Top 10 Tools To Improve Affiliate Productivity

I was how I can make my affiliate work more productive given that I've got to re-jig my work-life as I'm now a dad (I've got a dog - kids are for my post-wedding life) so I thought I'd list my 10 favourite tools that make me productive. I'm sure many of you will have your own favourites.

10) Affilistore


I use Affilistore for a couple of reasons. One is that it allows me to create cross-network content units whilst if you SEO it right then you can get some really good rankings in the Search Engines. I'm yet to give Lammo's Easy Content Units a go, but that look fab too. But I just love the ability to blog about a product, drop a link to my chosen retailer and then give the user the ability to see similar product across a wide range of merchants.

9) CSV Splitter


I just don't upload bog-standard product feeds into Affilistore, I doctor them with supplementary information to differentiate them. As I'm no technical whizz I just use Excel. Of course, many merchants have product feeds with more records than Excel can handle, so I use a neat tool called CSV Splitter which does exactly that. You can download a large product feed and set it to split it into 60,000 line files which you can then play around with. This is, of course, also good for PPC affiliates that which to use product feed data to create their keyword lists.

8) Blogger


Now I know some take the piss as I still use Blogger and they've got some sort of superiority issue as they use WordPress. But as I've got some seriously great rankings with some of my blogs, and I pretty much know it inside-out, I don't see any need to change. I don't care for "pretty blogs" I just want them to make mullah.

I can rattle of new blogs in no time at all. All I have to do is tweak the template, add some content, seed it with a couple of links then drip feed some more content until I'm ready to put a major effort into it. As you can see, I've got 90 blogs (on this account), but I don't update all of them regularly.

That's the issue, I'd rather be working on the content and which merchants to promote rather than playing around on some Wordpress plugin directory and tinkering with downloaded templates. My view is that too often people spend their time messing with stuff that they don't need to - just because their mate has XYZ plugin. My philosophy has always not to follow the crowd.

7) TextPad


TextPad is by far the best text editor I've ever used. And trust me I've used a few especially as I used to responsible for doing the ABCe audits for an online recruitment site nearly a decade ago. Texpad makes read/replacing and messing around with files soooo much easier. On any given day I'd probably use it once every 2 minutes constantly throughout the day. It's become a multi-text clipboard.


7) iPhone
I don't need to say a lot about the iPhone, just that it's one of the most important gadgets in my working and personal life. When you add in email, twitter, Google reader etc etc.

6) Google Reader


Google Reader has become an invaluable tool. It allows me to keep up-to-date with the new from the networks, the industry, PR companies and my competitors where ever I am. The web version is obviously more functional - with the keyword search facility the best. If I'm blogging about Easter, for example, I'll just search on that keyword and see what comes up.

5) Response Source
I get the feed into Google Reader, but you can just use the web version to do searches. If you're writing about a topic and you want to step outside of the affiliate world for content, and even the traditional sources of information such as the BBC etc, this is a great way to get content and build relationships with other PR companies or are usually often very keen to send samples across.

4) Google Analytics


Google Analytics is another priceless tool. I'd find it exceptionally difficult to do my job without it. The ability to cut and dice data is crucial in SEO'ing affiliate sites and so is the ability to see the trends in traffic against certain types of keywords is without a doubt absolutely key to keeping on top of your performance.

3) SEO Spy Glass



In recent months this has been such a crucial tool that has saved me loads of time, hassle and money if I was ever daft enough to pay for links. Although, I do have issues with their on-the-fly updates. It is unbelievable for finding sites to ask for links from as well as fully analyse the nature of your competitor's links!

2) Affiliate Window's Shop Window
This is quite possibly the single most important tool that someone else has created. If I'm not doing press or feature related stuff and I just want to add some product-related content then I simply either search on some keywords and find some products or I navigate down their categories and then filter on the most popular products sold and then blog about them. It even creates the deeplinks and and tracking code. I've loaded it on my GetVis domain which I don't use for SEO, just for finding products.

1) Brain Cell V3.2
You just can't buy or download common-sense, intellect or the ability to think for yourself. You can read the blogs of self-proclaimed guru's who will give you the top 10 tips to start an affiliate business, or whatever. But at the end of the day its a heap load of trial and error and working out what works best for you - as it'll often be very different than you'll read on the internet. Even seasoned (with salt and pepper) affiliates get things wrong, trust me I've made loads of mistakes and it took me a few years to find a method that really suits me.

Learn to think for yourself, don't get caught up in following the crowd because some blogger told you its ace to have Wordpress over Blogger, don't "do retail" because you read on a forum that it's the easiest way to make some cash. Be your own man (or women) and enjoy finding out what works, and what doesn't.

Learn to build your own relationships with the networks, agencies and merchants, don't take it for granted that one particular person is helpful, try and make content with merchants that are less vocal - there's often some hidden gems that people just don't talk about.