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?

A lot of affiliates are now starting to understand the power of Wordpress when it comes to developing affiliate portals to make money online. A few years ago, people used to use those good old HTML based websites to get their affiliate landing pages up and running. But with the power of Wordpress, you can manage huge portals easily without sweating a break. Best of all, Wordpress is for free, so you’ve really got nothing to lose by using Wordpress for your affiliate websites. Just make sure you choose a good theme to keep things looking as professional as possible.

If you are looking for a cool affiliate theme for Wordpress that not only is well-designed but it gives you the chance to make more sales everyday, here are 8 affiliate Wordpress themes you should consider:

eShop: many affiliate marketers make money by selling products from Amazon and eBay. If you happen to be in that group, you are going to find eShop for Wordpress pretty useful. Makes it easy to create a store around affiliate products.

Kidz Store: another attractive e-shop Wordpress theme that you can use to sell affiliate products. You can even build your own store and mix it up with your affiliate products. The choice is yours.

Classipress: a powerful classified listing theme for affiliate marketers. While you can use this theme to create a fully-fledged classified website, you can also build a killer affiliate portal. Just be creative!

Affiliate Theme: the ultimate theme for affiliate marketers. If you are looking to start your review site or just manage your landing pages, Affiliate Theme comes in very handy.

Thesis: Thesis is one of the most flexible themes ever made for Wordpress. Whether you are a blogger or an affiliate marketer, you’ve got a lot to work with Thesis WP Theme.

Wordpress Review Theme: one of the most flexible affiliate marketing themes for Wordpress. You can easily create your review sites fast with this theme.

AffiliatePre$$: a free affiliate marketing Wordpress themes that lets you go live with your affiliate website fast. It has a dark look and feel to it but it’s highly customizable.

Classified Theme: a great way to add products from Amazon, eBay, and more and start making money online. You can also charge others for adding products to your pages.

Starting an affiliate website used to cost a lot of money and take a lot of time. But no more. With the above themes, you have all the ammunition you need to take your affiliate business to the next level.

You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that lists are in demand. People seem to eat up lists, no matter what they are about. If you have visited popular websites such as Digg, Delicious, and Reddit, you have probably seen lists make it to the top of their front-pages. Of course, not all lists are created equal. You can always slap a list together and hope for the best. The better way to do it is by adding as much value as you can with your list.

Affiliates can get a lot of value from lists. Let’s say you are involved in the small business niche and make a living off of promoting small business products. You can always write articles promoting individual products. But a better way to do it is by creating your lists around products that go hand in hand. The best way to do it is by planning your posts ahead. If you are creating a top ten list, you want to find a way to fit in products that provide real value to your readers but address a different need each.

If you look at the lists that make it to the top of Digg and other websites, you’ll realize that you can’t get away with just slapping a bunch of products on a page and call it a list. If you are creating a list on similar products, you want to take time to compare their strengths and witnesses. However, if you use the approach above, you want to only promote the best services in each category. But you won’t have to do too much comparison.

The good news is that you are not on your own when creating top lists. You can use services such as Delicious, Digg, and StumbleUpon to get more ideas about your next piece. Now, I am not suggesting you should copy other people’s lists. But it doesn’t take too much to get ideas for your own lists. Just look at what others have had success with and use your creativity to create a killer affiliate list.

There are a lot of affiliates who assume that you can get everything they need to build a huge business without spending too much money to get it done. Many affiliates start their journey in the affiliate marketing world with free or cheap web hosts. There is nothing wrong with paying $5 a month for a shared hosting plans, but if you are running a business that people care about, you want to make sure your website is up all the time.

There are many shared hosting web hosting plans that promise you unlimited everything for only a few dollars a month. That would work fine if you only have a couple of sites and don’t drive too many people to your website. But shared hosting doesn’t work out too well if you are getting a decent amount of traffic. Imagine investing a lot of time and effort into your online business to drive people to your website through paid and organic search. Wouldn’t it be devastating if your site is somehow down when your visitors get to your website?

When signing up for a top web host, you want to make sure you know all the facts. You also want to make sure your host provides you with options to expand your business and build a more scalable business. If you are serious about your business, you should expect your traffic to grow and reach new heights every once in a while. It’s always better to be ready for your new visitors instead of subjecting them to error pages on your website.

A lot of affiliates just assume that in order to make money, you have to partner with Amazon, eBay, and other big stores. There is no question that as long as you play your cards right, you can earn a decent amount of cash from Amazon and other top websites. But you should not forget about small retailers who might be offering better prices on some items than even what Amazon has to offer. One of the best ways to build credibility with your audience is by helping it save money. If you keep sending people to Amazon and eBay without checking prices, you could lose credibility and your traffic in the process. That’s where Google Products (formerly known as Froogle) comes in. It’s a very helpful service by Google that lets you compare prices and find retailers that have the lowest prices for the item you are planning to promote on your website.

Google Products not only helps you provide the best prices to your customers, it also enables you to find products that people are searching for. On the front-page, you can find products that people have recently searched for. So you can easily get an idea what’s hot on any given day. What’s more impressive about Google Product Search is the fact that you can identify those smaller retailers and partner up with them to earn more money with your website.

