The Tools of the Affiliate Elite

The Tools of the Affiliate Elite

By Matt Falconer


Affiliate marketing has developed by leaps and bounds over the last 12 months. This has led to ever more sophisticated software tools being developed to help improve the profitability of affiliate marketing campaigns, when deciding which products to promote and which keywords to use for their promotion. Some of these tools come with pretty significant price tags attached, putting them well beyond the range of all but the upper echelons of the affiliate elite.

It used to be that if you spotted a product that looked like it was selling well and it had an affiliate program, you'd take a couple of relatively basic steps and start promoting that product. If it sold through your link, then you made a commission. Even if you did some pay per click (PPC) or banner advertising, the chances were that you made a lot more than the clicks had cost you. The only thing you used to work out your profitability was a simple calculator, and you deducted the cost of your advertising from your commissions - and provided you had a positive number at the end, you could feel reasonably happy.

Then as the costs of clicks started to rise, and people started to realise the relevance of keyword selection, affiliates started to 'track their ads' - using server-side scripting to identify which visitor clicked which ad, containing which keyword, to arrive at their site. This led to greater selectivity in the choice of keywords that affiliates used to promote products.

If they were really smart they also employed split-testing to compare variations of their landing pages, to improve the conversions those pages were achieving.

At about the same time as the cost of clicks started to rise, Google opened up its Application Programming Interface (API) to independent software developers to build applications driven by data drawn directly from Google's databases.

Amazon, Ebay and ClickBank among others, were all doing much the same thing at or about the same time.

To begin with the data accessible was relatively straight forward and pretty limited in scope. Applications were pretty limited in what they could achieve and were little more than alternatives to logging into your Adwords account on line.

This has all changed over the last 18 months, with the arrival of what have been called Spy Tools.

These are tools that affiliates can subscribe to or purchase outright, which will identify virtually every aspect of a marketing campaign. Including, which affiliates are promoting which products, what keywords are being used to promote products, the ads which, by dint of their persistence in appearing in the paid listings can be assumed to be profitable, the landing pages that the ads lead to, the cost per click of the ads and the traffic that the ad is generating.

With each successive launch of these 'Super Tools' they have become ever more affordable, whilst still remaining beyond the reach of the average affiliate marketer.

That is all about to change.

If you are serious about your affiliate marketing campaigns isn't it about time you joined the Affiliate Elite?

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