Ask yourself some questions

When looking for resources you need to make sure that the resources you are looking at are really suitable for you. Ask yourself these questions:

1. Do I have any experience of affiliate marketing?
2. Have I made money consistently as an affiliate marketer?
3. Do I have a list of people who have bought products through me?
4. Do I have a Clickbank account?

If you answered 'No' to the first three questions, then you need affiliate resources that will get you up to speed on affiliate marketing quickly. If you answered no to question 4, then you need to hop over to Clickbank and set up an account as an affiliate. This will enable you to market thousands of products in many different niches.

That is good, but actually you want to start marketing one of two products - if you try to market too many you will fail. Even so, Clickbank is an excellent marketing resource, and it is free. It also ranks all products available on its network so you can see which are selling well, and which are not.

You are your most important resource

The most important resource is yourself, and your business. What I mean here is that the resources should match where you are and what you know today. Leave the advanced resources until you are ready for them. Otherwise you can end up spending a lot of money and getting confused about the whole business.

Before you go out and buy anything, decide what your realistic goals are with affiliate marketing. You want to decide how you are going to market, where you are going to market, and what you are going to market. Then, set goals that are attainable. 'I will make $20,000 a month in three months' is not realistic. 'My goal is to make $1,000 in three months' is.

Don't have a business? Well, once you start operating as an affiliate you need to treat your marketing as a business. A business is based on some methods. It requires some discipline about the hours you work, the records you keep, the tools you use, and the methods you develop. And it needs resources like affiliate marketing directories, affiliate marketing networks, a computer and somewhere to work. Then you will need some training resources.

Your methods need to be based on sound marketing techniques, and will form your most important resource. You develop them by finding a system that works and gets you started making money, and then you turn into your unique system.

On the way, though, you need to develop a very critical approach to assessing any affiliate marketing resource, so that you do not get carried away by marketing hype and waste a lot of money. This is really a case of seeing through the hype to what is actually on offer.