Affiliate marketing is supposed to be simple and fun.
People often ask us what tools do you use and recommend for folks wanting to get into affiliate marketing?
These are my favorite ones that we use in our business for both affiliate launches and promotions.
Note: Some of the links on this page are affiliate links. That means I earn money if you purchase through my link. This in no way affects my suggestions. I only recommend products I know, love, and trust.
It All Starts With "Funnels"
Russell Brunson taught me how to use funnels. I can now make 5-10 times as much money for each visitor who clicks one of my ads than I could before I started using them. He also taught and helped my master the art of getting traffic to my sites and landing pages.
Below are the 3 books that I used to get started. They are free. All Russell asks is that you pay a small shipping and handling fee. It’s pennies compared to what you’ll learn and make going forward.
Like it or not, sales funnels are the future of business. They work for me and they will work for you.
Tools to Increase Affiliate Marketing Commissions
TW3 Elite Membership
The TW3 Elite Platform is perfect for the business owner who needs a system to scale and support his business, establish new affiliate income streams, and join a membership of elite entrepreneurs in a weekly mastermind.
See terrywilson3.com/faq for list of software and support included.
SamCart
SamCart is a Digital Product eCommerce Platform and the easiest way to start selling online.
Whether you are selling digital products or online services, SamCart is the easiest way to start accepting orders.
If you’re selling digital products online, you need more than a pretty way to deliver your content.
You need an easy way to boost conversions, maximize customer value, and run your business without worrying about technology.
I love SamCart and can’t recommend it enough.
Matt McWilliam’s Affiliate Freedom guide will show you how to get started with affiliate marketing and boost your income without creating your own products. Matt shows you why NOW is the time to get started, how to start, and virtually guarantee acceptance into any affiliate program.
This is how I got started in affiliate marketing.Advanced Ads
Advanced Ads lets you choose your display ads for specific pages, categories, or whatever criteria you choose. It also lets you choose whether to display an ad on mobile, desktop, or both. Very cool tool.
Thirsty Affiliates
This is my favorite affiliate link management tool for WordPress. You can easily manage all of your affiliate links INSIDE of WordPress, add the links to posts, cloak the links, and even track the performance of each link all in your WordPress dashboard!
LinkTrackr
Simply put, this is a link tracking program. It’s super easy to use and allows you to track the performance of different ads, copy, placement, etc. If you want to get serious about your promotions, I recommend checking out LinkTrackr.
LiveChat
Live chat is not only for your own sales pages (though I do recommend it below in that category). We use Live Chat on our affiliate bonus pages to overcome objections, answer questions, and close sales. Click the button below to learn HOW we use it during affiliate promotions.
Know What to Promote
Not sure what to promote? That’s the biggest obstacle to making more money as an affiliate. There are so many possibilities, so which ones to you choose? This free scorecard shows you exactly what offers to promote…and which ones to skip. It’s the exact scorecard we use to choose what we promote.
How to Win at Affiliate Marketing with Little or No Following
My free report shows you that you don’t need a huge list to succeed with affiliate marketing. I share two strategies you can use right now (no matter how big or small your following is) to earn significant income.
ShareASale
ShareASale as long been my favorite affiliate network. While I don’t use them as much as I used to, it’s a great place to find merchants with affiliate programs for the topics you want to promote. Their system and their team are the best.
Raven Tools
Awesome tool for tracking all of your marketing online. Similar to Google Analytics (which you can get for free) but more robust and allows you to track social media as well. If you want to get better at SEO without becoming an SEO expert, their site auditing feature is a must-have.
Tools to Recruit Affiliates
Your First 100 Affiliates
This free report shows you how to find and recruit top affiliates. It shows you where to look, what emails to send them, and what NOT to do in affiliate recruiting.
Dream100 Software
The Dream100 Software has become our go-to software for managing our contacts, keeping track of our affiliates and prospects, and maintaining our sanity when trying to develop relationships with key contacts. I personally LOVE that I can follow hundreds of people on social media, interact with them easily, and develop important relationships…without having to actually login to social media. This has truly been a game changer for us!
Gmass
Gmass is the BEST mail merge tool we’ve ever worked with. It’s a simple Gmail plugin that works directly with the Gmail interface. No limits (other than the regular Gmail limits), the ability to schedule emails, limit the number of daily emails, and more. We LOVE it!
Tools to Manage Affiliate Marketing Programs
iDev Affiliate
This is by far the most affordable (yet reliable) affiliate management program out there. It does almost everything you could need and is simple to use. Tracking is very accurate and reporting is fairly easy to use. We recommend this to anyone who is just starting out.
InfusionSoft
InfusionSoft is the only affiliate backend that Matt McWilliams personally uses.
In conjunction with his Affiliate Portal Builder, it offers affiliates reliable tracking via cookie, contact record (email), and IP. In addition, the reporting is second to none. It is also the world’s best marketing software out there.
