Affiliate marketing clinic study guide: 12 resources to get you going

If you’re an affiliate marketing novice, you and I have plenty in common. A few weeks ago, I knew little about the ins and outs of affiliate programs: how they work, the players involved, how to get started or how it fits into the typical multichannel marketing mix.

That’s partly how we arrived at today’s web clinic on the subject.

Back in 2003, MarketingExperiments tested affiliate programs, interviewed affiliate industry pros, and published an extensive, two-part research report on the topic: Affiliate Marketing Tested, Section 1 & Section 2. In 2006, further experiments by our team led to another research brief: The ROI on PPC vs. Affiliate Marketing.

Upon review, it seems many of those findings and recommendations still hold true for affiliates and merchants today.

And after our director of channel optimization, Aaron Rosenthal, and analyst and affiliate specialist Rob Reynard returned from the buzzing Affiliate Summit East show, we felt the time was right to revisit this topic and look at some new affiliate experiments we’ve conducted — including how those tests achieved gains of up to 165%.

Research and resources for affiliate marketing novices

For our web clinic, 57% of early registrants characterized themselves as “novices”  and 27% called themselves “experienced” in this area. So the following shortlist contains a dozen of the best articles, research, forums, and related resources we’ve seen that can help those who are just starting out.

• 2009 Affiliate Summit AffStat Report
• The Future of Affiliate Marketing
• Is It Time to Affiliate?
• Affiliate Marketing Blog
• Affiliate Classroom Blog
• Affzilla: Affiliate Marketing Tools
• Sugarrae: Affiliate Marketing
• Shoemoney.com (see cutting through the BS)
  
• Media Trust Blog: Podcasts
• Reputation Management for Affiliate Marketing
• 5 Star Affiliate Programs Forum
• ABestWeb Affiliate Marketing Forum

Let us know if you find these resources helpful and be sure to check back next week, when we’ll be posting Q&A and takeaways from today’s clinic.

Reminder: Our web clinic hashtag is #webclinic and you can follow us @MktgExperiments.