Basic Tools for Affiliate Marketing

In this article we will take a look at some of the basic tools you will need to be successful with affiliate marketing. Just because you are not creating your own products you are still running a business and need to treat it as such.

Blog or Website

As a business owner you need to have a home base to run your affiliate business from. This should be a blog or website. It is very easy and affordable to set up a wordpress site for your business. While there are free options it is recommended to buy a domain name, your blog address, and use a hosting company, this is where your site runs from. The total cost for these two things is around $20 and the monthly fee for hosting is less than $10.

Autoresponder Service

As an affiliate marketer you do not want to waste your time sending people to the vendors offer. Instead the smarter practice is to direct them to the affiliate offer on your own blog. On your blog you will have an opt in form to capture the email addresses of your visitors. This provides you with the opportunity to mail your list for days, weeks and years to come.

Now, you may ask why this is important? Most affiliate marketers will tell you that most prospective buyers do not always make a purchase the first time they click on your affiliate link.

If you send these buyers directly to the vendors site and they don't purchase, you have lost the sale. How can you connect with them again and find out why they didn't purchase - you can't.

On the other hand if you send them to your blog and they opt-in to your list you have their contact information. You can easily send out emails to them and provide them with more information or ask why they didn't purchase.

You are collecting and building your own data base of leads for all your affiliate marketing efforts. While a person may not like one product they may happily purchase others.

Using an autoresponder services allows you to mass mail people at one time. Plus you can schedule emails to go out while you are at work or out shopping.

Two of the most popular autoresponder services are Aweber and GetResponse, both have introductory trials for the first month.

While there are other tools that can help your affiliate business these are the basic ones that you should start with. Then as you become an experienced affiliate you may want to use tools that create landing pages and track who clicks on your links and how often.