Sure, when you set up the ONLY store in a town booming with gold finds, then you would do very well selling shovels and other tools. Maybe you could even name your own price.

Don't compete with 60 million sites

The Internet may offer lots of opportunities, but the gold digging days are over. Now, there are 60 million websites selling products aimed at making money online. Do you think you have a chance of competing with 60 million, and getting your web page ranked highly or even be able to advertise cheaply? No way.

Compete with a few thousand in niches

The sane alternative is to look for niches or niche affiliate marketing programs. So how do you do this? Well, you look for a market, a market that has plenty of people interested in buying things in it. Here are a couple of big markets of this type: Golfers and pet owners, both of whom spend a lot of money are interested in new things to buy in that niche.

But these are big markets, not niches. You need to work out your own niche affiliate marketing program which is a micro-niche within that niche. Here's an example of a micro-niche: wolfdogs. These dogs are actually crossed between German Shepherds and wolves, and they are bred mainly in central Europe. They are rare, but there is a band of people interested in them.

Now I am not suggesting you should get into that niche, as these dogs are not allowed in many countries, but you can see that this is a very small niche. Labrador dogs would be a niche but a bigger one, and training labrador dogs would be another small one.

Find if the market is buoyant

But it is no good just picking out a subject like that. Once you think of a niche, here are a couple of tests to see if it is worth getting into. First, go to amazon.com or EBay, and see if there are many products related to that niche. You can also get a ranking at amazon.com for top-selling books in different market segments, which is a useful check. In fact, golf does not figure that highly, because golfers buy equipment mostly.

Once you have ascertained that the basic market is worthwhile, you need to make sure that people are advertising in this sector. The easy way to do this is to go to Google and search for the term for your micro-niche, not the main niche. Are they any Adwords adverts on the right of the main entries? If the market is buoyant, there should be a whole column of them.

Next, you need to find affiliate products that fit the market, and fit it well. Always do things this way round, and you will succeed: find the market, then find the product to fit that market. Then get marketing!