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For many people who have heard about Affiliate Marketing, you may wonder “how can one be so successful in Affiliate Marketing?” What must I exactly do, and is there a shorter way to become successful. You may have many more questions, but you need not worry. There are several articles scattered on the web about Affiliate Marketing, and you’re reading one right now!

Affiliate Marketing is one of the best ways to make money online, and some may argue it is the easiest. I beg to differ. Affiliate Marketing can be easy if you know what you are doing, and give it time. An Affiliate Marketer must plan every step, and use the necessary tools to be successful as an Affiliate Marketer. After talking to some extremely successful Affiliate Marketers (and doing a little bit of research on the web), I have compiled a list of three important tools in order to be a successful Affiliate Marketer.

1) Having Your Own Website

Firstly, it is important to have a professional looking website to promote your affiliate product(s). Your website is going to be the basis for all your success (or failure, though I hope not). Evidently, you need to create a website that will be attractive to visitors, and hopefully persuade them purchase products through you. If you are not good at web design projects, you can always hire a professional to do it. No worries!

On your website, you need to keep one thing in mind; many people use the internet for information, and not to buy something. Your website should have lots of well-written content. If you are helpful, people will enjoy your website. The better quality your content is, the better you will rank in the search engines. The better information you writer, the more credible you are going to be in the eyes of visitors. The more credible you are in the eyes of visitors, the higher the chance they will buy a product or service from you. Reputation is a big part of being successful as an Affiliate Marketer.

2) Incentives

With millions of websites out there, you need to offer some sort of incentive so that people will choose you. In other words, you need to think ahead of your competitors, as they are probably looking for a similar incentive. Now, just offering an incentive is not good enough. It needs to be something worthwhile. If it is, there is a much higher chance visitors are going to proceed to purchase a service or product from you. Free software and free Ebooks are often great incentives to offer subscribers. Once again, think really hard of a good incentive, as it could give you the leading edge over your competitors. If you are incentive is not well thought out, people might not be interested by it and simply move on to your competitor’s website.

3) Link Popularity

Needless to say, the success of your website depends on how much traffic you get. Now, not any traffic is good. You need to get highly targeted traffic, as this will give you the best end result. So, before looking for anything more, you need to think of ways that you will get people to your website. You need to get your website high up in the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc…). Link popularity is a major factor used by search engines in determining your SERP (or search engine ranking more simply).

If you are on a tight budget, there is no need to worry. There are free ways to do this. Firstly, submitting articles is one of the best, and finally attaching your link at the bottom of the article. Websites such as Ezine are great, and even better, are free. The more articles you submit, the more popular your link will become, thus the higher you will rank in search engines. Be sure that the article is original and helpful. Copying an article from the net and submitting it with your link is virtually useless.

Hopefully these three tools above will help anybody trying to become successful as an Affiliate Marketer. Affiliate Marketing is a great way to make money, though it is not as easy as it may seem (like I said before). Think of it like this; how often do you come across a website that is selling a product or service, and actually buy it? Probably never, or at least not very often. Affiliate Marketing is possible, but it takes hard work, and the tools and steps above are some of the most important an Affiliate Marketer must consider. Best of luck to all!