How To Actually Make Money as An Affiliate

Go for the basic needs

While there are countless products that you can sell, it is better to categorize these products into which are considered needed, and which are not. Usually the amount of up sell you have to do for those products that are basic necessities is not too great while if you want to sell a luxury item, you might have to do a lot of up selling.

The margins are more in luxury goods, but the sales are much greater in basic goods. While it is easy to get swayed by the high profit margins of luxury products, if you are a newcomer it may be a better idea to go with low cost, but easy to sell goods.

While food, clothing and shelter are considered the basic needs for all life, with regards to Internet marketing it is a little different. When you look at products to market go with those that are related to wealth, health, and relationships.

Wealth

If you take any search engine, usually the most searched for string will be something related to making money. Because some people are lazy by nature, this will be narrowed down to making money online. Many people consider this niche to be an almost sure thing, because of the propensity of people to be fooled into making a quick buck.

There are innumerable sites that market eBooks that give expert knowledge on how to make money easily online, and although the sales of these books are not explosively high, they are high enough for a new entrant to think that he or she has a good chance, even if the competition is really stiff.

There are pitfalls though, and you have to ensure that you choose a good book to market. The only way for you to find out if the book is any good is to buy and read it, which will increase your initial costs quite a bit. If you compare the different books you have identified with their sales numbers and page rank on Google, you may be able to narrow down your search, but even there, you will never know what you are selling until you try it out yourself.

Books are not the only thing, and there are a number of blogs that are dedicated to giving you tips on how you can make money online. If you plan to enter this niche, you are almost guaranteed success, as long as you put some effort into giving a unique product. This is simply because of the competition out there, and while finding a truly unique product may not be easy, you can manage to do quite well if the design of your page is appealing, and the content good.

This does take effort, but if you manage to get the right combination, it is a perennial source of income for you. This niche never flags, and there is interest year round, and especially with the economy not doing too well, it looks like more and more people want to make money easily online.

You do need to do a little bit of homework though, and make sure that the home site that sells the book is also a really good one. There is no point in you driving traffic to another site just to see it all wasted with you getting very little sales to show for all your efforts. Another thing you need to be wary of is a site that advertises for other things besides the main product. There is every chance that this product is an ad for which the owner is paid, and by driving traffic there, all you are doing is helping somebody else get richer.

Health

This is the second niche where you are sure to hit success. The whole world is worried about health nowadays, and not only because it affects the quality of their life, but because health care has become quite expensive. What with social security and medical insurance looking for ways to wrangle out of paying for expensive treatment, it looks like it is a good idea to keep healthy.

The problem with this is that many people either do not have the time to exercise, or do not have the inclination. The majority fall into the latter category. This is the reason why any site that gives effective, weight loss remedies without the person having to do anything is sure to become a success.

There are various sub niches in health, like fitness, running, weight training, apart from the evergreen weight loss. Many people tend to go with the fitness niche simply because there are quite a few products to sell in this niche like supplements and pills.

As long as you manage to get your rankings high enough, you are sure to make a minimum of a few sales every month, and as long as you are not depending on one product alone, but are spreading it out a bit in the form of four or five different products, you can get a combined income that is quite a reasonable sum.

Unfortunately, just as in any other niche that is popular, this also means that you will have to spend a lot of time on updating your site. There is no way you can sit back after you do your initial work because your rankings can plummet in a short time if you do not add content to your site.

Getting a high ranking enough for you to see some activity and even some money is not an easy thing. Retaining your high ranking is even more difficult because you will have to constantly fight off efforts by newcomers who want to topple you. Yet, it is a lucrative market, and if you do manage to get into the top three or five results, you are sure to make much more money than almost any other niche.

Doing the homework is therefore essential. Just pumping your site full of content or into article directories and back linking alone is not enough. Search engines are evolving much faster than we can keep up with them, and 10 times out of 10 they are able to identify a good site based on a combination of factors. Many of these factors are a closely guarded secret, but it is imperative that you make sure that your site follows all the norms that search engines look for. Concentrating on one or two alone is not enough.

In addition, the search strings that are being used are never static. While one month a particular string may be at the top of the list, the next it may be a totally different one. This means that all your content will either have to be reconfigured to reflect this change, or new content added.

A simple example would be to go to Google AdWords and type in any niche that you like. “Washing machine” is searched a maximum of 1,830,000 while Labrador 2,740,000 times. Health is searched 45,500,000 globally, and even related keywords are looked for more often than the primary keywords in other niches.

Relationships

Relationships is another niche that is quite lucrative. This niche is a little more difficult to target, as there are any number of combinations of primary keywords, which is why they are not as popular as the previous two.

Yet they still offer possibilities, and if you are interested in relationships or have a lot of experience, this may be a good niche to choose. People are always looking at ways to make relationships work or even to get back into old or broken relationships. Many are indeed so desperate that they will try almost anything, because this niche does not satisfy a physical, but an emotional need.

There is little in the negative for this niche except that sales is not easy to come by. There is a lot of freely available information available on the net about relationships, and people do not find it necessary to pay for a product when they can find information for free elsewhere.

This does not mean that you cannot earn money out of this niche; to the contrary, it is one of the three most successful niches that you can choose.