First, find your market



The way to start the search is to decide what market you want to get into. The easiest way to do this is to go to the Clickbank marketplace and look through categories of interest and find products with high gravity. At this point you just want to find a market with several products with high gravity - at least over 50, and preferably over 100.

That tells you there is a good market there. A better first step is to go to amazon.com and find the ranking of the best sellers in a market niche. The lower numbers indicate a strong market, and a number over 200,000 is not worth getting into.

Now you know there are products selling in the market, make sure that this is a market online. Here the trick is to put in a few relevant keywords, and make sure there are plenty of Adwords ads on the page. These are usually the two items at the top of the page, and all the small items in the right hand column. When you go the second page for the keyword, there should be some adverts there.

A big market and a tiny one

Here are a couple of examples - car rental and 16-foot sailing dinghies. Type in 'car rental' and you will find adverts on the third page, and more no doubt but that was as far as I went. This is a very big market, with over 40 million websites competing. As an aside, there are only 440,000 sites competing for 'luxury car rental', and ads on page two.

By contrast, 16-foot sailing dinghies is such a small market that there are ads only on the first page, and most are not really relevant. If you are a dinghy sailor you might want to get into that market, but the simple fact is that it is too small.

You can see that luxury car rental is better than car rental, and that as a general rule the keywords you use to advertise should have three or four words, occasionally two words.

Next find a suitable product

Now that you have found a possible market you can go back to Clickbank or any other affiliate network and look for products that fit the market. Next you want to see if the merchant gives you any help with your marketing, such as keywords, adverts, email letters, which can be sent only to people you know and have given permission to email them, of course.

It really is important to take these steps before jumping into a market. I know, I have made that mistake, and spent of lot of time trying to compete in huge markets. Don't do it. Find a buoyant market, then find a niche in that market, and then find a suitable product - this is the way to find good affiliate marketing opportunities.