Affiliate marketing is a uniquely bizarre industry. A large proportion of the experienced, highly successful affiliates out there have absolutely no relevant credentials from places like universities, academies or business schools.
Think about that for a second. There are a vast number of people making hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars in profit a year in IM, and they basically never went to school.
That’s nuts!
So why is that? A lot of it comes down to the unique characteristics of these individuals such as perseverance and outlook on life, but also due to the knowledge that experience has bought them. A lot of this experience comes from buying data. Not buying courses, diplomas, info products or WSOs --
buying data. But – don’t take this to mean you
shouldn’t absorb knowledge from every single faucet available! Many of the top affiliate marketers I know will read books
constantly.
They read articles of note, keep their fingers on the many pulses throbbing in this industry by tapping into authoritative blogs/feeds, and
* they constantly look to improve what they know about virtually everything.* Now, you may or may not know this, but online courses are currently
booming. There is a venerable plethora of free information out there – but the catch is a lot of it is dilute and not worth your time. You may notice that a lot of marketers tell everyone to read books on copywriting. This is because there are a tonne of good books, and they provide absolutely
* invaluable information.* With so much information around, surely there must be
some other courses worth our time. Better yet, courses that will make us better marketers, right?
You bet your ass there are. But more importantly, there are courses that will help you become better at business as a whole. Want to tell your friends that you’re an entrepreneur? Or put it on your LinkedIn profile? Hell, even say so on Tinder?
That’s not going to happen if you hide under a rock and just upload banners and hit F5 all day. Below is a list of online courses that are completely FREE and are worth your time.
These are the most useful courses around that are applicable to Internet entrepreneurship and marketing, taught by some of the most accomplished professors at the best schools in the world. If you are serious about making marketing work, have free time on your hands, or just want to increase your knowledge (always a good thing), consider checking these out.
Coursera/Duke: A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior
https://www.coursera.org/course/behavioralecon Length/Start date: The course ran this spring and all materials are available. It's designed to last eight weeks. Time commitment: Seven to 10 hours a week, and no background is required other than a "curiosity about human nature." Why you should take it: People aren't always rational. They do unpredictable things that are often baffling to those who try to think rationally. The course is taught by Duke's Dan Ariely, author of the best selling "Predictably Irrational" and one of the most prominent scholars studying this through the lens of behavioral economics. The idea is to introduce students to the range of cases where people make decisions inconsistent with standard economic theory, which assumes rational decision making, and think about how insights about that sort of behavior can be applied. ####
Udacity: Introduction to Statistics
https://www.udacity.com/course/st101 Length/Start date: Self-paced Time commitment/preequisites: The time commitment is entirely up to the student, though those looking to complete it should set themselves some goals. No prerequisites are required other than basic algebra. There is a programming track which uses Python, however. Why you should take it: Statistics and data analysis are at the core of just about everything in business. Knowing how to read data and pull insight out of it is always useful. This course provides a tool-set that would be valuable to just about anybody. This course is designed to teach the basics of extracting meaning from data, visualizing it, and understanding the relationships in data with math. The course is taught by Udacity CEO and Stanford Research professor Sebastian Thrun, who founded Google X, the company's research lab, and helped develop driverless cars and Google Glass. ####
MIT: Introduction to Microeconomics
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics...icroeconomics/ Length/Start date: Self-paced Time commitment/prerequisites: The course is taken entirely independently. It's the first economics course undergraduates take, so no background is needed there. Some basic, single variable calculus is required, but no more than you'd learn in a high school calculus class. Why you should take it: Economics has a bad reputation, but it's absolutely vital. This introductory microeconomics class is one of the most popular that MIT has made available, and is taught by Jonathan Gruber. He's been teaching there for 20 years and is an extremely prominent economist who helped design Massachusetts' groundbreaking health-care reform. Economics, and microeconomics in particular, are about how we make the best decision given scarce resources like money or time. That's useful in itself, as is this course as background for more advanced work. ####
Wharton/Coursera: An Introduction To Financial Accounting
