Go to Clickbank.com. Clickbank is a well-established affiliate network, which allows affiliates to promote products from their huge database of over 14,000 items. You'll need a free affiliate account if you don't have one. Clickbank pays affiliates every 2 weeks, by old-fashioned checks in the mail.

Once you have your account, go to the Marketplace and choose one of the 9 categories from the drop-down list.



Let's say Health and Fitness. Click on 'Go'. Clickbank finds all the products in the category and lists them by popularity.

Each product shows a blurb by the product publisher, which tries to convince you to promote their product rather than anyone else's. This is followed by a line of statistics in green.



The important stats are these:

• $/sale: The amount of money you'll make for each sale. Obviously, the higher the better.



• %refd: Percentage of referred sales, as opposed to direct sales by the publisher. The higher the better. You don't want to be competing with a publisher who may have much deeper pockets than you.



• grav: Gravity is a number calculated by Clickbank which indicates the performance of the product over the past 8 weeks. The higher the better.

You don't need to choose the most popular product in a category to promote, or the one with the highest gravity. It's often better to page down to products which don't score as well, because there are not as many people promoting them. Try to find products with a gravity greater than 10 or so.

Under the stats for each product, you'll see a link to the sales page (Clickbank calls it a "pitch page", and "create hoplink".

Have a look at the sales pages for a couple of products, and choose 3 which appeal to you on an emotional level. Try to find sales pages which don't have pop-up opt-in forms, because you're going to be getting visitors to sign in for your own opt-in list. You don't want to annoy them by having them opt-in then sending them directly to another page with an opt-in form.

Once you've chosen 3 products which interest you, click on the "create hoplink" link for each one in turn. Copy and paste the hoplinks into a text file and save it for later use.

Here are some other sites which will help you find out what people are interested in.

CB Engine

Bestselling magazines at Amazon.com

Google Zeitgeist

Lycos Top 50