Affiliate marketing involves promoting a brand’s products or services and receiving a commission based on the leads and/or sales you send to that brand.
In this guide, we’ll explore what tools are needed for all the marketing activities you likely do as an affiliate marketer. So you can:
- Better understand your target market
- Connect with relevant brands offering affiliate commissions
- Create engaging affiliate content
- Run an affiliate site successfully
Let’s begin.
Semrush’s .Trends solution is a set of four market research tools you can use to learn more about your industry and the brands you want to promote. So you can create effective affiliate marketing content.
Market Explorer provides data on specific industries, including their:
- Size
- Geographical distribution
- Audience
Say you want to build an affiliate site focused on solo travel. So you research the “Travel & Tourism” category—like this:
If the TAM seems small, it may not be a viable market for your affiliate efforts. And not worth pursuing.
One2Target lets you analyze your target audience based on competitors. And you can use it to learn about the audience’s characteristics, so you can create content that appeals to them.
Knowing this, you could create videos offering tips for female travelers. And distribute them on YouTube.
Traffic Analytics lets you discover how other affiliate marketers attract visitors—and potentially replicate their success.
- The majority of a competitor’s users discover it via organic search
- One of this competitor’s top pages is a blog post on a certain topic
You could aim to attract these users by focusing on your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. And publishing a more comprehensive blog post on that same topic.
EyeOn tracks websites’ online marketing activities. Like their latest blog and social media posts.
Or, use it to keep tabs on your competitors’ activities. To follow what they’re doing and identify marketing opportunities.
Key Features
- Understand partner brands’ and competitors’ audience demographics
- Conduct useful industry and market research to inform your affiliate strategy
- Monitor partner brands’ and competitors’ online marketing activities
Pricing
- Free plan: 10 reports a day
- Paid plans: From $289/month for those with an existing Semrush subscription
Keyword Magic Tool helps you discover high-potential search terms to focus your affiliate site’s content on. To increase the chances that your site will appear prominently in search results and attract clicks.
For example, if you run an affiliate site for solo travelers, you could provide Keyword Magic Tool with:
- “solo travel”—as your seed keyword
- Your domain—to get data specific to your site
- Intent: The keyword’s search intent—the user’s purpose for entering the query. Knowing this helps you tailor your content to match what people search for.
- Volume: The average number of monthly searches for that keyword. Generally, the higher a keyword’s volume, the more traffic your site may get from it. But keep in mind that higher-volume keywords may be harder to rank for if many others also target them.
- Personal Keyword Difficulty (PKD %): The tool’s AI-powered score of how easy it may be for your site to rank in the top 10 results for that keyword. Targeting keywords with lower scores (e.g., 0% to 30%) may lead to more and better rankings.
Use this data to shortlist the keywords you want to target. While also considering whether you can mention affiliate offers in the content you create for these keywords.
Key Features
- Get keyword ideas to consider for your written content
- Filter keyword results by volume, keyword difficulty, and other metrics. To find keywords that meet your criteria.
- Save keywords to a list for easy access
Pricing
- Free plan: Up to 10 keyword searches per day
- Paid plans: From $139.95/month
ClickBank is one of the most well-known affiliate marketplaces for earning money as an affiliate marketer.
It hosts around 1,800 affiliate marketing programs in various industries—from arts and entertainment to health and fitness.
You may earn a commission if users click your affiliate link to buy the product.
Key Features
- Get affiliate links for the products you promote
- View your affiliate links’ performance
- Receive payments for confirmed referrals
Pricing
- Creating an affiliate account is free
- There’s a $2.50 pay period processing fee for every affiliate payment ClickBank issues to you
Further reading: How Do Affiliate Programs Work?
CJ Affiliate offers a platform for finding brands that pay affiliate commissions for referrals.
This commission ranges from a flat fee to a percentage fee based on the product’s cost.
Once you get approval, you’ll create affiliate links for their products. And add these to your content.
You can track your affiliate links’ performance in CJ Affiliate’s dashboard. As well as your pending and available commissions.
