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The Most Effective Affiliate Marketing Tools

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Written By Ideas Plus Business
Affiliate marketing tools
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Using affiliate marketing tools in your campaign can help you in many ways and even more than doing the same tasks manually.

The concept of using tools in internet marketing is simple; you need to automate or at least make certain daunting tasks less time consuming.

We are not talking about full automation here that has a bad reputation like article spinning and such.

But we are talking about tools that can help you do a better research for your affiliate products and niches.

Affiliate marketing is about creating an online business, and like any other online business, it involves a lot of technical skills.

Affiliate Marketing Tools

Just off the top of my head, here are few things that affiliate marketers can’t do manually:

  • Website design
  • Research and analysis
  • Affiliate links generation & cloaking

While some of these skills may require you hiring a professional freelancer (like web design), others can be done just as effectively using affiliate tools.

Let me introduce to you the most effective tools you can use on your affiliate website.

Using Google for Keywords Research and Niche Segmentation

Google is more than just a search engine, however many people fail to recognize this fact.

As an affiliate marketer you need to be aware of how to use Google to help your affiliate marketing business.

Let’s start with keywords research.

You need to find long keywords to rank for because these don’t have tough competition and could still generate you a decent number of monthly traffic.

Beside the traffic benefits you get from keywords research, you also could segment your niche to penetrate it from other angles.

Niche segmentation is a concept used by super affiliates who really understand marketing.

It helps them identify the demographics and problems of any niche, and it also helps them minimize the number of competition by staying away from saturated micro niches.

Open up Google and enter “YourNiche ALPHABET LETTER”:

Most Effective Affiliate Marketing Tools

All of these suggestions gives you a much wider understanding of your niche and certainly gives you the upper hand in your niche competition.

Understanding Your Niche Demographics with Google Trends

Google trends tool provides you with research data that other Google tools don’t; and that is finding out which countries are interested in your niche the most.

Such information is vital when you are planning out which niche you want to target on your affiliate website.

Open Google Trends and enter your niche keyword and set it to give you last year’s analysis:

Most Effective Affiliate Marketing Tools

You will see if the interest in your niche is declining or increasing:

Most Effective Affiliate Marketing Tools

Something which can tell you if the niche will be promising and can be reliable on the long run or it is just a trend that will fade away.

You will also see which countries are interested in your niche:

Most Effective Affiliate Marketing Tools

This helps you avoid niches that are in demand by third tier countries.

Tier one countries are: USA, UK, Australia and Canada and they have a high purchasing power unlike other countries.

This is a good indication of a profitable niche that you should target.

Cloak Your Affiliate Links Using Pretty Link Pro

If you are not familiar with affiliate links cloaking then you should familiarize yourself with it.

It is the concept of making your affiliate link look better and at the same time hide certain information from your readers.

Take for example this affiliate link for ShareASale product:

http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=601672&u=313242&m=49337&urllink=&afftrack=

Now you probably won’t understand a thing from this affiliate link, and so does your visitors.

Imagine telling people to click on it blindly. Some skeptical visitors will hesitate to click on it, fearing it could be something unsafe for them.

Link Cloaking is a solution to this problem, as you could turn this long affiliate link (which looks ugly too) into a more understandable and trust worthy link.

http://MyWebsite/Go/Product

Now this cloaked version will redirect to the same place as your original affiliate link.

You will also be receiving your affiliate commission even though the tracking codes are now gone.

Another reason why affiliate marketers tend to cloak their affiliate links is to prevent leaking PageRank to the product’s website and keeping it all on your site.

Plus your cloaked affiliate links will now be understandable and visitors will trust it more to click on it.

Pretty Link Pro is a WordPress plugin that allows you to cloak the affiliate links within your blog with ease; and it also has a free version.

This tool has been downloaded over 200K time which is a testament to its reliability and effectiveness.

Analyze Your Traffic Using Google Analytics

Google analytics is perhaps the most popular tool among online business owners, and you can install it for free.

Google analytics can help your affiliate marketing website by providing you with traffic data and user behavior reports.

You will be able to see what people do on your website and which pages they are most interested in.

Most Effective Affiliate Marketing Tools

This allows you to focus on your content and publish the best articles that make people stay on your website longer.

You can also measure your visitor retention rate, by finding out if your visitors return to your affiliate website or not.

Most Effective Affiliate Marketing Tools

As long as the returning visitors stay above 20% then it means you have a good content on your affiliate website.

Your goal will be to increase the returning visitors’ rate to 40%, and that can be achieved by making your affiliate website more engaging and frequently updated with content.

Creating your affiliate website as a blog is a good platform to improve all of these stats.

This is mainly because you can focus on providing problems-solving content in your niche, and at the same time selling your affiliate products.

Conclusion

Affiliate marketers who run a blog tend to have wider options in terms of affiliate tools, options provided by plugins.

This however doesn’t mean you should totally fill your blog with plugins and ignore other powerful tools like we mentioned above.

Combine all of these affiliate tools to increase your affiliate sales conversion rates.

This is a guest post by Ibrahim Dahy, co-owner of Affset.com. He has a 9 years experience in internet marketing. His affiliate marketing course training and tools will help you get traffic to your affiliate sites. 

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