When most experts talk about how to make a living by selling things to others, it is usually implied that you are selling your own products or services. For example, musicians are taught to sell their cds, and possibly selling merchandise such as T-shirts and mugs. Many entrepreneurs struggle to create and sell their own products.

Often times the lack of ability to make sales comes down to the facts that either there is no market for your product, or you don’t have enough traffic coming to your website. When you have a product-focused mindset (as most of us do) you focus too much on creating the product (the cd, the information product, etc) and not enough time on the marketing side of things. In other words, most of us aren’t great marketers or salesmen. So doesn’t it make sense to hone our sales and marketing skills before we spend too much time on product creation?

By becoming an affiliate and selling someone else’s product, the emphasis automatically becomes on finding a market and getting traffic to your website. The other genius of doing affiliate marketing is that you don’t have to worry about taking payments and delivering the product. This is all done by the vendor. And not to mention the ability to work at home.

So how do you find a market? Well, for starters you need to find products that are already selling. With some of the affliate networks like Clickbank, they organize products into categories such as Health and Wellness, Business, Entertainment, etc. You can drill down within a category you’re interested in (and ideally have some knowledge of) and find a product that is selling. In the case of Clickbank they have a variable called ‘Gravity’ which tells you the relative success of the product in the market.

Once you have your product you need to promote it on your websites, blogs and social networks. The key here is to determine the keywords that people are searching for in your niche of choice. This is how most people will find you, via searching by keyword phrases. You need to put these keywords in your titles, descriptions, tags, and content. Keep in mind there is a lot of competition these days so you’ll want to find keywords that aren’t super-competitive. When you search for the phrase in Google, try to find phrases that have well under 100,000 competing webpages (shown at top right of search results), but still enough searches to be useful. Combine this with using the Google Keyword tool, to make sure there are enough searches.

I like to think about affiliate marketing this way: “People are already buying billions of dollars worth of products online every year. So therefore I will try and get in between every transaction by referring people to those products, that I truly believe in and recommend to my readers.”

For an in-depth online course on affiliate marketing, check out Opportunity.com or check out this book on Affiliate Marketing.