First of all, you'll need to join an affiliate program. The accounts are free and usually take just a few minutes to get signed up with. For these examples, we'll be using ClickBank as our affiliate program. After you've joined and have an affiliate ID, you can check out the marketplace to see what niche products are being offered for you to promote.

If you have some idea of the sort of market you're looking to sell to, and the keywords they might use, you can quickly and easily type in those keywords and see what's available in the marketplace.

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If not, you can look at the list of categories available and see what's listed. Either way, you'll be left with a screen of products that should be sorted in order of popularity. The next thing to look for using our ClickBank example, is the line in green that shows: $/sale, future $, total $/sale, %/sale, %refd and grav - these are the figures that will tell us how popular and item is and how much you'll be looking to make.

The grav figure indicates the gravity that a product has. The higher the number, the more people tend to promote it. The %/sales tells you the percentage you should be making from each sale and the $/sale the amount per sale.

Another figure worth looking at is the %refd, this is the percentage of sales that are actually made via affiliates rather than the owner of the product - the higher the number, the more successful it appears to be for other affiliates.

Once you find an idea you like, check the product's sales (pitch) page. What you want to see is a page with no distractions. If it has links to too many products, a popup when you first get to it, links to join affiliate sites, and more, it can distract potential buyers and you'll lose a sale.

How well is the sales pitch written? Are you convinced to buy? Have they given people a reason to buy quickly - a strong call to action? Next, check the product itself. Buy it or ask the product owner for a complimentary review copy.

See if the product is of a quality you want to promote and that the whole process runs smoothly from payment to receipt of a download link, if you buy it. The higher the cost of the product, the higher people's expectations of it will be, and if they aren't being met, you'll start to get refunds being issued, reducing your payouts - so know in advance if the product is worth the money.

This is the subject that most affiliate marketers are desperate to find a definitive answer to - how do you get the traffic to the product you're promoting? There are a number of answers to this.

First, use a keyword tool to find out the number of people actually searching for your product each day. Then, when you have a list of keywords, use Google to search each of those keywords.

What you'll be looking for here are the paid ads on the righthand side of the screen. If there aren't any, then it probably means that the sales of those products on that keyword haven't been profitable enough to keep an AdWords campaign going, so cross out that keyword and look at the next.

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Free traffic will normally be generated by creating a website or blog to presell your product. Since you have no control over the seller's website, you'll be try to get people to yours first by optimizing it for the search engines and then giving people a compelling reason to buy from the vendor. The drawback is the time taken to create the website or blog and have it indexed. It's still worth doing because eventually, it should start bringing in traffic.

A quicker way to get free traffic is through article marketing. Article directories are generally highly ranked by the search engines and quickly indexed.

They have a large number of people visiting them daily. Article directories only accept original articles, so completely rewrite anything you have that isn't original. You usually can't have affiliate links or promotional copy in them - this is where the presell page comes in handy, too. You'll be able to include a link in the resource box that goes back to your presell (or landing) page.

PPC (pay per click) traffic is quick to generate but can be very expensive if you get it wrong.

You'll need to be signed up with Google so you can use AdWords. Before using AdWords, it's essential that you read their guidelines and watch the tutorials because they'll give you some of the best free guidance you can get on the way to use AdWords.

You should be looking at what other people are doing on the topic you're promoting to see what tactics to use. You should take the time to make a note of ads that show up constantly and how long they stay, if you see an ad that has been shown by Google (righthand side of the search page) over a period of a week you can be reasonably sure that this is a productive niche and worth paying to advertise on.

Next, you have to set a price that you'll pay for the ads. The best method to use is to take the amount you'll receive in commission and divide it by 200. If you can sell the product once in every 200 visits, you'll breakeven.

Write a short, powerful ad. You'll want to leave out the price, include the name of the product if it's well known and a reason for people to buy. You want to funnel your paid traffic through to your opt in landing page so that you capture the contact information for future sales and recoup far more than your initial investment.