10 Must-Have Tools to Kickstart Your Affiliate Marketing Journey

Affiliate marketing is one of best ways to make money online. Today, almost everyone who creating online content earning through affiliate marketing. Last year I made almost $30k from affiliate marketing and it possible because of using right affiliate marketing tools which help me to target right audience and track my all-affiliate campaigns.

Here, I’m sharing some best affiliate marketing tools which I used and test, these tools are affordable and essentials for every affiliate marketer.

No. 1 Domain & Hosting


Get your own domain (e.g., youraffiliatewebsite.com) and host your website. There are some web tools and platforms help to create your affiliate website.

Godaddy 

It is managing over 84 million domains and serving around 21 million customers globally. Godaddy considers as leading domain provider with Wide range of domain extensions (.com, .net, .org etc.) with tools like domain name generators and free privacy protection. 

  • It also offers hosting and AI powered website builder to make any website in just few clicks.   
  • Offers over 500 domain extensions e.g., .com, .co, .org, .ai, .shop etc.
  • Offers domain investing supports like Domain Auctions, a Discount Domain Club (up to 60% off registrations), and appraisal tools to maximize profits.
Godaddy

Did you know? you can buy any domain in 90 seconds from Godaddy

Namecheap

Namacheap provides domain name registration and web hosting services at very afffordable prices. Namecheap offers competitive initial domain prices (e.g., .com starting at ~$5.98-$9.98 for the first year) and significantly lower renewal rates.  

  • Namecheap offers lifetime free domain privacy to hide personal information from WHOIS public database. 
  • DNSSEC Support to adds an extra layer of security to prevent DNS hijacking. 
  • Offers 100+ TLDs (top level domain) including .com, .xyz, .org, .net, .ai, .io, and more. 
Namecheap

Hostinger

Hostinger is leading web hosting provide in the world, provide shared, VPS and Cloud hosting services along with Free .com domain with 1 or more years hosting. This is one of best platform to create affiliate marketing website.  

  • Shared hosting starts at $1.99-$2.49/month (4 years term)
  • Offers 99.9% uptime, fast load times and 9 global data centers
  • Free SSL, CDN, daily/weekly backups, AI website builder, and Hostinger Horizons.
  • One-click WordPress installation with free migration support.
Hostinger

If you need hosting + domain: Hostinger’s free domain with hosting plans, low initial costs.

Get Hostinger Discount Coupon Code

No. 2 Affiliate Networks


Connect with brands to access affiliate links and earn commissions.

CJ Affiliate 

Founded over 20 years ago in Santa Barbara, California, CJ is one of the world’s largest and oldest affiliate networks. With advanced tracking tools, real-time reporting, and connects affiliate marketers with over 20,500 merchants, including major brands like Barnes & Noble, Godaddy, GoPro, NordVPN, and Grammarly. 

CJ Affiliate 
  • It supports payments in over 150 local currencies, making it accessible for global affiliate marketers. 
  • Minimum payout threshold is $50 for direct deposit and $100 for checks, with payments processed monthly. 

Join CJ Affiliate

ShareASale 

ShareASale is an affiliate marketing network based in USA, considered as one of World’s most trusted platform for affiliate marketers. It has over 270,000 active affiliates and 25,000 merchants including Wpengine, FreshBooks, Monster Insights and more.  

ShareASale 
  • High Comission rates, with SaaS products offering up to 70% commissions. 
  • Average affiliate marketer earns $8,038 monthly with ShareAsale. 
  • Account approval process 2-4 business day, and some advertisers require manual approval. 

Join ShareAsale Affiliate

Impact 

Impact connects affiliates with thousands of advertisers across various niches, including retail, finance, technology, and travel. Notable brands include Adidas, Uber, Shopify, SEMrush and Airbnb.

Impact

Impact’s platform contributes to the $21 billion global affiliate marketing industry, projected to reach $40 billion by 2030. 

  • Fast Account Approval 
  • Analyze your audience, content, and commerce performance across hundreds of networks with Trackonomics by impact.com. 
  • It offers flexible commission models, powerful APIs, and dynamic tracking—including first-click, last-click, and multi-touch attribution 

Join Impact Affiliate

ClickBank 

Who want fast approvals, instant commissions up to 200%, and a catalog filled with high-converting digital products.

