The Six Best Books to Learn Affiliate Marketing

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why books?

oh, books. those things you may have read about in high school and now use as an easy way to look smart when there’s wine and cheese on the plate or to spruce up the background of your zoom calls. If you’re like a lot of people, you probably don’t read too many books, so it’s hard to see how or why they would apply to affiliate marketing. And you may wonder why reading books could be a good investment of time, with the industry evolving so fast; surely more dynamic mediums like podcasts, blogs or online videos are a more effective route to stay on top of things.

yes, that’s true. the books don’t evolve, except maybe a new edition every two years for some of them. dynamic content is better to stay informed about the latest news & major tactical innovations and platform updates, but the sheer amount of information available makes this like drinking through a fire hose. there is more information than ever, but that means there is also more bad information than ever.

You are reading: Books on affiliate marketing

It’s a double-edged sword. books that are a few or several years old won’t be up-to-date with all the nuances, but by their very nature of being around for a while, a process of natural selection has a chance to set in; bad content doesn’t keep selling, while good ideas have timeless value.

The same thing happens in music. Is the music of the 70s much better than the music of today? Or is it that after fifty years, the only music still heard from that era is the cream of the crop?

so think of books as a fantastic conduit for knowledge that, by its very nature, separates some of the good ideas from the bad.

Still not convinced? If there is something that seems to unite successful people, it is reading. And don’t just read tabloids or the latest fiction phenomenon, but read carefully to increase your knowledge. warren buffett reads 500 pages a day, bill gates carries about thirty pounds of books in a tote bag wherever he goes (spartan founder joe de sena should consider a large book bag instead of his kettlebell) Elon Musk learned to build rockets by devouring books, and Oprah Winfrey calls books her “personal path to freedom.”

an idea to read effectively

I don’t remember where I first heard this, but I love this heuristic for determining whether a new book is worth it: 100 pages minus your age.

Read 100 pages minus your age before deciding whether to continue or put the book down for something more worthwhile. strikes the perfect balance between spending enough time on a book to actually know if it’s worth while unabashedly acknowledging that, damn it, you only have so much time on this earth.

Also, Tim Ferriss has lots of other great tips for reading effectively and moving forward with what you’ve learned, but that’s another rabbit hole.

best books to learn affiliate marketing

I learned something about structured decision making in grad school, so let’s apply it (slightly) here. all we want is a bit of analytical rigor behind these recommendations, but not so much that we drown in numbers: we’re a simple, data-driven company, but we keep things fun.

structured decision making is just the process of assigning points to the things you want to analyze & compare based on the features you think are important. you can use it to compare important things, like potential business decisions or which restaurant to eat at. or books!

here’s my quick & dirty rubric:

first, crowdsourcing. I searched for “best books to learn affiliate marketing” and clicked on the top 10 articles. I reviewed each article and gave a point each time a book was mentioned in one of the lists. so if a particular book made six of the ten “best of” articles, it scored six points. there was more variability in these ten lists than I anticipated: 27 books made the spreadsheet, but to keep the focus on only the best ones, I narrowed it down to the six books that received at least five points each.
then look for valuable content. For those six, I looked up their Amazon review rating and the number of reviews that go with it. After all, sample size matters: a great review rating carries more weight if it’s the result of 10,000 ratings rather than 10. I then assigned a rating to each on a scale of 1 to 5, with five being the best and one worst, based on each book’s combination of overall review score and number of reviews.
finally, a popularity contest. I ranked each book in the amazon book category and assigned each one a score on the same scale from 1 to 5 based on how popular each one was. When looking at these numbers in the table below, remember that a lower range is better.

results

so without further ado, the results!

All of these six will teach you about affiliate marketing; that much is implied and not worth repeating for each. What I’d like to highlight is a specific angle or strength each book brings to the table. Hopefully that, together with this ranking, will give you a good place to start.

#1) From Nothing by Ian Pribyl

total score: 18

The runaway champion of our rankings! out of the blue focuses on effective internet marketing in general, not just affiliate marketing. he writes in a succinct and direct style and uses his own experiences, successes and failures as a serial digital entrepreneur as proof points along the way. if you like to learn through personal stories, this might be a good place to start.

#2 (tie) Affiliate Marketing: Launch a Six Figure Business with Clickbank Products, Affiliate Links, Amazon Affiliate Program and Internet Marketing (Online Business) by Noah Gray

total score: 13

noah gray has done a good job of creating a comprehensive instructional resource geared towards beginners. this book also emphasizes the brand perhaps a little more than the others.

#2 (tie) Affiliate Program Management: An Hour a Day by Evgenii “Geno” Prussakov

total score: 13

Many people describe this book, in a good way, as a manual. what they mean is that it does an exceptional job of explaining the intricacies of affiliate marketing for program managers or anyone interested in the terminology, players, and strategies involved in affiliate marketing.

mr. prussakov is often cited as an influential leader in affiliate marketing.

#3) Performance Partnerships by Robert Glazer

total score: 12

Where performance partnerships shine is in how they offer insight into the past and future of affiliate marketing. like mr. prussakov upstairs, mr. Glaser is often cited as an industry thought leader and shares valuable perspectives on how the affiliate marketing industry works, how it should work, and the importance of building strong relationships.

#4) Affiliate Marketing: Secrets by Chandler Wright

total score: 11

All books on this are suitable for affiliate marketing beginners, but this one is perhaps even more so. requires absolutely no prior knowledge in the field and aims to give a beginner a solid basic understanding of affiliate marketing.

#5) the complete guide to affiliate marketing on the web by bruce brown

total score: 9

Bruce Brown’s Affiliate Marketing Overview is aimed primarily at seller-side program managers, not content creators looking for more information on becoming an affiliate.

It’s good for beginners, but intermediate to professional marketers will likely find the content lacks enough detail to be of value to them.

put it all together

There you have it, a short list of the best books to start learning affiliate marketing or continue your journey in the field. I hope you have found this quasi-rigorous breakdown useful and that you can extract some solid insights from these books. or at least a book or two to test the 100 page minus my age approach.

If you’re looking for more, there are plenty of videos and online courses where you can work on your affiliate marketing knowledge. There’s also our excellent (but hey, we’re biased) blog that covers a variety of affiliate topics, including interviews with industry and thought leaders.

about the author

Hi, I’m Nate Bender. I am a born and raised mountaineer with a passion for trail running and bringing more data to environmental work. when i’m not running ultramarathons, i’m doing two master’s degrees at the university of montana in resource conservation (exp ’22) and business analytics (exp ’23). In my spare time, I run marketing and data analytics for a climate action nonprofit called Footprints Running. and for my graduate work, I’ve written about the intersection of data with various topics: climate refugee data rights, energy efficiency in the built environment, and mobilizing collective climate activism, among others. While I’m not as well versed in affiliate marketing as the pros at geniuslink, this experience gives me a good holistic view of how they leverage data and technology to help their clients be more efficient and profitable in a changing online landscape. I also viscerally hate clickbait articles, waking up early, and tomatoes. so there it is.

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The Six Best Books to Learn Affiliate Marketing – Geniuslink Blog