When it comes to affiliate marketing, there are special tools designed to help you make sales.
Some are to keep track of your affiliate links.
Some are to help increase clicks and conversions.
In this post, we’ll be looking at 5 affiliate marketing tools that will help you do just that.
So let's get started.
The 5 Affiliate Marketing Tools
#1. Affiliate Links (Lite)
Owner: TeamDev
Price: Free w/ paid options
Use: Affiliate Link Cloaking and Tracking
When you’re into affiliate marketing, you will obviously deal with a lot of affiliate links. At least one affiliate link per product you promote.
So instead of memorizing every link you’ve got out there, using a tool like Affiliate Links (Lite) will allow you to keep track of all your links within your WordPress Admin area. Just like you would with your blog posts, categories, and tags.
You’ll be able to track the number of hits it receives. Which is a nice feature that isn’t provided by many plugins of its kind.
Another nice feature is you could categorize your affiliate links. Which could be super helpful when you have dozens of links.
Also, turning ugly affiliate links into clean URLs is the real treat.
Recommended: Affiliate Marketing: Learn How To Make Your First $1000 Passive Income Online
#2. Tablepress
Owner: Tobias Bäthge
Price: Free
Use: Comparison Tables
Tablepress is a WordPress plugin that lets you create tables with ease.
As an affiliate, comparison posts and product roundups are 2 types of content you’ll likely create.
With Tablepress, you’ll be able to create useful tables that could increase your affiliate content’s conversions.
Here’s an example of a table that includes product images:
Here’s one with just plain text:
As you can see from the 2 examples above, you’ll be able to include:
- The products’ images.
- The pricing.
- The pros and cons.
- Your overall rating.
- And what ever you'd like.
#3. Review Content Type
Owner: Chetan Chauhan
Price: Free
Use: Affiliate Reviews
Product reviews are an affiliate's best friend. When done right, they convert like crazy.
Now, there are several product review plugins out there. What makes this one different is actually pretty big.
Most review plugins add mini-reviews at the top/bottom of your product review posts.
Review Content Type doesn’t. In fact, it adds a whole new custom post type. It’s just like Posts and Pages.
Actually, it’s exactly like Posts because it’s got its own Categories and Tags. The only difference is this custom post type is called Reviews.
You’ll even be able to rank them in the SERPs.
As for the review posts, you’ll create them just like you would with normal posts.
You’d write your review content in the WP post editor.
And then you’d get to work on the plugin’s main review feature. Which is the “summary area” at the top of the post.
You’d do this by filling in the Review Data tab.
When you’re done with that, you’ll get something that’ll look like this:
#4. Shortcodes Ultimate
Owner: Vladimir Anokhin
Price: Free
Use: Shortcodes – Buttons and more
What are shortcodes?
You’ve heard of “coding” before, right? It’s basically what everything on the internet is made up of. Code.
Well, shortcodes are like shortcuts to codes that would take 10x longer to write.
Basically, it would take something that looks like this:
Into something shorter, like this:
And still come up with the end.
Quick Note: Most of the code in our example isn’t real. It was created for the sole purpose of helping you understand what shortcodes are and what they can do.
So, why use shortcodes? How will this help me as an affiliate?
The Shortcodes Ultimate has more than 50 shortcodes to use. But the reason it’s on this list is because of its button shortcode.
Buttons that stand out make great calls to action.
That means you could use this to increase clicks on your affiliate links.
Let’s take a look at some examples:
I bet the ideas are just popping up in your head right now.
#5. Thrive Content Builder + Landing Pages
Owner: Thrive Themes
Price: Paid
Use: WP Content Editor w/ Landing Pages
I’m sorry. I tried to keep this list low-budget-friendly.
But hey, we all know we need to invest in certain things so we can grow our blogs and online businesses, right?
And Thrive Content Builder is one of the things you’ve got to invest in.
So how will this tool help you with your affiliate marketing?
Blogging plus affiliate marketing means you’ll need to create content. Reviews, comparisons, product roundups, etc. That’s where TCB comes in.
TCB is WordPress plugin from the guys at Thrive Themes. It’s like your default WP editor. But it’s jam-packed with tons of neat features.
For example, Styled Lists. Which are unordered list points, but with a little more style.
The best part about this is you’ll never need to load your preview page because you edit your content literally in preview mode (not in the wp-admin area). It’s the real WYSIWYG.
So anyway, there are 2 ways this tool can help you drive affiliate sales:
#1. Visually Appealing Content Performs Better
Visual content outperforms regular text almost all the time. And it’s been proven time and time again.
A great example would be from Buffer. They found tweets that included images received a whopping 150% more retweets than those without.
Why is visual content so dominant?
Optimal Targeting shows you the why in this image from their infographic:
Fascinating, isn’t it?
With the Thrive Content Builder, you’ll be able to turn plain text into something that is visually appealing.
#2. It Has Features That Can Increase Conversions
TCB has multiple features (aka elements) that can increase your affiliate sales or conversions.
A great example would be their Call to Action element, which has 4 different styles. All aimed at getting the reader to click a button (that could link to your affiliate offer).
Another great example would be their Table element, which allows you to create tables within your web pages. This would be great for product comparison tables or roundups.
They also have others that’d be useful for affiliates. Such as their Testimonial element, Pricing Tables, Guarantee Boxes, and the Star Rating element.
A quick note about their landing pages: they have 4 templates for affiliate content.
- The product review
- The comparison review
- The video review
- The recommended resources page
Conclusion
Promoting other people’s products for a commission is one of the best ways to make money with your blog. Mostly because you'll never need to deal with creating products, processing orders, shipping, and all that other stuff.
The 5 tools we featured in this post, they'll help you earn those commissions.
Install them. Learn them. Use them.