How to Choose the Best Affiliate Product for Your Blog

To be a successful affiliate marketer, you need to choose and promote the right products on your blog. 76% of new affiliate marketers fail to earn money from affiliate marketing simply because they do not choose the right product to promote.

Here at ShoutMeLoud, I have always focused on teaching my readers about affiliate marketing. In a previous post when I shared how I make money with ShoutMeLoud, I mentioned that a big chunk of that money comes from affiliate marketing.
Finding success in affiliate marketing is not easy, but it is not as complicated as you might think. You do need to be persistent, consistent and have a proper marketing plan to be successful in affiliate marketing.
For example, which affiliate products you choose to market and what medium you use to promote the products will make a significant difference in terms of what you gain from this type of marketing. I always select a product that I use for my day-to-day blogging, and I write tutorials and guides for the use of the product.  This  helps to promote the product I’m pitching, and gives the prospective buyer the information he needs about the product.
We have previously discussed how to start with an affiliate marketing program and affiliate marketing vs. AdSense. In this guide, I will share some tips I follow to choose the right affiliate product to promote.

Start with affiliate marketplace:

The best place to start hunting for affiliate products is in marketplaces like ClickBank, ShareASale and Commission Junction. Depending on your niche, you can find the best affiliate products to promote. For niche marketers, Commission Junction and ClickBank are highly recommended.
Here is a screenshot of ShareASale, where I can see their top 100 affiliate programs, and join them:

If you are using WordPress, you can use a plugin like GoCodes to mask your links. For the web hosting niche, I would recommend that you read our previously published guide on getting started with web hosting affiliates.
Join affiliate programs individually:
Most of the online products have their own in-house affiliate programs. One such example is the Dreamhost affiliate program. All you need to do is find the hottest selling products in your niche and take the opportunity to market these products. For example, if you run a blog about dogs, you can try to find an affiliate program related to dog food or dog care. Find the companies that are selling such products online, and on their website you will find the links to the affiliate programs. Alternatively, you can simply Google “site:domain.com affiliate” or “(product name) + affiliate program”. These are manual searches, of course, but this works in most cases, especially when you are in a niche where it is difficult to find an affiliate product. (An example of this might be something like tattoo designs.)

What is a niche affiliate product?
A niche affiliate product refers to any product that is related to your blog topics and would thus interest your readers. If, for example, you write a blog on topics within the health niche, you would want to promote a product related to the niche of your blog, that being the health niche.
My advice for you is to select the hottest selling products in your niche, and start writing about them. This will help you to boost your conversion rate. The difference between successful affiliate campaigns and those that fail are the conversion rates involved. If you’re getting 100 clicks on your affiliate campaign, for instance, but you have a low conversion rate, you need to redesign your strategy.
Be sure to try a product before recommending it! Not doing so is one of the most common mistakes made by bloggers.  I have often seen bloggers recommending high-end products without even using them. Personally, I recommend that you do not do this. Your credibility as a reviewer would be adversely affected by this practice.  Giving an honest review on a product you have actually tried and used will increase your credibility and your reliability.  You can either sign up for a free-trial of the product if one is available, or ask the product owner to give you a review piece. Worst case scenario, you can buy and use the product in order to come up with an excellent review either pro or con.
Note: 60% of my affiliate sales comes from reviews and tutorials related to products I have used.
When you sign up for any affiliate program, here are some factors which you should consider:

• Available banners
• Promotional matters
• Affiliate control panel
• Minimum payout
• Payment method
• Tax form required or not

These factors will help you to decide if you are ready to promote this particular product. Suppose, for example, that you select a seasonal product, and its minimum payout is $1000. Are you sure you will be able to achieve that much in terms of conversions in that particular season?
Bonus tip: Associating with famous brands will be an added advantage to your affiliate marketing campaign.
Are you into affiliate marketing? How do you decide which products are right for your blog and which are not? Let us know using the comments section below.

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