An affiliate marketer is someone who sells other people's products. There are lots of affiliate marketing

programs out there. Some of the most popular ones are Clickbank, Commission Junction and Amazon. Clickbank is very popular because of their high commission rates.

Often times  you can promote clickbank products for up to 75 % commission rates! That's a really good commission don't you think? So let's be clear. If you sell a product that costs $100 you make $75.

You don't actually make the sales when you are an affiliate, you simply refer visitors to the sales page on the publisher's site.

 

Say you have an affiliate link on your site, or maybe in your latest blog post, If a visitor clicks the link and purchases a product you make money. It's a very simple concept but affiliate marketing is not that easy.  

Do Your Market Research First!

Anybody want to sell floppy discs? You will waste a ton of time promoting the wrong affiliate products if you don’t do your research first.  So here I will guide you step by step through the process of selecting an affiliate product to market from Clickbank  (I like clickbank because of the high commissions offered. Sometimes up to %75! ).


 1.  Sign up for a Clickbank ID. It takes about two minutes and it’s free.

 2.  Once you are logged in go to the Clickbank Marketplace. This is where you can browse thousands of affiliate products.

 3.  Make a list of  potential affiliate products. Browse for a couple of hours first and try to narrow it down to maybe five potential products.

 4.  Now that you’ve found some affiliate products you need to check the stats to narrow it down even further.
$/sale: $40.67   This is how much you make per sale.

%/sale: 66.0%   This tells you what percentage your cut is.

%refd: 86.0%    This is the percent of sales generated by  affiliates. You want this number   to be high, around %70 or higher.

grav: 81.59     This tells you how many affiliates are gravitating toward this product.

You generally want a product to be between 65-120 on the gravity scale. A brand new product will have a gravity of say .89. A highly popular product can have a gravity of 300 or higher. That is usually an indication that the market is saturated with affiliates trying to market that product.

 5.  I always check the sales page I’m going to be referring my traffic to. I like to see it benefit oriented and with a strong sales copy. If the sales pages stinks then you’ll make no money!

 6.  Next step is to evaluate the amount of search engine traffic you can get to your blog or site. Use a keyword tool like GoodKeywords or Keyword Elite and do a broad search related to your product. In this case I would choose something like “credit”.

   You can see a lot of 3 and 4 word phrases that get around 1000 searches per month. That might not seem like a lot but when you add it all up it’s significant.  You would like some of the phrases to be related to the problem that the product solves. These are the searchers that will most likely buy. These long tail phrases are easier to rank for too.

 7.  Now, type your keyphrase in Google “with quotes” and see if there are some sponsored results. Check for  sponsored results to make sure you dont market a dead market. The sponsored results are on the far right of the page.  People overlook this step all the time and then they wonder why they aren’t making any money marketing affiliate products.


With this basic guideline you should be able to avoid wasting all of your time marketing dead products. In fact, this is a really great method for uncovering the best affiliate products to promote.

Many people want to just find a product and then promote it all day and night. That doesn’t work. Successful affiliate marketing requires research first and marketing later.