Part of the guide: Affiliate Marketing
I have watched more affiliate businesses die from the wrong email setup than from a bad offer. The offer you can swap in an afternoon. The email platform you fight with every day, and if it quietly kills your deliverability or bans affiliate links without warning, you find out on the worst possible morning.
I have been around this industry part-time since 2002, and the one asset that survived every product I ever promoted was the list. Not the funnel, not the comp plan, not the trend. The list. So the tool that holds your list is not a small decision. Let me walk you through how to compare email tools the way an operator does, step by step, instead of the way an affiliate blog does, which is “here’s my top pick, here’s my link, bye.”
In this guide
Step 1: Confirm the tool allows affiliate links at all
This is the step nobody tells you about, and it is the one that burns people. Some email platforms have terms of service that restrict or outright prohibit affiliate and MLM promotion. They will let you sign up, let you build a list, and then suspend the account when your links start pointing to third-party offers. You do not want to discover that with 8,000 subscribers trapped inside.
Before anything else, read the acceptable-use policy and search it for “affiliate,” “MLM,” and “network marketing.” If the language is hostile or vague, walk away. This is the same posture I take with opportunities themselves — the terms tell you the truth long before the sales page does, which is exactly the lens I use in my MLM red flags breakdown.
Step 2: Understand deliverability before features
Every tool will show you a feature grid. Automations, tags, drag-and-drop builders. Ignore all of it for a minute, because none of it matters if your emails land in spam.
Deliverability is mostly reputation plus authentication. The mechanism is simple: mailbox providers like Gmail and Yahoo decide whether to trust you based on how other people on your sending infrastructure behave and whether you have proven you own your domain. That means two things matter more than any feature:
- Shared vs. dedicated sending IPs. Cheap tools put you on a shared pool with thousands of other senders, some of whom are careless. Their bad behavior can drag your inbox placement down.
- Domain authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC). As of 2024, Google and Yahoo require bulk senders to authenticate their domains and keep spam complaints low, per Google’s sender requirements. A tool that makes authentication easy is worth more than a tool with a prettier editor.
A platform’s real value is whether it helps you stay trusted, not how many templates it ships with.
Step 3: Match the tool to your actual model
Here is where most comparisons go wrong. They rank tools on a universal scale as if every affiliate runs the same business. You don’t. Pick based on how you actually make money.
If you are a content creator or newsletter operator — you write, you send, you monetize with affiliate offers in the body — you want a tool built for publishing. Simple broadcasts, clean subscriber management, good deliverability, and a growth engine baked in. This is the lane where the Kit-versus-Beehiiv question lives, and I broke down that specific matchup in Kit vs Beehiiv, because for a lot of writers that is the entire decision.
If you are running paid traffic into funnels — landing pages, tripwires, order bumps, then follow-up sequences — you want an all-in-one. You do not want to duct-tape a page builder to an email tool to a checkout. Systeme.io is the budget end of this world, and it has a genuinely usable free tier; I covered whether the free plan actually holds up in my Systeme.io review.
If you are building a sales team or agency — pipelines, SMS, appointment booking, sub-accounts for clients — you are in GoHighLevel territory, which is powerful and heavy and priced for people who use all of it. I walked through who it actually fits in my GoHighLevel review.
You have been paid late before
You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
Read the contract →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
The point: there is no best tool. There is a best tool for your model. Buying GoHighLevel to send a weekly newsletter is like buying a semi-truck to commute.
Step 4: Compare on the things that actually cost you money
When you finally sit two tools side by side, judge them on the axes that hit your P&L, not the ones that look good in a demo.
- Pricing by subscriber count, not by feature tier. Most email tools charge by list size. A list of engaged buyers is cheap to profit from; a list of freebie-seekers you never clean is a tax you pay monthly forever. Ask what happens to your bill at 5,000, 10,000, 25,000 subscribers.
- List hygiene tools. Can you easily suppress unengaged subscribers? Providers now weigh engagement heavily. A tool that helps you prune dead weight protects your deliverability and lowers your bill.
- Automation depth you’ll actually use. Not “does it have automation,” but “can I build a simple welcome sequence and a re-engagement flow without a course.” Complexity you never deploy is complexity you paid for and didn’t use — a version of the complexity trap that eats operators alive.
- Export freedom. Can you download your full list, anytime, no friction? If the answer is unclear, that is a red flag. Your list is your asset. A tool that makes it hard to leave is telling you something.