Not all small retailers have an affiliate program. But don’t let that discourage you. There are plenty of them around that are willing to try their hands in this channel. Besides, you can always form partnerships with the ones that have limited resources and don’t want to spend their resources on running an affiliate program.

Google Products is a great place to get started as a newbie. It shows you the top stores that you could be partnering with to earn money online. It also gives you a good indication of what might be important to your audience. We are talking about price, brand, and even product reviews. Considering that the tool is available for free, there is no reason not to try it. Great tool to find affiliate partners and products to sell.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most interesting businesses to be involved in. One day you could be on the top of the world. But things could change very quickly the very next day. The way states are going after affiliates with Internet tax, you could certainly see affiliates suffering and small businesses that are using this model to stay afloat closing their doors. But if you thought that was bad, wait till you see what Amazon seems to be planning for its own affiliate program. The company owns one of the most profitable affiliate programs on the market, but it seems it’s not profitable enough. At least not in the UK and CA:

In addition, as of February 1, 2010 we will no longer pay referral fees on purchases made by customers who are referred to http://www.amazon.co.uk or http://www.javari.co.uk via Free Search Results. Free Search Results are links containing an Associate’s tag displayed in a search engine’s free, natural, or organic search results in response to a search query which send customers directly to an Amazon site without the customer first being sent to an Associate’s site and the customer clicking on a link to arrive at the Amazon site.

So why is this bad news? You may ask yourself, how can you even show up in the SERPs with only your URL. Believe it or not that’s possible and is a tactic used by super affiliates to make money on a daily basis. It’s a fairly short-term strategy, but if your URL happens to show up in the SERPs, you can earn a whole lot of money in a fairly short period of time. But Amazon is cracking on that practice, and in the process penalizing folks who don’t intentionally optimize their links to rank higher in the SERPs.

I don’t know what to think of this move by Amazon. Free search results are not something you can control easily. They are not like paid search. This is going to be a devastating move to many affiliates that rely on Amazon to make a living. The company is making a lot of money off of its affiliates, but it seems the economic conditions have had a negative effect on the company. Why else would you screw your partners out of commission they have earned?

It’s not as if affiliates are trying to hijack Amazon pages or pretend they run Amazon.com. There are a lot of affiliates who just post Amazon links to their websites to drive traffic to Amazon and generate sales. If your site is popular enough, the links you use on your site can actually rank very high on Google and other engines. That doesn’t mean you should be penalized for your efforts.

Amazon is a great company. Make no mistake about it. But it’s just unfortunate that some companies don’t know how to deal with their partners. Affiliates may not be employees. They may not have much leverage with Amazon and other affiliate programs. At the same time, that shouldn’t give companies an excuse to treat affiliates as they do. Driving traffic and optimizing a site for search engines does take some effort. Unfortunately, it seems affiliates are going to get the shaft due to reasons that are not faults of their own. The economy is struggling, so are many affiliate programs. With the powers-that-be hell bent on bringing the Internet tax to as many states as possible, it’s just a matter of time before many affiliates lose their businesses. That’s the sad part of it all.

Affiliate managers are going to use the software that gives them the best options possible. So it’s not too unreasonable for them to make software changes from time to time. If you happen to be partnering with CJ or LinkShare affiliates, chances are you won’t have to worry too much about affiliate software changes. But affiliate programs do jump from one network to another from time to time. That all means that affiliates will have to be alert about the links that they are using on their websites and have a way to keep track of them. Affiliate programs do tend to give affiliates enough time to change their links, but that’s not always a given.

I have seen so many affiliates that are all over the place with their approach to adding links to their websites. It’s so easy to just use a service such as bit.ly to add affiliate links to your website. Sure, the tracking is nice. But if there is a change in your affiliate URLs, you are going to have to do a lot of URL updating. Spending time updating URLs all over your campaigns is not the best way to use your time, which is why you should never use a third party service to handle your affiliate links.

I understand that a lot of affiliates want to mask their URLs and keep track of the hits they get. But going with services such as bit.ly or BudURL is not the way to go. You are going to want to have a main URL that you can update once across your campaigns. That can easily be done through your .htaccess file. If you are using Wordpress, plugins such as Redirection help you add URLs and keep track of the hits they get as well.

Working with affiliate partners is all about planning ahead and thinking of ways to improve the efficiency of your operations. Not having a proper affiliate link tracking system in place can be the difference between getting a lot done in a month or worrying about potential changes to your affiliate URLs. Using bit.ly and other similar services may be much easier on the surface. But you are going to thank yourself for using your own affiliate URL tracking system when your affiliate program moves to another platform.

Not all affiliate managers are the same. I admit that there are a few that take the time to work with affiliates and genuinely want to help them achieve more from their campaigns. But laziness has become a norm in the affiliate industry. Some affiliate managers don’t respond to affiliates e-mails even when they are not too busy. They just don’t check their e-mails more than once a week. There are others who go further and don’t pay their affiliates on time. You want to know the worst kind? Those who slack off for 20 days a month and then rush things through in the remaining days (often making mistakes along the way).

