Amazon is one of the best affiliate companies to work with if you intend to bring a deal affiliate site online. Deal and coupons sites can be quite effective if you work hard and do your research to only offer your customers the best deals around. If you intend to add Amazon products to your website, having a decent price tracker for that site would be helpful. Amazon does change its prices from time to time, so you want to make sure you offer your visitors the best Amazon deals possible.

These 4 Amazon price trackers can be quite handy:

Camel Camel Camel: a powerful tool that can save you a lot of time digging up Amazon deals. It keeps you on top of Amazon price drops. Its browser extensions are nice. You can import your wish-lists too.

My Price Track: allows you to subscribe to wishlists, registry lists, and listmania. It also keeps you up to date with price changes at Amazon.

The Tracktor: keeps track of changes in new and used products. It has a price history chart to help you keep up with changes more effectively.

Chintzee: want to keep track of the price for an individual product or two? Maybe you have a short list of top converting products you want to keep an eye on. This tool has you covered.

With all the tools available for affiliates today, there is no excuse for not posting the best deals to your deal site on a consistent basis.

I am a big fan of spying on what other affiliates are doing to push certain products. No one has the “perfect” strategy, but there are things we all can learn by looking at other people’s work. There are lots of tools that let you spy on your competitors but not too many of them bring everything together under one interface. As an affiliate, you do not want to just pay attention to others’ PPC campaigns. Their SEO campaigns, keywords, and everything else matter too. That’s where iSpionage comes into play. It lets people spy on their competitors’ SEO and PPC campaigns and gather some valuable data for further analysis.

iSpionage brings it all together. All you have to do is enter a keyword or a website and the tool will go to work for you. It grabs all kinds of information based on your input. If you enter a keyword, the tool will show you the SEO and PPC players for that keyword. It also shows the ads that are running for that keyword.

iSpionage provides you with SEO ranking information and link information for your competitors too. Just by looking at some of this data, you can come up with all kinds of ideas for your own campaigns. Of course, you can export them all and do a more complete analysis on it all.

At the end of the day, iSpionage is just a tool. The data you get from this tool won’t matter unless you do something with it. Nevertheless, it’s nice to have a tool that brings SEO and PPC data together.

Affiliate marketing is more than just playing with your landing pages and finding the right offers. Sure. Finding products that people can actually buy and get value from is a part of the process. But you want to make sure people can get to your landing pages and get connected with what you are trying to convey. That’s why you need to invest in a premium keyword research tool to help you with your affiliate campaigns.

You can always get away with using free keyword tools when you are starting, but if you want to expand your business, you are going to need the right tools. With that in mind, here are top 5 best affiliate keyword tools that can help you take your campaign to the next level:

Keyword Country: The ultimate tool for affiliate marketers that often goes unnoticed. It’s used by both Adwords and Adsense experts. Great way to put the right foot forward in a new niche. It can help you discover new markets too.

Keyword Spy: one of the most powerful keyword spying tools on the market. Whether you are interested in spying on your competitors or just want to figure out what markets can be lucrative for you to enter, Keyword Spy comes handy.

SpyFu: another one of those top spying tools that helps you develop long keyword lists, spy on your competitors, and find out new markets to enter to. You can use Kombat feature to compare your campaigns against your competitors.

Keyword Discovery: has been one of the best keyword research tools around for years. The data that you can dig up by using this service can help you plan those affiliate projects more effectively.

WordTracker: the tool has been around for years and has been used by most affiliate marketers. Since everybody seems to be using this tool, I don’t put too much emphasis on it. But knowing how to use this tool can give you an edge over most other affiliates.

What’s your favorite affiliate keyword research tool?

If you have been involved in the affiliate marketing industry for a while, you know the importance of choosing the right keywords to target your prospects. Not all keyword phrases are created equal. Some are capable of making you a lot of money, while there are others that could cause you a big headache and baffle you on their performance. What sets apart top affiliates from rest is not only just the strategies used but also the affiliate tools and how they are used to develop more optimized campaigns. A lot of newbie affiliates use those free tools on the market to set up their affiliate campaigns. That may work for a while, but if you intend to build a real business around your affiliate efforts, you are going to spend money to earn money.

There are plenty of tools that you can choose from to get your keyword research done properly. Affiliates have been using WordTracker, Keyword Discover, and Wordze in the past to develop their affiliate campaigns. These tools are nice on the surface, but they don’t provide you with affiliate specific information. There are keyword tools out there that not only help you build up your affiliate lists, but they also help you find out what other affiliates are doing and whether you should go after a specific keyword. If that is what you are looking for, here are 3 killer affiliate tools you should try:

Keyword Spy: my favorite affiliate keyword research tool. It’s one of the best tools on the market for pay per click affiliate marketers. The tool shows you how much competition you are going to face per each keyword and how much you may have to pay to achieve results with your pay per click marketing campaigns.

Keyword Country: this tool is the prime example of a keyword research tool that has something for everyone. Whether you are an Adsense marketer or just want to start a profitable affiliate marketing campaign on Google Adwords, Keyword Country has something for you. Great tool for bloggers as well.

