What ways to minimize time required to go from newbie to affiliate pro

What to learn, best course of action, etc.

[stlouislouis]

Hi,

Many successful affiliate professionals here have posted it has
taken them years to get to the point of making a full time living
from running their affiliate or e-commerce operations.

Looking back, what would you advise a dedicated and determined
newbie who wants to achieve the level of success needed to
provide a full time income from running affiliate or e-commerce sites?

How best to proceed? What to read and study? What skill sets to focus
on and master -- and in what order?

Thanks for sharing,

Louis

[theposter]

I am in this field since April, the very first month, I got top rankings for my search terms. and the market i target returns 500K results usually....all this by just reading about what the pro's said and then putting that into ACTION.

It takes just about 8 hours to understand fully the incestous relationships between Directories and Search engines.

After that you need to figure out what it takes to rank well on google and Inktomi. There is a big howto on google somewhere here on this forum.

I read a grat post at SEF on howto rank on Inktomi.

You get google and the rest will follow suite.

Its an easy biz...the only hassle is that we are bound by se update cycles :(

[Marcia]

Louis, don't even concern yourself with Inktomi for the time being. You can only target Ink when there are few or no Looksmart listings at MSN, and that's for individual pages for specific keyword phrases. The major concern today is for Google because of the vast exposure a good ranking with them will get for a site.

Here's Brett's Google Knowledge Base [webmasterworld.com], an incomparable resource.

We have people here who know Inktomi backward and forward, when you're ready post in our Pay for Spidering [webmasterworld.com] forum. There are some threads we can dig out for you that have some excellent information, it's basically just old-fashioned per page optimization.

You optimize "pages" for Inktomi and "sites" for Google, so a good strategy is to tackle the big picture first, then get down to the details.

[stlouislouis]

Thank you for the helpful info and links, Marcia!

I very much appreciate it.

Take care and absolute best wishes,

Louis

[Go60Guy]

Go to the Pubconference if there's still room.

[stlouislouis]

That's a great idea, Go60Guy! However, no can do this year. Right now I work full time as a
mainframe programmer/analyst. Can't schedule the vacation time to go this year.

I will definitely keep it in mind for next year though!

Basically, I'm spending most of my free time learning. Trying to choose
how I spend my time wisely so I get the most mileage out of the
time I can devote to it evenings and weekends. That's why I asked
about the best resources and courses of action/study.

Thanks again to one and all -- I really appreciate your helpful sharing.

Take care and absolute best wishes to you all,

Louis

[Marcia]

theposter, I also got top rankings for the first commercial site I did, and it was 100% accidental. I set out to find out how it happened and here I am today. :)

Louis, step by step, a few basics to learn first:

1. Choosing keywords and a domain name
2. Skills to put a small, simple web site together
3. The basics of *safe* optimization for search engine placement.
4. Pick out an affiliate program or programs based on what you read in this forum, what you feel comfortable with content and interest wise, and what's realistic for you from a competitive standpoint with keywords at your current level knowledge, which at this point probably is less than you'd like it to be.

Make a minimum investment so it's fun instead of critical to succeed; that way you'll enjoy it. Jump in and do it, expertise with anything grows as you practice, whether it's piano, a sport, or building web sites.

As you apply what you learn, the more you'll learn from your own experience and the more value you'll get from what you read here.

[DrCool]

One of the best ways to go from a newbie to pro is to learn quickly from your mistakes. Not every site you build will be successful. You need to have thick enough skin to chalk a failed project up as a learning experience and move on rather than pridefully trying to make it work. If you can figure out what made that site fail and learn from it you will eventually have a successful site and can call yourself a pro.