If you’re new to Internet marketing, one of the easiest ways to get started is affiliate marketing. You have no start-up costs, you don’t need a website or a product and the average Internet user knowledge is sufficient to get you started.

So what is affiliate marketing? Affiliate marketing is promoting someone else’s product and getting a commission for the sale. You choose a product that is already doing well and you promote that product. When someone buys the product from your link, you will get paid a commission. So you can basically start from nothing.

First of all you will need to find a product or several products to promote. The best way to find products in the Internet marketing niche is Clickbank marketplace. ClickBank is the online retail outlet for 10,000 digital product vendors and their 100,000 active affiliates. Go to Clickbank and sign up for a free account. Then open the marketplace, enter a keyword and do a search. Clickbank will produce a list of products relevant to your keyword. Under each product you will see information on how much commission you will make in dollars as well as the percentage of the product price. You will also see what percentage of the sales are made by affiliates (%refd) and the gravity of the product (grav:).

These are interesting figures, which you should pay attention to. For example, if the percentage of sales made by affiliates is low, it could mean that the product is not converting very well. The gravity shows the popularity of the product – the higher the gravity, the better the product has been doing for the last few weeks.

After you’ve found some products that seem interesting to you, do some more research on them. Go to sites like cbengine.com and cbtrends.com to find out, how the products are doing there. The gravity of the product on Clickbank marketplace doesn’t always reflect how well the product is currently doing. Instead, you might find out on cbtrends.com that the product has a falling trend. That could mean that the product has been on the market for quite a while already and its sales are decreasing. You may also find new products with a highly rising trend, which don’t have a high gravity on Clickbank marketplace yet. That means they were only recently launched and haven’t built up the popularity yet, so it would be a good place for you to start promoting these.

When you’ve done your research and found the products that are doing well and that you’d like to promote, go back to Clickbank marketplace and find the product there. Then click on create hoplink below the product description. In the new window enter your Clickbank user ID and click on create hoplink. This link will be the link to your personal sales page – anyone buying through that link will make you a commission.

The next step – start promoting your links. There are tons of ways to do that. The quickest way to get targeted buyers is Adwords (Google’s paid ads), but I don’t suggest using adwords, if you have no experience in it. Instead of making huge sales commissions you could make a huge loss on your ads, if you don’t know how to find the right keywords and place your bids for optimal results. Adwords is an entire science, so if you’re interested, do a Google search on it and you will find hundreds of resources of information on that.

I would recommend to use other methods for promoting. You can use safelists and traffic exchanges. You could also start a review blog for promoting your affiliate products. Blogs are free and easy to create (blogger.com, wordpress.com) and the best part – search engines love blogs. Blogs get indexed and ranked much quicker than regular websites, they get more traffic and higher visibility. The reason for that is that blogs are updated constantly with new content and search engines love content. Review blogs are a great way of promoting affiliate products. Write a blog post on each of the products you’ve chosen to promote. Try to be honest and precise in your reviews – bring out the characteristics of the product, but also what you don’t like about the product. Honest opinion is worth much more than a bunch of empty hype and sales pitches. So if you think a product is priced too highly, be honest about it and say you’d rather like the price to be half of what is asked, but if you could afford the price, you’d buy it.

Good luck – looking forward to seeing you among top affiliates!