You chose the affiliate marketing path for freedom, setting your schedule, making money with less hustle, and working from anywhere.
But reality kicks in fast: affiliate marketing isn’t just about dropping links and watching the money roll in. It involves content creation, email list building, audience engagement, marketing, and data analysis. All rolled into one!
Then you ask yourself: how do I keep up with all these demands without losing myself?
Here’s the fact:
You need a system and tools to automate, scale, and grow your affiliate business while earning back your time.
With the right affiliate marketing tools, you can simplify your workflow, focus on what you enjoy, and get real results (more traffic, a growing email list, or your first (or next) affiliate sale).
In this guide, I’ve reviewed 10 of the best affiliate marketing tools that would fit into everything you need as an affiliate marketer, from content creation to competitor analysis. As a bonus, you’ll gain insights from seasoned affiliate marketers as they share lessons from their missteps.
Here’s what Katie Breaker of BirdieBall Golf said about using the right affiliate marketing tool kits:
I researched and reviewed the best 10 affiliate marketing tools by considering critical features paramount to the affiliate marketing niche. I checked for features such as ease of use, automation, scalability, integration, performance tracking, affordability, and content support.
Of course, RivalFlow AI tops the list.
I’m not biased. I'm only following what most experienced affiliate marketers consider a priority tool for affiliate marketing. Nirmal Gyanwali of WP Creative, says:
This is exactly why you need to prioritize content targeting of your niche website for optimum visibility.
RivalFlow AI is a content optimization tool that helps improve website content ranking with AI-powered recommendations. It analyzes website content on a page level for SEO factors, finds missing pieces it needs to rank higher, and gets more visibility.
However, it’s good to mention that RivalFlow AI only optimizes published/old content for higher rankings. For new content, you may use other SEO tools for optimization, while RivalFlow AI does the ranking monitoring once it is published.
Now, let's uncover RivalFlow AI's core features and how they help you better position your website content for higher rankings.
RivalFlow AI monitors your content ranking position and compares it against competitors. When it detects that a competitor is outranking you on the SERP, it analyzes the differences and recommends quick, actionable changes to help you reclaim the top spot.
It does this on a page level and lists all content pages needing quick adjustments. I like how it ensures you are not guessing what to improve on your website. It shows you what to improve, how to improve, and where to add new sections on your website.
As an affiliate marketer with so much on your plate, RivalFlow AI presents you with a data-backed list of pages that are almost there (low-hanging fruits), but require a few tweaks. RivalFlow AI is like your real-time, behind-the-scenes content audit partner.
Like I mentioned, RivalFlow AI doesn't just highlight pages that need adjustment for you. It does the optimization job and suggests new questions your log post page hasn’t covered.
The best part is that you don't have to write anything. Its AI writes the required sections and highlights the perfect section to place the new suggestion in the published content.
And now with its Full Page Draft feature that blends all of the new copy updates with your existing text, the process is as hands-free as ever.
RivalFlow AI integrates with Google Search Console to ensure the optimization is monitored. This way, you can easily see the impact of the optimization.
RivalFlow AI is one of the top affiliate marketing tools that offers a competitive price plan. There’s a free plan that doesn’t require your credit card details, and a credit-card backed 14-day free trial opens up more flexibility in what you can do.
If you plan to invest in an AI content optimization tool, consider its annual billing that saves you 20%. All plans also come with a 30-day money-back guarantee to earn your trust as a new user.
Start a free plan - no credit card required
Content is king, and that’s why it holds an esteemed position in building or breaking your website's reputation. Regardless of how well-optimized your content is, a little grammatical error or spelling mistake could easily put off your readers, which may eventually impact your site conversion. A Quora user put it well from the standpoint of a buyer:
“Spelling and grammar go a long way in building trust and credibility for your brand. I know I’d never give my credit card info to a website riddled in spelling errors.”
To avoid leaving money on your table for competitors who get it right, Grammarly can be your best writing ally. As a content-focused tool, it reviews your content for grammatical errors or misspellings. It also suggests the correct text that best expresses your intention based on the context, brand style, and tone. It feels like having an editor working with you to sharpen your expression.
Here are some of Grammarly’s features that help with writing clearly and error-free.
Paragraph rewrite: Your first draft may not always be perfect, but with Grammarly, you can quickly fine-tune your expression to perfection without wasting time. With its AI function, you can instruct the tool to rewrite different paragraphs based on your preference, either to make your text shorter, more persuasive, or more inspirational.
Personalized suggestions: Another fantastic benefit of using Grammarly is that it can act as a strategic coach that guides your writing process. This means you’re getting unique inspiration to improve your content. For every content, it provides personalized suggestions based on context, target audience, and your writing goals.
