One never forgets the excitement of building your first few sites and the adrenaline rush when you log into your affiliate dashboard and see your first commissions. This excitement and adrenaline drives you forward into adding more content and building more sites. However, the key to driving your affiliate success forward is automation. Building and managing sites, keywords and campaigns and tracking your statistics is key to becoming a more successful affiliate.

For the EPN’ers out there, I use a combination of scripts, plugins and Linode VPS’ (which give me root access) to manage my eBay sites. Setting up a new Wordpress site with PhyBay Pro takes approximately 15 minutes, with the content and link-building outsourced I can quickly attract visitors through organic search.

For affiliates who use other networks with Pay-per-Click (PPC), a self-hosted Prosper installation provides everything you should need in terms of tracking and statistics. For those that prefer an outsource pay solution, there is Tracking202 Pro which should meet your needs for an outsourced solution.

There are of course many other tools out there, some of which I will be covering in future writing, such a keyword tools (Google Adwords Tool is great) and the iMacros plugin for Firefox, which is invaluable in the long-run.

Related posts:

1. Must have Firefox extensions for affiliate marketers
2. Updates
3. Does the design of a website turn people away?