Affiliate marketers use all kinds of affiliate tools in their business. Depending on how you run your affiliate business you might use different tools. For example, if you’re using paid marketing to drive traffic, you’ll need to use one of the paid marketing platforms such as Facebook, Google Adwords, Bing or YouTube for instance. If, on the other hand you’re going to use free traffic to drive your affiliate business, you’ll need another tactic such as blogging or video blogging (v’logging).
Most affiliates will pick a single marketing strategy and stick to it until they are successful. If you jump around from one strategy to another, you might be wasting time and be spreading yourself too thinly.
Affiliate Tools For Organic Traffic
The affiliate tools you will choose for organic traffic are going to be different than those for paid traffic. Paid traffic affiliates will often use landing page software such as leadpages.com. Lead pages offers a landing pages software where you can build and cross test different landing pages against each other. By sending targeted traffic to an opt-in landing page, you can collect subscribers and build an email list using an email autoresponder.
Here’s another affiliate tool which is very useful if not absolutely necessary. Without an email autoresponder in your affiliate toolkit, you must rely on passing traffic – either from organic search or through paid marketing. Since organic traffic is hard-won through content creation, and paid traffic is expensive, it’s a good idea to capture your visitors and collect their email addresses.
That way, you can follow up with them through an email marketing campaign. Most website visitors won’t buy on their first visit of a website. In fact, it takes several “touch points” before someone will buy from you. On a website, this makes things difficult. But once you get someone’s email address, this is much more achievable.
Affiliate Tools: Organic Traffic From Blogging
While there’s a variety of free blog platforms which affiliates can use such as Blogger.com, Hubpages.com and WordPress.com, it’s far better to build your own website by purchasing a domain name and getting it hosted. With your own domain name and website you send a much more authoritative message to your visitors. Google and other search engines also rate owner domains far higher than free blog sites. So you’re much more likely to both stand out to your audience and in the search engines if you own your own website.
You can purchase domain names from several places but a good, cheap place is namecheap.com.
You can also specifically choose a domain name with your particular niche in mind. This strategy is known as niche website building. With a niche website you can pick a domain name to give you some extra traction in the organic searches for your particular keyword. This website is an example of a keyword chosen domain name. I hope to get some traffic for my main keyword Affiliate Toolkit!
You can read more about building niche websites in this article: build a niche website.
If you’re building your own website once you have purchased a domain name you’ll need a hosting provider to host your domain. Hostgator.com offer a number of cheap hosting packages you can use for only a few dollars/pounds a month.
Blogging & Keyword Research
I’m a big fan of blogging and use several tools to help with my blogging SEO (search engine optimisation) and distribution/promotion. One of the main ones is a free plugin called Yoast SEO. This plugin helps you write search engine friendly content which is optimised for the search engines.
Before writing any content though it’s a good idea to do some keyword research. Keyword research gives you some information you can use in the blog titles. It will also show you how many monthly searches a certain keyword gets on Google. By doing a quick search on Google, you can also see how competitive your keyword is so you can give yourself more chance of ranking your content in the search engine listings. For more on this see Niche Blogging For Profit.
You can access Google’s keyword planner for free here. You just need an account to access it.
Affiliate Tools: Blog Post Promotion
While you can run paid ads to help give your blog content more views, this can be expensive. Google Adwords has a great advertising platform and I’ve found the “Dynamic” ad a great tool to help promote my blog posts. It lets you set up an advert which is relevant to each individual blog post on your website. But if you’re not yet ready to pay for blog promotion there’s other affiliate tools which can help you get your blog posts out there.
One of the ones I use is called Revive Old Posts. This tool automatically syndicates your content throughout your social media platforms. You can set it and forget it too!
You can also connect this strategy to another plugin called IfThisThenThat and automate syndication for free across a number of social media platforms. This lets you autopost to social media from WordPress without paying your Old Post subscription to upgrade the plugin! Sorry Revive Team!
Training, Tools & Support
One of the best things you can invest in as an affiliate is a connection to other affiliates. I found an online business community back in 2014 which helped me massively building my affiliate business. You can also get all the tools and software you need to build an online business from scratch using this resource. It lets you build a push button affiliate website which is pre-populated with affiliate links and banners. You can access mentors and live webinars as well as connect with other affiliates. I found a heap of value in this online business resource over the years.
Access a free video series to learn more below:
