Ever wondered how the big boys make so much money with affiliate programs? Here's some ideas to get you started on your own affiliate marketing business.

You will need to spend some time researching the best paying affiliate programs. Affiliate programs that I have used are Commission Junction and Clickbank. Commission Junction sell hard goods whilst Clickbank sell information products and software. Both programs have some high paying affiliate products.

Before you create any web pages or choose a domain name, you need to do some research. Take time to decide what sort of product you might wish to sell and then locate an affiliate program related to your chosen product. For example, if you have an interest in dogs, then you might choose an affiliate e-book about Dog Training. Make a note of all the relevant products and what your commission will be.

How to find your affiliate program

Commission Junction

You can search their programs by advertiser name or products. Hence, in our example of "dogs", you could search on the products box for this and find merchants who are selling this.

They also have a very useful tool called the EPC, which reflects how much has been earned for every 100 clicks. For example, if the EPC is $5, this would mean that for every 100 clicks, Commission Junction has paid out $5.

Now it's just simple maths, if you refer 100 customers to this program each day, you can expect to earn $5, 200 customers earns $10 and so on.

This is just a rough estimate of traffic, but it certainly helps in choosing one merchant over another, when theyre selling the same or similar products.

Also, it will depend on how relevant the advert is to your site. In our example, a vegetarian dog food advert placed on a site about dogs is likely to be more successful than one placed on a site about home cooking!

Clickbank

Visit CBmall.com to search the products that Clickbank have available. Again, you might search for "dogs" and come up with "dog training" products to market online.

Then create a mini-site focused on your product. Visit ez-search-engine-optimization.com and download Andrews free book on Creating Niche Sites for step by step instructions to creating a site which is highly attractive to the search engines.

Buying traffic

A quick way to get traffic to your site is to pay for clicks from either Overture or Google. Buying traffic is a numbers game and is only likely to be profitable if you are selling something of a high value.

If you are selling an e-book for which you get paid a $25 commission fee and you are converting 1% of your visitors into sales, you can afford to pay up to 25 cents per click. Ideally youd pay less than this so that you can make a profit!

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