No matter what you've read online you need a website to succeed in affiliate business marketing.

Not only does it give you a platform to sell from it helps create trust & confidence in your products with your visitors so that they click on the affiliate link.

Don't believe the Siren calls that tell you that you can make an income from a blog with affiliate links or directly from adwords with affiliate links direct to the affiliate product.

Visitors need convincing that the affiliate product is worth their hard earned cash.

Your review, comparisons, appraisals and endorsements will be the deciding factor.

Why else to you need an affiliate website

To offer other resources that draw visitors back to your website and therefore increase your conversions of visitors to buyers. Resources like:

• Articles
  
  
• Audio files
  
  
• Reviews of the products
  
  
• Free advice
  
  
• Endorsements & testimonials
  
  
• Free tools and software
  
  
• Membership area
  
  

Don't forget to look for ways of selling using these 'free resources' areas. Embed links to your affiliate products or pages within your website.

Opt-in forms for your newsletter and other incentives. - Generating a list of targeted visitors is a fantastic use of your website.

Somewhere to sell your own product. Even if you don't have anything to sell now, you may well do in the future. Either one that you have developed yourself or something that you have the resale rights to.

Highly optimised pages for you to display adsense ads as an extra revenue stream.

A way to develop your brand.

Somewhere to place links to other websites. This would form part of your search engine optimisation strategy.

Affiliate tool #2 - An Autoresponder

Almost every website, whatever their business, affiliate, drop shipping, ecommerce or membership or even simple adsense websites will benefit from this most essential of tools, an autoresponder.

Not just having but using this tool is the key to a successful affiliate business, Why?

Well what is the fuel of your business? Your visitors and their cash.

Now every good businessperson will tell you that it costs more to develop a new customer than it does keeping a current one.

This is the same for your affiliate website. If you get 10,000 visitors a day then you don't want them all leaving and never returning again. You've done the hard work of telling them about your website and getting it seen on the search engines, now capture their email addresses and keep in contact with them so that you can tell them about all the new offers you have in the future.

Autoresponders allow you to do this and can dramatically increase your affiliate click through and revenue. Take a look at AWeber or GetResponse for more on autoresponders.

Affiliate Website Tool #3 - Article Submitting Software

Well before you can capture those visitors email addresses you somehow have to generate visits to your affilaite website.

One great way that has many fantastic spin-off benefits is to write and submit articles to the many article submission & syndication websites.

By writing good, keyword rich articles all about your affiliate products you can send visitors both directly to those affiliate products, via your affiliate link, as well as directing them to your website.

• Plus - You increase the number of high quality backlinks to your website.
  
  
• Plus - Other website owners may use your content and put it on their website, along with a backlink to your website... more backlinks, more exposure to your affiliate links, more exposure to your brand.
  
  
• Plus - You get lots of lovely, keyword rich content for your own affiliate website. Great for search engines to pick up and index and also good for you to put adsense ads on for lots of extra income.
  
  

For more on article submission tools see www.simplewebsitemarketing.com

Affiliate Website Tool #4 - Link Cloaker

You may not consider this an essential... but I do. You've worked really hard to:

• Build your website
  
  
• Build your list
  
  
• Build your article submission and search engine optimisation
  
  

Now you're getting 100's and 1000's of visitors to your website so the last thing you want is to have your hard work stolen from you.

Link fraud is serious and on the increase and you can loose a big chunk of your business as a result. By cloaking your links you are protecting your income.

The other advantage is that it can help to encourage visitors to click the link. Why? because cloaked links look neater and don't appear to take the visiotr off to some unknown destination.

So hide those ugly links with a link cloaker.

Affiliate website tool #5 - A Great Affiliate Guide

Like all great explorers, you need good maps.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel or reinvent how to run a successful affiliate business, just follow the advice of someone who is already successfully running an affiliate business. If you ask me then I recommend any one of the following three super affiliates

• Ros Gardner's 'Super Affiliate Handbook'
  
  
• Jeremy Palmer's 'Quit Your Day Job'
  
  
• James Martell's 'Affiliate Marketers Handbook'
  
  

All offer a unique and usable guide on setting up and running a profitable affiliate website business.

To recap

• Build a great website
  
  
• Use an Autoresponder to capture your visitors email addresses
  
  
• Write and submit articles using an article submitter
  
  
• Use a link cloaker to protect your online revenue
  
  
• Invest in a great book to guide you to success