How To Find The Most Profitable Affiliate Programs For Your Niche

The most common question I’ve been asked recently is how to find a product to sell with an high payout affiliate program.

I have put together a step-by-step guide to finding a profitable products to sell below, but first we must look at choosing a profitable niche to operate within.

Doing so means we have done market and keyword research and be armed with the facts needed to build a successful website. Regardless of how you intend to promote it.

Choose A Sub-Niche To Market Your Products To

The main thing to remember when first starting out is don’t try and tackle a big niche head on. Instead break it down to a sub-niche instead. Otherwise you will get nowhere fast. Big terms are just way too competitive for a noob and the SERPS are full of established sites and brands that you wont get close to displacing.

The key is in researching sub-niches that are far less competitive, offer decent traffic volumes and that you can compete in keyword wise.

For example, within the hugely competitive skincare niche, here are some sub-niches you could investigate:

• Male Skincare
• Male Skincare for Teenagers
• Male Skincare for Black Teenagers

Even though we are carving out a sub-niche to target, we still have loads of products and potential traffic available to us. By careful use of long tail search terms and content you will be able to establish the site quickly in the relevant SERPS.

Our site could be on one of the above sub-niches of skincare, with focus on one or more of the following common problem areas:

• Acne
• Stretch marks
• Dry skin
• Eczema
• Dandruff
• Shaving

How To Find Products With An Affiliate Program

One you have chosen a niche and done your keyword research then you need to find some high commission products to promote. For this you will need some Google Fu and a spread sheet to keep track of things.

For this over the shoulder example I am going to look for potential eczema products to promote on my new skin care site.

While I am not going to go into how to do keyword research, a quick view at eczema related terms on Google’s keyword planner shows me there is a huge market out there.

Plus a quick look at Google trends shows me eczema is an evergreen niche that has growing search volume, therefore it is worth taking the time investigate opportunities.

How Many Products

Depending on how you intend to market the products on your site will dictate how many different products you will need.

Different strategies to consider are:

• Product comparison or Top 3
• Guide to dealing with problem where products are suggested
• Review of product
• General information page with advertising of product
• product Coupon marketing

Affiliate Networks

The first place to look for products is on the affiliate networks. The larger ones can have 1000’s of different products available to promote. Signing up is easy, but sometimes the programs require manual approval so you may need to already have a site up and running before you can be accepted.

There tends to be two different kinds of networks, physical and digital products. Some of the biggest affiliate networks are:

• CJ.com
• Tradedoubler
• Click Bank
• Affiliate Window
• Avangate
• Amazon Associate

A Word on Amazon Associate

By far the simplest way to find products to sell is as an Amazon Associate. It is very easy to be accepted onto their affiliate program and they have just about every product imaginable. Plus a whole array of tools to help you promote them.

The downside is that they just don’t pay much money. Depending on your sales volumes and categories, you are looking at around 5% commission.  That means if you sell a $50 product you get around $2.50, which is not very much. So unless you can get huge volumes of sales going, you may struggle to turn a profit.

You would do better to find products that offer from 20% – 50% commissions, so a $50 product sale pays $25.  This is much more workable amount.

While I do use Amazon, it is not my go to source for products and only use it in cases where I get stuck. Remember to set up accounts for each country you are targeting and use a link localizer to maximize revenue.

Warning

Be careful using plugins that pull data of Amazon using feeds to auto-populate your site. Google frowns upon them and I have have two sites penalized each one using a different plugin. If you do, make sure you rewrite the content sufficiently and add value to it.

Learn to edit your robots.txt file to block bots identifying your WP plugins.

The best product I have found so far to build an Amazon shop is this the Woo Commerce Amazon plugin. Its an amazing plugin and worth checking out.

Getting Started

So let’s get this eczema product search going…

Click Bank

The first stop will be Click Bank, a massive affiliate network mainly selling informational and digital products (that can include software). These are mostly in the forms of eBooks and PDF’s. They are highly specialized and you’ll find something for just about every niche. The commissions are huge and are often reoccurring for subscriptions plus anyone can create an account with Click Bank.

Once you have created an account, go to “Marketplace” and perform a search for your product keyword. In this case eczema.

If there are more keywords associated than run the search as many times as needed. This goes for all searches that follow in this guide.

You can see a number of products come up. The key with Click Bank is to check out the product Gravity, this is a vital indicator as to a products popularity, ability to convert plus how many other affiliates are getting success with it.

A very low score and the product may be no good (or very new), or very high and it will convert well but may also be very competitive.

What you can see in this case see is the product that comes top offers $18.50 a sale with Gravity of 53.4. This means other affiliates are having good success with it, and is a good bet if that if we can drive targeted traffic to this page, it will convert well.

If too many products come up in the search, then use the filter to remove the crappy lower Gravity products, so you can focus on what sells. Add the good ones to “My Favorites” and make a note on your spreadsheet what you are potentials and move on.