https://www.coursera.org/course/accounting Length/start date: Runs ten weeks Time commitment/prerequisites: Six to eight hours a week, and no background in the area required. Why you should take it: Learning the basics of accounting and how to read a balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow is incredibly useful for just about anybody. The course is also designed for students with no background in the subject, and the only math requirement is knowing how to add and subtract. As the professor puts it, accounting is "the language of business." The course is also offered by one of the most prestigious business schools in the country, and taught by one of Wharton's senior and most highly regarded faculty members, Brian Bushee, a 13-year veteran of Wharton and former Harvard Business School professor. "You will not only better understand what people in the business media are talking about," the course description says, "you will also be able to notice when they don’t know what they are talking about!" ####
Wharton/Coursera: An Introduction to Marketing
https://www.coursera.org/course/marketing Length/Start date: Nine weeks long Time commitment/prerequisites: Requires five to six hours a week. Though no formal prerequisites are required, this is an MBA course, so a business background helps. Why you should take it: Wharton has one of the highest-ranked marketing programs in the world, and this course is team-taught by three of its stars: Peter Fader, David Bell, and Barbara E. Khan. Anybody interested in starting a business needs to learn how to relate to customers and sell their products, so this is an absolutely essential course. ####
Udacity: How to Build a Startup
https://www.udacity.com/course/ep245 Length/Start date: Self-paced Time commitment/prerequisites: Students are free to pace themselves, and Blank suggests that they have at least some idea of the business they want to create. Why you should take it: This course is a bit unusual, in that it's not produced in partnership with a university or traditional professor, and it's not about a traditional academic subject. It's a practical and thorough guide to how to create your own company by successful serial entrepreneur Steve Blank, based on an approach he's been using and teaching for years. It takes would-be entrepreneurs through everything from developing a viable product to figuring out how they're actually going to make money. ####
Harvard/EdX: Introduction to Computer Science
https://www.edx.org/course/harvard-u...r-science/1022 Length/start date: A new, graded course starts January 2014. An older, self-paced version is already available. Time commitment: Eight problem sets, each of which will take an estimated 15 to 20 hours to master the material and complete, two quizzes, and a final project. Why you should take it: Though the course is difficult and time consuming, it's also a very thorough and rigorous introduction to the basics of computer science. It's designed for people who have no computer programming experience, to convince them to major in it. Students learn computer science theory and concepts in languages including C, PHP, JavaScript, SQL, CSS, and HTML. A good EdX alternative is MIT's introductory course, which focuses more narrowly on the Python language. Udacity also offers an introductory computer science course, which also focuses on Python. ####
UC Berkeley/EdX: Software as a Service
https://www.edx.org/course/berkeley/...e-service/1136 Length/start date: Lasts five weeks Time commitment/prerequisites: No estimated time commitment listed. Proficiency in an object-oriented programming language like Java, C#, C++, Python, or Ruby is required. The basics of Ruby are taught at an accelerated pace with that assumption. Why you should take it: This is one of the more advanced courses on the list, as it requires prior knowledge of programming. Still, if you have enough background, this course is definitely worth it. Software as a Service (SaaS) and agile development are more than just buzzwords in the tech world, they're essential. ####
EdX/MIT: Innovation and Commercialization
https://www.edx.org/course/mit/3-086...ialization/880 Length/start date: Runs for 13 weeks Time commitment/prerequisites: 12 hours a week, and no prerequisites required other than an interest in the subject. Why you should take it: It’s one thing to talk about coming up with an innovative product, but it's another thing entirely to do it. The same goes for making an existing company more agile and quicker to come up with new ideas. This course takes an intelligent look at how innovation happens in the real world, rather than how people talk about it in meetings. It's taught by Eugene Fitzgerald, who came up with important innovations in his own right during his time at AT&T's Bell Labs and later; and Andreas Wankerl, who runs the Innovation Interface at MIT and Cornell. ####
Wharton/Coursera: An introduction to Operations Management
https://www.coursera.org/course/operations Length/Start date: Eight weeks long Time commitment/prerequisites: Five to seven hours a week. The course is "designed for business students and executives," but there are no academic or math requirements. Why you should take it: This is the second course in Wharton's "MBA Foundation Series," which teaches a lot of what a first-year student enrolled at the school would learn. Anyone who has hopes to rise from being an employee to managing or running a company needs to learn some of the key principles behind analyzing and improving business processes, boosting productivity, and meeting higher standards. The professor, Christian Terwiesch is a multiple award-winner for his teaching at Wharton, and wrote one of the most popular textbooks on operations management.
