5 Ways to Automate Affiliate Marketing Business in 2023

Affiliate marketing automation is the use of technology to handle repetitive affiliate marketing tasks automatically (i.e., without human action). A smart automation strategy can help you achieve tasks faster and better so you can scale your affiliate marketing business at a low cost.

Typically, automation is achieved using apps and software platforms – for instance, AI writing assistants and cold email outreach tools.

In this post we’ll cover four benefits of automating affiliate sales, three ways to scale and automate affiliate marketing, and five key tasks you can automate using software. Whether you’re a beginner or seasoned pro, I hope you pick up some new tips, tricks, and inspiration for running your affiliate business on autopilot.

Time is money, so let’s get into it.

Benefits of automating affiliate marketing

Four key benefits of automating your affiliate marketing campaigns include:

Lower costs

Content creation and promotion (such as email outreach and link building) are two of the biggest costs associated with an affiliate marketing business, no matter how you slice it. If you do these activities yourself, there’s a time (opportunity) cost.

Outsourcing them to freelancers, on the other hand, entails a significant cash outlay. According to Copy.ai, for example, the average cost for a 1500-word blog post is $175. Video production costs are higher still.

Today there are tools available for automating content creation and link building, entirely or in part. We’ll cover some of these tools in an upcoming section.

Time savings

There’s no question that building an affiliate marketing business takes a lot of work – especially in the beginning stages, when you’re almost certainly putting in a lot of effort for very little return. After all, new affiliate websites can take weeks or months to get indexed and start generating search traffic.

The more you can automate the most time-consuming affiliate marketing tasks, like content creation and SEO, the sooner you can begin to build momentum, generate commissions, and reach your business goals.

Data collection and analytics

A primary advantage of using software programs to automate affiliate marketing is the vast amount of detailed data they collect, which can give you a competitive advantage as an affiliate marketer.

For example, a guest posting outreach platform can track data like open, reply, and click rates. With this information, you can determine which cold email templates and guest post topics resonate best with your prospects.

Apart from collecting data, many software platforms are equipped with advanced analytics features – for instance, the option to generate detailed custom reports that you can use to improve on future campaigns.

Scalability

A scalable affiliate marketing business is one that readily supports rapid growth. Put simply, the sky is the limit. Automation through technology is a key part of scaling any online business.

In addition to software automation, there are a couple other ways to scale your affiliate marketing business, which we touch on below.

How to scale and automate affiliate marketing

There are three primary ways you can scale and automate an affiliate marketing campaign:

Systems
People
Software

Let’s look at each of these in a bit more detail.

Systems

By developing systems and processes, especially around AI marketing strategies, you can eliminate bottlenecks and create a streamlined, efficient affiliate marketing business. You can document your systems (called SOPs, or standard operating procedures) by writing them in a Google doc or recording a tutorial video, which you can then use yourself or distribute to a team of freelancers.

Nowadays there’s software available to make the process of creating SOPs easier. Some examples include Process Street and Trainual.

People

Once your systems are in place and your affiliate marketing business is generating regular commissions, consider reinvesting some of those funds into a team of freelancers, such as content writers or outreach specialists.

By building a team, you can rapidly multiply your efforts and produce content much faster than you could ever hope to do on your own steam.

If you’ve done a good job of documenting your SOPs (noted above), it becomes a matter of finding skilled freelancers at the right price. Some of the best places to hire freelancers for affiliate marketing tasks include:

Upwork. The biggest online marketplace for hiring freelancers of all kinds, including content writers, web and graphic designers, copywriters, virtual assistants, and marketing specialists. When you post a job ad, freelancers bid on your project. This means you can choose from a large pool of applicants at a wide range of price points.

ProBlogger job board. One of the best places to hire qualified freelance writers. Be sure to take the time to craft a job ad that makes clear what you’re looking for in a writer.

