What you are going to find on this webpage is a whole bunch of tools that I currently use on a day to day basis to run my online business.
These are a mix of tools that are PAID for and many that are FREE!
It doesn’t need to cost you a fortune to start an online business and over time you most likely will add to those tools, especially when your business has taken off and you are starting to make money.
I will only recommend things that I would personally use, and in the case of these tools, I personally use them on a day to day basis.
I am recommending these tools so that you can get started quickly, but any results are based on your work ethics and how much effort you put in.
4 tools that are essential when starting in Affiliate Marketing!
Affiliate Marketing Training platform, where you can educate yourself and find great support!
Website, to showcase what it is you will be promoting. Hobby, Interest, (Niche)!
Keyword Research Tool, to help you rank high in the Search Engines!
Affiliate Networks, which you use to promote products and services within your website!
Affiliate Market Training Platform
Starting an online affiliate marketing business should not be taken lightly but finding the right training platform can be a hard task because there are so many.
Some good, some not so good!
After researching many training platforms I always came back to the same one, Wealthy Affiliate, and for me, they came out top every time on so many levels.
Right from the off, I decided that I was going to be taking it serious about building an online business, which meant commitment because this is going to be a long term investment.
For you to succeed in this business, you need to find the right training and it all starts with the basics and you build from there, but support is a big thing and at Wealthy Affiliate that comes in abundance.
You can check out my…
Costs…
The cost of becoming a member of Wealthy Affiliate comes in the way of 3 memberships, Free, Premium and Premier Plus.
If you are serious about building an online business then you really need to take advantage of the paid memberships which includes everything you would ever need to succeed online.
The one I use is the Premium Membership which costs $49.00 a month and the price hasn’t changed for many years, but you might think that is expensive, however, when you think about it…
Your website hosting is taken care of using Amazon servers which are some of the fastest servers on the planet, 24/7 security, 24/7 backups, 24/7 support and even Jaaxy comes with this membership too.
Paying upfront for a full year brings the costs down by nearly $100.00 to $495.00. Which currently works out at $1.38 a day which you must agree is an incredible value.
However, Black Friday if you can wait long enough will get you a full years membership for a staggering $299.00, which works out at $0.83 and that is less than $1 a day.
Seriously, this sort of training could literally cost you thousands.
Don’t forget…
You could join as a FREE MEMBER, which is what everybody tends to do just to get a feel of whether this is the training platform for you or not and upgrade if you want to really benefit from all the training.
As a bonus, you can get your first month for $19.00, which gives you access to the entire system for 5 weeks, which should be more than enough to evaluate the system.
Your Website
Site Rubix is Wealthy Affiliate’s own website management
system using WordPress as the underlying database.
Website manager, builder, domains, content, comments, feedback, beautiful themes, support plus much more.
All the tools to get your site up and running within 2 minutes and all integrated as part of the Wealthy Affiliate platform.
SiteSpeed, SiteSSL(HTTPS) and SiteProtect were my deciding factor when it came to choosing Wealthy Affiliate to host my site, which currently works out at $13.99/year
Keyword Research Tool
One of the most important aspects of affiliate marketing is finding
out what people are searching for in the search engines, and when it comes to search engines we tend to think of Google as it takes around 92% of the search engine marketplace, although Yahoo and Bing are not to be disregarded.
Jaaxy was created by the guys responsible for Wealthy Affiliate and is integrated within the training platform.
This is a tool that simplifies how you do keyword research and can be mastered very quickly, is very responsive and only brings back the important data that you would be interested in.
Costs…
Jaaxy has 3 memberships, Free which comes with the free Wealthy Affiliate membership, Jaaxy Pro priced at $49.00/month, which is built into the Premium Membership if you choose to upgrade, and Premium at $99.00/month
Affiliate Networks and Affiliate Programs
Affiliate networks are places that you can go to promote a specific product or service within the content of your website posts, so if your website was about the Health Niche, then you could go to these places pick up your affiliate link for a health product or service and recommend to your reader.
