Recently Halfgain released a wonderful ebook which talks about how the most successful affiliates are making money, its named as "Affiliate Marketing Ph.D" . We were among the very first to get hold of this ebook. Good part is that it's absolutely free of cost and you can download it from this link - http://blogprofitz.com/AffiliateMarketingPhD.rar (zipped) or http://blogprofitz.com/AffiliateMarketingPhD.pdf (PDF)

If you are unsure what the book covers then here is the table of contents of this book for your reference.

Table of Contents 
 
Introduction 
What You'll Find in this Book 
Why Listen to Me 
The 3 Principles I've Found Most Helpful 
 
I. Affiliate Marketing 101 
What Is Affiliate Marketing 
Why Affiliate Marketing 
A Few Money Making Guidelines 
1. Branding 
2. Speed 
3. Numbers 
4. Spending 
The Affiliate Strategy Simplified 
 
II. How to Research Your Market 
Step 1: Finding Markets 
Step 2: Think You've Found a Potential Market?
 
Example: How Scott Missed the Boat 
Step 3: Finding The Keywords That Pay  
 
III. Building Profitable Affiliate Sites 
Step 1: Setting up a Commission‐Ready Affiliate Blog 
Step 2: Filling Your Blog with Monetized Content  
Step 3: Monetizing with Affiliate Stores 
Step 4: Affiliate Blog Essentials 
Step 5: Multiple Streams of Income from Your Blog 
 
IV. The Big 12 Marketing Strategies 
1. Article marketing 
2. Free page creation 
3. Video marketing 
4. Classified ads  
5. PPC (Pay Per Click Advertising)
6. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
7. Forum campaign 
8. Free hosted blog creation 
9. Social networking (social news and social bookmarking)
 10. Link/ad/review buying 
11. Blog commenting 
12. Press releases 
 
V. Outsourcing: Supplemental Section 
 
Final Thoughts

Based on the suggestions we have received, we are planning to integrate a affiliate programs directory in our website where we'll list the best affiliate programs on the web. Since we are using Joomla for our site, we are in process of looking for a ideal extension to suit this requirement. We have a few options in hand but it would be great if you can suggest some good extensions which can be integrated seamlessly in the site.

I know there are already many very good affiliate program directories available but the main idea behind having it in our site is to ensure that our users can find all affiliate marketing resources at one place instead of searching on Internet. We are committed to provide you the best and latest resources from affiliate marketing world at one place.

I am writing this post to make an announcement which is going to hurt me a lot and many of our users also will be shocked by this anouncement :-(

From the topic of the post you must have come to know what this is all about. Just to make it formal, we have removed the forum from our site. The main reason being the spams. It was our mistake not to have security mechanism in place like captcha verifications and the forum we chose for this purpose was not highly secure. Since we provide all information for free and our intention was never to make money from this site, we can't afford to pay for quality forum software like vBulletin. The number of users crossed 500 within a span of 4 months but we realized that almost 70% of the users (~350 users) were spam accounts and were created through automated bots. We sincearly apologize to our 150 genuine users who were actively participating in the forums.

We know there are some very good open source forums available like phpBB, fireboard, SMF etc. Initially we though for phpBB but there are some integration issues with Joomla so dropped the idea. We are planning to re-create the forum in near future and we'll take all security measures this time. Most probably, we'll be using Fireboard but we are waiting for few new features to be added to FB and once it's done we'll plan to integrate the forum back in our site. In fact, we are not just planning for forum but for a full featured community site with features like forums, user blog, groups etc.

It feels so good to see that the number of users in our forum are increasing with such a rapid pace. From last post to this post, almost 100 new users have registered with Affiliate Plugin Central.

Keep posting !!