Affiliate marketing is becoming more and more popular, with the search for it increasing by 44% because more and more people want to be their own boss. The only problem with this idea is that making affiliate marketing your primary source of living is no easy feat. The rising popularity of digital marketing, thanks to 1.5 billion social media, the increasing popularity of digital marketing has made it quite challenging to build a successful affiliate marketing campaign.
So, what is one supposed to do to have a sustainable affiliate marketing business? You need the right tools to go into battle. Or should we say extensions? With the inception of Google Chrome in 2008, web browsing went through a significant makeover, and extensions were introduced.
Google Chrome extensions are made to help you in many ways, including accessibility, shopping, development, fun, communication, etc.
They are designed to improve overall user experience, efficiency, and productivity. You can add them to your Chrome browser to extend its capabilities. For example, if you find recurring ads extremely annoying, you can simply use an extension like Adblock to get rid of them. This is why Chrome extensions have become an important piece of the modern-day digital marketing puzzle.
Now, there are literally thousands of Chrome extensions available (188 620 as of 2019), so which ones are worth installing to help you with affiliate marketing? We have done the hard work and found the 25 best ones.
Apart from doing the obvious, AKA helping you in affiliate marketing directly, chrome extensions can do a lot of other stuff for you. There is a lot that goes into affiliate marketing, and you can find a chrome extension for every area an affiliate marketer has to work on, including:
So what extensions should I use?
Here is a list of 25 top chrome extensions for you to choose from and save your time to focus on your work. These extensions are designed to help affiliate marketers get the most out of their business, stay more focused, organize their tasks, increase their sales, and keep an eye on their website traffic.
So, without wasting another minute, let’s dive into the world of chrome extensions (Affiliate Marketing edition).
Moz Bar’s chrome extension is a must-get for affiliate marketers. It provides valuable insights to marketers about backlinks and domain authorities. Loved by affiliates all over the world, Moz Bar has over 800 000 users. You get three different helpful features when you install this extension that you can activate by clicking on the extension:
Sniply is an Avengers-level powerful plugin, especially if you are a social media affiliate marketer or you have an established fanbase. It has a massive impact factor (20 000+ users) and is perfect for social and list-building purposes.
Sniply lets you add your own CTAs (calls to action) over other user’s content.
So, if you want to share something on Facebook, for example, do not just share it. Instead, add your CTA, such as asking people to visit your blog or subscribe to your email list, which people will see when interacting with your shared post.
Needless to say, it is a clever way to keep your audience engaged by sharing amazing content from other interesting sources while still directing traffic flow to your affiliate blog or capturing emails. Take our word for it and install this chrome extension because it is not one just to ignore.
In short, use Sniply to share good content and get more traffic.
Keywords Everywhere is a must-have for all affiliate marketers, even beginners. You can use this extension to see search volume, competition, and even CPC. The best part about this extension is that you can use its settings and configurations to enable or disable the features that you want or don’t want, respectively. This way, you can make it work for your requirements and save time. This makes things super easy for the newbies. Plus, it is super popular (1 000 000+ users), so it must be doing something!
Ahrefs offers competitive content analysis, keyword research, and on-page audit with particular emphasis on backlinks. Affiliate marketers can use this extension to find out new and lost backlinks, their competitor’s backlink growth, and websites linked to the broken pages on their website.
Some of the primary functions that Ahrefs offers are:
If you are competing with larger websites, then use Ahrefs. However, if you already are an established leader in your niche or close to becoming one, go for SEMRush then. You can get a free trial to compare both of them. It has four subscription plans including Lite ($99), Standard ($179), Advanced ($399), and Agency ($999).
If you are struggling to find a fitting affiliate program relevant to your niche, this chrome extension will work wonders for you! Afilitizer is free, which is a huge plus. It specializes in finding the necessary information about affiliate programs every time you search a specific keyword. Moreover, the options are endless; you can search about anything, from online services like software or Saas to products through online eCommerce stores like Amazon.
To make Affilitizer work, you have to download it first (obviously) and then search for a keyword or a phrase with a brand’s name using Google Search. Now, watch it get to work without any glitches or hassles. You will be able to see a small logo of the extension right night to Google’s SERPs. The logo indicates the companies or brands that are up for working with an affiliate marketer or joining an affiliate program. The last thing you will have to do is click on the logo to link to the company’s affiliate program and start promoting it.
Easy peasy!
If you are an Instagram affiliate marketer, then this extension is a no-brainer for you. Bit.ly not only lets you edit your unique referral links but also allows you to save and share content from your browser to your Bit.ly account. People do not like to see long links, and Bit.ly helps you shorten a link to customize it according to your brand. Besides, you can also keep an eye on real-time stats with Bit.ly to see what engages your viewers the most.