If they click on your link and purchase you make a commission. Just look at them as a way to connect the customer to the vendor or supplier.
A few affiliate networks are, Clickbank, JVzoo, WarriorPlus, Max Bounty etc…
It could be that your website is about a more specialized subject like Drones and therefore you’d be looking for more specialized manufacturers and suppliers to promote within your content and these would normally have affiliate programs that you can join.
Just type drones + affiliate programs into the Google Search Engine and press enter and you are immediately presented with a bunch of companies that have affiliate programs to use.
All you have to do now is join the affiliate program and select the product or service that you want to promote with your content.
Costs…
Affiliate networks and affiliate programs are free to join.
Aweber – Email Marketing
Email marketing will be an intricate part of your business and
gives you another income stream that you can use over time.
Part of the affiliate marketing strategy is to capture the details of your readers who will become your subscribers, and eventually, a crowd that you can promote products and services to.
This is what we call an email list and all part of the autoresponder. Aweber is one of the better email marketing solutions currently out there.
What you have to be very careful about when deciding on an autoresponder is whether they allow affiliate marketing within their platform because many don’t.
Obviously, Aweber do and they are one of the more established companies involved in email marketing and they have a very good landing-page creator built into the system.
Costs…
Aweber costs are probably the best amongst their competitors and therefore I don’t think you are going to get a better deal anywhere.
So, when you are starting out costs are very important and we are trying to keep them down, Aweber allows you to create a FREE membership for 0-500 subscribers which I think is very good.
There is no restriction on this either, so if it takes a year to build 500 subscribers then it is still free until you hit that 500 subscriber mark and then you will have to upgrade to a paid membership.
You could skip the free membership and go straight to the Pro membership but I don’t see any benefits in doing this.
But if you wanted to do this then you’d be paying upfront for the year for $193.80 which brings down the costs to $16.15/month.
Obviously the more subscribers you have the more it is going to cost you.
Fiverr – Freelance Marketplace
When you start to get momentum with your online business then you 
are going to want to outsource some of the work whilst you can focus your attention on other areas of the business
Many affiliate marketers outsource their content to freelancers who work through Fiverr.
As the name suggests projects were supposed to start from $5 but you can find freelancers out there offering their services for much less.
However, if you are looking for content writers then expect to pay around $50 for a 1500 word document.
Costs…
Starting at less than $5 and can go up to $1000s
Canva – For all your Graphics
Canva is, without doubt, one of the most popular platforms for
creating anything graphically, whether it’s an image or poster for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter…You name it, Canva is the tool for the job.
Most people use Canva because it has a free membership which is brilliant and more than adequate but I recently upgraded to a pro version simply because it gave me access to some nice things I wanted access to.
I find Canva very easy to master and extremely quick when you want some graphics creating.
Costs…
Pro which costs $99.99/year or $8.33/month and Enterprise costs $288.00/year or $24.00/month
Google Search Console
You could just create your website content, publish it through the WordPress platform if that’s what you are using and over time Google will find your post or review and index and rank it.
But a quicker way would be to tell Google that your post or review was ready to index and rank and using Google Search Console is the way we do this.
Costs…
This is a completely free service from Google
Google Analytics
Knowing where your traffic is coming from and which pages are
performing well is something that you are going to need to keep abreast of from time to time.
This is the only way to check that what you are promoting is performing well or not and if it isn’t then you know that you need to do something about it in advance.
Costs…
There is no cost here as this is a free tool that everybody should be using to keep track of things.
Bing Webmaster Tools
This is Microsoft’s tool similar to Google Search Console and a quick way to ensure your website content gets indexed and ranked quickly.
This tool allows you to do what Google Search Console does but across the Bing and Yahoo search engines.
Costs…
This is another tool that is free to use.
Photoscape X
Photoscape X as the name suggests allows you to modify pictures,
images etc and is very easy to master not unlike some tools such as Photoshop.