Proofreading: For solopreneurs like affiliate marketers, Grammarly can be a reliable go-to tool whenever you need an extra pair of eyes to catch awkward expressions or misspelt words. It acts as a full-time editor and proofreader to catch typos, missing punctuation, grammatical errors, and commonly confused words before you publish.
While Grammarly is reliable for catching errors, I recommend reading through its suggestions to avoid over-relying on its suggestions, which may go out of context.
Grammarly offers three plans: one free forever plan and two paid ones.
I consider Kit (formerly ConvertKit) to be one of the best affiliate marketing tools for beginners and experts building an email list because of its feature-packed free plan and scalability. While there are hundreds of other free email list-building/automation tools out there, I like Kit’s scalability, supporting beginner affiliates from the ground up and intermediate or advanced affiliates with the advanced tools they need.
As a beginner, you can build up to 10000 contacts on Kit all for free. It’s also easy to use with its drag-and-drop landing page and form builders.
Let's look at Kits' features below.
Unlimited landing pages: I love this feature because it allows you to create different landing pages for every affiliate product or campaign without limits. The best part is that this is available to all users, whether free or paid.
Another thing is that this unlimited access empowers you to run A/B testing to see which of your efforts, titles, headlines, or copy converts best. Its unlimited landing page also allows you to design different lead magnets to build your email list before promoting affiliate links.
Email sequences: Affiliate marketing is more of a strategy, making email campaigns an inevitable aspect of it. You don't want to slap affiliate links on your audience's face without first building a strong relationship with them. This is where the email sequence comes in. You can use this email sequence to nurture your leads before selling them.
Unlimited automation: While free users can only access one automation, paid users tend to benefit more. Kit’s automation allows you to create a custom workflow, such as setting up behaviour-based emails. For example, if a site visitor joins your email list via your blog post on “Fitness,” Kit can automatically tag them as "Fitness Enthusiast" and send them only fitness-related product offers, not random ones.
See how Riley Westbrook used email list building to upscale affiliate marketing.
As Kit empowers new creators with its generous and feature-packed free plan, beginners may find setting up workflows with its automation a bit of a learning curve.
Kit is one of the best free email list-building tools for affiliate marketers. It offers a free forever plan and a 14-day free trial to explore its two paid plans.
Kit offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, and choosing its annual billing option gives you access to 2 months of free usage.
Getlasso is an all-in-one affiliate marketing solution that gives affiliate marketers the tools needed to optimize their affiliate assets for better performance. What I find very interesting about Getlasso is its unified dashboard with a search bar that helps affiliates monitor all their links easily.
Having Getlasso is synonymous with having a report sheet where all your affiliate performance metrics are accessible. The only caveat is that Lasso is designed for Amazon affiliates, helping them supercharge their earnings while complying with Amazon policies.
Let's see its core features.
Monetization opportunities: Getlasso tracks every link on your page for monetization opportunities. For every blog post on your website, it scans the page for affiliate words that you haven’t added the right affiliate links to. The fantastic part is that with just a toggle, Getlasso monetizes the link, and you can start driving revenue.
Click volume tracking: With Getlasso, you can quickly understand your most-viewed and clicked products across your website. This way, you’ll gain insight from what’s not working to improve your affiliate link strategy.
AI link optimization: Link monitoring is critical to avoid lost commissions. Getlasso has an AI which monitors your affiliate link performance for optimization. If you have a broken affiliate link, Getlasso recommends a higher-paying alternative.
Getlasso offers three price plans: one free forever and two paid ones. Its yearly plans are cost-effective, allowing users to save 45% on the actual monthly fee.
The goal is to grow your audience and generate traffic across all channels where your audience hangs out. And with over 5 billion people using social media daily, no affiliate marketer would want to miss out on this opportunity. At this same time, positioning for this opportunity with manual efforts comes with a sacrifice - your time and mental energy.
So, what’s the way out?
Manychat bridges the gap between this opportunity and the effort required. Manychat is popularly known as a chat marketing automation tool that helps creators engage their audience, collect emails, and grow their followers. Even when offline, with Manychat, affiliate marketers can close more deals and avoid the burnout of 24/7 social media engagement across different platforms.
What I love most about Manychat is that it allows you to grow your audience beyond each social media platform by creating a database for you. This means that losing any of your social media platforms won’t erase your ManyChat audience. You can export/import your subscriber list, message them via email or SMS, and DM them again once you re-link a new social channel.
Sounds like a good tool to have? Let's unveil its features.
Manychat AI: This is similar to having ChatGPT write content or brainstorm ideas for you. The only difference is that this is restricted to the Manychat automation ecosystem. Its AI has intention recognition, which contextualizes every conversation with your audience to understand the sentiment and respond accordingly on your behalf. It's like having a virtual assistant to manage your social media presence 24/7.
