Following is a list of products, tools, and websites I use or refer to regularly for my affiliate marketing business.
eBook Covers
Myecovermaker – You can create 3D book, pamphlet, and software box covers using their graphics, your own, or a combination of both.
They have a great set of fonts and stock images for use on your covers. The app is easy to use but not free. If you create a lot of book covers the price is very affordable. I’ve used them for almost 7 years now.
Google Webmaster Guidelines – Learn what Google expects to see from a quality website.
HTML/CSS/PHP/Javascript Education
W3Schools – Worth bookmarking for any time you have a question about coding, formatting your affiliate links, or modifying your website theme.
Keyword Research
Google Keyword Planner – Google’s free keyword research tool. It no longer gives the same level of detail that it used to unless you’re a big spender in their ad service but still useful for researching keywords related to your niche.
Photo Tools & Sites
Canva – The most amazing site ever for creating images for your website or social media profiles. It has templates for everything – website graphics, Pinterest pins, Facebook covers, profile images, book covers, and much, much more. (That’s my referrer link)
Plus, they have lots of free stock photos and icons to use in your images.
Dreamstime – A stock photo site for professional website and project images.
MorgueFile – This database of archived photos includes lots of free images that you can use in your websites. Just read the rules first because you do have to make changes to photos before you can use them without attribution.
Sales Page Builders
I use the free version of the Kadence WordPress theme, their available templates and the Kadence Blocks WordPress plugin to create my sales pages.
Once you’re comfortable with how these work you can create basic sales pages in minutes.
SEO
Google SEO Starter Guide – Google’s SEO training center for webmasters.
Moz – A great resource for all things related to SEO. I look forward to reading their SEO expert surveys which they put out every couple of years or so.
Website Hosting
Bluehost (* my affiliate link) – I have used Bluehost since I first started working online. They’re affordable and have been in business for a long time.
I start all of my sites out on shared hosting and then move them to a second Bluehost account where I use their Managed WordPress hosting plan.
Their help desk is very good but I may be biased. Because their call center is in the same town as I am their reps usually notice I’m local and I tend to get amazing service. Is it because I’m local? I don’t think so – they’re a big company and they’d be fools to only provide their best service to those in one city.
Site Ground – While I’ve always used Bluehost I have had reason to log into nearly every hosting company’s dashboard in order to help my coaching students so I have a pretty good idea who I would use if I had to switch and that’s SiteGround.
They offer affordable plans, good server security measures, and good server speed.
WordPress Education
WordPress Support & Tutorials – There are lots of bloggers who write about things you can do with WordPress but I like to go to the source first.
WordPress Plugins
Following are the plugins I use on every new affiliate marketing site I run:
Ad Inserter – Allows you to insert ads or text blocks within elements of your site. Useful for putting disclosure statements at the top of every post or for inserting Adsense blocks.
Akismet Anti-Spam – This comes with most installations of WordPres and gets the job done. You don’t have to use this one but I do recommend you use something to help filter website spam.
Better Search & Replace – This plugin allows you to search and replace items in your site’s data. If you want to switch all of your Amazon Associate tracking IDs this is the tool you want to use.
Contact Form by BestWebSoft – Provides a basic looking Contact page for your site.
Duplicator – Allows you to create copies of your website which is useful for backing up or moving your site.
Enable Media Replace – Allows you to replace an item in your site’s media library with a new version. If you ever upload a document or an image to your media library and then need to change the item (upload a new version of the document or a changed version of the image) but don’t want to change the URL for that item then use Enable Media Replace.
iThemes Security – Helps harden your WordPress site to reduce hacking and abuse.
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions – Helps clean up your site’s database by removing old, unneeded data which can help speed up your site.
Quick Page/Post Redirect – Sometimes you may wish to change a post URL to something else. If you don’t redirect your old URL to the new one you could lose traffic that was already being directed to the first URL. This plugin automatically creates the proper redirect code to send visitors to the new URL.
Really Simple SSL – A quick and easy way to set SSL up on your website once you have an SSL certificate.
Remove Query Strings from Static Resources – Helps with site speed and security.
Schema & Structured Data for WP – Guides you in formatting each post of your site with structured data which might get you better looking and/or ranking results in search engines.
Smush – Compresses image file sizes to help reduce load time of your site.
W3 Total Cache – Helps with site speed.
Yoast SEO – Provides the webmaster with more control over on-page SEO.
WordPress Themes
My favorite WordPress theme at the moment is the free version of Kadence. It’s regularly updated, runs fast, has tons of flexibility, allows for lots of customization, and they include a nice selection of starter templates for free.