Choosing the right product to promote is the key to affiliate marketing success. There are millions of affiliate marketing products out there, but not all of them will make you money. Some products are terrible and don’t work right at all. Another product might be great, but its landing page leaves something to desired so visitors are scared away. To make money as an affiliate marketing, you need to find a product that’s proven to sell well. Why sell something that nobody wants to buy?

To find our product, we are going to look at the Clickbank network. Although there are several excellent affiliate networks out there, Clickbank is one of the best for those starting out. They have a large selection of affiliate marketing products to sell, they always send your checks on time, and it is easy to get accepted into the network. Unlike other networks that require you to apply to promote a certain offer, Clickbank lets you promote every offer on their network immediately.

The first thing to do when choosing a product to promote, is to decide a niche. The best way to do this is to brainstorm on a piece of paper five or ten areas you think you would be interested in. When promoting a product, you will be doing a lot of research and writing about it, so make sure the topics you write down aren’t something that will bore you to death.

Once you have your topics, visit the Marketplace section in your Clickbank account. Clickbank has its products divided into categories, so pick an appropriate category and perform a search for each of your topics. In the results, you will see a list of products that Clickbank sells that best match your search term. Underneath each product description, you will see a number of different metrics.

The key metric to look at, is the product’s gravity score. Gravity basically tells you how many affiliates have made sales with this product recently. If many people are making sales with this product then this says you can probably do well selling this product as well. Usually I try and pick a product with a gravity score over 40. The other thing to look at is the dollars per sale. If you are going to use pay per click marketing to drive traffic to your product, then pick a payout greater than $30 per sale. By choosing a high enough payout, you can cover any advertising expenses and make a good profit.

Using the two criteria talked about above, write down the products that satisfy these criteria. Now pick the product that you would be most interested in researching about and promoting. You already know that other affiliates are having success making money with these products, so the key here is picking the product that will keep your interest so you can promote it successfully. This is the first step to becoming a successful affiliate marketer.