Affiliate marketing is sending leads to a sales page and getting paid for everyone of your leads that buy. But how do you select an affiliate product? How can you tell which affiliate products will sell and which won't sell?

The process of choosing an affiliate program to become involved with is not as hard as it may seem as long as you know what to look for and what you want. You need to know how to search for affiliate programs and how to compare one to another.

The first thing you need to know before you pick an affiliate program is what market or what niche do you want to sell in. For example do you want to sell internet marketing information, self help information or gardening information?

There are so many products you can sell, you need to narrow you choice to start with by answering that question. You will be most likely to succeed in an area you either know something about or are interested in.

Once you pick your niche you are ready to start looking. The largest collection of information products with affiliate programs is Clickbank. There are thousands of products in dozens of categories and hundreds of sub categories listed for affiliates to choose from.

Go to Clickbank and look around a little bit to get a feel for the site and read some of the information about getting started. If you do not have a Clickbank account, you need to sign up for one. It is through this account that you will be paid, so it is important to sign up.

Once that is done go to Clickbank marketplace. There is a link to marketplace at the top of the main page. Marketplace is where you can search for affiliate programs. They are organized by categories which is why you need to have an idea about the market or niche you want to sell to ahead of time.

There is a simple search engine there that will allow you to search by category, keyword, and sub-category. Once you enter the search parameters the system lists your results. There are some statistics that are shown for all each of the results. The key ones are gravity, total earned per sale, percent earned per sale and percent of sales by affiliates.

The most important number is gravity. Gravity is a score that Clickbank assigns to each affiliate product according to their secret formula. It has to do with how many sales and how recently those sales have occurred.

Suffice to say that high gravity means that affiliates are making a lot of commissions on sales. Low gravity means that there has not been many sales at all. So the gravity is an important measure of how successful a product is.

You do not want to select the product with highest gravity because that also means that there will be the highest number of competitors selling that product. It would be very difficult for you start with a product that has so much competition.

You would be much better off looking for a product with a gravity somewhere between 75 and 150. That way you know that the product sells fairly well and you won't have as much competition as the top products will have.

Once you find a number of products you might be interested in based on the gravity and category you can then start looking at the other factors such as total paid and percent paid. Always start with a good number of possibilities and narrow it down from there.

You can be more confident in picking the right affiliate product by understanding how to use the gravity numbers at Clickbank. That is a great start to picking your winning affiliate product.