c1sissy , thank you for your post. If you wanna learn about AM this is the perfect place to do just that. Ive tried on my own with what i thought Affiliate marketing was about for 3 months and i decided to try something else Because i thought that i did everything well enough and with all the hard work i done should pay off. Im talking i spent my 2 hour lunch and dinner breaks on the puter working at this but no sales. I am also self taught and seen that i wanted to learn other area's of ecommerce. There is SO much though that you can easily become distracted from what you set out to do in the first place.
If you want to learn SEO there are some great ebooks out there. Im not endorsing any products but that might be a good place to start if your just beginning in that area. If you like i can forward some books that i got in my personal library.

Mr. Thompson,
I appreciate your post and 411. Do you have any suggestions to hunting for products? Ive heard that googling a niche that you are interested in is a good way to start and then going to overture and using a free tool there to see what words are going cheap on search engines when it comes to the advertising? Of course i tried this with some products and found words not bidded on but they werent bidded on because they were not relevant to what i was marketing. In the end i was left confused and not knowing if i was doing the right thing.

Question: Is Google adsense a economical and effective way to advertise a product?

Catalyst,
once again thank you very much for your wisdom. We need more people like you who will tell it how it really is. That way all the people that arent ambitous will know if they even want to take a crack at something like this. (trying to not offend anyone) I understand alot of people try at this and dont succeed because they expect success overnight. Alot are under the impression that you CAN just throw up some banners , make a mediocre website and maybe pay for a service to advertise for them and they cross their fingers. I know i did that at the beginning. It was fun but i know i was fully committed at that point. I knew that i was fooling myself and got discouraged to soon try my luck in MLM(lol) thinking that i would have a more positive experience with that.
I dont regret spending all the money i did to try a crack at my dreams, it was worth it and the lesson was valuable. I wanted to give up at times and think that people who work from home, investors, business owners,self employed were all myths or a secret club hidden somewhere. I almost gave up. Dreams were just dreams at that time. Making a buck online seemed to elusive. But now that i became a member at this forum there Is hope! There ARE real people doing this and i would like to learn from them and i would like to teach others what i learn. So even if i make only $10 a sale here and there its better than nothing right? lol
In 7 months i'll be getting out of the Navy and hopefully doing awesome in AM.
Just have to keep doing and learning.
Have you ever created a product?
Out of the 3 topics that Mr. Thompson wrote about which do you think would be the best?