As an online marketer, your primary role is to promote a website or a product. online. The internet is such a huge market which makes it easy to be too broad. The internet doesn't quite follow the traditional offline techniques either. However the rules of setting up a marketing campaign are the same when it comes to targeting your audience, addressing their needs, building relations, converting your prospects into customers, upselling, etc.

In order to produce results, there are marketing tools used by online marketers and affiliates. These tools increase significantly their sales because having just a referral link or an affiliate replicate site is just not enough. If you master the use of these tools and use them effectively and efficiently, your success as an online marketer is guaranteed!

The first tool you want to have is your own website or at the very least, your own domain name. The main reason for this is that there will be situations where you are forbidden to post affiliate links. Therefore, by having your own website or your own domain name, you can redirect it to your affiliate site. You can also use your website as a review site of the product or program that you are promoting.

When setting up a marketing campaign, nothing better than an ad tracker to analyze your results! This software allows you to compare your ads performance. For example, you convert your affiliate link into 3 new URLs because you will be displaying your link into 3 different sites. The ad tracker is able to tell you how many clicks you've got and how many turned into sales, depending on the features of the chosen software. Therefore you can tell which ad gets the most clicks from which site exactly. An ad tracker that can provide detailed reports is a must when it comes to evaluating and controlling your advertisement budget.

If you want to build your own list of subscribers, you'll need a squeeze page. It's also known as a lead capture page or an opt-in page. Building your own list means that your visitors are interested in you and your products. Not anyone else's. With every squeeze page, there should be a thank you page where you thank your visitors for giving you their information and granted permission to contact them.

A tool that complements with the squeeze page is the autoresponder. This marketing tool is used to communicate with your subscribers with a few clicks. Its main role is to automatically respond to every email or subscription received. You can also broadcast one single message to as many members as you have in your list, like a newsletter. If you have multiple messages that need to be sent out in a certain order with a different time frame, you can set that up as well! It is fully automated!

For those of you who hold webinars or who intend to provide online training, online conference rooms are virtual offices or business locations where you can be a speaker or a trainer and have the audience listen to you live online. This tool can be useful to attract audience who still enjoys the human contact rather than plain virtual contact.

A URL rotator allows you to have a certain amount of websites shown in rotation by using one single url. For the same url, you can view more than one website. You can set one url to show more than the others if the chosen rotator offer such features. Before using a rotator, it's important that you verify with your affiliate merchant if this method is authorized/approved or not. Some website owners and merchants prohibit the use of a rotator.

The affiliate link masker, also known as link cloaker is a very important tool to have! This protects your affiliate link from being removed or deleted. Despite your marketing efforts, you won't get any commissions if sales did not come from your affiliate link. However, with an affiliate link masker or url forwarding, as soon as your visitor clicks on that link, there's no way you lose commissions because cookies have already been installed on their system. So protect your affiliate links and cloak them! Also, by using ad trackers, your affiliate links are automatically protected.

These are the main marketing tools and softwares that an online marketer will need. Some places offer them in a bundle or you can get them separately. If you want any of them for free, you may be compelled to have ads shown on the same page as your affiliate page in exchange of the free service. I don't think it looks professional but it's your choice as it can be another revenue stream.