Note: This stuff is expensive and if you have the budget and are serious about growing your business, InfusionSoft is the tool for you.
Affiliate Portal Builder
This is a product designed and used by Matt McWilliams every single day.
Give your affiliates a one-stop portal for everything they need to rock your promotion. Matt has built affiliate portals for some of the top online entrepreneurs like Michael Hyatt, Josh Turner, Ray Edwards, and more. Let him do the same for you.
Tools to Increase Product Sales
Product Launch Formula
Jeff Walker invented the formula that is now so common in product launches.
You may think that you can reverse engineer the process by watching other launches, but this course gives you the solid framework you need to succeed.
Matt McWilliams and his team regularly go through this course as a refresher. Its a significant investment but worth every penny.
LiveChat
LiveChat is the tool we use on all of our sales pages (and affiliate bonus pages…see above) to interact with potential customers. It gives us a simple way to overcome objections, answer questions, and close sales. This has dramatically increased our close rates on our sales pages.
WebinarJam
This is one of the few tools we recommend but do not personally use.
WebinarJam is an all-in-one out-of-the-box solution for promoting and hosting webinars.
We do not currently use it because we create custom pages, but it’s a solid product, especially for those who don’t know coding.
Tools to Build Your Affiliate Marketing Product
Teachable
Teachable is the platform we use for many of our courses…and we LOVE using them! More importantly, our students love using them! We’ve been able to implement some really cool tools that get results. Like quizzes, progress reports, timed emails based on where students are in the course, and so much more. We are huge fans of Teachable for building courses!
Ruzuku
Ruzuku is a simple, intuitive solution for creating online courses. It’s everything you need to create, sell, and run your course, all in one place. It’s ideal for entrepreneurs and small businesses who don’t have a lot of technology resources or knowledge and want to be able to just create their courses, without having to figure out a lot of backend integrations. (BEGINNER-LEVEL)
Kajabi
I have personally never used Kajabi for setting up a course, but we have multiple clients who use it to deliver their courses. In addition, I have taken numerous courses on it. It’s great from the consumer side and our clients seem to like it from their side. One caveat is that it is definitely not for the non-techie.
Tools to Build Your Affiliate Marketing Website
Click Funnels
Our favorite landing page and funnel creator. To date, we’ve moved nearly half of all of our optin pages to Click Funnels with new ones being added every week. There is simply no better tool for building easy-to-use sales funnels, webinar pages, and so much more!
LeadPages
An affordable alternative to ClickFunnels. This is what we used before switching to ClickFunnels and what we still recommend if you are on a budget. It’s a great tool for building landing pages, sales pages, etc. and allows you to capture emails and build your list.
ConvertKit
ConvertKit is our new email provider, after switching from MailChimp, who we had major issues with. ConvertKit is an all-in-one source for landing pages, optin forms, and email marketing. Great alternative to using LeadPages and MailChimp separately. Get a 30-day FREE trial using my link!
W3 Total Cache
This is the exact plugin I started using three years ago that instantly improved my web site speed by more than 50%! Web site speed is SO important and this simple little plugin does a lot of the work for you. It caches your pages, images, and much more to make it load significantly faster. That means your site ranks better, people stick around and…well, you make more money!
Zapier
Simply put, Zapier makes our jobs 10X easier. It’s like plumbing for the internet.
Zapier connects all our favorite apps so we can automate tasks in the background. Trigger an action in one app and the results show up in another without us lifting a finger. The robots handle the mundane work so we can focus on what’s most important.
Pretty Link
This is the tool I use to shorten URLs and make them “pretty.” It’s great to creating URLs that you send in emails, mention on podcast interviews, or share out and about. The free version, Pretty Link Lite, works for most people, but there is a paid version.
Agathon Hosting
Agathon is the 9th host I’ve used and they are by far THE BEST! We absolutely love them. Their service is unmatched and the downtime is extremely rare. If it sounds like I’m raving, it’s because we love them that much. I’ve never had a host even half as good as Agathon. They are not the cheapest but we’ve paid twice as much for a lot less reliability and quality.
Canva
This is my go-to graphic creation tool. It is super easy to use, even if you have no design-skills whatsoever.
They have hundreds (maybe thousands) of templates for every type of design you can imagine.
ALL of my graphics on my site were done by me in less than 10 minutes using Canva (and I am NOT a professional designer).
CopyAI
Tools for Social Media
MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar is a social media manager used by many to schedule posts for Twitter and LinkedIn.
It makes it super easy to bulk schedule messages and manage all of your different categories of messages (content, promotional, lead magnets, etc.).
HootSuite
HootSuite is what we use to manage one-off messages for Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as replies and monitoring.
The free version is great but does have its limits. Which is why we recommend MeetEdgar (on the left) for scheduling posts.
HootSuite is the best tool we’ve found for managing replies and monitoring mentions, though!