SpyFu: the secret tool no one talks about. I have heard many top affiliates mention all kinds of tools that they use to generate profit, but they rarely mention SpyFu. It’s not that the tool is not effective. It’s that it’s too effective. If you have access to this tool, you can download your competitors and those super affiliates’ keywords and duplicate and better their campaigns. I have no doubt that your super affiliate mentor has your best in mind, but he/she is not going to introduce you to a tool that could spill the beans. SpyFu Kombat is a wonderful way to not only optimize your Adwords campaigns but also take your SEO game to the next level.

What’s your favorite affiliate keyword tool?

A lot of affiliates are good at copying what others are doing to make money online. Affiliate marketing is a tough business, and what a better way than following the leaders and piggybacking on what they have done. There is nothing wrong with that. A lot of top online marketers you do that, and even they do it in their own business. But what you don’t want to be in the affiliate marketing world is a pure follower. There is a right way and wrong way to piggyback. If you are just borrowing other people’s strategy and just cloning their business strategies, you may see some short-term results, but you are not going to succeed on a long term basis. The person who’s concocted the strategy that you are borrowing is always going to have an edge over you as they know exactly where to take their business whereas you are just following.

Top affiliate marketers usually analyze other folks’ strategy and try to absorb the strengths and get rid of the weaknesses. Then they add their own innovations to make even more money online. You can be a follower, and there is nothing wrong with that. But you don’t have to follow someone all the way to the bank. You can always take a short-cut along the way or find better ways to proceed. Top marketers do a little bit of both. They have the luxury of knowing other top marketers. These folks are super networkers, so when they borrow strategies from others, they do so from the cream of the crop. Even then, a lot of these folks take time to analyze what they are borrowing and how they can improve upon it.

Top affiliate marketers also understand that there is more money in developing their own products than actually promoting what other people have made. When you are promoting other people’s products, you are only settling for a small percentage of the revenue. You can always promote ClickBank, and there is a lot of money to be earned there, but I personally prefer working on a real business strategy than looking for new ClickBank products to promote each and every week. ClickBank and other info products could be a part of your overall strategy but shouldn’t be the only thing you focus on. You can always try to sell your own info product to find out what it takes to develop and launch a product.

At the end of the day, you want to think outside the box and come up with your very own strategies to promote products and take your business to the next level. Affiliate marketing is not the be all end all when it comes to making money online. I’d like to think it as a training ground for folks who want to own their own products and grow their companies on a consistent basis. The commission checks can be great, but it’s much tougher to make it as a millionaire as a pure affiliate marketer than it is by having your own products and services. If you don’t like risking too much, you can’t expect high rewards, now can you?

Traditional affiliate marketing tactics may still work these days, but there is no question that the emergence of video marketing has opened new doors for online marketers. And unlike a few years ago, you don’t have to spend a fortune to get your hands on a camcorder that allows you to take videos whether you are at your office or on the go. HD mini camcorders are great to record affiliate training videos or product reviews online, and they are very convenient to take with you when you are on the go.

Here are top 4 recent mini camcorders that affiliate marketers can use to start with their affiliate videos:

Sony Webbie HD: Sony Webbie MHS-PM1 HD Camcorder is a decent HD camcorder for vloggers and people on the go.

Flip UltraHD: the Flip needs no introduction. It has been around for years and is great for vlogging.

Kodak Zx1 HD: An affordable mini HD Camcorder for those constantly on the go.

Creative Labs Vado HD Camcorder: Creative Labs Vado HD 720p Pocket Video Camcorder with 8 GB Video Storage and 2x Digital Zoom is another pocket HD camcorder for those who live a mobile life.

You don’t have to a millionaire to get started with affiliate marketing or upgrade your old equipment. All you have to do is spend about $200 in your business. The quality of these camcorders may not be as high as a $20,000 professional camcorder, but they get the job done. These gadgets give you the most affordable way to take your affiliate business to the next level.

Affiliate marketing is a very competitive business. If you intend to keep making money in the affiliate marketing industry, you’ve got to take time to learn new tricks and innovate yourself and your campaigns to make more money. One of the best ways to innovate your campaigns is by adding videos to increase your sales. Video blogging is one the rise, and it is no longer something only early adopters do. Most bloggers, affiliate marketers, and industry experts have started their vlogs. Video can help you increase your sales dramatically in more ways than one. For starters, prospects seem to eat up great video content. If you are planning to sell a product, you can do a video review on it. If you plan to sell a service, you can provide free video tips. As long as you don’t ramble on, provide real value, and sell your product in your videos, you can expect to convert more folks.

A few years ago, it wasn’t really possible to create videos without having to spend $500-$1000 on a camcorder. Not everyone afforded that kind of money and cheap camcorders were not exactly great for creating affiliate videos. But devices such as Flip Mino have made it extremely easy to shoot affiliate videos fast. Flip Mino HD is designed for video-bloggers. It’s a portable mini camcorder that allows you to shoot decent quality videos without having to break the bank (see a preview here).

