In the affiliate marketing world, there is a wide range of affiliate marketing tools that you’ll need to help run your business. Although many are not a necessity, they will help you reach your goals at a much faster pace.
Some take a pretty good investment, some a small investment, but there are quite a few that are free.
In fact, you can get started on your affiliate marketing business with mostly free tools. Then as you start seeing some commissions coming in, you can upgrade.
I’ll include both free and paid tools in my list below.
Ahrefs is a popular SEO tool used for keyword research, competitor analysis, and online ranking data and is known most for its backlink checker.
It’s the best tool out there and is used by thousands of webmasters and affiliate marketers for in-depth research of keywords and competitors’ websites.
Yoast is a plugin that is an all-in-one search engine optimization tool that optimizes your website and helps them perform better in Bing and Google search engines.
Long Tail Pro is a powerful keyword research tool that you can use to generate hundreds of thousands of long-tail keywords in just a few minutes based on one root keyword.
AWeber is an email marketing service used by over 120,000 small businesses, bloggers, and entrepreneurs around the world.
You can set up email campaigns, broadcasts, segments into groups, etc. Also, build landing pages to collect your email addresses. Affiliate marketer-friendly. Free up to 500 email addresses.
GetResponse is an email marketing platform with a 99.55% deliverability rate. They have over 350,000 customers spanning 183 countries around the world.
3. SumoMe
SumoMe is an email capture WordPress plugin that you can install on your website and capture email addresses as visitors enter or leave a specific page.
You can tailor the pop-up to be relevant to the page on which it appears. There is also a whole suite of apps that can help you build your email list.
ClickMagick is a web-based app that tracks and optimizes your marketing. It tracks your affiliate links and lets you know who clicked on them and who made purchases.
ThirstyAffiliates is used by affiliate marketers to cloak and track their affiliate links to see where and who the clicks come from and from which click the sale is made.
It also can cloak your URL to make it more attractive to the eye.
Pretty Link is a plugin that allows you to implement link shortening inside WordPress along with link management, affiliate management, and automation.
You can use this to shorten your long ugly URLs into short, attractive URLs that are cleaner-looking and more appealing to the eye.
Bitly is a URL-shortening service and also a link management platform.
You would use Bitly to cloak (disguise) your long ugly URL to make it a shorter more appealing URL. This is a free tool with 50 URLs a month limit. A premium applies when over 50 URLs.
Voluum is a cloud-based tracker used by marketing agencies, affiliate marketers, and just about anyone running paid ads. It automates, tracks, and optimizes your ad campaigns, saving you time and money.
LeadDyno is an affiliate management platform that helps the affiliate marketer or any business manage commission payouts, launch different programs with an email marketing campaign, and helps in tracking.
Clickfunnels is an easy-to-use and powerful sales funnel builder designed to help businesses automate their sales process.
With Clickfunnels, you can create sales funnels, landing pages, regular websites, membership sites, opt-in pages, squeeze pages, and for affiliate marketing, one of the most important pages, bridge pages.
Elementor is a drag-and-drop WordPress website builder that helps webmasters build websites professionally without having to write code.
3. Kadence Theme
Kadence is a multi-purpose WordPress theme that is neutrally designed so it can cover a variety of niches. Free to download and easy to maneuver around.
4. Kadence Blocks
Kadence Blocks is a WordPress plugin that enables you to use custom blocks to design the pages of your website without code.
Click and drop, or drag and drop the block you want, (text, image, video, columns, etc.) in the place you want. Very straightforward technology.
It is free with an upgrade to premium available. But, starting out, the free version is all you need.
5. Leadpages
Lead Pages is a hosted tool that you can use to design landing pages to drive prospects into your emailing list, along with using it to give away lead magnets and register people for webinars.
Create simple one-page lessons that help your audience learn what you teach. You can build your first one-pager for free. Pick a template and launch in minutes.
7. WordPress
WordPress is the most powerful blogging and website builder on the internet. Used by countless webmasters around the world.
Over 40% of the top 10 million websites use WordPress. Although it doesn’t have a built-in drag-and-drop editor, you can install Kadence Theme and Kadence Blocks to enable that feature.
Google Analytics is an analytics tool that is used to track and analyze actions on a website, such as the number of visitors, number of page views, from what device your site was visited, from what country your site was seen, and the site’s bounce rate.
Google Docs is a free online word processor offered by Google along with Google Sheets, Google Slides, and many more.
Used to create your content for ease in sharing if you hire outside writers or share within your company.
4. Google Sheets
Google Sheets is a free spreadsheet program included in Google Docs Editor’s Suite.
Good for creating spreadsheets to keep up with your affiliate marketing data.
5. Site Kit By Google
Site Kit is a WordPress plugin that provides easy integration with Googles Analytics and Google Console so users can manage it all from a centralized area on their dashboard.
6. Google XML Sitemap
The Google XML Sitemap is the layout of your website. It lists the essential pages of your website.
