Rosalind Gardner vs. James Martell
Rosalind Gardner is the author of an ebook called the Super Affiliate Handbook, and James Martell is the author of another ebook called the Affiliate Marketers Handbook. Both ebooks are pretty good, but there's a significant difference in price. Gardner's book costs $47 and Martell's book costs $167. My opinion is that Martell's Affiliate Marketers Handbook is well worth the extra money.
The Super Affiliate Handbook is not a bad book at all. But Rosalind Gardner is a big fan of the PPC search engine approach to getting traffic to her affiliate sites. And that's not necessarily a bad way to get traffic to your sites, and it can be very profitable indeed if you're really good at it. But for the most part, it's very hard to make money in affiliate marketing buying traffic on a pay per click basis. It can be expensive, time consuming, and requires a lot of work to manage effectively. There was not a lot of great information on getting free traffic from the search engines.
Martell's Affiliate Marketers Handbook is all about free search engine traffic. James doesn't advocate using pay per click marketing for a simple reason: the profit margin is much higher when you're not buying the traffic. And James provides a specific map, an easy to follow gameplan/checklist to actually launching an affiliate site that's going to make money fairly quickly.
One of my favorite aspects of James Martell's ebook is that he doesn't promise a get-rich scheme. He explains exactly what work you need to do to actually make a living in this kind of business. And he doesn't overpromise how much money you can expect to make; after six months, if you build a site per his instructions, you should be earning $500 a month or more from the site. That doesn't sound like a tremendous amount of money, but say you build 10 sites making $500 a month--now you're making a full-time living. But make no mistake, there is work involved in generating that many sites that make that kind of revenue.
The other great thing about Martell's book is that he offers a couple of updates every month and good user support through his Affiliate Buzz newsletter and his updates page. He's very specific in his handbook about how to optimize for search engine traffic, but everyone who understands about search engine algorithms realize that this kind of information becomes dated fairly quickly. With James's updates, you're able to receive the latest information from James about how he's optimizing sites. And he's demonstrated that his techniques work.
I'll be honest--I'm glad I bought Rosalind Gardner's book, but I'm a lot more glad that I bought James Martell's book.