AgoraPulse
Effective September 2022, we no longer use nor do we recommend the use of this product.
Repurpose
The coolest new tool I’ve found in a while.
We use Repurpose to take our podcasts and Facebook Lives and automatically post them to YouTube, automatically post podcast clips to Twitter, and so much more!
It saves us thousands of dollars a year and gets our content a LOT more exposure!
Tools for Your Podcast
Blue Yeticaster USB Microphone Bundle
I switched to this microphone in 2022 and LOVE it! The sound quality is the best of any microphone I’ve used under $500 and this bundle comes with a boom arm and shockmount. It’s a plug-and-play mic so no software is needed and you can record professional quality podcasts and videos.
Windscreens
Windscreens remove a LOT of the background noise from getting through to your mic. They are cheap (usually less than $10 for a 5-pack) but dramatically improve the quality of your sound. Make sure to grab a 5-pack at least as they do wear out over time and it’s nice to have them handy when traveling. They also make a great cover for your phone mic if you are talking on a windy day!
Auphonix Microphone Pop Filter
If you’ve ever heard a podcast recorded WITHOUT a pop filter, you’ve probably heard the hard “P” and “T” sounds. It can be distracting to the listener and this little tool removes them. The Auphonix is my favorite. It’s only a few bucks more than the cheapest pop filters and worth the extra money.
Audacity
Audacity is the 100% FREE tool to edit podcasts. I’ve used Audacity for nearly a decade to edit my podcasts and highly recommend if you are on a budget. It has virtually all the tools you could possibly need to edit and export your podcast in high-quality formats.
Libsyn
It might seem like you can just host your podcast on your own server…but that is NOT a good idea! There are countless reasons why, but one is that you can host your podcast for only $5-15 on Libsyn, which is reliable and they don’t charge you per download like most regular hosts will. Their stats rock, too!
Fusebox Podcast Player
This is the podcast player we use on my blog. I’ve tried just about every other player and this one, from Pat Flynn, is THE BEST! He created it for his own podcast so you know he’s going to make sure it keeps up with the times. Check out all the features using the button below.
Tools for Your Videos
Logitech C922x Pro Stream Webcam
This is the camera I recommend if you are on a budget and want to do high-quality videos or livestreams. I’ve never seen it cost more than $78 on Amazon at the link below. It’s a plug-and-play USB camera that works on every device I’ve tried. NOTE: If you are on a Mac, make sure to install the Logitech Camera Settings app.
Logitech BRIO Webcam
The BRIO costs more than twice as much as the C922x and it’s only slightly better. Since it saves us a few minutes per video in editing, it’s worth it, but I used the C922x for years before upgrading. Only use this if you truly need the slight increase in quality and don’t mind paying $150+ for a webcam. Also plug-and-play USB and if you are on a Mac, you’ll need the Logitech Camera Settings app (FREE).
Linco Studio Lighting Kit
The number one factor in video quality is the lighting. Bad lighting = bad videos. Good lighting = GREAT videos! This is the best lighting kit for the money BY FAR! Usually under $125 at the link below. I’ve paid 3-4 times as much for worse products. This kit has everything, including backgrounds, two reflector lights, two umbrella lights, carry bag, and more.
Tools for Your Team / Personal Productivity
Asana
I resisted using a tool like Asana for a long time. But now that we use it as a team, I cannot imagine my work life without it. Asana is by far my favorite project management and task management tool. It’s easy to use and makes collaboration and delegation super easy. You can start with the free version, which has worked for us for more than a year.
Slack
This is just about the only tool my team uses to communicate with each other. No more long email chains, random texts, or forgetting to copy someone. Slack is the go-to communication tool for almost every online business I know. And you don’t need a huge team to get started. I got started with just three of us…for free!
Simple Gmail Notes
We used to a use a paid service ($1,000+ a year) to accomplish what Simple Gmail Notes accomplishes for free, so we switched. This is a very easy-to-use Gmail plugin that allows you to put notes on emails. My customer service team can summarize emails for me to answer, ask questions, and we can easily correspond without having to leave Gmail.
Full Focus Planner
I used to have tasks and notes saved everywhere…legal pads, Asana, sticky notes, you name it. But once I started putting everything in one place and focusing on my daily Big 3 tasks and weekly review, I began to get the clarity I needed to lead my team and grow my business. Michael Hyatt’s system flat out works to help you focus on what really moves the ball forward.
Read It For Me
On average I read about 2 ½ books every week…We’re talking all the best marketing, entrepreneurship, leadership, and personal growth books on the planet… So how do I do it? I use a service called Read It For Me which summarizes the content and gives you all the GOLD NUGGETS. What would normally take you a few days to read, you get in 15-20 minutes. I’m literally able to get 40-50 times the information in the same amount of time! Steve Cunningham, the founder of Read it For Me, is sharing a special offer just for my followers. Click the button to check it out.