You send the sitemap to Google and they use it to crawl and index your website faster. You can also send a sitemap to Bing.
7. Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a free internet browser that synchronizes with Google services and accounts.
It also spellchecks and translates web pages.
8. Microsoft Ads
Microsoft Ads,(Bing Ads) is a platform you can use to run ads sending traffic to your website or affiliate sales funnels.
You’re charged per click from $.01 to $500 or more per click. It can be very fruitful for you and it can be devastating if you don’t take it slow.
9. Adwords
Adwords is Google’s paid ad platform where affiliate marketers can run ads for their products, sending the prospect to their website, landing page, sales funnel, etc.
It is a pay-per-click system, where you pay only when someone clicks on your ad.
7. Bing Webmaster Tools
The service offers webmasters tools to troubleshoot their website’s crawling and indexing, submission of new URLs, Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools, website statistics, consolidation of content submission, and new content and community resources.
SurferSEO is an on-page optimization tool that analyzes your site and compares it to those ranking at the top of the search engine results.
It then gives you the keywords needed, the number of times each should be used, how many headings you should have, and how many paragraphs and images to compete with the top-ranked.
As you include the suggested keywords, it gives you a score from 1-100. Get the article to score 70 or more and it’s considered well-optimized to have a chance to rank in the search engines.
Jasper.AI is a copywriting software that can help you write blog posts, articles, social media posts, ad copy, etc by using artificial intelligence and natural language processing.
It’s good, also, to help with writer’s block. You can use it to write a paragraph or a whole article.
I find it extremely useful in helping with outlines for my article, coming up with various headlines, paragraph H2 heading ideas, and opening and ending summaries.
3. Frase.IO
Frase.io is an AI-powered tool that helps identify the questions your audience is asking and will create content briefs that are SEO and answer-focused. It helps solve the problem that every content marketer has and that’s finding relevant questions and answers.
4. Anyword
Anyword is an AI copywriting tool that helps make copies for ads, blogs, emails, newsletters, landing pages, etc, and helps you promote creatively.
Grammarly is a cloud-based software that reviews spelling, punctuation, grammar, and clarity mistakes in English language text and offers correction suggestions.
They do have a free version with an upgrade to premium available.
2. Mammoth.docx converter
Mammoth is a WordPress plugin that converts Docx documents to HTML.
You can use this when you create your content on Google Docs and want to convert it to transfer onto your WordPress editor.
3. Hemingway Editor
Hemingway Editor is an editing tool that helps you improve your writing by highlighting lengthy and complex sentences or other common errors and giving suggestions.
4. Moz Title Tag Preview Tool
You don’t want your article/blog title to be too long and cut off when it appears on the search page.
With the Moz Title Tag Preview Tool, you can enter your title and it will show how it will appear in a search result. Free to use.
Word Count is a free word count tool that you can simply copy and paste the text into and it will give you the word count, number of characters, number of sentences, number of paragraphs, and also top keywords and top phrases.
6. Copyscape
Copyscape is a free online plagiarism checker that checks to see if there is similar content anywhere else on the web.
Image And Video Tools
1. Unsplash
Unsplash is a website that boasts nearly 4 million stock photos, that you can download for free to use on your website without worry of copyright infringement.
2. Pixabay
Pixabay is a website for free photography and media, free from any copyrights. They also share images, videos, music, graphics, illustrations, etc.
This is a good resource for you to gather the graphics and images you want to use on your website without worrying about copyright infringement or getting permission.
3. Canva
Canva is an easy-to-use graphic design platform that can be used to create social media graphics, presentations, logos, documents, posters, etc.
Templates to choose from or create your own from scratch.
4. Coolers
Coolers is a super fast color palette generator. You can save unlimited palettes, colors, and gradients.
Create your color palette for your global on your website.
5. Loom
Loom is a screen recording and messaging software. It works well when you need to explain how to set up the software, for instance.
You can make a quick recording and send it to whoever needs it.
6. VidIQ
Vidiq is a SaaS product that helps YouTube creators find keywords and the best topics that would compete with top-ranked videos.
It has an excellent SEO section, that helps with producing the best tags, titles, etc. It’s the Ahrefs of YouTube.
7. Screencast
With Screencast, you can video your computer screen while narrating what’s going on.
It’s excellent for training or showing other affiliate marketers how to set up various software.
8. Pitch
Pitch is a powerful PowerPoint software that is excellent for sharing training with your prospects, team, or customers.
They have an abundance of templates ready for you, depending on what you are pitching.
Website Security And Speed
1. Bunny.net
Bunny.net is a global content delivery platform with next-generation CDN, Edge Storage, and Optimization Services.
In essence, they store your website at various sites around the world so access to your website is quicker, which in turn increases the loading speed of your website.
This is a free download.
2. Wordfence
Wordfence is a security plugin for websites that use WordPress. They offer various configuration options to help guard your site against intrusion.
