Google Analytics provides you with a deeper understanding of your website and customers by tracking your marketing efforts. This way you can see who is interacting with your site and see what is or is not working. It can also provide data on which of your customers are likely to convert into paying ones. This is also free.

____________

Google Search Console is free and is offered by Google to help you monitor, maintain and troubleshoot your website. It helps you to understand how Google sees your site. It offers tools and support for various actions such as: Indexing problems; finding and crawling your site; viewing Google search traffic data such as how often your website shows up in a Google search, and how often visitors click through for those searches; alerting you if Google encounters issues such as spam; showing other sites that link to your site.

____________

Google Adsense allows you to place ads on your website. It is free and there are no fees. While Google AdSense is a source of revenue, it is best geared towards those websites that are generating a lot of traffic. As a new affiliate marketer, it is better for you to concentrate on building out your website and getting traffic first.

An email service provider helps you to build an email list needed to market your products through email marketing. There are a couple of free ones such as Mail Chimp, Systeme.io, and Mailer-Lite which are great to get you started.

There are several paid providers, such as AWeber, Constant Contact, GetResponse, and Kit.

Every website should have a contact form so your visitors can reach you.  Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms and they are easy to customize. It supports CAPTCHA and Akismet spam filtering.

This is a free plugin that  you can download right in your wordpress site.

FREE STOCK IMAGES – As you build out your website you will want to add some images. While there are several paying ones (including Royalty Free Images) there are a few that are totally free:

·     Pixabay

·     Unsplash

·     Picjumbo

·     FoodiesFeed

 ____________

DESIGN – If you like designing, Canva is free (Procanva.com option available). You can make everything from posters to Facebook covers, to business cards and logos to graphs. Even if you have never designed anything before, it is not too difficult to master and with a little patience you can produce some great stuff. There is also a paid version as well.

Online forums are an excellent source of ideas for your blogging content. A word of caution though – promoting your website can be considered as spam so be careful.  A few of these forums are:

·         Quora

·         Reddit

·         Warrior

As you build out your website and start getting some traffic, you will want to join some affiliate networks. They act as an intermediary between publishers (affiliates) and merchant affiliate programs. This is one way you will earn money on your websites.

I will list a few to get you started but you can always do a google search. (For example, if your niche is travel, type in travel + affiliates and available affiliates programs will be listed.) They are also free to join.

• Amazon

• Awin

• Click Bank

• Rakuten

• Coimmission Junction (CJ)

• Share-A-Sale

THE 4-HOUR WORK WEEK by Timothy Ferriss

Who wouldn’t like to work shorter hours and break out of the 9-5 rut? Timothy Ferriss’s step-by-step guide teaches you how to outsource by hiring others, travel the world and live the life style you want working less hours. 

 ____________

YOU ARE A BADASS AT MAKING MONEY by Jen Sincero

Author of the best selling You Are A Badass, Jen Sincero takes you through her own transformation – from living in a converted garage to a woman who travels the world, in style. She delivers her sage advice with humour as she draws on personal essays giving you tips on how to get the results you want and has you looking at money in a new way. 

 ____________

MAKE YOUR BED by William H. McRaven

This book is based on a Navy Seal’s graduation speech. Here he shares ten principles that helped overcome challenges in his training as well as his career. His original speech had over 10 million views. The principles he teaches provides wisdom, advice and encouragement that will keep you going even in the toughest of times.