There are several ways to increase your affiliate marketing knowledge and they come with varying degrees of effort and resources required, but they generally fall into: information products, speaking to someone in person and forums/blog.

Speaking to an affiliate or super affiliate (generally referring to someone who makes at least $10,000 in profit from affiliate marketing) is hands-down the best way. You get to ask your question, get an answer, ask a follow up question and get an answer almost immediately.

Another solution is to gain information via an information product. This being Internet Marketing, your first inclination might be towards ebooks, but take note that this category also includes videos, DVDs, audio CDs and printed magazines and books. The depth of information might not be as comprehensive as talking to someone face-to-face, or maybe over an instant messenger or email, but what you lack in personalized attention is more than made up by the breadth of information available.

A third avenue is through forums and blogs. It can be a mess out there, sorting out the good forums and blogs from the great ones. But typically if the site has many visitors, a high PageRank (indicative of a good number of links and backlinks) and most importantly the reputation and buzz about the place, it’s likely to be a good source of information.

As forum and blog posts tend to be fairly episodic and ‘bite-sized’, you will have to spend a little more effort in pieceing together the information.

But taking all 3 methods in tandem, you’ll find your knowledge increasing rapidly.

The most significant factor in your development as an affiliate marketer lies in your ability to put your knowledge into action. Knowing is not enough, it’s the doing which brings in the dollars.

If you’re looking for a forum with a condusive atmosphere with a helpful administration and moderator team, you should check out the: 5 Star Affiliate Forum

If you’ve listened to the past episode in which 5 Star founder Linda Buquet was featured, you’d know that she’s a great resource and I was pleasantly surprised that she posted a reply to my forum post within a couple of minutes (It was about 2am her time I think).

Check out the: 5 Star Affiliate Forum