5 Ways To Discover Affiliate Products That Make Money

On my recent post about pre-sell affiliate pages, Rich Minx left a question about how to find affiliate products to promote.

It’s actually something I never really thought about, so I thought I’d develop it into an article and came up with 5 ways that I have used to find affiliate products.

I’m sure that there are many more, so feel free to leave your ideas in the comments.

Here’s my Top 5 Ways to find affiliate programs that can actually make money.

5.) Copy Related Sites

When you visit other sites that relate to your topic, what are they promoting? Pay particular attention to sites that are more successful than you, and that promote products, especially in prominent positions on their sites, for extended periods of time.

It is likely that these are the affiliate programs that are making them money. Steal their ideas!

4.) Sign up for Related Mailing Lists

I have a special Gmail account for these, which I check once a week. I can look in quickly see what the sharks (I mean marketers) are pumping.

Since the “make money online” crowd are so intense, it’s hard to imagine that a drop of affiliate, money making raw meat won’t find its way on to someone’s list.

If there is anything interesting, meaning I could recommend in good conscience, then I’ll take a closer look.

3.) Investigate An Affiliate Forum

A Best Web & 5 Star Affiliate Programs are the two best I’m aware of. Search for your keywords or ask for recommendations.

Pay particular attention to products where the affiliate manager is active answering questions and helping people solve problems and make more money. Nothing worse than trying to be the affiliate of a company that doesn’t give a crap.

2.) Be an AdWords Spy

AdWords intelligence is a hot topic these days. Most of the latest products launches in the make money online area that relate to affiliate marketing are pushing some sort of AdWords Spying capabilities.

The concept for these products has been stolen from the first rule of direct response marketing:

If an ad is running for a long time, then it is likely to be profitable.

When applied to affiliate marketing with AdWords this would mean that if you find an ad that is attached to a specific keyword and product, running on Google for a long period of time, then it is probably producing a profit for the affiliate marketer (most people won’t toss money into a losing ad for very long).

Go to Google and search for a keyword that your site does well on. Then look at the sponsored listings. Anything that is being advertised is a potential product for you to promote on your site (providing that they have an affiliate program).

To take that spying to the next level and really turn it into market intelligence, you’ll need to track which ads are being run by affiliates and you’ll need to do it over time. To find out which ads are being run by affiliates, view the source code in Google and look for affiliate ID’s in redirect URLs of the ads.

It can be a lot of work, but the knowledge gained is extremely valuable because you will have the product, the keywords and the ad copy that is profitable…all lifted from someone else’s hard work.

If you’d like to see how this can all be automated, visit the Keyword Elite video page, scroll down and watch the project 5 demo video (really worth a look if you’re not aware of this type of research).

1.) Know Your Market – Live Your Market

You have to be living your market, or hire people to live it for you.

Why I blog about making money online is because I spend 8+ hours a day doing “make money online” stuff!

I seem to find out about new products by radar or osmosis.

I was tempted to just be a smart ass and say if you don’t get the new products in your market by just living your life, you may be blogging about the wrong topic.

It’s always worth asking yourself the tough questions and a lot of blogs don’t have a chance to be successful because they have been started for the wrong reasons.

Bonus affiliate success tip: The key to great affiliate sales is to actually know about the product that you are promoting. I always request a review copy or sample of a product. I don’t always get it, but I’m surprised at how often I do and from the merchant’s point of view it makes sense, since I’ll be able to do much better job of promotion.

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