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How to Find Profitable Affiliate Products to Promote

Posted: 07 Jul 2009 07:20 AM PDT

“How do I find affiliate products to promote on my blog?”

Last week I spoke with a small group of bloggers here in Melbourne over a coffee. One of the topics that a number of them were interested in talking about was affiliate marketing. They were struggling with the advertising as a model to make money from their blogs and wanted to branch out and experiment with affiliate promotions on their blog.

However wanting to get into affiliate marketing and actually doing it are two different things. There are a number of challenges to overcome first.

One of these challenges is finding the right product to promoted.

Choosing the right products to promote in affiliate promotions is crucial for a number of reasons - the two main ones being:

1. Relevant Products are Key - if your blog draws an audience centered around a particular topic or demographic you’re unlikely to be able to sell products that have no relevancy to your blog’s topic.

2. The Quality of Products can Impact Your Long Term Brand - promote low quality products and you could be hurting your brand. Readers remember who they heard about products from and their trust of you and your blog will be increased or decreased by what you recommend to them.

So - choosing the right affiliate product is crucial. It not only impacts conversions and profitability but it impacts your brand and relationships with readers.

How to Find the Right Affiliate Product to Promote

A few tips and thoughts on finding affiliate programs to promote come to mind:

Google It - this one isn’t rocket science but it does work. If you have a Beauty Product blog google “Beauty Products Affiliate Program”. Insert your main keywords into that search and you may just find products that are relevant to your niche.
Look at Your Competition - what products are other people promoting in your niche. Quite often a quick glance down the sidebar of another successful blog in your niche to see what products and services they are promoting will reveal affiliate products you could promote to (and it could also point you to some relevant advertisers to promote).
Check out AdSense Ads - many of the AdSense ads appearing besides Google search results, on other blogs and even on your own blog are likely to be products with affiliate programs attached. Don’t click the ads on your own blog but checking out what the ads promote can reveal all kinds of potential affiliate partners. The same thing is true with other types of advertising. For example I was recently surfing on Facebook and saw an ad relevant for my blog - on clicking it I found a new product with an affiliate program that I’d not heard of before.
Approach Potential Affiliate Partners - this one might not work if you’re a new blog with small traffic but as your blog grows you might find yourself in a position to approach the makers of a product or service to see if they’d start some kind of affiliate program for you. I’ve done this a couple of times over the last year and it has been great. The best part of it is that you get a head start on your competition for the promotion as you’re likely to be the only person promoting it.
Search Affiliate networks - lastly there are quite a few affiliate networks around that list many affiliate programs. Most of these have search functions to allow you to type in keywords and find promotions relevant to your niche. Check out MarketLeverage, Clickbank, Commission Junction, PepperJam Network (disclaimer, MarketLeverage sponsors ProBlogger) and many more.
Search Online Stores for Products - many online stores like Amazon have affiliate programs attached to them. In general the comissions are not massive (for example Amazon’s range from as low as 4% up to 15% depending upon the type of product and how much you sell) - I guess they have narrower profit margins) - but stores like this have a massive range of products and can be a good place to start while you build traffic and find other programs.