There are a lot of free tools affiliates can use to improve their marketing, but you can also spend a lot of money on tools and services. Be especially wary of services where you have to pay monthly. If you are not careful, you can find you have spent $1,000 on one service.

If you do decide that you must have a tool or service that is available only as a membership, make a note of every time you use it or go to the site, and then see if it is worthwhile. If you don't use it you are wasting your money. If it does not actually increase your income you are wasting money, too. This is the test for any membership service.

It is also the test for any software, but if you buy anything decent, you will get something out of it in the first month. Again, if you really don't get anything out of it, don't be afraid to ask for a refund.

You can get a refund on any Clickbank product up to 60 days after you bought it, and if you genuinely did not find it of value, then I suggest you get a refund. I am not suggesting you should ask for a refund if you used it and were not able to make money, which is not the same thing.

Keyword Searching Software

But what affiliate marketing software tools are worth buying? There are some very good keyword searching software tools out there to choose from. Actually, you can do just as well using the free Google tool, called the Keyword Tool in Adwords. You need to sign up for an Adwords account to use it, but you do not need to advertise. It is very good.

Affiliate advertising searches

Of course, the Clickbank Marketplace is the best tool for finding affiliate products, so long as they are of the digital download variety.

If you do a lot of Adwords advertising, there are several tools you can buy to help, but you need to be making money from Adwords to justify the expense of most of these.

Some are very elaborate programs that search through the Internet and find what keywords are being used with what adverts, and they then list the keywords and ads. Some even list the amount being paid for the advert.

Get a good one of these programs, and you can certainly increase your income. Some cost over $200 a month, so you need to be making $1,000 in commissions from Adwords to justify buying one. And you need to know how Adwords works.

You don't really need one of these tools, which tend to be expensive, with a monthly subscription. Wait till you are making about $1,000 a month from Adwords before considering one of these tools. Otherwise it will be a waste of money.

Once you have decided to make affiliate marketing a business, you need products to sell. My second top Affiliate marketing tip is a fairly straight forward: get yourself a system which includes access to products and the system you need to presell them. This is a top affiliate marketing tip.

Well, many affiliates fail because they go to Clickbank (that's good) find a few products that will pay them $20-40 a sale (that's also good) and start advertising. That method will run into trouble straight away.

For example, Google allows a url (like http://www.example.com) to be used in any series of Adwords ads. That means you cannot use the merchant's url because he or she or some well-established affiliate will already be using it.

Instead, you need a website so that you can send the prospect to http://www.mysite.com/ to tell him or her about the product or to send him to the merchant's site straight away.

Owing to some recent changes Google's regulations, you really do need a website to advertise on Adwords. This is because you must have your own URL to send the prospect to. You cannot send it to the merchant's website directly, unless no one is using his URL, which is unlikely.

The simple way to avoid the need for all these things is Automated Money Machine.

One good way of marketing is with articles. You write articles about affiliate marketing and post them on article directory sites. This way you get a lot of links to your site, where you promote your affiliate products. Two good ones are ezine articles and goarticles.

Eventually, you will also need an autoresponder service. But otherwise, if you get the right product, you will not need a web site or the usual services.

Affiliate marketing is a great way of making money on the internet, but you need to go about it the right way - here is the top affiliate marketing tip. You are probably expecting some secret way of getting Google Adwords for free or getting a ton of traffic, but the top affiliate marketing tip is none of these things.

Don't rush into advertising

You see, many people rush into affiliate marketing, by signing up for a few products at a few well-known merchants, buying an e-book or two and then start advertising. It seems simple because you don't need a website as you can send the prospects directly to the merchant's site.

The problem is that you can easily spend a lot of money for little results. Leave an ad or two running over a weekend and you can find that you have spent $100-200 for no sales. My top affiliate marketing tip could well be: "Do not advertise immediately."

The reason for this is that advertising on Google Adwords takes quite a lot of research and testing. You need to understand the way Google works. So part of the first tip is not to jump into advertising, especially with an ad that can run away with your money faster than a pick pocket.

The top affiliate marketing tip

But here is the real top affiliate marketing tip: Treat your affiliate marketing as a business. What does that mean? Well, to start with, you allocate certain hours to the work - how many depends on whether you have a job or are working on the internet full-time. My advice is to start part-time, and to keep the money coming in from your job.

The next important thing is to plan what you are going to do. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

1.What is your ultimate aim with this business? Is it to get a bit of extra money, to work full-time at it, or to build an internet empire bringing in over $1m a year? All these things are possible, but they all take time and planning.

2.How will you reach your income goal? Obviously, you will not earn anything in the first few days or weeks, so when do you aim to make your first sale? And how do you expect the sales to build up to your target?

3.How are you going to get that first sale? What is the best product, and best method of marketing - this will take quite a bit of research.

4.How will I manage things? You will need to keep records in spreadsheets of keywords, advertising campaigns and so on.

5.What other records will I keep? You need to keep records for tax purposes. To start with you can use spreadsheets listing expenses and income, and later use a program like Quickbooks or MYOB. This is a business!

6.Get a system that encourages you to treat this as a business but gives you the tools to do so

You are probably thinking that these are really rather boring things, and what you want is to see all that money coming into your Clickbank account. Maybe, but if you are going to make real money, you will need to treat your affiliate marketing as a business. Here is a a Free report on how to get started now.