10 FireFox Addons to Help Affiliate Marketers

Posted on 04/14/2010

Firefox is a great browser, especially since there are so many add-ons available. The power to augment your browsing experience with tools that will make you more productive is priceless, especially for an affiliate marketer. Capturing key data via your browser instead of having to use multiple external tools will definitely save you time. Below we have compiled a list of Firefox add-ons that will come in handy for any affiliate marketer.

1. See Page Ranks While You Browse

While there are a few addons that display Google PageRank for the current page, Search Status can be considered the best one for a number of reasons:

• It display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank, Compete ranking and SEOmoz Linkscape mozRank (you can disable any of the metrics)
• Its position in the browser can be customized in plenty of ways (it is always important if you have multiple addons and want to position them properly);
• It has quite a few other handy tools including link nofollow attribute display; link report; etc):

2. See Which Country the Site Is Based On

If you are considering a merchant or a program, you want to instantly see which country it comes from. This will save your time immensely by allowing you to instantly filter out programs from the countries you don't want to (or can't) deal with.

Flagfox displays a country flag depicting the location of the current website's server and provides a multitude of other useful tools such as site safety checks (this one is run by Site Advisor), whois look-up and translation (based on Google Translate):

3. Get Warned of Suspicious Sites

Like the above one, this addon will help you stay away from shady merchants and suspicious programs.

MyWot is the community-based safe surfing tool that rates all sites based on the complex combination of metrics and scores:

• Trustworthiness: A poor rating may indicate identity theft potential, Internet scams, credit card fraud, phishing, lottery scams, viruses, adware, or spyware.
• Vendor reliability: A poor rating indicates possible fraud or a bad shopping experience.
• Privacy: A poor rating indicates spam, adware, or spyware.
• Child safety: A poor rating indicates the presence of age-inappropriate material (content that is sexually oriented, hateful, or violent in nature).

4. Run Keyword Research

Most of affiliate niche sites rely on search referral traffic. This is why it so important to know what people search for when looking for something related to the site topic. Thus doing keyword research prior to (and while) creating content for your affiliate site is so essential.

SEO Blogger allows you to find the most sought-after keywords for your topic without ever leaving your blog editing screen. The tool opens in a handy sidebar so it will never interrupt your content creation process:

5. Easier Optimize and Analyze

While the previous addon helps you create an optimized content, this one lets you see how well you have done your job.

"KGen" (Keyword Generator) is a FireFox addon that allows you to see what keywords are strong on the current web page:

6. Quickly Check Where Your Affiliate Site Ranks

Now that you have optimized your content for some important words and analyzed the word prominence, you can hope for some high rankings for your pages. SEOBook Rank Checker will help you check how well your pages are doing in Google:

• Check multiple pages and multiple keywords;
• See the actual page ranked;
• Export results to a CSV file or save the results for future reference:

7. See How You Are Being Tracked

Seeing which tracking software the current site is using is useful in a number of ways: first, it (indirectly) tells you how trustworthy the site is (for example, it may warn you about some potential traffic leak by showing that the merchant's site is using AdSense). Besides, this also broadens your outlook by letting you know how others track and analyze traffic.

Ghostery is a FireFox plugin that is aimed to do the following:

• It detects “web bugs, ad networks and widgets” on every page on the web;
• It allows to block any detected web bugs trackers and thus protect your privacy.

8. Convert Currencies Easier

Currency converter is a handy FireFox addon that will turn particularly handy for non-US affiliates who promote American merchants. It will help them quickly estimate their earnings as well as get around unknown currencies.

The addon has quite a few useful options:

• Customize the settings based on your location;
• Track the conversion you make: access daily, weekly, monthly, and annual charts depicting the historical exchange trends of the currency pair that you selected;
• Save your last conversion and use those FROM and TO parameters for your next conversion request so that you don’t need to make the same selections each time.

9. Create Your Affiliate Links Faster (Amazon)

AffiliateFox adds your Amazon Reference ID to Amazon.com thus allowing to easier generate deep links to your browser Address Bar - just copy and paste and you are done!

10. Tweet Your Affiliate Links Easiar

This one is great to use in combination with the previous addon: first generate your affiliate link to your address bar and then Tweet right from there! TwitterBar allows to post to Twitter from your address bar.

Note: you don't want to Tweet your affiliate links to often to make sure your Twitter stream is relevant and spam-free!