Step 5: Set up compliance before you send one email
This is not optional and it is not exciting, and skipping it is how affiliates end up with fines instead of profit. In the United States, commercial email is governed by the CAN-SPAM Act, and the rules are concrete: don’t use deceptive subject lines or headers, identify the message as an ad where required, include a real physical postal address, give a clear opt-out, and honor unsubscribe requests promptly. The FTC lays it all out in its CAN-SPAM Act compliance guide, and the penalties are per-email, which adds up fast.
Any tool worth using bakes the mechanics in — an unsubscribe link, an address field in the footer, opt-out handling. But the content choices are on you. Don’t fake your “from” name, don’t disguise ads as personal notes, and honor unsubscribes even when it stings. Good deliverability and good compliance are the same discipline pointed at two audiences: the mailbox providers and the regulator.
The honest bottom line
If you want the short version: pick the tool that matches your model, confirm it welcomes affiliate links, and treat deliverability and compliance as the real product rather than the feature list. A modest tool you understand and keep clean will out-earn a powerful tool you half-configure and let rot.
I stopped doing network marketing seriously back in 2017 — here’s why — and the through-line from then to now is the same lesson: own your assets and don’t rent your foundation from someone who can shut you off. Your list is the most durable asset you have in this business. Choose the house you keep it in accordingly.
If you’re still figuring out where to plant your flag, I put the whole roadmap in one place — start here and build in order.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Tell me in the comments what you’re using now and what it’s costing you at your current list size. That single number — cost per thousand engaged subscribers — tells you more about whether your tool is a bargain or a slow leak than any feature comparison ever will.
Three posts a day. One email a day.
Everything I publish, in one short daily email. Real numbers, no hype, unsubscribe in one click.
Get paid 100%, on-chain, the second the sale clears
Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
See how the payout works →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
Twenty-two years in corporate procurement and step one here, checking the terms of service before you build anything on top of a platform, is the exact due diligence every vendor contract review should include and almost never does at the individual level. I signed dozens of SaaS agreements at my old job with a legal team reading every clause. Most people building a business alone skip that entirely and find out the hard way, exactly like this post describes.
In plain English, Graham: read the fine print before you build your whole list on someone else’s platform, because if the small print says no affiliate links, no fine print in the world saves you when they shut the account.
Graham’s procurement point reminds me of something from running the diner for nineteen years. I signed exactly one lease in all that time and I read every line of it twice, because once you’re in, moving the whole operation somewhere else costs more than most people ever plan for. An email list is the same kind of commitment dressed up as a free signup. You don’t feel the lock-in on day one. You feel it three years in, when moving eight thousand subscribers somewhere else looks like more work than just tolerating whatever the current platform is doing wrong.
One correction: the CAN-SPAM requirement is a physical postal address in the footer, not necessarily your home address, a registered business address or PO box satisfies it. Worth clarifying because I’ve seen people avoid starting a list entirely out of a mistaken worry that compliance means broadcasting their home address to every subscriber. The rest of the compliance section is accurate as far as I can tell.
Priya, that correction matters more than it might look like at first glance. I know several people who put off starting an email list for months over exactly that worry, that compliance meant publishing their home address to strangers. Once you know a PO box satisfies the requirement, the entire compliance step stops being intimidating and becomes a ten-minute task. Small correction, real effect on whether people actually start.
This is very useful, though I notice the compliance section discusses CAN-SPAM only, which is the American law. For those of us selling to Europe, GDPR requirements around consent are considerably stricter, and a tool that satisfies American rules does not automatically satisfy European ones. I would be interested whether the deliverability and authentication advice holds the same way for a list built mostly outside the United States.
Step three assumes you already know which model you are, content creator, funnel operator, or agency. I write, and only write, no funnels, no landing pages, no sub-accounts for clients. That’s a real fourth category the post doesn’t name even though it clearly exists in the growth tools it references elsewhere, and the advice for it is basically ‘ignore steps two, three and four are for someone else.’
What this post is circling without quite naming it is switching-cost economics, specifically the ‘export freedom’ point tucked into step four almost as an afterthought. A platform that makes list export difficult isn’t doing that by accident, it’s a deliberate lock-in mechanism, and the research on this is old and well established: the harder an asset is to move, the more pricing power the platform holds over you afterward, regardless of how good a competitor’s product actually is at that point. I’d treat that as the single most important line item in the whole comparison, not the footnote it currently reads as, because it’s the one factor that gets more expensive to ignore every year you wait.