You would install the plugin on WordPress to maximize the security of your website. The plugin is free.
3. Cloudflare
Cloudflare is one of the largest networks operating on the internet.
You would add Cloudflare to your website tools to increase performance and security for your website.
5. LiteSpeed Cache
LIteSpeed Cache is a server-level caching system that helps improve speed and performance for websites that have high traffic.
6. WP Rocket
WP Rocket is a WordPress caching plugin that was created to improve the speed of WordPress websites.
The plugin is a free download you can get from your WordPress plugin store on your dashboard.
Lead Generating And Lead Management Tools
1. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is a powerful lead-generating tool used by bloggers, marketing agencies, eCommerce websites, etc to improve their opt-in rates and have fewer cart abandonments.
They have 97+ templates to choose from for email capture, with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder. Integrates easily with most email service providers.
2. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a top-rated CRM software that helps you manage your leads.
It’s AI-powered automation that saves you time, where you can easily schedule and customize sales actions. Also has extensive security features.
3. Group convert
Group Convert is an excellent chrome extension that helps you with your Facebook group.
When someone joins your group, it saves their information and answers to your questions and pushes the info to Google Sheets.
From there, Zapier will push their email address to your email marketing service.
4. Zapier
Zapier is software that connects all the apps you use so that work flows smoothly. Once your apps are connected, then you set a trigger that makes an action take place. For example: If someone joins my Facebook group, I ask questions to see if they fit, then their email address is sent to my Google Sheets. From there, Zapier is triggered when the email hits the Google Sheet and sends the email address to Aweber, my email marketing service.
Organization Tools
1. Trello
Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. You can use it to organize content projects, deadlines, editorial calendars, etc.
2. Calendly
Calendly is one of the best free scheduling tools there is. You set the days and time frames you’re available, send your Calendly calendar to your prospect, they choose a day and time to meet, and you confirm. Follow-up emails will automatically remind them and you when the meeting approaches.
3. HubSpot
HubSpot is one of the top CRMs out there. It helps you organize, track and sell and has tools for everyone on your team.
It also helps you manage your pipeline, log sales activity, and store data.
Outsourcing Tools
1. Fiverr
Fiverr is a global freelance service provider connecting freelancers with individuals or businesses that need a service such as content writing, web design, SEO, etc.
You can use Fiverr to hire writers, graphic designers, webmasters, and very reasonable rates. You can also offer your services on Fiverr.
2. Upwork
Upwork is a freelancing platform where entrepreneurs, content writers, SEO specialists, etc can list their skills and put them up for hire.
You can also hire whatever you need to do work for you, saving you time and making you money in the long run.
Payment Management Tools
1. Thrivecart
Thrivecart is an affordable shopping cart software that is designed to help online entrepreneurs sell their products and services easily.
You can use Thrivecart to take payment on your website and to deliver digital products and physical products.
2. Stripe
At some point in your affiliate marketing career, you,ll have something to sell. Whether it be an online course, a membership site, eCommerce, etc, you’ll need a way to accept and process payments. Stripe is that platform.
It’s easily integrated with your website or sales funnel and handles all the headaches of payment processing for you.
3. PayPal
This is one affiliate marketing tool you can’t do without.
This is how you receive your commissions from a majority of the affiliate programs and how you can pay your affiliates if you have them.
One way of making money with your authority website is to sell it. Flippa is where you can go to buy or sell your websites.
It works just like real estate, except its digital real estate. They have roughly 6,000 websites listed from $500 to $50M.
2. Clickbank
Clickbank is one of many affiliate networks you use in affiliate marketing.
It’s also one of the largest where you can find a wide range of products to sell and receive commissions from. Free to join.
3. Thinkific
Thinkific is the go-to if you are wanting to create an online course to sell.
It’s laid out in an easy-to-understand format and is also quite enjoyable. They also have an affiliate program.
4. WPZeroBounce v2.0
WPZeroBounce (not to be confused with ZeroBounce email validation service) saves traffic leaks from the website.
It helps cut down the bounce rate, that is when someone gets to your site and then clicks on the back button and leaves.
With ZeroBounce, when someone clicks the back button, it will direct them to whatever landing or sales page you want and gives you that extra chance for a sale.
Best Affiliate Marketing Tools Summary
There are hundreds upon hundreds of affiliate marketing tools out there and this has just scratched the surface.
However, you definitely don’t need to use them all. And as I said in the beginning, you can definitely get started with your affiliate marketing business with just the free tools.
Everyone’s needs are different, so you need to do your due diligence and make sure your favorite affiliate marketing tools are truly needed in your arsenal.
Disclosure: Please note that some of the links above are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I’ll earn a commission. Know that I only recommend tools, products, and services I’ve personally used or my associates have used and stand behind. When you purchase a tool using one of my affiliate links, the company compensates me, which helps me run this blog and keep all of my in-depth content free of charge for readers.
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