Tools for Affiliate Marketing: What You Actually Need (Free Options First)

Affiliate Marketing · Tools

Search for affiliate marketing tools and most of what you’ll find is written for the wrong person. Half the lists are software for companies running an affiliate program: PartnerStack, Impact, Post Affiliate Pro. The other half are for media buyers spending thousands on ads, built around trackers like Voluum at $199 a month. Neither helps someone promoting their first product.

This guide is for the affiliate side: you, recommending other people’s products. It’s organised by the job each tool does, starts with the free option every time, and tells you when (and whether) paying makes sense. Where I use a tool to run EvonSoft itself, I say so and show how.

If you haven’t chosen what to promote yet, start with my guide to the best affiliate programs for beginners. The tools below are only useful once you have a program to point them at.

Affiliate tools vs affiliate software: which do you need?

These two phrases get mixed up constantly, and it matters because the products are completely different:

If you’re promoting someone else’s product, you need the left column. Everything below is from it.

The quick list

Prices are from each official pricing page in October 2026. Intro prices are marked, because renewals usually cost more.

Landing pages and email: Systeme.io

If you only set up one tool, make it this one. Most affiliate sales don’t happen on the first visit. They happen days later, in an email, after someone has had time to think. A landing page that collects an email address plus an automated follow-up sequence is the core of almost every affiliate business, and Systeme.io does both in one account.

What the free plan includes (from Systeme.io’s pricing page): up to 2,000 contacts, 3 sales funnels, unlimited emailing, 1 blog, 1 course, 1 custom domain and no transaction fees. It doesn’t expire and needs no card.

When you’d pay: the Startup plan is $17 a month ($204 a year) and becomes worth it once you pass 2,000 contacts or need more funnels. That’s a nice problem to have.

The alternative: Kit’s free plan holds up to 10,000 subscribers with unlimited landing pages and forms, which is more generous on list size. But it has no automated sequences, and the automated follow-up is the part that sells for you. Kit’s Creator plan, which adds automations, starts at $33 a month.

New to how follow-up emails turn into commissions? I walk through it step by step in affiliate marketing for beginners.

A done-for-you funnel: CB Profit Club

Building your first funnel from scratch means writing a landing page, a lead magnet and a week of follow-up emails before you’ve earned anything. That’s where most beginners stall. A done-for-you funnel skips that step: the pages and emails are already written, and you connect your own affiliate ID and autoresponder.

CB Profit Club’s free Team tier gives you exactly that: your own copy of its membership funnel tagged with your ClickBank affiliate ID, a ready-made follow-up email campaign you import into your autoresponder, swipe emails, blog post templates and the intermediate training. You earn 50% on upgrades people buy through your funnel. The paid VIP level ($495 a year or $67 a month) adds rotator traffic and more training, but it’s optional.

It pairs naturally with Systeme.io: CB Profit Club supplies the funnel and email copy, Systeme.io sends the emails. The one thing it can’t do is bring you visitors. You still need traffic, which is what the rest of this list is for.

For screenshots of everything on the free tier and what stays locked, see is CB Profit Club free? and my full CB Profit Club review.

A website: WordPress + Rank Math

You don’t need a website on day one. Systeme.io’s free blog and landing pages are enough to start. But if search traffic is your plan, a site you fully own and can grow for years is worth it, and WordPress is the standard. EvonSoft runs on it.

• WordPress (from wordpress.org) is free software. You pay for hosting and a domain. Budget shared hosting usually costs a few dollars a month on an introductory term and more on renewal, and a domain is typically $10 to $20 a year.
• Rank Math is a free SEO plugin that handles titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps and FAQ schema. The free version covers everything a new affiliate site needs.

Skip expensive premium themes and page builders at the start. A fast, plain theme and good content beat a fancy design that loads slowly.

Link management: Pretty Links

Raw affiliate links are long, ugly and tied to one program. A link manager turns hop.clickbank.net/?affiliate=you&vendor=xyz into yoursite.com/product. That matters for three practical reasons:

1. You can change the destination everywhere at once. If a program changes its link or closes, you update one redirect instead of hunting through 50 posts and old emails.
2. You see clicks per link. Most networks report sales but not which page or email sent the click.
3. Links you can read are easier to share in videos, podcasts and social bios.

I use Pretty Links on this site. Every affiliate button you see here, like evonsoft.com/systeme, is a Pretty Link. The free Lite plugin (200,000+ active installs) includes 301, 302 and 307 redirects plus click and unique-click tracking with bot filtering, which is enough to start. The paid plans start at $99.60 for the first year (Beginner, one site), and Marketer ($149.60) adds automatic keyword linking and split testing. Those prices are introductory; renewal is higher. ThirstyAffiliates is a free alternative that works the same way.

