Being an affiliate or associate marketer is often a challenging business.  We need to know a lot more than we thought when we first entered the field.  And the learning curve can be so steep that many simply give up.

The most frequent difficulty among failed affiliate marketing enterprises is buying magical, secret strategies and not putting them into action to test if they actually work.  Some are no more than buyers; they don’t even read the books or watch the videos they buy.  I hope that you are among those who will remain committed over the long haul, constantly improving your knowledge base and actually applying what you learn by taking action.  If not, please just stop reading, because you’ll simply waste money, and your business will fail, regardless.  I’m sorry for being so blunt.

There are two resources for affiliate marketers that I include in my recommendations.  One of those is a new approach to article marketing that automatically forwards your articles to many blogs as well as traditional websites, not just those you run yourself.  The system is called My Article Network.  I have described the way it works elsewhere (see that link).  Here, I am going to describe one way that it can be used creatively by an affiliate marketer.

If you write an article for distribution via one or more article directories, your link is limited to the author’s resource box, usually placed at the bottom of the content.  In the new method of article marketing, you can use the much more effective contextual linking, that is placing your links directly within the content of the article, where they are far more likely to deliver targeted traffic to your vendor’s site.  Furthermore, the top article directories (those with the most traffic, which are most likely to show up in the search engine directories) will not allow you to place a direct affiliate link into even the resource box.  However, this new, vastly improved approach allow you to use affiliate links that will go directly to the vendor, without having to send your hard-won traffic to your own site as a costly intermediate step.  You can get a feel for the whole process by visiting the site for this article marketing system that will pre-spin your article so that unique versions are distributed to websites and blogs within your niche from their membership of over 10,000 websites.

The other resource is a complete educational system set up exclusively for affiliate marketers of various size businesses as well as those preparing for a career as an affiliate manager.  It is a brand new version of Anik Singal’s well received AffiliateClassroom.  Singal, who was named as one of four Business Week Magazine’s young entrepreneurs of 2008, has spent two years, along with his partner, revamping the critically acclaimed program to make it even more expansive and comprehensive.  If you are truly serious about improving your affiliate marketing business, at least sign up to receive the full information.

As I write this, the product has not yet launched, so all you can do is sign up on the squeeze page to be continually updated.  Depending upon when you read this article, it is possible that it will have already sold out.  Check to see if they have established a waiting list.  If so, sign up and hope that a space for you opens.

Anticipating a question that I would ask, yes, both of these have affiliate programs, but you can’t use your own affiliate links to purchase either membership.  You must sign up for both prior to gaining access to the affiliate programs.

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