You’d be surprised just how many affiliate marketing tools there are out there, that will help you effectively do many of the things you need to get done.
While some affiliate marketing tools exist to help you sell your products, others can help you get your affiliate website started.
There are many areas in affiliate marketing that you don’t have to do manually, areas like:
- Creating your affiliate website
- Cloaking your affiliate links
- Getting traffic
All of these areas either require hiring someone, buying read-made solutions or using a tool.
On the other hand there are non-essential tools that are not exactly affiliate tools but can be used as such. Today we’re going to go over some of the tools you should have in your affiliate marketing campaign arsenal.
Tools that will help you gain a competitive advantage over other affiliates in your niche.
The good news is, most of the affiliate tools I’ll be sharing in this article are absolutely free.
Find Your Niche Using Google Trends
One of most overlooked tool by affiliate marketers is Google Trends.
Google Trends shows you the most trending topics that are high searched every day in your country. This gives you the potential of targeting local niches on your affiliate website.
They list the topics in a categorized manner, allowing you to find a niche that falls within a certain category.
For example, if I want to promote a health related product but I am not sure which segment in that niche is trending right now, then I can use Google Trends for that.
Open up Google Trends and select the category you want:
This will return you a list of niches in the health category:
They are organized in a unique way, unlike the usual “weight loss”, “muscle gain” categories.
Now say I liked the niche “Mediterranean diet”, you then go to Google Trends main page and type in your keyword:
You will see a detailed analysis of the niche, like which countries search for the niche the most and how well the niche performed over the past 12 months.
But most importantly you will get a list of segments in your niche:
Niche segments allow you to be more specific in your promotions, and help you target a group of people on your affiliate website.
This can only increase your affiliate sales.
Anyone visiting your affiliate website looking for tips and information about a specific topic, they will find that you cover every aspect of it.
In the end they will start to trust you and your expert opinion, which helps increase your sales.
Cloaking Your Affiliate Links Using Pretty Link Lite
Cloaking is a technical term and it means hiding or disguising something. Affiliate links are the only thing that need disguising in affiliate marketing.
To better explain, take a look at this example of a Clickbank affiliate link:
http://affiliateid.vendorid.hop.clickbank.net
Besides looking long and ugly, you won’t have any idea of where this link leads to just by looking at it. It’s not something you would like to present to your website visitors and ask them to click on after reading one of your product reviews…
Yes, some of your website visitors would click on that link, but there are many that won’t because it looks a bit spammy.
Cloaking comes as a solution to this problem, as you can turn this ugly affiliate link into something more readable and trustworthy like:
http://mysite.com/PRODUCT
Now this is a better version of your affiliate link; it is the same as the original one and will lead to the same page.
Also, at a glance, users can understand where this link leads to.
There are many paid tools that can turn your affiliate links into elegant ones like in the above example. At the same time, those paid tools provide you with in-depth stats and tracking data.
However if you are looking for a free solution then you could use Pretty Link Lite WordPress plugin.
This WordPress plugin has been downloaded over 200,000 times so it gets the job done in an efficient manner.
Writing Your Affiliate Product Reviews
Review pages allow you to not only sell your affiliate products but also voice your own opinion on the product.
However writing product reviews goes beyond typing a bunch of text on your screen, and hoping that these words will magically earn you affiliate sales.
Your product reviews need to contain these content types:
- Text
- Images and Screenshots
- Videos
In most cases you will have access to a professional word editor to write the text of your product reviews. Microsoft Word is a great tool for writing product reviews; it will check and fix your grammar and spelling.
If you don’t have Microsoft Word, I recommend using Google Drive’s word processor.
Screenshots is the tricky part.
Operating systems like Windows or Mac offer you a way to capture what’s on your screen and save it into an image file. But by using these built-in tools doesn’t allow you to add effects to your screenshots (i.e. arrows, circles, text…etc).
Snagit is a great tool for screen capture, visual effects and saving the result in a web friendly image format. They have a free trail which you can start using.
The importance of such visual effects is very high when writing affiliate product reviews.
Including arrow and circles for example, allows you to highlight certain parts of the image and stress your point in a clear manner.
Adding videos to your product reviews increases your sales conversion rates.
Specifically product’s walk-through videos are the most effective ones because they give your readers a chance to see the product in action.
You can use a tool like Snagit which also records what is on your screen but this time saves it in a video file.
Conclusion
Quality affiliate marketing tools can help your business in many ways:
- They can help you find and analyze niches to detect profitable ones
- Finding and comparing multiple affiliate products
- Improve your SEO (on and off page)
Affiliate marketing courses and training sometimes offer affiliate tools in their package. Having access to such tools is great especially if they are part of a step by step training. You also can learn about blogging tools since many affiliate websites are WordPress based.