Looking for affiliate marketing tools? What are the most important affiliate marketing tools which every affiliate needs in their affiliate toolkit? A lot of affiliates will start out looking for the cheapest way to make money through selling affiliate products. This is how I started out too. I used affiliate marketing tools which were largely free. I did buy a few courses however and I’d recommend you do spend some money learning some skills through a training resource of some kind.
But once you have a few skills up your sleeve it’s time to go to work. You can spend the rest of your life learning new skills. This is called getting stuck in “learning mode”. While there’s not limit to the amount of knowledge you can build up with affiliate marketing, knowledge alone doesn’t make you any money! You also need to apply. So the first thing you should do is get some training as an affiliate. Once you understand some concepts it’s time to go to work! The affiliates who succeed know when to become producers instead of consumers.
So what are the bare minimum of tools which are needed to succeed as an affiliate? Here’s a few I’d recommend.
Affiliate Marketing Tools – Training
Absolutely the best money you can spend is on your affiliate marketing knowledge. Of course you can find free stuff on YouTube and Google. But it can be very much a lottery as to the bits of information you paste together on your own. A course is a step by step training for affiliate marketing. It breaks it down into simple easy to accomplish parts.
By investing in your knowledge, you’re setting yourself up for long term success. So many people rush into affiliate marketing thinking they are going to make a lot of money without much groundwork. I did the same. It was years before I realised that I needed firmer foundations. Knowledge is your foundations so they are definitely worth building if you intend to make affiliate marketing a main source of income. Access a starter account here to learn step by step.
Affiliate Marketing Tools – Email Marketing
I spent years before I even realised that I needed an email autoresponder. It was wasted years! I held out hoping that the few sporadic hits on my website would eventually turn into sales. They mostly didn’t and it was a disappointing ride. An email autoresponder is the best money you can spend as an affiliate after getting training and support.
What does an email autoresponder do? An email autoresponder for affiliate marketing essentially gives you control of your traffic. Organic traffic takes a lot of time to build up, and paid traffic is expensive. But once you start collecting emails on an email database you own, you can send that traffic anywhere you want. You can build a relationship with your subscribers over a long period of time by offering huge value. When people like you they are much more likely to make a purchase of your affiliate products.
Most people need several touch points from a website to buy too. Which is harder to accomplish with only a small amount of traffic. With a list, you can do this much more easily and quickly. Plus you can build up a number of subscribers quite quickly, especially if you’re using paid marketing.
A Website
Why do you need a website for affiliate marketing? While technically you don’t need a website for affiliate marketing, a website is a good idea for a few reasons. Without a website of your own, you’re reliant on other platforms such as free blog sites or video blog sites such as Hubpages.com or YouTube.com. Should a site change their rules or decide to ban you, you can lose your content over night. Plus there’s less freedom in using free blog platforms and you can be restricted on the affiliate products you promote from them.
Having a website of your own gives you more authority too; both with your visitors and with the search engines which don’t rate free blog sites as highly as owner domain names. There’s a couple of ways you can use your own website to make money with affiliate marketing. One way is to create a lot of content on it and attempt to rank organically in the search engines. While this is slow, it’s also cheap – free even! So if you’re on a tight budget, it’s a great way to build up your “digital asset” over time.
You can also send paid marketing to a website to collect emails for your email list. You can also do this through using a landing page software. Depending on your marketing budget and available time, a website is definitely one of the most important tools you can use as an affiliate. If you don’t have time for blogging or content creation though, you can bypass owning your own website and go straight to building an email list using your autoresponder and a landing page software.
Landing Page Software
A landing page software is the shortcut version of having your own website. On a website, visitors have choice to browse around and look through your content. On a landing page they only have a couple of options – sign up to your email list or leave! So a landing page software is pretty awesome if you don’t want to build content and you have a marketing budget for paid marketing. Landing page software lets you focus on building an email list much more quickly than through using content marketing.
You can also cross test your marketing with a software. This means you can easily test one landing page against another to see which one out performs the other.
Affiliate Marketing Tools – Your Mind
Training has already been mentioned but it’s also worth mentioning that your mind is your most important asset (or your most dangerous liability) when it comes to affiliate marketing. When things get bad in your affiliate business will you quit or will you learn from it? Since 95% of affiliates quit, you’ll need to be pretty aware of this if you’re to become successful.
It’s easy to take a few bad affiliate experiences and throw in the towel. Far more difficult is to pick yourself up when things don’t work out as you expected.
Having a focal point for your mind to “flag up” is definitely a good idea. You can’t hit a target if you don’t have one and goals and vision are vital for success. One of the best affiliate marketing tools in this regard I’ve found is Stuart Lichtman’s books “How To Get Lots Of Money For Anything Fast“. Despite the “salesy” title of this book, Stuart Lichtman had spent over 25 years developing a strategy to help people achieve the seemingly impossible. He studied at MIT in engineering, psychology, and artificial intelligence, masters work in applied psychology, and doctoral work in organisation development and cross cultural business.
The result is a strategy for flagging up any i seemingly impossible achievement to the subconscious mind to get all parts of the brain working on the outcome you desire. Stuart discovered that most people don’t succeed in their goals because they have other parts of their mind competing against the outcome. By focusing your subconscious mind on the main problem you wish to overcome, you can get it to flag it up so that it’s always there, working on a solution. See also Stuart Lichtman Cybernetic Transposition.
