Affiliate Marketers Handbook, 2005 - Ebook Review
If you were only to buy one ebook in your entire affiliate marketing career, James Martell's Affiliate Marketers Handbook, 2005 is the one you should buy.
Buying this ebook was the first "big" decision I made when I started out in affiliate marketing. It was the second digital infoproduct I ever purchased - the first was a $29 ebook, and it was definitely much easier to plunk down $29 than it was to hand over $167.
Luckily, it turned out to be a very good decision on my part.
Yes, the price is hefty in comparison to a lot of other stuff out there. But this book is really all you need. Armed with the Affiliate Marketer's Handbook, an HTML editor, a domain name and web hosting, you really can launch a successful affiliate marketing career.
The thing is, with this book in hand, you really won't have any excuse for not creating your own affiliate marketing site. Not that that means anything, considering I sat on this book for half a year before I actually started working on it. But that's just me. And as usual, I found that once I started, it was a lot easier to keep going.
Martell-type sites now make up over half of my Internet business strategy. And the only reason I'm not doing only Martell-type sites is because I like to diversify my projects.
There are three main reasons why the strategy set out in the Affiliate Marketer's Handbook works: the focus on (1) keyword-rich content, (2) on-page optimization and (3) the Martell internal linking strategy.
And perhaps the best part is the way James Martell has set his strategy down for his students, using a step-by-step blueprint - including baby steps. Those baby steps really help with the "getting started" part.
If you're a novice at search engine optimization, you'll find that after you've been doing this for a while and start learning more about optimization, you'll be able to read through James' ebook again and see exactly why it all works.
But the nice thing is that you don't need to know a thing about search engine optimization to give it a go. James' method works - you just need to commit to it and stick with it. By working through the ebook, you'll end up with a content-rich, well-optimized site.
You probably won't be able to quit your day job after your first site is up, but you'll have taken that first important step.
Like everything else that's good about affiliate marketing, this ebook is not about getting rich quick. It's about developing an Internet business with solid foundations. It takes an initial outlay of hard work, but James has provided a good blueprint for getting there.
A few additional notes:
If you are experienced at putting up websites, you will definitely find the material on using Frontpage to be really basic. Bear with the book, because the meat of it is not in the technical details of site building, but rather in the strategy behind the way the site is built.
Also, because I had purchased the Affiliate Marketers Handbook early last year, I was well-versed in James' strategy when I read the 2005 version. (Actually, if you've read the original version, all you really need to do is read the 2005 update notes at the front of the manual).
If you are new to the book, you definitely should read the book as James suggests at the beginning of the 2005 edition. Skim through the 2005 updates, and then read the original text. James has put convenient hyperlinks between the original sections and his 2005 notes, so you can tell at a glance if there is updatedl information that is pertinent to building websites today. The basic structure of his technique hasn't changed, though, so reading through the original parts of the book will give you the foundation you'll need to start building your Martell-style sites.
Click here to purchase the Affiliate Marketer's Handbook, 2005, get more information or download the table of contents..
