There are many online marketing gurus that suggest that Affiliate Marketing is where everyone should begin to make money online, but what are the necessary tools?

– What does it entail to succeed at Affiliate Marketing?
– What are the steps that are required to become an Affiliate Marketing success?
– Is there a shortcut to Affiliate Marketing success?

These are all questions that Affiliate Marketers have asked and wondered about at some time in their careers.

Affiliate Marketing is proclaimed by many to be the easiest and most effective way to make money online, but it is not as easy as it is made out to be.

The seasoned Affiliate Marketer has a plan and carefully executes it every step of the way.

Using the correct tools is paramount for operating a successful Affiliate Marketing business.

Some of the best Affiliate Marketers have been asked what their top three tools of choice for Affiliate Marketing success are and their answers were almost all the same.

* The Number One Choice Was Having Your Own Website

The most popular answer for the best tool of choice was a website. Having your own website is considered the most important tool by most Affiliate Marketers but it is not an absolute necessity for successful Affiliate Marketing, but having your own website is a great tool in establishing your online reputation and credibility.

By having your own website you are creating an online presence and your visibility as a professional with quality content that gives your visitors answers to questions that they are seeking.

Having a website not only adds to your credibility but it also gives you the added ability to upload files for easy downloading and to set up Op-tin pages, thank you pages and sales pages for your chosen products.

* The Number Two Choice Was Building a List

Creating a list and offering incentives were the second popular choices and considered by some Affiliate Marketers to be the most important of all tools. To have the ability to build a list of prospects requires a website, an Op-tin form and an autoresponder.

To effectively get ahead of the competition you will need to build a list of prospective buyers and use an autoresponder to send them new information that they have shown an interest in or to offer them incentives like free gifts and new affiliate products that they might find helpful. .

* The Number Three Choice Was Traffic

Getting traffic is understandably the most important element of successful Affiliate Marketing, and obtaining link popularity is one of the dynamics necessary to achieve this. There are several ways to get traffic but having your own website is one of the best, and gaining links to your site or pages within your site is one of the best ways to receive targeted traffic.

The use of article submission is one of the best ways to gain immediate link popularity and targeted traffic to your website. Submitting original articles to article directories will not only bring in some traffic but most importantly will build links to your site and that will bring the Search Engine spiders that will crawl your sites content. Article directories will allow you to place a link back to your website within your author’s resource box. Publishing more articles will create more links and increase your overall link popularity.

There are many other tools other than these three that we have not listed but were mentioned by the successful Affiliate Marketers. Finding and implementing the tools available is really not that difficult. It only takes research and studying the techniques being used effectively by marketers that are currently successful.

Author Bio: Greg Wight is an Affiliate Marketer with over four years of experience. He is currently the admin of several websites and writes for many of them. He writes much of the content and is the editor for Raief.com. If you would like to learn more about Affiliate Marketing and receive free tools visit Raief.com.

Category: Marketing
Keywords: Affiliate Marketing business, successful affiliate marketers, link popularity, affiliate marketing