Is 2023 too late to kick things off with affiliate marketing? Not at all, especially if you can back up your ambitions with compelling content and have a reliable affiliate website builder to speed up the process, overcoming the possible lack of coding knowledge.
Creating an affiliate website is still profitable, with 16.87% of affiliates earning over $50,000 annually from their affiliate marketing endeavors – for many of them, a side hustle besides their core offering!
If you create mouthwatering content and feel like promoting related businesses, you have every chance to create a website for affiliate marketing and monetize it.
Source: NHL
Affiliate marketing has room for everyone, especially if you know how to create an affiliate website or blog quickly, leveraging free and paid affiliate marketing tools.
With no further ado, let’s walk you through an affiliate website creation step-by-step and then see how you can speed it up with an affiliate website builder and specific affiliate marketing tools.
For those new to the game, let’s remind you of the basics of affiliate marketing before we start:
The first step towards creating an affiliate website is choosing a niche you know well and can monetize. This can be your niche – the best-case scenario – or a related one. For example, if you are a former home insurance agent with a website around insurance, you can promote real estate or insurance policies.
That said, not all niches are equally good to start an affiliate website. Fields like healthcare or finance can be hard to harness because of the abundance of compliance rules and regulations. On the other hand, niches that pose challenges are usually the most profitable.
Likewise, you need to know where affiliate marketing is going in general, including trending topics. Tools like Google Trends and Exploding Topics can help you understand how your niche is trending over time and what topics are best at the moment.
While there’s no universal recipe for successful affiliate marketing, you can make an educated guess about the type of website you need based on your niche, expertise, audience, and content. If you lack data or want a deeper dive into your future prospects, feel free to use tools like predictive modeling.
| Blogs | Accounting for 64.48% of affiliate marketing traffic, affiliate marketing blogs dig deep into the issue, presenting a peculiar, comprehensive, and oftentimes contrarian view. Affiliate blogs require authentic content, regular updates, and a strong community, including hardcore believers. |
| Review Sites | Used by 18.7% of companies for affiliate marketing, review websites focus on customers searching for the best product. These sites require unbiased, non-promotional, up-to-date content and explicit affiliate disclosure. |
| Price Comparison Sites | Price comparison sites are aggregators catering to shoppers searching for the best deal. For this type of website, you must always pull accurate prices and immediately update the list of options. Alternatively, you can create a coupon site, an option favored by 14.8% of brands. |
Of course, you don’t have to limit yourself to a single website type. With enough resources and some ingenuity, you can create an all-in-one affiliate website that unites everything mentioned and then some. However, if you are an aspiring affiliate blogger, it might be reasonable to start from what you know and can do best, minimizing risks until you get the ball rolling.
Once your idea is baked, it’s time to choose your website name (domain name) and where to store your website information (hosting provider).
You can go for traditional or cloud hosting:
Here are the top 10 best web hosting providers as of August 2023, according to Forbes (most of them are still relevant). For more information about website hosting, here’s an ultimate web hosting guide from HubSpot.
As for the domain name, you need one that reminds people of your brand or resonates with your ideas or core values while being exceptionally memorable and incorporating the major industry keywords. For a home insurance affiliate website, you may go with something like HomeInsuranceHub, InsuranceHomeBase, or HomeShieldAdvisor.
When choosing your top-level domain, either choose one that covers your target audience or just settle down with the universally accepted “com.” Speaking of which, 47.8% of global websites use a “.com” top-level domain, with only 4.7% using “.org” and 2.9% using “.net.”
Now that you’re ready to create an affiliate website, you need a CMS or website builder and plugins.
At this point, you need to decide whether you want flexibility and a steep learning curve or quick website creation and somehow limited functionality:
Important: A dedicated affiliate website builder might be your best option to create an affiliate website. Some affiliate website builders are geared specifically for affiliate marketing, with tons of useful functionality and features.
Likewise, you need affiliate marketing tools and plugins for content creation, link management, SEO optimization, and more. We’ve gone the extra mile to compile a list of the affiliate marketing tools you may need – scroll down for your most comprehensive list of affiliate website builders and tools.
