Courses

Recommended courses:

Matthew Glanfield is a well-known and well respected internet marketer who has made a lot of money from affiliate marketing, and he has now set up the BBO Institute, which consists of a variety of courses to assist people who are new to affiliate marketing.  The course is laid out in simple steps, and is extremely easy to follow, even if you are a total newbie.  He also has a forum, plus a team of people on a helpdesk, who are very helpful.  To see some videos that will explain the course in more detail, click here.

The Internet Marketing Centre are another company who really know their stuff, and they have a variety of products to assist you at all stages of your internet marketing career.  I recently attended one their bootcamps, and was very impressed by the whole outfit.  They have a great course which is ideal if you already have a product, and want to learn how to market it on the internet.  They teach from the very basics to advance tactics for growing your business.  They will also show you how to research and find products if you do not already have a product in mind to sell.

Basic Resources

Website

You need your own website and hosting.  Do NOT advertise an affiliate site directly using Google adwords as you will pay over the top for advertising costs.  You can purchase a domain name for less than $10US per year, and you will own it.  Hosting can be as cheap as $7US per month.  I personally use Godaddy for domain names, and Hostgator for web hosting.

Email Marketing

You need an autoresponder.  One of the best ways to make money is to build a list of subscribers, and provide them with quality information.  You probably know yourself that you are much more likely to buy from someone who has taken the time to build a relationship with you.  Statistics also show that the average person needs to be contacted 7 times before they will purchase, so using an autoresponder is the way to go.  It is all automated, and will ensure you do not get accused of spamming.  I personally use Getresponse, who are good.  Aweber is also used by lots of on-line marketers and is recommended.  I suggest you look at both.  Getresponse do have a free version which you may want to try, but it does have limitations.

Website Builder

By having your own domain name, you will also need to build your own website, unless you opt for a ready-made website like the Plug In Profit Site.  There are a few options available:

Squeeze Page - if you are looking to have just a one page website with a small bit of information, and an opt-in box, Your Squeeze Page is the answer.  This software allows you to quickly and easily create squeeze pages, and you can split test automatically which is very important. 

Before you go and buy Dreamweaver or Frontpage, which will cost you hundreds of dollars, you should check out MyFreeWebsiteBuilder.  This is totally free to download, and comes with a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor.

I created this website using Xsitepro, which is a very popular website builder, and is extremely easy to use, you don't need to know or understand HTML, (which is great, because I don't understand it).  This isn't free, but is a fantastic piece of software, and is worth your while looking at.