The most important thing you can do to make money with affiliate programs is to know your market. When you know what your market desires, you can find the right products to fulfill this desire. Success in affiliate marketing and closing sales online is being able to match up a need with the right product.

Finding a niche

So to make money online, all you need is a good niche market. There are still many of them left, but take the time to research this as it is where the money is. But how do you locate good niche markets? One idea is to try the Overture keyword tool to find out what people are looking for.

Anytime you find a market for something, run the keyword through Overture and see how much people are searching for it. Then go to the search engines and search the term to see the number of websites there are on that topic. Thats your supply. Try to find niches and topics that have a good demand but not too much supply. This will be your niche market.

Marketing to the niche

Next, find an affiliate program or network that sells a product that your niche market needs. Finding high paying affiliate programs can be tough as there are many programs to choose from and not all pay well. To make real money online, do not settle for anything less than 30% commission.

Once you have found your affiliate product, learn the product and how it is beneficial to your target or niche market. Then, try to build a website for your niche market so you have somewhere to send traffic and convert them into buyers of the product you promote. It is vital to have a custom landing page for the specialized web visitors because it will match their mindset and have what they are looking for. They are then more likely to read the full page and visit your affiliate programs sales page.

Niche content

Build the website with related content that would be interesting to the niche visitors. This will pre sell or warm up your visitors and make them want to click on your affiliate links and visit the product sales page. When you use interesting and informative website content to warm up your visitors before they clickthrough to the sales page, you make more sales and commissions.

You gave them the information they needed in an interesting way so they could see exactly how the product could help them in their lives. As a result, they desired the solution you are recommending on your website and they later decided to buy. Some affiliate programs install a small file or cookie onto the visitors computer so in case the visitor clicks through your link to the product site, but leaves, and buys later, you still get commission for the sale. This can also work for future orders months in the future.

Email marketing

Another thing you can do once you once you start building some web traffic is capture your visitors email address and build your subscriber list. You can do this by adding a sign up box on your website to join your newsletter list. You can build a newsletter (or series of emails) with the help of any of the popular email list management services. Add your subscription sign up form on your webpages so niche web visitors will see it.

Presell your visitors

The key to making money online is to find a niche market, learn what it is they desire, and match up products to sell to them. Providing good information on your website presells or warms them up the sales page, in which case they will be open to buy because they understand what the product does for them. The more you do this with new niche markets, the more income streams you create and the more your income will grow.

In essence, find the niche market, build a website around the theme or topic, attract the targeted traffic through getting links to your website and posting on forums or writing a blog, pre sell them before sending them to the product site, and sell them related products through your newsletter or autoresponder in the future.

By doing your homework and knowing your market, you will achieve a higher clickthrough rate to your affiliate product sales page and earn more commissions on the products your visitors buy.