With the initial setup and the first round of customization behind, you are ready to join the affiliate marketing game. Theoretically. In practice, you may still need to come a long way until your website ranks high enough to be interesting to advertisers and affiliate networks.
Make no mistake, creating an affiliate website is not even half the job. For the most part, it’s never-ending content creation, affiliate link tracking, partner management, and synergizing your affiliate campaigns with your other undertakings.
There’s a way to keep the right balance, though. Phonexa offers a unique marketing ecosystem that unites heterogeneous campaigns into a single dashboard, closing the loop between clicks, calls, leads, and revenues in affiliate and performance marketing.
Choose your subscription plan now or schedule a free consultation to learn more about Phonexa.
Сreating a website for affiliate marketing is not easy by any stretch of the imagination, requiring technical knowledge and creativity, among many other qualities a successful online businessman must possess.
There’s a shortcut, though: an affiliate website builder that can facilitate affiliate website creation and management, allowing you to drag and drop an affiliate blog or website and auto-create content for it.
| Website Templates | Industry-specific templates with customizable elements like product review pages, comparison tables, blogs, ad space, sign-up forms, testimonials, disclosure page, etc. |
| Link Integration | Simplified affiliate link management, including automatic link insertion, tracking, analytics, cloaking, geotargeting, expiration, and more |
| Content Management | Automatic or semi-automatic content generation, publishing, and analytics |
| SEO Tools | SEO-friendly URLs, sitemap generation, metadata management, link health monitoring, optimization checkers, SEO audit tools, etc. |
| Integrations | Integration with popular affiliate networks and CRM platforms |
Building a website for affiliate marketing with the help of an affiliate website builder is simpler from start to finish. You don’t need to purchase a domain name, choose a hosting provider, design your website layout, search for relevant plugins, or integrate affiliate links – instead, you follow the on-screen instructions to create and run your affiliate website.
Downsides? Not at all, especially with an affiliate website builder that fits your case. Speaking of which, we’ve compiled an exhaustive list of affiliate website builders that you can use to create an affiliate marketing website.
The era of automated affiliate marketing has come. Learn to streamline your success.
For your convenience, we’ve divided the shortlisted website builders into three tiers:
Remember, however, that you need an affiliate website builder that fully satisfies your needs and wants and is pleasing to your budget, not the most popular one.
Source: Star Wars
Wix is the most popular online affiliate website builder, accounting for over 43% of the market share, ahead of Squarespace and Weebly. The platform provides plenty of templates, a user-friendly interface, and an app market where you can find apps and integrations to supercharge your website.
For paid plans, Wix charges from €5.50 to €29 per month, depending on the features.
GoDaddy is a fully-fledged ecosystem for creating and managing an affiliate website. From SSL certificates to e-commerce solutions to marketing services, GoDaddy has it all to become your go-to choice.
The world’s second most popular affiliate website builder – over 40 million website visits – Squarespace offers everything Wix can offer, including a convenient drag-and-drop interface for creating affiliate websites and an online store.
You can set up various payment gateways, manage items, sell products directly through the platform, and more for only €15 per month or €11 per month if paid annually.
Learn to tap into social media as a major affiliate traffic stream.
Squarespace can boast the highest share of referral traffic among all affiliate website builders on our list. The platform draws 35.2% of visits from referral traffic sources, or 13% more than the runner-up Astra with 22.08%.
Bluehost is a hosting and domain registration service that can develop into an all-in-one affiliate marketing platform if integrated or synergized with WordPress through one-click installation, optimized hosting, automatic updates, and a dedicated testing environment.
With over 9 million monthly visits, a high page-per-visit ratio of 7.7, and a low bounce rate of around 30%, Bluehost knows how to generate and retain users. The website draws 5.69% of its overall traffic from referral sources.
Closing out our top-5 affiliate website builders in our list, Elementor does what its name suggests: expands your WordPress functionality. However, it is not a standalone affiliate website builder like, for example, Wix or Squarespace, but one that requires a WP website in the first place.
Here’s how you can maximize the value of AI for your performance and affiliate marketing.
With around 4.6 million monthly visits, Elementor relies equally on direct (41.88%) and search (42.49%) traffic, drawing 11% of customers from referral sources.
