Affiliate marketing is the classic form of web-based eCommerce work which holds out the promise of allowing you to earn a “passive income” as long as you play your cards right.
There are many obvious potential benefits to affiliate marketing. For one thing, when you are an affiliate marketer, you don’t have to worry about production costs, stock management, shipping, or any number of other concerns that would be of major importance if you were running a conventional eCommerce business.
Of course, just because the basic concept behind affiliate marketing is straightforward, that doesn’t mean that actually being an effective affiliate marketer is “easy.”
Here’s a look at affiliate marketing “spy tools” and how they can help you to make your business flourish.
What are spy tools?
The term “spy tool” may sound suspect upfront, but rest assured that when using affiliate marketing spy tools you are not going to be interfering in the geopolitics of other nations, or having to go on secret assignments under cover.
Essentially, affiliate marketing spy tools exist to let you see what your competition is doing, and to give you clues about developing trends, best practices, and shifting consumer interest, so that you can direct your professional efforts as precisely as possible, and capitalise as a result.
Essentially, affiliate marketing spy tools are a way of gathering data so that you can engage in the smartest possible strategy for your business, and can focus your energies effectively instead of spinning your wheels and wasting weeks, months, or years, not to mention an extraordinary amount of energy and effort, exploring avenues that are essentially dead ends.
What is the benefit of using spy tools?
Here’s perhaps the core “secret” or “trick” of affiliate marketing:
In order to be a successful affiliate marketer, you need to corner a niche that hasn’t yet been capitalised on, so that you can become the “go to” resource for prospective consumers, once the trend really hits its stride.
Consider how affiliate marketers gain their edge over the big players in their industries. It’s not by out-competing them on overall breadth of services, or by having a larger marketing budget. Instead, it’s by being able to focus intensely on one particular niche that no major company will find it profitable to dedicate a major amount of attention and resources to.
As an affiliate marketer, you can quickly aggregate just about all the products available in a particular niche, from the top 10 companies to provide that product, and can therefore “corner the market” in that sense at virtually no cost.
The trick is in ensuring that you get in early so that other affiliate marketers don’t scoop you.
The data you accumulate from spying tools can therefore be crucial for your ability to succeed.
A few affiliate marketing spy tools
Here are a few leading spy tools you may wish to consider.
Adbeat
Adbeat boasts “unparalleled insights into the complex world of digital advertising,” and serves major companies including Box, Ancestry.com, and Lending Tree.
In addition to showing what your direct competitors are up to, and the branding being used, Adbeat can show the sources of web traffic – including where particular media was purchased, and which publishers were running particular ads.
Adbeat allows you to create a free account with limited features, including the ability to save your favourite ads. Pricing for Adbeat Pro starts at $249 per month for the standard plan, and features 90 days of data, 1000 results per search, desktop and mobile ads in 26 countries, All Display, Programmatic, and Native ads, and more.
Adplexity
Adplexity allows you to view campaigns running in over 75 countries, with an emphasis on allowing you to see which of your competitors’ ad campaigns are the most effective.
Not only can you download every landing page that may be relevant, you can find ads promoting affiliate offers from over 150 networks with a single click.
Adplexity pricing starts at $199 per month for the desktop version. Among other things, the service includes pop-up ad data from Adcash, PropellerAds, PopAds, and Popcash. It features data from all major browsers, a powerful but intuitive interface, and the ability to download all landing pages with one click.
Anstrex
Anstrex offers a variety of packages, including one focused on push notification advertising trends, one focused on the hottest selling dropship products, and one focused on native advertising campaigns.
Anstrex allows for integration with a variety of useful platforms that can enhance your productivity, including Shopify, AWS, Woo Commerce, AliExpress, and more.
With Anstrex, You can easily sign up for a live demo on the company’s website in order to get a comprehensive overview of what you can expect before signing up to the service in earnest.
Anstrex starts at a very affordable price point relative to many competitors – with the Native only Solo Plan costing $59.99 per month per user. This service includes 27 Native Ad Networks, data from 64 countries, a landing page ripper, competitor alerts, and more.
Earn even more by finding the best payouts
Once you have found the offers and ads that are working well for others, using the best spy tools, you should also compare offer payouts across multiple affiliate networks to ensure you are getting the best rate. Getting a better rate simply means earning more from doing the same amount of work!
Use the WOW TRK Offer Engine to quickly search for an offer and compare rates across multiple affiliate networks.
