💡 How We Built AffiliateToolsNow.com Using Mostly Free Tools — A Beginner-Friendly Blueprint

Starting your first affiliate website can feel overwhelming—especially when you’re trying to stay within budget. The truth is, you don’t need to spend a lot of money to launch a functional, fast, and professional-looking affiliate site.

In this post, we’re breaking down how we built AffiliateToolsNow.com using mostly free tools. We’ll show you everything from hosting to WordPress plugins to traffic generation—so you can do the same with minimal cost.

Let’s dive into it.

🔵 Step 1: Choosing the Right Hosting (Affordable & Reliable)

Your website starts with hosting—and picking the right provider makes all the difference in speed, uptime, and overall ease of use.

We chose Bluehost for several reasons:

  • Super affordable (plans start at just $2.95/month)

  • Great customer support

  • One-click WordPress installation

  • Free SSL certificate

  • Excellent uptime and speed

👉 Click here to check out Bluehost’s deal

💡 Pro Tip: If you’re just testing the waters, Bluehost’s basic plan is more than enough. You can always scale later.

We also recommend Namecheap as a backup option—they’re reliable and offer competitive pricing, especially for domain registration.

🔌 Step 2: Installing Essential (Free) WordPress Plugins

Once our hosting and domain were set up, we installed WordPress (which is free) and added a suite of plugins—most of which are 100% free and can be found in the WordPress plugin repository.

Here’s a breakdown of the exact plugins we used and why:

🔍 All in One SEO (AIOSEO) – For Search Engine Optimization

SEO is critical for any affiliate site. AIOSEO makes it easy to:

  • Add meta titles/descriptions

  • Submit sitemaps to Google

  • Optimize your pages for keywords

  • Set up social media previews

It’s a plug-and-play solution that works well right out of the box, even if you’re not an SEO expert.

✍️ Classic Editor & Classic Widgets – For a Simpler WordPress Experience

Modern WordPress uses the Block Editor (Gutenberg), but we found it clunky and not ideal for affiliate layouts.

We rolled it back with:

  • Classic Editor – Brings back the old content editor

  • Classic Widgets – Makes managing sidebars and footers way easier

If you’re coming from older versions of WordPress or just want a more straightforward editing experience, these two are must-haves.

📬 Contact Form 7 – For Creating a Simple Contact Page

We needed a way for visitors to get in touch with us—whether it’s for questions, collabs, or feedback.

Contact Form 7 is lightweight, customizable, and free. We dropped in a simple contact form on our “Contact” page, and it was ready in under 10 minutes.

📰 Newsletter Plugin – For Building an Email List

Affiliate marketing and email lists go hand-in-hand.

The Newsletter plugin helps us:

  • Collect email signups via forms

  • Send updates directly from WordPress

  • Create simple automations (e.g., welcome emails)

It’s free and scalable—perfect for beginners who want to start building a list early on.

💡 Bonus Tip: Add a signup form to your homepage or blog sidebar to capture more leads.

🔐 Loginizer – To Protect Against Hackers

Security is one of those things people often overlook… until it’s too late.

Loginizer protects your login page from brute-force attacks. It limits login attempts and can blacklist IPs. Set it and forget it, but sleep better knowing your site’s safer.

🔒 Wordfence Security – Full-Suite Website Protection

To level up our security even more, we added Wordfence Security, which includes:

  • Firewall protection

  • Malware scanning

  • Live traffic monitoring

  • Email alerts for suspicious activity

The free version offers more than enough protection for most small affiliate sites.

🌐 Open Links in New Window – Better User Experience

You want visitors to explore affiliate links, but you don’t want them to leave your site entirely.

This plugin ensures all external links open in a new tab, keeping your site open in the background.

Simple fix. Huge difference in bounce rate.

🔁 WP External Links – Managing 404s & Redirections

Broken links can kill SEO and annoy users. WP External Links helps you:

  • Automatically redirect 404 errors

  • Add nofollow tags to affiliate links

  • Open specific links in new windows

It keeps things tidy and Google-friendly.

⚡ SpeedyCache – Speed Up Your Site

Fast websites = better SEO, better user experience, and more conversions.

SpeedyCache is a free caching plugin that helps:

  • Compress files

  • Serve cached versions of your site

  • Reduce load time significantly

We noticed a real difference after installing it. Page speed jumped almost instantly.

📤 ShareThis Share Buttons – Easy Social Media Sharing

If your content can help people, make it shareable.

ShareThis adds floating share buttons to blog posts so users can spread the word on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and more.

It’s an easy way to expand your reach with zero extra effort.

🌍 Step 3: Driving Traffic Using Free Methods

With the site fully built, our next focus was traffic.

One free platform we tested was TrafficAdBar, and we documented the entire experience in a detailed case study here.

Here’s the short version:

  • TrafficAdBar uses a credit-based exchange model

  • You view other people’s websites to earn credits

  • Your site is then shown to other users based on those credits

It’s not targeted traffic, but it’s great for:

  • Testing landing pages

  • Getting early impressions

  • Seeing how people interact with your content

We gained hundreds of views using just the free version.

👉 See the full results here

🧠 Key Takeaways & Why This Matters

If you’re on a tight budget (or just want to test your idea first), this method works.

Here’s a quick recap of what we used:

✅ Hosting:

✅ Free WordPress Plugins:

  • SEO: All in One SEO

  • Editor Setup: Classic Editor & Widgets

  • Forms & Email: Contact Form 7, Newsletter Plugin

  • Security: Loginizer, Wordfence

  • External Links: Open Links in New Window, WP External Links

  • Speed & Sharing: SpeedyCache, ShareThis

✅ Free Traffic Source:

  • TrafficAdBar – Simple way to get early traffic

🎯 Final Thoughts: You Can Build a Pro Affiliate Site Without Going Broke

A lot of people think you need a huge budget to start affiliate marketing. But as you’ve seen, you can do a ton with free tools and just a few dollars for hosting.

That’s what Affiliate Tools Now is all about—showing you real-world examples, tested methods, and affordable tools to help you grow your online business.

If you’re just getting started, we recommend starting small, testing everything, and upgrading only when you really need to.

Got questions? Want us to review your site or help you build one? Reach out through our contact page, or drop a comment below.

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