Affiliate marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways for affiliate marketers to promote products and services online and earn extra income while doing so.
Even though it does not require any upfront investment, it can reap great rewards.
With thousands of affiliate programs available in the market, you can promote any products or services of interest on your websites, blogs, and social media pages.
And when someone clicks on the link or purchases the product, you get a commission.
But as a blogger, it’s essential to write valuable and informative content, master SEO, keyword research, and even market research if you want to skyrocket your affiliate earnings.
And to do that, you need essential tools to help you manage your links and provide information about traffic, sales, and statistics.
Here’s a list of tools I use and found beneficial. Most of them have a free plan that you can use straight away.
Remember that you don’t need to use it all at once. Instead, look through them and choose the best fit for your business needs.
Disclosure, Some of the links in this article are affiliate, which means I may earn a commission if you decide to purchase through the link. But don’t worry, It’s at no extra cost to you. For more information, please read my disclosure page.
16 Best Free Affiliate Marketing Tools
Web Hosting for Affiliate Marketers
1. SiteRubix
Do you have a domain name yet? Then, read this post before you buy.
Though having a website is not compulsory to get started with affiliate marketing, it’s best to have one.
Creating your own website helps build trust and credibility between you and your audience.
It’s vital to build your website with a powerful and fast host. A slow loading site creates many setbacks causing you to lose out on potential customers.
Wealthy Affiliate site builder a low-cost option with various plans to choose from depending on the type of site you are running.
In addition, you get access to malware protection, SSL encryption, CDN service, and more.
I like most about this site builder is the 24/7 technical support team. You don’t have to worry about any technical issues while building your site, as the team is always on stand-by.
Moreover, there are many training to help you get started quickly, even as a beginner. Remember, your website will be slow without fast hosting, and visitors may leave for another site.
Training Program for Affiliate Marketers
2. Wealthy Affiliate
When you are just starting, it’s best to attend a training program that can help you understand how affiliate marketing works.
My top choice is the Wealthy Affiliate platform because there is so much free training to help you start your affiliate marketing business on the right foot.
Wealthy affiliate is the world’s most extensive affiliate marketing training program and community of people from all over the world made for beginners and experts alike.
There’s a comprehensive training program to help you learn how to make a living online with affiliate marketing.
The focus is always on quality education with courses taught by expert instructors and top industry professionals.
It’s best to sign up for a free account and check out the beginner course for FREE.
One of the main worries for an affiliate marketer is the technical work.
However, you don’t have to worry as the Wealthy Affiliate team takes care of everything.
Join Wealthy Affiliate training free
Research Tools for Affiliate Marketers
To be successful with affiliate marketing, you need to invest time in keyword research.
3. Jaaxy
Jaaxy is an easy-to-use keyword research tool that helps you find profitable keywords based on your niche.
You can use Jaaxy to generate keyword lists, identify trends for your niche, and discover new niches to enter.
Below are some helpful tips for using Jaaxy
- It’s free to use, but you can choose to buy an upgrade for expanded features.
- You can get suggestions based on your niche, or you can choose to do broad searches.
- You get the opportunity to export your results into a CSV file that you can then save and share with other people.
- The interface is straightforward to use, so it’s possible for beginners who do not know SEO to use it.
A paid plan comes with a 30 day free trial period. But, except you need the advanced features, you can get started with the free plan.
Google Analytics is a powerful tool that helps you grow your website and make it better.
This free tool provides in-depth information about visitors by tracking their activity on your website. You’ll be able to see what they did, how long they engaged with it, which devices they used while browsing, and more.
With Google Analytics, you can see what content you have been successful in past marketing campaigns, so you know which strategies to continue using when promoting new products or services.
It also tells you where we need to improve when it comes to customer experience. You can then use this information to improve your site and give your users a better experience.
Google search console is a free tool created by Google to help monitor and improve your site’s performance and diagnose technical issues. It also enables you to take proactive steps to maintain high-quality sites that provide a satisfying experience for users.
