What is the best marketing product online that can be used for affiliate marketing?

[Darren Langdon]

I am currently doing some research at the moment on website design and have just learned about affiliate markeing and how to use these, basic level only. Any help would be good to carry on with my studies.

[denise w]

Scams abound. You'll find over-hyped products everywhere from so called "gurus" promising you'll make a ridiculous amount of money, in a short amount of time, doing just a little bit of work for a minimal investment. They'll even show you a Photoshopped image or a video claiming to show the money they've made. I call them Pinocchio Marketing Tactics. LOL!

I suggest grabbing all the FREE information you can find and read up on it. You'll run into some pretty outrageous claims of overnight fortune, super secret/underground/never seen before traffic generating systems and more.

To start, I would suggest setting up a Wordpress blog or your own website and monetize it by opening a Google Adsense account, an Amazon Affiliate account and an Ebay affiliate account and place those ads on your site.

Now just because you've setup your site, doesn't mean people are going to flock to it. You'll need traffic and that traffic has to be converted to sales. So you'll need to know something about how to get traffic to your site.

There are people making money online, ethically and unethically. Do your due diligence. As the saying goes, if it's too good to be true, it probably is.

[Fred Romulous]

What's the best product, you say? That's an extremely tough question to answer, Darren, because it just depends...

Here are some quick steps to help you get started...

Step 1:
Think about your own interests first. Do you like video games? Gadgets? Fitness? Marital Aids? Dating? Etc.

Step 2:
If you are just starting out, I would recommend that you begin this adventure with digital products. Easy to fulfill, and low production cost means the merchant can usually afford to give you (the affiliate) a nice big cut of the sale. E-books, E-courses, and software.

Once you kind of have an idea about your interests, you need to figure out if there are good products out there with affiliate programs, and if a market exists for the product. You don't want to waste time, energy, and money on something no one is going to buy, right.

Step 3:
Do some research. I like to check the magazine and the books section of Amazon. Navigate to the Magazine Subscriptions section and click on the category that most closely matches your interests. Notice that Amazon lets you know which subscriptions are the top sellers (Customer Favorites). This is great data. Also, if there is a magazine, then there are probably people who buy and read it. This is also great information.

Anyway, all we are trying to do here is determine if there is a viable market for our interest, and trying to identify a specific product to promote. So let's just say you are interested in fitness, so you go to Health, Mind, and Body category, and you see that Maximum Fitness is a top seller, and you are an exercise nut. Cool, looks like it's probably a seller, and the cover is a buff dude with a six pack stomach. Well who doesn't ant that?

Step 4:
Find a good product with an affiliate program. A good place to start is clickbank for digital product. Go to the marketplace, select the Health and Fitness category, and browse the list. This is sorted by popularity as well, so most popular products are listed first. In the list you see several products that seem good, but maybe Truth About Abs catches your eye, and you decide that you want to look deeper into the product.

Step 5:
Make sure you are a believer. Check out the product sales page, subscribe to the list, hell, if you want to really understand it, just buy it. Go through the entire process that your prospective referrals will go through. If there's an inconsistency, you might want to scrap it and look for something else. If they do what they say, and they over deliver the value, than it's probably a winner.

Step 6:
Sign up for the affiliate program and access the affiliate tools. Pick a recommended traffic strategy as suggested in the affiliate area, call or email the affiliate manager and speak to them about what methods are working, and just do it. Get out there and promote it. Write some articles, run a small PPC campaign, set up a blog, start some social media, and you are an affiliate marketer.

Good luck...

Oh yeah, and watch out for all the crap. There's a ton of bad info out there.