When you are just starting up as an Affiliate Marketer and decide you want to make money online, it’s very easy to get distracted by get rich quick scams, hyped e-books or false assumptions about the affiliate business.

That’s why I decided to make a shortlist of hand picked resources to guide your Internet Entrepreneurship path through Affiliate Marketing:

Forums

• 5 Star Affiliate Marketing Forums  by Linda Buquet. Not sure why your site is not converting? Still waiting for the first sale? Not enough visitors to your site? Feeling down? 5 Star Affiliate Forums it’s the “Affiliates doctor”, ready to heal you up and guide your path through the help of the great community around it.
• AssociatePrograms Affiliate Marketing forum by Allan Gardyne. It’s a friendly, helpful affiliate forum where you can find answers about getting started, how to earn more, affiliate networks, blogging and many more.
• The #1 Affiliate Marketing Forum :: ABestWeb  - probably the largest forum about affiliate business.

Blogs

• Shoemoney . There are plenty of Internet Entrepreneurs out there but Shoemoney has an unbiased view on making money online and he got famous for showing his over 100k earnings Adsense check 
• Problogger by Darren Rowse. Making money with your blog, best online money makers, and lots of tips and resources to run your online business.

E-books

• If you haven’t already bought an affiliate marketing e-book, well, that’s good as you can get most of the information for free anyway like Allan Gardyne’s “77 Ways To Get Traffic nearly all FREE” 

Conferences

• Affiliate Summit  is the place to be. It happens several times a year in different locations in USA, including the first Summit in Europe in London this year.

Magazines, trainings, statistics

• E-consultancy  - a generous list of studies, statistics and facts about almost everything that happens online
• Affiliate Classroom  - Step-by-Step Training For All Levels of Affiliates
• Revenue Magazine  - a revenue magazine which delivers the most integrated and personally relevant information to today’s online marketers

Most of the financial news regarding the economy has been pretty dismal over the past few months. Plummeting stocks, failing banks, hundreds of billions of dollars being passed around in the hopes of fixing it all. People are understandably worried about the economy, their jobs, their homes and their credit.

Meanwhile, in the past 3 months my net income has risen 20% even though I’ve only been working an hour or two per day since my son was born. How is that possible? It’s simple: Internet Marketing is very resistant to the economic woes facing other industries. Let’s talk about why.

Advertising

Television and radio are kept alive by the ROI (return on investment) of their sponsors, and the commercial web is no different. The advantage of advertising online is that it’s far more efficient. When a sponsor puts an ad on a television show or radio program, they can only be vaguely certain of who is watching or listening. Sure the networks provide their own research in demographics and how large their audience is, but much of it is guesswork and impossible to know for sure.

Also, results from TV and radio are very difficult to track. How do you know if the person who just bought your widget was motivated to do so by seeing or hearing your commercial? Again, it’s guesswork.

The internet is different. When you place an ad online, you can track exactly how many people saw it, precisely how many people responded (clicked-through) and exactly how much money you earned from it. You can work to refine and improve your ads to improve your ROI as well. It’s vastly superior to TV and radio in that regard.

So when it comes time for companies to tighten their belts, it only makes sense that they will focus on the ad medium that has the best ROI.

What does this mean for you, the Internet Marketer? It means that your advertising-driven web sites that use AdSense or other programs will likely remain relatively healthy during hard times. My own AdSense income has not changed much despite the economic troubles, which is no surprise to me. It’s also good news for anyone in the search engine optimization business (or related businesses such as pay-per-click), since they, too offer great ROI opportunities.

Selling Information

Another reason that Internet Marketing does well when other sectors are having problems is that people who lose their jobs in those other sectors often turn to the Internet to try and earn a living. When an industry starts having problems, people who lose their jobs in that industry often have a very hard time finding work in the same industry. If they can’t find a job, what can they do? Again, many turn to the Internet — the “new economy.”

Unfortunately, there are a lot of sharks out there ready to take advantage of these individuals. But for those of us who are honestly offering real opportunities and solutions, we find even more customers during such hard times.

Leveling the Risk

A third reason why Internet Marketing tends to do well even when things look gloomy everywhere else is because the Internet makes it much easier to level your risk. I have customers in 60+ countries. When one country’s economy isn’t doing so well, another’s is flying high, and so I’m less affected. A unique advantage of doing business on the web.

So stay focused on your online business, and remember that you’re in a better position to weather the storm than most.