What I like about Flip Mino HD is that you don’t have to read a 200 page manual to get a handle of this gadget. It’s so easy even a caveman can do it. All you have to do is press the record button and keep the camcorder steady. Once you have recorded your videos, you can use the USB feature to upload them to your computer and use FlipShare software to put your videos on YouTube. If you can afford to host your own videos, that’s even better. But the moral of story is, you don’t have to be a rich affiliate to make videos when you can buy Flip Video MinoHD for about $200. And the SEO benefits that you get by putting videos online is going to make it all worth your while. Affiliate videos are not the only thing you need to concentrate on, but it’s a great way to compliment your campaigns in other channels and bring down your overall CPA.

If you have been paying attention to the online marketing industry in the past few months, there is a good chance you have heard of Market Samurai. I was personally introduced to Market Samurai through the Immediate Edge. At the time, I was using WordTracker and Google Keyword tool to find niches and do my market research. But affiliate marketing can be tough if you do these things by hand. There is no reason you should spend more time than you have to get your research process done. Market Samurai does all the research process for you and more. But what I was impressed about was how you could use it to find backlinks to your affiliate sites. We are not talking about any backlink but the “do follow” ones.

Here is how it works. Once you have identified a core keyword for your market, it’s time to get down and do some research to find places you get links from to your blog or affiliate website. Market Samurai has a buit-in system that lets you find juicy sites fast.

You can find related pages on hubpages, Squidoo, Weebly, and forums in your niche. This is not something that can’t be done by hand. But think about it. How much time would you have to spend to find places you can post your link and get involved to drive traffic back to your affiliate website.

Now here is the killer part. You can sort through these sites based on their Page-Rank, Follow-No follow attribute, and even the number of backlinks to them. If you are planning to move your site to the top of the search engines, getting links (tons of them) is one of the best way to go. With Market Samurai, you won’t even have to make more than 2 clicks to get all this data. That’s what I call proper outsourcing. And best of all, there is no human error involved.

Stay tuned for a more comprehensive Market Samurai review!

Affiliate marketing is a game of numbers. Every guru would tell you that. No matter how good your landing pages are or how much traffic you are driving to your website, if you are not constantly monitoring your numbers and improving every aspect of your website, you can’t expect to make any real money online. If you have been in the affiliate business for a while, chances are you are already using pay per click marketing to drive leads to your website. Any PPC marketer knows that the goal is stay ahead of the engines to keep your quality score high and your minimum bids low. And it helps if you could bring up your conversion rate. You need to do all that plus work with affiliate programs that you are associated with. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had an integrated software solution that allowed you to get more out of your campaigns? AffiliateReporting.com is an online service that allows you to increase your ROI and get more from your affiliate programs.

If you need a dashboard that aggregates data from all sources and gives you a better overall view of your campaigns, AffiliateReporting has a solution for you. AffiliateReporting provides you with:

• Aggregate Commission Data: CJ, Linkshare, Performics (Google Affiliate Network), ShareASale, PepperJam Network, ClickBank, PartnerFusion, Converseon, Kowabunga are all included in Affiliatereporting.com. I don’t know about you, but tracking these networks’ numbers on an individual basis is not the best way to track your progress as an affiliate.
• PPC Cost Data: AffiliateReporting.com allows you to aggregate your cost data from top search engines such as Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN Adcenter.
• ROI Analysis: ROI should not be the only metric that you are concerned about, but it’s a very significant metric. With AffiliateReporting, you get sophisticated ROI reports without having to do all the hard spreadsheet work. Saves a lot of time.
• Alarm system: you also get an alarm system that notifies you if there are problems with your campaigns. If you are a busy affiliate like me, you’d appreciate this feature.
• Search Engine Management: wouldn’t it be nice if you could create multiple campaigns on top search engines at once? You can do it all with AffiliateReporting.com. And there is a bid management tool integrated into this system as well. So, if you have trouble optimizing your bids, you can always use the bid management software to keep you on track.
• Deep Reports: Not only you get top level reports on AffiliateReporting.com, you also get deep keyword, ad, and adgroup level reports from the system. The more numbers you can look at, the better, more knowledgeable decision you can make.

AffiliateReporting is not for everyone. It’s a sophisticated solution that costs a lot of money and is designed only for super-affiliates. The minimum fee you’ll have to pay is $500, and 2% of your ad spends are added to your monthly bill. If you are making lots of money in this business, you are going to save a lot of time and money, offsetting the fee. But if you are a newbie, you may want to stay away until you have enough revenue to justify purchasing this package.

Boy oh boy times have changed. New affiliate marketers have no idea what it took to actually make it in the affiliate marketing world. A few years ago, there weren’t many tools available for affiliate marketers, and those tools that were available were selling for hundreds of $$$. But times have changed. There are so many software packages available for affiliates to become more efficient with their daily operations. I have personally used Affiliate Elite for quite some time. When I got hooked on Affiliate Elite, it was selling for a lot of money. But now folks get to try it for $5, and it has become so affordable that anybody can afford it.

The same can be said about other tools in the affiliate marketing world. It’s not to say that all affiliate tools come cheap, but a lot of them do, and newbie affiliate marketers don’t have to do everything by hand. Talk about a year to get into this business. If you haven’t started in the affiliate marketing world, you probably should as soon as possible. There is no better time to get started.