Key Features
- Find affiliate programs to join and get affiliate links
- View affiliate link performance reports
- Receive payment for available commissions
Pricing
- Free for publishers
ShareASale’s affiliate programs encompass over 30,000 brands.
Affiliates go through two rounds of vetting—once by ShareASale and once by the brand—before they can start promoting products.
After adding affiliate links to your content, you can monitor how many clicks and commissions they’re getting you in ShareASale’s reports.
Key Features
- Find affiliate programs to join
- Get affiliate links and promotional images for your content
- Track link clicks, commissions, and conversion rates
Pricing
- Creating an affiliate account is free
- Receiving affiliate payments by direct deposit is free. Wire transfers cost $29 each.
ContentShake AI is an AI-powered content creation tool you can use to produce affiliate blog and social media posts.
If you’re writing a blog post, give the tool details like your post’s title, target keywords, and tone of voice. And it’ll generate a draft you can use as a starting point.
As you edit the draft in the tool, you’ll receive feedback on your writing’s readability, tone of voice, and keyword optimization.
Just tell the tool what your post is about and whether it should entertain, educate, or sell.
ContentShake AI will then offer various copy and image options for your post.
Key Features
- Get suggested blog and social media post content
- Edit your posts in the tool’s writing editor
- Publish finalized blog posts directly to your WordPress site
Pricing
- Free plan: Create three articles per month and get three topic ideas per week
- Paid plan: Create unlimited articles and get 25 new content ideas per week for $60/month
Further reading: 20 of the Best Content Marketing Tools in 2024
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that affiliate marketers can use to help with content-related tasks.
For instance, you can ask it to:
- Generate a list of content angles for promoting a partner brand’s new product
- Suggest an outline for your article topic
- Proofread your writing for spelling and grammar mistakes
Key Features
- Generate text-based content
- Create images (available for paid plans only)
- Save your chat history for future reference
Pricing
- Free plan: Get basic text-based responses
- Paid plans: From $20/month for more sophisticated text-based responses and image generation
Pretty Links is a WordPress plugin that helps you rebrand and manage your affiliate links.
This lets you create custom affiliate links with your branding (most links reflect the brand or affiliate marketplace).
For example, you could create something like this: “yourwebsite.com/go/brand”
Pretty Links then redirects those who use your custom links to the original ones. And keeps count of the number of link clicks.
If a partner brand’s affiliate link changes, simply update its corresponding custom link in the affiliate marketing tool. Your custom link will automatically redirect to the new affiliate link in all places you’ve used it.
This saves you the trouble of hunting down all uses of the affiliate link on your site. And updating them one by one.
Key Features
- Create custom affiliate links
- Track affiliate link clicks
- Manage custom links in one place
Pricing
- Free plan: Unlimited link redirects and link management
- Paid plans: From $249/year (not including a welcome discount) for features like conversion reports and Google Analytics integration
The ThirstyAffiliates WordPress plugin provides a wide range of features for setting up and managing custom affiliate links.
Apart from creating custom links that redirect to the original affiliate links, you can also:
- Customize your links’ social media previews
- Schedule custom links to redirect users to different URLs before and after a certain date
- Create categories to organize your affiliate links
Key Features
- Create custom affiliate links
- Manage custom links in one place
- Generate click reports
Pricing
- Free plan: Link redirects and management
- Paid plans: From $249/year (before a welcome discount) for features like link health checks and link scheduling
Backlink Analytics helps you check a website’s backlinks (links from other websites that lead to it). To find domains that link to competing affiliate sites who you can reach out to for your own backlink.
The more backlinks from reputable sources your site has, the higher it may rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).
More backlinks also mean more opportunities for users to discover—and visit—your site.
The result?
Your site potentially gets more traffic.
To use the tool, feed it a competing website’s URL. And it’ll reveal information about its backlink profile, including:
- How many backlinks the site has
- Each backlink’s source page
- The Authority Score of the backlink’s source page. In general, higher is better.
Key Features
- Check any website’s backlinks
- Filter backlinks by various criteria—like whether they’re active or lost
- Compare a website’s backlink profile against up to four others
Pricing
- Free plan: Up to 10 requests per day
- Paid plans: From $139.95/month
Site Audit can analyze your affiliate site for over 140 technical and on-page issues that may affect its performance. So you can address any problems to improve your rankings and traffic.