Omnichannel Integration: Manychat functions are available across social media platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, SMS, and Email. This means you can leave all your social media engagement to Manychat automation. However, you should review its performance across all your socials for a few hours.
Conversation Management: Manychat engages your audience just as you would. It can turn your comments into conversations that sell. For example, you can auto-DM people from comments and capture their email or phone number to build your contact list. For example, you may ask your audience to reply with a word like “COMMENT” in the comment section to get a freebie or an offer. Based on the automated workflow, ManyChat sends a message to every commenter who uses that keyword.
Manychat can also help you automate responses to common questions by providing relevant and accurate answers, leading to conversion. Like email tools, Manychat allows you to set quick automations and sequences. However, setting up automated workflows and sequences can be complex for beginners.
ManyChat is one of the best affiliate marketing tools, offering juicy prices. It has a free and two paid plans. I love that its paid plans are pay-as-you-go monthly packages, allowing users to use as needed.
CoSchedule is one of the best marketing tools affiliates can use to manage their social media/marketing calendar. Although it’s popularly known as a social media calendar tool, it can be your overall marketing planner, managing and scheduling social media and blog content.
Its dashboard consolidates all your social media efforts, allowing you to track growth across all platforms. With scheduling filters like in-progress, completed, and submitted, it can also serve as a mini-project management tool for your social media and marketing efforts.
Let's uncover CoSchedule’s features.
Seamless integration: Beyond its clean interface, I love its easy integration with other third-party tools across different categories, such as project management, social media, asset management, WordPress, and Email marketing. This guarantees a seamless workflow with your favourite tools.
Best publishing time suggestion: One of the incredible hacks that affiliate marketers and creators always seek is knowing the best time to publish on social media. CoSchedule analyzes your audience’s behaviour and suggests the best times to post on social media. This means more eyes on your affiliate content when it goes live.
AI assistant: Those moments when you are staring at a blank screen? That's when CoSchedule’s AI assistant comes in as your writing assistant. It can help you to generate headlines, social captions, or email subject lines tailored to your affiliate offers. This is especially helpful when writing captions or copies for multiple products or campaigns.
While CoSchedule earns a solid reputation with its ease of use and free forever plan, it’s good to mention that the free plan only supports one social profile.
CoSchedule’s price offers are user and feature-based, which means you get more features and user access as you pay more. See the full list of its price details below.
CoSchedule limits the number of social profiles to be connected across all plans and allows users to add extra profiles at $5/month for each social added on all paid plans.
Awin is a popular affiliate marketing network platform that connects advertisers with publishers. Since affiliate marketing is about getting rewarded for promoting the brands you love, Awin has different categories of products that you can choose from based on your interests. It also provides the tools needed, such as tracking technology, access to a global network of brands, and strategies to get you started as an affiliate and make your first sales.
Let’s see some of its core features.
Diversified partner type: Regardless of your experience in affiliate marketing and content type, Awin can support your journey with expert advice. You can join the program as an influencer, content creator, publisher, technology partner, or media site.
Chrome extension for quick linking: The Awin has a Chrome extension that simplifies getting advertisers' affiliate links. Once you’re on the advertiser’s website, the Chrome extension generates a unique trackable link for you without logging in. This feature is particularly great for editorial publishers or media sites.
Cross-device content attribution: One of the ways that Awin supports affiliates is with its deterministic algorithm. This algorithm favours affiliates such that once site visitors use your link to get to an affiliate site on a device, but continue browsing on another device to finalize the sales, you earn commissions. This ensures you receive payment for your part in sales at the end of a cross-device user journey.
Since this algorithm often relies on site visitors’ email addresses to attribute a unique ID, if the visitor’s sales journey is completed on another device with a different email, Awin may not be able to attribute the cross-device sales to you.
Awin is a free-to-use networking platform for affiliate marketers.
Google Analytics 4 is a free analytics tool designed by Google to help site visitors have a full view of their website traffic and how people interact with the site. Considering that long-term affiliate marketers often have a website to drive organic traffic to, this tool can greatly benefit them. This tool lets you easily track every click, scroll, content performance, audience demographics, and purchase behaviour. In fact, you could consolidate data as Ihor Shulezhko did with GA4.
Let's see its features.
Traffic source reporting: Google Analytics offers a dashboard allowing you to visualize all your traffic sources. This means that if people visit your website via different channels such as TikTok, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, email, etc., you’ll be able to see the referrals. With this report, you can make smarter decisions to concentrate on traffic sources that convert most, whether paid, organic, referral, or social. In essence, you can track which platform contributes most to your affiliate sales.
