9 Affiliate Marketing Tools I Use to Build 5-Figure NIche Sites

If you Google “affiliate marketing tools”, you'll find a bunch of articles that list dozens of tools, websites and services.The reality is most of those lists are unnecessarily long because:They hope that a longer article will rank higher in GoogleThey want to maximize their commission by recommending as many tools as possibleA lot of the time, they recommend tools they don’t use, and sometimes the people writing them don’t even do affiliate marketing.So when I decided to make this list, I wanted to boil it down to just the essentials.I run over a dozen niche websites, and I can guarantee you that it doesn’t take 31 tools to make money with affiliate marketing.Also, I’m assuming you have the basics (a web host, domain name provider, and WordPress).With that being said, here are nine essential affiliate marketing tools I personally use and recommend to build profitable niche websites.

Affiliate Marketing Tools for SEO

An SEO tool of some sort is a must for affiliate marketing. You need software to do https://imwarrior.site/link/slingly2022 keyword research, track rankings, analyze competitors, and monitor your backlinks. Ahrefs does all of that and more.I primarily use Ahrefs for keyword research. It’s super easy to find long tail, targeted keywords thanks to all of their filters.

I also use Ahrefs when I’m doing niche analysis. In fact, I use it to analyze a lot of the niches I breakdown in our newsletter. You can search any site and see a list of the keywords they rank for, who’s linking to them, any SEO issues they have and a lot more.

The only potential issue with Ahrefs is it’s on the pricier side if you’re just getting started. Their pricing starts at $99/month for a monthly plan. But in my opinion, that plan has too many limitations so I suggest going for the standard plan ($179/month).If you don’t want to spend that much, I recommend going for the next tool on my list.2. Mangools

If you want a full suite SEO tool (something to do keyword research, backlink analysis, rank tracking, etc.) but don’t want to spend as much as Ahrefs, Mangools is a good alternative.Mangools is a suite of five tools:KWFinder: Keyword researchSERPChecker: Analyze SERPSERPWatcher: Keyword rank trackerLinkMiner: Backlink analysisSiteProfiler: SEO analysis of websitesI’ll be honest. While it does all of these things, it doesn’t do them at the level of Ahrefs. However, I’d go with Mangools over Ahrefs Lite plan. Their highest price tier is still cheaper than Ahrefs’ smallest plan. So it’s a fraction of the cost and will allow you to do everything you need for a niche website.I primarily use Mangools to track my keyword rankings, do keyword research and occasionally to check metrics like DA and PA for different sites.

One of the things I like about KWFinder in particular, is the “Autocomplete” feature. It’s essentially like Google Autocomplete, but with keyword data.

You add your seed keyword, and KWFinder will show you relevant keywords with that exact term.

The reason I use both Ahrefs and Mangools is because I like to have multiple sources of data. Sometimes the search volumes I get from Ahrefs seem low, so I do a search in KWFinder to see what their data shows.However, you don’t need Ahrefs and Mangools, just one. If you want something a little more lightweight and affordable, go with Mangools. If you can afford $179/month and want more data, go with Ahrefs.

The next affiliate marketing tool on my list is Frase. Frase is a part of the content optimization software trend that’s starting to take off.Frase uses AI to analyze the top ranking pages for a topic/keyword and suggests relevant keywords, topics, and questions to include in your article to improve your chances of ranking.It’s somewhat comparable to tools like SurferSEO and Marketmuse.I primarily use Frase to optimize old articles that aren’t ranking as well as they should, or have lost traffic.To optimize existing articles, you enter the URL for your existing article and the target keyword/Search Query (you can also copy/paste the content directly into Frase).

Then Frase imports your article and analyzes it against the top ranking pages for your target keyword.

You’ll get a full report that shows an optimization score (percentage), and a list of relevant keywords competing sites mention.

In the screenshot above, you can see the Apartment Therapy article has a score of 35%, which is slightly better than the average score of 34% (represented by the yellow marker).In order to improve their score and make their article more relevant for the target keyword, they could go through Frase’s suggested keywords and add them in.One thing to take note of though, is you don’t need to try to hit 100%. I usually just try to be better than the average score, and only add the keywords that make sense.The other major use-case for Frase is to create content briefs. You can use Frase’s analysis to create a brief for your freelance writers. It’s pretty handy to make sure your content is optimized from the start.Frase currently starts at $45/month, which isn’t bad for the value you get from it. And most other content optimization tools I’ve seen are either more expensive or not as good.

Link Whisper is a WordPress plugin for adding internal links to your content.The reason I’m including this on a list of affiliate marketing tools is because one of the most common SEO mistakes affiliate marketers make is not having any internal links on their website—especially if you’re outsourcing the content to a writing service.A lot of lower cost writing services won’t add internal links to your content. So you’re left with a bunch of orphan pages and articles on your site that don’t link to each other, which is a big missed opportunity to improve your on-page SEO.Link Whisper crawls all your articles and looks for opportunities to add internal links. Then you can add them with just a few clicks.

I started using Link Whisper because I had one affiliate site with over 100 articles on it, but noticed I barely had any internal links. Going through all these posts and manually adding internal links would’ve taken way too long, and I didn’t want to outsource the work to anybody.So when Link Whisper launched, I jumped on it and quickly used it to add tons of internal links to that site. It was so convenient that I kept using it for my other sites too.Internal links might seem like a small thing, but they can have a big impact. You can use internal links to help Google understand what pages on your site are related, which are important, and also to link from your informational/educational articles to your money pages (buying guides and reviews).I’ve written an entire article about how to add internal links with WordPress, and Link Whisper is hands-down the easiest and fastest solution I’ve found.

Affiliate Marketing Tools for Affiliate Links

Amazon Affiliate WordPress Plugin (AAWP) is probably one of the most frequently recommended affiliate marketing tools you’ll see.It’s a WordPress plugin that allows you to add Amazon affiliate links into your content much quicker than using Amazon’s built-in tools.You download the plugin, add in your Amazon Tracking ID, then you’re able to add tables, buttons, lists and other formats to your content using shortcodes.Here’s an example of what the shortcode looks like on the backend.

One of my favorite features of AAWP that a lot people overlook, is you can track clicks on your affiliate links in Google Analytics!You can see which products people click on and what articles they click from using Events in Google Analytics.