Nine explainers, and the one worth reading first argues that traffic is not the first problem. Rick Roberts puts the offer and the page ahead of the visitor count, which is the opposite of what most people starting out want to hear.
He works through affiliate marketing from the beginning: where products come from, why a marketplace exists at all, what a vendor gets out of letting strangers sell for them. Niche selection gets its own set of rules. Sales letters are broken into four parts you can check your own page against.
The viral marketing piece is the most opinionated of them. He argues that corporate scripts kill a campaign dead, and that gimmicks, pranks and a willingness to look slightly ridiculous do the work instead, which fits an author who also writes about health products and social networking without changing his voice.
The prose is stiff in places and reads like it was tidied more than it was written. Look past that. The structure underneath holds up, and a person who has bought a domain and still has no idea what belongs on it will get further here than with another traffic course.