Fiverr. Tends to be lower cost than some other freelancer marketplaces. Fiverr can be hit or miss and is best used for small, one-off tasks like logo design. Avoid purchasing backlinks on Fiverr, as they usually come from spammy sources.

Software

Software and apps are ideal tools for automating affiliate marketing because in most cases they cost less than hiring a freelancer.

As AI and machine learning technology becomes more advanced, AI tools for affiliate marketing (both free and paid) are dominating the marketplace. These tools continuously “learn” and evolve as they discover and process new data inputs. The result is that their outputs become increasingly sophisticated over time.

Examples of affiliate marketing automation software include AI copywriting tools, AI video generators, AI video editors, and social media post generators.

In the next section, we’ll look at five aspects of an affiliate marketing campaign that you can automate using software.

5 affiliate marketing tasks you can automate

Next we’ll look at seven aspects of affiliate marketing campaigns that can be partially or fully automated, including:

Content writing and copywriting
On-page SEO
Email outreach and link building
Social media marketing
YouTube video creation

Content writing and copywriting

There’s no way around it: If you want to have a successful affiliate marketing business, you need content, and lots of it. For many affiliate marketers, content creation – including writing blog posts and guest posts – is one of the most time-consuming tasks they face on a daily basis.

With today’s sophisticated AI copywriting tools, much of the content writing process can be automated, allowing affiliate marketers to produce content at scale. And these tools will only become accurate over time as AI technology continues to improve.

AI writing software can create any kind of written content, from Instagram posts to full-length blogs. To use these tools, you type in a brief description of the kind of content you want to create, and the tool will output multiple variations for you to choose from. The AI can also “learn” from your selected content to produce the rest of the article.

Many of these tools let you choose the tone of voice you want (e.g., professional or humorous), and some can even emulate the tone of celebrities and politicians.

It can take a bit of practice to master AI writing software to ensure you get the best results, but you’ll be well rewarded for your effort in terms of time saved.

A couple of the most advanced AI copywriting tools on the market are Jasper (formerly Jarvis) and Copy.ai.

Jasper offers an especially useful feature called “recipes,” which are prebuilt workflows or templates that let you assemble specific types of content very quickly – for instance, blog posts, Facebook ads, and even food recipes.

You can browse Jasper recipes on the site or create your own and share them with the rest of the Jasper community. Check out the video below for an example of a Jasper recipe in action:

On-page SEO

If you want your affiliate site’s pages to rank, you need to properly optimize them for search engines. This involves using your target keyword strategically throughout the HTML headings (H1, H2, etc.), title tag, URL, and body copy.

AI-powered content optimization tools like Surfer SEO and Frase use machine learning algorithms to identify the common denominators between the top-ranked articles for a given keyword. They use this information to create content briefs, which you can fill in step-by-step using the tools’ suggested keyword phrases and density.

The tools will give you a score in real time as you optimize your content so you can see how you stack up against your competitors.

Some of these DIY SEO tools include additional SEO features, like keyword research, website audit, white label SEO reporting, and AI writing functionality.

Another important, and often overlooked, part of on-page optimization is internal linking. By linking related blog posts on your site together, you can signal to Google what your content is about and gain an advantage over more authoritative competitors with a weak internal linking strategy.

Smart internal linking tools can help you automate this aspect of your affiliate marketing. For instance, Link Whisper is a WordPress plugin that automatically suggests internal links as you write. It can even build relevant internal links to all of your past and future posts entirely automatically.

Cold email outreach and link building

Buying backlinks can get outright expensive, with the average backlink costing $361.44. Aside from that, paying for links is against Google’s webmaster guidelines and can get you hit with a manual penalty.

For these reasons, guest posting via cold email outreach is still one of the most effective ways to build links in 2022. It also happens to be one of the most tedious aspects of affiliate marketing.

