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What's the best way to take in all of this valuable information? (7)

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I am overwhelmed by the amount of information. It is great to read threads that provide such value, but it feels cluttered and I never get around to actually studying.

What has helped you all succeed with studying all of this great information within STM?

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Hi affiliateguy! I see that you've joined up recently - welcome to STM! Love your username btw! I'm surprised it wasn't already taken.

If you're new to affiliate marketing, I would suggest that you start by reading all the major threads in the "Newbie Zone" section. Then, I would suggest for you to just pick set up all the infrastructure stuff - hosting and tracking, sign up to some affiliate networks, pick a traffic type and sign up to some of the corresponding traffic networks, talk to your affiliate network managers to find out what kinds of offers are hot right now, and just launch a campaign to get some practical experience.

How is all this relevant to your question?

Only after you have some practical experience, will you have the context and foundation necessary to assimilate the information you read about here. I know first-hand what it is like to keep reading and reading and reading and taking notes, just because I wanted to be SURE I knew what I was doing before launching my first campaign. Trust me - that day would never come, because you can never know enough to be completely confident that what you do will result in profits.

And the more you read, the more questions you'll have. And the more options you see, the more undecided you'll become.

So at one point I just said to myself "screw reading - let's just take some action and see what happens!"


So again, my best advice would be to:

1)Read all the major threads in the "Newbie Zone" section.

2)Set up your first campaign ASAP, and look for relevant posts to solve any immediate issues that you encounter along the way (or start new threads to ask for help if you can't find the answer in existing threads).

3)Continue to spend some time each day to read forum posts, in addition to launching new campaigns and maintaining existing ones.


Additional tips on finding the rarest gems in a sea of gems:

-If you go into any forum section, and click on the "Replies/Views" menu to sort by either replies or views in descending order, you'll see some of the best posts at the top.

-Caurmen is always scouring the forums for a list of the best posts, which he would then post in this subforum here and on facebook here.

-If you find a particular member's posts especially helpful, you can click into their profile to check out all their latest posts and the latest threads they started. In addition, you can ask to add them as a "friend" so that any new posts they make will appear in your "My Activity" post feed (under the "All" tab and the "Friends" tab).


Good luck and let us know if you need anything else!



Amy

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If you want to get better at learning, the most valuable resource I know of is the Coursera course Learning How To Learn.

It's taught by a couple of the biggest experts on learning in the world, and I know a lot of the techniques it teaches will be directly applicable to STM because I've used 'em myself

Also, it's short, easy bursts of stuff. Won't take long to learn.

Aside from that, I agree with everything Vortex said! In particular, it's important to put this stuff into action as early as possible, and to not worry about getting things wrong early on. Provided you don't accidentally spend all your budget or something (harder to do than you might worry), mistakes are how you learn!

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I have this same problem. The first day on this forum I was overwhelmed with an influx of new information and it was especially confusing when I had little context to put it into.

Since then, according to RescueTime (software that logs my activity) I've logged in 22 hours on this forum. I think it's only now that I'm beginning to have a basic general overview understanding of how affiliate marketing works in tandem.

A lot of times I would have at least a dozen different tabs open. Sometimes I end up just skimming the thread and then copying and pasting certain snippets of posts into a text editor with the thread url so that I can revisit and review later on.

Not sure of how to go about optimally learning all of this information aside from getting a mentor, becoming a reclusive hermit, and launching a couple dozen campaigns. Deploy campaign, lose money, collect data, revise process based on new information, constantly reiterate, and then finally succeed?

I did sign up for the program starting tomorrow in the hopes of drastically reducing the learning curve, overcoming technical barriers, as well as launching that first campaign quickly.

Once I actually start launching campaigns, I think I'll be able to identify which specific aspects to focus on and adjust from there.

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AM is like anything else in life, business related or just learning something in general. It simply takes time, Rome wasn't built in a day either, right?

The simple fact, that you guys landed here on STM, gives you a massive advantage. You'd have a hard time finding a resource packed with more information than this one. Add the very helpful community and you have a solid basement for your progress.

I understand the wealth of information can be overwhelming, especially for people who have no past experience with affiliate marketing. It's a good idea to split the learning process into smaller steps.

First of all, you need to understand how the biz works, there are 3 basic steps : get traffic(traffic sources), promote something (affiliate networks), get a conversion (advertisers) ... get paid. AM has one HUGE advantage, starting a campaign only takes a few hours from the very beginning all the way to actually seeing traffic flowing. Once you do this, you will see all the 3 steps in action and that will clear a lot of the confusion.

This is what I always recommend to anyone, read about the basics first and as soon as you are even remotely capable to launch a campaign, do it. Seeing a campaign running in real time, is a big eye-opener.

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Yeah, I agree. Time, experience, the right disposition, persistence, a sufficient monthly budget to practice can all factor into whether you'll succeed in such an endeavor as AM.

Definitely, not only the wealth of information but also the ability to ask questions is very valuable. Planning on going through the follow-alongs and case studies sometime soon to gain insight on what works and what doesn't.

It's overwhelming when you're just starting out and the separate processes are looked at in exclusion. Once I started building a mental framework of AM as a system then it started making more sense. I think making flowcharts and mindmaps might also be helpful.

Yeah, launching a campaign quickly seems to be recommended a lot. It's something I still need to do but hopefully real soon. You start gaining immediate feedback in the form of data. Maybe you start reevaluating things such as the difficulty of reaching profitability with your first campaign and how some minute details have a bigger impact than you realized. Start making mistakes and over time gradually reduce the number of corrections.

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As many will say, I'll echo it to further drill it down. Focus on one area and master it.

Don't give up. Don't quit. Keep trying and testing. Take action.

Limit reading. You can only learn so much from reading. A lot of the guys who talk don't know, and a lot of the guys who know don't talk. The best way is to figure it out for yourself. It's so easy to waste countless hours on STM reading valuable information - however - if it's not relating to your core focus, skip it. Your time can be better spent taking action on the area you have chosen to master.

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