Connecting your website to Google search console is crucial because it gives in-depth information into how Google interacts with your site, including crawling, indexing, and ranking.
In addition, you can get an accurate overview of the pages on your site that need to be fixed, drive traffic, and what is generally working.
Furthermore, it’s essential to submit your sitemaps to Google search console to ensure your site gets crawled and indexed more quickly and accurately.
Google keyword planner is a free tool that helps find keywords and their popularity.
It also gives insights on how many people type in the keywords, what search engine websites they use, and how competitive or difficult it will be to rank in the organic search results.
And in addition, it enables you to find search volume, competition level, and suggested bids for each keyword. This way, you can analyze them and determine which ones are best suited for your business goals.
7. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a powerful tool for keyword research as it provides a lot of data.
So, if you are looking for detailed data about the keywords, Ahrefs is a good option.
The primary purpose is to help you find out what keywords are being searched online and how competitive they are.
You can do that by looking at the search volume and the competition of a particular keyword.
In addition, you can see where your domain ranks for those specific keywords.
Email Marketing Tool for Affiliate Marketers
8. Aweber
Email marketing software, an autoresponder service, and a CRM service are the perfect tools to help you grow your affiliate business.
You often hear people say; there’s money in the list. It’s not far from the truth, as you can generate extra income through your email list.
There are many email service providers, but I use Aweber because of the user-friendly and intuitive templates for creating emails.
There are other features to boost your email marketing strategies;
- Campaign automation
- Integration with other apps
- Sign up forms
- Segment your contacts list
- Analyze your email performance
You can use the autoresponder services to write emails in advance, removing the stress of writing every day.
Well-written autoresponder emails can help maintain a good connection with your customers and keep them coming back for more.
With this, you can give out freebies and coupons and promote your products and services.
In addition, there are training videos to help you learn how to use the software. And good enough, you can get started with the free plan up to 500 subscribers.
Writing Tools for Affiliate Marketers
9. Grammarly
Grammarly is an AI-powered writing tool that checks your writing for errors,
- makes suggestions to fix spelling and grammar errors,
- vocabulary, and punctuation for better writing quality.
- Checks plagiarism to keep your content stay original
- Corrects overuse of passive words
- Checks tones and writing styles to ensure they flow well together.
You can start with Grammarly’s free plan.
10. Coschedule Headline Analyzer
A headline analyzer helps you assess your headlines and make them better.
There are many of them, but my favorite is the Coschedule headline analyzer. It helps you create headlines that match your post’s intent and evaluates your topic against an analysis model to provide insights on how well it will perform.
In addition, Coschedule’s headline analyzer does the following
- Provides insights into how well your headline looks
- It matches the intent of your post with an analysis model
- Evaluate your topic against competitors
- Shows word count, word balance, grade level, and many more.
- You can generate high-performing headlines in seconds.
Learn more about coschedule headline analyzer
SEO Plugins for Affiliate Marketers
11. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a free WordPress plugin Yoast SEO that comes with some premium features that are worth the price. For example, you can optimize your article’s metadata for search engine algorithms like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
It also monitors your site for SEO best practices to ensure you are doing everything correctly.
12. All in One SEO is a free and powerful open-source plugin for WordPress that does it all for you, from on-page optimization to helping with redirects and creating XML sitemaps.
It helps you optimize your website content giving a score of up to 100 for; meta description, internal and external links, readability, and many more.
Links Manager for Affiliate Marketers
13. Pretty Links
If you have many affiliate links, it can be challenging to keep track of them in one place, but with pretty links, you don’t have to worry.
Pretty link is a must-have tool to manage, track, customize and shorten your links to promote products on your blog or social media profiles.
You can easily create your own custom URLs with colors, fonts, and graphics making it easier to remember than the long affiliate link you would get from the merchant.
The advantage of this is that it helps you manage all your affiliate links by giving them all unique URLs rather than just relying on the default or pre-defined ones provided by each company’s affiliate link system.
