Anyone who has ever decided to try to make a living through online affiliate marketing has likely discovered the obvious - there is a lot to know. On the surface, affiliate marketing seems easy enough; all you have to do is promote a product, and let your customers click on a special link to the product's Website. If the customer buys, you make money.

That part is easy enough, but the mechanics of informing the public and making the sales can get rather complicated in a hurry. How do you promote the product? E-mail? A Website? If promoting by e-mail, where do you get the address to which to send the messages? What kind of Website do you build? How do you get paid? For someone new to affiliate marketing, these questions can quickly become overwhelming.

Fortunately, there are plenty of available solutions. Many marketers have written affordable ebooks on the topic of affiliate marketing. These books typically sell for $37-$97 and cover various facets of the subject - pay per click advertising, choosing a product to sell, e-mail list generation and more. These books, while often informative, are rarely comprehensive. That frequently makes it necessary for would-be marketers to purchase a number of different books in order to gain the well-rounded knowledge necessary to succeed in online marketing.

Another option is to purchase a complete course. There are a number of them available on the market; one such example is Internet Marketing Explained. This course covers virtually all topics related to marketing products on the Internet and includes dozens of hours of audio material as well as nearly a thousand pages of printed information. One benefit of a formal course is that they come in the form of physical material - real, tangible books, as opposed to ebooks, which come in a PDF format. While comprehensive courses do include just about everything the potential marketer would want to know, the price is substantially higher than for ebooks, with price tags that typically range from $997-$1997.

Which is the best way to go? Both ebooks and complete courses have their pluses and minuses. Ebooks are certainly more affordable, but the number of them that you may need to purchase may ultimately lead you to spend just as much money as you would have on a formal marketing course. The complete course gives you everything you need in one place, but may require a financial investment that few people can readily afford. The purchase of ebooks does allow the buyer to spread the investment out over time, however. Spending money over time may work better for cash-strapped marketers.

Ebooks and formal marketing courses are both good options for those who are interested in learning about online marketing. Which one is better is mostly a personal choice, depending on the amount of cash the individual has on hand and whether the would-be marketer really needs to learn a lot of marketing information at once. For many students of marketing, learning a little bit at a time works best. That, as it happens, is also the most affordable solution.