So you have decided to take a shot at affiliate marketing, and there are a lot of things you need to know, learn and master. But first of all you need to know what affiliate marketing tools you would need to help you in affiliate marketing.
In any field or industry, tools are simply items (physical or digital) that you USE to perform tasks related to your job, which help you achieve your job’s objectives. You simply cannot do a job successfully if you do not have the right tools and so without further ado, here is a list of affiliate marketing tools that you would need.
Affiliate Marketing Tool 1 - An Email Account
The first step to establishing a presence online is to be actually reached on line, hence you need to have your own email address. While some people prefer using a free email account by subscribing to Yahoo or Gmail, if you want to establish yourself as a professional business entity online, it would be best to use your own business email account, and that would mean an email account that uses your own domain name.
To do that you simply need to register your own domain name. For example, if you register the domain name, www.affiliatemarketingpointers.com, then you would then easily be able to create your own email address with your name in it, which could appear like, yourname@affiliatemarketingpointers.com.
If you need some information about registering and selecting the right domain names, visit Domain Name Registration tips, by clicking that link. There are many domain registrars who can give you a domain at a very cheap price, on average it would cost you $9 for a year, or even less especially if the registrar has an on going promo.
Affiliate Marketing Tool 2 - A Website and Domain for Each Niche or Market
Your website is your online presence and it is important that you have one. Your website can be a regular website or a blog.
In affiliate marketing, you simply send traffic and visitors to a product owners website sales page, when they make a purchase, you get a commission. But you need your own website to first attract traffic, that you then send to the product owner’s site. It is not wise to send traffic directly to a product sales page, and there are many who encourage this practice through Pay Per Click advertising or bum marketing. If you truly want to be a successful affiliate marketer, you have to build a relationship with your visitors, hence the importance of getting them to your site first before sending them to product sales pages.
Your website should be full of content, content that is relevant to the affiliate product you wish to promote to your visitors. Your site should also have your affiliate links worked into the content. Affiliate links are the specific URL’s to a product sales page that contains your information, so the product owner knows whom to credit a sale to.
Ideally, a website will also have a squeeze page, where you can collect the names and email addresses of your visitors, in order to build your lists.
Affiliate Marketing Tool 3 - A Web Server
A web server is a remote computer where you can upload your website files. You would need a web server if you want to maintain or run your own website or blog. The best part is there are a lot of web hosting services that you can simply subscribe to and at very affordable monthly rates. HostGator Web Hosting is my preferred web host. You can check them out by visiting that link. You may browse around for other web hosting services and cheaper rates, but always remember that the most important criteria to consider when subscribing to a web hosting service is 24/7 support and 99.9-100% uptime reliability. Other than that, everything they tell you is all standard, all the same for all web hosting companies.
Affiliate Marketing Tool 4 - An FTP Client
If you have your own website on your own webserver, you would need an FTP client that will allow you to upload your website files to your server. An FTP serves as a sort of link to your server and there are many free FTP clients available, I personally use FileZilla, which you can search for and download online.
Affiliate Marketing Tool 5 - A Product or An Affiliate Program
If you do not have a product to sell, you either search for a product with an affiliate program that sign up to, or join affiliate programs that have an array of products that you can choose from. One such program I recommend you sign up to is ClickBank; this is probably the leading affiliate program for digital and information products. It would be best to fist master affiliate marketing with ClickBank before proceeding to other physical products on other affiliate programs. Sign up is free.
Affiliate Marketing Tool 6 - An Autoresponder
An autoresponder is a web based software that sends out one email or a series of emails to people who sign up to your mailing list or newsletter. A good autoresponder will also give you the ability to send out broadcasts to your list. You can start with a free autoresponder, such as that offered at www.getresponse.com, however these may have certain functional limitations and the best idea is to get a paid service. The autoresponder I use and recommend is Aweber.
Affiliate Marketing Tool 7 - Keyword Research Tools
Keyword research is one of the important foundations of a successful website, so to have a successful online business or affiliate marketing website, you need to do proper keyword research. If you intend to use Pay Per Click advertising to drive traffic to your site you will also need Keyword Research Tools.
Google has a free online keyword tool that you can use, and there is also another web based tool called WordTracker which I also use regularly. That link will direct you to the free keyword research feature, however it has certain limitations compared to their paid service.
So how do you do keyword research? You can learn how to do it at the Free Blogging Course that I put together.
Affiliate Marketing Tool 8 - Website, Campaign and Sales Performance Tracking Software
The key to success in marketing, not simply online… is continuous testing and documentation of results which later become the basis for further tests campaign optimization with the objective of achieving better results.
It is thus important to be able to monitor and track website and traffic activity; know where your visitors are coming from, what are they viewing on your site, how long they stay on your site, are there any repeat visitors, etc.
If you are doing PPC advertising, you also need to monitor campaign activity, sales activity, etc.
Knowing what happens on your site, or in your advertising campaigns allows you to make improvements, and have factual basis for making such optimization.
If you are selling your own product and have an affiliate program, it is important to have a reliable affiliate marketing software that takes note of sales generated by your own affiliates and commission payouts.
There are many tracking software available, however if you are just starting out, I would recommend signing up for a Google Analytics account, which is free yet provides webmasters and online marketers with a lot of crucial information to help them understand how visitors are relating to and behaving while on the website.
Affiliate Marketing Tool 9 - Word Processor
As an affiliate marketer, you will be doing a lot of writing; articles, sales letters, ads, and newsletters. Any reliable word processor would suffice, like Microsoft Word or even Microsoft Word Pad.
Affiliate Marketing Tool 10 - Split Testing Software
Of all the tools mentioned, this would have to be the last one you should get and only when you also have developed your skill at generating traffic and building a list.
As mentioned earlier, testing is a very important part of marketing, it is the unending process of finding out what works, what works better and what could work better than that.
Split testing software allows you to test different headlines, layouts, images for different pages. The idea is to test variables and to find out which one performed better. Say for example, if you want to test two headlines, Headline 1 reads “Learn to Blog for Free” and Headline 2 reads “Blog For Fun and Profit”; what the software does it it rotates those headlines and documents performance, recording how many visitors signed up to the same offer through headline 1 and compares the data to those who signed up through headline 2. If a visitor returns to the site, they will always be shown the same headline and not the other.
This tells you what works better, and you can do further tests to even improve performance or visitor conversion.
There may be other tools that you find you need in the future, but all of these affiliate marketing tools listed will get you started. Some of these may cost you, but they are relatively small investments in affiliate marketing which offers potentially huge returns, if done the right way.
To do all these, you would obviously need a good internet connection and some method of keeping files and record. Be sure to back up all important files, password information, notices of sales that have been made, and any other information that is important to your affiliate marketing business.
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