Read our review of the top 7 areas for tools that assist SEO & online marketers to get more clicks – perfect for the solopreneur and startup affiliate marketer! And best of all, they’re free!
1. Platforms
WordPress – Our number one free platform for creating websites and blogs should come as no surprise. WordPress is a global phenomenon, providing a free, opensource environment for anyone to create modern, useful websites.
With plugins like Yoast for SEO, Contact Form 7 for data capture, and Jetpack for metrics and other groovy features like CDN image hosting, the amount of great functionality you can get for free is astounding. And best of all, it’s constantly evolving to keep up with modern needs.
If there’s one downside, its opensource development nature means that support for unusual problems can be spotty. Use the most trusted plugins from reputable sources and you should be able to go a long way.
2. Content ideas
Try these tools the next time you’re stumped trying to find a great headline for your content marketing article.
Content Idea Generator – type in a few key concepts such as what product you’re targeting in your affiliate marketing efforts, where your audience is located and so on, and press the button for a plethora of ideas to base your articles, social media posts, and email marketing campaigns around.
3. Keywords
Keywordtool.io – this is like using Google’s autocomplete feature (on steroids). Type in a seed keyword, and watch as it looks up popular search terms that contain it. You have to go pro to get the exact numbers, but for free you can use it to generate keywords that you hadn’t even thought of yet.
4. Social Media
Buffer – automates and schedules your social media posting so you can concentrate on other things. It also tracks engagement, offering a groovy performance dashboard so you can see what works and what doesn’t. The free account lets you have 3 social media accounts to automate.
5. Assets
A picture is worth a thousand words, but maybe they shouldn’t cost a thousand dollars. Some stock image companies expect everyone to be a high roller with huge monthly subscription bills. If you can’t afford that, you can look for CC0 (royalty-free, attribution free) licensed images. We’ve done the hard work for you and found the best stock image, video, and icon providers in this handy little list:
- Unsplash – images
- Pexels – images and video
- Pixabay – images and video
- AlienValley – graphics assets (some freebies, others paid)
- Iconmonstr – icons
6. Linking
Bitly – If you use a link shortener in your social media or email campaigns, try using one that tracks your opens! Another piece of analysis to use in your quest for more clicks.
7. Google’s suite of tools
The discerning affiliate marketer knows they have to be a webmaster, too. So what better place to get all your webmaster tools than the granddaddy of search, the search engine so huge, it became a verb. I refer, of course, to Google. (Have you ever heard anyone ask you to just Yahoo, or Bing something? No, me neither.)
If you haven’t yet started using their search tools, why not??? But just in case you’re new to this, I’d like to point out the ones I find most useful in my day-to-day work.
Search Console – helps your site get found by search engine bots.
AdWords – their Keyword planner tool can be used for free and gives a good sense of how popular a keyword is by how expensive it is. Find a niche by using longtail (combo) key phrases.
Analytics – how can you tell if people are visiting your site? Analytics is a powerful stats program used by many online marketing professionals.
Page speed insights – a faster page load time is treated preferentially by Google so why not use their own tips on how to make that happen?
With the wealth of free tools out there, there’s no excuse not to be making decisions that bring in the clicks to your affiliate marketing blog, social media or email campaigns!
If you’re an affiliate marketer looking for a solid affiliate income or highly qualified lead gen, sign up with revJOLT today!