Affiliate marketing is one of the best ways you can make money online. Using the right affiliate marketing tools can make your journey to passive income so much easier!
There are heaps of tools and systems out there that promise to help you achieve your passive income goals. But which ones are the best?
Important: When available, we use affiliate links and may earn a commission!
If you’re not familiar with affiliate marketing and how it works, check out this Affiliate Marketing Tutorial for beginners first! This will give you the rundown on how to start affiliate marketing.
In this guide, we’ll focus on the best affiliate marketing tools and how you can get the most out of them. We’ll show you how to maximize the value you’re giving your audience while almost completely automating the process!
There are 5 tools we recommend – the last one being the most impactful so make sure you stay tuned! We’ve included some free affiliate marketing tools as well as some paid ones. These tools will work for any and every affiliate marketer.
Here are the 5 affiliate marketing tools for beginners we’ll cover:
So, let’s get started!
Affiliate Marketing Tool #1 – Kit
Kit is a free service that allows you to group your favourite products, tools and services into Kits. You can create Kits for heaps of different topics that can then be easily shared out.
Kit is an awesome free affiliate marketing tool that allows you to share your recommended tools
Some kits we’ve created include:
- Video travel gear
- Best microphones for video
- Live streaming gear
- Our YouTube video setup
- Where to find music for your videos
This should give you a bit of an idea of how creative you can get with your Kits!
Kit allows you to group your affiliate links into different topics – these are just a few of ours
A major benefit of creating Kits is that you only have to send one link and people will be able to view all of the affiliate links you have in there.
Kit started out hosting only Amazon affiliate links but has grown massively since then. Now, you aren’t limited to certain affiliate programs – you can put ANY link in there. For example, we even link to music sites such as Artlist & Epidemic Sound. So really, no affiliate program is off limits.
You can also set up Choice Pages. So if someone clicks on a product and it’s available from multiple places, they can choose which platform they’d like to buy it from. Buyers can purchase from places like Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart, depending on where the product is in stock. In our experience, giving people a choice on where they can purchase from really increases your affiliate revenue!
You can set up Choice Pages that allow the shopper to decide where they purchase the product from
Kit even redirects people to their local Amazon store depending on their location. When someone clicks one of your Amazon affiliate links to buy a specific product, they are automatically redirected to the Amazon store in their region. But the best part is that it passes on your Amazon affiliate details. This means people can purchase from their local store but that commission is still tracked as coming from you.
As if it needs another awesome feature, Kit is also a search engine. People can either browse organically or they can search the platform to find your Kits. So, you don’t only get the traffic that you’re personally driving to your Kits. You also get organic on the platform itself.
We even link to our Kits on the Primal Video website
You can link to your Kits from anywhere. We features some of our Kits on the Gear and Resources page of our website. This is a great way to further increase traffic to your Kits. So, we’d recommend sharing your Kits wherever they’re relevant as well!
Kit Pricing
As mentioned earlier, Kit is completely free. Based on all of the features, you can tell that it’s an awesome platform. You’re probably wondering how they’re able to offer all this for free…
Well, when anyone creates an account and doesn’t include their Amazon associates information, Kit uses their Amazon affiliate details. So when you sign up, make sure you add your details so that you receive the commissions rather than Kit!
Now, let’s move onto our favourite affiliate marketing tool for WordPress.
Affiliate Marketing Tool #2 – Thirsty Affiliates
Thirsty Affiliates is an awesome affiliate link management tool. It’s a WordPress plugin so you will need to have WordPress installed to use it.
Thirsty Affiliates is another great affiliate marketing tool that will make your life so much easier!
It’s super easy to manage your links with Thirsty Affiliates because it keeps them all contained in one library. So, every time you need to find an affiliate link or create a new one, it’s all done in that one place.
You can also change those big, ugly affiliate links some platforms give you (yuck!) to more user-friendly, prettier ones. Thirsty Affiliates allows you to convert your links that are less long and spammy, and more professional and cohesive.
Enter your original affiliate link in Destination URL to convert it to your neater Cloaked URL
We converted our affiliate links from long, messy URLs to www.primalvideo.com/go/name-of-product.
This isn’t just for aesthetic purposes. Once you’ve created this new link, you now own and control it which has a HUGE benefit.
When an affiliate link might change down the track (they do this from time to time) you don’t need to go back through ALL of your YouTube videos, website content, blog posts, or wherever you’ve got that affiliate link. You can just log into Thirsty Affiliates and redirect the old link to the new affiliate link.
Thirsty Affiliates stores all of your links in one library, making it super easy to manage them
This saves you so much time from changing things manually.
Thirsty Affiliates provides great analytics on your affiliate links. You can see which links are your most-clicked and where those clicks are coming from. This is really useful to help you systemize and streamline your affiliate marketing.
Thirsty Affiliates Pricing
ThirstyAffiliates isn’t free, but it is incredibly cheap considering how much time and stress it will save you!
There are different pricing options depending how many sites you have, but the basic version should be ideal for most people
For a single website, you should be good to go with the basic license for $49. If you’d like to install it on more than one website, there are other options available.
Affiliate Marketing Tool #3 – Geniuslink
This is a super powerful tool that we use a lot here at Primal Video. Geniuslink owns Kit, so there is some overlap there. But where Kit features groups of affiliate links, Geniuslink is all about individual links. You’ll notice there are also some similarities with Thirsty Affiliates.