Fortunately, you can eliminate much of the work using automated outreach and link building platforms. These tools automate the most time-consuming parts of a link building campaign, including:

Identifying website, blog, and podcast opportunities
Finding current contact information for your prospects
Suggesting topic ideas for your guest posting campaigns
Sending bulk email campaigns (optionally, you can add personalized snippets to your emails for better response rates)
Sending follow-ups (and automatically stopping follow-ups when a prospect replies)
Contact management/CRM
Tracking open, reply, and click rates
Providing advanced analytics

Besides saving time, these tools provide invaluable data for optimizing your emails’ open and reply rates so you can get better results with fewer emails.

A couple of excellent tools for automating cold outreach and link building are Woodpecker and Postaga. The latter has a comprehensive suite of tools for automating link building campaigns.

Social media marketing

There are a few different types of software platforms that can help you automate your social media marketing, including:

AI copywriting tools. Today’s AI writing assistants (discussed above) can create all kinds of content, including posts, hashtags, video scripts, and descriptions for top social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube. For a quick example of how to use one of these tools to create a social media post, view our demo of Copy.ai here.

AI-powered social media content generators. These tools use AI technology to generate graphics for your social media campaigns. For example, you can use them to create eye-catching Pinterest pins in seconds. Two of the top tools for generating social media graphics and banners are Predis and AdCreative.ai. (AdCreative gives you a $500 free Google Ads credit when you sign up.)

Social media scheduling tools. Scheduling tools not only save a ton of time, but they can improve engagement on your campaigns by collecting data and posting when your audience is most likely to engage with your content. Some of these tools also curate shareable content and provide data on what kinds of posts perform well for your competitors. Tailwind (for Pinterest and Instagram) and Hootsuite are a couple of the best social media schedulers for affiliate marketers.

If you need an all-in-one social media automation tool that creates and schedules posts for you, check out Ocoya.

Video creation

If you use videos to promote affiliate products on YouTube, TikTok, or your own website, then you know there’s a lot of work that goes into creating a single video: generating topic ideas, writing a script and description, recording and editing, transcribing and captioning, and even designing eye-catching thumbnails to entice people to click on your video.

Today there are software solutions to help you automate all of the above tasks and then some. For instance, text-to-video AI video generators like Pictory and Lumen5 can generate professional-looking videos from a blog post or other text that you input. This is a great way to adopt video marketing into your affiliate marketing strategy without putting in too much effort.

AI video editors like Movavi Video Editor and Wondershare Filmora make it quick and easy for even novice video creators to edit, transcribe, and caption videos. Other software, such as AI video upscaling tools, focuses on a single aspect of video editing.

If you’re interested in monetizing your videos in ways besides affiliate marketing, check out our post about the best microlearning platforms.

Automated affiliate marketing: Frequently asked questions

Can you automate affiliate marketing?

With the help of software, you can automate many aspects of an affiliate marketing business or campaign, including:

Keyword research
Content writing and copywriting
On-page SEO
Cold email outreach and link building
Social media marketing
Video creation
Branding and graphic design

How do you automate sales in affiliate marketing?

You can automate sales in affiliate marketing by using a variety of tools, such as chatbots and pop-up forms, to encourage visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter or otherwise make a purchase.

How do you create an automated affiliate marketing website?

Affiliate marketing websites are largely automated by nature – once your site is generating traffic, your website visitors can click on your affiliate links and make purchases while you sleep. That said, you can further automate your affiliate marketing website using a few key tools, such as:

Chatbots
Opt-in freebies and popup forms
Email newsletter

How can you use AI for affiliate marketing?

Nowadays, AI tools can help you automate all kinds of affiliate marketing tasks, including content writing, link building, SEO, social media marketing, and video marketing. To learn more about how to use AI in your affiliate marketing business, check out the following articles:

Wrapping up

Starting up an affiliate marketing business can be a slow grind. Once you start building momentum and seeing regular traffic and commissions, you can build on those successes by automating affiliate marketing tasks wherever it makes the most sense for your business.

5 Ways to Automate Affiliate Marketing Business in 2023