As an affiliate marketer, you very well know how tracking works and why it is important. You must always be on the watch — see what other marketers are doing and looking into your affiliate program on the internet. Enter Ghostery and its various extensions. They let you see who is tracking you on the web and gives you a peek at the invisible stuff by showing you the beacons, trackers, bugs, and pixels that businesses place on their pages.
Sidekick works with everything — Outlook, Salesforce, Gmail, or Apple accounts. It schedules emails to be sent later, tracks who clicks and opens your emails, and your recipients’ details, including recent tweets, their title, and company social profiles. Just imagine how you can use this information to your benefit. To name a few, you can increase your email productivity, expand your network, and close deals with sales leads.
It might be surprising to know, but you don’t always need hashtags. However, as an Instagram affiliate marketer, hashtags are a necessity for you. So, when you use hashtags to increase your traffic, make sure to use the ones that add value.
Enter HashTest.
It is designed to test the quality of hashtags that you want to use in real-time and gives you an idea of the hashtags that will perform the best. Moreover, it is super convenient to use because it allows you to copy the best hashtags to your clipboard, thus saving your precious time!
Do you want something that will help you optimize your website so you can climb up the ranks on Google’s search engine? Lighthouse is your answer. It is an open-source tool by Google that will show you how your website or blog is optimized based on its search engine’s requirements.
This extension works by analyzing your website, and then scoring is based on various parameters and tells you which sections of your website need improvement. The best part of this extension is that it does not leave you on a cliffhanger. Instead, it explains in detail how you can make those improvements. It is beneficial for affiliate marketers who wish to focus on promotions through Google.
Grammarly is hands down, the best extension for affiliate marketers who produce content in English.
Its free version lets you check grammar, punctuation, writing style, spelling, readability, etc. You can use Grammarly by installing its extension and checking your text as you type. Or you can check your text by copying it and pasting it on Grammarly’s website. For more features, you can subscribe to Grammarly’s premium version that detects plagiarism, corrects passive voice, improves vocabulary, and make your text better, engaging, and more readable in many other ways. The payment plans are $29.95 a month, $19.98 a month, or $11.66 a month.
Another Google Chrome extension to help affiliate marketers build meaningful business relationships via Gmail. Yesware notifies you whenever a recipient opens your email, clicks on your link, or interacts with any attachment that you might have sent. Another exciting aspect is that it can also count how much time your recipient took to read the attachment. You can synchronize all these details through a CRM system. Yesware offers three subscription plans priced at $12, $25, and $55, respectively. With the premium subscriptions, you get campaign management, reporting, personal templates, email reminders, email scheduling, etc.
Check My Links is another one of the must-haves for affiliate marketers because it helps them get the best backlinks. It scans websites and highlights the broken links on the web page.
Your blog must be optimized for search engines as an affiliate marketer, and broken links are not what you need. So, what you can do is, contact the owner of a website with a broken link and ask them to replace that broken link with one of your affiliate article’s links. That is both clever and effective!
Doing this will increase the traffic to your blog, and ultimately your domain authority (DA) will go up. You can use this extension to create backlinks, and we all know that Google absolutely adores backlinks. To use this extension, search for blogs on the internet, run the Check My Links extension on a website, find the broken links that will be in red, contact the website owner, and nicely ask them to replace that broken link with your affiliate blog’s link. And voila!
That is all you need to do.
You can see that the broken links are highlighted in red while the valid links are highlighted in green.
If you are an affiliate marketer working on Twitter or Facebook and do not use the RiteTag extension, you are truly missing out. RiteTag is designed especially for Facebook and Twitter to show you how specific hashtags will perform before your publish your content. In order to use the RiteTag extension, you have to log in using your Facebook or Twitter credentials. It works because it checks and analyzes your hashtags and then highlights them in different colors.
So, how does color-coding work? Well, if it highlights your hashtag green, it means that the hashtag will make your content visible instantly. If a hashtag is colored gray, then you should most probably choose a new hashtag as it has a very low level of user engagement. If a hashtag is color-coded as blue, your chosen hashtag will make your content visible, but it will take some time. And, lastly, if your selected hashtag is colored red, you need to search for a new one because the one you chose is so popular that your post will drown in the sea.
The SimilarWeb extension provides you with important metrics that you must know to improve your website – the number of visits per month, your website’s ranking in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), where your visitors come from, and where they go from your website.
You can use this information to see where and what your competitors are posting, find the most rewarding affiliate networks, hunt down your competitor’s landing pages, view the ad networks other marketers use, etc. In short, SimilarWeb lets you find growth opportunities for your affiliate blog by exploring and analyzing other websites.
Wappalyzer is one of the best analytical extensions that analyze your competitors and tells you how you can make your website better than theirs. It shows what widgets, Content Management System (CMS), analytics system, frameworks, etc., were used on the website under consideration.
