Few would disagree that affiliates live and die by the effectiveness of marketing efforts. If you can't get enough eyes on your affiliate marketing content, struggle to create effective landing pages, and so on, you won’t make much money.
A big part of preventing such problems and becoming a successful affiliate marketer is having the right tools in your toolbox. Here are 17, ranging from underrated affiliate marketing tools to tried-and-true fan favorites.
PS. Did you know Jasper also has an industry-leading affiliate program where you can earn up to 30% recurring on each and every sale? Learn more about how to become a Jasper affiliate.
Types of affiliate marketing tools we’ll be covering
- Content and copywriting software: Creating strong content that resonates with readers is essential in generating affiliate conversions.
- Marketplace tools: These tools allow you to find new affiliate products and software to promote with your audience.
- WordPress tools and plugins: WordPress powers a large portion of the internet, so it’s likely many of you reading this are using WordPress to host your blog content. These tools are specialized for the WordPress platform.
- Conversion-focused landing page tools: Conversions, conversions, conversions. That’s the lifeblood of any affiliate business, so it’s important you drive them home.
- Email marketing tools: Email is one of the most powerful owned marketing channels, making it a key component of any affiliate strategy.
How to drive affiliate conversions like a pro
Standing out and converting clicks into sales is the ultimate goal of affiliate marketing. But how do you elevate your strategy from amateur to professional? Whether you're just starting out or looking to optimize your existing efforts, mastering the art of driving affiliate conversions is key. This guide is designed to help affiliate marketers harness effective strategies to boost conversions and skyrocket success.
Understand Your Audience Inside Out
The foundation of successful affiliate marketing is a deep understanding of your audience. Knowing who they are, what problems they face, and how the products or services you're promoting can solve those problems is crucial. This insight allows you to tailor your content and recommendations in a way that resonates with your audience, making them more likely to convert.
Tips for Understanding Your Audience:
- Conduct surveys: Use your email list or social media platforms to ask your audience directly about their preferences and challenges.
- Analyze data: Utilize tools like Google Analytics to understand audience demographics, interests, and behavior on your site.
- Engage on social media: Pay attention to comments, questions, and discussions to gather insights into your audience’s needs and preferences.
Leverage Trustworthy Content
Content is the bread and butter of affiliate marketing, but not all content is created equal. To drive conversions, your content must be trustworthy, informative, and engaging. Reviews, tutorials, and case studies that offer genuine insight and value tend to perform best.
Affiliate Content Tips:
- Be honest and transparent: Always disclose your affiliate relationships and focus on promoting products you truly believe in.
- Provide real value: Go beyond basic information to offer in-depth reviews, how-to guides, and personal insights.
- Use a variety of formats: Incorporate long-form blog posts, videos, and social media updates to engage your audience across different platforms.
Optimize for Search Engines
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is vital for driving organic traffic to your content. By optimizing your content for relevant keywords, you can attract more visitors who are actively searching for solutions that your affiliate products can provide.
Affiliate SEO Strategies:
- Keyword research: Use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to find high-volume, low-competition keywords related to your products.
- On-page SEO: Incorporate keywords naturally into your titles, headers, content, and meta descriptions.
- Quality backlinks: Build relationships with other bloggers and websites in your niche to generate backlinks, which can improve your site’s authority and search ranking.
Utilize Email Marketing
Email marketing remains one of the most effective tools for driving conversions. By building an email list and nurturing it with valuable content, you can develop a direct line of communication with your audience, allowing you to promote affiliate products more effectively.
Email Marketing Best Practices:
- Offer incentives: Encourage sign-ups by offering freebies, such as ebooks or exclusive content.
- Segment your list: Tailor your emails to different segments of your audience based on their interests and behaviors.
- Include clear calls-to-action (CTAs): Make it easy for your readers to take the next step, whether it’s reading a product review or making a purchase.
Test, Analyze, and Optimize
The world of affiliate marketing is always evolving, so it’s important to continuously test different strategies and analyze the results. Use analytics tools to track your traffic, clicks, and conversions, and don’t be afraid to experiment with new approaches.
Optimization Techniques:
- A/B testing: Test different versions of your content or emails to see which performs better.
- Conversion rate optimization (CRO): Make incremental changes to your website and content to improve the user experience and conversion rates.
- Stay up-to-date: Keep abreast of the latest affiliate marketing trends and platform changes to ensure your strategies remain effective.
Top affiliate marketing tools for content and copy
Since content is such a key part of marketing overall and affiliate marketing specifically, here are a few must-haves for content creation and ongoing, stress-free distribution.
1. KWFinder
What’s the consequence of not doing SEO to attract site visitors to your affiliate site from organic search results? You’ll have to spend a lot more time manually promoting your content, which is neither efficient nor profitable unless you already have a huge, engaged following.
