A quick recap on what we have covered so far…

The first post on affiliate marketing explained how affiliate programs work and that all are free affiliate programs.Then we discussed finding a niche and there were heaps of ideas from James Schramko’s video about what kinds of products you can promote on the internet. Lastly we talked about how to find a niche market product that will be profitable.

So now that you have chosen your market and you know that people are looking for solutions to their problems in your market, you need to find a specific product. After you have found the exact product that you want to promote, make sure you save your affiliate link somewhere you can find it again!

Places to Find Free Affiliate Programs

1. Clickbank

Go to the clickbank marketplace and see what comes up when you type in your chosen keyword.
There are a few things to understand about clickbank. It is a place where you can find products to promote on many, many different topics and keywords but there have to be able to be delivered digitally. This means you can’t sell physical products through clickbank.

When you are trying to decide which product to promote through clickbank there is lots of information that can be gained from the small description of the product. Look at the sales page for the product by clicking on the “view pitch page” hyperlink.

The statistics below the product are also important to understand.

$/sale is the average amount that an affiliate earns for each sale.

Future $ is only relevant if the product is a recurring product.

%/sale is the commission rate for the product.

%refd is the percentage of sales that were referred by affiliates.

Grav stands for gravity and is a calculation made by clickbank. The higher the gravity the more recent sales that product has had. Products with a high gravity are hot but may also have a lot of affiliates promoting it and therefore be more competitive.

Once you have decided on the clickbank product that you want to promote then click on create hoplink – the hoplink is your affiliate link.

2. Commission Junction

The first thing to do once you get to Commission Junction is to decide if you are an advertiser or a publisher. An advertiser is a product owner, so if you are looking to promote others people’s products you are a publisher. It is a simple thing to sign up as a publisher for commission junction – you just have to fill in a form with your details and wait for a confirmation email with your login details. Once you have your login details you can search for an appropriate product to promote and get your affiliate link.

3. Paydotcom

Here is the link for the sign up page for paydotcom.
At paydotcom you will find both physical and digital products to promote and there is no maximum price limit of the products for sale.
It also a simple procedure to sign up and become an affiliate at paydotcom.

4. Google

Type your product or keyword + affiliate program into the Google search box and see what you get.
If you want to find an affiliate program with recurring commissions then search “your product affiliate recurring” – you might get some helpful results that way as well.

You can also Google “affiliate directory” – there are 38 million results for that search term so you should be able to find an affiliate product to promote somewhere in there.
The search term “affiliate program directory” also has 31 million results in Google.

Some affiliate programs are easy to join and you don’t have to supply much information at all – the basic information that you need is your name, email address and a paypal account. (If you don’t already have a paypal business account now is a good time to get one)

Other affiliate programs require a lot of information to become an affiliate including existing websites and traffic stats etc. This is extremely difficult to do especially if you are just starting out and don’t have anything established in that particular niche as yet. I suggest that if there are too many hoops to jump through on the affiliate signup page then it is time to move on. As was said before there are millions of places to find free affiliate programs!

It is also good to know that sometimes it takes a couple of days for you to actually receive your affiliate link so it is probably best to research and apply to a few different affiliate programs at the same time so that you don’ t lose a few days waiting…

Here is a present for you -  click here for access to a free video by James Schramko on How to Accelerate Your Affiliate Sales

Related posts:

1. Affiliate Marketing for Newbies – Affiliate Links
2. Affiliate Marketing for Newbies – Niche Product Ideas
3. Affiliate Marketing for Newbies