking tools.
1. RedTrack
RedTrack is one of the industry giants. If you have been in the affiliate marketing game for a few years, you have come across this affiliate marketing tool one way or another. Its popularity is well earned though. The tool has incredible features that can help affiliates track even the most minute details about their campaigns’ performance.
RedTrack offers a lot of features that you won’t find on other tracking tools. The bad part about this is that the more advanced features are well hidden within the menus and submenus. RedTrack’s possibilities are also the thing that keeps it down from beginning perfect. Namely, for beginners, the tracking tool can be too much to handle, but it’s still easier to use than some of its competition.
Pricing:
- Basic: $49/mo
- Pro: $99/mo
- Advanced: $149/mo
2. Voluum
Similar to RedTrack, Voluum is just one of those industry giants that most affiliates have heard of. For most purposes, the difference between Voluum and RedTrack is minimal. They both offer similar features and picking any one of them will be a great choice.
Voluum tries to make things as easy as possible to affiliates. They offer the possibility to track search, display, native, and many other types of ads in real-time! This affiliate marketing tool offers a lot of premade templates that are optimized for a lot of the most popular traffic sources.
Voluum is well optimized for advanced affiliates but not so much for beginners. Those who are searching for specific features might prefer RedTrack to Voluum. The price of Voluum is quite high at times, but as with all of the tools on the list, it’s well worth it.
Pricing:
- Discover: #89/mo
- Profit: $149/mo
- Grow: $449/mo
- Agency: $999/mo
VPN Service Tools
If you spent any time watching YouTube videos, you probably noticed that most creators have some sort of ads for VPNs. The market of VPNs has exploded in the past few years and there is a lot of competition battling for your money!
Most affiliates use some sort of VPN since they can offer you a lot of protection and benefits for your campaigns. So let’s spare you some time searching for the best ones, and here are the two that we use the most often!
1. NordVPN
NordVPN has quite a reputation. It is one of the most talked-about VPN services out there. With over 5200 servers in 62 countries, you don’t have to worry about support at all! Even though the service is huge, they still offer one of the best security solutions compared to other VPNs on the market. If you are in doubt about which one to get, Nord won’t be a bad choice for sure!
Pricing:
- 1-month plan: $11.95/mo
- 1-year plan: $4.92/mo
- 2-year plan: $3.67/mo
2. ExpressVPN
With servers in over 94 countries, no activity logs, support for encryption, and always helpful customer support, ExpressVPN manages to enter our list in incredible style. The service is quite popular on the web and their track record seems to prove that they are a great choice for any affiliate marketer.
Pricing:
- 1-month plan: $12.95/mo
- 6 months plan: $9.99/mo
- 1-year plan: $8.32/mo
Landing Page & Design Tools
One of the most valuable affiliate marketing tools that marketers use is landing page builders and design tools. These can help you create some incredible landing pages in mere minutes with incredible quality. Tools like that can save you time and money, and if you are great with design tools, you can even make some extra cash on the side!
1. Unbounce
Tired of spending hours in WordPress creating and optimizing your pages to the finest details? Well, then platforms like Unbounce are perfect for you. This app can create incredible landing pages from customizable templates in just a few minutes. If you want your LPs to run well, be stylish, and create them fast, don’t look any further than Unbounce!
This platform is specifically optimized for affiliates and their needs. So if you can only pick one page-building tool to use, try this one first!
Pricing:
- Launch: $80/mo
- Optimize: $120/mo
- Accelerate: $200/mo
- Scale: $300/mo
2. Wix
Wix is one of the most popular website builders on the web. They got their reputation through years of hard work and experience. Building even the most complicated pages can be done within just a few minutes of drag and drop.
You can create websites, landing pages, and much more! All through pre-made templates and an easy-to-use drag and drop system! No coding is required!
Pricing:
- Business Basic: $17/mo
- Business Unlimited: $25/mo
- Business VIP: $35/mo
3. Adobe
Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, and After Effects. All of these programs can be an incredibly powerful toolset in the hands of skilled affiliates. These tools can help people who love to take things into their own hands to design their creatives and visual styles.
If you are completely unfamiliar with the tools, you will have a hard time getting the hang of it. These tools require years of use to master properly, and if you don’t have the skill or time, maybe it’s best to hire a professional designer instead!
Also, if the Adobe suite is too expensive for you, there are free and cheaper alternatives available on the web that can do all of the things!
Pricing:
- Single app: $20.99/mo
- All apps (20+): $52.99/mo
4. Canva
Tired of doing all the creative work yourself? Canva can help you do all of the design work for the creatives on your blog or page! Its system is extremely easy to use, and you can create incredible eye-catching masterpieces within a few minutes. You don’t need to master complicated apps or pay for designers to do the work for you!
Pricing:
- Free: well, it’s free!
- Pro: $12.99/mo
- Enterprise: $30/mo
Content Tools
Your content matters, it is the thing that sets you apart from your competition! The better written, and more creative it is, the more success you will have within your niche! Luckily, there are a lot of tools that focus on content generation and optimizations, and here are some of them!
1. Grammarly
Poorly written content is one of the big sins in content writing. Nobody wants to read a copy that has grammatical, spelling, and clarity mistakes that can be easily fixed. They make you seem unprofessional and not genuine, so always do a thorough spell-check on your content! One of the best apps for this is Grammarly. It will point out your mistakes and help you correct them in no time. You can even combine Grammarly with other spell checkers to ensure that your content is well written and correct.
Pricing:
- Free: $0
- Premium for individuals: $11.66/mo
- Premium for Teams: $12.50/mo
2. BuzzSumo
Creating relevant content for your blog or age is hard. With experience, you can get pretty good at this, but without a lot of experience, you can completely miss the mark and in turn lower your audience's interest. Enter a few keywords that you think fit your audience's interests and BuzzSumo will find the most relevant topics related to that keyword. It gives you a detailed report and contains a lot of useful detail and actionable insights.
In short, if you want to make sure you create content that is popular right now, use BuzzSumo. You will quickly notice patterns and things that can increase your readership!
Pricing:
- Free: $0
- Pro: $99/mo
- Plus: $179/mo
- Large: $299/mo
3. Bitly
Affiliate marketing revolves around making people click on your link and buy the product or service you advertise. Sometimes the links given by networks can seem a bit untrustworthy or too long. This is where services like Bitly can be incredibly useful. Bitly can shorten URLs or even make them branded. This can help your links seem more trustworthy and clickable. Forget about long and unreadable links, make your links short and branded!
Pricing:
- Basic: $35/mo
- Premium: $300/mo
Conclusion
Hopefully, this list of useful affiliate tools will help you grow your business faster and better. Don't try doing everything yourself, get some help in the form of tools or even marketing agencies. They can save you a lot of time, and create much better things than you could in the same amount of time. This, in turn, can earn you bigger profits and more customers.
But of course, tools aren't everything. You always need to keep improving yourself and learn new things. No tool can replace you. So always try your best, and keep up to date. But save time and optimize your content with tools!
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