Affiliate Marketer Handbook – 3 Essential Affiliate Marketing Tools

Ricky Lee
Although affiliate marketing is one of the best ways to make money online for a beginner, it is not as easy as it especially in the beginning. To start with a successful affiliate marketing business, you need the best tools. Here are some essential affiliate marketing tools you should have.

Affiliate Marketing Tool #1: Your own website

The most important and indispensable tool in Affiliate Marketing is your own website. The first step in any successful affiliate marketing business is building a good, credible and professional looking website. Your website is the jump off point of all your marketing efforts.

Thus, you must first build a user-friendly website, which will appeal to your prospects and encourage them to click on the links to the products and service you are promoting and make a purchase. Therefore, you must first concentrate your efforts in building a website that will cater to what your prospects need.

I recommend you check out HyperVRE by Matt Callen. You can build a user and search friendly site in less than 10 minutes even if you have no website building experience.

The most important thing you should consider is that almost all web users go online to look for information, not necessarily to go and buy something. Above all else, make your website full of original, relevant and useful content.

People will love articles that are appealing and helpful. Keep in mind that, in the internet, content is still king and good quality content will not only build your credibility, it can also help you achieve a higher search engine ranking.

By posting relevant and useful articles, you establish yourself as a credible expert in the field, making you a more trustworthy endorser of the product or service you promote. Establishing a good reputation is a good step in building up a loyal consumer base.

Affiliate Marketing Tool #2: Incentives

Competition is extremely tight in the internet world. You must always be one-step ahead of your rivals to ensure that you capture a significant share of your target market. Therefore, you must use every possible means to encourage people not only to visit your site but also to click and proceed to the websites of the products and services you are promoting.

Building an opt-in email list is one of the best ways to gather prospects. Offer a newsletter or an e-zine. Better yet, offer incentives to your prospects to encourage them to subscribe to your newsletters. You can present free softwares, access to exclusive services and other freebies that will be helpful to your prospects.

Affiliate Marketing Tool #3: Link Popularity

The importance of driving highly targeted traffic to your website cannot be emphasized enough. The all-important web traffic is at the top of the list of the most important entities in the internet world.

Attracting people to your site should be the first step you should carry out. Do everything to achieve a high search engine ranking. Link Popularity is one of the factors that search engines use to determine search engine rankings.

Therefore, to enhance your link popularity, you need to know how to obtain one way links from other websites. The best book I´ve read about SEO is the SEO book from Aaron Wall. It´s the best comprehensive search engine optimization book I have read.

One of the best ways to do this – at no cost at all – is by submitting articles, with your website's link at the resource box, to e-zines and free article sites. You will not only gain exposure, you will also have the opportunity to advertise for free, just include a link back to your site. The more sites you submit your articles to, the better your link popularity is. Make your articles original, relevant and useful so that more websites will pick it up and post it.

These are but three of the many tools that an affiliate marketer can use to maximize earning potential. The possibilities are endless and are limited only by your imagination, creativity, resourcefulness and determination.

If you want to learn more about how to make money in affiliate marketing, I highly recommend you check out Rosalind Gardner´s Super Affiliate Handbook. Learn how she made over $500,000 a year from affiliate marketing.