Basic Affiliate Marketing Tools

In today’s Tools of the Trade Tuesday, I cover some of the basic affiliate marketing tools you can use that will help you achieve online success. Knowing the dynamics of how affiliate marketing works is essential. So is creating content that attracts the right audience to your offer. Once you understand the basics of operating as an affiliate online, you’ll want to put to use a few tools that can help you do your job with speed and efficiently.

WordPress themes

If you haven’t heard about WordPress by now, then you have been living under a rock. It is the web platform of choice simply because of the immense power to create and ease to setup over the other online platforms. Plus WordPress has, because of its popularity, more available to utilize it than any other platform. WordPress themes are just one of tools that can help you increase sales. Once WordPress is installed, you’ll find that each blog comes with free themes already included that you can start with. However, there are themes that are specifically designed to help affiliates marketers make sales.

Keyword tools

Keyword tools are a good way to get an edge up on the competition. Not only does this help you with your SEO, you can dig down deep into your niche and compile a huge arsenal of long-tail keyword phrases that can be used to attract tons of traffic to your affiliate site. There are both free and paid keyword tools available. Free tools typically allow you to do a limited amount of research. They will return a list of keywords and phrases, tell you the approximate global and regional monthly volume, and give you each keyword’s competition levels like “low, medium or high”. Then there are premium keyword tools like Spyfu or WordTracker. These advance forms of paid keyword tools provide you with even more information, including the profit potential for each of the words and phrases.

WordPress plugins

As mentioned above, WordPress is a very powerful online tool in itself. What even makes it more powerful is the ‘add-ons’ like themes and plugins that take it to the next levels. Plugins are great for affiliates to add to their blog because they can help automate your blog with certain tasks – like auto posting to social network sites or your different social network accounts. Plugins can give others the ability to do tasks on your blog. For example, you can add a social bookmarking plugin so that your visitors can share your posted articles or reviews with others on Facebook, Google Plus, Pinterest, Twitter or via email. There are even plugins that allow you to easily embed Amazon product listings into your blog post and keep them updated automatically. Some help your site become mobile friendly in an instant. You can find a list of plugins for affiliate marketing to get started online found here: WordPress Plugins for Affiliate Marketing Sites.

An autoresponder

If you want to build a lasting online presence, you will want to build your own list of subscribers. To do this effectively, you will need to get some sort of email marketing provider that offers an autoresponder. All you need to do is preload your autoresponder with a series of emails including affiliate offers that help to increase your sales. You never want to just give-away your site visitors by just sending them to affiliate offers.

Final thoughts….

Using affiliate tools is something you should add gradually. Trying to automate too many things at once will end up overwhelm you instead of helping out. You should want to have a hands-on understanding about what makes you site grow and convert (like analytics) before you replace yourself with any automated system or tool! What about you – what tools do you currently use online? Are there automated systems you’ve put into place that have worked for you, or failed miserably with? Please share any comment you would like to make in the comment section below…. Thanks! :)