What is the Most Important Affiliate Tool?

If you are promoting products on the Internet as an affiliate marketer, then you'll need to use the best affiliate tools. These will help to identify profitable niches, products to promote and then generate sufficient traffic to have a satisfactory number of sales.
I will try to identify which are the most useful affiliate tools and possibly which is the best affiliate tool.
A Keyword Tool
A good keyword tool is surely one of the most useful affiliate tools. It will enable you to find what people are really searching for on the Internet and provides real numbers. You can enter a keyword or phrase, and these tools will return a list of alternate phrases which real people are searching for and you can promote to them, and hopefully sell them products.
You should identify keywords with a relatively high search and small competition. This is really important, as a low competition result is likely to give you higher listings in the search engines. Often even keywords with a relatively small number of searches, but little competition give an opportunity to sell to those customers.
A Website Building Tool
Initially you can start promoting products without your own website or blog. However to achieve some good results you should develop your own professionally looking website or blog. Wordpress blogs are especially powerful and allow to produce blogs with the look of a normal website.
Your website or blog will allow you to have your own landing pages or review pages where you can direct your visitors and presell your promotion
Traffic and Backlinks
Driving highly targeted traffic to your website is vital. This should be at the top of your list at all times. No traffic equals no sales. Getting a high search engine ranking should be on of the things you work on constantly and an important Affiliate tool is a good SEO tool.
Linking is something that is important in order to get search engines ranking your site well. You can get backlinks in many ways such as:
- Submitting articles with links in your resource box. - Blog entries and blog comments - Membership websites which you can use to backlink your websites. - Getting involved in Users groups