You can have all the certifications and knowledge in the world. If you don’t take time to improve your performance in your job, then you are not doing yourself or your company a favor. I admit that affiliate program managers are often underpaid. After all, while they do manage affiliates, they are not seen as those who directly contribute to the bottom-line (which is somewhat untrue). Top affiliate managers can actually help companies make more money by engaging affiliates, establishing relationships with them, and partnering up with those who have not taken the time to become an affiliate.

The very top affiliate managers can command a decent amount of money to run affiliate programs. But they do take time to keep things in order and provide affiliates with tools they need to succeed online. Take Buy.com’s affiliate manager. She and her team spend a lot of time reaching out to affiliates to help them get more out of Buy.com’s affiliate program. Not many affiliate managers are like that. Isn’t it frustrating as an affiliate to need a banner for a hot offer but have no one to reach out to? Shouldn’t companies take time to plan these things ahead of time?

I have seen and worked with a lot of affiliate managers in the past. Many of them do the bare minimum to complete their job without doing anything too drastic. Sometimes you can blame their companies for not providing enough support for the affiliate channel. But there is a lot that can be done even with little support from the management. If you are passionate about managing affiliates, you probably wouldn’t put anything less than 100% effort forward. But if you happen to be an affiliate manager due to the fact that it was the only job available, you are in the wrong field.

New affiliate marketers are always more jumpy and sensitive to everything that happens to their business. I have seen so many affiliates that get discouraged when Google slaps their pages and asks them for more money to keep their pages on the first page. A lot of it is due to people setting unreasonable expectations for themselves and their business. It’s true that there are a lot of people who are making a killing with affiliate products. These folks have mastered the art of Google Adwords and affiliate marketing and have developed a well tuned system that keeps making them money in the most difficult times. Newbie affiliates don’t have that luxury.

One of the biggest steps in running a business is planning. Planning on how you are going to make money. How you are going to promote your business? What tactics you are going to use to make money online? What does it take to break even? These are things that master affiliate marketers take into account. Let’s say you have made a killing in a month. Do go on spending all the revenue you have earned on things before accounting for refunds and other miscellaneous fees. Those who have been in business long do have a sense for refund rates, so they do account for that when preparing their break-even analysis.

Every product will get returns. There is no two ways about it. You are not going to find a product that gets 0 returns. That means you are going to lose a portion of your revenue in the process. Some products get more returns than others. That’s why you should do your research to make sure the product you plan to promote is valuable and of high quality. After all, nothing’s more frustrating that partnering up with a company that makes terrible products. That not only cost you time and effort, but it will hit your credibility where it hurts in front of your audience.

A lot of people want to make money online from affiliate marketing. There is nothing wrong with that. But the process takes time and doesn’t happen overtime. Unlike what some have said in the past, affiliate marketing is a serious business and does take some effort. It may sound like the best job in the world, but it’s a tough business.

The new year is finally here, and yet another cycle begins for us affiliate marketers. If you think about it, affiliate marketers don’t really have off days. We are going to have slow days and weeks depending on the niche we are in, but you can’t take Christmas or the New Year’s day off if those are the days your target shoppers are out there shopping. If you have time to take off, you have time to invest more efforts in your business. Now I am not suggesting that you should never take off or have fun when you are running a business. But affiliate marketing is all about being at the top of your game when your target audience is ready to spend.

The holiday season may be over, and many affiliates are already evaluating and implementing new plans for the new year. Some of the things you can do are obviously niche specific. But there are general things you can do to improve your affiliate business in 2010. Here are 5 ways how:

• Conquer Social Media: social media is here to say. If you haven’t taken time to create a social media presence for your affiliate portal or reach out to your target audience on Twitter and Facebook, the time is now. You don’t want to spam those people, but you want to use the tools available to build a solid relationship with them. The time for reading social media books is over. It’s time to act.
• New Markets: the new year’s day is always my favorite time of the year. It’s usually the day I go over the markets I targeted in the previous year and the niches I want to target in the new year. I am not suggesting that I go about the process in one day. But my New Year’s day is more relaxed and great for brainstorming and identifying a broad set of niches to target in the new year.
• Test more: if you have been testing your campaigns rigorously, good for you. But 2010 is going to be even more demanding when it comes to testing your campaigns. You can never stop optimizing your affiliate campaigns. Not if you want to expand your affiliate business.
• Invest In Your Business: the times may be tough, and many small businesses are cutting their budgets and spending less money. If you are in the affiliate game to win it, you can’t afford to do that. Whether it’s hiring new employees or expanding your advertising campaigns, don’t forget to invest in the future of your business.
• Better Content: content is king and will remain king for the years to come. It’s true that some affiliates get away with sub-par quality content, but if you take time to produce high quality content that people want to consume, you are going to have a better chance of expanding your business.

These are all broad, but the fact remains that if you want to take your business to the next level this year, you need to invest your time and effort into it. Better quality content, more skilled employees, better tested landing pages, and … are all ways to increase your margins and expand your market-share. Remember, there are no magic bullets.

Your take: what are your new year’s resolutions as far as your affiliate business is concerned?