HostGator is one of the largest web hosting services, with over 4.2 million monthly visits. Besides the hosting options – shared, VPS, dedicated, cloud, and reseller hosting – and domain registration, HostGator offers a drag-and-drop affiliate website builder with pre-designed templates, mobile-friendly design, SEO tools, and e-commerce features.
Zyro is a dedicated website builder for personal and e-commerce websites, empowered with content automation features like AI writer, title generator, heatmap, and more. At the time of writing, Zyro runs a promotion, offering subscription plans for $2.59 and $3.59 per month.
The youngest affiliate website builder on our list, Durable allows you to create a website in seconds using AI technologies. The platform also offers an AI affiliate blog builder, a CRM system, and extra tools like a business name generator and Google Ads writer.
With 80% of technology products expected to be built by non-IT professionals by 2024, Appypie offers a no-code website and app builder that seamlessly walks you through affiliate website creation.
Web.com is an ever-growing platform that encompasses a variety of tools and services for creating a website and establishing an online presence, including web hosting, domain name registration, and an affiliate website builder.
Well-known to WordPress enthusiasts, Astra is arguably the most popular WordPress theme. The website offers over 240 ready-to-import templates, customizable WooCommerce themes, site and blog layouts, and more. Astra is so popular among WordPress users that it collects around 1.3 million monthly visits, half of which are from search engines.
Source: Reddit
Site123 is a dedicated website and affiliate blog builder with straightforward navigation. Following its name, Site123 allows you to create a website from scratch in three simple steps or pick from one of the ready-made templates. On top of the affiliate website builder, Site123 offers free hosting, custom domains, a website editor, SEO tools, and the ability to create an online store.
Site123 runs a free subscription plan, offering 250 MB storage, 250 MB bandwidth, and a subdomain. Alternatively, you can pay $7.80 monthly for increased storage, bandwidth, and the ability to create an online store.
Site123 collects over 900,000 monthly visits, having the largest email traffic (6.88%) in our list while relying mostly on direct and search traffic. Speaking of which, check out this guide if you want to learn more about affiliate email marketing.
May the down-to-earth, simplistic design of Network Solutions not mislead you – this old-school player is among the first to offer domain registration and hosting services, and now also an affiliate website builder along with e-commerce and online marketing features.
Having overcome fierce, decades-long competition, Network Solutions is still in the spotlight, drawing around 780,000 monthly visits, 61.53% of which are direct traffic.
Mobirise is the most popular free mobile affiliate website builder, allowing you to drag and drop your affiliate blog or website in just a few minutes. Over 8800 free and paid building blocks, themes, templates, and extensions will cover your needs through and through. And if you want it all, you can get it for $149 as a one-time payment.
Mobirise has over 535,000 monthly visits, 7.56% of which are referrals. The builder may not be the best choice for a complex website, but it greatly benefits affiliates willing to capitalize on simple affiliate marketing ideas.
Website.com is a freemium domain registrar and an affiliate website builder offering commercial website templates. For the latter, though, you must switch from a free to a paid plan starting from $10 a month.
Website.com enjoys around 380,000 monthly visits, around 6.5% of which are referred customers.
Gravitec is not exactly an affiliate website builder but a service that provides push notification technology for websites, a feature you may need to engage your audience. The main feature of Gravitec is that even offline users receive push notifications.
Besides push notifications, Gravitec provides targeting and monetization tools, campaign reports, and news delivery. The pricing plan starts at $20 per month for websites with up to 20,000 subscribers, and there’s a free test plan with an unremovable watermark.
Performance-wise, Gravitec is among the few websites in our list that draw over 10% of referral traffic. However, the two main traffic sources are traditional direct (52.29%) and search (36.44%) traffic.
Thrive Themes is an affiliate website builder for WordPress that allows you to drag and drop your website architecture without coding knowledge. Like most WordPress-centric products, Thrive Themes provides plenty of advanced features for WordPress: plugins, quizzes, themes, testimonials, countdown times, comments, and more.
Weblium is a free blog and affiliate website builder that offers over 300 ready-to-use templates for online stores, landing pages, even pages, business pages, and more. The platform provides a fully-fledged CRM system, SEO component, and marketing elements like, for example, pop-up windows that run on specific triggers.
