There are three big affiliate networks out there that have thousands of products to promote. The big 3 networks are Commission Junction, Click Bank and Linkshare. There are also a lot of smaller affiliate networks and thousands if not hundreds of thousands of affiliate programs run in-house (ran by the same company that sells the product).

When you are searching for products to promote at Commission Junction (CJ) check the EPC in your account manager. EPC = earnings per hundred clicks. If a product has a $50 EPC on average an affiliate earns $50 dollars per every hundred visitors they send to the product or merchant's website. CJ will give you a weekly and a 3 month average EPC. The higher the EPC the more money affiliates are earning.

When searching for a product at Click Bank look at the product's gravity. This is done in score form and the criteria is how many affiliates are selling the product and how well the product is selling. This does not give you an average of how much the product is earning per hundred visitors but if the product has a high gravity score than it is selling well.

One thing to keep in mind is that just because a product has a high EPC or Gravity score doesn't mean everything. I have had success with products that have had high and low EPC's and Gravity. These metrics should only be used as a guide. A Niche product might not have a lot of affiliates promoting it so the gravity could be low, but it could still be very profitable. A product could have a low EPC but maybe it's not being advertised effectively.

One disadvantage of high gravity is the higher the gravity the higher the number of affiliates promoting the product. That means more competition. EPC doesn't quite work the same way, you can have 1 person promoting a product and you will still see the EPC whether it is high or low. With CJ there is a "Network Earnings" indicator bar that goes from one to five to show how many affiliates are promoting a merchant's website. One being not many affiliates and five being a lot of affiliates.

You have to be a little more careful when promoting an in-house affiliate product. The reasons for this is there are no 3rd parties involved to make sure that everything is kept honest. Try to find out a companies reputation before promoting their products. You can search for the company name, product name, search affiliate forums and search engines to find out if affiliates have horror or success stories about the company. No matter how good a product is or sells there will always be some complaints. Nobody has a 100% success or customer satisfaction rate.

Before promoting any product visit the website and ask yourself the following:

Is the website easy to navigate?

Does the website look professional?

If I was looking to buy this product, would this website convince me to do so?

If there are a few competing affiliate products in the same market that interest you, try promoting them all. Test which one is the best seller and promote that one the most. If you have 2 that are profitable keep promoting both. I have promoted many products and constantly weed out the losers. Sometimes you will try 3 products and they will all lose money, sometimes they will all make money, sometimes 1 out of 3 will make money. The important thing is weeding out the losers and finding winners.