KWFinder is an affordable way to do keyword research and find terms that you can rank review-style and comparison posts with.
Pricing: If you don’t want to spend hundreds on SEO tools like Ahrefs, take your SEO game to the next level for as little as $49 per month with KWFinder.
2. Jasper
Jasper is an incredibly sophisticated AI writing assistant. It can help you write informative content and persuasive copy for your affiliate products (or services) up to 2x faster than you otherwise could. This is, in part, thanks to its various templates that make it easy to generate ideas for a variety of content formats and audiences.
For example, if you wanted to create a video on the advantages of using a product that you’re an affiliate for—for example, Semrush—you could use the Video Script Hook and Introduction template to generate ideas.
Alternatively, you could use the Product Description template to create an informative, high-converting description for a sales page.
And the same goes for many of Jasper’s templates including the Attention, Interest, Desire, Action (AIDA) Framework, the Pain, Agitate, Solution (PAS) Framework, and others.
Pricing: You can create conversion-focused copy with Jasper for as little as $29 per month.
3. Vidyard
If you’re doing software reviews, tutorials or anything of that sort and don’t want to pay for a Loom subscription, Vidyard is the way to go. The free plan allows for unlimited recording, unlimited uploads, and sharing. But, on a paid plan, you can also:
- Password protect your videos, which can be good for gated content
- Include calls-to-action to drive sales and earn commissions
- Enable replies to your videos to address questions about your offers
- See detailed analytics to understand how each video is performing
Pricing: Vidyard’s paid plans start at $19 per month and, if you typically get a good ROI from your video marketing, pay for themselves many times over.
4. Missinglettr Curate
It’s been said that content creation is only half the battle. Without distribution—specifically, ongoing distribution—your content will never reach its full potential. This would cost you countless sales.
With Missinglettr Curate, though, you can upload everything from product reviews to social media posts to landing pages to a library where it can be found for years to come by people who want to read it or, even better, share it with their audiences. The single action of uploading a piece of content or copy can get you hundreds or even thousands of views and affiliate sales long-term!
Pricing: Besides its free plan, Missinglettr Curate offers plans starting at just $19 a month.
Reputable marketplace tools for affiliate marketers
Next up, what are some of the top places to find new vendors in need of affiliates?
5. ShareASale
With over 16.5K merchants and $182 million generated in 2020, there are more than enough offers to choose from and more than enough money to be made with ShareASale.
This huge affiliate marketing network makes it easy to find products and brands that you’d be excited to promote, and that your audience will be thrilled to pull out their wallets for.
6. CJ Affiliate
With the help of CJ Affiliate’s cutting-edge tech—cross-device tracking, cookieless tracking, and more—you can drive sales for and earn commission from the world’s biggest brands. This includes the likes of Office Depot, Barnes and Noble, Overstock, and others.
7. ClickBank
Another popular affiliate network is ClickBank. Not only does it pay commissions as high as 90% in some cases but it also offers other perks such as recurring commissions and the ability to connect with and learn from other affiliate marketers.
The best affiliate marketing tools for WordPress
With WordPress powering 42% of the web, it’s safe to say that a good number of affiliate marketers are using it. If you’re one of them, you'll be interested in these four WordPress plugins.
8. WP Engine
WP Engine is an alternative to popular hosting providers like GoDaddy. Users report being impressed by its user-friendliness, advanced security options, speed, reliability, and more. Not to mention the ability to easily add new WordPress sites to your hosting plan, which is great if you run more than one affiliate website.
Pricing: WPEngine’s monthly plans start at $30 and the company provides a range of more advanced plans that can grow with you as you scale your affiliate marketing operation.
9. Rank Math SEO
Yoast is one of, if not the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress sites. But its competitor Rank Math offers numerous advantages when it comes to optimization for search engines. It’s faster, able to integrate with Google Analytics, able to track keywords, has a schema markup generator, and much more.
Instead of bare minimum prompts to help you write high-quality content, Rank Math goes the extra mile to help you rank in the top search results. This means more organic traffic and, potentially, more affiliate sales.
Pricing: Rank Math has two plans priced at $129 and $429 per year respectively.
10. RafflePress
There are few better ways to drive traffic, convert leads to prospects, and prospects to customers than with giveaways and contests. If you need to generate excitement around your affiliate offers, give RafflePress a try. It features easy drag-and-drop functionality, many pre-made templates that you can quickly customize, social media and CRM integrations, and even fraud protection.
How could you use this to your advantage as an affiliate marketer? If your affiliate link will get customers a discount on a product or service, only promise it to a handful of contest winners (instead of making it publicly available). This is a great way to generate hype and leverage scarcity and FOMO.
Pricing: You can grab RafflePress for one site for as little as $49 per year. Other plans are available as well if you have other sites or want additional features.
