Top 10 Free Tools For Affiliate Marketers

If you are into affiliate marketing, you would probably know that you can’t just succeed in affiliate marketing by working hard – you need to work smart.

Every affiliate marketer loves a marketing tool that can make things easier for them, and if the tool comes for free, it doesn’t get any better.

Just a few days back, we listed the top 13 tools that every affiliate marketer needs. While the tools we listed are AWESOME, and we can vouch for it, we know some of you might be looking for free tools to supercharge your affiliate campaign.

Well, some marketing tools come free, whereas you can use some of the tools for only a limited period. Therefore, you should check whether the tool you are installing is free-to-use forever or you can only use it for a limited period.

More importantly, you need to know which tools you need to use to run your affiliate marketing campaign successfully.

We have broken down the whole process of building an affiliate marketing business and compiled the top free tools you can use at every step of your affiliate journey.

Website Development

Of course, you can become an affiliate marketer without having a website and many merchants would be happy to have you on board as a partner if you have a good social media presence. However, most merchants need a website as a bare minimum and you must have a website of your own to get started as one of their affiliate partners.

The first step to having a website of your own is to have a domain name and domain names DO NOT come free (they are not too pricey either). When you are done with choosing a domain name, go to a domain hosting site such as GoDaddy or BlueHost to make the first purchase for your affiliate business – a domain name.

Free Tool 1: Website Builder

After selecting the perfect website domain for your business, you need to start building your website. There are quite a few options, but we recommend using WordPress.com, which is the most popular Content Management System all around the world.

By using WordPress, you can choose from a variety of themes, opt for additional features, design, edit, customize and integrate your favorite payment gateways.

Free Tool 2: Designing

Next, you may want to add custom-designed landing pages and creatively designed infographics to your website.

For affiliate marketers who lack in-house web and graphic design capabilities, we recommend an intuitive freemium graphics tool called Canva. Canva is a free-to-use graphic design tool with professional layouts and drag-and-drop functions, which makes it equally popular among beginners and seasoned affiliate marketers.

Email Capturing

If you are done with setting up your website, now is the time to choose an email capturing tool that you will need to generate leads, build your email lists and send out promotional emails to your active leads.

Email capturing should not be a hack work for you if you can find and use a good email capture tool. Good email capturing tools can be used for sending automated promotional emails at regular intervals, and you can focus on other important areas of your business instead of getting caught up in the process of sending emails.

Free Tool 3: Email Capturing Software

Most email capturing tools are free for a limited amount of contacts and you can only use the basic features if you go for the free version. However, as you keep adding contacts to your list, send emails more frequently or try to use the premium features, you need to shell out a few dollars to upgrade to the premium version first.

If you have limited emails to send to a limited number of subscribers, there are quite a few great tools, such as MailChimp. However, if you want a forever free plan, go for Hubspot Marketing Free, which costs exactly ZERO for a lifetime.

Research

Affiliate marketing is all about planning, researching, and strategizing. You need to use both free and paid tools to do the necessary research for your campaign. Here are some free affiliate marketing research tools you can try.

Free Tool 4: Search Trends

If you can’t gauge the search behavior and interests of your target audience and the search trends in a specific region or globally, you cannot go ahead with campaign planning. Google’s Trends is an excellent free tool that you can use to analyze and compare the search trends data.

Free Tool 5: Audience Research

Facebook is a great repository of data that you can use for free. Just use the advertising feature of the social media website and set up an advertisement campaign on Facebook. Use the ad customization features to segment your target audience. Facebook will let you know about the rough size of the target audience and you can get useful audience insights from Facebook.

You don’t have to complete the process as Facebook will feed you with the required data even before you spend a dime. Just collect the information you need.

If you are considering Facebook advertising to reach your exact audience, you can complete the process, but if you are only trying to get the insights, you can just leave midway through.

You can also use LinkedIn, which is another great source of audience data, albeit it is focused on businesses and professionals. Just like Facebook, you can complete the initial steps of setting up an ad campaign on LinkedIn and collect the data that LinkedIn shows you for your research, including business sizes and names, and job titles and job categories.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is integral to affiliate marketing. It’s a particularly lengthy and time-consuming process, but you need to do it religiously to know whether your campaign is on the right track. Keyword research is also essential for search marketing, organic traffic generation, content mapping and planning, and formulating a marketing strategy.

Free Tool 6: Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are the holy grail of search engine optimization. The simplest way to find long-tail keywords is to use Google Suggest, which is one of the basic functions of the search engine which you can use for free.

Simply keep typing a search phrase into the Google search bar and Google will attempt to fill in your search. You can pick long-tail keywords from these suggestions, which are based on similar search queries by other users.

Free Tool 7: Keyword Tool

Since Google’s Keyword Planner is meant for advertisers who run Adwords, there was a dearth of good alternatives to the Keyword Planner which can be used by anyone. Thanks to Keyword Tool, a nice and free alternative to Google’s Keyword Planner, marketers can now generate thousands of long-tail keywords. You can even use it without signing up. Nice, eh?

Traffic

Driving quality and targeted traffic to affiliate websites and ultimately making them click on affiliate links is what the end goal of an affiliate marketer is, in a nutshell. However, you can’t just rely on some magic traffic-generating tools. You need to know the basics as well as think out of the box to get quality inbound traffic to your site.

While there are no free tools to help you generate traffic, there is at least one free tool that you can use to direct targeted traffic to your website.

Free Tool 8: Decrease Load time

Having a quick and responsive website means you can retain your visitors and encourage repeat visits. While images and other multimedia elements might increase the load time of your website, you can always optimize it to significantly reduce the load time.

GTmetrix is a tool that we stumbled upon while searching for a tool to test the performance of our website and we must say it’s AWESOME! The site will generate a detailed performance report so you can identify the issues on your website.

Based on the recommendations, you can make the required improvements and upload the images through Compressor.io, which is another great free tool for optimizing and compressing your images.

Tracking And SEO Analysis

As a webmaster and an affiliate marketer, you must know how visitors discovered tour site, from where they landed on your website, what content they read more often than now, what campaigns are working, what kind of products or affiliate offers they like as you need these stats to continuously improve your affiliate marketing campaigns and to turn your leads into buyers.

Free Tool 9: Website Analysis

Google Analytics is undoubtedly one of the best free affiliate tools when it comes to website analytics. It comes free, it has got all the features you need (plus a few more), it’s simple to download and install and it gives you a comprehensive picture of what’s happening on your site.

The only drawback which we found is that there’s a steep learning curve and you need to invest some time and effort to figure out how to use the tool to your advantage.

Free Tool 10: Interaction

Last but not least, you can check how your visitors are interacting with your site using a simple free tool – Heatmap. Although there are options to upgrade to paid plans, you can stick to the free plan if you have just one website and you want to enhance the user experience and improve your website’s retention rate.

Final Thoughts

To become a Super Affiliate, you need to use the right tools and have an obvious strategy. However, if you are a beginner or on a budget, there’s no point in investing in premium tools. Instead, you can just use the tools we have suggested here and build your affiliate business step by step.