Simvoly is an affiliate website builder with over 200 block templates, 200 webpage templates, 30 widget elements, 900 fonts, a header and pop-up builder, and more features to drag and drop your website. Whether you create an affiliate blog, website, or sales funnel, you can go white-label and apply your own branding.
Supercharge your affiliate marketing with social media influencers.
Site Ground is an old-school hosting provider – now cloud-based – that features web, cloud, reseller, WordPress, and WooCommerce hosting, all with advanced functionality and security solutions. However, Site Ground isn’t a dedicated affiliate website builder but only works if integrated with WordPress or WooCommerce.
The cheapest subscription plan costs €2.99 per month, including hosting for a single website, 10 GB web space, around 10,000 monthly visits, and freebies like free installation, email migrator, SSL, and more. The website is visited by around 160,000 users monthly.
Brizy is an affiliate website builder that you can use standalone or integrate into WordPress. The platform provides free and paid website, branding, block, and pop-up templates, and various solutions for personal and e-commerce websites, starting from $5 per month.
Beaver Builder is a WordPress plugin encompassing a drag-and-drop page builder, popular website page templates – galleries, sliders, testimonials, etc. – and other features for easy website creation.
The AI-powered platform provides an all-encompassing AI suite for creating any type of content and sprucing it up with advanced design elements and SEO. Likewise, you can track your performance, conduct A/B tests, and leverage customer data in many other ways while staying compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR.
Source: ABC Network
Visual Composer is a WordPress plugin with a library of pages, pop-ups, themes, and content elements. The platform offers four subscription plans, starting from $49 a year, and a 30-day money-back guarantee to try the plugin without risk.
Website Builder is not what its name suggests – not an affiliate website builder but a search and review platform where you can find a suitable builder and unbiased feedback. Among the highlighted builders are Zyro, Weebly, Site123, Wix, Squarespace, and more renowned brands, all with detailed reviews.
BoldGrid is a suite of WordPress plugins for drag-and-dropping a website on WordPress and reinforcing it with customizable webpages, themes, and other blocks and elements. Speaking of which, BoldGrid provides a vast pre-made content block library to facilitate content creation.
GenerateBlocks integrated website blocks into WordPress, offering core blocks (for example, blocks for headlines and buttons) and customization options for colors, typography, and gradients.
Boxmode is a freemium domain registrar and an affiliate website builder with a solid library of templates. In the free version, the platform applies Boxmode branding and runs ads, whereas paid subscription plans cost from $6 to $10 monthly.
With the global podcast audience almost doubling in recent years, podcasts have paved their way into affiliate marketing. Podcastpage is one of the few platforms that allows you to drag and drop your podcast website in minutes using customizable templates. Podcastpage is a standalone platform with its own CMS and templates.
Simbla is a comprehensive AI platform for creating CRM systems, websites, applications, managing content, and more. Like many other affiliate website builders, Simbla employs a vast library of pre-designed templates to make it happen for those without coding knowledge.
Offsprout is a white label affiliate website builder created for web designers to speed up their work. In addition to the builder, the platform provides an editor and marketing and SEO tools to squeeze the most out of it.
The risk-free trial is valid for 14 days. The paid subscription plans start from $9 per month.
Jetpage is an all-in-one blogging platform that allows you to create and manage content with the help of proprietary AI tools. Every created blog or website is mobile-friendly, has an SSL certificate, and loads fast.
Webwave is a dedicated blog and affiliate website builder with a library of templates, hosting options, custom CSS, and SEO tools. Likewise, Webwave can be tailored to your business as a white-label solution.
AuthorityAzon is a service for Amazon affiliates who need a custom Amazon website or theme. Likewise, they can create a premium Amazon website from scratch for you for $998.
It’s one thing to build an affiliate marketing website and quite another to maximize its performance through compelling content, search engine optimization, and advanced e-commerce solutions, everything unlocked by free and paid affiliate marketing tools.
Below are essential affiliate marketing tools around
and more. These tools will help you grow the performance of your affiliate blog or website.