11. ThirstyAffiliates
Specifically for affiliate marketers like yourself, ThirstyAffiliates offers several helpful features. For instance, it acts as a link management tool, allowing you to:
- Cloak the long, ugly links that you share with your audience
- Deter commission thieves
- Organize your links so that you can find and use them quickly
Not to mention that it creates automatic affiliate disclosures and advanced statistics reports so that you can monitor the success of your affiliate marketing campaigns.
Pricing: If you own just one affiliate site, the basic plan, which starts at $49, will do. The Plus and Advanced plans are $99 and $149 respectively and cater to marketers with multiple sites to manage.
Conversion-focused landing page tools for affiliate marketers
In addition to MOFU content such as product comparisons, it’s smart to have dedicated sales pages set up to convert prospects. You’ll love these three tools for better landing pages.
12. Unbounce
It’s no wonder Unbounce is such a popular tool among affiliate marketers. It requires zero coding skills and its drag-and-drop builder and templates make it possible to create high-converting landing pages, popups, and sticky bars in no time!
Unlike your average no-code page builder, Unbounce provides a Conversion Intelligence platform that gives feedback on the persuasiveness of your copy, maps and tracks conversions, and even learns from your page and visitor attributes. Since your primary goal is to get conversions and keep the commissions rolling in every month, you’ll want this tool to set you up for success.
Pricing: Plans start at $80 per month and range up to $300 per month depending on the scale of your needs.
13. GrooveFunnels
You’ve heard of the website and funnel builder ClickFunnels, right? Well, have you heard of its rival, GrooveFunnels? GrooveFunnels is a fast way to build high-converting sites and sales funnels for your affiliate products and services.
Plus, it’s connected with an impressive suite of other products and services such as:
- Live webinars and live streaming
- Video hosting
- A help desk
- Surveys
- Purchase popups
- Booking and scheduling
Pricing: You can get your hands on GrooveFunnels by itself for the low price of $0 per month. That’s right; it’s free! And if you’d like the full suite of tools—Groove.CM—you can get it for a single payment of $1,397.
14. VWO
Are you even a marketer if you’re not constantly testing the effectiveness of your efforts? No doubt you want to know what colors, versions of copy, and techniques are having the biggest impact on your conversions. After all, only when you know what you’re doing right can you do more of it (and vice versa). So, when it comes to A/B testing, VWO is a great tool to have in your arsenal.
You can choose between either a code editor or visual editor, segment users, run several tests at the same time, record your detailed hypotheses, and track your results across your entire funnel.
You can even connect behavioral insights such as heatmaps with your A/B tests for a more accurate picture of what is and isn’t converting prospects via your affiliate links.
Pricing: If you’re interested in VWO, you’ll need to fill out a pricing request form for the solutions you’re interested in.
Handy email marketing tools for affiliate marketers
Now for a few tools that can help you get more subscribers and maintain your email list.
15. Folderly
Before you can hope to see any results from email marketing, you have to first make sure that your emails make it to potential customers’ inboxes. This can be particularly tricky as an affiliate marketer, since some approaches to affiliate marketing are more likely to be seen as spammy or overly salesy.
To keep your emails from landing in the spam folder, use Folderly. It’s an AI-based platform to analyze and fix deliverability issues. This can ultimately improve metrics such as open, reply, clickthrough, and conversion rates.
Pricing: Folderly’s base package starts at $200 per month. But considering that it boosts one of the most important factors in email marketing—deliverability—you may find that the cost is well worth it.
16. Thrive Leads
Thrive Leads is an incredibly powerful WordPress plugin for lead generation. You can use its simple, user-friendly editor to design, deploy, and test eye-catching email opt-in forms. And not the cookie-cutter kind.
Thrive Leads’ advanced targeting capabilities increase conversion rates by allowing you to display dynamic offers to your website visitors based on their specific interests. In turn, this makes them more likely to buy using your links.
Pricing: For just $19 per month, you can get access to Thrive Leads and a suite of other tools including a landing page builder and countdown campaigns tool to create urgency and drive sales.
17. Mailerlite
An easy-to-use alternative to tools like Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign, Mailerlite offers key features such as automation, popups and embedded forms, A/B testing, segmentation, and surveys. This makes it easy to promote the right affiliate offers to the right portion of your audience at the right time.
Pricing: With a free plan available and cost-effective paid plans starting at $10 per month, you won’t have to worry about a hefty expense cutting into the money you make from your commissions.
Which tools will you try?
The 17 tools on this list don’t come anywhere near the number available to help with any and every part of your affiliate marketing strategy. But these are definitely some of the best out there. We can't wait to hear how they—and especially Jasper—impact your ROI!
Give Jasper a try for free and, if you love it as much as we think you will, join our affiliate program to start earning recurring commissions!