Summary: Choosing a profitable affiliate product or service to offer your readers is critical to insure that your blogging efforts are profitable.

Okay, now you're cookin' with gas!

You’ve chosen your niche. You've smartly decided to offer affiliate products (i.e., not your own – too much work!)

Now your next task is to choose an affiliate product to promote.

That’s exactly what you’ll learn how to do in this lesson and the next – read on.

Choosing an Affiliate Product to Promote

You want to promote a profitable product. And one of the best ways to do that is by selecting an affiliate product that your market is already buying. That way, all you have to do is get traffic to your blog and put this affiliate product in front of highly targeted market.

So how do you find out what your market is already buying?

First off, just review some of the research you did when you were first choosing a market. Specifically:

What are the top sites in your market selling?

Example: When you run a search in Google for your main keywords, what products are the top sites selling?

• What types of products are marketers advertising? Here we’re talking about paid ads, such as those in Google AdWords or in offline publications. You can also look at the banner and text ads placed on the top sites in your niche.
• What are people searching for in the search engines? Your keyword tools (like WordTracker.com) will help you uncover specific products that your market is searching for. Just enter your broad keywords and then look at the tool’s suggestions for similar keywords.

• What are the top products in your niche? Again, go back to the Clickbank.com and Amazon.com marketplaces, enter your broad keywords, and check which products appear first in your search results because these are usually the most popular products.

Now, you’ll likely find a mix of physical and digital products (as well as services) being sold in your niche. You can sell either of these.

But keep in mind that digital products usually produce higher commission rates and thus more profits.

Meanwhile, physical products (especially through a vendor like Amazon.com) may produce more sales due to the trust factor.

So start with what’s popular – and if that factor alone isn’t enough to help you make your decision, then look at other factors like commission rate and so on.

Tip: If all else is equal – meaning both physical and digital products are popular sellers in your niche, then I suggest you start with the high-commission rate digital products on Clickbank.com. That’s because you’ll need to sell a whole lot more physical products than digital products just to make a decent income.

This is just for starters. Later on you’ll be adding more products to your blog, so you can promote both physical and digital products.

Here’s what to look for:

• Products with a commission rate of at least 50% for digital products (though 40% is okay too, if you find a wildly popular product). For physical products, aim for about 10% commissions.

• Popular products where there are similar products on the market. Let’s say you find a product in your niche that’s a bestseller and there’s not a single product on the market on the same topic. That bestseller may be an anomaly. Thus it’s best to choose products where you find similar products on the market, as that suggests there’s a general demand for that kind of product.

Today’s task: Find out what your market is already buying using the tips above.

Tomorrow you’ll find out how to do your due diligence before you join an affiliate program!