You can also see how your content and keywords rank over time and investigate possible SEO issues with your website. There’s a domain comparison feature to see where you stand against the competition.
The basic plan costs $99 monthly. If paid annually, you get two months for free, reducing the average monthly subscription cost to $83.
However, Similarweb does provide a toolkit to reckon with, including analytics tools for website traffic, competitor analysis, keyword research, and more. They collect over 10 billion pieces of data daily, analyze over two terabytes of data, and generate over 10,000 traffic reports.
One of the best data-driven affiliate marketing tools, Similarweb offers a 7-day free trial, with the cheapest paid subscription plan costing $149 per month if billed monthly or $125 per month if billed annually.
| Semrush | Simlarweb | Ahrefs | |
| Primary Focus | SEO, PPC, and content | Web and competitor analytics | SEO and backlink analysis |
| Keyword Research | Granular | Limited | Granular |
| Backlink Analysis | Advanced | Limited | Granular |
| Traffic Analysis | Advanced | Granular | Limited |
| Competitor Analysis | Granular | Granular | Limited |
Besides, the cloud-based SEO tool can conduct SEO audits, keyword research, backlink analysis and integrate with the new Google NLP language model to fragment content and identify entities (how Google sees content) and sentiment.
Content-wise, Surfer can help you generate affiliate blogs in minutes based on the top-performing and custom keywords, with an average article taking around 20 minutes to complete and costing seven times less than a writer.
The optimization toolkit includes:
The 5-day trial costs $1. The cheapest subscription plan costs $14.99 per month if billed monthly or $12.66 per month if billed annually.
NitroPack digs into the core of the issue with its pack of page loading solutions for page caching, image optimization, CSS and JavaScript minification, lazy image loading, and more.
With over 230,000 monthly website visits, Nitropack draws around 39% of users from search engines and around 5% from their affiliate program. Every subscription plan includes a 14-day money-back guarantee to test the tool without overcommitment.
The plugin costs $59 annually, but you get a 100% money-back guarantee for 14 days from the purchase date. WP Rockets collects an impressive audience for a mere plugin – over 580,000 monthly visits, 14.60% of which are referrals.
The service encompasses 89 features to make your affiliate blog stand out among competitors. With Rank Math, you can create optimized content with minimum effort and ensure it passes Google’s scrutiny.
At the time of writing, the subscription plan costs $59 for the first year of usage, allowing you to track 500 keywords for any number of websites (among other things).
Google Analytics is free, making it an invaluable tool for aspiring affiliate bloggers and website owners. If there’s a safe way into affiliate marketing analytics, it’s Google Analytics.
The main features include link suggestions, link editing, broken link checking, URL changer, performance reports, and more. Price-wise, the license for one website costs $77; for three websites – $117; for ten websites – $167; for 50 websites – $347.
Imagify is designed specifically for image optimization through multi-level compression, resizing, and conversion, speeding up your website while retaining its visual appeal. The tool is free up to 20 MB per month; an unlimited bandwidth costs $9.99 per month.
Jasper isn’t much different from ChatGPT or similar AI content generators, offering some initial settings and a chat window where you can give commands about the content you’d like to create. Unlike ChatGPT, Jasper isn’t free, although there’s a 7-day free trial. The basic Creator subscription plan costs $39 per month.
Grammarly works everywhere, from social media apps to Google Docs to Microsoft Office, backing up your writing ambitions across digital avenues.
The free subscription plan is quite useful, correcting mistakes and providing basic writing suggestions, including tone detection. The all-inclusive plan costs $12 per month for individuals and $15 per month for businesses.
Buffer is a set of affiliate marketing tools to help you manage your social media posts from a single dashboard. The app supports post scheduling, post analytics, account management, and other features to squeeze the maximum out of your social media activity and social media posts in particular.
The free version of the app allows connecting up to 3 social media channels and grants access to a landing page builder and publishing tools. The paid version costs $6 per month per social media channel, unlocking engagement tools and analytic reports.
The free version supports five monthly exports and one website while imposing Wordable branding. The basic paid plan costs $50 per month for more than 50 exports and five sites, whereas the most expensive “Done-for-you” plan also supports tailored services, around-the-clock exports, and custom tasks in your CMS.