It also tells you how your affiliate blog will look with a particular CMS. You can use the free version for the primary analysis, which is more than enough. But if you want to enjoy more features, you will have to spend some money to get the advanced versions including Starter ($79/mo), Team ($199/mo), and Business ($349/mo).
NoFollow has got a whopping 70 thousand users. So, what does it do for so many people to love it? No Follow indexes web pages and determines what links are coded with the ‘no follow’ (the links that can’t be crawled) metatag. No-follow links don't matter in search engine authority, so you can use this extension to see if external sites are backlinking to your affiliate blog with followed links.
Moreover, you can also use the extension to your benefit by using the ‘no follow’ links on pages that you do not want to be followed, such as a thank you page. Or you can use this extension to see if you have coded your links correctly.
It is easy to identify the no-follow links because they are highlighted in red.
If you are looking for an alternative to Wappalyzer, BuiltWith Technology Profiler is your guy... or extension. It tells you about the technologies used on a certain website and provides you with more diverse information, such as the marketing platform connected to the website or its Alexa Rank.
You have to register yourself to use this extension, and it is free for five websites, but in order to use it for more, you will have to buy the paid versions including Basic ($295/month), Pro ($495/month), and Enterprise ($995/month).
SMMBox scours the internet world to find the best and top-performing content on the topic you want. For instance, if you are a travel blogger, you can find relevant blogs by using the SMMBox extension. It also works with Instagram and saves a lot of time, especially if you post a lot. It is a paid extension (Start, Pro, and VIP). However, there is a free trial person of 14 days.
Hootsuite is not a secret weapon anymore. It offers so many valuable functions; the most important ones, however, are:
If your affiliate campaign depends solely on social traffic, then this is a good place for you to start. And it is free, but you can upgrade to Professional ($19/mo), Team ($99/mo), Business ($599/mo), and Enterprise (Custom Solutions).
For an affiliate marketer, it is crucial to use the right supporting pictures and videos to convince your audience to buy a product or service using your referral link.
That is where Loom comes into play.
It lets you take video selfies and record your screen with sound. So, you can use the video however you want. You can add emojis or comments to it, trim it, share a link to it, or download it, etc.
So, if you are promoting some sort of service via an affiliate, you can use Loom to make a tutorial for your readers.
If you’ve ever had the opportunity to use Google Analytics to track a specific link, you know how much of a headache it is. Fortunately, there is a simple fix for that — Google Analytics URL Builder. It is an extension that lets you create links for URLs and track the data from them directly in your analytics account.
It’s especially useful for Facebook affiliate marketers because the traffic that comes from Facebook shares typically gets lumped together with all the clicks coming from Facebook.
BuzzSumo’s goal is to make research easier for content marketers. It helps you find the best content in your industry so you can build your affiliate marketing campaign around it. Additionally, it also lets your track comments and trends.
So, if you are doing affiliate marketing or running ads on lesser-used social media platforms such as Reddit or Twitter, you need to get the BuzzSumo extension yesterday. Another perk of this extension is that it will also keep you updated on the trends in affiliate traffic sources and the top-performing content so that you can stay on the top of your game.
VidIQ needs to be at the top of every YouTube affiliate marketer’s toolkit. Yes, it is that important! This extension tells you everything you need to know to run a successful affiliate campaign on YouTube —the number of subscribers per day, month, viewing time, tags, view count, engagement, recommendations, SEO indicators, etc.
You can get data about your competitors and track your videos at the same time. You can even keep an eye on your competitor's subscribers, likes, dislikes, and commentators. And for the cherry on the top, VidIQ also stores comment templates to let you quickly interact with your viewers.
Checkbot offers the perfect mixture of security and technical SEO to let you determine how optimized and safe your website is for search engines. Search engines, such as Google, give immense importance to website security and the quality of content in their rankings. And this extension is nothing short of a handy one-two punch for web developers and affiliate content creators.
Checkbot chrome extensions can test the SEO, page speed, and security of over 250 URLs per domain, all free of cost. This way, you can take care of these three categories to keep your website and visitors safe from unsafe material.
Conclusion
Turning your affiliate marketing business into your full-time job does not have to be so difficult. You just have to use the right tools. Because all you need is the right kind of tools to better your craft. And as you can see by our list above, there are plenty of tools made solely for affiliate marketers to cater to their big dreams. We hope that, by now, you have found at least one worth-installing extension that can help you advance in your affiliate marketing career.
Besides, we have only discussed 25 chrome extensions in our article, but trust us, there are plenty out of them out there. You just have to be aware of your requirements and then look accordingly. We do not expect you to download all of them and start using them simultaneously. That is impossible, anyway. But we suggest that you try at least a few of them and see what works for you and what doesn’t.