Clickbank affiliate marketing platform perfect for email marketers, content creators, and paid traffic specialists looking for high ROI campaigns with low barriers to entry and fast earning potential. 

ClickBank
  • ClickBank used by 24.6% of marketers, with over 100,000 affiliates. 
  • Top-performing products in 2025 include The Genius Wave (brain enhancement, $51.88 APV), Teds Woodworking ($73.65 APV), and Nitric Boost (men’s health, $137.23 APV), with hop conversion rates ranging from 0.38% to 5.08% (Source – Clickbank) 
  • Average affiliate marketer earns $8,038 monthly, with experienced marketers (3+ years) 

Join Clickbank Affiliate

Rakuten Affiliate

Searching for long term partnership for affiliate, Rakuten Advertising best for you. It’s best suited for content affiliates, loyalty sites, and large publishers who want high-volume, high-integrity partnerships. 

Rakuten Affiliate
  • Rakuten is consistently ranked as a top affiliate network, with over 150,000 publisher. 
  • Only PayPal and checks in some regions, which may inconvenience international affiliates. 

Join Rakuten Affiliate

Partnerstack 

It is best affiliate program for SaaS and B2B products, last year Partnerstack paid $45M+ for affiliate partners. It’s one of the best platforms for earning recurring monthly commissions from brands like Monday.com, Asana, Aircall, Webflow, AWS, IBM, QuickBooks, and Wix.

Partnerstack

Affiliates earn a 15% recurring commission on subscription fees from referred clients for the first 12 months, with no minimum payout threshold. Payments are made monthly via PayPal or Stripe. 

  • Offers a 90-day cookie window, giving affiliates ample time to earn commissions on conversions. 
  • SaaS affiliate programs offer 20% to 70% commissions, among the highest in affiliate marketing 

Join Partnerstack Affiliate

No. 4 Email Marketing Tools


Build and engage an email list for recurring traffic and sales. 

GetResponse 

GetResponse is a full-featured email marketing platform with tools for automation, landing pages, webinars, and sales funnels—making it highly appealing to both beginners and pros. GetResponse offers a free plan, but you need a paid subscription to get the most out of it. How much you pay depends on the features you require and the size of your contact list. 

GetResponse

GetResponse provides a free plan that can be used indefinitely. This works with up to 500 subscribers and gives you access to quite a lot of the platform’s key features. 

Join GetResponse

ConvertKit 

Kit was founded in 2013 by a blogger named Nathan Barry. He was looking for an email marketing solution that would be more creator-friendly, so he ended up creating his own. Though Kit does offer a generous freemium Newsletter plan for up to 10,000 subscribers (with unlimited emails, forms, and landing pages included), with one automated email sequence.

Due to this generosity, we awarded them our Best Free Email Marketing Tool for 2025. Their cheapest paid package starts at $29/month for up to 1000 subscribers, with prices going up as your list grows. 

  • Up to 10,000 subscribers 
  • One basic automation 
  • One email sequence (an automated series of emails) 
  • (No credit card is required to sign up for the free plan). 

Join ConvertKit

ActiveCampaign 

ActiveCampaign is slightly more expensive than the simpler email marketing tools. ActiveCampaign may also be too powerful for your needs.  Affiliates promoting ActiveCampaign benefit from high conversion rates and recurring commissions starting at 20%, with opportunities to earn up to 30% based on performance. 

ActiveCampaign’s drag-and-drop visual automation editor is what made me fall in love all those years ago. Many competitors have tried to copy their style. 

ActiveCampaign recently introduced bundles, allowing you to buy the sales and marketing features independently – or together as a bundle at a discount.

Join ActiveCampaign

No. 5 Content Creation Tools 


To create text, image and video content for affiliate marketing campaigns.

Grammarly For Content Writing 

I’ve been using Grammarly for several months now. I admit that in the beginning, I didn’t think I needed an extra digital editing tool. Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant that improves grammar, clarity, tone, and style—making it a go-to tool for bloggers, writers, students, and professionals. 