You can make your business branding look consistent across all your visuals and collaborate with other designers in real-time. The free plan includes over 250,000 free templates, 100 design types, and a million stock photos, but most advanced features come within the paid $14.99-per-month plan.
There’s a free plan, but even the most comprehensive Pro plan costs only $4 a month and allows you to enroll in the free 7-day trial in the first place.
With the second-highest attendance in our list – over 112 monthly visits – Shopify is the most popular e-commerce solution for an affiliate blog or website, drawing 5.2% of their traffic from affiliate sources.
Shopify offers a free 3-day trial, after which you can choose between Basic ($32 per month), Shopify ($92 per month), and Advanced ($399 per month) subscription plans.
Learn to protect yourself from affiliate fraud and future-proof your affiliate network.
Besides the paid subscription plans – Profit for $199 per month and Scale for $349 per month – you can book a free demo to check it out. The software itself is quite popular among affiliate marketers, collecting around 875,000 monthly users, 30.26% of which are paid referrals.
With a strong focus on competitors’ performance, Adplexity runs real-time traffic source monitoring, including ads, landing pages, and affiliate networks. They dig deep: for example, ad insights include the number and duration of shows, target locations, traffic sources, and more.
Likewise, Adplexity allows you to track trending topics, capitalizing on the market’s momentum and shifts. The subscription cost is $199 per month per user for mobile and desktop users; $249 per month for the advanced Native plan.
To start off, you can enroll in a 3-day free trial. The paid subscription plans start from $13 per month for 1 GB RAM, 1-core processor, 25 GB of storage space, and 1TB bandwidth, among other things.
Wonder how to create affiliate marketing content that ranks? Here you go.
Likewise, you can get notifications whenever your competitors’ apps appear on the app store or keywords reach the top. With tons of insights into your own and competitors’ performance, you can get a head start with choosing the right affiliate marketing strategy for your website or blog and utilize your affiliate marketing tools more effectively.
The comprehensive intelligent solution hasn’t gone unnoticed, collecting around 1.3 million monthly visits, 65% of which are direct traffic. The subscription cost starts from $79 a month, with a free demo available.
The tool is available for $149 per month, which includes ad analysis for 150 countries, an advanced search feature, detailed form statistics, a library of native ads and landings, and room for two simultaneous sessions. Likewise, you can request a free demo.
UpdraftPlus supports scheduled and incremental backups, cloud storage integration, site duplication, migration, database encryption, restoration, and more functionality for website operation. They offer free and paid plugins, with the latter priced at $84 per year for the basic version.
On top of that, Hootsuite provides post scheduling, content curation, SEO suggestions, and security solutions. One of the most accomplished affiliate marketing tools for managing your social media presence, Hootsuite starts from $99 monthly and provides a 30-day free trial.
What is an affiliate website builder?
An affiliate website builder is a free or paid platform that allows you to create a website for affiliate marketing, with the main advantage being the ease of execution.
A typical affiliate website builder contains:
What are the types of affiliate website builders?
There are all-in-one and narrow-focused affiliate website builders to choose from:
Luckily, there are more than enough free and paid online affiliate website builders, so you can easily choose the right one for starting an affiliate website.
How do you create an affiliate website with an affiliate website builder?
Creating an affiliate marketing blog or website with an affiliate website builder usually boils down to:
Besides, you may want to connect a customer domain, add social media integrations, optimize for mobile phone and SEO, and spruce up your website according to your knowledge and expertise.
In general, starting an affiliate marketing website with the help of an affiliate website builder is much simpler than creating it on your own. With a website builder, you already have a core to build around, saving lots of resources at little to no sacrifice.
Is creating an affiliate marketing blog easier than a website?
Creating a blog for affiliate marketing is usually easier than creating a website, but affiliate marketing blogs are more content-demanding, requiring unstoppable content updates.
Can you create an affiliate marketing blog using an affiliate website builder?
Most affiliate website builders allow creating an affiliate blog and customizing it however you see fit. A typical advanced affiliate website builder also offers a huge library of blog templates, themes, functionality, integrations, and specific content strategies.
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