Super Affiliate Handbook Review

Let me just start off by saying I didn’t buy this ebook for many years. The title alone made me think it was going to be a hype filled book with nothing of substance. I mean really ~ super affililiate? Who really attains super affiliate status? Is there really such a thing?

Well YES. There is, and Rosalind Gardner is one of them and has written this book to show how she did it.  A super affiliate is a person who is the top  earner for a company they promote.  Rosalind carries that title along with Lynn Terry who is the reason I bought this book to begin with. Her review was really good and I realized this book was not just another quickly put together book that would only clutter up my computer.

Rosalind Gardner wrote this book over 5 years ago. Amazing huh? How many ebooks on internet marketing do you know of that are still around and just as pertinent 5 years later? Not many for sure.  Rosalind has updated this book a few times, the most recent being just last year. She has incorporated a lot of new things that have come up and this book is very current.

So let me tell you the story.

A while ago I had an incident that really made me stop and look at my business model and look at how I was doing business on the internet. Yeah, I make a decent living, but what would happen if this … what would happen if that… Those questions starting freaking me out a little and I decided to buy this book to see if I could increase my revenue not just from this blog, but create some other income streams as well.

When I bought the book I wasn’t sure what techniques Rosalind was going to teach, but I really felt like I had to diversify a little bit ~ beyond the Squidoo lenses, and beyond the sites I already had pulling in income. I wanted to move my business to the next level ~ I wanted to reach the bigger income goals I have set for myself. What I’m doing works great, but I wanted something more!

Super Affiliate Handbook

This book is huge. I mean huge. It’s over 200 pages. It took me an entire afternoon to read, and really soak in the information. (which is amazing since most ebooks I spend only a short time with), and I’ve been back to review it a number of times since then.

Is it for beginners?

This book is designed for beginners (she walks you through an entire section on the benefits of affiliate marketing, as well as what it is and how it works for you, an affiliate) as well as people who are already making money with affiliate marketing, but want to ramp up their earnings.  There are plenty of screen shots in the book to help you walk through the steps to get going.

I particularly like how she walks through the entire process, giving you the information in the order you need it so you can follow along and take action as you go. It worked well for the way my mind works.

Checklists ~ ohhh, I love checklists, and this book has them. She has checklists throughout the book to help you come up with ideas, implement tasks, problems to watch out for, things to avoid. The lists are very clear and concise and help you implement the ideas she’s discussing. They are definitely worth printing out.

What kind of affiliate marketing is this?

There are a lot of ways to do affiliate marketing for sure, the way she teaches happens to align very well with my values and the way I like to do business. She’s not about building a million sites with minimal content that will make you a dollar a day. She’s about building quality sites that will pay dividends over the long haul. She’s about giving your reader great content ~ and combining that content with products and services that fit in seamlessly. When I looked at her sites I had clicked through to a product page before I’d even realized she was selling the product. It was just so seamless.She can teach you that.

See live active super affiliate sites

Yes ~ I said I looked at her sites. This is really cool and isn’t done very often. She actually shows you some of her working and in operation sites.  It was fantastic to be able to go to the sites and look at them, study what she’s doing, how she’s doing it, what I like about it, what I could use from it, how I could make it work for me. It completely changed how I look at my affiliate sites for sure.

Get started exercises while you read

She has exercises where you actually write things down, brainstorm get ideas. These exercises really helped me get clear about what I wanted to do and how I could do it.

My biggest takeaway

I’ve been doing internet and affiliate marketing for years now. I have made more sites than I can count. I’ve left more sites than I’d like to admit half done. Through my entire internet marketing career I have never really treated it like a business.

This is the biggest AHA moment I took from this book.

Planning a site ~ before you start.  That means planning all the different elements that make up a site ahead of time. This kind of planning has revolutionized the way I think about sites! It is really remarkable. A business owner doesn’t just go racing in and build stuff without a full plan of what it’s going to do, how it’s going to it and when.

The second part of the business piece I learned was record keeping and organization. OMG. I know I suck at this ~ my husband tells me this every time he does our taxes. But what I didn’t realize is how much money I’m losing out on. When you keep records ~ monthly income/expenditure records you can ask for a raise ~ you know exactly how much you’re worth and so do affiliate managers.

Keeping track of the numbers and doing regularly with diligence was the missing piece for me. Rosalind walks you through her entire process for tracking every number you could want or need.  I hate math, I hate numbers ~ but this was actually interesting to me, and it felt like something I could totally do, in fact, I’ve started doing it.

Don’t worry if you haven’t made your first money yet ~ you will be so much better off to start implementing these “business” activities and mindset right from the beginning. I swear it will change your business. (you are in business right?)

What didn’t I like?

She talks a bit about PPC (although it is not her only way to drive traffic), as someone who has never dove into PPC (and is thinking I might like to put my toe in the water) I didn’t feel like there was enough information to really get started on that.

That’s about it. The book is really good but it’s not a PPC training guide.

This book would be great for people who…

• need a real business model they can stick with.

• prefer to focus on one or two topics long term

• have a passion for a topic

• need some help getting their business organized

• need to learn to look at their business AS a business

• want to increase their income

• want to become a super affiliate

Is it right for you?

Only you can say. Learn more about what Rosiland has to say about the Super Affiliate Handbook. If you’re thinking about getting it, know that it is a quality book and will give you a ton of information to move your business forward.  I have to say I wish I had bought this book a few years ago. I think it would have made a big difference in the speed of which I made it to a full time income.