Geniuslink is an amazing tool that lets you create, track, and manage your affiliate links
So when should you use Geniuslink? Well, we use Geniuslink for all of our Amazon products.
Just like Kit, Geniuslink will redirect people to their local Amazon store and attribute that commission to you. It also has the Choice Pages options which allow people to decide where they want to buy a specific product from, as mentioned with Kit.
And just like with Thirsty Affiliates, Geniuslink can be used to make your URLs more user-friendly and less spammy.
It’s super easy to keep your links consistent and neat with Geniuslink
One of the best features of Geniuslink is how easy it is to create new affiliate links and manage them all within the platform.
To create a link to a new product, simply head to Amazon. Find the URL for the product you want to link to and paste that into Geniuslink. It will do a quick search and tell you if that product is in stock and available as an affiliate link in each of the different Amazon stores or Amazon regions.
If you choose to create a Choice Page, Geniuslink will do an automatic search to find that product on all the different supported websites for you.
Geniuslink gives you the option to enable Choice Pages so the customer can choice where they purchase from
Another thing that’s really powerful about Geniuslink is their performance reports. Here are some things the reports cover:
- Any of your products that are out of stock
- Other providers that have your out of stock products available
- A deep dive into analytics around your affiliate links including which ones are getting clicked the most, where their traffic is coming from, etc.
Genius Links Pricing
Geniuslink starts at $5 per month. This gives you access to all of their features and up to 2,000 clicks on your affiliate links. If you go above 2,000 clicks, you only pay for the clicks that you use. There’s a handy little slider down the bottom of their pricing page which will show you how much you can expect to pay as your link clicks go up.
Geniuslink pricing is scalable which is awesome for beginner affiliate marketers who won’t need to drop heaps of cash when they’re getting started
For example, if you get 10,000 link clicks in a month, you’d pay $20 that month. We think this scalable pricing model is really cool. It gives so many more people the opportunity to get started with affiliate marketing without needing to spend a ton of money.
Affiliate Marketing Tool #4 – Resources Page
Tool number four is building a resources page. This is a simple page on your website that features all of your top recommended products, services and tools.
Creating a resources page is an awesome way to collate all of your recommended products in the one place
If you don’t have a website yet, here are some tools we’d recommend to get started:
- SiteGround is an awesome (and cheap) web hosting platform
- WPX is another great web hosting platform but slightly more expensive than SiteGround
- Kinsta is an awesome managed hosting solutionÂ
- GoDaddy will allow you to get your domain name for your website sorted
Once you’ve created your resources page, you can link to it on your homepage, YouTube videos, emails newsletters – anywhere that you’re communicating with people who might be interested.
Make sure you link to your resources page on your website homepage so it’s quick and easy for people to access
Our resources page has grown and developed over time. It now features HEAPS of things we recommend.
Have a look at our Gear & Resources page for some inspiration and to see how this all works in practise.Â
Affiliate Marketing Tool #5 – Email List
Now it’s time to cover the most impactful affiliate marketing tool.
Your goal should be to get as many of your viewers, subscribers, most loyal followers, onto a platform that you control – an email list. This is so valuable!
It provides a direct line of communication to people whenever you like, without any sort of algorithm or notification system potentially stopping that communication.
Your subscribers will be automatically entered into funnels and linked to your affiliate links and YouTube page
This is not just a huge part of what we do here at Primal Video, it’s also a huge part of what we teach inside our Accelerator program.
Why? Because it’s a great way to grow your affiliate income. Amongst many other reasons! But this is a big benefit of building your email list.
To grow and to build your email list, you need to ask how you can help your subscribers.
What are their biggest problems and challenges? Then you can create things like:
- Checklists
- Exclusive content
- PDF downloads
- Something of value designed to help them
Create content that is of value to your potential subscribers
If you offer something that will help them, people will opt in to your email list in exchange for that piece of content.
Once people are on your email list, you can deepen that relationship and continue to add value for them.
You can create automated email sequences that are automatically sent out on your behalf to people as they join and sign up to your email list.
These emails can link to your YouTube videos, additional resources and tools that you know will help them get results. Of course, you can use affiliate links for the products and services that you use and trust.
Give people something of value that will help them and they will sign up to your email list
Linking people to your YouTube channel also creates a positive feedback loop. It drives additional traffic onto the YouTube platform and onto your videos. This increases the likelihood that your videos will get shown to new viewers on the platform.
So not only does this help you grow your affiliate revenue, but it can also help you grow your YouTube channel!
Now you Know the Best Affiliate Marketing Software & Tools
So, now you know the best tools to help you make money online with affiliate marketing! We covered the best free affiliate marketing tools as well as some paid ones that offer some serious bang for buck.
All of these tools are awesome and we recommend using them all in unison to really build out your affiliate marketing strategy.
If you’re interested in learning more about how all this works then definitely check out our free training workshop featuring 3 Steps to Build an Email List. We take you through everything you need to know to get set up – from selecting the software right through to capturing your leads.
Links
When available, we use affiliate links and may earn a commission!
General Affiliate Link Management:
Amazon Affiliate Link Management:
Website & Resources Page:
Email Automation & Marketing:
- ConvertKit (best for Beginner-Intermediate and ‘less technical’)
- ActiveCampaign (best for Intermediate-Advanced)
- Kajabi (awesome all-in-one to also sell digital products!)
Recommended Gear & Resources
Check out an up-to-date list of all the gear, software & tools we use and recommend right now at Primal Video on our resources page here!