Tip: Always check the product landing page for the quality. Make sure it looks good, and you feel you would buy from it.

Commission Junction

Commission Junction (CJ) is another massive network but this time consisting of physical products. Signing up is easy, but sometimes the programs require manual approval so you may need to already have a site up and running before you can be accepted.

The advantage with a network like CJ is that a lot of the products are well known brands, so will sell easily if you can get the right traffic. They also offer lots of coupons if you want to market that way.

Once you have created an account, do a search for your keyword:

Here you can see that 5 brands come up. The one that stands out is the Skin Store with a network earnings rating of 5. This tells me there program is working well for other affiliates and the earning potential is good so it’s worth us checking out whats on offer. However, upon closer inspection it reveals it is just a store selling general skin care products which is not that useful for us.

However Forces of Nature  Organic Medicine program has a number of organic eczema products to offer that ships worldwide:

 

I like the look of this. It has high value products worth $40/$50 and by looking at the program terms I can see it pays 20% commission which could work well. I wouldn’t lead on these products but it definitely offers a potential revenue stream.

Other Product Affiliate Networks

I tried two other big networks, Tradedoubler and Affiliate Window for more products, but there was nothing of interest. It may be that the product niche I am working with is just too specialist for these types of broad networks.

Niche Networks

This is normally where you can find some real affiliate program goodness. Often, these niche networks provide products designed specifically for affiliate marketeers that can only be ordered online. They offer huge sales commissions of up to 50%. While these commissions are good news for us, it may be that they are not that good, so vigilance is required!

How To Find Them

I have given you some big networks which you should have heard about already, but what of the hundreds of smaller networks, how do we find them? There are some affiliate directories available but the best thing to do is Google them.

Here I used “Niche Keyword” + Affiliate Network.

Note: As Ezcema is a very specialist term I broadened the search to “Skin care”. I could also try “Beauty” or “Health”.

 

This first query revealed at least 5 decent looking specialist networks on the first few pages. There will be loads more if you change the query.

http://www.markethealth.com/

http://www.sellhealth.com/

http://www.healthtrafficker.com/

http://www.clickkingdom.com/

Lets create some accounts and see whats on offer…

 

While there are some awesome product offers for skin care, not all had products that match my eczema requirements. Still I am going to book mark this for later as there are other specialist products with great commissions that my site could promote.

I did however find this:

A product designed for eczema that offers 30% commission. That means about $20 a sale for us. This would definitely be a great product to consider promoting. I like anything that pays $20+ a sale.

We could keep repeating the above process with all different terms related to our niche to uncover more and more mini-networks. You’ll be surprised how many exist…

Lets Go Deeper

OK, so we now have 3 products to offer. All quite different at this point. It’s taking shape but we need to go deeper to make sure we fully understand all of the products in our market. Plus find any more that have affiliate programs.

Here are some more targeted search queries to perform:

• “eczema” affiliate
• “eczema” affiliate products
• “eczema” affiliate program

While these queries threw up more programs, some were the Click Bank products we found earlier plus some are just very old.

It does show an interesting result though:

http://www.eczema.net/best-eczema-treatments/

I always take a good look at what other authority sites/affiliates promote either in the same or parallel niches. It just happens that this result jump started that part of the process.

Other Queries to use to find more sites like this:

• top 5 products + “problem”
• best products + “problem”

The products listed on these comparison sites are new ones we have yet to see elsewhere:

• Exzaderm
• Oxyvectin
• Grandmas’ Rash Remedy

These sites reek of “made for affiliate” activity so lets target these products to see what programs, if any they offer affiliates:

“Product Name “+ affiliate program

From this search, I could only find the products listed on Amazon, which mean we could become an affiliate via the Amazon Associates channel, but this is always a last resort as the commissions will never be as good as if you can strike up the partnership directly.

If a Google search or checking the product site footer does not reveal links to affiliate programs, as is the case above, don’t worry, they may still have one.

The next phase is to use their website and do a bit of outreach. Message them directly with a message like this:

Dear Sir,

I have a skin care (www.website.com) site and was looking to promote your product. Can you tell me if you offer an affiliate program?
Many thanks,

Nick

Although I have yet to hear back from the companies I contacted directly about their programs above, I now have a clearer picture of the eczema product landscape alongside 5+ different products I could promote on my site.

Wrapping It All Up

So now I have 6 products I can promote.

• 5 Physical products
• 1 Informational product

Given the products we found, my preferred choice for this would to do a “Top 3 Guide of Best Performing Eczema Products”, using the ZenMed ($20 commission) as my clear winner and 2 other physical products as runners up and sell via Amazon. When I hear back about about the other affiliate programs I can revise my decision.

You could also test the ClickBank information product as a sideline on that/other theme inked pages.

For this example I choose a very specific niche which I have no experience in but I still managed to find a quality physical product offering good commissions. Further work would uncover more I am sure.

Phew, that’s it! Let me know if you have any questions.