Internet marketing is at an all-time high now. The industry generates over 20 billion dollars in revenue every year and the growth is exponential. It is also just about the only industry that has actually benefited from the current economy crisis, as businesses started looking for cheaper advertising methods, and the Internet was the best choice around.

If you’ve been an Internet marketer for a while, you may know that there are certain tools that you can’t live without. And just a few years ago, you had to build your own tools or acquire existing ones for very high prices (and they were pretty new and buggy, as well). But nowadays, everything is starting to change. There are enough free and cheap services and software around to satisfy the need of any Internet marketer, no matter what niche he is in.

Below you’ll find some of the best such tools, which will undoubtedly help you in your online marketing activities.

Google AdWords. Google is, of course, the largest search engine around, but not many people know about their wonderful tools that can help an Internet marketer work faster, more effectively and make more money online. The most important one is AdWords, where you can scout out the best keywords to target on either PPC or SEO and find out what kind of traffic and competition to expect. It can also help you design the best landing pages for PPC.

Google Trends. Another great tool from Google is called Trends, where you can find information about the latest keywords that have become popular recently and have little to no competition. These keywords are very easy to rank for, and can be very profitable (for example, new product names and models are the best ones to go after).

Google Wonder Wheel. The Wonder Wheel is relatively unknown, because it’s pretty new, but it is a MUST HAVE for any SEO campaign. It basically shows you which keywords are relevant to a main one in Google’s eyes. Using this information, you can build links with anchors that you KNOW will improve your site’s ranking for a certain main keyword. You simply have to check it out to realize how much it can help your site’s rankings.

Microsoft AdCenter. If you are doing PPC or SEO on Yahoo and Bing, you’ll simply have to use this tool. AdCenter has a lot of great reports to offer, and besides the usual competition, click price and monthly searches information, you can also view the demographics of people performing the searches. This gives you a better idea about your potential customers, so you can design your Landing pages and ads accordingly.

KeywordSpy. With KeywordSpy, you can skip all the hard work that goes into creating the best ads on paid search and finding the best keywords to target. Using this service, you can find the best ads, keywords and landing pages in any niche that other professional marketers are using. Because of this, it is considered “grayhat” or even “blackhat”, as you can just copy someone’s hard work and easily outcompete him. But if you’re new to PPC, there’s no better way to learn how to create good campaigns than this. Besides, you can’t just blindly copy someone’s ads, landing pages and keywords, as your Quality Score will be lower and your ads might not show because they’ll be duplicates.

Jounce. Finally, the never-ending search for affiliate networks is over. Until now, the only way to find the best advertisers for your site and products with the highest affiliate payouts was to register at as many affiliate networks as possible. That was pretty hard, as you may know. With Jounce, you can find the best advertisers and products that have an affiliate program for your site and join only the networks that have the highest payout (or the best one – weekly or by Paypal, for example). This makes the whole process MUCH easier.

If you are an Internet marketer, you should definitely try the above tools out. Whether you’re a newbie or a seasoned pro, they WILL help you and make your work (and life) easier.