Affiliate marketing apprentice?

I was wondering if any successful affiliate marketers ($1000+ a month) were looking for an apprentice? Certainly someone would like to pass on their knowledge and wisdom to help out an aspiring marketer?

I have a year off before I go to college, and I would like to see if I can make affiliate marketing work for me. I already have my foot in the door; I currently have a wordpress website with 13 original articles. I have done all of the on page SEO, and I am working on acquiring traffic.

I am suffering from information overload. I keep getting articles denied by ezinearticles, which is of course my own fault, and I am having trouble moving forward. Trying to spin my own articles has already proven itself time consuming and tedious. I feel like my website/design/script/ skills are lacking and I just don't really understand how to continue developing my website. I mean, I can edit the html/css somewhat but I don't really know how to bring my website up to an appropriate quality. trying to find helpful resources online just confuses me more. Everything is discussed in such broad terms, that I am left with a broad outline and no clue how to ACTUALLY produce real results.

Even with the help of Affiloblueprint, specific steps like "submitting articles for backlinks" turn out to be a much more complex process, which i ultimately know nothing about. At this stage, I am not even sure if my articles are sufficient, yet I am at a point where I am tediously rewriting these uncertain articles for backlinks/traffic. I don't even know if these articles convert!

I think my issue is that I've always been better at learning from very focused and specific guided information and/or step based experience. I am very good at reproducing, for example: Reading has taught me to write well. If someone shows me how to do something, I pick it up incredibly fast as long as the steps are very specific and precise. Trying to research these processes myself has simply lead me to more affiliate products and misinformation. Based on this, I have emailed various webmasters for some more HANDS ON type help. I am of course focusing on affiliate marketing right now, but ultimately my goal is any type of revenue generating website.

Unfortunately no one will respond to me. Nobody making thousands off dollars of their website wants to share the specifics. Their time could be better used to create another revenue generating website or improve their current website, plus, I am a potential competitor. I understand the mindset, but I figure that there must be a couple of successful marketers out there that would like to pass on their methods and wisdom to a student (of sorts). There aren't exactly any COLLEGE CLASSES in online marketing.