Tools Every Affiliate Marketer Must Have for 2014

Depositphotos 34861675 xs Tools Every Affiliate Marketer Must Have for 2014

Affiliate marketing is a booming and competitive business. In fact, the 2013 Affiliate Summit AffStat survey found, of the sixteen hundred attendees surveyed, more than 30 percent had begun their careers in affiliate marketing in the last 3 years. As the industry has ballooned in recent years, it has become even more necessary to have the best tools available to stay ahead of the curve. Here are five modern operations and marketing tools that can give you an edge in the growing and competitive field of affiliate marketing:

Quora

Quora is a veritable goldmine when it comes to generating ideas for content. Quora collects questions and answers from it’s users on a wide variety of topics in a digital environment that combines familiar features from social networking sites. A large number of Quora users are involved in the tech sector, and users are required to use their real names.

Quora stands out among the crowd of Q&A sites due to it’s “follower” mechanism, which allows users to follow the topics presented and answered by tech and business minds that they might not normally be able to network with. Mia Yiannopoulos of The Telegraph predicts that Quora’s popularity will one day outshine Twitter, and that more than one techblog’s content agenda already seems to be dictated by topics trending on Quora. For those looking for ideas for content, Quora is an indispensable tool.

Buffer

For marketers who have a lot of content to distribute across many different social media networks, Buffer can save you a lot of time and a lot of headaches. Buffer allows users to create a schedule for automatically posting content to various sources throughout the day. Additionally, Buffer provides social media analytics to let you see who is viewing and sharing your content, allowing you to adapt your content stream on the fly.

Storify

Storify is a social networking tool that allows users to easily search through various media sources, and arrange the elements selected from those services into stories and timelines. These Storify elements can then be embedded into articles and blog posts, effectively collating vast sums of information from across social media into one organized source.

Though it has been around for a few years, Storify’s release on the iPad in 2012 solidified its position as one of the great content curation services. Its popularity has only bloomed since then, and currently the news show “The Stream” on Al-Jazeera uses Storify almost exclusively to collect and present various perspectives on news stories. For an affiliate marketer, the potential to collect various stories from across the vast social media sea and link them into one article for presentation is invaluable. Storify’s clean and professional design lends itself to an authoritative presentation, and allows users to update and add their own perspective’s effortlessly.

Intuit

If you’re like many affiliate marketers, you probably don’t have an accountant handling your books. Intuit free accounting software puts you in charge of your finances, allowing you to track payments and invoices, estimate future income as well as expenses, and organize all of your paperwork come tax time. Created by the folks at Quickbooks, Intuit links to your bank accounts so your collective financial information is available at the press of a button. If you are still using spreadsheets to do your accounting, switching to Intuit software can simplify your life as well as eliminate common calculating errors before they punch a hole in your bankroll.

Consumer Barometer

Consumer Barometer, developed by Google, provides users with vast insights into how various consumers search for and decide on products to purchase. As an affiliate marketer, insight into consumer habits is a valuable commodity, allowing you to tailor content to match the patterns created by consumers. Customer’s past purchasing data is available, and Sogeti Trendlabs reports that this data is mined from both the Consumer Barometer Study and the Enumeration Study. By creating a visual representation of the large amount of complicated data analysis, Consumer Barometer makes accessing the minutia of analytics easy and streamlined.