Grammarly

Join Grammarly

Canva For Graphics 

I came to Canva with little design experience and instead of being overwhelmed, I was instantly creating. The breadth of tools and apps is mind boggling to see offered and for such a low price, its amazing. I am a user for life. 

Canva Free, Canva Pro ($14.99 per month or $119.99 per year for one person), and Canva for Teams ($29.99 per month or $300 per year for the first five people). 

Canva For Graphics 

Join Canva

CapCut for Video

CapCut, a free video editing app, has emerged as a powerful tool in the realm of video content creation. Available on iOS, Android, desktop, and as a web-based editor, it offers flexibility across platforms. Recent updates have locked previously free features (e.g., watermark removal, transitions, filters) behind the Pro subscription, frustrating long-time users. 

CapCut for Video

Download Capcut

No. 6 SEO Tools 


Find keywords and optimize your content for search engines. 

SEMrush 

One of the biggest challenges for SEOs and website owners when picking an SEO tool is accuracy. Checks for over 130 technical and SEO issues, including broken links and missing meta tags. 

Semrush’s set of data includes over 808 million domains, 26.4 billion keywords, click stream panel data from billions of events per week, over 43 trillion backlinks, over 10 billion URLs crawled per day on average, and a range of data aggregated from social media networks. That’s impressive numbers not every SEO tool can offer. 

SEMrush

Join SEMrush

Ahrefs  

Ahrefs is an all-in-one marketing intelligence platform that assists with content marketing, competitive research, and all aspects of search engine optimization. Honestly, it’s one of my most reliable tools for managing SEO. It’s quite helpful for SEO audits and keyword research. 

Join Ahrefs

Keyword Planner 

Free tool within Google Ads, Google Keyword Planner is designed for PPC campaign planning but is widely used for basic SEO keyword research. It provides search volume, CPC, and keyword ideas directly from Google’s data. 

  • Generates keyword ideas based on seed keywords, with metrics like average monthly searches, competition level, and CPC. 
  • Provides broad range estimates (e.g., 1K–10K searches/month) unless refined with an active Ads campaign. 
  • Achieved 40.94% search volume accuracy in a 2023 Backlinko study, better than Ahrefs but behind SEMrush. 
Keyword Planner 

Join Keyword Planner


Shorten, cloak, and track affiliate links.

Pretty Links is a popular WordPress plugin for affiliate link cloaking, shortening, and tracking.

It’s designed for bloggers and marketers, offering a user-friendly interface to manage links within the WordPress dashboard. It has over 2 million active installations. 

Pretty Links (WordPress plugin)

Download Plugin

Bitly 

Bitly is a leading URL shortening service with basic cloaking and tracking capabilities.

It’s platform-agnostic, suitable for social media, email, and affiliate marketing, but less tailored for affiliate-specific needs compared to WordPress plugins. 

Bitly

Short URL Using Bitly

Cutly  

Cutly (likely a typo for “Cuttly” in your query, as no tool named “Cutly” exists in the context) is a URL shortening and link management tool with features for cloaking, tracking, and branding.

It’s less known than Bitly but offers similar functionality with a focus on customization. 

Cutly

Join Cutly

ThirstyAffiliates 

ThirstyAffiliates is a robust WordPress plugin tailored for affiliate marketers, offering advanced cloaking, management, and tracking features.

ThirstyAffiliates 

It’s praised for its organization and automation capabilities, with over 443,000 users. 

Download ThirstyAffiliates Plugin

Opener.one 

Opener.one is a lesser-known link management tool, primarily focused on shortening and tracking links. It’s a cloud-based service, not a WordPress plugin, and lacks the affiliate-specific features of Pretty Links or ThirstyAffiliates. Limited data is available, suggesting it’s a niche or emerging tool. 

Opener.one

Open App Opener

No. 8 Analytics 


Track traffic, behavior, and conversions.

Google Analytics 

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a free, event-based analytics platform for tracking website and app performance.

It’s essential for measuring the effectiveness of social media campaigns and affiliate link clicks. GA4’s 89% market share in web analytics underscores its dominance. 

Google Analytics 

Join Google Analytics

Google Search Console 

Google Search Console is a free tool for monitoring website performance in Google Search results. Tracks impressions, clicks, and CTR for social-promoted content in search results, revealing which posts gain organic traction.

