In order to succeed in any profession you require the proper tools. Affiliate marketing is no different. If you do not have the necessary tools, you will only be making your job more stressful and more difficult, and you will produce lesser results than those with the right tools. These are (in my personal, professional opinion) the top 10 affiliate marketing tools.

1. Affiliate Elite: I cannot imagine doing affiliate marketing without this amazing software! This software allows you to see what products the superaffiliates are promoting, what websites they are using to promote them, and how long they have been promoting them for! It also allows you to locate affiliate products to promote, analyze your adwords competition, and determine what keywords different domains are bidding on.

2. Keyword Elite: You know that keyword research is very important. So important in fact, that I wrote a whole article listing the top keyword research tools. This keyword research tool is a little on the pricy side, but it is a one time fee and it does everything that everything that all the other keyword tools do combined. You can also sign up for a free course that teaches you how to do proper keyword research using this amazing tool. It is not a necessity, but it sure makes your keyword research a lot easier, and a lot more popular.

3. SEO Elite: Search engine optimization is the best way to get a flood of free targeted traffic to your website or blog. SEO Elite is a software that I recommend to everyone in order to cut down on the time needed to optimize your site for the search engines. This tool does almost all of the work for you, including finding great link partners and discovering how your competitors rank highly so you can copy them and one up them.

4. Brute Force SEO: As you probably know, off-page search engine optimization is incredibly important. Having related links to your site that are from sites with relevant content and with your keywords in the anchor text can raise your search engine rankings greatly. This software creates pages for you using Web 2.0 sites and video submission service, and interlinks the webpages so you have 2 and 3 way links so each page ranks highly. It also provides tools to help you choose a profitable niche to target.

5. Linkubaiter: Linkubaiter comes with The Ultimate Search Engine Loophole, a system for achieving among the top three rankings in MSN by taking advantage of the fact that MSN is in the stone ages when it comes to search engines. You can purchase the Linkubaiter on it's own, but it is also offered as an upsell if you purchase The Ultimate Search Engine Loophole at a discounted price, and you can learn about the whole purpose of the Linkubaiter and how to use it to dominate MSN. I generally create a separate website for the same product for which I focus on ranking for MSN, and one website for ranking on Google and Yahoo.

6. Camtasia Studio: You have probably hear of Camtasia Studio. It is video creation software that all of the top internet marketers use. It is a couple hundred dollars, but you can get a free trial during which you can create a bunch of videos for different products. If you cannot afford Camtasia Studio, then you can use a video creation software that is not nearly as great as Camtasia, but it is still great if you are first starting out. This software is Jing.

7. Traffic Travis:Traffic Travis is a free tool that allows you to do things like conversion tracking so that you can make sure that you are not running campaigns that aren't profitable. You can use Traffic Travis to determine what is bringing you money, and what is just wasting your time so you can scale your profits by focusing on what works and throwing away the things that aren't bringing you any money.

8. Article Submitter Platinum: You may already know that you can gain a lot of traffic by submitting articles to article directories. Article Submitter Platinum submits your articles to over 100 directories with the push of a button, giving you lots of backlinks and traffic from the different directories.

9. Directory Submitter: Using this free tool you can easily submit your URL to hundreds of directories semi-automatically in order to obtain backlinks to your site and gain traffic.

10. My Free Website Builder: Using this tool you can easily create professional looking webpages in next to no time. It is free and easy to use so you will not have to hire professionals to create your webpages for you.

To Your Success,

Shawn Horwood

http://top5-workathome.com/blog/

All resources can be found here: http://top5-workathome.com/blog/top-10-affiliate-marketing-tools/