Newbie Friendly Affiliate Marketing Blogs & Tips

Squidoo is a wonderful place to begin your affiliate marketing efforts. If you can come up with good content, it's easy to make great lenses that can rank well in Google. Sooner or later you will probably want to develop your own domain site but until you are ready, Squidoo works. Later on, it will be a useful supplement to your other online efforts so anything you learn now will continue to add value later.

There are a lot of excellent sites for learning to use Squidoo so I am not adding them to this lens. By now you should know about thefluffanutta's site SquidUtils and hopefully use it to improve your lenses. You should also know about Captain Squid's Blog which is a wonderful resource. I hope you visit both of them regularly.

Webmasters Make $$$

Whether you want to sell posters or not, it makes sense to join the All Posters program. They have posters to cover many different topics and with a link back you can freely use them on your lenses. Who knows, you might also sell some along the way. As an affiliate marketer, you need to create multiple streams of income. This can be one. :0)

What about the July 2009 Squidoo rules?

According to the official Newsflash: 4. Two special cases of note: Allposters and Clickbank. Lots of lensmasters use Allposters.com to punctuate their lenses with photos, as well as to make money from the Allposters affiliate program. For the most part, you do it fairly and well. You don't take advantage of your readers and you properly cite your sources. So Allposters is on the Whitelist for now and you can have as many outbound links as you like. But a word of caution not to overdo it.

Squidoo is all about good content that is good looking. If you use the AllPosters site to accent the rest of your work, you shouldn't have any problems.

Have you ever heard of the 30 Day Challenge? It's an A to Z crash course on the how to's and whys of Internet Marketing put on by Ed Dale and his team each August. Don't think you can sit back and jump in when August rolls around or you'll find yourself skurrying around trying to catch up. You see, the pre-season, although less intense, introduces the programs and gets you and your computer ready to do the challenge. It's a great place to meet other people who like you are learning the ropes and get help from other world class marketers. The main focus is on helping new people get going and it's specifically designed to be no hype for the 30 days. Granted, if you want to continue, you can join the 30 day Plus later on but it's not required.

So what is the 30 Day Challenge? It's to learn a marketing system from scratch and make your first $1.00 online in 30 days. You can still do last year's program but I would recommend visiting the other blogs and then joining the preseason that starts in June. Whether you are totally new to all of this or simply want to integrate what you already know into a viable system, the Thirty Day Challenge can help.

Here are some of my favorite Affiliate Marketing blogs. They aren't in any particular order because each of them is worth a visit. Most of them have a paid product to help them stay in business but offer a lot of good free info to help those who are starting out.

Caroline Middlebrook's Blog is where I got over my fear of editing and installing Wordpress Blogs. She has a pdf and videos showing step by step how to create niche blogs and even how to tweak your blog to increase its effectiveness. She also has a course called The Blogger's Bible which you can get in free installments or buy all at once if you prefer. Both of these are newbie friendly.

PotPieGirl's Blog is also a great site for those who need to stop lurking and get productive. Her information on Six Step Niche Sites is very helpful. Once you feel that you have most of the basic tools and need to put it all together, her OneWeekMarketing Plan is a great buy.

If you are a little more comfortable understanding Affiliate Marketing information, MasonWorld (Mark Mason) is a treasure trove of information. I like his Article Directory List that lets you evaluate directories by their rank.

Another Blog that I have recently started following is Internet Marketing with Josh Spaulding He has more good solid information. Besides, I won an iPod Touch in his recent contest. Maybe you will be the lucky winner next time. :0)

As you get a little more experience, you will realize the importance of keeping your eye on emerging trends. An interesting blog to follow is Mashable. It seems to be more of a group effort and the content is ever changing. If you scan it in your RSS reader, you will surely have a headline grab your eye now and again. What, you haven't figured out an RSS reader yet? I posted some info on my Gandree Consolidated Blog that should help you with that.

All these sites are great but who has time to visit them everyday? If I had to run to each site, I would never get anything done. That's why RSS is so great. You don't even need a special RSS reader because Google provides that for you. If you are new to all of this, the Google desktop makes it fun. If you prefer to sift the info and run, try the Google Reader. They both make running through the info that your favorite blogger puts out quick and easy. Seriously, If you need help, visit my Gandree Consolidated Blog. I wrote a series just for beginners like you. :0)

According to Google, Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

In plain English, if there is something you Google Search for on a regular basis, you can set a Google Alert to monitor it and send you the results on a regular basis. If your email box is too full, you can have the results sent to your Google reader. You can have up to 1000 alerts so you can set it for whatever catches your interest or even your name and it will keep you up to date on what is happening.

When you create a blog and have to come up with regular posts, anything that gives you fresh ideas is welcome. That's the beauty of Google alerts. It brings fresh ideas to you that you can repackage and post. How cool is that?