Time and time again, it has been said that affiliate marketing is, without a doubt, the quickest and most efficient way of earning a living online. There are a variety of reasons for this. For starters, most affiliate programs do not require any enrollment fees. There is no financial investment on the part of the affiliate. Secondly, the affiliate is only tasked with pre-selling the affiliate merchant's products. The sales page, the payment processing, the digital delivery, and the post sales services shall be borne by the affiliate merchant.

These shouldn't mean that the affiliate should want in commitment, however. As a matter of fact, an affiliate's success wholly depends on how much commitment he could give the program, and how much effort he could invest to pursue such commitment.

Sometimes, this requires some monetary expenses. Getting a web host, for example, as well as a domain name, would necessitate some cash to be laid out. Getting professionally made graphics to make his website attractive can also cost some dough, in the event that the affiliate cannot do this for himself. PPC advertising can equally be just as costly, if not even more, if the affiliate would ever decide to utilize this option.

But not everything needs to come at a price. There are vital tools that would help ensure the affiliate's success, and they can be availed of for free.

Here are the top five tools under this category. Knowing them would give you the edge you need. Using them would give you the head start that would push your online enterprise to the next level.

1. WordPress. WordPress is a movable-type blog. It is a software program you could download and use to create your own blogs which you could upload in your own server. You won't have to settle for the words ?blogspot? or ?livejournal? or ?xanga? to be attached to your URL. You could host your blog under its own domain name, or as another page in your main website. Blogs are great marketing tools. They get indexed quite quickly by the search engines, and often, the figure prominently well in the search engine results pages (SERPs). They could also give your main website the backlinks it needs to boost its own page rank. Additionally, a blog can be customized to become your main website. The primary advantage of this approach is the convenience you'll receive when it comes to publishing content. Download the WordPress client for free from http://www.wordpress.com .

2. NVU Website Creator. Macromedia Dreamweaver is too expensive? Microsoft Front Page is too complicated? Then the NVU Website Creator is the program for you. This software program streamlines the website creation process through an interface that is easy to use, but powerful enough to make professional-looking web pages. Download the client for free from http://www.nvu.com .

3. Backlink Builder. If you're maintaining your own website, either as a review center for your affiliate program's products, or as an affiliate mall for the same, or even as a blog which promotes the aforementioned digital items, you will need to build a thorough list of backlinks to increase your page rank. The higher your page rank is, the better chances it will have of appearing in the first few pages of search engine results. Don't know where to start? Use the free tool available at http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php to discover all the places where you could leave some links to your website.

4. Keyword Selector Tool. Keywords are the primary ingredients of any search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. You will use them for your meta tags, your h1 tags, your ALT tags, your page title, and your content. You will even use them for the articles you will submit to the many article directories in the World Wide Web. The proper use of keywords would result in the more efficient documentation of your website so that the search engine spiders will have an easier time finding your web pages for any relevant query. And since 80% of the traffic that you will be able to generate for your website would come from the search engines, keywords become the most essential aspects of your site building efforts. Need to find the right keywords? Go to http://www.nichebot.com and use their powerful tool to determine the profitability of the keywords related to the affiliate products you will be promoting.

5. Statcounter. You will need to study your website's statistics so that you'll know what you're doing wrong, as well as replicate what you're doing correctly. For this purpose, simply copy and paste the code that will be provided by http://www.statcounter.com to get in-depth reports about the performance of your website.

All of these tools would improve your performance as an affiliate. And the fact that they all come without charge just makes the deal even sweeter. Try them out. Chances are, you will realize that the best things in life can be free after all.

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