In addition, you can integrate pretty links with many different platforms such as WordPress, Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, etc.
Graphic Design Tool for Affiliate Marketers
14. Canva
There are many websites to get free photos and images. But I use pictures from Canva for my blog and social media images. It’s easy to use, even for beginners.
Millions of free stock images. The free option is enough to get started, except you want more advanced features.
Image Optimizer for Affiliate Marketers
15. TinyPNG
TinyPNG is an optimized image tool that can compress images with high quality. In addition, it provides lossless compression that converts any photo into a smaller file size without affecting quality.
In addition, TinyPNG can reduce loading times for your website with JPEGs or PNGs by up to 80%.
16. Smush
When it comes to SEO, image size is essential. Smush compresses the images on your website, so they are all optimized to the same size.
Smush can automatically compress images of JPEGs and PNGs files without losing any quality.
Affiliate marketers need to optimize images on their sites to reduce page load time and save bandwidth.
Learn more about Smush
Final Words
Remember, you don’t necessarily have to use all these tools at once. Instead, try to start with the convenient one, master it, and then add more tools with time.
What free tool do you use to boost your affiliate earnings?
Please share with us in the comment below.
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Fantastic article for people looking to start or improve their affiliate marketing experience.
super tools for your marketing domain and for building SEO content.
everything in the article is useful and not to be missed or skipped by anyone that is looking to start affiliate marketing at any level
the pages and apps reviewed are some of the most prominent tools available to content creators today
useful and nicely redacted
Very well said, Alex.
I use most of these tools regularly, and they are so so helpful.
Cheers.
Affiliate Marketing is really a great way to earn money anywhere in the world. Instead of a tiring 9-5 job, affiliate marketing is just a click away! For one thing I see some good and helpful stuff in your blog, like Wealthy Affiliates and Site Rubix which sounds really promising since I’m considering to do an online business. Secondly I have always heard of Grammarly, and that it’s a really great app but I never had a reason to download it, but now that I am going to do business online I am going to get it right away! Overall I really like your blog the contents is very informative and well put together.
Hi Kemisha
True, there’s the flexibility of working from anywhere, which is one reason I prefer affiliate marketing.
Check out Grammarly, and if you have any questions, let me know.
Cheers
There is one thing I want to add which I see you haven’t mentioned. It’s Google adsense. It is a way for you to make money by people clicking on the ads on your website. I have been trying to get it on my website for the longest of time but I seem to be struggling in that department. I will try again today. Thank you for this lovely post
Hi Daniel
Thank you for bringing that to my notice; I haven’t tried Google AdSense yet.
You can contact the support team relating your challenges.
I wish you success with it.
Affiliate marketing has been around for a long time, and it was very difficult for me to personally find affiliate marketing that was right for me. I remember having a hard time deciding what kind of information was correct and whether it was reliable or not. It’s really beneficial to be able to share with people of different experiences in a community like WA. If you practice a little every day, you can expect good results.
True, there’s no shortcut in affiliate marketing; you have to put in the work to see the result.
But with determination and hard work, the sky is the limit.
Thanks for this helpful list of tools for affiliate marketers. I’m probably most interested in finding a great email marketer at this point. I have a couple of sites with lists and will be sending out mail to thousands of people. I don’t think that I qualify for a free plan with that many emails, but I like the features you list with aweber so I’m going to check it out. Thanks!
Sure, Aly, Aweber is an excellent choice to cater to your need. The premium plan is available, and you have access to advanced features.
I appreciate your comment.
cheers.
Affiliate marketing is, in my opinion, one of the more cost-effective ways to make money. What is good about affiliate marketing is that it doesn’t take a lot of money at the beginning. Beginners should definitely attend some kind of training at the beginning to understand how affiliate marketing works.
Hi Djordje
I agree that beginners need to go through training to get a good understanding of how it works.
Thank you.
Cheers