Free and essential for SEO, complementing social promotion by boosting organic reach. 

Google Search Console 

Join Search Console

Hotjar 

Hotjar is a behavior analytics platform used by over 1 million websites, offering heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys to understand user interactions.

It complements GA4 and GSC by providing qualitative insights into how social-driven visitors engage with content and affiliate links. 

Hotjar

Join Hotjar

No. 9 Social Media Scheduling Tools 


Promote content consistently on social platforms. 

Buffer 

Known for its simplicity and affordability, it’s ideal for scheduling and analyzing content to maintain consistent posting. It supports a wide range of platforms and is trusted by over 75,000 users. 

Schedule posts for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Threads, Bluesky, YouTube Shorts, Pinterest, Google Business Profile, Mastodon, and Twitter/X. Offers auto publishing and mobile notifications for manual posting. 

Buffer
  • Supports multiple users for content approval and scheduling (Team plan).
  • Integrations: Connects with GA4, Google Analytics, and link shorteners like Bitly for tracking social-driven traffic. 

Join Buffer

Hootsuite 

Hootsuite helps you automate every part of social media management — posting, writing, messaging, and social listening. With advanced scheduling, monitoring, and analytics, it’s ideal for large-scale campaigns requiring consistent posting and team collaboration. It’s used by over 18 million users globally. 

Schedule unlimited posts across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, and more. Bulk scheduling via CSV upload for efficiency. 

Hootsuite

Over 18 million users, including 80% of Fortune 1000 companies (Hootsuite, 2024).

Pricing: Free plan (2 channels, 5 posts/month); Paid plans start at $99/month (Professional, 10 channels) to $249/month (Team, 20 channels). 

Join Hootsuite

Later 

It’s popular among creators, influencers, and small businesses for its intuitive scheduling and visual planning features. It’s used by over 7 million users.  

Schedule posts for Instagram (Reels, Stories, Feed), TikTok, Facebook, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube. Auto-publishing for most platforms. 

Connects with GA4, Bitly, and Shopify for e-commerce-focused affiliate campaigns. 

Free plan (1 channel/platform, 10 posts/month); Paid plans start at $16.67/month (Starter, 1 channel) to $80/month (Advanced, 6 channels). 

No. 10 Tracking & Attribution Tools 


Monitor performance of affiliate campaigns in detail. 

Voluum 

Voluum has helped us tailor messaging to specific audience segments and automate campaign management. We increased ROAS by 35% and ROI by 25%, while reducing costs by 15%. It’s favored for its advanced analytical features, AI-driven optimization, and extensive reporting, making it ideal for advanced users managing high-volume traffic. It’s used by thousands of marketers globally but has mixed reviews due to complexity and cost. 

Tracks clicks, conversions, ROI, and granular metrics (e.g., user agents, mobile ISP, geolocation, device type) in real-time. Supports redirect and direct tracking. 

API access, integrations with Google Ads, Facebook Ads, TikTok, and affiliate networks. Compatible with GA4 and Bitly for social tracking. 

30 Big Data reports, customizable dashboards, and white-label options for client sharing. 

ClickMagick (advanced users) 

ClickMagick, founded in 2014 by Patrick Kelly, is a web-based ad tracking tool known for its affordability, ease of use, and advanced features like bot filtering and link cloaking. It’s popular among affiliate marketers and small-to-medium businesses, with a 4.8/5 Trustpilot rating from 599 reviews. Advanced users appreciate its flexibility and detailed tracking capabilities. 

Tracks clicks, conversions, and sales across funnels using UTM parameters and first-party cookies. Supports cross-device tracking, real-time stats, and organic/paid traffic (e.g., social posts from Later). 

Creates dynamic affiliate links and rotators (Fulfillment, Spillover, Random, Sequential) to distribute traffic across multiple URLs, ideal for A/B testing social campaigns. 

Shailesh Chaudhary

Shailesh Chaudhary

I’m Shailesh Chaudhary, a computer science engineer, tech enthusiast, and digital content creator. I review digital tools and services to help entrepreneurs find the best solutions for their businesses. I believe in Google’s E-E-A-T principles—so I always buy, test, compare, and then publish honest, unbiased reviews.