Time and time again, it has been said that affiliate marketing is, without a doubt, the quickest and most efficient way of earning a living online. There are a variety of reasons for this. For starters, most affiliate programs do not require any enrollment fees. There is no financial investment on the part of the affiliate. Secondly, the affiliate is only tasked with pre-selling the affiliate merchant’s products. The sales page, the payment processing, the digital delivery, and the post sales services shall be borne by the affiliate merchant.

These shouldn’t mean that the affiliate should want in commitment, however. As a matter of fact, an affiliate’s success wholly depends on how much commitment he could give the program, and how much effort he could invest to pursue such commitment.

Sometimes, this requires some monetary expenses. Getting a web host, for example, as well as a domain name, would necessitate some cash to be laid out. Getting professionally made graphics to make his website attractive can also cost some dough, in the event that the affiliate cannot do this for himself. PPC advertising can equally be just as costly, if not even more, if the affiliate would ever decide to utilize this option.

But not everything needs to come at a price. There are vital tools that would help ensure the affiliate’s success, and they can be availed of for free.

Here are the top five tools under this category. Knowing them would give you the edge you need. Using them would give you the head start that would push your online enterprise to the next level.

1. WordPress. WordPress is a movable-type blog. It is a software program you could download and use to create your own blogs which you could upload in your own server. You won’t have to settle for the words “blogspot” or “livejournal” or “xanga” to be attached to your URL. You could host your blog under its own domain name, or as another page in your main website. Blogs are great marketing tools. They get indexed quite quickly by the search engines, and often, the figure prominently well in the search engine results pages (SERPs). They could also give your main website the backlinks it needs to boost its own page rank. Additionally, a blog can be customized to become your main website. The primary advantage of this approach is the convenience you’ll receive when it comes to publishing content. Download the WordPress client for free from http://www.wordpress.com .