To be a successful affiliate marketer as in any other type of business you need to have the right tools and know how to use them. There are thousands of products available but do you need them all, a good question to ask yourself before you buy. I know I have a few sitting on my hard drive somewhere that I have forgotten about and will never use.

However there are a couple which without, your success as an affiliate marketer will be that much more difficult. I am taking it for granted that you already have a web site so I will not cover that here, I am talking about tools that take the hard work out of affiliate marketing.

An email auto-responder is top of my list because affiliate marketing is all about getting and keeping in touch with your potential and existing clients. An auto-responder helps you do that by as its name suggests, automatically responding to the messages you feed into it. If you wanted you could load up a whole years worth of newsletters and it will happily send them to your list on the days you have told it to.

This leaves you free to do other affiliate promoting and still with the ability of broadcasting any special offers or information to your list whenever you have the need.

Article submitting tools or web sites take the grind out of having to submit your articles manually to the hundreds and thousands of article directories and getting them accepted. The one I currently use checks your articles to make sure they are article directory friendly before submitting them to over 5,000 possible publishers. Without this tool it would take days or even weeks to achieve the same effect tying up valuable time and effort which could be spent more profitably elsewhere.

Successful affiliate marketing is about giving your potential and existing customers the information to make them want whatever it is your affiliate program is all about and one of the best ways of giving them that information is via an e-book.

Of course you can use a simple PDF format and I advise anyone new to internet marketing to stick with that easy to use format, but as you become more proficient and your affiliate business grows you will want to present your information in a more professional looking format. This is where a good e-book builder or generator will become your most used tool.

By using an e-book generator you can not only make your electronic book look great you can add passwords and security, include good affiliate links and a whole host of other benefits into it as well. Stopping people from copying and pasting and using your valuable affiliate information for their own profit is a great advantage a e-book generator has over a standard PDF document.

These three tools alone will give you the time you need to spend on being a successful affiliate marketer, they will give you the advantage of being and looking a professional business person and customers will be more willing to buy your affiliate products.