Keyword research: Google Search Console + Ubersuggest

If your traffic comes from Google, keyword research decides whether anyone ever sees your content. You need two kinds of data: what your site already shows up for, and what people search before you’ve written about it.

Google Search Console is free and non-negotiable. It shows the exact searches your pages appear for, how many clicks you get, and any indexing problems. Within a few weeks of publishing, it’ll show you keywords you rank on page two for, which are often the fastest wins.

Ubersuggest fills the other gap: search volume and difficulty for keywords you haven’t targeted yet. I use it to plan the posts on this site. This one is a good example: “tools for affiliate marketing” gets about 1,900 US searches a month with a search difficulty of just 7 out of 100, while “affiliate marketing software” gets 1,600 but is dominated by software companies. Without that data I’d have aimed at the wrong phrase.

Ubersuggest has a limited free tier. The Individual plan adds 150 searches a day, rank tracking for 125 keywords and site audits, and is sold monthly or as a one-time lifetime payment. Lifetime purchases are non-refundable, so use the free trial first. Prices vary by country, so check the official pricing page.

What to look for: keywords with real volume, low difficulty and buyer intent that matches your product. “Best X for Y”, “X review”, “X vs Y” and “is X legit” searches convert far better than broad “what is” questions.

Images and video: Canva + Higgsfield AI

Affiliate content needs a steady supply of visuals: featured images, Pinterest pins, YouTube thumbnails, short-form video. Two tools cover nearly all of it.

Canva handles everyday graphics. The free plan includes 1.6 million+ templates and 5GB of storage. Pro ($144 a year) adds premium stock, the background remover, one-click resizing and brand kits. Free is plenty until you’re producing graphics daily.

Higgsfield AI is what I use for AI images and video. The featured image on this post was generated with it. It brings many of the leading image and video models into one account, which is useful for thumbnails, product-style scenes and short promo clips without filming anything. It’s credit-based with no free plan, and pricing changes often with promotions (a $10 Lite plan was on offer when I checked in October 2026), so look at the current page before you buy.

For a closer look at its features and pricing, read my Higgsfield AI review.

Voiceovers: ElevenLabs

Faceless YouTube and short-form video is one of the most popular ways affiliates get traffic now, and it needs a voice. ElevenLabs produces natural-sounding narration from a script, in many languages.

The detail most lists miss: the free plan (10,000 credits a month) doesn’t include a commercial license. Affiliate videos are commercial, so you need at least the Starter plan, $6 a month, which adds the commercial license and voice cloning. Creator ($22 a month) adds professional voice cloning and more credits. Both had first-month discounts when I checked.

AI writing assistants (and Google’s rules)

ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini all have free tiers and are genuinely useful for outlines, email subject line ideas, summarising long sales pages and rewording clunky sentences. Grammarly’s free version and the free Hemingway web editor catch errors and over-long sentences.

But be careful how you use them. Google has said it rewards helpful content however it’s produced, and that using automation mainly to manipulate rankings breaks its spam policies (Google’s guidance on AI content). In affiliate marketing the risk is specific: an AI can’t use a product, so it can’t tell your reader what’s actually inside, what the upsells cost, or who it’s wrong for. That first-hand detail is what makes people trust your recommendation and buy through your link.

Use AI as an assistant, check every fact it gives you against the official source, and add what only you know.

Tracking what earns

You don’t need a paid tracker as a beginner. Three free sources tell you almost everything:

• Your affiliate network’s dashboard (ClickBank, Digistore24 and others) shows clicks, sales and refunds. Use tracking IDs, which most networks support, to tell which page or email made the sale.
• Google Analytics 4 shows where visitors come from and which pages they read.
• Pretty Links click stats show which buttons get clicked.

Put together, those answer the only question that matters early on: which content produces sales, so you can make more of it.

Tools you can skip for now

Plenty of tools on other lists are good, just not for someone without income yet:

Rule of thumb: don’t buy a tool to solve a problem you don’t have yet. Pay for one when a free version is clearly holding back something that already earns.

Your $0 stack vs your first paid stack

Upgrade one line at a time, only when you hit that tool’s free limit. Many affiliates make their first sales without paying for anything on this list.

The bottom line

The tools for affiliate marketing that actually move the needle are simple: a page that captures emails, automated follow-up, clean trackable links, keyword data, and a way to make visuals. All of them have free versions good enough to start with. Spend your first months creating content and testing offers, not comparing software.

Tools only multiply a good offer. To pick the program you’ll point them at, compare commissions, cookie windows and approval rules in my 10 best affiliate programs for beginners.

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