In order to make money online, and here I mean more than just some 50 dollars a month, you have to learn a lot of skills and techniques, especially about affiliate marketing. So, I can’t help you by providing any in-depth knowledge I’ve already learned by myself (I’m still a noob), but I can give you some good resources from where you can start. The following list contains 10 useful (and free) resources to learn more about affiliate marketing. Beside many other resources, I personally use these tools and information I find them very valuable.

1. Wickedfire

Wickedfire is a real awesome forum that mainly concentrates on affiliate marketing. There you’ll find a lot of good infos about the different aspects involved in marketing. It’s also a great place to find ideas that you can easily adopt by yourself. But be warned, the forum threads contains more or less rude language sometimes, which is a matter of taste. I personally like their style because it’s far more honest this way

2. Digitalpoint Forum

The Digitalpoint forum is another wonderful place to find useful background information on afiiliate marketing. I think, compared to Wickedfire, this forum offers even more threads dealing about making money stuff. It would take years until everything would be read there.

3. Affiliate Masters PDF

One of the best free ebooks about affiliate marketing is probably the Affiliate Masters Course from Sitesell.com. It contains 165 pages loaded with many infos, from finding the right niches to creating good landing pages. It’s definitely worth the download, and it’s free!

4. Thirty Day Challenge

The Thirty Day Challenge was (and is) a contest held over the last years. The goal is to teach other people how to make their first 10 bucks online within a single month. Everyday there was released a new piece of information that helped the readers to start their own business online. Although the contest is over now and the next one will start at August 1st this year, you can still follow the last challenge from 2007. The information holds true even for today. Just sign-up for free and follow the instructions. Prepare for some well done (and sometimes funny) video tutorials by Ed Dale!

5. Adwords Learning Center

With affiliate marketing you won’t come around doing some PPC advertising on one of the major advertising platforms like Google, Yahoo or MSN. If you need some good tutorials on how to set up Google Adwords campaigns, feel free to check out their learning center. They offer dozens of tutorial videos, ranging from the Google quality score, over the right ad copy to budget management. Very useful!

6. Wordtracker GTrends Tool

Wordtracker offers a free keyword research tool called GTrends. And I think it’s a must have for anyone trying to make money fro affiliate marketing. With Gtrends you can find many long tail keywords (up to 100 in the free edition), check their daily search volume and find competing sites that were optimized for the given keyword. It’s a fast and easy way to find good niches with less competition (which will make the most money).

7. Affiliate Networks

Some good affiliate networks you could join are Commission Junction and the Pepperjamnetwork for example. They both offer a great service and a huge portfolio of different products and services you can promote. Also Clickbank is worth atry if you want to promote electronic products like software or ebooks. Feel free to check out that link to find many more networks!

8. BANS Process Series

BANS stands for “Build A Niche Store” and is a nice software that allows you to start your very own eBay store. The BANS process series is a really good step-by-step tutorial on how to set up your first store.

9. Quit Your Day Job

QuitYourDayJob is one of the many blogs I’ll personally read on a regular basis. Sure, I could name a few dozens more here, but that would make that list even…longer. Anyway, QYDJ is really worth a look. You’ll find a lot of brilliant ideas about affiliate marketing and many links to other valuable resources.

10. Deezer.com

Last but not least, I’ll present you Deezer.com. Ok, actually it hasn’t anything to do with affiliate marketing. But it may help you while reading all those ebooks, forum threads and blog posts. Deezer.com is a fully free and legal music platform. You can listen to almost every song in the world. Search for your favorite artist or album, create a playlist and start listening your music for free (you can’t download the music to stay on the legal way). I personally listen to Deezer.com while doing my researches, it helps me to relax a little and I feel a lot better.

Ok, that’s all for now. I hope you like my list, maybe I’ll start another one when I have found more useful affiliate marketing resources.

Until then my sson-to-be marketers!
Querblogger