In this 2-part post of the Internet Business Ideas Guide, I will explore one of the most common ventures that new internet marketers go into - Affiliate Marketing. It is fairly common for new internet marketers to look at affiliates as their first possible business venture. If you have bought those self-help books along the lines of How to Make Money Online, it’s highly likely that affiliate marketing would be an area of focus. There are several reasons for this:

1. As an affiliate, you won’t have to develop your own products. This saves you time and money.
2. With affiliate products, you are able to test out a product, without incurring development costs
3. Affiliates are rewarded with huge commissions (usually between 25% and 75%)
4. Usually in digital form, affiliate products incur no inventory and are downloaded automatically once a purchase is made.
5. You are able to promote several products online at the same time.
6. You have a huge pool of affiliate products to choose from.

How to choose an affiliate product?

Theoretically, you can sell ANY affiliate product. Affiliate networks such as www.clickbank.com, www.cj.com, www.clickbooth.com, or www.pepperjamnetwork.com, are just some popular sites where you can sign up as an affiliate marketer for
free.

Essentially, your success with affiliate marketing depends on several factors:

1. Find a niche product

Discover your niche by researching on your interests, and identifying the right keywords to use for your niche. If you’ve not read my previous posts on these topics, they are:

• How to identify niche items to sell online?

• How to generate ideas on what to sell online?

2. The Quality of the Sales Letter

The Sales Letter needs to be convincing enough to your target customers, before any sale can be made. It needs to appeal to readers needs and offer him a solution to his problems.

The fact is, is would be quite difficult for amateur internet marketers to tell if a sales letter is effective, just by reading it. Publishers of the product would have experienced testing, rewriting and refining of content of the sales letter, before it is what it is today.

However, while you may find a sales letter effective, other readers may not feel the same way as you. Therefore, you need tools to help to evaluate an affiliate product.

3. Evaluate affiliate product performance

Use statistical information provided by your affiliate network to see if an affiliate product performs. Indicators such as Gravity, Popularity, Referred Rate and Commission are used by Clickbank, while sites such as CBmall.com and CBTrends.com provide greater
analysis options.

According to How to Select The best Affiliate Product To Promote, these are criteria used to filter performing, and non-performing affiliate products.

• Ideally in the top 10 Search Results of Clickbank’s catalog
• High gravity of between 100 and 200 (too high, and you are facing tough competition)
• Referred rate of over 80% - with over 80% of sales conducted by affiliates, this shows there is money to be made with the affiliate product
• High commission percentage
• Product and Publisher credibility

What’s next in Part 2?

• Affiliate Product Testing
• Unprofitable affiliate products (even though they pass the evaluation test)
• A review of several popular affiliate network sites
• Further Reading Resources