From the outside, affiliate marketing sounds pretty simple; gently push customers towards products and services they want and reap the rewards when they start spending.
Of course any insider will tell you that affiliate marketing involves the ability to simultaneously juggle a number of different tasks like backlink management; SEO and page ranking among others. That’s why more and more affiliates are looking into industry-specific software suites like Raven Tools.
Multiple Applications Under One Interface
Raven Tools brings together a number of different applications and tasks affiliates use on a daily basis under one product including:
- Keyword research and analysis
- Backlink management tools
- Content management
- Site metrics
“Raven brings together the best data sources from every component of the online marketing world. We build our own tools on top of that data and make it so that they work together,” Raven Tools Vice President of Marketing Taylor Pratt told us in a recent interview. “A good example is with our integration of Google Analytics in the system. With access to your analytics data we’re able to tie that data into our link building, social media management and rank tracking tools. Eliminating the need for you to make those connections manually.”
For affiliates, Raven’s most attractive feature is probably its robust Links Manager application. Backlink Explorer generates a daily list of sites that are linking to your content and provides one click functionality for bringing those sites into your daily workflow. This feature makes tracking and contacting new site managers a lot easier than it once was.
Raven Tools also includes a number of keyword research and analysis tools that integrate, and build on the key features of Google’s popular Keyword Analyzer. This dashboard allows affiliates to track keywords both from competitor’s and their own site to see how compare. The keywords analyzer can be tweaked to search a variety of specific sources such as:
- Social media, including Facebook and Twitter.
- Forums
- Traditional websites and blogs.
Tools for Beginners and Experts
For affiliates who are just getting started, making sense of keyword analysis, content optimization and backlinking can be very confusing. And while there are many software suites out there that are designed to help affiliates with marketing and SEO functions, not all of them are necessarily appropriate for newbies. So we asked Pratt what Raven Tools has to offer beginners.
“Raven does a lot of the heavy lifting for you, which is very valuable to those new to the SEO world. A good example is with Raven’s Site Finder tool,” he said. “Site Finder allows you to perform a search for a keyword you’re interested in ranking for. It analyzes the top ten results in Google for that keyword, and will find all of the common, valuable backlinks that those ten websites share. Tools like that can help guide new SEOs to understanding what makes a link (in this case) valuable.”
There’s also a new Research Central tool on its way, which presents data from SEMRush, MajesticSEO and SEOmoz through API access. All that data is centralized in one spot in categories like Summary; Keywords; Competitors and more!
For More Information
Raven Tools is offering a 30-day free trial of this product on their website. Check them out here!