Affiliate Marketing Secrets

I want to promote my new blog article in the home based business niche. I am considering entering it in directories. What is the best gig of that sort, or is there a better method to use my $5? NO black hat SEO for me!

I have a 3-month old site (my first) with which I directly sell my own product (as a vendor) through Clickbank. However I have just seen that a search on Google for any of my keywords now only brings up a certain affiliates hoplink in place of my site. The meta description is mine and the SE results/rankings match those in my Google Webmaster Tools so it definitely should be my direct site link coming up and not an affiliate.
My official site is http://www.teachenglishabroadguide.com
The result that comes up is
http://www.teachenglishabroadguide.com/?hop=andrewghay
A search for “teach english abroad guide” will show this on the first page.
On yahoo it looks fine.
Can anybody tell me if this is some dirty black hat trick by the affiliate and what I should do to get my link back (preferably without losing my rankings)?
I’d be very grateful for any help.

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Affiliate marketing is the process of paying someone to do the advertising for you, then you pay them per sale or action. This is affiliate marketing from the advertisers’ (the product seller) point of view. Affiliates don’t see it that way though.

As an affiliate here is my definition of affiliate marketing: it’s the process of match-making a buyer with a seller. This definition was first introduced to affiliates’ training by Travis Sago, the author of “Bum Marketing”.

Starting to make money on the Internet as an affiliate is one of the easiest business models. The low start up costs made it easy for everyone, whether qualified or not, to start an affiliate marketing business. 2010 witnessed the release of tens of affiliate marketing training courses that claim to be the best ever in the field. That made it even easier for new affiliates to start their businesses.

In the process of match-making a seller with a buyer, the affiliates spend money and/or effort gathering information about the product and what it can do to which group of people. Then they spend more money and/or effort on advertising.

In this process the affiliates are taking all the risk on themselves, and only get paid for their successful promotional efforts. All of the experimenting, tweaking, researching, and optimizing expenses are on them. This situation resulted in two kinds of affiliates:

1. Those who would do anything to get the most out of their promotional efforts, including unethical and sometimes illegal practices, and

2. The affiliates who try hard to make their living honestly but fail to break even several times and finally they drop the ball and look for something else to do.

The super affiliates are not necessarily unethical or using the so called “black hat” techniques, but for most of them success didn’t come over night. They learned from their mistakes and had their “light-bulb moments”. Each on of them has specialized in one form or another to drive the “hungry crowds” down their promotional funnels and only started experimenting with other methods after they mastered what they are doing.

Formal affiliate marketing training, unfortunately, doesn’t exist. The alternative is buying all of the affiliate marketing training courses and learning from them, or doing your own research and gathering the information that you need in order to start.
The good news is that I have a completely free affiliate marketing training sereis posted on my website: http://marketing-online-101.com where I explain it the way I do it. But without the right vision and business mindset all of the training of the world will be worthless. So learn first, plan, then execute.

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