Taking what I have learned from online marketing, I am writing this post to maybe help someone that is just getting into to it from making a costly (in the literal sense) mistake.

First of all, decide on the product you want to represent. Sounds moronic and simple, well that’s because it is.

Go to any of these places that have affiliate products to choose from such as Clickbank.com, CommissionJunction.com, Linkshare.com, Paydotcom.com, Clixgalore.com. Shareasale.com, MaxBounty.com, Tradedoubler.com or Amazon.com and choose 1-3 products. I’ll tell you why in a bit.

For the sake of argument, let’s run with Clickbank.com.

Okay we’ll choose one product to start with and run with that.
Let’s go to Clickbank.com and click on Marketplace. There we will find a huge number of choices - now we just need to narrow down our products to what we want to promote.

Think of common issues you’ve had or know people that have had.

Potty Training Kids?
Dog Training?
Cat Training?
Losing Weight?
Making Money From Home?

All of these are common issues and good choices. Now narrow it down.

Since more than half of America is overweight, let’s help them out and rep a weight loss program we like.

You can sort your results however you like, the default is by popularity. Here are the top 2 choices for weight loss programs as of today:

1) Fat Loss 4 Idiots. Affiliates: FatLoss4Idiots.com/aff :::: Thanks.
$/sale: $31.05 | Future $: - | Total $/sale: $31.05 | %/sale: 75.0% | %refd: 94.0% | grav: 597.85
view pitch page | create hoplink

2) Top Secret Fat Loss Secret :: 75% Commission:: Best Affiliate Toolkit. Makes $25-$60 Per Sale | Converts As High As 3%-5% | We Tested Just 1 Promo & Made $2,280/24hrs | We Give You Same Promo Free! | Sells Itself! | Get 1st-Movers Advantage | Join Now Free! | TopSecretFatLossSecret.com/affiliates.php.
$/sale: $32.33 | Future $: - | Total $/sale: $32.33 | %/sale: 75.0% | %refd: 91.0% | grav: 235.06
view pitch page | create hoplink

Both of these are high gravity, meaning they have a lot of affiliates representing these products so if you fear competition, choose a product with lower gravity.

The pay out for these is just over $30 a sale each so that’s not bad at all.

Okay now for the promotion you will have a couple of options-

*Create a review page where you compare the two weight loss plans. Even better if you’ve used them or know someone that has. Make one slightly better than the other - pros and cons work well. Search YouTube for a video - I guarantee you’ll find one - videos add a lot of OOmph to affiliate review pages. This will entail having a domain and you can get one dirt cheap at Web Host Giant. Here’s an example of a pros and cons website, it would be even better if there was video too. http://weightloss.4infoandreviews.com/weightloss.html

*Create an informational blog and make 3-5 postings about one or both programs. Here is the exact same website text in a blog (Wordpress) format.http://weightloss.4infoandreviews.com

* Magically Redirect - You can simply get a domain name and then redirect it to the landing page of your affiliate product. This involves zero creation of pages of any kind and you simply tell your web server to bounce anyone that lands whatever URL you choose to youraffiliatename.affiliateproduct.hop.clickbank.net.
Here is an example of a redirect: http://find.4infoandreviews.com

Now you can got out and post yourself on Digg.com, Stumble.com, Sphinn.com and Squidoo.com yourself however nothing will have the traffic driving ability of Adwords.com.

Adwords.com will kill your bank account if you’re not careful but if you play the game right and I’m about to lay it on you how, you can win and create a steady stream of passive income. You pay in advance so if you only want to spend $10 advertising, just put in 10 bucks and when that is gone - your ads will be suspended until you make another payment.

Now what I’m about to tell you works for my products with my keyword choices and my ads that I write.
Tweak this to be your own system and you’ll have a way to see very quickly what will work and what won’t with Adwords and you can make great money when you line it up right.

Okay I use keywordspy.com first to see what the best ROI (return on investment) keywords are for products.

I go to www.keywordspy.com and input a keyword or product name. This time I am using “4idiots” the Clickbank name of our product “Fat Loss 4 Idiots”.

At the next screen I click on “Affiliate Keywords” and I’m about to show you how to dig for gold.

There are three tabs there “affiliates” which will show you the top affliates selling this product.
“Keywords” is the total keywords used in selling this particular product.
“Ad Variations” will show you the various ads that are being used.

Under keywords, click on the ROI column and sort to show the best to the least return on investment keywords. Cut-n-paste or write ‘em down. That’s the ones we’re using for Google Adwords first. These keywords have already proven they are giving a return on investment - why not benefit from someone else’s research?

Next look at the ad variations, but DO NOT COPY THEM. Just glean what they are hitting on. Use each keyword in your title and ad body for greatest relevance. I have found most people will click an Adwords ad that asks a question, it’s like they feel the need to answer or something and usually they answer by buying the product -ka-ching!

Be targeted in your keywords. “Weight loss” is a logical keyword but it is also way too broad of a keyword and it doesn’t target people wanting to lose weight specifically. “Permanent weight loss” is one with a good ROI as is “Lose weight for wedding” these are both people looking to lose weight and keep it off and that should be the basis of at least one of your adwords ads. Sure you won’t get 3,000 clicks a day but who wants clicks with no sales?

Now get your webpage, blog or redirect up and running. It doesn’t have to be fancy-dan gorgeous - friendly, believable and easy to read will garner you far more sales. Redirects either piss people off who didn’t want to visit a sales page or they work great on a well written campaign. Sometimes I’ll test out a redirect for a week and if I see it’s not converting sales, I’ll throw up an html page or a blog page to promo the product and it give it a week to perform.

Now head over to Adwords.com and create your campaign.

It’s pretty self explanatory, but take your campaign out of the partner search network and the content network. Put your keyword phrases in [brackets] so you target people searching EXACTLY for those keyword phrases.

You don’t need a ton of keyword phrases - longer (long tailed) more exact keyword phrases will bring you less traffic but they will bring you the people that really want to buy.

This will cut down on clicks that are basically wasted that cost you money because someone was curious. This will lead to more targeted clicks by people that are actually part of your own targeted consumer base.

Here’s a cool hint too - you can’t put call to action phrases in your adwords ads like download now, click here, visit now - however it CAN be in your URL. Like one of my book ads has the URL http://www.keywordcontent.net/download-now it’s a definitely call to action that shows in my Adwords, however it’s legal because it’s not in the text. But I have more conversions on this link than any other.

As far as bidding, I like to have my advertisements appear in the top 5 ads so I bid higher initially then take it down .25 to .50 a day until I’m still in the top 5 but not spending too much on my Adwords campaigns. Think about when you search - do you click down 4 or 5 pages to find something?
Of course not.

Also, if you’re using a site or blog - by all means, try to hit organic results too by using places like Socialmarker.com where you can submit your website or blog to something along the lines of 30 different networks and generate free traffic.

I wish you tons of success!