No-Cost Marketing Tools For Affiliate Marketers

This tip brought to you by our Entrepreneur Guru Carma Spence-Pothitt on Feb 08, 2010

Did you know that affiliate marketing is the quickest and easiest way to earn a living online? Why is it that? I think it's because of the extremely low start-up costs. Most affiliate programs don't require enrollment fees, so you have not up-front financial investment to be able to start selling other people's products. But also, you can get set up to start with pretty much no cost outlay, too.

O.K. Getting a web host, as well as a domain name, can cost a little upfront. And, if you aren't graphically inclined, getting professionally made graphics can also cost some money. Also, there might be the PPC advertising costs. But you can put off these expenses until after you've started making sales.

How? you say? By using these free tools to get you up and going as an online affiliate marketer. That's how!

Your First Affiliate Website

The easiest way to get set up on the web is to use one of the free blogging platforms. Wordpress.com and Blogger.com offer free hosted blogs. And, should you decide to eventually host your own WordPress blog later, both these platforms export and import easily into a self-hosted WordPress website.

Blogs are great marketing tools. They get indexed swiftly by the search engines, and often, they figure prominently in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The primary advantage of this approach is the convenience you'll experience when it comes to publishing content.

Of course, you could create a series of mini-websites that focus solely on the products you promote. And, if you don't have Dreamweaver or FrontPage, you can use free online services such as NVU Website Creator at nvu.com or Google Sites at sites.google.com.

Keyword Research

Did you know that 80 percent of your website's traffic will come from search engines? This is why keyword research is, well, key. They are the most important ingredient in your search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. You'll need to use them in your "H" tags, your "ALT" tags, your page titles and your content. You should also use them in articles you submit to directories to help promote your website. Therefore, you'll need to do some keyword research.

Lucky for all of us, there are several free keyword research tools available online. The one I use the most is provided by Google at adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.

Keeping Track of Statistics

You will need to study your website's statistics. This way you'll be able to figure out what you're doing wrong, as well as what you're doing correctly. There are a couple of tools online that can help you do that. One s StatCounter at statcounter.com, the other is Google Analytics at google.com/analytics. If you're using a self-hosted WordPress site, there are a few plugins that are very good for this, as well. I use WP-Stats and have been very happy.

All of these tools can help you get started in affiliate marketing without much cash outlay, as well as improve your performance as an affiliate. Give them a try. Chances are, you'll realize that the best things in life can be free after all.