Make money without a fixed work schedule? Millions of people are reaping the rewards of being an affiliate marketer. Affiliate programmes are one of the top ways you can earn a second passive income stream from anywhere in the world. If you’ve just started your journey as an affiliate marketer in 2023 or are looking for ways to increase your revenue, you’ve come to the right place. However, before the additional income starts flowing, you need to learn the skills, techniques, and tools of the trade. Here are a few tools every affiliate marketer should use to be a successful and sustainable affiliate.

Affiliate marketing tools

When you have the right affiliate marketing tools, you can collect relevant information, track your income and visitors, build high ranking websites and landing pages, and more.

1. Canva

Canva is your easy-to-use graphic design and publishing tool. Not every affiliate has design skills or the budget to pay a freelance designer for posts, so this comes in handy for affiliates and content creators. Content with images and videos get more views than simple posts with just text. With Canva, you can design beautiful posters, thumbnails, social media images, presentations, eBooks, infographics and more, making your posts attractive to your audience and giving them a wider reach.

2. Tiny PNG

Size matters. Especially when it comes to photos that take forever to load. Visitors to your page will quickly log out and search elsewhere. That’s a potential customer you’ve lost simply because of a slow site. Tiny PNG takes your big PNG and image files and compresses them without affecting the photo quality. This helps you use less data and frees up more space to save more photos on your device.

3. BuzzSumo

Buzzsumo is a handy research and monitoring tool for affiliate marketers. This tool helps you research content across the internet and provides useful metrics that every affiliate needs. It’s great because you can use it across different social media platforms including Reddit, Twitter, and Pinterest. Furthermore, you can use their content discovery tool to help you search for fresh content ideas and stay ahead of the rest.

4. Grammarly

Grammarly is your go-to writing and editing tool for error free copy. Like the name suggests, this tool checks your grammar, punctuation, spelling, and other common copy mistakes we make. It can also pick up words spelled correctly but used in the wrong context. This is great for multilingual affiliates who want to reach an English-speaking audience but it’s not their first language.

5. SEMRush

SEMRush is a digital marketing tool that gives you insight into what your competitors (other affiliates) are doing with their campaigns. It allows you to discover patterns and trends to help you modify your content and promotions. Although it comes at a price, it also helps you generate leads, provides essential SEO metrics as well as backlink and site audits.

6. AnyTrack

AnyTrack is another conversion tracking tool that’s popular among affiliates. It works with Google Ads, Facebooks Ads, Bing Ads, SEO campaigns and utilises Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel to track your conversion and sync them. You can use this tool regardless of the affiliate network or programme you are on.

7. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is one of the most popular SEO plugins for your WordPress blog. It’s best used for on-page optimisation and therefore, ensuring your blog is search engine friendly and your website ranks high on search engines globally. Your SEO ranking is coded green, orange and red, which guides you on how SEO friendly your content is and suggests changes to improve your content.

8. Buffer

We love social media. It’s endless hours of fun, engagement, and interactions with your friends and followers until it’s not. Affiliate marketers who have multiple accounts across platforms may start to lose the fun of social media when it begins to feel like work. This happens when you’re juggling content, schedules, post formats and more. Buffer takes this stress away and collates your different accounts in one place, making it easier to manage and save you time. Here, you can create and schedule posts across your platforms and leave them to go live when you go out and do what you do best.

What to look for in an affiliate marketing tool

This list isn’t exhaustive as there are many different tools to choose from. Each tool comes with its pros and cons and serves a specific function in affiliate marketing. But there are certain things that are must-haves in the tools you choose to work with:

•   Good customer support services
•   Easy to integrate with other tools you use
•   Good user interface and navigation
•   Be affordable
•   Analytics system
•   Good SEO software

How Alison’s Affiliate Programme works

It’s easy to become an Affiliate. Once you’ve created your Alison account, you can sign up to become an Affiliate.

1.     Register an an Affiliate

Go to our Affiliate Page and click the button “Become an Affiliate”. Once you accept the T&Cs, you are fully registered. It’s that easy! You can also join one of our informative webinar sessions and speak directly with an Alison representative to learn more about empowering others as an Alison affiliate. 

2.   Invite

Using the Affiliate link generator, share your Affiliate links online with your friends, family, colleagues, neighbours and anyone else you can think of who might benefit from our free educational and professional tools.

3.     Earn money

You will receive 20% of the revenue generated by the new learners who come to Alison through your Affiliate links. 

The first and most important step as an affiliate is choosing the right platform. Remember that the platform you affiliate with must be one that aligns with your brand and will offer you guidance and support as you grow. Added to this, the marketing tools you use to promote your affiliate links will impact your success as an affiliate. However, most importantly, be creative with it and have fun. Happy earning!