Event-based tracking: GA4 tracks user interactions (like clicks on affiliate links, video plays, downloads) as events. You can track affiliate link clicks directly, even if they don’t lead to an immediate sale, helping you measure campaign interest and engagement.
Custom audience for retargeting: GA4 provides a built-in tool for creating and managing audiences based on some set rules, allowing you to define complex conditions. You can use this functionality to segment the audience for marketing retargeting. For example, you may set up Google Analytics so that any site visitor who lands on a page but doesn’t click the affiliate link or buy should be segmented for retargeting. If your GA4 account is connected to Google Ads, you can use these audience lists to remarket or re-engage warm leads who didn’t convert.
Google Analytics 4 is a free-to-use affiliate marketing tool for tracking.
AdRoll is a digital advertising program that helps advertisers get more website traffic or increase brand awareness for improved conversion rates through advertising. It is also a pay-per-click platform like Google Ads, but more flexible and advanced with AI-powered features.
What I particularly love about AdRoll is its retargeting feature, which ensures that site visitors who didn’t convert the first time get an ad that showcases your product to them wherever else they visit on the internet.
Once you’ve installed AdRoll’s pixel on your website, you are on your way to improving your conversion rate. Then, old/first-time site visitors who didn't convert can convert later with retargeting. However, it is important to note that AdRoll can be a bit pricier than traditional Google Ads. It also has a broader range of coverage than Google, supporting ad placements on Google Display Network, Facebook, Instagram, web, and email.
Expert AI-powered retargeting: AdRoll leverages AI to track users and remarket your products to previous website visitors who didn’t convert. The AI predicts the users' behaviour to determine the next platform to showcase an ad to them, whether on a news site, Facebook, or Instagram.
Brand awareness: If your goal is to find new customers or drive new traffic, you may as well consider Adroll’s digital advertising platform. This is particularly good for new brands seeking marketing strategies to build credibility and put their names out there.
Marketing automation: I love its automation builder because of its optimization for cross-platform ad campaigns. For example, suppose you plan to run ads across multiple channels like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, and random websites for a product. In that case, AdRoll’s automation supports you with creating one campaign and optimizing it for each platform. No fuss, no muss! It’s time-saving, saves you from guesswork, and is conversion-focused.
AdRoll offers two price packages, Ads and the Advanced package. The Ads plan is a pay-as-you-go option for display and native ads, while the Advanced package provides the complete AdRoll platform with more ad credits.
Beyond being an advertisement platform, AdRoll offers an advertisement management service where its digital advertising experts support your ad efforts.
Images are powerful tools for boosting user engagement on your website. But when they’re not properly optimized, they can slow down your site and hurt performance. That’s why image optimization is essential for user experience and search engines.
Consider this:
These stats make one thing clear: a fast, smooth experience is critical if you want visitors to stick around and take action.
That’s where Imagify comes in. Designed for affiliate marketers and online business owners, Imagify helps you compress and optimize your site images without sacrificing quality. The result? Faster-loading pages, better user experience, and improved chances of converting traffic into sales.
Let’s look at some of its amazing features that make this possible.
Seamless website integration: Imagify integrates easily with websites to facilitate image optimization at scale. While it offers a plugin for WordPress websites, it also provides an API that allows other custom websites to access it.
NextGen Conversion: As Google recommends serving images in modern formats, AVIF and Webp, Imagify automates image conversion to these formats. With these conversions, your website has a higher chance of having a better page speed score and core web vitals. In the long run, website visitors won’t be frustrated, leading to improved conversion.
Smart compression: I love this hands-free approach to image optimization. Imagify automates image compression for you once uploaded to your website, ensuring image balancing, quality, and performance.
Imagify is another free marketing tool that affiliates should add to their tech stack. It offers a generous free forever plan, allowing you to optimize up to 200 images monthly, and two paid plans.
The table below gives a brief and detailed overview of the best marketing tools you should have as an affiliate marketer.
While affiliate marketing is a specific marketing strategy that relies on performance, it is as broad as regular marketing. As a result, its tools are diverse and categorised. Here are different types/categories of affiliate marketing tools based on activities.
No doubt, there are hundreds of affiliate marketing tools in different categories out there.
The best tool is the one that fits perfectly into your use case. While there’s no one-size-fits-all rule for choosing an affiliate marketing tool, considering the factors listed below can guide you in making the right decision.
Regardless of your affiliate marketing tool, look for the following features.
Every industry has best practices that guide them in working smartly to standardize processes, minimize errors, and achieve their goals more effectively. Likewise, affiliate marketing isn’t left out. It’s good to know that having the right tools alone won’t save your business. How you use it matters more than what it is. Now, let’s uncover the best practices.
A quick shoutout to all experts who shared their experience:
