Products to promote (affiliate programs)

Without a product to promote, more specifically affiliate programs, within your niche it become much more difficult to make money off of that niche. Because of this, it is important that you invest some time into product research before you go ahead with a full fledged campaign.

Fortunately for email marketers, there are 10,000's of programs that allow you to promote pretty much anything imaginable without having to own the product yourself. We are going to discuss both affiliate networks, independent affiliate programs, and how to find those independent affiliate programs within even the most obscure niches.

Affiliate Networks

The first natural place to find affiliate programs are within affiliate networks. Affiliate networks are exactly how they sound, networks of affiliate programs. The great part about affiliate networks is that they allow you promote 1,000's of programs under one roof. This means that you only have to sign-up once, only have to submit your details once, and all your earnings are consolidated into a single paycheck.

Some of the top Pay-Per-Sale affiliate networks are:

• Clickbank
• Commission Junction
  
• Google Affiliate Network
  
• LinkShare
• ShareASale
• RegNow
• Pepper Jam Network
• Click2sell.eu (Europe)
• Hydra Network

Some of these networks will require you to sign-up to search their database of programs, but it is important to have access to a wide range of affiliate programs anyways so we recommend that you sign-up to at least three of the programs above.

Finding Affiliate Programs Within ANY Niche

This technique is actually quite simple. All you need to do is a targeted search within Google and you will come up with a list of relevant programs within your niche.

For this example, we will come up with some really "weird" niches to prove to you that there are affiliate programs within pretty much any niche you could ever come up with.

Below we chose an obscure niche,"hood fans" in attempt to find an affiliate program.

Hood Fan

We simply typed...

hood fan affiliate program

...into Google. Here are the search results:

As you can see, 3 of the first 4 listings were links to affiliate programs. You can use this same technique within pretty much any niche. If you can find affiliate programs for "hood fans", you can find them for even the smallest remote niches in a matter of seconds.

However, if there are no affiliate programs within the niche that you choose, we suggest you move on. There is an opportunity to create your own product within an industry where there is no competition, but for now, we suggest you focus on industries that have affiliate programs. There tends to be a reason why niches have affiliate programs...because people are making money within them.