Being an affiliate marketer is often a difficult business.  There is much more to learn than most of us anticipated when we first started.  And the learning curve can be so steep that many simply give up.

The most frequent difficulty among failed or failing affiliate marketing enterprises is buying magical, secret plans 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 stay dedicated 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 has to do with using a marketing approach using blog entries, not only your blogs but the blogs of many other people.  This system is a very useful membership site called MyArticleNetwork.  Here I’m going to focus upon one use to which an affiliate marketer can put it, although the prior link in this paragraph will deliver you to a lengthier description of how the entire system works and may benefit you.

If you use the traditional method of article marketing, you write articles and submit those articles to article directories.  With that method, your links are limited to the author’s resource box, usually published at the end of the article.  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.  With this system, affiliate links are permitted.  You can check it out for yourself by visiting this remarkable article marketing system that directly submits unique versions of your articles to blogs and websites in your niche from its list of over 10,000 sites anxious to receive content.

The other resource is a complete educational system established exclusively for affiliate marketers of various size businesses as well as those preparing for a career in affiliate management.  This is a completely revamped reissue of Anik Singal’s famous Affiliate Classroom.  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.  I strongly urge you to sign up for the complete information before all the spaces are taken.  No joke, this will fill very quickly.

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.

When Willie sutton,a famous American bank robber in the early 2oth century was asked why he robbed banks, he famously replied, ‘because that’s where the money is’.

This famous quote describes  an irrefutable yet very simple principle that underlies a very slick way of making quick affiliate marketing money from the internet.   It’s called  by various names: ‘the Commission Ritual method’, ‘the leech’, etc. and has been offered before as a quick way to make money online as an affiliate marketer by several online marketing experts.

The simple idea behind it is to specifically target an internet searcher precisely at the moment when he has selected what he wants to buy and he has his credit card at the ready.  It is proven way to  generate fast cash and recurring streams of passive income. A successful sniper site can be making profit literally in days, and you could establish a whole network of sniper conversion pages online over a peried of days and weeks.  

However, like all things that sound too good to be true, the Google cash sniper technique, while it can be very effective, is not the easiest thing in the world to do successfully.You just need to have the knowlege of how and why it works, and to have the right tools and techniques at your disposal.

Because upwards of 99% of internet searches are not focused on actually buying anything, the essense of the cash sniper method is to focus your efforts very specifically on those who are actually in the buying mode.The most import aspect of the sniper method is to target only those prospects who have likely already made a buying decision, but who are now simply looking for confirmation or something extra to make them take the plunge.

Consider how people do internet searches:

1. First, most people start by looking for general solutions to a problem or need
2. Second, they go through the process of narrowing available choices to the best ones for them
3. Third they are likely to make the final choice on what they need, which could be just information, or it may be an actual product they want to buy.
4. Then, they may be looking for final confirmation before they take the final buying step.

Thus, perhaps the most effective time to capture the buyer’s attention with your website or ad is when he is most ready to buy during the final confirmation phase. In this way, you’ll be able to intercept, leech or snipe the opportunity to sell so long as you put a really good sales or conversion page in front of them.   So, sniping success requires these key elements:

• A great money channel sniping target that is keyword specific
• A place to snipe from, your top ranked website or blog
• The weapon, your compelling conversion copy
• The ammunition, your unique selling proposition

See Commission Ritual for an example of a well constructed sniper site.