Except it doesn't work quite like that.

Most people soon discover that if they want to earn a living with affiliate marketing, they need more than just a link and a website. They need tools to help maximise their marketing campaigns, to get the most from the visitors to their website, and generate as much traffic as possible.

Below, I list five tools I consider essential for any new affiliate marketer to find.

1. Guide-book.

Listed first because it is probably the first thing most affiliate marketers purchase. Of course, it is possible to become a successful affiliate marketer by yourself. But buying a guide-book or joining a program that will teach you the best methods and tell you how to avoid basic mistakes will save you both time and money.

Of course, many e-books promising to teach you how to become a successful affiliate marketer are scams. Some others have little or no useful information. But if you do your research and find the affiliate marketing program that is right for you and your level of knowledge, this could be an invaluable tool.

2. Link tracker.

Link trackers keep track of how many times a link has been clicked on, and, if you are paying to place that link where it is, how much you are paying per click.

Without a link tracker, you have no way of knowing which of your advertising campaigns is working? You might have made $200 in one week, after spending $40 on one campaign and $15 on another. But what if all the clicks came from the $15 campaign, and none from the campaign that cost $40?

You have just thrown away $40, and without a link tracker you would never have known.

3. Hit counter.

A hit counter's basic role is to count how many visitors you have to your website. However, a good one will do much more than that.

They will tell you what other pages link to yours, what search engine terms visitors use to find your site, what countries people are visiting from, what operating systems they use, what link they leave your site from, how long they spend reading your site, and more.

All this information can be used to increase the amount of money your site earns and to produce more traffic.

4. Autoresponder.

There is a famous story of an affiliate marketer who sat down and made a million dollars in 24 hours.

It is no myth. He really did. But he had a huge advantage: he had a mailing list.

Super-affiliate marketers make most of their money from their mailing list, which can often have tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of members. It only needs a tiny fraction of this list to buy a product to make the affiliate thousands of dollars.

An autoresponder will help you build and manage your own mailing list, so you can start pulling in profits like the super affiliate marketers do.

5. Article submitter.

Articles are one of the best traffic generators there are. Write an article, submit it to a directory, and it can end up being seen by thousands of people: who all also see the link to your website at the bottom.

But who can be bothered to manually submit their articles to hundreds of article directories? It would take hours of filling in forms, hours in which you could be doing more productive work.

A good article submitter will save you all that work, submitting your article automatically. You will see the results immediately.

The good news is, not all these things are expensive to buy. In fact, most of them are available free! However, it is important to be wary. You need good, high quality tools. Bad ones can actually lose you money.

Look out for recommendations for the tools and resources you need. And when you have them, you will find your road to becoming a successful affiliate marketer becomes that much easier.