The tool categorizes issues into three categories.
Issue
What It Is
When to Consider Fixing It
Error
The most severe issues, including broken links and slow load speeds
as soon as possible
Warning
Medium-severity issues like missing meta descriptions
when you have the time
Notice
Items that aren’t critical, such as links with non-descriptive anchor text
if you think you need to
Once you set up a project, you’ll be able to view:
- Which pages experience a certain issue
- Possible reasons and causes for these issues
- Suggestions for fixing each issue
Key Features
- Discover technical and on-page SEO issues on your site
- Customize the audit’s scope. For example, you can have the tool skip certain URLs.
- Schedule daily or weekly audits and get email updates
Pricing
- Free plan: Audit one website and up to 100 pages per month
- Paid plans: From $129.95/month
Google Search Console (GSC) is a tool for tracking your affiliate site’s search performance on Google SERPs. Through metrics like clicks, impressions, and click-through rate.
Using the URL inspection feature, you can check whether Google has indexed (added to its database) a given page.
If it hasn’t, you can request that Google do this.
Key Features
- Inspect page URLs for issues
- Submit your sitemap and URLs to Google’s index
- Track essential site metrics
Pricing
- Free to use
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a Google tool for measuring your site’s traffic and users’ activities.
The tool offers a variety of reports. For example, you can track the number of users who visited your site over a certain period.
Key Features
- Get website performance reports
- Track customer journeys and conversions
- Connect GA4 with GSC to view your site’s organic search data in GA4
Pricing
- Free to use
Further reading: How to Set up GA4: A Complete Step-by-Step Guide (2024)
Semrush Social’s suite of social media marketing tools lets you create and distribute posts on multiple social platforms and review their performance.
Use Social Poster to write and schedule posts for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Plus, check out all past and upcoming social posts on a calendar:
Social Tracker monitors the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts against your competitors’. And enables you to see the details at a glance.
You can import your existing ads from different social accounts to manage them all from AdRoll’s dashboard. And create ads for distribution across various social channels.
Key Features
- Create social ads and distribute them on different platforms
- Manage ads on multiple social platforms in one place
- Measure your ads’ performance
Pricing
- Pay-as-you-go pricing for running ads on others’ websites—doesn’t include social ad creation
- From $36/month for social ad creation and management plus other features
ConvertKit is an email platform designed for creator businesses. Its advanced tagging, segmenting, and automation features help you email targeted affiliate offers to different subscriber demographics.
When you join ConvertKit’s Creator Network, other creators can recommend you to their audience.
ConvertKit also lets you create and sell digital products to complement your affiliate income.
Key Features
- Email affiliate offers to your audience
- Get exposure to other creators’ audiences—and potentially new subscribers
- Create and sell digital products
Pricing
- Free plan: Set up one automated email sequence and send emails to up to 10,000 subscribers
- Paid plans: From $9/month for unlimited automated email sequences and emailing up to 300 subscribers
GetResponse is an omnichannel marketing platform for engaging with your audience via email, SMS, live chat, and more.
Its email features include creating email forms, landing pages, autoresponders, and newsletters.
For example, you can have an automation to send follow-up emails to people who visit your site’s affiliate offer pages. To try to close a sale.
Key Features
- Create email forms and landing pages
- Set up automated emails
- Engage your audience via multiple marketing channels
Pricing
- Free plan: Send up to 2,500 emails per month to up to 500 contacts
- Paid plans: From $19/month for sending unlimited emails to up to 1,000 contacts
Semrush’s Media Monitoring app tracks keyword mentions—including the name of your site, a competitor, or a partner brand. Or the names of the products you promote.
You’ll see a preview of each mention and can filter them by category, sentiment, and importance.
For example, you can view the changes to your number of mentions and their reach over a given period.
- A deep understanding of your target audience and market
- A high-performing site, packed with relevant content and affiliate offers
- Strong customer relationships nurtured via email and social media
The 18 affiliate marketing tools we’ve shared can help with this.