Affiliate marketing has exploded since the dawn of the internet, and its easy to see why. You don't have to have your own product, and all you have to worry about is going through a couple of steps and driving traffic to where it needs to go. If set up properly, an affiliate marketing campaign can generate great sums of money for your bank account.

There are just a few things you need to keep in mind when setting up an affiliate marketing campaign. Yo need to have a couple of tools that are absolutely necessary, and you need to remember that there is competition to consider, as well. That being said, let's look at the tools you need.

The single most important thing you need for an effective affiliate marketing campaign is an auto responder. The reason is very simple. When you get a visitor, there is about a .2% chance that he or she is going to give you any money.

They will, however be very open to getting free information about the subject matter at hand. Depending on the niche you're in at the time, the probability is that they don't realize that along with this information will be your asking them again to buy. After somewhere between five and ten contacts, they will be much more likely to buy from you.

What makes this the perfect affiliate marketing tool beyond the initial product sale is that you now have their email addresses and can hit them up later to sell them related products and services. Aweber has the best auto responder on the market. You can track how many people open your mails and/ or click on your links, personalize the emails, and set the time intervals between the emails for about twenty bucks a month.

The other most important thing you can have is a landing, or squeeze, page for each affiliate marketing campaign you have in place. Squeeze pages are great. As a matter of fact, this is where you can really get creative with your affiliate marketing. If you don't know HTML, you can always use a squeeze page or sales page generator.

You can add your auto responder opt-in form, incentives to get your customers to buy from you, mention other products to plant the seed for when you hit them up later, reference your own website, or even add audio or video, like with Cam Studio. You can't do that on the affiliate site. Besides, it's tacky to send someone directly to an affiliate site without any kind of personable warm-up from you. Most article publishers won't let you put a link directly to an affiliate site, anyway.

Affiliate marketing can be a lot of fun if you do it right. Using just these two tools (and a little practice) will increase your chances of success tenfold or more. Before driving traffic to your sites, try building a landing page with an opt-in form from an auto responder with about ten follow-up messages in place, and drive traffic to it instead. Your affiliate marketing efforts will pay off much more if you follow even just these simple steps.