A tool that was developed in Korea but now under the hands of Microsoft so rest assured it is safe.
I use this tool to create all sorts of fancy stuff which make your images stand out more, even if it is just a nice border that I want to add.
Costs…
There are 2 memberships, Photoscape X which is what I use is FREE or you could pay for Photoscape X Pro but don’t ask me what the differences are but the version I use is more than adequate to give your images that bit of professionalism.
Photoscape X Pro would cost you $33.49 to buy which I think is a bargain for what this software gives you.
You can download the FREE version here.
Screen Cast O Matic -Video Creator Software
At some point in your affiliate marketing journey, you are going
to want to use Youtube to help in your marketing, after all, YouTube is the second largest social media platform just behind Facebook and owned by Google.
Screen Cast O Matic is a simple video and editing software with some very nice features.
Costs…
Screen Cast O Matic comes with 2 paid memberships which you pay upfront for the year.
Delux costs $19.80/year which works out at $1.62/month or Premium that will cost you $48.00/year which comes in at $4.00/month.
Very reasonably priced compared to some of its competitors which can cost you several hundred dollars over the year.
If you are fortunate enough to find an affiliate link then I believe there is a 20% deduction, so Premium would cost you $3.20/month.
You can access the software here.
Microsoft Paint
I use Microsoft paint for making quick changes to the image size but there are a few features that would come in handy.
Call To Action Button Generator
This is a piece of software that allows you to create call to action buttons to give your content more of a professional feel to it.
Costs…
This a free and the link can be found here.
Logo Design
If you want to create a quick logo then check out this software tool. 
You can choose from the thousands of high-quality templates that are available which can be edited to your liking,
Costs…
This is FREE to use and can be accessed by clicking here.
Cool Text
Another great tool for quickly designing graphics that will 
really make your content stand out. Just select the type of image fill in a form and you have a custom image created on the fly.
Costs…
This is FREE to use and can be accessed by clicking here.
Remove Background
Often when you are creating graphics and you take a snapshot 
or snippet of that text it often comes with a background that you don’t really want especially when you want to overlay that image onto another image.
This simple tool allows you to remove the background very easily just by uploading the image and straight away the software will remove the background.
However sometimes when the image is not straight forward or not large enough it struggles, but the way around that would be to create a larger version.
Costs…
This is FREE to use and you can access the tool by clicking here.
Free Images to use
If you become a member of Wealthy Affiliate then you have access to over 1 million images for free, however, there are a few sites where you can get access to FREE images.
Reverse Engineer an Image
I know, that’s sound a little complex for what it is, but really
all we are trying to do is find out where an image originates from.
This comes in handy when we are researching let’s say a make money opportunity and we want to know how legit the product is, especially when they include testimonials from people because often they use people from Fiverr and in most cases they use Stock Images.
All you would do is right-click the mouse within the webpage where the image is and select “inspect”.
You should be able to see the image information where it actually resides within the webpage.
Just copy the link and paste it into the reverse image search display.
Costs…
This is FREE to use and you can access the tool here.
Microsoft’s Own Snipping Tool
The snipping tool from MS is a great tool that I use all the time which is built into the MS Operating System.
Of course, there are others that you could use and some that you have to pay for too, but you don’t want it to do anything fancy, you have tools like Photoscape X for that, but MS’s own snipping tool does what I need it to do.
It allows you to create images from images very quickly.
My Yearly Costs
Wealthy Affiliate = $299.00
Canva = $99.99
Screen Cast O Matic = $38.40
Domain = $13.99
Total for the year = $451.38
That’s $1.24 a day
I did initially choose these tools at the time because I was trying to keep my costs down, but since that doesn’t apply now I had no reason to change what was already working for me and the reason why I still use them.
Hope that you get some benefit from this list of tools but as I said earlier it doesn’t have to cost you the earth to start an online business.
I will be adding new tools as and when!
Any questions at all please comment below and I will get back to you.
Stay safe,
Mick
